A Dark-Age crisis: aspects of the Iconoclastic controversy

Generally, the study of the Iconoclast controversy has tended to become a study of the origin of Iconoclast ideas, and this study has, in turn, been incapsulated in a search for a local, provincial setting for such ideas. A consideration of the attitude of the early church to images and the discovery of an Iconoclast movement in the totally Christian environment of seventh-century Armenia have led almost all scholars to regard Iconoclasm as endogenic: it was a crisis within Byzantine Christianity itself. Altogether, the Iconoclast controversy is in the grip of a crisis of over-explanation. Indeed, the only two men in the Dark Ages whom we know to have been deeply interested in art–the Emperor Theophilus-and Bishop Theodulf of Orleans–were Iconoclast or at least, anti-Iconodule. It became brutally plain for the first time that either the bishop or the holy man must be the moral arbiter of Byzantium.