John of Damascus

Syrian-born writer, monk, and religious scholar

• Born: c. 675
• Birthplace: Damascus (now in Syria)
• Died: December 4, 0749
• Place of death: Near Jerusalem (now in Israel)

During the Iconoclastic Controversy of the eighth century, John wrote a series of theological tracts defending the use of images in Christian worship, thus establishing the theological position of Eastern Orthodoxy.

Early Life

John of Damascus (deh-MAS-kehs) was born in the city with which he is identified at a time when Syria was under the rule of the caliphs. His family name was Manṣūr, meaning “victory.” John’s father was Sergius Manṣūr, a wealthy Christian who served at the court of the Umayyad caliph ՙAbd al-Malik. Because of the practice of toleration by the Umayyad Dynasty, it was not unusual for Christians to serve the caliphs. When Sergius was elevated to the rank of prime minister, he was troubled at the thought that his son John would adopt Arab ways. He placed him under the instruction of the Sicilian monk Cosmas, who had been brought to Damascus as a slave.

It was customary for the Arabs to go on plundering excursions along the Mediterranean coasts and to return with a number of prisoners, whom they made slaves. Among a group of prisoners brought back from the coast of Sicily was the monk Cosmas. Cosmas was an ordained priest and a teacher. He knew grammar and logic and as much arithmetic as Pythagoras and as much geometry as Euclid. He had also studied music, poetry, and astronomy.

The usual practice was to sell such prisoners to farmers, who would work them in the fields until they dropped dead. There existed laws against introducing slaves into the houses of official families. John’s father managed, however, to buy Cosmas for a great price from Malik and took him into his home; from that point onward the learned monk became John’s tutor and master. Thus John acquired a formidable knowledge of theology, rhetoric, natural history, music, and astronomy. He learned from Cosmas much about the world and about spiritual theory.

John became deeply religious and, like his father, was given to good works. On his father’s death, however, Caliph ՙAbd al-Malik appointed John to the high position of chief secretary. In an Eastern court, only the position of councillor of state was higher. In time, John enjoyed the powers once possessed by his father. While serving in the Eastern court, John continued to practice the Christian virtues of charity and humility. He was obsessed by the thought of offering up all of his wealth to the poor and then following his teacher and master, Cosmas, into a monastery. It is clear that the humble Cosmas exerted more influence over John than did the mighty caliph. Cosmas had retired to the monastery of St. Sabas in Palestine when he had completed John’s education. John remained at his position in the caliph’s court until approximately 730, when he, too, entered the monastery of St. Sabas. Yet already before he left the secular world, John had begun the great work of his life, the refutation of iconoclasm (the opposition to religious imagery).

Life’s Work

Iconoclasm was the latest in a series of challenges beginning with Arianism that the Eastern church had had to face. The Iconoclastic Controversy began with Byzantine emperor Leo III and continued through the reign of his successor, Constantine V. It was a conflict over images and the particular significance attached to them. In the Eastern (or Greek) church, the practice of venerating icons was widespread by the seventh century. The opponents of this practice maintained that Christianity, as a purely spiritual religion, must proscribe the cult of icons. This opposition was strong in the Byzantine Empire, so long the cradle of religious ferment. There were considerable remnants of Monophysitism, and the Paulicians, a sect hostile to any ecclesiastical cult, were gaining ground.

Defenders of the practice of venerating icons attributed Leo’s hostility to images to Jewish and Muslim influences. Mosaic teaching requires strict repudiation of image worship, but it was contact with the Muslim world that had intensified the distrust of icons. Muslims have an abhorrence of any pictorial representation of the human countenance. They teach that “images are an abomination of the works of Satan.”

In 726, the Greek islands of Thera and Therasia were shaken by a marine volcanic eruption. At the request of iconoclastic bishops of Asia Minor, Leo III responded to this natural disaster by issuing a decree declaring that the eruption was the result of God’s wrath on the idolatry of the Greeks; therefore, all paintings, mosaics, and statues representing Christ and his saints had to be destroyed. Another decree ordered the destruction of the great statue of Christ over the bronze gate of the palace in Constantinople. A riot ensued when imperial officers tore down this statue. The emperor then ordered the execution of those who had tried to protect the statue; the victims were the first martyrs of the Iconoclastic Controversy.

