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The Platonic influence is suggested in the text of his seven-teenth Homily, written on the occasion of the dedication of the icon of the Virgin Mary (Panagia) at Hagia Sophia. It reads in part:
These things are conveyed both by stories and pictures, but it is the spectators rather than the hearers who are drawn to emulation. The Virgin is holding the Creator, as an infant in her arms. Who is there who would not marvel upon seeing it rather than upon hearing about it, at the magnitude of the mystery, and who would not rise up to laud the condescension that surpasses all words.30
After the death of the last iconoclastic emperor, Theophilos (820-842), a regency was set up consisting of Empress Theo-dora,31 the logothete of the drome, Theoktistos; the patrician Bardas, the brother of Theodora; and her uncle, the magister Emmanuel the Armenian.32
Theodora wished to restore icon veneration.33 However, it took the regency a year to ease out the iconoclastic patriarch, John the Grammarian, and to elect a new patriarch, Methodios, from the party of the iconophiIes.34 Unlike Empress Irene (797-802), who was hampered by military opposition at the summoning of the Seventh Ecumenical Synod in 787, Theodora had the support of the army on convoking a synod in March of 843, which revoked the iconoclastic decrees and reaffirmed the canons of the Synod of Nicaea of 787. In memory of this event, the first Sunday of Great Lent is called the Sunday of Orthodoxy, still observed annually by the Eastern Orthodox Church throughout the world with special church services and hymns. 35 The new patriarch, Methodios, recalled the bishops who had been exiled because of their iconophile beliefs and had suffered during the iconoclastic upheavals. At the same time, however, he was very careful not to appoint as bishops men with extremist views in order to avoid any increase in resistance by the Zealots to his efforts to bring peace into the Church.36
In the government, however, the real power gradually passed to Theoktistos, as Theodora favored him most among
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