ADVENT · 4 DECEMBER Priest, Confessor & Doctor of the Church
John of Damascus
Priest, Confessor & Doctor of the Church · The Last of the Greek Fathers · c. 675–749
Damascus — dam-AS-kus · Umayyad — oo-MY-ad · Mar Saba — mar SAH-ba · Pege Gnoseos — PEH-gay GNOH-seh-os · Iconoclast — eye-KON-oh-klast · Cosmas — KOZ-mas · Sarjun — SAR-jun · Theophanes — thee-OF-an-eez
O God, who didst give to thy servant John of Damascus the grace to gather up the wisdom of the Fathers and offer it whole to thy Church; Grant that we may receive with thankfulness so great an inheritance, and transmit it faithfully to those who come after us, until all knowledge is gathered into the knowledge of thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
John of Damascus (dam-AS-kus) was born into the most unlikely of circumstances for a Father of the Church: a Christian family of senior officials serving the Umayyad (oo-MY-ad) Caliphate in Damascus. His father Sarjun (SAR-jun) had administered the fiscal affairs of Syria under the Arab rulers who had displaced Byzantium, and John himself inherited the post, serving as a senior official at the Caliph’s court before renouncing everything in his forties and descending to the great desert monastery of Mar Saba (mar SAH-ba), carved into the cliffs of the Kidron Valley south of Jerusalem, where he spent the remainder of his long life as a monk, theologian, hymnographer, and — in the fullest sense of the word — Father of the Church. He is the last of the Greek Fathers, the man who stands at the end of the Patristic age and performs for the Eastern tradition precisely the service that Gregory the Great had performed for the Western tradition a century and a half earlier: he gathers everything up, organises it, defends it, and passes it on. The Advent season in which his feast falls is exactly right for him. He is the last word before the long medieval silence — the man who ensures that nothing is lost when the ancient world ends and the new world begins.
His great work is the Pege Gnoseos (PEH-gay GNOH-seh-os) — the Fount of Knowledge — composed in three parts at Mar Saba and dedicated to his foster-brother Cosmas (KOZ-mas) of Maiuma, himself a bishop and hymnographer of distinction. The first part is a philosophical introduction using the categories of Aristotle — the first time Aristotelian logic had been systematically deployed in the service of Christian theology — which provided the intellectual framework that the medieval West would later inherit through the Latin translation and use as the foundation of Scholastic theology. The second part is a comprehensive catalogue of heresies, drawing on Epiphanius and extending his list to John’s own day, including — with remarkable acuity for a man writing in the eighth century — an entry on Islam, which he treats as a Christian heresy derived from Arianism rather than as a separate religion. The third part, the Orthodox Faith, is the summit of the whole: a systematic exposition of Christian doctrine, organised with a clarity and comprehensiveness that had never been achieved before, covering the Trinity, the Incarnation, the sacraments, the Last Things, and the veneration of the saints and their images. It became the standard theological textbook of the Byzantine Church and, when translated into Latin by Burgundio of Pisa in the twelfth century, the primary source through which the Greek Patristic tradition reached the Western Schoolmen. Peter Lombard used it. Thomas Aquinas cited it on almost every page of the Summa Theologiae. John of Damascus is, in this sense, the hidden foundation of the greatest achievement of medieval Latin theology — the Greek Father whom the Scholastics were reading without always knowing they were reading him.
The other great achievement of his life was the defence of sacred images against the iconoclasm (eye-KON-oh-klaz-m) of the Emperor Leo III, who ordered the destruction of icons throughout the Byzantine Empire in 726. John’s three treatises On the Divine Images constitute the definitive theological response to iconoclasm, and they rest on a single argument of elegant simplicity: the Incarnation itself sanctifies the visible image. If God truly became visible in human flesh — if the eternal Word took on a face, hands, eyes, and a body capable of suffering and death — then the representation of that flesh in paint, mosaic, or carved wood is not idolatry but the logical and necessary consequence of faith in the Incarnation. To smash the icon of Christ is to deny, implicitly, that Christ was truly and fully embodied. The iconoclast, however sincerely motivated by the fear of idolatry, ends by being a Docetist — a man who cannot quite believe that God was really there in the flesh. John lived under Muslim rule and was thus entirely beyond the reach of the Byzantine Emperor’s edicts, which gave him a freedom to write that no bishop within the Empire could exercise. History arranged this with perfect irony: the great defender of Christian sacred art wrote in safety at the court of the Caliph, protected by the very rulers who had displaced the Christian empire that was destroying the images. His three treatises were condemned by the iconoclast Council of Hiereia in 754 — five years after his death — and vindicated by the seventh Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 787. The Church has not revisited the question since.
He was also, at Mar Saba, one of the greatest hymnographers the Eastern Church has ever produced. The Easter canon that still resounds in Orthodox churches on Pascha night — The day of resurrection, let us be radiant, O peoples — is John’s. The canons for Christmas, Theophany, Pentecost, and the Dormition of the Mother of God are his. His hymns gather the whole theological tradition into sung prayer with a compression and beauty that is the Eastern counterpart to the Latin hymnody of Ambrose: dogma become melody, the definitions of the Councils turned into the praise of the assembly. He who had organised the Fount of Knowledge in systematic prose organised in musical verse the same knowledge for the lips of the worshipping Church, and the two forms of his genius — the philosophical and the lyrical — are not in tension but are expressions of a single intelligence entirely given to God. John of Damascus is the last of the Fathers, but he is not the least. In him the tradition reaches a completeness and a lucidity it had been approaching since Ignatius dictated his first letter in chains on the road to Rome. Seven centuries of witnesses, martyrs, exiles, preachers, systematists, poets, and pastors, and at the end of them this one man in a cliff-face monastery above the Dead Sea, writing it all down, singing it all up, offering it whole to the God from whom it came.
O Almighty God, who by thy servant John of Damascus didst gather the wisdom of all the Fathers into one inexhaustible fount and offer it to thy Church for all ages; Grant that we, who have received so great a treasure of faith, theology, and sacred song, may guard it with humility and transmit it with fidelity, knowing that every word of true doctrine and every note of worthy praise is a gift not ours but thine; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.