St. John of Damascus

Almost everything told about John's life comes from a biography written some centuries after his death, and the accounts disagree about his dates and about at least one episode of his career. The places where that matters are marked below.

For Inquirers

St. John of Damascus began life as a rich man's son in a very comfortable position, and the thing he is loved for is what he did after he gave it up. He grew up in Damascus, in what is now Syria, in a Christian family that served the Muslim ruler of the land: his father kept the ruler's accounts, and the household could afford a learned tutor, a monk who had been captured in a raid and bought out of slavery to teach the boys. John was clever enough to rise to a high post at court himself. The Church remembers that he then handed his money to the poor, walked into a monastery in the desert near Jerusalem, and asked to be taught how to obey.

What he did there is a little like what a good teacher does with a mountain of notes. For centuries Christians had written enormous numbers of books about who God is, who Jesus is, and what a believer should hold to be true, and John sat down and set it all in order, chapter after chapter, so that a person could find an answer without reading a library. He also wrote songs. A great hymn sung on Easter night, and the grave hymns sung at a Christian funeral, come down under his name, and singers in the Church still ask for his help.

He is remembered especially for his part in a quarrel over pictures. In his day an emperor ordered the paintings of Jesus, of Mary, and of the saints taken down and destroyed, saying that bowing to a picture is bowing to something people made. John, who lived beyond the emperor's reach, answered that God had become a man, with a face and a body and hands, and that if God was willing to live in flesh and wood and bread, then a painted face of Christ does not stand between us and him. The love goes straight through the picture to the person it shows. Thoughtful Christians land in different places on pictures in worship, and John's reasons are worth hearing out whichever way you land, because they begin from something nearly all Christians hold: that God really did become one of us.

Overview

• Who: John of Damascus (also called John Damascene) was a monk, priest, theologian and hymn-writer whose death is placed in 749 by OrthodoxWiki and by the OCA's article on iconoclasm, though other sources give 760 or about 780 (see Where the Accounts Part Ways). He is also known by the title Chrysorrhoas, "streaming with gold," for the beauty of his speech.
• Where: He was born in Damascus into a Christian family that served the Muslim caliphs, and spent most of his working life at the monastery of St. Sabbas (Mar Saba) near Jerusalem.
• What he wrote: the Fount of Knowledge, whose third part, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, is a summary of the Church's doctrine; the Three Treatises on the Divine Images; homilies on the Dormition of the Mother of God; and hymns still sung in the Church's worship.
• Why he matters: he gave the defense of Icons its lasting argument from the Incarnation, and the OCA says that the council of 787 that restored the images followed his theology.
• Feast: December 4.

Summary

John was born in Damascus under Muslim rule, in a Christian family whose men held office under the caliphs, and he himself served in that administration before leaving it for the monastery of St. Sabbas in the Judean wilderness. There he was ordained a priest (the sources disagree on where, as noted below) and spent the rest of his life writing. The story of his life comes to us mostly through a much later biography, and its details (a forged letter, a severed hand, a healing before an icon of the Mother of God) belong to the Church's tradition about him. The writings are firmer ground, and they show a man who read widely and arranged what he read.^orthodoxwiki-life

His largest work, the Fount of Knowledge, has three parts: a short course in logic, a catalogue of heresies, and the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, which takes the teaching of the earlier Fathers on God, creation, the Incarnation, and the sacraments and sets it out in order. Beside it stand the three treatises against those who destroyed holy images, written while the Byzantine emperors were doing exactly that, and the argument at their centre is that the Son of God took flesh, so matter has been made a vehicle of salvation, so the images of Christ and his friends may be painted and honoured. The OCA says that the council of 787, which ended the first period of iconoclasm, followed this theology.[^oca-iconoclasm] The Church sings hymns under his name still, among them the canon of Pascha, which the OCA says is ascribed to him, and songs of the funeral service.[^oca-easter-funeral]

Why He Matters

John's gift was to gather. Athanasius answers Arius and Cyril answers Nestorius, each fighting a particular fire in his own century; John comes after the fires and arranges what had been learned in them, so that a student can walk from the doctrine of God, through creation and the fall, to the Incarnation and on to the resurrection of the dead in one connected book. The OCA lists him among the Fathers whose writings have received the universal approval of the Church.[^oca-fathers] Later writers keep returning to the Exposition; when Pomazansky's twentieth-century dogmatic theology wants to explain the unity of God, the limits of our knowledge of him, or the union of Christ's two natures, it turns to John's text.[^pomazansky-uses]

The fight over images turned on whether the Incarnation reaches all the way down to wood, paint and bread. John's answer ties together things that are often treated separately. The cross, the book of the Gospels, the altar table, and the Body and Blood of Christ are all matter, he points out, and anyone who despises the matter of an icon has to explain why the rest is allowed.[^treatise1-matter-list] On his reading, the iconoclast quarrel is a quarrel about whether the Word really became flesh, and nobody who answers yes to that can consistently refuse to paint him.

He is also present in ordinary worship. The Paschal canon, sung in the night service of Pascha, is ascribed to him by the OCA, as are the special songs of the funeral service,[^oca-easter-funeral] and the Menaion headed one of the canons sung for the Dormition of the Mother of God on August 15 "A Composition by John of Damascus."[^dormition-canon] An icon on a church wall applies the argument he made, and the OCA notes that because he was a hymn-writer, the Church prays to him for help in the study of church singing.[^oca-synax]

A Boy in the Caliph's City

Nearly all the information about John's life reaches us through a biography of him attributed to John, Patriarch of Jerusalem, and dating, as OrthodoxWiki puts it, to the tenth century. Scholars, OrthodoxWiki adds, have noted that this record is long on piety and short on historical detail.^orthodoxwiki-life What follows is therefore what the Church's tradition says of him, checked where possible against the other notices.

