John of Damascus

Saint John of Damascus is one of the most beloved late patristic saints. He was born in the imperial Muslim capital of Damascus around the year 680, into a Christian family at the very top of the Caliph’s government. His father was the chief financial officer of the Muslim state, and they were Christians under Muslim rule, which was permitted in those years if you paid the special tax. John was brilliant. His father ransomed a captured Greek monk to be his tutor and gave him the finest education the East could provide. He took over his father’s position at court and became prefect of Damascus. Then the iconoclast emperor Leo III tried to forbid the veneration of icons. John, safely outside Byzantine reach in Damascus, wrote three brilliant treatises defending the holy icons. The emperor was furious. He forged a letter to make John look like a traitor and sent it to the Caliph. The Caliph believed the forgery and ordered John’s right hand to be cut off. John picked up his severed hand, prayed to the Theotokos, fell asleep before her icon, and woke up with his hand reattached. He gave away everything, became a monk at the Lavra of Saint Sabbas in the Judean wilderness, and spent the rest of his life writing. He composed the Paschal Canon we still sing every year at the great Paschal Liturgy. He produced the Fount of Knowledge, the first comprehensive Orthodox dogmatic textbook. He died around the age of 100, sometime around 750.

The Damascus that John grew up in was unlike anywhere else in the Christian world. Sixty years earlier the city had fallen to the Arab Muslim conquest. The new rulers established their capital there. The first generations of Muslim rule allowed Christians and Jews to keep their faith if they paid a tax called the jizya. John’s grandfather Mansur had actually been the Christian official who negotiated the surrender of Damascus to the Muslim armies in 635. The family kept its position at court for three generations. John’s father Sergius was the Caliph’s chief financial officer and one of the wealthiest Christians in the empire. He wanted his son to receive a Christian education that would equip him for greatness. So one day at the Damascus slave market, where captives from Byzantine wars were sold, Sergius saw a learned Greek monk named Cosmas being treated as merchandise. He ransomed Cosmas. He brought him home. He told him: this man is to be the tutor of my son and my foster son. Cosmas spent years teaching the two boys everything he knew — grammar, logic, astronomy, music, philosophy, theology. By the time Cosmas had finished, John was one of the most brilliantly educated Christians in the entire Eastern world.

In 726 the Byzantine emperor Leo III the Isaurian decided that the Christians had become idolaters by venerating icons. He ordered that icons be destroyed throughout the empire. Christ the Savior, the Theotokos, the saints — their painted faces were torn down, plastered over, smashed. People who tried to defend the icons were beaten, exiled, sometimes killed. The whole structure of Orthodox piety was under attack. John of Damascus, sitting safely in Damascus outside the emperor’s reach, decided to write a defense. He wrote three treatises titled Against Those Who Revile the Holy Icons. He laid out the entire theological case. The Incarnation, John argued, changes everything. God in the Old Testament could not be depicted because he had not yet shown himself in flesh. But now, in Jesus Christ, God has become matter; he has taken a human face; he has consecrated material reality through his own embodiment. To venerate the icon is not to worship the wood and paint but to honor the person depicted. To refuse to venerate icons is, in the logic of the matter, to refuse to acknowledge that the Incarnation was real. John’s three treatises became the foundation of Orthodox iconology. When the Seventh Ecumenical Council finally ratified the veneration of icons in 787 (forty years after John’s death), it drew directly on his theological work.

The emperor Leo could not reach John in Damascus through normal channels. So he tried something else. He had his scribes forge a letter that looked like John’s handwriting. The letter was addressed to Leo and offered to help him conquer Damascus. Leo sent the forged letter and a flattering note to the Caliph, explaining that this Christian official in the Caliph’s service was a traitor. The Caliph believed it. He had John dragged from his post and brought to the public square. He ordered the executioner to cut off John’s right hand — the writing hand. They did it. They led John back to his own home in chains. That evening, John asked for his severed hand to be brought to him. He pressed the hand back to the bleeding stump of his wrist. He went into his prayer room and stood before an icon of the Theotokos. He prayed: Mother of God, you know I am innocent. You know I cut my hand off in your son’s service, defending the icons. I beg you: heal me. Let me be able to write again. I will use this hand only to praise you and your Son for the rest of my life. He fell asleep before the icon. He dreamed that the Theotokos appeared to him and said: it is done; now write without ceasing. He woke up. The hand was attached to his arm. There was only a thin red line at the wrist where the cut had been. Later, in thanksgiving, John had a silver model of his hand made and attached to that icon. To this day the icon, called "Of the Three Hands," is still venerated, especially at the Hilandar Monastery on Mount Athos.

