More Examples Of Medieval Opposition To Prayer To Saints

Concerning some of the opposition to prayer to saints around the time of the Second Council of Nicaea, Dirk Krausmuller writes:

The second half of the sentence [in a response to the eighth-century emperor Constantine V] then establishes a close nexus between the rejection of the title “saint” and the rejection of intercession. This casts doubt on Brubaker’s and Haldon’s hypothesis that Constantine merely wished to prevent overuse of invocations of saints. The next statement is even more explicit. Constantine is said to have claimed that “the holy apostles and all the blessed martyrs do not possess the power to intercede and have only helped themselves through the sufferings that they endured and have saved their own souls from punishment” and that they therefore cannot help those who call on them. This statement can no longer be explained away as a misunderstanding. It reflects a coherent worldview, which posits that nothing comes between God and the individual human being and that Christians must attain salvation through their own efforts. It is evident that this is one possible interpretation of the Christian faith. As Gero has pointed out, similar statements are found in Protestant texts of the 16th century. It seems unlikely that an Iconophile who took the mediating role of saints for granted would have fabricated such a complex argument. Significantly, the author of the treatise Against Constantine the Horseman felt the need to defend the mechanisms of intercession. He declared that even in this life people turn to the mothers of those from whom they want a favour because they know that good sons listen to their mothers and concludes that this was even more the case with Mary and her son Christ. This is quite an elaborate response. That the author took the trouble to formulate it makes it even more probable that he reacted to a real challenge....

It is in this light that we must assess claims that Constantine interfered with the cult of the saints. Theophanes the Confessor declares that the emperor moved against all-night vigils in honour of Mary. Patriarch Nicephorus adds that he not only rejected Mary’s role as intercessor but also “adulterated and counterfeited all the hymns which invoke her name and which the supplicants address to the one who is born from her in litanies and entreaties” and that he raged “against the sacred memoranda of the saints.” This suggests that Constantine excised calls for intercession from liturgical poetry and from saints’ lives. Confirmation for this interpretation comes from the hagiographer of Nicetas of Medikion who claims to have seen sermons written by the emperor “which had no intercession.” That the emperor wrote such texts shows clearly that he was not an “enemy of the saints,” despite iconophile claims that he slandered the Virgin. It is certain that he held them in high regard, but as models for imitation and not as powerful mediators between the ordinary faithful and God. Such an understanding of the role of the saints would be in keeping with the “ethical theory” of images, which we know the iconoclasts to have promoted.

At this point we need to ask: what was the historical context for Constantine’s measures? Two texts offer concrete information, the Chronicle of George the Monk and Theophanes’ Chronographia. George informs us that the emperor “promulgated a universal decree for the people, that none of the servants of the Lord should be called holy … and that one should not ask for their intercession, for they have no power.” Theophanes is even more precise. In the entry for the year 765/66 we read that Constantine “displayed a madness much worse than that of the Arabs to the orthodox bishops and monks and laymen, governors and subjects, under his rule, everywhere rejecting in writing as being unprofitable and unscriptural the intercessions of the holy Virgin, the Mother of God, and of all the saints.” Theophanes attributes to the emperor a specific line of reasoning, that a practice is invalid if it is not mentioned in the Bible. Accordingly, Constantine would have reasoned that there were no Scriptural proof texts for the intercession of the saints and that it must therefore be rejected....

It needs to be said, however, that Auzépy, Brubaker and Haldon would dismiss all these arguments. They argue that Constantine could not possibly have taken such a step because the Council of Hieria had anathematized anyone who did not accept the traditional role of Mary and the saints within the Christian belief system and did “not ask for their prayers as having the freedom to intercede on behalf of the world according to the tradition of the church.” At first sight it does indeed seem impossible that the emperor would have gone against the decisions of a church council, which he himself had convened. Yet the matter is not as clear-cut as one might first think. In his Second Antirrheticus Patriarch Nicephorus avers that at the council Constantine had promised his bishops to obey them in all respects but that he had then broken his word and attacked the cult of the saints. Even clearer evidence is found in the Acts of the [Second] Council of Nicaea. There the quotation of the anathema is followed by the comment: “Therefore after this publication of theirs [i.e. the Acts of the Council of Hieria], they also rejected the well-received offering up of intercessions to God, having wiped it out from this writing of theirs; and this everybody knows.” The meaning of this passage is clear. It is claimed that after 754 the emperor had come to the conclusion that the council’s pronouncement about the intercessions of the saints was not sufficiently orthodox and therefore needed to be excised. If the chronology in Theophanes’ Chronographia is to be trusted, this step would have been taken around the year 765/6 when Constantine published his edict against the cult of the saints. Gero remarked that there is no strong reason for doubting the veracity of the comment. Although it was not discussed by Auzépy, or by Brubaker and Haldon, we can assume that they would regard it as a fabrication. Yet it is difficult to see how the organizers of the Council of Nicaea could have invented such a story when many of the participants would already have been in office during the reign of Constantine and thus would have had first-hand knowledge of his religious policies. One might still object that the decrees of a council could only be changed by another council. It is, however, not at all certain that Constantine V felt bound by this rule. After all, we know that on other occasions he did not hesitate to interfere in the business of the church....

Already his son Leo IV returned to the status quo even though he maintained the iconoclastic position. This may well have been the reason why the topic is hardly mentioned in the Acts of the Council of Nicaea. This does, of course, not mean that the extremists disappeared after Constantine’s death. Hagiographical texts such as the Life of Joannicius suggest that they continued to agitate against the cult of the saints. Yet they now did so without imperial support.

(Mike Humphreys, ed., A Companion To Byzantine Iconoclasm [Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2021], 469, 471-73, 476-77)