Nicephorus of Constantinople

Origins and a confessing house

Nicephorus was born at Constantinople about the year 758, in the very depths of the first iconoclasm, into a family already marked by suffering for the icons. His father, Theodore, was an imperial secretary (ἀσηκρῆτις, asekretis) in the service of the iconoclast emperor Constantine V (Copronymus); a devout venerator of the holy images, he confessed the Orthodox faith openly, was scourged and twice sent into exile for it, and died a confessor in banishment at Nicaea. His mother, Eudokia, shared the confession and the exile. The son thus inherited the cause for which he would one day lose his throne: the household that formed him was one in which the veneration of the icons had already cost a father his liberty and his life.

He received the full education of the capital — grammar, rhetoric, and the sacred letters — and, following his father, entered the imperial chancery, rising to the same rank of imperial secretary. He served the empire in that office through the reign of Leo IV and into the regency of the Empress Irene, under whom the tide against the icons at last began to turn.

The Seventh Council, and the ascetic retreat

When Irene and the Patriarch Tarasius summoned the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787) to restore the veneration of the images, Nicephorus was present — not yet a churchman, but a lay commissioner representing the imperial government at the sessions, a young man of learning trusted with the affairs of the council that healed the first iconoclasm. The experience bound him for life to the doctrine the fathers there proclaimed, that the honour paid to the image passes to its prototype.

Not long after, he withdrew from public life. Renouncing the honours of the court, he founded and endowed monasteries on the eastern shore of the Bosphorus, toward the Propontis, and lived in one of them in ascetic retirement — still, remarkably, a layman, unordained, giving himself to prayer, study, and the writing of history. The tradition also sets him for a time over the greatest poorhouse (πτωχοτροφεῖον) of the capital, the charge of the city's destitute — so that when the Church called him, it called a man already tested in learning, in asceticism, and in the works of mercy.

From layman to patriarch (806)

The Patriarch Tarasius reposed on 25 February 806. The choice of a successor fell, by the will of the emperor Nicephorus I and the acclamation of clergy and people, upon the layman Nicephorus — a second elevation straight from the lay state to the patriarchal throne, following the very precedent Tarasius had set a generation before. Ordained in a few days through the intervening grades, he was consecrated Patriarch of Constantinople on 12 April 806 (Holy Pascha).

The promotion did not pass without opposition. The rigorists of the monastery of Stoudios, led by Theodore the Studite, questioned the elevation of a layman over the heads of the monastic clergy; and the quarrel deepened almost at once into the renewed "Moechian" controversy. Under pressure from the emperor, Nicephorus consented to a synod (806/809) that reinstated the priest Joseph — the same who had blessed the unlawful second marriage of Constantine VI, and whom Tarasius had refused to countenance. The Studites broke communion rather than accept the leniency, and for some years (until Joseph was again deposed under Michael I) the Church of Constantinople was troubled by the schism. The tradition honours both men as saints and records the disagreement without resolving it against either: Nicephorus governing by the economy of a peacemaker, Theodore contending for the strict letter of the canons — the very tension that had earlier divided Tarasius from the same monastery.

Patriarch and pastor

For nine years Nicephorus led the Church, under the emperors Nicephorus I, Michael I Rangabe, and then Leo the Armenian. He continued the work of Tarasius: a defender of the icons and of the Church's canons, a corrector of abuses, and a writer whose pen never rested. Where the emperors leaned toward harshness against dissenters, he counselled moderation; where the discipline of the clergy had slackened, he laboured to restore it. But the peace of the icons that his predecessor had won was not to last his lifetime.

The second iconoclasm, and the resistance of the patriarch

The emperor Leo V the Armenian (813–820), a soldier who ascribed the empire's military disasters to the veneration of the images, resolved to revive iconoclasm. He assembled a commission of scholars — chief among them the learned John the Grammarian, later himself an iconoclast patriarch — to comb the fathers for texts against the icons, and moved to reimpose the policy of Constantine V. Against this Nicephorus stood as the wall of the Church. He held all-night vigils with the faithful bishops and monks; he confronted the emperor face to face, defending the images from Scripture and the fathers and refusing to yield a word of the Council of Nicaea; when Leo demanded that the icons hung low be at least raised out of reach — a first concession toward their removal — Nicephorus resisted every compromise. To the emperor's claim to arbitrate the Church's doctrine he answered that matters of faith belong to the Church and her councils, not to the palace.

