The Doves of Antioch: Severus, Chalcedonians, Monothelites, and Iconoclasm

Ken Parry

Introduction

The theme of this study focuses on the accusations of iconoclasm in the chris- tological debates in the Christian East during the sixth to eighth centuries, especially in relation to anti-Chalcedonians and Monothelites. Such accusa- tions appear before the outbreak of iconoclasm in Constantinople in the eighth century,and indicate that christology and iconoclasm had become linked in the minds of theologians. The incidents of iconoclasm associated with Severus of Antioch will be the starting-point of our investigation into these accusations. In doing so we will need to discuss their textual history, and whether they rep- resent any real connection with the faith communities they disparage, or are simply the result of Chalcedonian polemic. This in turn will lead us to reassess the politics of heresy in relation to these accusations and how they may have impacted on Byzantine iconoclasm itself. In an article published in 2012 in the Art Bulletin entitled ‘Iconoclasm as Dis- course: From Antiquity to Byzantium’, the art historian Jaś Elsner has demon- strated that in order to understand Byzantine iconoclasm it is important to examine the long-standing debate over the status of images that is evident in the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean.1 He has done so to some extent in response to the exhaustive work on Byzantine iconoclasm by Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon published in 2011.2 In their book Brubaker and Haldon have isolated the phenomenon of iconoclasm in Byzantium and abandoned dis- cussion of theological and christological themes and thereby diminished the intellectual content of the controversy. I am in agreement with Elsner on this, for it seems to me that unless we place Byzantine iconoclasm in this broader perspective we miss vital aspects of that discourse on images that went on for centuries across cultures and languages, and which undoubtedly impacted on what happened in Constantinople in the eighth century. I would go further and

1 J. Elsner, ‘Iconoclasm as Discourse: From Antiquity to Byzantium’, ArtBulletin (2012), 368–394. 2 L. Brubaker and J. Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era c. 680–850: A History (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2011).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/9789004307995_008 the doves of antioch 139 say that it impacted on attitudes and responses in the early Islamic world as well.3 It is therefore with this notion of ‘iconoclasm as discourse’ in mind that I want to approach the topic of this study.

Severus of Antioch

There are two surviving passages that detail Severus’ apparent iconoclasm. The first is from a petition against Severus by Chalcedonian monks and clergy from Antioch preserved in the Acts of the Home Synod of Constantinople in 536,4 and cited at Nicaea ii in 787. It reads as follows:

He [Severus] did not even spare the sacred altars and vessels: for the former he scraped off on the pretext they were impure, the latter he melted down and distributed [the proceeds] among his fellow-thinkers. This, too he has daringly done … He has appropriated, along with other things, the gold and silver doves representing the Holy Spirit that hung above the sacred fonts and altars, saying that the Holy Spirit should not be designated in the form of a dove.5

This episode is referred to as a source of iconoclast authority in an eighth- century work called the Nouthesia, or The Warning of the Elder Concerning the Holy Images attributed to George, bishop of Constantia in Cyprus, who may have been the George condemned by the iconoclasts at their council in 754 at Hiereia (an Asiatic suburb of Constantinople), along with the patriarch Germanus and John of Damascus.6 Some of the contents of the Nouthesia suggest a date prior to 754, but it erroneously refers to the Fifth Ecumenical Council of 553 as condemning Severus for his supposed iconoclastic actions,

3 See the important study by G. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1999). 4 J.D. Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum Nova et Amplissima Collectio, viii. Florence 1767; Graz 1960– 1962, 1039a–b; C. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312–1453 (University of Toronto Press: Toronto, 1986), 44. 5 Mansi, xiii, 184a; Mango, Art of the Byzantine Empire, 44. Clement of Alexandria was the ear- liest writer to discuss images of doves, in his case on signet rings, as Christian art, Paidagogos, 3.10.59. For a sixth-century silver dove from Syria in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, see W. Mayer and P. Allen, The Churches of Antioch (300–638) (Peeters: Leuven, 2012), 367. 6 S. Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm during the Reign of Constantine v with particular attention to