St John of Damascus

Biography

Born in Damascus about 675 into a prominent Christian family that served in the fiscal administration of the Umayyad caliphs, John held such an office and then renounced it to become a monk at the Lavra of St Sabbas near Jerusalem, where he was ordained and spent the rest of his life in writing and prayer.

Living under Muslim rule and so outside the reach of the iconoclast emperor Leo III, he could write freely, and did. His three Treatises against those who reject the holy images became the charter of the Orthodox defense; his Fountain of Knowledge, with its Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, is the first great systematic theology of the East; and he was among the Church's supreme hymnographers, author of the Paschal canon. He reposed at St Sabbas about 749.

The controversy

• The first Iconoclasm: the imperial war on the holy icons begun under Leo III, which John answered doctrinally from Palestine while the hierarchy within the empire was pressured into conformity.

Position taken

• That the making and veneration of icons is not idolatry but the confession of the Incarnation, since the invisible God, having become visible in the flesh, may now be depicted.
• That the honor paid to the image passes to its prototype, worship in the strict sense (latreia) belonging to God alone, veneration (proskynesis) to what is holy; the distinction the Seventh Council would define.