There was passionate opposition to iconoclasm throughout the Eastern church, and the greatest defender of icons was St John of Damascus who argued that Christ coming in the flesh as the image of the invisible God changed everything.
So maybe it was because his conscience was pricked by Islam that in 726 the Christian Emperor of the East, Leo III, banned all images, and started a smashing campaign, which we call “iconoclasm.” He argued that the Old Testament forbids graven images, and especially worship of them. Islam forbids all pictures, while images of Christ, the Virgin Mary and the saints were a central part of Christian worship in the Middle Ages. Within a decade of Mohammed’s death Muslims had conquered vast tracts of the empire, and they kept at it until they finally took Constantinople in 1453. But from the seventh century it had a deadly new threat to deal with: Islam. The eastern half of the Christian Roman Empire survived for centuries after the west fell to barbarian tribes.
0 kommentar(er)
