Download PDF | (Oxford Early Christian Studies) Andrew Louth - St John Damascene_ Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology-Oxford University Press (2002).
346 Pages
Preface
St John Damascene has been oddly served by scholarship. On the one hand, we now have a fine critical edition, nearly complete for his prose works, the life-work of Dom Bonifatius Kotter, OSB. This is a signal mark of recognition, as yet extended to relatively few of the post-Nicene Greek Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysios the Areopagite have been similarly honoured; a critical edition of Maximos the Confessor is well under way; and less complete editions, save in the case of Gregory Nazianzen and, more recently, Evagrios, are appearing in the series Sources Chrétiennes).
But despite this, there has been little attempt to reflect on the theology of the Damascene. In the early years of the project fostered by the Byzantine Institute of the Abbey of Scheyern, under whose auspices Kotter's work proceeded, a number of works on aspects of John's theology appeared: notably, valuable studies of his theological method by Basil Studer, of his Christology by Keetje Rozemond, and of his logic by Gerhard Richter; but since then there has been little.
Earlier still, attention to John's theology had been slight: there were monographs by Langen (1879), on his trinitarian theology by Bilz (1909), and on his theology of icons by Menges (1938), but in his Héstory of Dogma Harnack (1884-9) devoted only a handful of pages to the Damascene. Still further back, the seventeenth-century scholar and advocate of union between the Orthodox Churches and Rome, Leo Allatius, wrote a good deal on John's works (or what he believed to be his works), but this scarcely amounted to a consideration of the Damascene's theology as a whole.
Kotter's edition has transformed our understanding of John, and demands renewed reflection on the theological wavre of the Damascene, which this book attempts to provide. It improves on Le Quien's edition of 1712 (reprinted, with some additions, in Migne, PG 94-6) in several ways. First, as one might expect, it provides a more secure text, as well as revising the list of works by John thought to be authentic. But further, it makes clear both the nature of the tradition of John's works, several of which exist in different recensions which Le Quien's edition had tended to conflate, and also the nature of his sources; for John, like any theologian (or indeed any other kind of thinker) of Late Antiquity or the Byzantine period, was concerned simply to record the truth that had always been known and, he believed, generally better expressed by the ‘Fathers’, from whom he had received his faith.
This he did in a particular historical situation, during the first century of the Arab Empire, ruled by the Caliph, whose servant he had been before embracing the monastic life: an empire founded on the ruins of the Persian Empire and the eastern and southern provinces of the Roman (or Byzantine) Empire. Much of the interest in studying John's theology lies in attempting to understand how John and the tradition to which he belonged coped with the transition from being the religious centre of the Christian Byzantine Empire to being the site of one of the holy places of the religion of Islam.
John has generally been dismissed, either explicitly or implicitly, as an unoriginal thinker, a mere compiler of patristic florilegia. Even if it is argued that there is nothing ‘mere’ about compiling florilegia, there soon comes the realization that John was often not even doing this much, but was using an already existing tradition of such compilation. This was not due to laziness, or carelessness.
It was intentional: twice, towards the beginning of his great Fountain Head of Knowledge, John asserts that ‘I shall say nothing of my own’. If we are to think through what is meant by ‘tradition’ and ‘originality’ in relation to John, we shall be forced to revise what we mean by these terms. The epigraph to this book, from the Greek writer and critic, Zissimos Lorenzatos, points towards a possible way of understanding John. The whole sentence, from an essay on the great writer Alexandros Papadiamandis, too little known outside his native Greece, runs as follows:
Originality means to remain faithful to the originals, to the eternal prototypes, to extinguish ‘a wisdom of [your] owt’ before the ‘common Word’, as Heraclitus says (Fr. 2)—in other words, to lose your soul if you wish to find it, and not to parade your originality or to do what pleases you. (Lorenzatos 2000, 15)
John would have understood that; indeed, he would have been astonished that it needed saying, But it does need saying in our day, and if we are to make anything of John and the tradition to which he belonged (which continues to the present day), we need to try and understand it. The following pages are an attempt to do that.
