Byzantine Culture

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John of Damascus

Writing from under Muslim rule, John of Damascus produced the definitive defence of icons and the first systematic Orthodox theology. His life, his works, and his influence on east and west.

The most effective opponent of Byzantine iconoclasm was a man the Byzantine emperors could not touch, because he lived outside their empire, in a monastery near Jerusalem, under the protection of the Umayyad caliphs whose administration his family had served.

John of Damascus, born around 675 and dead by about 749, wrote the defence of religious images that the Second Council of Nicaea adopted, compiled the first systematic exposition of Orthodox doctrine, composed some of the greatest Byzantine hymns, and produced the earliest substantial Christian account of Islam. He is conventionally called the last of the Greek Fathers.

A Christian in the Caliphate

His family, the Mansur, were prominent Christian Arabs of Damascus who had held financial office under the Byzantines and continued to hold it under the Umayyads after the city’s surrender in 635. His grandfather is said to have been involved in negotiating that surrender; his father served the caliph as a financial administrator.

John himself held office in the caliphal administration before entering the monastery of Mar Saba in the Judaean desert, probably in the 720s, where he spent the rest of his life writing and where he was ordained priest.

This biography matters for two reasons. It explains why he could attack the religious policy of Leo III with impunity — an iconoclast synod at Hieria in 754 anathematised him, which was all it could do — and it means that the most influential Greek theologian of the eighth century spent his adult life in an Arabic-speaking Muslim society.

A legend developed that Leo III forged a treasonous letter to get John condemned by the caliph, that John’s hand was cut off, and that the Virgin restored it overnight — which is why icons of John of Damascus often show him with three hands, and why a three-handed icon type, the Tricheirousa, exists at all. The story is not historical.

The Defence of Images

John’s three Treatises Against Those Who Attack the Divine Images, written in the 720s and 730s, set out the arguments that the iconophile side used from then on.

The Incarnation argument. The Old Testament prohibition of images applies to attempts to depict the invisible God. But God has become visible: “I do not venerate matter, I venerate the Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake.” To refuse to depict the incarnate Christ is to doubt the reality of the Incarnation.

The distinction of veneration. John separates latreia, worship due to God alone, from proskynesis, the relative honour given to persons and things — parents, rulers, holy places, the cross, the gospel book. Icons receive the second, never the first.

The image and its prototype. Quoting Basil, the honour given to an image passes to the person it represents. The icon is a channel, not a terminus.

The sanctification of matter. Matter is not evil and is not excluded from salvation; the body is saved, the bread and wine are the body and blood, the wood of the cross is venerated. An anti-material religion is not Christianity.

The arguments are worked out further in the theology of icon veneration.

The Fount of Knowledge

His major systematic work is in three parts: a chapter on philosophical vocabulary (the Dialectica), a survey of a hundred heresies, and On the Orthodox Faith — a hundred chapters covering God, the Trinity, creation, angels, humanity, the Incarnation, the sacraments, the Virgin, icons, scripture and the last things.

It is not original, and it does not claim to be. John says explicitly that he will say nothing of his own but will gather what the Fathers have said. What he contributes is arrangement: for the first time, the scattered patristic material is organised into a sequence that can be taught and consulted.

Its influence in the west was substantial. Translated into Latin in the mid-twelfth century by Burgundio of Pisa, it was used by Peter Lombard and by Thomas Aquinas, who cites it frequently. Byzantine theology’s one systematic textbook thus became a source for the scholastic method that Byzantine theology otherwise did not develop.

On Islam

Chapter 100 of the heresies section — sometimes numbered 101 — is a short account of “the heresy of the Ishmaelites,” and it is among the earliest Christian descriptions of Islam.

John treats Islam as a Christian heresy rather than a separate religion, a view that says something about how the boundaries looked from Damascus in the eighth century. He knows a certain amount: he names suras, refers to the Qur’anic accounts of Jesus and Mary, discusses Muslim objections to the Trinity and to the crucifixion, and reports Muslim criticism of Christians as associators who attribute partners to God.

