VII Ecumenical Council of 787

Iconoclasm. The beginning of iconoclasm under Leo the Isaurian (717-741). Aggravation of the conflict with the West. Constantine V (741-775).

Iconoclastic Council of 754 Constantine Persecution. Protection of icons outside the empire. In the West. Emperor Leo IV the Khazar (775-780). Reign of Irene together with her son Constantine VI (780-790). Preparation for the Seventh Ecumenical Council. An attempt to open an Ecumenical Council in 786. VII Ecumenical Council (787). Iconoclasm after the Seventh Ecumenical Council. The Second Period of Iconoclasm. Emperor Nicephorus (802-811). Michael I Rangawe (811-813), who was the minister of the court (Kurapalates). New iconoclasm. Leo V the Armenian (813-820). The Second Iconoclastic Council of 815 Michael II Travl (820-829). Theophilus (829-842). The Triumph of Orthodoxy. Reflection of the iconoclastic disputes after the Seventh Ecumenical Assembly in the West. The Council of Paris in 825 The end of iconoclasm in the Frankish Empire. The Reflection of Iconoclasm in the Armenian Church.

From the Editors.

The history of the ecumenical councils of the Christian Church, from the famous Nicaea Council (325), which adopted the common Christian Creed, to the Paris Creed (825), is one of the most interesting and at the same time the most difficult topics to investigate. Its implementation requires deep knowledge of the era, a scrupulous analysis of primary sources, and knowledge of ancient languages. This largely explains the paucity of fundamental works specifically devoted to the ecumenical councils. In our country over the past few decades, there have been practically no serious scientific publications that comprehensively cover the era of the Ecumenical Councils and the history of the Councils themselves.

The book by the famous Orthodox church historian and theologian A. A. Kartashev will help, at least partially, to fill this gap. The Russian reader gets the opportunity to get acquainted with the most important pages in the history of the Christian Church, full of exciting, sometimes dramatic and even tragic episodes. At the Ecumenical Councils, these gatherings of the higher clergy, a system of doctrine and worship was developed and approved, canonical norms and liturgical rules were formed, various theological concepts were evaluated, and methods of combating heresies were determined. "Councils for the East," writes A. V. Kartashev, "are lightning rods, palliatives and medicines for dogmatic fevers, which relieved the acuteness of the disease for a certain period and contributed to its healing in the course of time."

As a serious researcher, Α. Β. Kartashev, of course, could not confine himself to the framework of the immediate history of the Ecumenical Councils. He presents it against the broad background of the socio-political and cultural life of that era. and the epoch covered in the work of A. V. Kartashev is truly unique. This is the era of transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages, when the economic, social, political and spiritual foundations of European civilization were laid in the area of the Roman Empire, which largely determined the ways of its further development.

"Ecumenical Councils" is a fundamental historical work to which the author devoted many years. But this considerable stretching in time of the process of creating a book could not but affect the language and stylistics of its various parts: some of them are closer to the norms of the modern Russian language, others are farther away. Often the author uses phrases and words that are unusual for the modern Russian reader, seemingly archaic. However, when you start reading the book, you soon cease to notice this "outdated" manner of presentation and are completely immersed in the experience of the most acute collisions, which are so rich in the ancient history of the Christian Church and which the author of the book was able to convey to us so vividly.

This publication is intended not only for a narrow circle of specialists, but also for all those who today show a keen interest in the history of religion and the church. Among this last category of readers there may be people who are little familiar with the Christian religious-ecclesiastical terminology that the author of the book widely uses. Taking this into account, the editors considered it necessary to give brief footnotes of an explanatory nature. Unlike the author's notes, which are marked with numbers, editorial notes are marked with an asterisk.

Preface.

Dogmas are eternal and inexhaustible. The stages of their revelation in the consciousness and history of the Church, the definitions, the "oroses" of the ecumenical councils, are not tombstones rolled to the doors of the sealed sepulchre of eternally crystallized and petrified truth. On the contrary, they are milestones, on which are inscribed infallible guiding indications where and how confidently and safely a living Christian thought, individual and conciliar, should go, in its irrepressible and boundless search for answers to theoretical-theological and applied life-practical questions.

The history of the Church, like the biblical history that preceded it, is the unfolding of the stages of the ever-growing revelation of God in the destinies of earthly mankind and, more precisely, in the destinies of certain of its parts, i.e., of individual peoples. When we look at these peoples with the eyes of faith, they appear to us as chosen vessels and organs of revelation. With such providential pre-election, these peoples, with their inherent qualities and their cultures, were not in the least ashamed in their natural free development, in their passions, extremes, passions, mistakes, falls, and rebellions. The history of the chosen peoples does not stop in its natural movement, does not stiffen and die, like a mechanical instrument in the hands of Providence. Divine revelation does not need to abolish freedom. The natural evolution of these peoples served only as the most expedient background and environment on which the finger of Providence inscribed the writings necessary in the economy of the salvation of the world. "In many parts and in many forms, of old, God, who spoke by the father in the prophets" (Hebrews 1:1), at times corrected the course of events by the intrusion into it of miraculous influences from above, "working miracles sometimes."

Sacred biblical and ecclesiastical history could have been different in concrete forms, with all their invariability in essence. It is the realm of freedom, not of physical, deadening necessity, of fatal predestination. The conceivability of other variants of the history of the Church is brilliantly illustrated by the differences in the universal ecclesiastical evolution within the framework of a single ancient "universe" – "οικουμένη" with the differences in the experience of questions of dogma and piety in its Latin and Hellenic [1] halves, which ultimately led to the fatal disintegration of the Church into two branches that diverged separately.