4
December 749 A.D. John
of Damascus Dies
Editors.
“Saint John of Damascus.” Encyclopedia Britannica. N.d. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/305049/Saint-John-of-Damascus. Accessed 5 Sept 2014.
Saint John of Damascus, also called Saint John Damascene, Latin
Johannes Damascenus (born c. 675, Damascus—died Dec. 4, 749, near Jerusalem; Western feast day December
4), Eastern monk and theological doctor of the Greek and Latin churches whose treatises on
the veneration of sacred images placed him in the forefront of the 8th-century Iconoclastic
Controversy, and whose theological synthesis made
him a preeminent intermediary between Greek and medieval Latin culture.
John of Damascus
succeeded his father as one of the Muslim caliph’s tax officials, and while
still a government minister he wrote three Discourses
on Sacred Images, c. 730, defending their
veneration against the Byzantine emperor Leo
III and the Iconoclasts. The Iconoclasts obtained a
condemnation of John at the Council of Hieria in 754 that was reversed at the
second Council
of Nicaea in 787.
Soon after 730,
John became a monk at Mar Saba, near Jerusalem, and there passed the rest of his life studying, writing, and preaching, acquiring the name “the Golden Orator” (Greek: Chrysorrhoas, literally “the Golden Stream”). Among his approximately 150 written works
the most significant is Pēgē gnōseōs,
(“The Source of Knowledge”), a synthesis of Christian philosophy and doctrine that was influential in directing the course of medieval
Latin thought and that became the principal textbook of Greek Orthodox theology. Revised c.
743, it is composed of three parts: the philosophical (“Dialectica”), drawing
largely from the late 3rd-century Neoplatonist Porphyry’s Isagoge, an introduction to the logic of Aristotle; the historical, transcribing
sections from the 4th-century Greek churchman Epiphanius’ work Panarion, on heresies; and the theological and most widely known segment, the
“Exposition [Ekthesis] of the Orthodox Faith.”
Essentially a résumé of the 4th-century Cappadocian Fathers Basil, Gregory of
Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa, and expressed in Aristotelian vocabulary, it
manifests some distinctive originality in John’s choice of texts and
annotations reflecting Antiochene analytical theology. Through its translation
into Oriental languages and Latin, the “Exposition” served both Eastern and
Western thinkers not only as a source of logical and theological concepts but
also, by its systematic style, as a model for subsequent theological syntheses
composed by medieval Scholastics. The “Exposition” speculates on the nature and
existence of God, providing points of contention for later theologians.
Elsewhere the
“Exposition” analyzes the nature of free choice and the will. The author was
sensitive to this question in light of Christian doctrine on personal
responsibility for salvation. He describes the human will as a rational
appetite or inclination to the good, functioning with regard to ends or goals
rather than with means, which relate more to the intellect. In God there is
will but no deliberation.
A counterpart to The
Source of Knowledge is John’s anthology of
moral exhortations, the Sacred Parallels, culled from biblical texts and from writings of the Church Fathers. Among
his literary works are several intricately structured kanōns, or hymns for the Greek liturgy, although his reputation in liturgical poetry rests largely on his revision of the Eastern Church’s hymnal, the Octoēchos.
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