In order to strengthen his position, Leo attempted to win over the pope and the patriarch of Constantinople. His proposals were decisively rejected by the aged patriarch Germanus I (715-730), and his correspondence with Pope Gregory II (715-731) only produced negative results. After these two authorities, the emperor’s principal opponent was John of Damascus.

As images, paintings, and statues were being destroyed, John wrote to the emperor. He argued that figures of the cherubim and seraphim adorned the ark of the covenant. Further, citing the Scriptures, John wrote that Solomon was ordered to adorn the walls of the temple with living figures, flowers, and fruit. He concluded that it was fitting that Christians should adorn their churches. John’s letter was reasoned and scholarly, replete with quotations from the Bible.

Leo was determined that the images be removed. He believed that Christianity needed purifying and that this could only come about with the destruction of the images. Leo was determined that Christianity survive the increasing power of Islam. Failing to get any support from Germanus, who had joined the side of the image-worshiping Christians, Leo replaced him with Anastasius.

Still in the caliph’s court in 730, John issued a formidable attack, quoting the evidence of the Church fathers who favored the worship of images. He quoted from Saint Basil, Dionysius the Areopagite, Gregory of Nyssa, and Saint John Chrysostom as evidence that they openly supported the use of images. The image worshipers, he wrote, were not circumscribing God but were venerating God, which was right and proper. John closed his letter by deliberately misquoting Galatians 1:8 and accusing Leo of preaching a gospel contrary to the Bible. This letter ushered in hostility between the emperor and John.

Unable to overwhelm John by force of argument, the emperor determined to destroy him by stratagem. He forged letters addressed to himself, signing John’s name to them. The letters informed the Byzantine emperor that the guards surrounding Damascus were weak and negligent and could easily be subdued. The letters urged the emperor to send an army immediately against Damascus, stating that Leo would have the cooperation of John.

These forged letters were sent by messenger to the caliph. John was summoned and asked how he could explain them. When he could offer no explanation, the caliph ordered John’s right hand severed. All that night, holding his severed hand to his wrist, John prostrated himself before an icon of the Virgin Mary. According to Adrian Fortescue’s text The Greek Fathers (1908), John said the following prayer:

Lady and purest mother, who didst give birth to my God, because of the holy icons my right hand is cut off. Thou knowest well the cause, that Leo the emperor rages; so help me at once and heal my hand by the power of the Most High, who became man from thee, who works many wonders by thy prayers. May he now heal this hand through thy intercession, and it shall in future always write poetry in thy honour, O Theotokos, and in honour of thy Son made man in thee and for the true faith. Be my advocate, for thou canst do anything, being mother of God.

In the morning, there was only the mark of a suture to show where the knife had passed. Soon afterward, John begged the caliph to relieve him of office. Reluctantly, for he valued his service, the caliph let him go. In the year 730, after he sold all of his worldly possessions and gave the proceeds to the poor, John set out for the monastery of St. Sabas in Palestine.

At the monastery, John did not take an active part in the Iconoclastic Controversy as it continued to rage throughout the East. The statues and paintings were destroyed, but he had nothing more to say about them. As a monk, John took the vow of complete silence; he was charged to renounce all secular learning and ordered not to write. About 735, he was ordained for the priesthood, and then the restrictions were removed.

Living in a small cell, John wrote voluminously: homilies, commentaries, ascetic tracts, liturgical canons, and hymns. One of his works, to which no definite date can be attached, was the comprehensive Echdosis tĪs orthodoxon pisteōs (Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 1899). In it, he wrote briefly about images. At first God had no form, John wrote, but God became human out of pity for humans and to save humans. As human, God lived on Earth among humankind, worked miracles, suffered, was crucified, rose again, and ascended to Heaven. All these things, he wrote, actually happened and were written down for those who were not alive at the time. When humans look on the image of God, then, they remember God’s saving passion, and they fall and worship what is represented there.

It was during his time at the monastery of St. Sabas that John formulated a fuller defense of holy images, which was his only original contribution to theology. Because of this contribution, he is recognized as the last of the Greek fathers. This defense is in the form of three treatises, collectively known as Logoi treis apologĪtikoi pros toms diabollontas tas agaias eikonas (c. 730; On Holy Images, 1898). The crucial argument of the treatises is the continual insistence that in the Incarnation a decisive and abiding change took place in the relationship between God and material creation. John wrote that before the Incarnation, God, being without form or body, could not be represented. Since the Incarnation, however, God has emerged in the flesh and lived among humans, and representations can be made of Him. Humans do not worship matter, wrote John, but worship the creator of matter.