He was born in Damascus into a Christian family. His father, Sergius Mansur according to the OCA's synaxarion, was a treasurer at the court of the caliph, an office OrthodoxWiki describes as hereditary and as heading the tax administration for Syria.[^oca-synax] Life under Muslim rule, OrthodoxWiki says, did not shake the family's faith, and the family's Muslim countrymen held them in high esteem. A household like that wanted its sons educated. In the Damascus slave market Sergius ransomed a learned monk named Cosmas, taken captive in a raid and called Cosmas of Calabria in the OCA's account, and put him in charge of the boys' schooling. The OCA's account adds a second Cosmas, an orphan Sergius had taken into his home, later venerated as a saint, so that John grew up with a foster brother.[^oca-synax] Under the monk, OrthodoxWiki's biography says, John advanced in music, astronomy and theology, and "equaled Diophantus in algebra and Euclid in geometry."^orthodoxwiki-life

After his father's death John took up a post at court. The OCA's life calls him city prefect, and OrthodoxWiki calls him protosymbullus, chief councilor.^oca-synax The name by which later centuries knew him, Chrysorrhoas, means "streaming with gold," and the Menaion's notice for his feast explains it as a tribute to the skill and eloquence of his words, a title shared with the river that flows by Damascus.[^menaion-dec4] The picture is of a young Christian official, trained in the sciences, who lived between two worlds, and the next part of the story is about how he stopped.

The Hand and the Icon

According to the Church's account, the break came through the quarrel over images. The Byzantine emperor Leo III had issued his edicts against the veneration of icons, John's treatises answered them, and the emperor, who could not reach John because he was no subject of Byzantium, took another road. He forged a letter in John's name offering to help Leo take the Syrian capital, and sent it to the caliph. The caliph removed John from office and ordered the hand that wrote the treatises cut off.[^oca-synax]

The tradition holds that the severed hand was returned to John that same evening, and that he pressed it to his wrist and prayed before an icon of the Mother of God, asking to be healed so that he could write again in defense of the Faith and in praise of the Virgin and her Son. He fell asleep, heard her voice telling him he was healed and must labour with the restored hand, and woke to find it joined to his arm, a thin red line the only sign. In thanks he hung a silver hand on the icon, which is why one image of the Mother of God, kept at Mar Saba until the twelfth century and now at the Athonite monastery of Hilandar, shows her with three hands and is commemorated on June 28 and July 12.[^oca-synax][^tricherousa] When the caliph learned of the miracle, the OCA says, he begged forgiveness and offered John his old office. John refused, gave away his riches, and left for Jerusalem.

Obedience at Mar Saba

The monastery John entered was that of St. Sabbas (Savva) the Sanctified, a lavra in the wilderness near Jerusalem, in a country that had been under Arab rule since 636.[^oca-iconoclasm] The tradition has him arrive as a simple novice and find it hard to get a spiritual father, because the monks were daunted by his learning and his former rank. Only one experienced elder would take him, and the training this elder gave him was designed to unmake the official. John was forbidden to do anything of his own will. He was sent to Damascus to sell baskets the monks had woven, at a price far above their worth, dressed in rags, through the very streets where he had been prefect. Nobody recognised him except a former steward of his house, who bought all the baskets at the asking price out of pity.[^oca-synax]

The same account tells how the training broke down and was mended. When a monk died and his brother begged John for something to console the mourners, John wrote the funeral hymns that begin "What earthly delight" and "All human vanity," and was banished from his cell for composing without permission. The elder at last agreed to forgive him on one condition, that he wash out the monastery's chamber pots and clean its latrines with his bare hands, and John ran joyfully to do it. Afterwards the elder was told in a vision of the Mother of God to let John write again. In the OCA's account the Patriarch of Jerusalem ordained him a priest and made him preacher at his cathedral, but John returned to the lavra and spent the rest of his life composing doctrine and hymns.[^oca-synax] The Menaion, by contrast, places his ordination at the monastery of St. Savvas itself, and adds that he wrote against the iconoclasts Leo the Isaurian and his son Constantine.[^menaion-dec4]

Where the Accounts Part Ways

These lives do not agree on when John lived. The OCA's article on iconoclasm gives his dates as c. 652 to 749; OrthodoxWiki's biography gives c. 676 to December 5, 749; and the OCA's synaxarion says he was born about 680 and died about 780, more than a hundred years old. The Menaion in Archimandrite Ephrem Lash's translation says he lived eighty-four years and died in peace in 760.[^dates] This entry follows the 749 date that the OCA's and OrthodoxWiki's historical notices share, and it takes his birth to fall somewhere in the later seventh century.

The OCA's synaxarion says that John left Mar Saba only once, to denounce the iconoclasts at the council of 754 in Constantinople, where they imprisoned and tortured him but he survived.[^oca-synax] That council, convened by the iconoclast emperor Constantine V, is recorded by the OCA as having 338 bishops, and Wikipedia adds that none of the patriarchs of the great sees took part,[^hieria] and a death in 749 does not leave room for John to have been there. The tradition and the chronology have not been reconciled in any source quoted here, and the entry does not try to do it for them. The accounts also differ on where he wrote the treatises: OrthodoxWiki has him begin them in the caliph's court, while the OCA's article on iconoclasm describes him as a monk at Mar Saba.[^orthodoxwiki-life][^oca-iconoclasm] What no account quoted here doubts is that the treatises were written in his lifetime under Muslim rule. As to their effect, the OCA says the council of 787 followed his theology, and OrthodoxWiki says the iconodule position prevailed largely through his work.

The Fount of Knowledge

John's major work is called the Fount of Knowledge, and OrthodoxWiki describes it in three parts. The first, the Philosophical Chapters or Dialectic, is mostly logic and exists to prepare the reader for the rest. The second, On Heresies, is a catalogue of errors, and it includes a section on the "Heresy of the Ishmaelites," which OrthodoxWiki calls the first apologetic work by a Christian against Islam. The third, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, OrthodoxWiki describes as the most important of his works.^orthodoxwiki-life

The Exposition is divided in the received text into four books. Book I treats the knowledge of God, his attributes, and the Holy Trinity. Book II treats creation: the angels, the devil, the visible world, paradise, and man, including the faculties of the soul, free will, providence and predestination. Book III treats the economy of salvation and the person of Christ, with chapters on his two natures, his two wills and energies, the Mother of God, and his passion and descent to Hades. Book IV begins with the resurrection and ascension and moves through faith, baptism, the Cross, the Eucharist, the saints, images, Scripture and the Antichrist, ending with the resurrection of the dead.[^exposition-contents]

