RELIGIOUS IDEALS AND INSTITUTIONS 93
and the augury of eventual failure that might be discerned in the in-
tervening set-back was fulfilled when the illogical but statesmanlike
compromise on which an iconoclast administration and an iconodule op-
position in the East Roman Empire came to terms in A.D. 8431 proved to
have won for the Orthodox Church no mere ephemeral truce but a last-
ing peace in a theatre of ecclesiastical warfare in which the polemics had
been flaring up, off and on, by that time for no less than five centuries.
This apparently permanent settlement of the controversy over images
in Orthodox Christendom was not, however, the last that was to be
heard of this vexed question in Christendom at large. The temporary
re-establishment of the cult of images in Orthodox Christendom by the
decisions of a council held at Nicaea in A.D. 787 evoked expressions of
dissent and disapproval in Charlemagne's dominions;2 and, though this
protest in Frankland against Iconodulia was quashed at Rome by Pope
Hadrian I (fungebatur A.D. 772-95), when he rejected Charlemagne's
suggestion that he should co-operate with him in a joint condemnation
of the Second Nicene Council's acts,3 the eruption in Transalpine
Western Europe which these anticipatory rumblings portended did
burst out at long last. A slow-growing Western Christendom had to wait,
it is true, some eight hundred years longer for its Martin Luther than a
precocious Orthodox Christendom had had to wait for its Leo Syrus;
but, when the renaissance of a Jewish Iconophobia did break out in
Western Christendom at length, the sixteenth-century explosion in

1 See IV. iv. 364.

2 In the Libri Karolini composed m Charlemagne's name by his ecclesiastical advisers
in A.D. 790, the Fathers of the Second Nicene Council were taken to task on the ground
that they had taken it upon themselves to declare the cult of images to be obligatory
under pain of anathema, whereas, according to the iconodule Greek theologians' Prankish
critics, the correct view was that the exhibition of pictures in churches was neither
obligatory nor unlawful. Thereafter, at the council of Prankish bishops held at Frank-
furt in A.D. 794, the acts of the Second Nicene Council were formally condemned on the
false assumption (due apparently to a mistranslation) that the Fathers had awarded the
same honours to the images as to the Holy Trinity (see Hodgkin, Th.: Italy and her
Invaders, vol. viii, Book IX: The Prankish Empire (Oxford 1899, Clarendon Press),
pp. X7-i8).

This unfriendly reaction in Frankland to the Second Nicene Council's decisions was,
no doubt, to some extent the reflection of a cultural antipathy between Western and
Orthodox Christendom and a political rivalry between the Carolingian and the East
Roman Power. In the intercourse between the two churches it was a cardinal principle
of policy on either aide that the other party must never be admitted to be in the right;
and the position taken up by Frankish theologians in the Libri ffarolini was nicely
calculated to put Greek iconodules and Greek iconoclasts equally in the wrong. It is
suggested by Hodgkin, ibid., that Charlemagne's hostility to the full-blooded Christian
Iconodulia of the Nicene Fathers may also have been partly inspired by his own personal
experience in wrestling with the pagan idolatry of Saxon barbarians whom he was
finding it difficult to subdue and convert. Though there seems to be no positive evidence
to corroborate this conjecture, it is supported by an analogy between Charlemagne's
experience and Muhammad's; for Muhammad's uncompromising Iconophobia was
undoubtedly a reaction to the stubbornness of the Quraysh in clinging to their pagan
worship of the idols in the Ka'bah, Yet, when all due allowance has been made for local
and temporary considerations of a religious order, as well as for non-religious considera-
tions of a cultural and political order, which may have played some part in inclining the
Frankish Church to react unfavourably to the Second Nicene Council's Iconophilism,
a recollection of the instances, noticed on pp, 89-90, above, of iconophobe feeling in Gaul
as early as the sixth century of the Christian Era may lead us to look for the main cause
of the manifestations of Iconophobia in Frankland in A.D. 790 and 794 beyond the
horizon of current affairs, in an original and abiding Judaic element in Christianity. We
must not leave out of our reckoning here the gadfly ghost of a Judaic Aniconism.

3 See Hodgkin, ibid., pp. 18-19.