It would take Orthodox churchmen several decades definitively to sort out the difference between an icon and an idol, and several more decades to create a theology that fully incorporated the role of icons. (Leslie Brubaker, Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm [Studies in Early Medieval History; London: Bristol Classical Press, 2012], 22)
Women and icons
It is often supposed that women were particularly attached to images. There are two reasons for this hypothesis, one based on outdated and misplaced assumptions, the other on the belief that Byzantine women had few religious outlets other than icon veneration. Neither is supported by any but the most tenuous evidence.
There is a long tradition in western historical thought that images valuable didactic tools for the illiterate. This was expressed as early as the sixth century by pope Gregory the Great, and remained a standard tenet of western Christian thought throughout the Middle Ages. It was never, however, the dominant tradition in Byzantium, which—as we have seen throughout this book—favoured visual evidence and, from the late seventh century onwards, believed that images of saints could be invested with their real presence. In the western, Catholic Middle Ages, images were considered particularly useful tools to teach novices and women, but, there is no evidence for such a divide in the Orthodox church. The Catholic European mind-set was, however, somewhat paradoxically applied to Byzantium by Edward Gibbon, in his influential Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a key text of the ‘Enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century. Gibbon, like many Enlightenment authors, was fiercely anti-clerical, and opposed to what he saw as the idolatry of the Catholic church; he also—again, like many Enlightenment authors—had scant regard for female intellect. These attitudes came together in his evaluation of the Byzantine iconoclast period, where he claimed that ‘The idols . . . were secretly cherished by the order and sex most prone to devotion; and the fond alliance of the monks and females obtained a final victory over the reason and authority of man’. Gibbon cites no evidence, though we may assume that his indictment of women as idolaters stemmed from the restoration of image veneration in 787 during the regency of Eirene and in 843 during the regency of Theodora. As we have seen, there is no contemporary evidence that either empress was ‘secretly’ pro-image, nor that their religious sentiments were the main focus of either the 787 council or the 842 synod. As we have also seen, except for the Stoudite monks under Theodore’s leadership, there is no evidence that monks, as a group, were particularly pro-image. We must, in the end, discount any association of women (with or without monks) and icons based on either a false analogy with the Catholic tradition, on the one hand, or the anti-clerical and anti-female attitudes of the Enlightenment, on the other. (Leslie Brubaker, Inventing Byzantine Iconoclasm [Studies in Early Medieval History; London: Bristol Classical Press, 2012], 117-18)