John's method is announced at the opening of Book I, and it is the stance of a man who intends to add nothing. He writes that all that has been delivered by the Law and the Prophets, the Apostles and the Evangelists, is received and honoured:

"All things, therefore, that have been delivered to us by Law and Prophets and Apostles and Evangelists we receive, and know, and honour, seeking for nothing beyond these." An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book I 1.10[^exp-1-1]

That does not mean he refuses to argue, only that his arguments are drawn out of what was handed down, and he names his predecessors as he goes. At the heart of his account of Christ's deification he stops to cite Gregory the Theologian, and in defending images he cites Basil.[^exp-names] The OCA's article on iconoclasm describes the same habit, saying that he "extensively quoted previous Fathers" in his defense of icons.[^oca-iconoclasm]

His handling of the Old Testament canon shows the same method. Book IV, chapter 17 counts twenty-two books in the Old Testament, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and then adds the Wisdom of Solomon and the Wisdom of Jesus the son of Sirach with the remark that they are "virtuous and noble, but are not counted nor were they placed in the ark." An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book IV 17.39[^exp-canon] Metropolitan Philaret's catechism names him with Cyril of Jerusalem and Athanasius as reckoning the Old Testament at twenty-two books; the wider question is taken up in Canon of Scripture.[^philaret]

The Emperor and the Images

In the winter of 717 to 718 an Arab fleet besieged Constantinople, and the new emperor Leo III the Isaurian used "Greek fire" to drive it off. The OCA's account says he then turned to reform and began to blame the Church for the empire's problems, in particular the monks, who numbered at least a hundred thousand and whose lands escaped taxation. When a dispute about icons raised by certain bishops from the eastern provinces of Asia Minor came to his attention, he used it to assert his own authority, and from 726 he issued edicts against the veneration of images. The OCA thinks it probable that the example of Islam, which condemns pictorial religious art, played a part, and notes that the iconoclasts appealed to the second commandment.[^oca-iconoclasm] OrthodoxWiki reports that the Caliph Yezid had ordered the removal of icons in his own territory shortly before the controversy began, and that inside the Church there had always been what the page calls a "puritan" outlook, which saw all images as latent idolatry.[^orthodoxwiki-seventh]

The patriarch of Constantinople, St. Germanus, refused and was deposed. The OCA names Germanus and John as the two theological leaders of the defenders of the images, and observes that John could speak relatively freely because he was a monk at Mar Saba, in Arab territory, outside the emperor's power. A council at Rome in 731 condemned and excommunicated the iconoclasts.[^oca-iconoclasm] Leo's son Constantine V pressed the policy harder. He removed defenders of the images from the episcopate and in 754 convened the council that met at Hieria, near Chalcedon, whose 338 bishops condemned the making and venerating of images.[^hieria] Its reasoning was Christological: any image of Christ, it said, either depicts his humanity alone, and so divides him, or confuses humanity with divinity. The decree the OCA quotes calls for rejecting and cursing every likeness made in any material and colour by "the evil art of painters."[^oca-hieria-decree]

The council's standing was weak. No patriarch attended, the see of Constantinople was vacant, and Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria were under Muslim rule, which is why its opponents called it the "Headless Council." A synod at the Lateran in 769 anathematized its rulings and the second council of Nicaea in 787 overturned them.[^hieria] In between came what the OCA calls the decade of blood, 762 to 775, when monks and others were imprisoned, tortured and killed for keeping icons. The council of 787 met under the Empress Irene and, in the OCA's words, "followed the theology of Saint John of Damascus in affirming the propriety of the icons."[^oca-iconoclasm] OrthodoxWiki says that largely through the work of St. John of Damascus the iconodule position prevailed, and records the decision of the council as that icons are to be kept in churches and given relative veneration, like the Cross and the Gospel book.[^orthodoxwiki-seventh] Iconoclasm returned under later emperors and was finally ended in 843.[^orthodoxwiki-iconoclasm] Bishop Kallistos Ware, quoted by the OCA, sums up what had been at stake:

"It was not merely a controversy about religious art, but about the Incarnation, about human salvation, about the salvation of the entire material cosmos."[^ware-via-oca]

The Three Treatises

John's defense, which he wrote in three parts, called apologies or treatises, opens as a speech from a man who has decided he cannot be silent. He sees the Church in danger, and he cites the prophet's warning that a watchman who sees the sword coming and does not cry out will answer for it:

"I see the Church which God founded on the Apostles and Prophets, its corner-stone being Christ His Son, tossed on an angry sea, beaten by rushing waves, shaken and troubled by the assaults of evil spirits." Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Icons — PART I 0.4 Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Icons — PART I 0.5 Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Icons — PART I 0.6[^t1-open]

He says he spoke because "the truth was stronger than the majesty of kings" Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Icons — PART I 0.16 Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Icons — PART I 0.17[^t1-open], and the tone of the whole is a pastor's. He begins by affirming what the iconoclasts affirm, one God, uncreated, invisible and without form, whom alone he adores with the worship of latreia, and only afterwards turns to what the iconoclasts have misunderstood.

The first misunderstanding is about the commandment itself. The Law says "Thou shalt not make to thyself an idol, nor likeness of anything" (Exodus 20.4), and the iconoclasts took that as a flat ban on images. John answers from the same Law: the Lord who gave that commandment also ordered, "thou shalt make two cherubs graven in gold" (Exodus 25.18), to overshadow the mercy-seat, and he commanded the tabernacle to be made after a pattern shown on the mountain. The law forbade an image of God, who cannot be circumscribed, and it ordered images of the cherubim, who can. The tabernacle itself, John says, was a figure and a type, and the Law was not itself an image but "shrouded the image."[^t1-law]

The step on which everything turns comes next. Before the Incarnation there was nothing to paint, because God has no body, and Book IV of the Exposition puts the point in so many words: "But besides this who can make an imitation of the invisible, incorporeal, uncircumscribed, formless God? Therefore to give form to the Deity is the height of folly and impiety." An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book IV 16.15 An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book IV 16.16[^exp-4-16] After the Word became flesh, John says, the situation changed: the Son lived on earth, worked miracles, suffered, was crucified and rose, and was seen by men; these things were written down for those who were not alive to see them, and the Fathers sanctioned depicting them for people who have no letters or no time for reading.[^exp-4-16] The prohibition of the Old Testament and the permission of the New are therefore two phases of the same teaching. The commandment kept Israel from painting the God it had never seen, and the Incarnation gave the Church someone to paint.

