Praised be Jesus and Mary, and now and forever.
St. John Damascene was an Arab Christian who grew up under Muslim rule.
Damascus where he was born was conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate in 635.
His grandfather Mansur may have been one of the city officials who negotiated favorable terms of surrender.
His grandfather was in any case taken into the Caliph's service,
and his father Sergius succeeded him in the fiscal administration of the growing empire.
The Umayyads preferred Christians for such positions requiring technical skills.
Damascus became the capital of their empire in 661 around the time St. John was born,
and eventually he too worked for the Caliph.
In 705 Al-Walid I became Caliph.
He decreed that public records were to be kept in Arabic rather than in Greek,
unless they were too complicated to express in Arabic.
He also generally made the administration more thoroughly Muslim.
Previously Muslims had worshipped in a prayer room attached to the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist,
but they had outgrown this, so they now took over the whole building.
A few years later it was demolished to build a mosque in its place.
It may have been events like these that led to St. John's decision to leave public service
and become a monk near Jerusalem.
He was a mature man, but we don't know exactly his age, probably somewhere between 30 and 55.
He entered the monastery of St. Sabah in the Judean desert,
about halfway between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea to the southeast.
He became a protege of John V, Patriarch of Jerusalem, who ordained him a priest.
He dedicated his time to prayer and the study of the Fathers and the Church,
and he mastered their thought.
He had been a monk for about 20 years by 726,
when the Emperor Leo the Assyrian, or Syrian,
ordered the destruction of icons throughout the Byzantine Empire.
Apparently he considered them idolatrous, even though they had long been used by Christians.
Thus began the period of iconoclasm.
In 730 the Emperor took this policy further by making it a formal edict.
St. Germanus, Patriarch of Constantinople, resisted him,
so the Emperor forced him to resign.
But in the Judean desert, St. John Damascene took up his pen
to defend the orthodoxy of religious images.
He was still in the Caliphate and therefore out of reach of the Emperor,
but what he had to say wouldn't have pleased his Muslim rulers either.
The three treatises he wrote furnished such a complete defense of the veneration of sacred images,
based on scripture, tradition, and reason,
that in subsequent ages and down to the present day there has been no need to add to it.
The foundation for the Christian veneration of religious images is the Incarnation.
St. John writes,
The Mother of God and the other saints have been made like God by His dwelling in them,
and so they are also worthy of veneration.
This honors the God who dwells in them and whose friends they are.
This defense was so effective that even after St. John's death,
an iconoclast council felt it necessary to anathematize him.
The mastery of theology had shown in these works and in his preaching
that a fellow monk who had been made a bishop to ask him for a summary of Christian thought.
He responded with a work in three parts,
dialectic or philosophy in the first part,
then a catalogue of Pharisees, and lastly a synthesis of theology.
In the catalogue of Pharisees he includes Islam.
He shows a thorough knowledge of the Koran, which he cites verbatim,
and of the Hadith or Muslim traditions.
He bases his argument against Islam on the lack of authority of Muhammad,
the inconsistency of Muslim beliefs and traditions,
and their unnatural attitude towards women.
The third part of the work on the Orthodox faith became the best known in the West.
It was translated into Latin in the 12th century and was much used by the scholastics.
Blessed John Dunscotus cites it more than he does any other father.
It is a summary of patristic thought
and in this it is necessarily not original,
but it is original as a synthesis
and in some points that he develops more than his predecessors did.
Among his homilies, the three that he preached in Jerusalem on the Dormition stand out.
The Dormition or falling asleep of the Virgin is what preceded her assumption.
We have time only for a few phrases from these masterpieces of oratory and theology.
He says,
He relates that she rose on the third day
and connects this particularly with her virginity and divine maternity.
For it was fitting, he says,
should have her body preserved from corruption even in death.
It was fitting that she, who held the Creator in her lap as a baby,
should not rest in the tabernacle of God,
or should rest, rather, in the tabernacle of God.
The time came for St. John Demasin II to fall asleep in Christ,
around the year 749 at a great age.
In 754 he was condemned by an iconoclast council, as I said,
but in 787 the Second Ecumenical Council of Nicaea
approved his teaching on images and proclaimed his sanctity.
In 1890 Leo XIII declared him a doctor of the Church.
Praised be Jesus and Mary.
Now and forever.
© transcript Emily Beynon