When an image was once set up in a sacred place, there soon came into play the old belief, common to Egyptians and Romans, that the spirit of the being represented would enter the statue. Hence all prayers to saints were addressed wherever possible to their images, and the same usage followed the introduction of images of Jesus and the Virgin. And while the Theodosian code contained laws prohibiting on pain of death the placing of wreaths on pagan statues and the burning of incense before them, the Christian populace within a century was doing those very things to the statues of saints. In the same way the use of holy water, which in the time of Valentinian was still held un-Christian, became universal in the Church a century or two later. Images could not well be left out. The old Judaic conception of the supreme being was indeed too strong to permit of his being imaged; though in the fourth century the Audæans, a Syrian sect of a puritan cast, held that the deity was of human shape, and were accordingly named Anthropomorphites; but the orthodox insistence on the human form of Jesus was a lead to image-making. Thus for the Moslems the eastern Christians were idolaters as well as polytheists; and the epistles of Gregory the Great show him to have zealously fostered the use of miraculous relics and sacred images in the West. Professing to condemn the worship of images, he defended their use against Bishop Selenus of Marseilles, who ejected them from his church. One of Gregory's specialties in relics was the chain of St. Paul, from which filings could be taken daily without diminishing the total bulk. It was presumably while all pagan usages were still familiar that the Italian Christians adopted the custom of painting the statues of saints red, in the common pagan fashion, as they did the old custom of carrying the images in procession. For the rest, they had but to turn to the lore of the pagan temples for examples of statues brought from heaven, statues which worked miracles, statues which spoke, wept, perspired, and bled--all of which prodigies became canonical in Christian idolatry.
Some scrupulous and educated Christians, such as Epiphanius and Augustine, had naturally set their faces against such a general reversion to practical idolatry, just as many educated pagans had done on philosophical grounds; and the council of Elvira in the fourth century condemned the admission of pictures into churches. But this had no lasting effect. In the eighth century, when it could no longer be pretended that Christian images served merely for edification, the Greek emperor Leo the Isaurian began the famous iconoclastic movement in the East. It is probable that he was influenced by Saracen ideas, with which he often came in contact; though it has been held that his motive was mainly political, the local worship of images having weakened the central authority of the Church. But after some generations of struggle and fluctuation, despite the ready support given to iconoclasm by many bishops, the throne reverted to orthodoxy, and idolatry thenceforth remained normal in the Greek as in the Latin Church. The one variation from pagan practice lay in the substitution of pictures and painted wooden images or icons for the nobler statues of past paganism, with which indeed Christian art could not pretend for a moment to compete.