Because the iconoclasts had also charged the defenders with idolatry, John spends much of his effort on the kinds of honour. In the first treatise he writes that "Worship is the symbol of veneration and of honour" Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Icons — PART I 0.267[^t1-worship], and he goes on to separate degrees of it. The first, latreia, is the worship due to God alone, who alone by nature is worthy of it. Below it stands the honour shown for God's sake to his saints and servants, to holy places, to the tabernacle, even to rulers God has established, and he gathers Scripture's examples: Joshua and Daniel bowing to an angel, David to the places where the Lord's feet stood, Jacob to Esau, Joseph's brothers to Joseph. The third treatise sets out the kinds of adoration owed to God, among them the worship of servants, of admiration, of thanksgiving, of need and of contrition, and then the ways in which creatures are honoured in Scripture. Pomazansky, the twentieth-century Russian dogmatician, notes that this distinction between the "worship" of God and the "veneration" of icons was first set forth by John in these treatises.[^pomazansky-icons]

A principle runs through the whole argument: the honour given to the image does not stop there. John makes it his own by quoting Basil, and in the Exposition he sets it down in a line; the Seventh Council's definition, as Pomazansky quotes it, states the same principle of the prototype.[^pomazansky-icons]

"For as Basil, that much-versed expounder of divine things, says, the honour given to the image passes over to the prototype." An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book IV 16.3[^exp-4-16]

A prototype, he adds, is the thing imaged, so the honour shown to the icon of Christ is given to Christ.[^exp-4-16] An image also teaches. It does for the person who cannot read what a book does for the person who can:

"What a book is to the literate, that an image is to the illiterate." Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Icons — PART I 0.419 Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Icons — PART I 0.420[^t1-book]

Tradition, Scripture and the Emperor

The iconoclasts demanded a command in Scripture for painting Christ, and John asks what rule they would apply to their own creed. In the third treatise he asks where in the Old Testament or the Gospel they find the Trinity, consubstantiality, three persons, or the two natures of Christ stated in so many words, and answers his own question:

"Still, as they are contained in what Scripture does say, and defined by the holy fathers, we receive them and anathematise those who do not." Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Icons — PART III 0.22 Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Icons — PART III 0.23[^t3-trinity]

A church that accepts the vocabulary of Nicaea and Chalcedon has already admitted that doctrine can say in new words what Scripture says in old ones, and John asks only that the same freedom be extended to the images. In the second treatise he adds that much of the Church's practice rests on unwritten tradition: the threefold immersion in baptism, the adoration of the Cross, prayer toward the East. In the Exposition's chapter on images he likewise calls the veneration of images an unwritten tradition, like worship toward the East and the worship of the Cross.[^t2-tradition] Holy Tradition treats the principle at length.

John does not hide that the emperor's policy was political, and his answer is that the emperor has no authority over what the Church holds:

"I am not to be persuaded that the Church is set in order by imperial edicts, but by patristic traditions, written and unwritten." Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Icons — PART II 0.483 Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Icons — PART II 0.484[^t2-emperor]

Just before it he says that the emperor has not received the power to bind and loose, and he recalls earlier emperors who persecuted the true faith, Valens, Zeno, Anastasius and Heraclius among them. He wrote from outside the emperor's power, and OrthodoxWiki notes the irony that Christians living under Muslim rule at that time had more freedom to defend the icons than those within the empire.[^orthodoxwiki-iconoclasm]

Matter, Flesh, and the Face of God

The sentence in the treatises that explains why a Christian may honour the stuff of this world is this one:

"I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake, and deigned to inhabit matter, who worked out my salvation through matter." Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Icons — PART I 0.337 Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Icons — PART I 0.338[^t1-matter]

The OCA quotes the same passage in another translation, gives it as Treatise I.16, and reads it as the centre of his case: icons of Christ are fitting because the Son of God really took human flesh, and in that flesh he can be depicted.[^oca-iconoclasm] The sentence turns on a fact about the world: God has used matter. The Word who was "made Flesh" (John 1.14: "The Word became flesh and lived among us") did not borrow a body as a costume. In the Exposition John argues that the body of Christ is true flesh, not brought down from heaven and not simply passed through the Virgin as through a channel, and that the whole purpose of the Incarnation would fail otherwise, since the nature that had sinned was the nature that had to be freed.[^exp-3-12-body]

He draws the conclusion that the iconoclasts could not accept, and draws it as a list. The wood of the Cross was matter, and so were the holy mountain of Calvary and the rock of the sepulchre, and so is the book of the Gospels, and the table that gives the bread of life, and the gold and silver of chalices and altar-plate, and, before all these, the Body and Blood of the Lord. He puts the choice to his opponents: either give up the honour of all these things or accept the Church's tradition of icons, for "Do not despise matter, for it is not despicable." Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Icons — PART I 0.367[^t1-despise] To despise what God made, he adds, is the Manichean heresy. The OCA, for its part, sees in the council of 754 "a dualistic streak" that denies the full goodness of the material order.[^oca-iconoclasm]

Behind the sentence stands an account of why the Son came, which the Exposition gives in one of its plainest passages:

"Further, the Son of God became man, in order that He might again bestow on man that favour for the sake of which He created him." An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book IV 4.6[^exp-4-4]

The favour is life in communion with God: man was made in God's image and likeness, lost the marks of both through the transgression, and was brought back by the Son sharing in what is inferior, our nature, to renew in himself what was made after his image. The meaning of that renewal is spelled out in his account of what happened to Christ's own flesh. That flesh, he writes, is deified without any change of nature, as steel is made to burn by being united to fire:

"for the flaming steel burns, not because it has been endowed in a physical way with burning energy, but because it has obtained this energy by its union with fire." An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book Iii 17.7[^exp-3-17]

The same pattern, a union that gives without confusing, is what John describes next for the saints, and what the doctrine of Theosis names.