The chapters are arranged in three parts. The first, ‘Faith and Life’, tells what we know of the life of John Damascene and sets it in its historical context; it also opens up discussion of the way in which John was not simply shaped by tradition but was also determinative for the form that the later theological tradition of Byzantium was to take. The second and largest part, ‘Faith and Logic’, is devoted to John's own presentation of Orthodox Christian theology, especially in his three-part work The Fountain Head of Knowledge. The final part, ‘Faith and Images’, looks at the place of images in John's theology, both his defence of visual images in the context of the iconoclast controversy, and also his use of imagery, both in his homilies and in his liturgical poetry.
A few words are perhaps necessary about another aspect of presentation. John's Bible was the Greek translation, the Septuagint (abbreviated as LXX); my references are therefore to that text (with occasional indications of marked differences from the versions found in English Bibles, which, for the Old Testament, are based on the Hebrew). The numeration of the Psalms between 10 and 146 is therefore generally one less than that found in English Bibles. Note also that 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings appear as 1-4 Kingdoms (Ked.) in the LXX.
For the same reason figures of the Old Testament are referred to by their Greek names, rather than the Anglicizations (which is what they mostly are, rather than transliterations) of the Hebrew forms, as in most English Bibles (e.g., Elias and Isaias, rather than Elijah and Isaiah). Greek names have been transliterated from the Greek, rather than va Latin, save when there is a familiar English form (so Athanasios and Maximos, but John and Cyril).
This book has been a long time in conception, if not in execution. My earlier books on Denys the Areopagite (1989) and Maximos the Confessor (1996) were undertaken, in part, because I wanted to clarify my mind about two of the Fathers whom John revered. They are very different thinkers from John, and precisely for that reason, perhaps, more accessible to present-day theology. Over the years I have incurred many debts, some of which I have probably now forgotten. First, I would mention my students, especially my graduate students over the last five years in Durham, who must think they have heard rather more about the Damascene than they might reasonably have expected.
They have been too polite to criticize, but I am grateful to them, especially for their looks of incomprehension, which have forced me to think through my ideas more clearly. I am grateful, too, to the two universities that have employed me over the last ten years or so, Goldsmiths! College in the University of London and the University of Durham, and to the periods of research leave they have granted me, without which none of this would have been possible. I must also express my gratitude to the librarians of the libraries I have used, and those who service the Inter-Library Loan system, especially to Alisoun Roberts and the other librarians in the Palace Green Library of the University of Durham and Professors David Wright and Trevor Hart who made available to me a couple of rare books.
Several parts of this book have been offered as lectures or papers at conferences and seminars, where I have benefited from the wisdom of others. One chapter (Chapter 8) is a revised and expanded version of my contribution to a symposium, which later appeared as a chapter in the book Preacher and Audience: Studies in Early Christian and Byzantine Homiletics (1998); I am grateful to the publishers, Brill of Leiden, for permission to reuse the material here. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to all who have encouraged me: from the beginning, Professor A. M. Allchin and Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia, and along the way too many people to mention, but especially Averil Cameron, Charlotte Roueché, David Ricks (who introduced me to Lorenzatos), Brian Daley, Pauline Allen, Clare Stancliffe (who prevented me from making too many mistakes about Bede), Alexander Lingas and Archimandrite Ephrem Lash (who each knows more about Byzantine liturgical poetry and music than I ever shall), my former colleagues in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths (who taught me to ask historical questions), and my present colleagues in the Department of Theology at the University of Durham (especially Sheridan Gilley on a few points of style).
I would also like to thank Hilary O'Shea of Oxford University Press and my fellow editor of the Oxford Early Christian Studies series, Gillian Clark, for accepting this book for the series, and for the two anonymous readers who made a host of helpful suggestions. But I doubt if this book would have been ever finished without the constant encouragement of my wife and colleague, Carol, to whom it is dedicated.
