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Concept
Council of Hieria
Summary
The iconoclast Council of Hieria was a Christian council of 754 which viewed itself as ecumenical, but was later rejected by the Second Council of Nicaea (787) and by Catholic and Orthodox churches, since none of the five major patriarchs were represented in Hieria. However it is preferred over Second Nicea by some Protestants.
The Council of Hieria was summoned by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine V in 754 in the palace of Hieria at Chalcedon. The council supported the emperor's iconoclast position in the Byzantine iconoclasm controversy, condemning the spiritual and liturgical use of iconography as heretical.
Opponents of the council described it as the Mock Synod of Constantinople or the Headless Council because no patriarchs or representatives of the five great patriarchates were present: the see of Constantinople was vacant; Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria were under Islamic dominion; while Rome was not asked to participate. Its rulings were anathematized at the Lateran Council of 769 before being overturned almost entirely by the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, which upheld the orthodoxy of and endorsed the veneration of holy images.
Three hundred and thirty-eight members attended the 754 council. It endorsed Constantine V's iconoclast position, with the bishops declaring that "the unlawful art of painting living creatures blasphemed the fundamental doctrine of our salvation—namely, the Incarnation of Christ, and contradicted the six holy synods. [...] If anyone shall endeavour to represent the forms of the Saints in lifeless pictures with material colours which are of no value (for this notion is vain and introduced by the devil), and does not rather represent their virtues as living images in himself, etc. [...] let him be anathema". This council declared itself the 'Seventh Ecumenical Council'.
Similar pronouncements on the issue of religious images may had been made in the Synod of Elvira (c. 305) whose canon 36 states: "Pictures are not to be placed in churches, so that they do not become objects of worship and adoration".
Official source
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