The sacraments rest on the same ground. In the chapter on the Eucharist John reminds the reader that the Word made the heavens and the earth and became man without seed, and then asks:

"can He not then make the bread His body and the wine and water His blood?" An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book IV 13.21[^exp-4-13]

He adds that God uses ordinary things because man is accustomed to them: since it is man's custom to eat bread and drink wine and water, God joined his divinity to these and made them his body and blood, so that we may rise to what is above nature through what is familiar. The bread, he says, is changed by the invocation and presence of the Holy Spirit, and the manner of it cannot be searched out. Eucharist gives the wider teaching. In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas opened one objection in the Summa on the sacrament with John's words.[^aquinas-eucharist]

Friends of God

John's chapter on the saints is the corresponding chapter on persons, and its logic is the same as the logic about images. The saints are to be honoured, he says, as friends of Christ, as sons and heirs of God, and he is willing to say what that means in startling terms: "gods," he writes, not by nature, but "as being united to God of their own free-will and receiving Him as an indweller and becoming by grace through participation with Him what He is Himself by nature." An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book IV 15.8[^exp-4-15] That is the Orthodox doctrine of Theosis stated by an eighth-century monk, and it explains why the honour paid to a saint is, like honour paid to an icon, ultimately honour paid to the God who dwells in him.

The relics follow from that, and John faces the objection that a corpse was unclean under the Law. His answer is that those who have fallen asleep in hope of the resurrection are not called dead, and he lets the point rest on the line:

"For death is rather the sleep of the saints than their death." An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book IV 15.13[^exp-4-15]

Near its end the chapter gives a practical program for the people who ask the saints' help: raise temples in their names, honour their memories, sing psalms and hymns, and then, in the sentence that links this chapter to the next, "Let us raise monuments to them and visible images, and let us ourselves become, through imitation of their virtues, living monuments and images of them." An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book IV 15.33[^exp-4-15] The painted image is meant to turn into a lived one. See Invocation of Saints for the practice, and Iconostasis for where the images stand in church.

Songs for Easter, for the Grave, and for the Mother of God

The OCA credits him with the Paschal canon and the funeral songs.[^oca-easter-funeral] OrthodoxWiki's life is more guarded about the Oktoechos, the book of the eight tones, saying he may be responsible only for improving and revising it, and OrthodoxWiki's article on the Octoechos says he is credited with the systemization of the musical forms of the Church.[^orthodoxwiki-hymns] The history of the canon, a hymn of nine odes that grew out of the nine biblical canticles, runs, in OrthodoxWiki's summary, from St. Andrew of Crete, who began it in the second half of the seventh century, to John of Damascus and Kosmas of Jerusalem, who developed it in the eighth.[^orthodoxwiki-canon] OrthodoxWiki says the Church considers Cosmas the Hymnographer, an eighth-century hymn-writer, and John the best representatives of the later Greek classical hymnology.[^orthodoxwiki-cosmas]

The OCA says that the canon hymns of Christ's resurrection, ascribed to John, are chanted on Easter night with the troparion of the feast as their constantly recurring refrain.[^oca-easter-funeral] Archimandrite Ephrem Lash's Anastasis, from which the quotations here are taken, heads the canon for Pascha "A Composition by Monk John," so the identification with John of Damascus rests on the Church's tradition and on the OCA's ascription. Its opening irmos sets the tone:

"The day of Resurrection, let us be radiant, O peoples! Pascha, the Lord's Pascha; for Christ God has brought us from death to life, and from earth to heaven, as we sing the triumphal song."[^pascha-canon]

The canon does not stay in the register of triumph for long. In its third ode, the singer's voice becomes the voice of the believer who has been baptized into Christ's death and now rises with him:

"Yesterday I was buried with you O Christ, today I rise with you as you arise."[^pascha-canon]

This is the Paschal faith put in the first person and in the present tense. The same canon calls creation, "both seen and unseen," to keep the feast, which is a line the treatises' defense of matter would not find foreign.[^pascha-canon]

The OCA's article on the funeral service names the same saint as the author of the joyful canon of Easter night and of the Church's songs of death, and it finds nothing ironic in the pairing: the songs are "unyielding in their gravity and uncompromising in their bluntness and realism" about the fate of fallen human beings. The article's argument is that the funeral service makes the Church's last word about death possible by first looking at death unflinchingly.[^oca-easter-funeral] One of the hymns it prints begins:

"What earthly sweetness remains unmixed with grief? What glory stands immutable on the earth?"[^oca-funeral-hymn]

John Behr, in The Mystery of Christ, reads another of the funeral hymns, which laments the beauty of the human form lying disfigured in the tomb, as a more categorical judgment on death than most consolations allow: from a Christian perspective, he argues, death is always a catastrophe, yet the hymn still points to a reason behind it in the command of God.[^behr-funeral]

For the Dormition, the Menaion gives two canons, of which the second is headed "A Composition by John of Damascus." In it young virgin maidens with Miriam the prophetess are summoned to raise the song of departure, for the Virgin is being taken over to her appointed place in heaven.[^dormition-canon] John's hymns and John's homilies treat the same event, and the homilies are where the theology becomes plain.

The Mother of God and the Dormition Homilies

John's doctrine of the Virgin is a corollary of his Christology. In the Exposition he proclaims the holy Virgin to be, in the strict sense, the Mother of God, and defends the title against Nestorius:

"Hence it is with justice and truth that we call the holy Mary the Mother of God. For this name embraces the whole mystery of the dispensation." An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book Iii 12.17 An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book Iii 12.18[^exp-3-12]

If she bore him who was born of the Father before the ages, then he who was born of her is God, and likewise man; the name, John says, signifies "the one subsistence and the two natures and the two generations" of the Lord. Behr brings his survey of early reflection on Mary to a close with the first sentence of this passage.[^behr-mary] Book IV adds her ever-virginity, argued from the Gospels' own language: "first-born," John says, means only that the child was born first, and "till" marks a limit of time without excluding what follows. The same chapter gives her parents as Joachim and Anna and her descent from the line of David, and explains that the Gospels give Joseph's genealogy and not hers because it was not the Hebrews' custom to give genealogies of women.[^exp-4-14] This is Church tradition as John received it, set out with the kind of reasoning he applies elsewhere.

