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The Catholic Historical Review 86.4 (2000) 656-658



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Book Review

L'Hagiographie et I'Iconoclasme Byzantin:
Le cas de la Vie d'Étienne le Jeune

Medieval

L'Hagiographie et I'Iconoclasme Byzantin: Le cas de la Vie d'Étienne le Jeune. By Marie-France Auzépy. [Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Monographs, Volume 5.] (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company. 1999. Pp. x, 342. $83.95.)

This book attempts to redress the balance of scholarly opinion by regaining a more favorable view of the Isaurian emperors (Leo III and Constantine V), whilst exposing the expedients by which the supporters of the images succeeded at the Council of Nicaea II (787) and beyond. The outward double purpose of the Life of Stephen the Younger, to discredit the Isaurians and to [End Page 656] propagate the iconodule orthodoxy, is mistrusted. In Auzépy's reading, the text's violent attack against the iconoclast emperors is read as a purposeful campaign for their damnatio memoriae, while the need to bolster iconodule positions with the words and actions of a saint reveals signs of insecurity in the validity and universality of the theses of the council.

The author, Stephen the Deacon, is the polemical voice of the patriarchate, rather than an objective witness. In Auzépy's view, the hagiographical genre provided the perfect literary guise for iconodule propaganda. By setting out detailed tables comparing the narrative with historical information from other contemporary sources (pp. 48-49), Auzépy unmasks what she considers purposeful lies ("le mensonge": pp. 86-87) on the part of the hagiographer, whose account alters dates and sequence of events in order to tell a coherent and uncontroversial story about Stephen, and to present him exclusively as a defender of icons. The analysis of the narrative structures and of the literary background shows the author's deliberate manipulation of his material.

Auzépy concludes that the text reveals more about the time when it was written (809-810), than about the period of the action sixty years earlier. Auzépy's detailed study of the quotations from the Acts of Nicaea justifies her claim that the Life depends upon its theses and is devoted to propagating them. (Unfortunately, the lack of translations of the parallel-text comparisons will hamper the non-Greek-literate readership in forming an independent opinion of the use and modifications to the sources; this absence partly undoes Auzépy's effort of making the Life more widely accessible in translation in volume 3 of the same series.)

The choice of other sources is presented as revealing of the author's spiritual and cultural milieu in an interesting and successful attempt at probing the implications of the literary borrowings. What emerges in particular is a theological continuity with Andrew of Crete and a marked influence of the Palestinian milieu.

The question of the audience for which the Life was composed, however, is not directly addressed. In depicting the monks' flight, humiliation, and persecution at the hands of the iconoclasts, the hagiographer is furnishing a glorious past for monastic institutions (including the Trichinareae, who probably commissioned the work). But while the agenda of the Life was in the monasteries' interest, who needed to and really could be persuaded by the patriarchal viewpoint, when it involved such a radical re-writing of history, not long after the events?

Auzépy detects, despite this pro-monastic rhetoric, an anti-Stoudite aim, which fits in with the situation of conflict between St. Theodore and the patriarchate at the time of composition of the Life. It is a pity that a separate section could not have been devoted to defining the real difference between the [End Page 657] Nicaean/patriarchal iconodule stance and that of the Stoudites. Two related issues could have gained clarity from such an examination: that of the relation between the spiritual and temporal powers, and that of the critical assessment of the theological substance of Nicaea II.

Auzépy uses the West as a foil to sustain her attack on...

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