Leo would not be gainsaid. In March 815 the patriarch was deposed; refusing to sign the iconoclast profession, he was driven from the throne and sent into exile across the Bosphorus — first to the monastery of Saint Theodore, which he himself had founded near Chrysopolis, and afterward to the monastery of Saint Menas, another of his foundations. A packed iconoclast synod met in Hagia Sophia in 815, in the presence of the exiled patriarch's empty throne, and formally renewed the condemnation of the images, undoing the work of the Seventh Council; the second iconoclasm had begun, and would run for a generation.

The theologian in exile

The thirteen years of his banishment (815–828) were the years of his greatest writing against the heresy. From his cell Nicephorus composed the arsenal of iconodule theology of the second period: the Apologeticus Minor and the great Apologeticus Major, defending the making and veneration of the holy images; the three Antirrhetici ("Refutations") against the iconoclast arguments of Constantine V, whom he names only Mamonas and Kopronymos; and the Elenchos kai Anatropē — the "Refutation and Overthrow" — a point-by-point demolition of the definition of the iconoclast synod of 815. In these works he set out, with philosophical rigour, the Christological ground of the icon: that to deny that Christ can be depicted is to deny the reality of his Incarnation, since what has truly been seen and handled in the flesh can truly be portrayed.

To the same author the Church owes works of history, composed chiefly before his patriarchate. His Breviarium (Historia Syntomos, the "Short History") narrates the Byzantine story from the fall of the emperor Maurice in 602 to the year 769 — a spare, valuable, and unusually sober record of the very century of iconoclasm. His Chronographikon Syntomon is a compact chronological handbook, a table of the rulers and patriarchs from Adam to his own day, much copied and much translated in the Middle Ages. The confessor who lost his throne for the icons is thus also one of the significant historians of Byzantium.

Repose in exile

Nicephorus never saw the capital again. He reposed at the monastery of Saint Theodore, in exile, in the year 828, worn by age and banishment, having governed the Church nine years and suffered for it thirteen more. His repose is kept on June 2 — the sources vary on the precise civil day of his death, but the liturgical commemoration of his falling-asleep is fixed on that date. He was buried at the monastery of his exile, and there his body rested until the Church he had defended came at last into her own.

The Triumph of Orthodoxy and the return of the relics

The second iconoclasm outlived Nicephorus by fifteen years. It ended only with the death of the iconoclast emperor Theophilus in 842 and the regency of his widow, the Empress Theodora, for their child Michael III. Theodora, a secret venerator of the icons, deposed the iconoclast patriarch John the Grammarian, raised the confessor Methodius to the throne, and on the First Sunday of Lent, 11 March 843, restored the holy images in a great procession — the "Triumph of Orthodoxy" that the Church keeps to this day.

With the images restored, the relics of the confessors who had died in exile were brought home in honour. On 13 March 846 (some reckonings 847) the relics of Nicephorus were translated from the monastery of Saint Theodore across the Bosphorus back to Constantinople. The tradition dwells on the details: that the body, after some nineteen years in the tomb, was found incorrupt, whole and undecayed, a sign of the sanctity of the exiled patriarch; that the Empress Theodora, her son the young emperor, the Patriarch Methodius, and the whole city went out to meet the returning relics with lamps and hymns; that they were carried first into Hagia Sophia, the Great Church from which he had been driven, and then borne to the Church of the Holy Apostles and laid among the patriarchs of Constantinople. The day chosen for the translation, the tradition notes, fell on the very anniversary of his deposition in March 815 — so that the day of his humiliation became the day of his glory. This return is the feast of March 13.