In the first of the Three Homilies on the Dormition of the Theotokos, John says that neither human tongue nor angelic mind can praise her worthily, yet to be silent would be wrong; her death, he says, was held by the tomb, and yet "Nor did she leave the grave empty," for her body left it a fragrance and a source of healing.[^dormition-homily-1] In the second, he asks the question the feast puts to every hearer: how could the one who bore the Life of all fall under death? His answer is that she did die, obeying the law of her Son, and that corruption could not touch her:

"It was meet that she, who had sheltered God the Word in her own womb, should inhabit the tabernacles of her Son."[^dormition-homily-2]

As the ark of old was carried into the Holy of Holies, so the living ark of the new covenant is carried by the apostles, and as her Son rose on the third day, so it was fitting that the mother be united with him. In the same homily John addresses the tomb itself, and the tomb answers that she is not there, and that what remains in it is grace; yet the tomb is not the only vessel of that grace, since "divine power is not restricted by place, neither is the Mother of God's working." The homily ends in an appeal to purity of life: she is a lover of virginity and purity, and if we turn from our sins in earnest she will often visit her servants, bringing Christ her Son with her.[^dormition-homily-2] The third homily is a litany of "To-day" proclamations, in which the living ladder and the heavenly table are said to be assumed into heaven.[^dormition-homily-3] John does not claim to have witnessed any of this; at one point he introduces an episode with the formula that it is "asserted by many" and "said," and a reader sees him handing on tradition and marking it as such.[^dormition-homily-2]

One God, Three Subsistences

Book I of the Exposition begins with the incomprehensibility of God and ends the first chapter with an instruction to be content with what has been revealed, "not removing everlasting boundaries."[^exp-1-1] The second chapter draws a distinction that governs the rest: neither are all things about God unutterable nor all utterable, neither all unknowable nor all knowable. It gives a list of what we can know and confess: that God is without beginning, uncreate, simple, incorporeal, uncircumscribed, and that he is one essence known in three subsistences.[^exp-1-2]

The Trinity is the subject of chapter 8, and the long profession with which it begins collects the attributes in a single sweep: one essence, one divinity, one power, one will, one energy, one beginning, one authority, one dominion, one sovereignty, known in three perfect subsistences, which are, he says, "united without confusion and divided without separation" An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book I 8.1[^exp-1-8] The chapter then handles the Father as source, the Son as begotten before the ages, and the Spirit as proceeding, and insists that the Father could not have become a Father in time without changing, and that generation, unlike creation, is the production of a like nature from the begetter's own nature. The Son is therefore not made.

He first explains why the persons of the Trinity are unlike three men, who stand apart in space and time, and then writes:

"For the subsistences dwell in one another, in no wise confused but cleaving together, according to the word of the Lord, I am in the father, and the father in Me" John 14.11 An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book I 8.104[^exp-1-8]

He continues with the conclusion: "Wherefore we do not speak of three Gods, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but rather of one God, the holy Trinity." An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book I 8.105[^exp-1-8]

The same idea returns where the Exposition turns to the properties of the divine nature: "The subsistences dwell and are established firmly in one another," John writes, inseparable and cleaving to each other without coalescing or mingling, the Son in the Father and the Spirit, the Spirit in the Father and the Son, the Father in the Son and the Spirit.[^exp-1-14] Book III borrows the image when it sets the Trinity beside the Incarnation, describing the three subsistences as "interpenetrating one another without confusion."[^exp-3-5] What John says in plain English is that the three cleave together in one will, one energy and one power, in contrast to Peter and Paul, who share a nature but whose subsistences, he says, do not exist one within the other and so stand quite separate.[^exp-1-8] For the Orthodox account of the Persons, see The Trinity and Hypostasis.

The same chapter bears on a dispute that outlasted him. John writes that the Father is not derived from anyone, that the Son is from the Father, and that the Spirit is likewise from the Father and is called the Spirit of the Father, and then adds a sentence later disputants over the Filioque cited:

"And we do not speak of the Spirit as from the Son: but yet we call Him the Spirit of the Son." An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book I 8.122[^exp-1-8-spirit]

He goes on to say that the Spirit is manifested and imparted to us through the Son, and uses the image of the sun, from which come both ray and radiance. Thomas Aquinas, taking up the objection from this sentence in the Summa, judges that in this point John's opinion is not to be held, while noting that some assert that John's words do not express a denial of the Son's part.[^aquinas-filioque] How that disagreement is to be judged belongs to The Filioque.

Two Natures, Two Wills

Book III turns from the Trinity to Christ. In the second chapter he gives the formula that guards the Incarnation:

"Wherefore we speak not of man as having become God, but of God as having become Man." An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book Iii 2.14[^exp-3-2]

The one who becomes incarnate is the same subsistence that was before the ages, and he takes a full human nature, body and reasoning soul, without ceasing to be what he was. Chapter 3 applies this against those who hold that after the union Christ has one nature: the two natures were united without change or alteration, the divine not leaving its simplicity and the human not being turned into God or reduced to nothing. If the heretics were right, John argues, Christ would be of one essence neither with the Father nor with his mother, and "Christ" would name a nature, not a subsistence.[^exp-3-3] Chapter 4 draws out the consequence in what is called the communication of properties: because the subsistence is one, we may say of Christ that he is both created and uncreated, subject to suffering and incapable of suffering, and may speak of the Lord of Glory crucified, never in respect of his divinity but in respect of the humanity he took. The Word, John says in the third chapter, imparts his own attributes to the flesh "in virtue of the interpenetration of the parts one with another," and in chapter 7 he speaks of the natures of the Lord as permeating one another. Pomazansky renders the union as "mutually immanent," citing chapter 7.[^exp-3-4]

The question that divided the East in the century of his birth was whether Christ has one will or two. John answers in a sentence that settles the matter with his usual economy:

"Since, then, Christ has two natures, we hold that He has also two natural wills and two natural energies." An Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — Book Iii 14.1[^exp-3-14]

Will and energy, John says, belong to nature; if they belonged to subsistence, the three persons of the Trinity would each have a different will and energy. Things that share an essence share a will and energy, and things that differ in essence differ in will and energy. The sameness of will in the Trinity is the sign of the sameness of nature, and the difference of wills in Christ is the sign of the two natures that are safeguarded in the union. OrthodoxWiki records that the sixth council judged that human nature without a human will would be incomplete, condemned the Monothelites, and anathematized, among others, Pope Honorius and Sergius of Constantinople.[^exp-3-14][^orthodoxwiki-sixth] OrthodoxWiki is the only source cited here for the council's acts, and whether Honorius belongs among the condemned is a long-disputed point between East and West. See Constantinople III and Christology.