He accused the iconoclasts, who insisted that the Old Testament’s prohibition of idolatry applied to images, of quoting Scripture out of context. He proceeded to cite passages showing how God, having forbidden the making of idols, yet commanded the use of material objects and images in divine worship, instructing that his temple be adorned with the likenesses of plants and animals images that were not to be worshiped as idols.

On the basis of Scripture, John made a distinction between absolute worship, or adoration, and relative worship, or veneration. The Bible records many occasions when the patriarchs and prophets worshiped, venerated, and bowed before places or things to whom such honor was due, yet never with the attitude of adoration that is to be reserved for God alone. John argued that it is wrong to identify every image with its prototype. Only Jesus the Son, as the pure image of God the Father, can be said to mirror his prototype with absolute faithfulness. All other images, John wrote, whether natural, symbolic, or allegorical, are essentially different from their prototypes.

Only God, he wrote, is worthy of absolute worship, or adoration. Relative worship, or veneration, is given to the Mother of God, the saints, or sacred objects. Thus, veneration given by a Christian to an image of Christ is ontologically the same as the reverence he or she ought to give his or her fellow Christians, who are also images of Christ, but it is ontologically different from the adoration that is due God alone.

Significance

The Council of Nicaea in 787 under the Byzantine empress Irene (r. 797-802) restored the use of images in Christian worship. Whereas the Iconoclast Synod of Constantinople in 754 cursed John of Damascus, the church council in 787 looked on him as a great hero. With the end of the Iconoclastic Controversy, the honor of John’s name was spread throughout Christendom. An early ninth century chronicler, Theophanes the Confessor, writes that John was rightly surnamed Chrysorroas, after the chief river of his city. This name was chosen because through his life and teachings, John gleamed like gold. This name, however, did not become the common one associated with John; he has been known and honored through the centuries as John of Damascus. In the Eastern Christian church, John’s feast day is December 4. Pope Leo III of the Western Christian church declared John a doctor of the Church and appointed March 27 as his feast day. Throughout Christendom, John is known for his virtue, piety, and learning and for defending the worship of holy images.

Bibliography

Anderson, David. St. John of Damascus: On the Divine Images. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980. Contains an analysis of John’s three treatises on images.

Cavarnos, Constantine. Guide to Byzantine Iconography: Detailed Explanation of the Distinctive Characteristics of Byzantine Iconography, With a Concise Systematic Exposition of Saint John Damascene’s Defense of Holy Icons. Boston: Holy Transfiguration Monastery, 1993. Explores John’s work defending icons in the Church. An excellent resource on the icons of the orthodox church, explaining the theology of icons. Bibliography, index.

Fortescue, Adrian. The Greek Fathers. London: Catholic Truth Society, 1908. Written by an expert in the field, this classic volume contains a chapter on John of Damascus, together with translations of some of his works. Generously documented.

Louth, Andrew. St. John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Explores John’s work on faith, with three sections covering his life, his logic, and iconoclasm. Bibliography, index.

Ostrogorsky, George. History of the Byzantine State. Translated by Joan Hussey. Rev. ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1969. An excellent and thorough history of the period. Contains a section on the iconoclastic controversy. Illustrations, colored maps, bibliography.

Parry, Kenneth. Depicting the Word: Byzantine Iconophile Thought of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries. New York: E. J. Brill, 1996. Surveys John’s intellectual contributions defending the veneration of icons, controversial literature on iconoclasm, and more. Bibliography, index.

Payne, Robert. The Holy Fire: The Story of the Fathers of the Eastern Church. Crestwood, N.Y: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980. Contains a chapter on John of Damascus, together with a discussion of some of his writings.

Runciman, Steven. Byzantine Civilization. London: E. Arnold, 1966. Contains a chapter on Byzantine literature and makes frequent references to the works of John of Damascus. Includes bibliographic notes.

Schönborn, Christoph. God’s Human Face: The Christ-icon. Translated by Lothar Krauth. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994. An exploration of the nature and history of iconoclasm and the iconoclastic controversy, the theology of images, the representation of the body, and much more. Chapters also cover “The Icon as Grace-Filled Matter: John Damascene” and the second Council of Nicea. Bibliography, index.

Valantasis, Richard, ed. Religions of Late Antiquity in Practice. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. A study that includes the chapter “Texts on Iconoclasm: John of Damascus and the Council of Hiereia.” Bibliography, index.