ANDREW LOUTH
Darhngton, Feast of St John Damascene, 2000
1 Life and Times
St John Damascene forms a strange, though by no means exceptional, case in the history of Christian theology. His influence is far-reaching, not only in later Byzantine theology, where eventually the pattern of John's theological synthesis became determinative, but also in later Western theology, beginning with the great Swmmae of the scholastic theologians, for whom his epitome of patristic doctrine (known in the West as De Orthodoxa Fide, ‘On the Orthodox Faith’) became their principal resource for the Trinitarian and Christological doctrines defined by the Oecumenical Synods of the early Church, and continuing through the Reformation era and the period of Protestant scholasticism, up to the systematic theology of the great Romantic theologian Schleiermacher. But if the ripples of his influence reach out throughout a millennium or more of Christian history, at the centre from which these ripples emanate there is found a mysterious figure. In fact, we know far more about the times of St John Damascene than about the events of his own life, and closer scrutiny of the sources in recent scholarship has only eroded the few fixed points that were thought to exist, without providing others. The hagiographical lives of John that survive are late and unreliable (though not without interest, as we shall see); his writings contain scarcely any personal clues; and references to him in other historical sources are spatse.
The general parameters of John's life, both temporal and geographical, however, seem clear: he lived the whole of his life in the Middle East in the period of the Umayyad caliphate (651-750), first in Damascus, where he was born, and latterly in Palestine, where he became a monk. The first of the Umayyad caliphs, Mu‘awiya, made Damascus his capital in 651, and from there ruled the empire the Arabs had built up from their conquest of the eastern and southern provinces of the Roman (or Byzantine) Empire and their defeat of the Persian Empire in the three decades after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632.' This empire continued to expand. It crept along the North African coastline during the course of the seventh century until in 711 Spain was itself invaded by the Arabs. In the course of the same century, one by one, islands of the Mediterranean fell to Arab rule—Cyprus (649), Rhodes (654), though Crete and Sicily were successfully to resist the Arabs for some centuries. The Arabs also invaded Asia Minor with the ultimate intention of taking the Byzantine capital, Constantinople: Arab fleets blockaded the city from 674 to 678, and again in 717-18. The Umayyads also expanded towards the East, bringing under their control the more remote provinces of the defeated Sasanid Empire of Persia.
The Umayyad Empire was the beginning of a new configuration in the political geography of the Middle East. For the seventh century can be seen to constitute a watershed in the history of the Middle East—and in fact in the history of Europe and western Asia as far as northern India. In the course of this century two landmarks, clearly in place in the eatliest history of the eastern Mediterranean world we possess—that of the Greek Herodotus—were swept away. The first landmark was the basic unit of society, the old city-state: a city with its public spaces and public life that, with its agricultural hinterland, formed a fairly self-sufficient economic unit. This was eroded over a period of time that critically includes the seventh century. The other landmark was the—admittedly flexible—frontier that separated the Eastern Mediterranean world (eventually the Mediterranean empire known as the Roman Empire) from the Persian Empire, that ran—ideally, from the Greek or Roman point of view—along the upper Tigris valley and the lower valley of the Euphrates. This was ultimately swept away and replaced by a frontier that consisted of the Mediterranean itself, and the Taurus and Anti-Taurus mountains that separate Asia Minor—now western Turkey—from the rest of Asia. The ripples of that change of configuration spread throughout Europe and across Asia at least as far as India, but the epicentre, so to speak, was located in the Middle East—the area now covered by Syria, the Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.* The Umayyad Empire was the first political entity based on this change.
The background of the Umayyad caliphate is more relevant to John's life than one might expect, for his family had a long-standing role in the fiscal administration of Syria, which it retained under the new Arab rulers.‘ John's grandfather, Mansur ibn Sarjun, to give him the name by which he is known in the Arab sources, had been in charge of the fiscal administration at Damascus from early in the seventh century. He was evidently a survivor, for he maintained his position not only after the surrender of Damascus to the Arabs in 635, a surrender that Mansur himself is said to have negotiated,* but also during the earlier occupation by the Persians from 612 to 628: he retained his position when Herakleios retook Damascus in 628 only by paying an indemnity of 1,000 dinars.’ He was succeeded by his son, Sarjun ibn Mansur, who is mentioned by the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes for the year 690/1 as a ‘most Christian man’ and the General Logothete (treasurer).’ There is nothing surprising in John's family continuing to occupy such a position, at least for the first half-century or so of the Umayyad period, for part of the secret of the success of the Arab expansion was that the Arabs left the administration of the conquered provinces intact, and ruled as a military elite who kept themselves apart from their conquered subjects. From their names, it would seem that John's family was Semitic, probably Syrian rather than Arab;* but whatever their racial background, as members of the continuing administrative class in Damascus, they are likely to have been thoroughly Hellenized.’
