Steven Bingham

If John Italos was ultimately censured for teaching Greek philosophical doctrines as the ultimate truth, why was he accused of iconoclasm? What role did icons play in the controversy around Italos’s philosophical teachings? At first glance, we might be surprised to hear that icons played any role at all since Italos was accused of teaching ancient, philosophical ideas instead of Christian doctrines: namely, that souls exist before human conception and that the cosmos was not created out of nothing. He was nonetheless accused of theoretical and practical iconoclasm, as well as its very opposite, worshiping images. We will now follow his story, accompanied by the pertinent documents surrounding the controversy, to see how images became involved in a dispute about philosophy.

St. Gregory Palamas’s adversaries, rather astonishingly, accused him of being against icons and even of having desecrated one. Iconoclasm is not the first accusation associated with the controversy over Palamism, and yet, St. Gregory and his followers were accused of being anti-icon. Was such an attack just a manifestation of ‘all’s fair in love and war,’ of ‘throw everything at your enemy and see what sticks’ or did St. Gregory and his supporters, by their statements, opinions, and acts, lend credexce to the allegation of iconomachy? The present article deals with this question and attempts to answer it.

1. Introduction

During the controversy between St Gregory Palamas and Barlaam of Calabria, icons had no place in the arguments on the essence and energies of God. And yet, Fr John Meyendorff said in one of his works on the subject, and only in passing, that the opponents of hesychasm accused St Gregory and the Palamites of Iconoclasm. These laconic ref- erences¹ have always intrigued me and inspire me now to investigate the theological basis of the charge. This is the objective of the present study.

I have a second motivation for conducting this research. A long time ago, I started a series of historical studies on the documents and controversies concerning Christian images. Starting with the paleo-Christian period and up to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, I sought out the documents and controversies that were related to Christian art. Since the Reformation and its relationship to images have already been thoroughly studied and do not directly relate to Orthodoxy, I decided to limit my work to 1517 in the West.

1.John Meyendor , A Study of Gregory Palamas (Aylesbury, UK: The Faith Press, 1964), 89 and 95.

2.S. Bigham, Early Christian Attitudes Toward Images (Rollinsford NH: Orthodox Research Institute, 2004) and ‘Eusebius of Caesarea and Christian Images’, 185-216; Les images chré- tiennes: Textes historiques sur les images chrétiennes de Constantin le Grand jusqu’à la periode posticonoclaste (313–900), (Montreal: Médiapaul, 2010); L’art roman et l’icône: Le dernier art occidental à caractère iconique, (Montréal: Médiapaul, 2012) (Romanesque Art and the Icon, an ebook available on the ebook platform Smashwords); Epiphanius of Salamis, Doctor of the Iconoclasm?: Deconstruction of a Myth, (Rollinsford, NH, USA: Orthodox Research Institute, 2008), an ebook available on the ebook platform Smashwords; ‘Histoire de Léon de Chalcédoine: D’un lion féroce à un doux minou ou “Beaucoup de bruit pour rien”’, Études sur le mot image, an eb- ook available on the ebook platform Smashwords, 2017, 1-121.