The Gender of Debate in the Byzantine Iconoclastic Crisis, 726–843
The years from 726–843 CE were characterized in the Byzantine empire by fierce debate over the place of icons in Christian life and practice. Eastern Orthodoxy continues to emphasize the importance of images of Christ, Mary of Nazareth, and the saints, as the church of this region did particularly before the controversy broke out. Historians have apparently not settled on a precise reason for the emergence of this debate, although theories range from Islamic influence to political conflict between the imperial leadership and the clergy.
One thing that is immediately noteworthy about this conflict, however, is the fact that the two people to settle the two major eras of Iconoclasm were women: Empress Irene, with the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787, and Empress Theodora, with a synod affirming the decisions of Nicaea II in 843. In addition, many of the most common stories about popular devotion to the icons involve women! In the midst of a world history so lacking in stories about women, why is this? I am inclined to agree with Judith Herrin’s initial reaction to these accounts: “...as yet another example of the common slurs on womankind perpetrated by uniformly male writers,” though she later reconsidered. Those of us interested in gender issues may be elated to find mentions of women in the midst of our so-called “Patristic History,” but we must not seize onto these stories without question. It remains the case that most of our history was written by men, and that this history must therefore be read as such.
Beginning in the year 726, emperor Leo III of Byzantium instigated the first era of Iconoclastic debate, along with his new patriarch Anastasius, appointed in 730. Together they issued the first decrees ordering images to be destroyed, and outlawing their use in worship. As the story goes, one of Leo III’s first iconoclastic actions was to order the removal of the icon of Christ placed above the Chalke gate of the imperial palace, at which point a riot ensued, led by a woman , and the man sent to destroy the icon was killed. It is possible that this story is the stuff of legend—the leader is sometimes called Theodosia, sometimes Maria; the rest of her rioters are sometimes women, sometimes men —yet from the very beginning of the century-long iconoclastic controversy, we see a belief that women were particularly attached to the icons, so much so that they were willing to die as martyrs protecting them.
During the years that followed, Leo III and his son Constantine V oversaw violent persecutions of anyone found with icons, and in response this period also saw the first theology explicitly dealing with the role of images. St. John of Damascus’ On the Divine Images became a key text, cited frequently during the Second Council of Nicaea held in 787. In 754, Constantine V assembled a church council, now considered heretical, to ensure official church support for his iconoclastic policies. This council focused on christology, as had the previous, orthodox councils, maintaining that a visual depiction of Christ cannot possibly represent his two natures, divine and human. The only true icon, they claimed, was one of the same nature as its subject; image and prototype must be consubstatial. Therefore, because in the Christian framework, it is impossible for anything material aside from Christ himself to have a divine nature, it is thus impossible to create an icon consubstantial with Christ, and the worship of any other icon is thus idolatry.
Constantine’s son, Leo IV, took the throne after his father’s death in 775. While Leo inherited his father’s violently iconoclastic official policy, his wife Irene was firmly on the iconophile side of the debate. It was perhaps through her influence—which seems to have been considerable, judging from her later political activity—that these iconoclastic policies were no longer enforced, and prisoners released. There are enough stories, however, of Leo IV’s punishment of Irene and others within the palace for worship of icons that it seems safe to assume that Leo continued to enforce his father’s policies in some more general ways.
Leo IV died suddenly in 780, leaving Irene with a nine-year-old heir named Constantine VI. Irene assumed the throne as regent for Constantine, though the authority she exercised and the official images released suggest that she acted more as co-emperor. With the support of the newly-elected iconophile patriarch Tarasius, Irene called the Seventh Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in 786. Because of complications from iconoclast imperial guards, the council was called off to forestall further violence, and reconvened in Nicaea the following year.
The theological focus of the council was the historical precedent for the veneration of icons, centered on icons of Christ but also including icons of Mary (the Theotokos, literally “bearer of God”) and the saints. Christ’s incarnation became central; because Christ had taken a fleshly, material form, this form can be represented and his divine nature implied. Contrary to the iconoclast position, the iconophile council maintained that the image and its prototype did not need to be identical, but rather that worship given to the image would pass on to the prototype. Because the incarnation of Christ was seen as the central tenet of the Christian faith, this debate was not taken as merely academic, but the iconoclasts were portrayed as heretics of the worst kind, denying the possibility that matter could become deified through Christ’s incarnation.
Perhaps owing to these strong feelings on both sides, following Irene’s death in 803, the leadership began to shift back toward iconoclasm, culminating in the council of 815. This council rejected the rulings of Nicaea II and affirmed the iconoclast council of 754 as the Seventh Ecumenical Council. Persecution of monks and other iconophiles continued, reaching a peak with Emperor Theophilus (829-842). Theophilus’ wife Theodora, however, became a legendary iconophile, along with many other women in the royal family. Stories of Theodora teaching her children to worship the icons, along with her mother-in-law Euphrosyne, have become fairly common ways to portray the loyalty to icons presumed to be common among women. Upon Theophilus’ death in 842, Theodora took power as regent for their son Michael III. Once she replaced her husband’s iconoclast patriarch with the iconophile Methodius, the two of them organized a synod in 843 to restore the decisions of Nicaea II. This synod represented the end of the iconoclast period, and is remembered as the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” on the first Sunday of Lent.