Chapter 17 then returns to the deification of Christ's flesh and will. John's image there, the burning steel quoted above, shows that the permeation of the natures through one another changes neither of them, and he cites Gregory the Theologian for the phrase that the one deified and the other was deified.[^exp-3-17] The Eucharist chapter states the purpose: that we may become by adoption what Christ is by nature.[^exp-4-13]

The Heresy of the Ishmaelites

On Heresies, the second part of the Fount of Knowledge, closes with an entry on the "superstition of the Ishmaelites," a passage that needs careful reading and that is contested, both for its portrait of Islam and for its stories about Muhammad. It is a short entry in a catalogue of heresies, written by a man who, in the Church's tradition, had served a Muslim ruler and who lived under Muslim government. OrthodoxWiki calls it the first apologetic work by a Christian against Islam, and OrthodoxWiki's pages on Islam and on Muslims still cite John for the judgment that Islam is a heresy.[^orthodoxwiki-islam] The opening judgment is severe: the Ishmaelite superstition, he says, is "a forerunner of the Antichrist."[^heresy-101-open]

The Ishmaelites, also called Agarenes and Saracens, were idolaters, John says, until the time of Heraclius, and then Muhammad appeared among them, who "after having chanced upon the Old and New Testaments and likewise, it seems, having conversed with an Arian monk, devised his own heresy." John begins his summary of the teaching by granting common ground, that Muhammad says there is one God, Creator of all things. He then reports the teaching about Christ: that the Christ is the Word of God and his Spirit, but a creature and a servant, born of Mary without seed, not crucified but taken up to God.[^heresy-101-christ] His objections are put as questions. Who testifies that God gave this prophet his book, and which earlier prophet foretold him? The Law was given on Sinai before all the people, whereas, in John's report, this book came down to its prophet in his sleep.

John's most carefully argued reply answers the charge that Christians are "Associators," who set a partner beside God by calling Christ his Son. John replies from the Muslim description of Christ itself:

"Therefore, if the Word of God is in God, then it is obvious that He is God. If, however, He is outside of God, then, according to you, God is without word and without spirit."[^heresy-101-word]

He answers the charge that Christians are idolaters for venerating the Cross by pointing to the veneration of a stone at the Kaaba, and he names several of Muhammad's "books" and retells stories about his life, in a mocking tone.[^heresy-101-rest] No source cited here corroborates the stories about Muhammad, and how fairly the passage represents what Muslims of his day believed is contested; the Christological argument above can be weighed on its own terms, and the tone is a feature of the polemic of his century. John Meyendorff's "Byzantine Views of Islam" (Dumbarton Oaks Papers 18, 1964), listed in OrthodoxWiki's reading on Islam, is a place to continue. See Islam for the wider encounter.

OrthodoxWiki also lists a Conversation between a Saracen and a Christian and a Tract on Right Thinking, described as an apology for the residents of Damascus; no text of either is cited here.^orthodoxwiki-life

The Last of the Fathers

John is sometimes called the last of the Fathers, and OrthodoxWiki's article on the term "Patristic" says whose phrase that is: the Roman Catholic Church regards him as the last of the Church Fathers, while the Orthodox Church does not consider the age of the Fathers over and includes later influential writers.[^orthodoxwiki-patristic] The OCA's list of the Fathers of particular importance names him in a series that continues past him to Photius of Constantinople and Gregory Palamas.[^oca-fathers] The Menaion's notice for his feast calls him "the originator of systematic and the father of scholastic theology, by his accurate setting out of the orthodox faith."[^menaion-dec4]

In the Summa Theologiae Thomas Aquinas cites "Damascene" on the Eucharist, on the procession of the Holy Spirit, and on Christ's humanity as an "organ of His Godhead," a phrase he takes from the nineteenth chapter of Book III of the Exposition.[^aquinas-eucharist][^aquinas-organ] He also corrects him on the procession, as noted above.[^aquinas-filioque] In Orthodox handbooks John is simply cited: Pomazansky's Orthodox Dogmatic Theology turns to him for the unity of God, the knowability of God, the union of Christ's two natures and the Eucharistic change, and Philaret's catechism for the reckoning of the Old Testament books.[^pomazansky-uses][^philaret]

Beyond the works treated above, OrthodoxWiki lists the Sacred Parallels, the Dialogue against the Manichaeans, an Introduction to Elementary Dogmatics, and the Christian romance of Barlaam and Ioasaph, "The Precious Pearl," without settling questions of attribution here.^orthodoxwiki-life

His Feast

The Church keeps St. John of Damascus on December 4, and the troparion sung that day is a short portrait of the man the sources describe:

"Champion of Orthodoxy, teacher of purity and of true worship, the enlightener of the universe and the adornment of hierarchs: all-wise father John, your teachings have gleamed with light upon all things."[^troparion]

The kontakion calls him "the composer of hymns, the star and teacher of the Church, the defender of her doctrines."[^troparion] OrthodoxWiki reckons his death to December 5, while the Menaion keeps his feast with St. Barbara's on December 4.[^dates] A separate commemoration, on June 28 and July 12, belongs to the icon of the Mother of God "of the Three Hands," the image that carries the memory of the severed hand.[^oca-synax]

The man the feast remembers started as an official in a caliph's court and became, by the OCA's reckoning, one of the two theological leaders of the defenders of the images, answering why a painted face of Christ is not an idol. His name is linked in worship to the hymns that carry the Church from the grave to the joy of Pascha, and in doctrine to a line he wrote that holds Icons, the sacraments, and the body of the Mother of God together: that the God who became flesh has made flesh a place where he can be met, which is the heart of The Incarnation and the ground of what the Church means by Theotokos.

