The Pope sent a long letter in answer to the protest of Charlemagne, which
did not, however, satisfy that monarch, because he convened in 794 a
council at Frankfort, at which he presided himself. This synod, composed
of three hundred bishops of France, Germany, and Spain, and at which two
legates of the Pope were present, condemned the enactment of the second
Council of Nice respecting the worship of images.
This decree of the Council of Frankfort is very important, because it not
only condemned the worship of images, but it virtually rejected the
infallibility of the Popes, as well as of the General Councils, since it
condemned what they had established.
The opposition to the worship of images continued amongst the Western
churches for some time after the death of Charlemagne. Thus an assembly of
the French clergy, held at Paris in 825, condemned the decree of the
second Council of Nice as decidedly as it was done by the work of
Charlemagne and the Council of Frankfort. Claudius, bishop of Turin, who
lived about that time, opposed the worship of images, which he removed
from his churches, calling those idolaters who adhered to this practice;
he also condemned the adoration of relics, of the figure of the cross,
&c.; and he was not inaptly called, on this account, by the Jesuit
historian Maimbourg, the first Protestant minister.
There are other traces of a similar opposition during the ninth century,
but it seems to have entirely disappeared in the tenth, and it was again
renewed by the Albigenses in the eleventh century. Their history, however,
is foreign to the object of the present essay; and I shall endeavour to
give in my next chapter a short sketch of the legends of the saints,
composed during the middle ages.
Chapter VI. Origin And Development Of The Pious Legends, Or Lives Of
Saints, During The Middle Ages.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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