Speaking on the development of the veneration of images, which would later become dogmatically defined at the Second Council of Nicea (AD 787), Will Durant wrote:
The Old Testament (Deut. iv, 15) had explicitly forbidden any “graven image of any figure, male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth.” The early Church had frowned upon images as relics of paganism, and had looked with horror upon pagan sculptures purporting to represent the gods. But the triumph of Christianity under Constantine, and the influence of Greek surroundings, traditions, and statuary in Constantinople and the Hellenistic East, had softened this opposition. As the number of worshipped saints multiplied, a need arose for identifying and remembering them; pictures of them and of Mary were produced in great number; and in the case of Christ not only His imagined form but His cross became objects of reverence—even, for simple minds, magic talismans. A natural freedom of fancy among the people turned the holy relics, pictures, and statues into objects of adoration; people prostrated themselves before them, kissed them, burned candles and incense before them, crowned them with flowers, and sought miracles from their occult influence. In Greek Christianity especially, sacred images were everywhere—in churches, monasteries, houses and shops, even on furniture, trinkets, and clothes. Cities in danger from epidemic, famine, or war tended to rely upon the power of the relics they harbored, or on their patron saints, rather than on human enterprise. Fathers and councils of the Church repeatedly explained that the images were not deities, but only reminders thereof; the people did not care to make such distinctions . . . Constantine [the fifth] exacted from Leo IV (775-80) an oath to continue the Iconoclastic policy; Leo did what he could despite his weak constitution. Dying, he named his ten-year-old son Constantine VI as emperor (780-97), and nominated his widow, the Empress Irene, as regent during the youth’s minority. She ruled with ability and without scruple. Sympathizing with the religious feelings of the people and her sex, she quietly ended the enforcement of the Iconoclast edicts; permitted the monks to return to their monasteries and their pulpits, and convinced the prelates of Christendom in the Second Council of Nicea (787), where 350 bishops, under the lead of papal legates, restored the veneration—not the worship—of sacred images as a legitimate expression of Christian piety and faith. (Will Durant, the Story of Civilization, vol. 4: The Age of Faith: A History of Medieval Civilization—Christian, Islamic, and Judaic—from Constantine to Dante: A.D. 325-1300 [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950], 425-26, 427)
Further Reading
Karl Joseph Von Hefele, A History of the Councils of the Church From the Original Documents, vol. 5: A.D. 626 to the Close of the of the Second Council of Nicea, A.D. 787
