I contend it was somewhat serious but not in itself fatal; it contributed to the growing sense of alienation between the eastern and western Christian Church.


I stand by my statement up to that point. The first sentence does not seem open to much controversy; I understood it to be generally accepted European missionaries routinely equated or merged pagan deities with Catholic saints in their apologetics to pagans. It is impossible to imagine that without veneration of icons connected with those saints but not directly connected to the Trinity, so iconoclasm would remove an arrow from that quiver and thus be undesirable (i.e. iconoclasm has less orthodoxy.) Likewise fifty years of the Byzantine church periodically but harshly condeming veneration of icons added to the existing strains on its relationship with the Roman church in which that remained an important and integral part of worship even apart from pagan missions. I am obviously no professional scholar, but enough of them attest to that for it to be taught in US high schools, where I first learned of it.

The rest of my statement is speculation I thought my tone conveyed as such even if I did not expressly state it:

I am not claiming those positions to be matters of documented fact, only that they are plausible within the contemporary context.


A key reason, yes, I stand by that simply because that is how they taught it to me in school, and other sources still contend the same. Obviously not THE key difference; my impression is that was the longstanding rivalry between Constantinoples Patriarch and Romes Bishop, or perhaps the latters rivalry with both Patriarch and Emperor. The former probably began (i.e. more speculation, not documented historical fact) long before iconoclasm, with the fertile ground Constantinople heresies (e.g. Arianism) in the Churchs early centuries. Not that I am inclined to receive more expletives for going down that rabbit trail.


My primary evidence is that iconoclasm held sway off and on for half a century in the Eastern Church but never in the Western Church. About the closest it came in the latter was Charlemagnes ironic condemnation of what he mistakenly believed Constantinoples ENDORSEMENT of iconoclasm as idolatry, because the Western Church never equated worship with veneration or saints with the Trinity (although, IMHO, their Mariology often skirts the line, but that is a separate debate, and hopefully my opinion on that is at least valid AS my opinion.) It might have been a hard sell even without pagan missions, because icon veneration was rooted fairly deeply. However if Constantinople was also still preaching to pagans (which you may recall I only claimed had "largely" ceased "in Asia Minor") that was not given urgency by the threat Rome faced of being overrun by a pagan onslaught. I imagine Constantinoples tendency to alternate between using Rome as a pagan foil and abandoning Italy to marauding pagans did not help relations between the Eastern and Western Churchs either.


It was a critical but not decisive factor, as scholars have held since long before either of us was born. Its significance, so far as I can tell, lies not in the Pope attacking iconoclasm, but the Empresses through the Patriach of Constantinople attacking icons, which exacerbated existing theological and secular competition between the two churches that culminated in the formal Schism.

None of that is novel or original with me except for speculations I have now tried to more explicitly label as such. If that is not enough, so be it.