Saint John Damascene (675–749)

The last of the Greek Fathers

Tradition sees John Damascene as the crowning point of the great Greek patristic age. After him the East would still produce great theologians, but none would play this role of synthesis: John gathers and orders the teaching of the Fathers who came before him — Athanasius, the Cappadocians Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus, Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor — and hands it on in a clear, methodical, assimilable form. He is less an inventor than a genial organizer of the received faith, and that is precisely his value: in him we have a faithful summary of eight centuries of Christian thought.

The great witness of the Assumption and the defender of images

Two causes made his name immortal. First the holy images: at the moment the Byzantine emperor was having icons destroyed, it was John, sheltered in Muslim land, who formulated the soundest doctrinal defence of their veneration. Then the Virgin Mary: his homilies on the Dormition rank among the finest in the whole East and prepared from afar the definition of the dogma of the Assumption. For these two reasons Leo XIII would proclaim him Doctor of the Church in 1890.

A saint who wrote in Muslim land

One trait makes John Damascene unique among the Fathers: he lives and writes under Muslim rule, in a Damascus become capital of the Umayyad Caliphate. This situation paradoxically gives him a freedom the bishops of the Empire do not have: the iconoclast emperor of Constantinople has no hold over a monk who is the caliph’s subject. That is why John can write against imperial iconoclasm without being silenced — and why the emperor, tradition says, will seek to ruin him by cunning.

A great Christian family under the Umayyad Caliphate

John is born in Damascus about 675–676, into a leading Arab Christian family: the Mansurs. Under the Arabic name Mansūr ibn Sarjūn — “Mansur, son of Sergius” — he belongs to a line that holds, from father to son, high financial responsibilities in the city’s administration, first under the Byzantines, then under the Umayyad caliphs who made Damascus their capital in 661. To live as a Christian at the heart of Muslim power, yielding nothing of his faith: that is the setting in which the future saint grows up. The Catholic Encyclopedia describes his father as “a sterling Christian whose infidel environment made no impression on his religious fervour”^[2].

High official of the caliph

His father, Sarjūn ibn Mansūr, is in charge of the caliph’s finances — the equivalent of a minister of the Treasury. John receives a careful education, classical and Christian: tradition gives him as master an Italian monk, a ransomed captive named Cosmas, who teaches him philosophy, mathematics and theology. Grown to manhood, John succeeds his father in public office: he is protosymboulos, principal counsellor, in the caliph’s service^[3][4]. Benedict XVI sums it up: born into a rich Christian family, John “while still young assumed the function — perhaps already held by his father — of Treasurer of the Caliphate”^[5].

The byname “Chrysorrhoas”, the golden stream

Posterity surnamed him Chrysorrhoas, “the golden stream”. The chronicler Theophanes the Confessor, writing about 813, reports that his friends gave him this name “on account of his oratorical gifts”^[6]: his speech, like a river, carried the gold of doctrine. It is the distant echo of another Father with a like surname, Saint John Chrysostom, “Golden-mouthed”. John of Damascus deserves, then, to be counted among the great voices of the East.

Renouncing the world

At a moment of his life the sources place about 720–730, John renounces his office, his fortune and his position to embrace the monastic life. This renunciation is neither a failure nor a forced retirement: it is a choice of love, that of leaving everything to serve God alone. The man who managed the finances of an empire chooses the voluntary poverty and obedience of a monk.

The monastery of Saint Sabas

He withdraws to the famous monastery of Saint Sabas (Mar Saba), founded in the previous century in the desert of Judea, “some eighteen miles south-east of Jerusalem”^[7]. It is one of the high places of Eastern monasticism, austere and silent, clinging to the cliffs of the Kidron — the same desert that had formed a John Climacus. There John finds both the silence of prayer and the leisure for an immense literary activity. Benedict XVI stresses that he remained there until his death, “devoting himself to asceticism and literary work”^[8].

Ordination and the life of a monk

At the monastery John is ordained priest by Patriarch John V of Jerusalem^[9]. Now monk and priest, he divides his life between liturgy, asceticism and writing. From this cell, and not from a palace, will come the works that will make him a Father and Doctor of the Church. There is a lesson here: the most powerful defence of images and the finest theology of the Incarnation were born from the silence of a desert, not from the noise of power.

A summa before the Summa

John Damascene’s masterwork is called the Fount of Knowledge (Pēgē gnōseōs, in Latin Fons scientiae). It is, well before the Summa of Saint Thomas Aquinas, a theological summa: an ordered, complete and methodical presentation of the whole Christian faith. John does not seek originality there; he seeks fidelity. His aim is to gather and hand on, without distorting it, the teaching of the Greek Fathers who came before him. This modesty is his strength: the work became the textbook of Eastern theology and, translated into Latin, one of the sources of the scholastics.

The three parts of the work

The Fount of Knowledge divides into three parts, following a pedagogical order that moves from the instrument to doctrine:

Dialectic

The first part lays down the intellectual tools: definitions, categories, rules of reasoning. John shows there that philosophy, far from being the enemy of faith, is its handmaid: it helps to think the revealed mystery correctly. That is exactly the conviction Latin scholasticism would take up again.

