The Seventh Ecumenical Council - A.D. 787

Edited from a variety of translations (mentioned in the preface) by H. R. Percival

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Page 2

Introduction.

Gibbon thus describes the Seventh Ecumenical Council of the Christian Church: "The decrees were framed by the president [507] Tarasius, and ratified by the acclamations and subscriptions of three hundred and fifty bishops. They unanimously pronounced that the worship of images is agreeable to Scripture and reason, to the Fathers and councils of the Church; but they hesitated whether that worship be relative or direct; whether the godhead and the figure of Christ be entitled to the same mode of adoration. [508] Of this second Nicene Council the acts are still extant; a curious monument of superstition and ignorance, of falsehood and folly." (Decline and Fall, chapter xlix.)

And this has been read as history, and has passed as such in the estimation of the overwhelming majority of educated English-speaking people for several generations, and yet it is a statement as full of absolute and inexcusable errors as the passage in another part of the same work which the late Bishop Lightfoot so unmercifully exposed, and which the most recent editor, Bury, has taken pains to correct.

I do not know whether it is worth while to do so, but perhaps it may be as well to state, that whatever may be his opinion of the truths of the conclusions arrived at by the council, no impartial reader can fail to recognize the profound learning [509] of the assembly, the singular acumen displayed in the arguments employed, and the remarkable freedom from what Gibbon and many others would consider "superstition." So radical is this that Gibbon would have noticed it had he read the acts of the synod he is criticising (which we have good reason for believing that he never did). There he would have found the Patriarch declaring that at that time the venerable images worked no miracles, a statement that would be made by no prelate of the Latin or Greek Church to-day, even in the light of the nineteenth century.

As I have noted in the previous pages my task is not that of a controversialist. To me at present it is a matter of no concern whether the decision of the council is true or false. I shall therefore strictly confine myself to two points: 1. That the Council was Ecumenical. 2. What its decision was; explaining the technical meaning of the Greek words employed during this controversy and finally incorporated in the decree.

[507] Who was possibly at least not the president, vide Michaud, Sept. Conc. OEuméniques, p. 330.

[508] Worship is "relative" or "absolute," what Gibbon means by "direct" would be hard to say. How entirely false the whole statement is, Gibbon himself would have recognized had he read the acts.

[509] Dr. Neale complains that the acts display a painful lack of critical knowledge and that several spurious passages are attributed to the Fathers. But I confess this does not seem to me either surprising or disgraceful. The attributing of books, even in our critical days, to persons who were not their authors is not so uncommon as to make us wonder such a thing might have occurred in such stormy times, when learning of this sort must have suffered by the adversities of the Church and State, the Iconoclastic persecutions and the Moslem incursions.

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