Ended the first iconoclast crisis: sacred images may be venerated, and the honour paid to them passes to the one they depict.
- Where
- Nicaea in Bithynia — İznik, Turkey
- Convoked by
- The empress Irene, regent for her son Constantine VI, at the urging of the patriarch Tarasius
- Pope
- Hadrian I, represented by two legates, both named Peter — the archpriest of St. Peter's and the abbot of St. Sabas
- Emperor
- Constantine VI, with the empress Irene as regent
- Sat
- A first attempt on 1 August 786 was broken up by iconoclast soldiers; the council reconvened at Nicaea on 24 September 787
- Sessions
- Seven sessions at Nicaea; the eighth and last was held in the Magnaura palace at Constantinople
- Bishops present
- About 263 bishops, after the repentant iconoclast bishops were admitted
What it faced
In 726 or thereabouts the emperor Leo III began removing images from the churches, and for over half a century the empire tore itself apart over whether a Christian may paint Christ. The iconoclast case was strong and serious: the second commandment forbids graven images; God is invisible and cannot be circumscribed; and to bow before a painted board looked exactly like what the prophets had spent centuries denouncing.
The answer, worked out chiefly by John of Damascus — writing safely outside the empire, under Muslim rule — was that the Incarnation had changed what could be depicted. 'I do not worship matter,' he wrote, 'I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake.' God cannot be pictured; God made flesh can, because he chose to be seen. To forbid the image of Christ is, in the end, to doubt that he really took a body.
The council also had to make a distinction the Greek language could carry and Latin could not: between proskynesis, the bow of honour a Christian may give to an icon, a relic, the cross or the Gospel book, and latreia, the adoration owed to God alone. Everything turned on it.
What it defined
- ✠That images of Christ, of the Mother of God, of the angels and of the saints may be made and set up in churches, on vessels and vestments, on walls and in houses, and along the roads.
- ✠That they are to be given honour and veneration — the same kind offered to the cross, the Gospel book and relics — but not the adoration due to God alone.
- ✠That the honour given to the image passes to the one it represents, so that whoever venerates the image venerates the person in it.
- ✠Twenty-two canons of reform, including that no church may be consecrated without relics, and that elections of bishops by secular rulers are void.
In its own words
“Certainly this is not the full adoration in accordance with our faith, which is properly paid only to the divine nature, but it resembles that given to the figure of the honoured and life-giving cross, and also to the holy books of the gospels and to other sacred cult objects.”
“The honour paid to an image traverses it, reaching the model, and he who venerates the image, venerates the person represented in that image.”
Its canons
The disciplinary rules it made — law, not doctrine, and most of them long since changed.
- Canon 3An election of a bishop, priest or deacon made by secular rulers is null and void.
- Canon 5Condemns simony — the buying of ecclesiastical office — in the strongest terms.
- Canon 7No church is to be consecrated without relics; those consecrated without them are to receive them.
- Canon 15No cleric may hold office in two churches at once — an early strike at pluralism.
- Canon 19Forbids taking money for admitting anyone to ordination or to a monastery.
- Canon 20Forbids the founding of new double monasteries of men and women together.
- ✕It did not authorise the worship of images. The definition draws the distinction in the same breath in which it permits veneration, and reserves adoration to the divine nature alone.
- ✕It did not settle the question. A second iconoclasm broke out in 815 and ran until 843, when the icons were restored for good — the day the Byzantine Church still keeps as the Triumph of Orthodoxy on the first Sunday of Lent.
- ✕It did not command that statues be used; the Byzantine tradition venerates painted icons and has generally avoided free-standing sculpture, which is a matter of custom and not of this council's law.
What people think it did
The Church added the veneration of images at Nicaea II, in defiance of the commandment against graven images.
What happened: Images were in Christian use centuries before: the house church at Dura-Europos, painted in the 240s, has scenes of Christ on its walls, and the catacombs are full of them. The council did not introduce the practice but defended one already ancient, and argued from the Incarnation rather than against the commandment — the God who forbade images of himself when he was unseen took flesh and became visible.
The whole Western Church rejected this council, so it was never truly ecumenical.
What happened: The pope's legates were present and Hadrian I approved the acts. What rejected it was Charlemagne's court, working from a translation that turned veneration into adoration — a documented mistranslation. The Frankish objection was to a council that did not exist.
What followed
The council is the seventh and last that Catholics and Eastern Orthodox hold in common. Everything after it, both communions received separately.
In the West it was badly received, and for a bad reason: the Latin translation of the acts sent to Charlemagne's court rendered the Greek proskynesis as adoratio, so the Frankish theologians read the council as commanding that images be adored. On that misunderstanding they wrote the Libri Carolini against it, and the Synod of Frankfurt in 794 rejected what it thought the council had said. Rome, which had legates present and the Greek text, never wavered.
The definition's principle reaches further than icons. It is the reason a Catholic may kiss a crucifix, bow to a relic, or keep a photograph of the dead — the honour is not stopped by the object but travels through it to the person. And it rests on the Incarnation: what may be depicted is what God chose to make visible.
Follow it further
Sources
- Second Council of Nicaea — definition and canons (English)
- John of Damascus, Apologia against those who decry holy images
Every date, figure and quotation on this page was checked against the conciliar text or a published translation before it was written, and independently re-checked by three separate passes over dates, quotations and theology. Where the sources disagree — attendance figures above all — the page gives the range rather than choosing.