The Triumph of Orthodoxy

Byzantine iconoclasm, the rejection of religious images as a form of idolatry, had already been condemned once, at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, only to be revived by later emperors who again ordered icons removed from churches and their defenders persecuted. Emperor Theophilos, an active iconoclast, died in 842 leaving the throne to his infant son Michael III, with Theophilos's widow Theodora ruling as regent. Theodora, who had reportedly continued to venerate icons privately even during her husband's reign despite the risk of doing so, moved quickly to reverse imperial policy once she held power in her own right.

She convened a synod at Constantinople in March 843 that deposed the sitting iconoclast patriarch, restored the pro-icon Methodios to the patriarchate, and formally reaffirmed the teaching of the Second Council of Nicaea that icons could be venerated without idolatry, since the honor shown to an image passes to what it represents rather than terminating in the material object itself. The synod's decision was announced on the first Sunday of Great Lent, and Orthodox churches have kept that day as a feast of the restoration ever since. Theodora is venerated in the Orthodox Church as a saint in her own right, remembered specifically for this act, and the feast she set in motion has outlasted every other episode of the century long iconoclast dispute in continuous liturgical memory.

The feast's liturgy, the Synodikon of Orthodoxy, was composed to be read at the service itself, and beyond its original focus on icons it grew over the following centuries into a wider proclamation, listing doctrines and teachers the church affirms and pronouncing anathema on a lengthening series of rejected teachings and named heresiarchs, so that the day gradually came to function as a general celebration of Orthodox doctrine as a whole rather than of the icon controversy alone.

The procession with icons that marks the feast today, in which clergy and laity carry icons around the church or in a circuit outside it, is a direct dramatization of what the 843 synod actually restored: images that could once again be displayed, carried and venerated openly rather than hidden or destroyed. The feast is kept across the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox communions, though the specific text of the Synodikon read varies somewhat by jurisdiction, reflecting each church's own later doctrinal history layered on top of the original ninth century core. Placed at the start of Great Lent rather than at a moment closer to the actual anniversary, the feast also frames the season of penitence that follows it as a season undertaken by a church already reaffirmed in its own doctrinal identity, rather than as a season of uncertainty about what that identity is.