After the miracle, the Caliph apologized. He wanted to restore John to his old position. John refused. He gave away all his wealth, said goodbye to his life at court, and traveled to the Lavra of Saint Sabbas in the Judean desert south of Jerusalem. He arrived at the monastery as an ordinary novice and asked to be received. The other monks were intimidated by his learning and his former rank. None of them wanted to be his spiritual father. Finally one strict old Elder accepted him. The Elder forbade John to do anything according to his own will. He instructed him to offer to God all his labors and supplications as a perfect sacrifice, and to shed tears that would wash away the sins of his former life. One day a brother monk in the Lavra died. The brother’s grieving brother begged John to compose something consoling for the burial service. John refused at first because he had been forbidden to write. But out of pity for the grieving man he gave in and composed the funeral troparia we still sing today — "What earthly delight remaineth without sorrow?" and "All human vanity remaineth not after death." When the Elder found out, he was furious. He banished John from his cell. The other monks pleaded for him. Finally one of them suggested a penance: let John clean every chamber pot in the Lavra and scrub the latrines with his bare hands. The Elder agreed. John, the former prefect of Damascus, the most learned theologian of his generation, ran joyfully to the work. He scrubbed every latrine in the monastery on his hands and knees. The Theotokos appeared to the Elder in a vision and told him to allow John to write again. John spent the rest of his life at Saint Sabbas, writing the books and hymns that would shape Orthodox theology and worship for the next thirteen hundred years.

Once the Elder allowed him to write again, John spent the rest of his life producing books that would shape the Orthodox Church for centuries. His most important book is called the Fount of Knowledge, in three parts. The first part is a textbook of philosophy and logic, because John believed that good theology requires good thinking. The second part is a catalog of all the heresies the Church had encountered in its history, including (remarkably) the first Christian theological treatment of Islam ever written. The third part, which is the longest and most important, is called An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. It is the first systematic Orthodox dogmatic textbook ever written. John walks his readers through every major topic: the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, creation, providence, the saints, the icons, the sacraments, the resurrection of the dead. He draws on the entire patristic tradition before him — Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor — and synthesizes their teaching into a single coherent whole. For the next thousand years, every Orthodox theologian would learn dogmatic theology from this book. It was translated into Latin in the medieval West, where it became one of the foundational sources for the development of Western scholastic theology. Saint John gave the entire Christian world a map of what the Faith teaches.

In addition to his theological work, John was one of the greatest hymnographers the Church has ever produced. His most famous composition is the Paschal Canon, which the Orthodox Church sings at the great Paschal Liturgy on the night of the Resurrection. The opening words — "The day of Resurrection, let us be illumined, O peoples; Pascha, the Pascha of the Lord" — ring out in every Orthodox church around the world on the holiest night of the Christian year. John composed the entire eight-tone hymn cycle that the Orthodox Church uses in her weekly worship; the book is called the Octoechos, the "Eight Tones," and it shapes the entire pattern of Orthodox sung prayer. The funeral troparia he composed at the Lavra — the ones that got him in trouble with his Elder — are still sung at every Orthodox funeral. The Resurrectional canon is sung every Pascha. The Octoechos shapes every Sunday Liturgy. Every Orthodox Christian who has ever sung along with the choir at Pascha or at a parish funeral has been singing words that John of Damascus wrote.

The foundation of John’s defense of icons is the reality of the Incarnation. The Word truly became flesh. He became visible. He became circumscribable, depictable, recognizable. He took on every dimension of authentic human experience except sin itself, including the suffering and the temptations and the bodily limitations that the rest of us know. This is not theological abstraction; it is the foundation of the entire Orthodox spiritual life. Because the Word truly took flesh, we can paint his face on wood and venerate the icon. Because he truly suffered, we can bring our suffering to him and know that he understands. Because he was truly tempted, we can bring our temptations to him and know that he has overcome them. The whole shape of John of Damascus’s theology rests on this single luminous fact: God has come into our condition without remainder.

After the Theotokos commanded the Elder to allow John to write again, John spent the rest of his life at the Lavra of Saint Sabbas. He left the monastery only once. When the iconoclast Council of Hieria met in 754 (forty years after the heresy had begun) and tried to give iconoclasm formal ecclesiastical sanction, John traveled to Constantinople at his very advanced age to denounce them publicly. The iconoclasts arrested him, imprisoned him, tortured him. By the mercy of God he survived. He returned to his monastery. He kept writing dogmatic treatises and composing hymns. He died at Saint Sabbas around the year 750 (some sources say a bit later, into the 770s or 780s). He was over 100 years old. His relics remained at the Lavra, where they continue to be venerated to this day. The Lavra itself, founded by Saint Sabbas in 478, is still inhabited by Orthodox monks and is one of the few continuously functioning monasteries in the world that has been operating without interruption for more than fifteen hundred years.

John of Damascus matters to every Orthodox Christian because he gave us so much of what we recognize as Orthodox Christianity in its fullness. The icons that line every Orthodox church — the right to venerate them was theologically anchored by his three treatises against the iconoclasts. The Paschal Canon that bursts forth on the night of Resurrection — he wrote it at the Lavra of Saint Sabbas. The Octoechos that shapes the rotation of every Sunday Liturgy — he was its principal compiler. The funeral hymns that we sing when we lay our beloved dead to rest — he composed them. The first systematic textbook of Orthodox dogmatic theology, which guided the Christian East for a thousand years — the Fount of Knowledge, his magnum opus. He came at the end of the great age of patristic theology and gathered everything that had come before into a single coherent structure. He gave the Church a map of what she believes. Every subsequent Orthodox dogmatic treatise stands on his work. To love Saint John of Damascus is to love the structure of Orthodoxy itself.