The book of heresies

The second part surveys the errors that have attacked the faith, from the oldest to the most recent. Remarkably, John devotes a chapter to Islam, which he knows from within, having lived at the caliph’s court: he is one of the very first Christian authors to offer a theological analysis of it. Here we find again the patristic concern to defend the faith against distortions, in the line of Saint Irenaeus and Saint Athanasius.

The “Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith”

The third part is the most famous. The De fide orthodoxa offers a complete synthesis of Christian dogma, organized and clear. In it John unfolds the doctrine of creation as a free gift of God’s goodness:

“God, who is good and more than good, did not content Himself with the contemplation of Himself, but willed that there should be beings filled with His benefits.” — Saint John Damascene, The Orthodox Faith, II, 2^[10]

And in it he sings the Incarnation as the summit of God’s love for man:

“It was necessary for nature to be strengthened and renewed […] Then there appeared on the horizon of history the great sea of God’s love for man.” — Saint John Damascene, The Orthodox Faith, III, 1^[11]

The master of the Latin scholastics

John Damascene’s influence on the West is immense. Translated into Latin in the 12th century (notably by Burgundio of Pisa), the De fide orthodoxa becomes one of the authorities constantly cited by medieval theologians. Peter Lombard uses it for his Sentences, and Saint Thomas Aquinas cites it hundreds of times in the Summa Theologiae, calling him simply “the Damascene”. Through him, a Greek Father from the desert of Judea thus became one of the foundations of Latin theology — striking proof of the deep unity of Eastern and Western Christians before their divisions.

The iconoclast quarrel

In 726, then in 730, the Byzantine emperor Leo III the Isaurian publishes edicts against sacred images and launches the destruction of icons^[12]. This crisis, which will tear the East apart for more than a century, is told in detail in The Quarrel of Images. What concerns us here is the saint’s answer. A subject of the caliph and not of the emperor, John is one of the only theologians able to speak freely: he takes up his pen against imperial iconoclasm.

The Three Treatises against the iconoclasts

His riposte bears a programmatic title: the Three Treatises against those who reject the holy images (Contra imaginum calumniatores). In them John builds a defence resting not on custom but on dogma: it is the Incarnation itself that justifies the image. So long as God was invisible, He could not be depicted; but since He became flesh and lived among men, depicting Him is no longer an offence but a profession of faith:

“Of old, God, who has neither body nor face, could by no means be represented by an image. But now that He has made Himself visible in the flesh and has lived with men, I can make an image of what I have seen of God.” — Saint John Damascene, Against those who attack the divine images, I, 16^[13]

“I do not worship matter, but the Creator of matter”

The heart of the argument is a theology of matter. Far from scorning the sensible world, John affirms that it is sanctified by the Incarnation. The famous formula, quoted at the head of this article, deserves to be given in its fuller version:

“I do not worship matter, I worship the Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake, who willed to dwell in matter and who, through matter, worked my salvation. I will not cease, then, to worship the matter through which my salvation was worked.” — Saint John Damascene, On the holy images^[14]

The icon is therefore not an idol — a capital distinction developed in The difference between icon, idol and sacred image. The idol claims to enclose the divine within matter; the icon, on the contrary, points beyond itself towards the one it represents.

Latria and veneration: the decisive distinction

To answer the charge of idolatry, John lays down a distinction that will become classic and that the Second Council of Nicaea will take up: we must separate worship (latreia), due to God alone, from veneration (proskynēsis, in Latin dulia), the simple honour that may be paid to an image as addressed to the one it represents^[15]. We do not worship wood and colour; we honour Christ, the Virgin or the saint through his image. The same veneration holds for the saints, “those in whom God has rested”:

“Let us worship first those among whom God has rested, He the only Holy One who rests among the saints […] those who, so far as possible, have made themselves like God by their own will.” — Saint John Damascene, Third Treatise on images, III, 33^[16]

Condemned at Hieria (754), vindicated at Nicaea II (787)

History has done John justice. The iconoclast conciliabulum of Hieria, in 754, condemns him by name and anathematizes him^[17]. But in 787, the Second Council of Nicaea, the seventh ecumenical council, solemnly restores the veneration of images and rehabilitates John Damascene, whose doctrine becomes that of the Church^[18]. The monk condemned by the empire has become a Father recognized by the universal Church.

The three homilies on the Dormition

John Damascene is also one of the greatest Marian preachers of Christian antiquity. His three homilies on the Dormition of the Virgin, preached in the 730s near Gethsemane, are masterpieces of theological poetry^[19]. In them he contemplates Mary’s passing from this life to heavenly glory, not as an ordinary death but as a falling asleep followed by the glorification of her immaculate body.

A doctrine of the Assumption before the letter

Long before the definition of the dogma by Pius XII in 1950, John forcefully affirms that the body of the Mother of God did not see the corruption of the tomb but was raised to her Son. His preaching is one of the great patristic witnesses invoked in favour of the Assumption, as recalled in The Assumption of the Virgin Mary and in Why is the Assumption a dogma?. It is for this Marian preaching, as much as for his defence of images, that Leo XIII proclaimed him Doctor of the Church in 1890^[20].

