The Franks and the Second Council of Nicaea

A great section just now in Charlemagne. Was going to post my summary to twitter but it got kind of long for a thread so here it is.

So, the Byzantines have been going back and forth between iconoclasm (banning images to prevent their worship) and the iconodules (lovers of images). On the one hand, the Franks like their art and like their decorated churches, so they’re against iconoclasm. On the other hand, there’s stories of Orthodox priests who scrape off paint chips from their icons and mix it with wine and serve it as a holy medicine. Outright superstition. 

The word from Constantinople is that these arrogant Greeks holding the Second Council of Nicaea (to which the Franks and Anglo-Saxons are not invited) are going to come down in favour of the veneration of icons in such a way that the icons would be on par with the holy trinity. The Franks see this as not just heresy but almost a reversion to paganism. 

Luckily, Charlemagne has been promoting literacy by teaching people to read and producing books at an astonishing rate. It’s called the Carolingian renaissance and this its first real test. Charlemagne wants to produce a refutation of the Second Council of Nicaea using all this newly rediscovered Aristotelean philosophy and he wants to take it to Pope Hadrian and get the whole thing shut down. So he starts prepping a Synod of Frankish bishops and starts writing a book, the Opus Caroli regis contra synodum ("The work of King Charles against the Synod"). 

Technically it’s his bishop Theodulf the Visigoth writing the book but Charlemagne is certainly paying close attention: so close in fact, that in the 20th century they discovered his own personal comments written in Tironian shorthand in the manuscript’s margins––the book claims these are the only handwritten notes from a medieval ruler to have been preserved anywhere. This is going to be the biggest intellectual project in Western Europe since the collapse of the Roman Empire. They’re going to make an argument for a third way: the Franks don’t worships pictures, but they do use them. They’re justification is that, no one can be so egotistical to claim to know God, he’s above us, but the part of God that was Jesus was an historical person, thus images can serve to educate the ignorant and bring them to an understanding of history which they would otherwise lack given widespread illiteracy and that mass is sung in latin, a language most don’t speak. Theodulf spends three years working on the book and it wasn’t going to be just a dry tome but a caustic attack on the Byzantine emperors. Charlemagne will become a conqueror not just of the battlefield but of the spiritual realm as well. 

*Adam Curtis voice* And then something strange happened: the Franks received word that the pope endorsed the Council. The Franks are astonished. How could this be? The Franks were politely reminded that none of them actually spoke, much less read, Greek. All of the ire the Franks held for the Council was based on a misunderstanding, a confusion of the words ‘veneration’ and ‘adoration.’ The Pope sent them encyclicals walking them through it step-by-step. Charlemagne held the Pope in such high esteem that he knew he couldn’t really go against him on a church issue, and so the book was scrapped. The second half was never completed and still exists only in a rough version, with crossings out and notes for later corrections.