Looking at the major players in this history, it is easy to assume that women took a leading role in the fight against iconoclasm. Several key figures in the story are female; icons could be kept in the home, and worshipped there without the intervention of a priest. It seems to be a common scholarly conclusion, then, that women would naturally be more devoted to these practices. In her article “Women and Icons, and Women in Icons,” though, Robin Cormack suggests that such a convenient explanation is simply another result of a patriarchal academic discourse that can only associate women with home life and personal, private piety. Additionally, the idea that if women are visible as consumers of any particular form, this form is then gendered feminine and all use by men may be safely ignored represents nothing more than a slight “feminist” twist to the classic polarity of men-against-women.
When we can see, for example, that some women were devoted to iconography, the reaction of many scholars is to ask “why were women more devoted than men?”, reflecting the assumption that icons must be either feminine or masculine, that the dividing line between iconoclast and iconophile must somehow fall along gender lines, because women and men are so essentially different that they cannot possibly have similar religious practices. As Cormack suggests in introducing her work, feminist scholarship often begins by simply “find[ing] women and giv[ing] them a more visible role in history.” While certainly a worthwhile pursuit, this usually demonstrates an assumption that any time a woman appears, it is an unequivocal good; ignoring the fact that women are often portrayed in negative, circumscribed, or even false ways.
In her article “Female Piety in Context,” Brigitte Pitarakis provides an interesting example when she interprets female use of objects like crosses, religious jewelry, and reliquaries. She seems to dismiss objects owned by both men and women as having no significance in terms of gender, though this very fact tells us that many types of devotional objects were used by both men and women. While I don’t doubt her when she asserts that marriage and procreation were central to life in Byzantine society, and even that, as a result, successful childbearing was a significant concern for women, it is both damaging and untrue to suggest that the only concerns of these or any women dealt with pregnancy and family life. While women have very often been constrained by their roles “as mothers and wives,” they are always more than that. To continue defining any group of women solely in terms of these roles is to commit the oldest patriarchal sin in the books. While her description of a seal belonging to Irene Synadene expressing the desire for a child is certainly interesting, does Pitarakis not find it significant that her husband Manuel owned a matching one, expressing the same desire? If parenthood was so central to all sectors of Byzantine life, it is completely unhelpful to limit those concerns to the study of women’s piety.
Robin Cormack’s “Women and Icons” begins by challenging this very assumption, that women were necessarily more devoted to icons because of their domestic nature. Once she has raised this question, Cormack proceeds to analyze depictions of women in extant iconography to explore whether that assumption is valid. She focuses on the panel commemorating the Restoration of Icons (under Theodora in 843) found in the British Museum. While only two of the 18 figures depicted (aside from the icon-within-an-icon of the Mother of God) are female, they take prominent positions; Empress Theodora is dominant in the center of the upper register, in royal robes, and St. Theodosia, though tucked in a corner, holds a martyr’s cross as well as an icon of Christ. Cormack attributes Theodora’s presence to the need to emphasize imperial authority and the official state legality of iconography, rather than on the her status as a woman in power.
Her argument against St. Theodosia’s image being interpreted as representative of female devotion to iconography is more complicated. Because of the martyr’s cross and the icon she holds, Cormack concludes that she must be the Theodosia immortalized in the story of the icon at the Chalke gate. As she examines the evidence for this story, however, she proposes that it is in fact a fictional one, invented probably by the iconophiles as a backstory for the new Christ icon that Irene had placed over the Chalke gate in 800. This story probably caught on after 815, when the iconophiles suddenly were forced to explain how and why they had lost their gains under Irene, especially if they were the ones maintaining the orthodox tradition. As they sought an explanation that would portray them as correct and devout, yet would explain their loss, they found the perfect spokespeople: women. Women were the ideal vehicle for an image of weak piety; “women were the natural victims when a group was needed who must be losers.” The iconoclasts, too, could agree with this characterization—it is squarely within the patriarchal tradition to portray your opponent as “girly.” Irene’s key role in restoring iconography certainly contributed to the power of this bit of propaganda.
If the story of Theodosia at the Chalke gate cannot be used as significant evidence for a special tie between women and images, then St. Theodosia’s presence on the British Museum icon is probably not useful either, because “the saint who appears ... as a champion of icons was then an invented fictitious woman.” Neither can stories about women’s devotion to icons in themselves prove a particular link, because there are certainly stories of equal devotion among men. Cormack recounts the story of the sick woman who scraped at an icon of the medical saints Cosmas and Damian, dissolved the powder in water and “drank it as medicine.” To counter it, however, she gives us the story of Gregory of Tours, who drank dust from the tomb of St. Martin to combat his dysentery. We may be historians, but we are firstly individuals in our own social contexts, and we must not become so wedded to the binary categories of “woman” and “man” that we insist on seeing gender difference when evidence points to an equally-if-not-more interesting cross-gender phenomenon.