The hymnographer of Mar Saba

John did not only think the faith: he sang it. A monk at Mar Saba, he composed many liturgical hymns and canons that entered the daily prayer of the Churches of the Byzantine rite. With his adopted brother Cosmas of Maiuma, he is one of the great craftsmen of Eastern liturgical poetry. The Catholic Encyclopedia notes that he composed hymns for the great feasts — Easter, Pentecost, Christmas^[21].

The Paschal Canon and the Octoechos

Tradition attributes to him the Paschal Canon, summit of the Byzantine liturgy of the Resurrection, whose opening ode — “This is the day of Resurrection, O peoples, let us be enlightened!” — still resounds each year in the Eastern Churches. To him is also attributed a large share of the Octoechos, the collection of the eight tones that organizes Byzantine liturgical chant. Through his hymns John Damascene still prays, daily, on millions of lips: his theology of the Incarnation and the Resurrection became praise.

“This is the day of Resurrection! Let us beam with joy for this feast, and embrace one another. Let us say: brethren! even to those who hate us; let us forgive all for the Resurrection’s sake.” — Saint John Damascene, Canon of Easter, attributed^[22]

The legend of the hand cut off and restored

The memory of the saint is inseparable from a miraculous tale reported by his hagiographical tradition. The emperor Leo III, unable to reach directly the monk who defended images, is said to have sent the caliph a forged letter accusing John of treason. Deceived, the caliph orders his hand to be cut off — the hand that wrote against iconoclasm. According to the tale, John gathers up his severed hand, prostrates himself in tears before an icon of the Mother of God and begs her to restore the hand that defended her image. Falling asleep in prayer, he wakes healed: the Virgin has joined his hand back on^[23][24].

The Church does not make this tradition an article of faith, but she keeps it preciously: it tells, in narrative form, a deep spiritual truth — that whoever defends the veneration of the Mother of God’s images receives her protection in return. The writer Vittorio Messori reports this tale — the right hand “reattached” by the Virgin’s intervention — while at once warning that “we obviously lack the documents that would satisfy our critical minds”^[25].

The Tricheirousa icon (Trojeručica)

In thanksgiving, tradition says, John had a votive hand of silver fixed to the icon. Hence the name of the Tricheirousa icon (in Slavonic Trojeručica, “of the three hands”): the Virgin is shown there with a third hand of silver added at the bottom of the image. This icon, one of the most venerated in Orthodoxy, is kept today at the Serbian monastery of Hilandar, on Mount Athos^[26]. It perpetuates, in matter itself, the mystery John had defended with the pen.

Death at Mar Saba

Saint John Damascene dies at the monastery of Saint Sabas, on the traditional date, 4 December 749^[27]. He leaves a considerable work — theological, polemical, Marian, liturgical — that will make him, for East and West alike, one of the most cited authorities of the centuries to come. He dies as he had lived since his conversion: a monk, in the silence of the desert.

Doctor of the Church (1890)

For eleven centuries John was venerated as a saint and recognized as Father and doctor by East and West alike, without the formal title. It is Pope Leo XIII who, in 1890, officially proclaims him Doctor of the universal Church^[37][38]. The Church thus solemnly recognizes the value of his teaching on the Incarnation, on images and on the Virgin. He takes his place among the Doctors of the Church in history, last of the Greek Fathers to enter this close circle of masters of the faith.

The liturgical feast

The cult of Saint John Damascene is universal, but its date has varied:

The 1969 reform fixed the Latin memorial on 4 December, joining the date on which the East has always celebrated the one who remained, to the end, a bridge between the two lungs of the Church.

Saint John Damascene speaks to our time in several ways. First, he recalls that matter is not contemptible: in an age tempted now by a disembodied spiritualism, now by a soulless materialism, he teaches that the body, art, the sacraments, images and relics are paths to God because God Himself became flesh. His theology of the image is a theology of the Incarnation.

Then, he shows that one can be fully engaged in the world — he was finance minister of an empire — and leave all for God without renouncing any of one’s intelligence: philosophy, science, culture are not obstacles to holiness but handmaids of faith. Finally, his fidelity to the Fathers is a lesson for an age that often confuses novelty with truth: John did not want to invent, he wanted to hand on — and it is precisely for that reason that the Church made him a Doctor.

• The Quarrel of Images (iconoclasm) — the Byzantine crisis in which John played the role of first doctrinal defender of icons.
• The Second Council of Nicaea (787) — the ecumenical council that restored the veneration of images and rehabilitated John Damascene.
• The difference between icon, idol and sacred image — the doctrinal distinction John helped to fix.
• The Assumption of the Virgin Mary — the dogma prepared by John’s homilies on the Dormition.
• Saint Maximus the Confessor (579–662) — the great Greek theologian whose heritage John gathers.
• The Doctors of the Church in history — the category of Doctors to which John has belonged since 1890.