Sources

[^oca-iconoclasm]: Orthodox Church in America, "Iconoclasm" (article on the iconoclast controversy). [^oca-fathers]: Orthodox Church in America, "The Fathers." [^oca-synax]: Orthodox Church in America, Life of St. John of Damascus (December 4). [^menaion-dec4]: Anastasis (Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, tr.), Menaion, December 4. [^pomazansky-uses]: Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, on the unity of God (citing Exposition 1.8), on the knowledge of God (citing Exposition 1.1), and on the incarnation (citing Exposition 3.17, 3.7 and 3.8). [^treatise1-matter-list]: John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, Treatise I. [^oca-easter-funeral]: Orthodox Church in America, "Easter Sunday: The Holy Pascha" and "Funeral." [^tricherousa]: OrthodoxWiki, "Panagia Tricherousa." [^dates]: OCA, "Iconoclasm" (c. 652–749); OrthodoxWiki, "John of Damascus" (c. 676–December 5, 749); OCA, Life of St. John of Damascus (born c. 680, died c. 780); Anastasis (Lash, tr.), Menaion, December 4 (died 760, aged 84). [^hieria]: Wikipedia, "Council of Hieria." [^exposition-contents]: John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Books I–IV (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^exp-1-1]: John of Damascus, Exposition 1.1 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^exp-names]: John of Damascus, Exposition 3.17 (Gregory the Theologian) and 4.16 (Basil). [^exp-canon]: John of Damascus, Exposition 4.17 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^philaret]: Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, Longer Catechism, on the books of the Old Testament, citing Cyril of Jerusalem, Athanasius, and John of Damascus. [^orthodoxwiki-iconoclasm]: OrthodoxWiki, "Iconoclasm." [^oca-hieria-decree]: Orthodox Church in America, "Iconoclasm," quoting the decree of the Council of Hieria (754). [^orthodoxwiki-seventh]: OrthodoxWiki, "Seventh Ecumenical Council." [^ware-via-oca]: Kallistos Ware, quoted in Orthodox Church in America, "Iconoclasm." [^t1-open]: John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, Treatise I (opening). [^t1-law]: John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, Treatise I; Exodus 20.4 and 25.18 (Brenton). [^exp-4-16]: John of Damascus, Exposition 4.16 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^t1-worship]: John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, Treatise I; Treatise III (kinds of adoration, tr. M. H. Allies). [^pomazansky-icons]: Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, "The veneration of icons." [^t1-book]: John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, Treatise I. [^t3-trinity]: John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, Treatise III (tr. M. H. Allies). [^t2-tradition]: John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, Treatise II; Exposition 4.16. [^t2-emperor]: John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, Treatise II. [^t1-matter]: John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, Treatise I.16. [^exp-3-12-body]: John of Damascus, Exposition 3.12 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^t1-despise]: John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, Treatise I. [^exp-4-4]: John of Damascus, Exposition 4.4 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^exp-3-17]: John of Damascus, Exposition 3.17 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^exp-4-13]: John of Damascus, Exposition 4.13 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^aquinas-eucharist]: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 75, a. 2, obj. 1 (quoting John of Damascus, Exposition 4). [^exp-4-15]: John of Damascus, Exposition 4.15 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^orthodoxwiki-hymns]: OrthodoxWiki, "John of Damascus"; OrthodoxWiki, "Octoechos." [^orthodoxwiki-canon]: OrthodoxWiki, "Chant." [^orthodoxwiki-cosmas]: OrthodoxWiki, "Cosmas the Hymnographer." [^pascha-canon]: Anastasis (Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, tr.), Canon for Pascha, Odes 1 and 3. [^oca-funeral-hymn]: Orthodox Church in America, "Funeral." [^behr-funeral]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (2006), on the funeral hymn of John of Damascus. [^dormition-canon]: Anastasis (Archimandrite Ephrem Lash, tr.), Menaion, August 15, Second Canon. [^exp-3-12]: John of Damascus, Exposition 3.12 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^behr-mary]: John Behr, The Mystery of Christ: Life in Death (2006), closing discussion of Mary. [^exp-4-14]: John of Damascus, Exposition 4.14 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^dormition-homily-2]: John of Damascus, Three Homilies on the Dormition of the Theotokos, Sermon II. [^dormition-homily-1]: John of Damascus, Three Homilies on the Dormition of the Theotokos, Sermon I. [^dormition-homily-3]: John of Damascus, Three Homilies on the Dormition of the Theotokos, Sermon III. [^exp-1-2]: John of Damascus, Exposition 1.2 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^exp-1-8]: John of Damascus, Exposition 1.8 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^exp-1-14]: John of Damascus, Exposition 1.14 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^exp-3-5]: John of Damascus, Exposition 3.5 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^exp-1-8-spirit]: John of Damascus, Exposition 1.8 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^aquinas-filioque]: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 36, a. 2, obj. 3 and reply to obj. 3. [^exp-3-3]: John of Damascus, Exposition 3.3 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^exp-3-2]: John of Damascus, Exposition 3.2 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^exp-3-4]: John of Damascus, Exposition 3.3, 3.4 and 3.7 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9); Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, "The incarnation of the Son of God" (citing Exposition 3.7). [^exp-3-14]: John of Damascus, Exposition 3.14 (NPNF 2nd ser, vol. 9). [^orthodoxwiki-sixth]: OrthodoxWiki, "Sixth Ecumenical Council." [^heresy-101-open]: John of Damascus, Fount of Knowledge, On Heresies 101 ("Ishmaelites"). [^orthodoxwiki-islam]: OrthodoxWiki, "Islam." [^heresy-101-christ]: John of Damascus, Fount of Knowledge, On Heresies 101. [^heresy-101-word]: John of Damascus, Fount of Knowledge, On Heresies 101. [^heresy-101-rest]: John of Damascus, Fount of Knowledge, On Heresies 101. [^orthodoxwiki-patristic]: OrthodoxWiki, "Patristic." [^aquinas-organ]: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 112, a. 1, reply to obj. 1 (citing John of Damascus, Exposition 3.19). [^troparion]: Orthodox Church in America, Life of St. John of Damascus, Troparion and Kontakion (December 4).