Because the debate over iconography took such a theological form, however, how could an intellectual discourse become so strongly gendered simply because of a piece of propaganda? In fact, the debate itself centered on the issue of incarnation—did Christ become truly human, and even if so, could the matter of the icon do justice to this divine form? At heart was the question of earthly matter, and of human flesh. Christ’s depiction in icons is only possible because he took human form—the Creator God is formless, and still impossible to represent. When the iconoclasts denied Christ’s icons, many claimed that they denied the incarnation itself. The iconophiles asserted their own belief in the (possible) sanctity of matter by claiming that their opponents demonstrated “a dichotomy between ‘the spiritual’ and ‘the sensory,’ an insufficient awareness of the reality of the Gospel story.” For the iconophile, “God became man so that man might become God.” Or, for an alternative turn of phrase, “[b]y assuming human nature, Christ impregnated it with grace, making it participate in divine life, and cleared the way to the Kingdom of God for man, the way of deification and transfiguration.”
As this language perhaps makes clear, the discussion of “the flesh” has always been a gendered one, though it is rarely a consistent relationship. When we speak of matter becoming divine, it is always male—for how else would “man ... become God”? When we want to speak of the distinction between the divinity of Christ and the flesh of humanity, however, this same matter must be gendered female in opposition to Christ’s hyper-masculinity, which impregnates the entire human race. This sort of language does not, of course, originate in 1978 with Mr. Ouspensky; on the contrary, Howard Bloch outlines quite clearly that this gendered discourse of the flesh has been common since at least the days of the earliest Christian writers: Tertullian, Philo, Clement of Alexandria, even Paul.
For John Chrysostom, woman’s secondary nature dates from the very beginning of time, from her creation out of Adam’s rib. This existence as “side-issue” easily becomes associated not simply with flesh itself, but with the so-called “mind of the flesh,” with wantonness, beauty, aesthetics, ostentation. Clement of Alexandria explains: “Just as the serpent deceived Eve, so, too, the enticing golden ornament in the shape of a serpent enkindles a mad frenzy in the hearts of the rest of womankind, leading them to have images made of lampreys and snakes as decorations.” Women become associated with the senses, and thus all artistic pursuits become suspect, tainted with the feminine. As a result, “whatever belongs to the realm either of the feminine or the esthetic is devalued within an ontological perspective according to which everything conceived to exist beyond the flesh, and thereby gendered masculine, alone has a claim to full Being.”
It is no surprise, then, that the support of iconography—something associated explicitly with incarnation, with flesh, as well as something so clearly aesthetic—became associated as well with women. At the ideological heart of this controversy was firstly the question of Christian art itself, of the realization of the spiritual by means of the visual; and secondly, the question of the nature of matter, this flesh that was apparently so tainted by the “sin of Eve” that the only way to redeem it was by the indignity of God assuming that very flesh. Here we have a debate in which two of the major players are women, which furthermore centers around the issues of artistic display and of embodiment. That the veneration of these icons was ultimately confirmed as Orthodoxy, against these formidable gendered odds, speaks to the great power these images must have had in the hearts of a significant sector of the Byzantine population—certainly made up of men as well as women. What is not surprising in the least, however, is the fact that the devotion to icons became associated with women.
From the time of the debate through to the present study of Byzantine history, the stories that have endured as emblematic of the conflict are stories about women: Theodosia/Maria at the Chalke gate. Irene’s secret iconophile practices, under her husband’s nose. Theodora’s image-worship given away by a palace dwarf. Euphrosyne’s secret teaching of her grandchildren with icons hidden in a chest. The mythic quality of these stories—and their anomalous character in a Christian history so devoid of stories about women—should suggest that they were told to make a point. And yet, even so-called feminist historians have seized on these stories and the association of women with icons as a rare glimpse into the spiritual lives and practices of medieval women. Should we not have learned by now that our history is rarely favorable to women’s perspectives?
When our evidence does not necessarily support the claim that support for the icons was skewed female, we should consider the possibility that iconophile practice could have been common across genders—a fact that would be interesting in itself, in any society with rigid gender roles!—rather than concluding, as Alice-Mary Talbot seems to, that we simply do not have enough evidence. To open our minds to such possibilities as historians requires that we leave behind the rigid gender polarities that persist in our day. In the Iconoclast controversy, we have stories of women’s devotion to icons; we must not then assume that women were somehow the primary devotees, or even that women were more devoted than men. Instead we should ask, simply, “why do we have these stories about women?” As feminist scholars, we have become used to reading between the lines of stories told by men—why do we abandon this practice when the stories are about women?
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