How Orthodox Christianity Inflicted a Mortal Wound Upon the Byzantine Empire

Iconoclasm was a persistent and important religious position in Eastern Christianity for many centuries. It held that no image should ever be made of God, Jesus, or the Saints, as this was tantamount to idolatry. Icons were (and are) sacred painted images very important in the Orthodox Church, and they were (and indeed still are) venerated as religious conduits to holy powers of whom the praying venerator seeks aid. Iconoclasts formed popular reform movements in the Near Eastern provinces of the Byzantine (or Eastern Roman) Empire; Iconoclasm flourished as a heresy in Anatolia (modern Turkey), Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt. Repeatedly the iconclasts were crushed by the imperial military authority and the judicial officers of the Orthodox Church. On rare occasion candidates for the Imperial Throne in Constantinople even supported the cause, creating full-blown civil war and fueling bloody inter-dynastic feuds. The Iconoclasts had at least as ancient a religious heritage as any other form of Christianity. Many of their religious communities had been originally Jewish centers going back to Roman and Hellenistic times. And of course, religious imagery is forbidden in Judaism, just as it was among heavily Jewish sects of Christianity like the Jacobeans mentioned in an earlier posting in this blog. While the Iconodules (the image-venerating party) won the struggle in the short term, it would cost the Empire heavily in the long term. All those regions that had preferred iconoclastic forms of worship did not forget how badly treated they had been at the hands of the Byzantine religious and secular authorities. When the Muslim Arabs came knocking at their doors, the Eastern Provinces welcomed them as liberators. Their new Islamic masters allowed them to worship as they preferred, and the Byzantine Empire lost its richest provinces of trade, natural resources and agricultural products. The Orthodox Byzantines for their part put up a brilliant fight, and sometimes temporarily won back territory from Islam. But their days were now clearly numbered. People will always prefer freedom of worship than bloody oppression by an Official State Religion.