He is polemical and frequently unfair, and the passages on Muhammad are abusive in the manner of the genre. But he engages with specific texts and arguments rather than with rumour, and the exchange he records — Christians accused of associating partners with God, Muslims accused of mutilating the biblical narrative — is recognisably the debate that continued for centuries, as Byzantium and the Islamic world describes.

The Hymns

John was also one of the greatest Byzantine hymnographers, working alongside his foster-brother Kosmas of Maiouma. The canon for Easter — “The day of resurrection, let us be radiant, O peoples” — is his, and it is the most exuberant text in the Orthodox repertory. So is the funeral service’s set of hymns, which includes the sombre and famous idiomela on human mortality.

Tradition credits him with organising the eight musical modes of Byzantine chant into the Octoechos, though this is probably a simplification of a longer development. His place in the tradition is discussed in Byzantine hymnography.

Vindication and Legacy

The council of Hieria in 754 anathematised him three times over. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 reversed the condemnation and adopted his arguments, and he was proclaimed a saint.

His long-term standing is high in both churches: the Orthodox commemorate him on 4 December, and the Roman Catholic Church declared him a Doctor of the Church in 1890.

The judgement that he is “the last of the Greek Fathers” is a western convention and should be handled carefully — Orthodox theology treats the patristic era as continuing, and Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas are Fathers by its reckoning. What is true is that John stands at a hinge: he closes the era of the ecumenical councils, and he is the last major Greek theologian whose work became foundational for the Latin west as well as for Byzantium.

The Three Kinds of Image

John’s most useful contribution to the argument is a taxonomy, and it disposes of the objection that venerating images is idolatry by showing how many different things “image” means.

He distinguishes six, of which three carry the weight:

The natural image. The Son is the image of the Father — same nature, distinct person. This is the primary sense, and it establishes that “image” is not automatically a lesser or deceptive thing: there is an image within the Godhead.

The image as divine intention. God’s foreknowledge of what he will create — the logoi of Maximus’s system — are images of things not yet made.

The image by imitation. Humanity made in God’s image, and, derivatively, the painted image of a person.

The argument’s force is cumulative. If God has an image of himself within himself, if creation exists as an image in the divine mind, and if humanity is made as an image, then the image is fundamental to how God relates to what is not God. An artificial image of Christ is the lowest rung of a ladder that goes all the way up.

John adds the crucial historical point: the Old Testament prohibition was given to a people who had seen no form, only heard a voice. “But now God has been seen in the flesh and has lived among men, and I make an image of the God who can be seen.”

The Damascene Household

The biographical detail that explains John’s position is that his family were tax officials for a Muslim state, and had been Roman officials before that.

The Mansur family administered the finances of Damascus under the Byzantines, negotiated or were present at its surrender in 635, and continued in the same role under the Umayyads. John’s father Sergius held the post; John appears to have held it too before entering the monastery of Mar Saba.

Three things follow.

He knew Arabic and Islamic argument at first hand, which is why his account of Islam engages with specific suras and specific objections rather than with rumour.

He was untouchable. The iconoclast emperors could anathematise him, and did, three times at the council of Hieria in 754. They could not reach him. The most effective polemic against Byzantine imperial religious policy was written by a Byzantine-educated Greek theologian living under the caliph’s protection.

He had reason to think about images and empires. He was writing in the decades when the caliph Yazid II issued his own edict against images (721) and when Umayyad art was working out its own aniconic programme, and he was a subject of that state while defending the opposite position for another.

The Textbook That Went West

On the Orthodox Faith had a second career in Latin that its author could not have anticipated.

It was translated into Latin by Burgundio of Pisa around 1153–1154, at the request of Pope Eugenius III. Burgundio was a Pisan jurist and diplomat who had spent time in Constantinople and also translated Galen, Nemesius and Chrysostom.

The translation arrived exactly when western theology was looking for systematic structure. Peter Lombard used it in the Sentences, which became the standard theology textbook of the medieval west; Thomas Aquinas cites Damascenus frequently in the Summa; and the work’s divisions influenced how Latin theology organised itself.

The irony is worth stating. Byzantine theology never developed a scholastic system of its own, and was often criticised in the west for not having one. Its single systematic textbook, written by a monk in the Judaean desert under Muslim rule, became a foundation of the scholasticism that Byzantine theologians would later define themselves against.

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