JESUS CHRIST]

L1ike most ordinary minds, and if we are to judge by his letters Gregory’s was a very ordinary mind, he was merely governed by the circumstances and passions of his time without the least foreknowledge of the result of his actions. The letter of Pope Gregory to the emperor (729 A.D.) is arrogant without dignity, dogmatic without persuasiveness; in the stronger part of the argument far inferior, both in skill and ingenuity, to that of the aged Germanus, or the writer who guided his pen. The strange mistakes in the history of the Old Testament, the still stranger interpretations of the New, the loose legends which are advanced as history, give a very low opinion of the knowledge of the times.

2[Sidenote: [731-742 A.D.]]

3When Gregory addressed this and a second letter to the emperor Leo, the tumult in Constantinople, the first public act of rebellion against iconoclasm, had taken place; but the aged bishop Germanus was not yet degraded from his see. Germanus, with better temper and more skilful argument, had defended the images of the East. Before his death (731), he was deposed or compelled to retire from his see. He died most probably in peace; his extreme age may well account for his death. His personal ill treatment by the emperor is the legend of a later age to exalt him into a martyr.

4But these two powerful prelates were not the only champions of their cause whose writings made a strong impression on their age. It is singular that the most admired defender of images in the East was a subject not of the emperor but of the Mohammedan sultan. John of Damascus was famed as the most learned man in the East, and it may show either the tolerance, the ignorance, or the contempt of the Mohammedans for these Christian controversies, that writings which became celebrated all over the East should issue from one of their capital cities, Damascus.

5In the West, all power, almost all pretension to power, excepting over Sicily and Calabria, expired with Leo;[90] and this independence partly arose out of and was immeasurably strengthened by the faithful adherence of the West to image-worship.