Decrees of the Second Council of Nicaea

The Decrees of the Second Council of Nicaea, convened in 787 and read here from the Papal Encyclicals Online archive's hosted text, are the ecumenical council's own canons, including its ruling in favor of the veneration of icons that ended the first period of Byzantine iconoclasm. Its strength is that it is the primary conciliar record itself, accepted as ecumenical by the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Oriental Orthodox traditions alike, a rare cross tradition standing among church councils. Its limit is that a council's decrees state its ruling without the surrounding theological argument, court politics or dissenting voices that shaped the debate, so a claim about why the council ruled as it did, or about the iconoclast controversy's fuller course, needs a historical study of the period alongside the decrees themselves.