Oxford history of the christian church

Irene and Constantine VI.

These conflicting tendencies can be seen during the reign of Irene and her immediate successors. The council of Nicaea II may have restored orthodoxy but there remained an undercurrent of iconoclasm ready to exploit for political purposes what was probably a family struggle for power. When the young Emperor Constantine VI attempted to oust his dominating mother, the Empress Irene, and assume control of the government it was the iconoclast party and the Asian troops who backed him, though he himself was not an iconoclast. But he lacked military ability and political adroitness and his mother returned to power. His second attempt to assert himself over the question of his marriage also failed and this time proved his final undoing. His divorce from his wife Mary the Paphlagonian and subsequent second marriage to Theodote in 795 created the so-called adultery, or 'moechian', controversy. The grounds for the divorce were debatable and in any case second marriages were frowned on in Byzantine canon law. The Patriarch Tarasius only penalized the priest Joseph who had been persuaded to perform the marriage, exercising oeconomia towards the Emperor. Both the offence and the temporizing patriarchal attitude gave the extreme monastic element grounds for opposition to Tarasius and the Emperor. But the loudly-voiced criticism of the monks only resulted in the exile of Abbot Plato of Saccudium (a house on Mount Olympus in Bithynia) and his followers, including Theodore (later of the Studite monastery in Constantinople). But their exile was short-lived, as in 797 the Emperor was blinded by his mother who recalled the monks. The priest Joseph's fortunes went up or down according to the imperial wish. He was excommunicated under Irene, reinstated by her opponent and successor Nicephorus I, and finally in 812 in response to Studite pressure was degraded under the pro-monastic Michael I. Oeconomia, even when prompted by humane motives, was outside the severe monastic code, an attitude which was to cause endless rifts between moderates and extremists throughout the history of Byzantium.

In the difficult post-787 period of readjustment an even more tricky problem than Constantine VI's second marriage was the question of the episcopate, since this affected the good government of the whole Byzantine Church. The extremists wished the Patriarch Tarasius to depose all iconoclast bishops, even if repentant, as well as those who had been guilty of any kind of simony, interpreting simony in an impossibly wide sense to include ordination fees and offerings normally made to a bishop. Patriarchal decrees witness to the prolonged struggle between Tarasius and the monks ⁴² during which there was even recourse to Pope Hadrian I, ⁴³ not that much satisfaction was obtained from papal sources. This split between extremists and moderates within the orthodox ranks inevitably weakened any concerted orthodox stand against lingering iconoclasm itself. It was moreover an indication of the growing strength of the monastic party that it was able to challenge patriarchal policy in this way. The final word however usually lay with the Emperor and when Tarasius died in 806 the monks did not on this occasion succeed in placing their nominee on the patriarchal throne.

Irene may have been orthodox in belief and instrumental in restoring the icons but in certain other respects her reign was disastrous. Apart from the uneasy ecclesiastical equilibrium as well as political opposition centred in her son Constantine VI, there was squandering of economic resources and repeated military failures against external enemies such as the Arabs and Bulgars. There was loss of prestige due to western territorial encroachment in Italy, followed by Charlemagne's imperial coronation in St Peter's in 800. Then Rome had realized that the Franks (though often overbearing, as in their attitude to Nicaea II) were likely to be more effective allies than the Byzantines and in any case the papacy was perpetually irritated by its failure to get back its ecclesiastical jurisdiction in southern Italy, Sicily, and Illyricum which had been transferred to Constantinople in the mid-eighth century. Irene was by no means unaware of the problems posed by Charlemagne and the papacy, but in the event these were left for her successors to deal with. Her over-ambition, arrogance, and on the whole poor statesmanship created such havoc in the Empire that in October 802 she was ousted without difficulty by Nicephorus, a former treasury official.