John Damascene

John was born in Damascus about 675, into a prominent Christian family that served the Muslim government. His father held a senior financial post under the Umayyad caliphs, and John appears to have held one after him. He grew up in Arabic and Greek, inside the new Islamic world, working for it.

At some point, the chronology is uncertain, he left the job, gave away his property, and went to the monastery of Mar Saba in the Judean desert, between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea. He was ordained priest, and stayed there for the rest of his life. He died about 749.

His safety matters to the story. In 726 the Emperor Leo III began destroying icons across the Byzantine Empire, and anyone inside the empire who objected could be beaten, exiled, or killed. John was not inside the empire. He was under a caliph, out of imperial reach, and he used that freedom to write the three Treatises on the Divine Images, the fullest defense of Christian art anyone produced.

His argument was not about art. It was about the incarnation. He wrote that he did not worship matter but the God of matter, who became matter for his sake and worked salvation through matter. God cannot be pictured, he agreed, but God took flesh, and flesh can be pictured. To forbid an image of Christ is to doubt that Christ really came in a body. The iconoclast Council of Hieria anathematized him by name in 754. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787 vindicated him.

His other great work is the three-part Fountain of Knowledge. The first part sets out the philosophical vocabulary; the second catalogues heresies, including one of the earliest Christian accounts of Islam, written by a man who had lived inside it; the third, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, gathers the teaching of the Greek fathers into a single ordered summary. It became the standard theological handbook of the Eastern church, was translated into Latin in the twelfth century, and was quoted constantly by Aquinas and the Western scholastics.

He was also a hymn-writer of the first rank. The Paschal Canon sung at Orthodox Easter, The Day of Resurrection, is his, and English congregations still sing it in John Mason Neale's translation, along with Come, ye faithful, raise the strain.

A later legend says the emperor forged a letter to get his writing hand cut off, and that it was restored after he prayed before an icon. The legend is late. The books are not.

Sources: John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images and An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith; the acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. IV; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913).