That John was born in Damascus, son of a family prominent in the civil administration of Syria, is universally admitted. When he was born is less clear. The fact that he died around 750 (see below) suggests a date in the latter half of the seventh century, but attempts to define the date more precisely (Kotter suggested 650,'° Nasrallah 655/60") depend on giving greater credence to the assertions of later, hagiographical sources than they warrant (see the next chapter). The same is true for the hagiographical details about John's education (again, see the following chapter): all we can say is that John's later command, of both Greek verse and Greek prose, makes it clear that he had benefited from a classical education (the enkyklios paideia). His education finished, it seems that John, whose Arabic name was the same as his grandfather's, Mansur ibn Sarjun, also served in the fiscal administration of the Umayyads.”
At some stage, perhaps in the second decade of the eighth century, John resigned from his post in the administration at Damascus, and became a monk in Palestine, taking as his monastic name John, the name by which he has been known ever since. It seems not unlikely that this took place around 706, when, under Caliph al-Walid, the changeover from Greek to Arabic in the Umayyad civil service finally took place.'* The tradition that his monastery was the famous Great Laura, the monastery of St Sabas (or Mar Saba), founded in 478 by St Sabas on the steep slopes of the Wadi Kidron in the Judaean desert, is a late tradition: there is no mention of this monastery in the account of John in the tenth-century Synaxarion of Constantinople, its earliest mention seems to be in the probably tenth-century Greek v7/a, composed by John, patriarch of Jerusalem. There is little doubt, however, that it was in the environs of Jerusalem that he became a monk, for one of the rare personal references in his works mentions his closeness to the patriarch (presumably John V, 706-35: Trisag. 26. 13-14).'* There he lived to become an old man (he refers to himself ‘in the winter of words’: Dorm. 11. 1. 30f.). He seems to have been ordained a priest: Theophanes always refers to him as ‘priest and monk’, which is how he is generally designated in the inscriptions to his works. Just once, in the title for the homily on the fig-tree, John is described as ‘presbyter of the Holy Resurrection of Christ our God’. This suggests that John held some position in the Church of the Anastasis (as well, presumably, as belonging to his monastery, whichever it was); on this basis, Eustratiades asserts that he was the ‘sacred preacher (Azerokéryx) of the Church of the Anastasis’,"° and that as such he composed his liturgical poetry, and presumably also his homilies. Theophanes the Chronicler is also witness to a tradition that he had some fame as a preacher: he always calls him John Chrysorrhoas (‘flowing with gold’), ‘because of the golden gleam of spiritual grace that bloomed both in his discourse and in his life’ (the same epiphet is used, as a vatiant for the more usual chrysostomos, of St John Chrysostom himself).'’ Furthermore, Theophanes mentions that John delivered a sermon in praise of Peter of Mafuma, who was martyred for cursing Muhammad in 743.'* A final reference to John occurs in his condemnation at the Synod of Hiereia in 754, preserved in the Acta of the Seventh Oecumenical Synod of 787: there he was anathematized under his Arabic name, Mansur. He was condemned together with Germanos, the patriarch of Constantinople deposed by Leo HI in 730, and an otherwise unknown George of Cyprus. The condemnation concludes by saying that ‘the Trinity has deposed all three’, which suggests that by then they were all thought to be dead.
John spent the last years of his life as a monk living in the shadow of Jerusalem, a city by then dominated by the Muslim mosques on the Temple Mount—the Mosque of the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque—though the Christian shrines, including the Church of the Anastasis (or the Holy Sepulchre), remained, and Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Places seems to have continued, though in a reduced form. It was during this period that John probably composed his large theological euvre, though we cannot rule out the possibility that some of his works were composed during his time as an Umayyad civil servant in Damascus.
But if it is difficult to establish more than the barest outline of the events of John's life, it is scarcely less difficult to establish any chronology with respect to his works. In the rest of the book, whatever evidence there is will be discussed in its place. But, to anticipate these discussions, there is very little to go on. John was, as we have seen, well educated, and an interest in theological matters was something that a well-educated layman might pursue.” One might well surmise that, once John became a monk, he had more time to devote to theological matters, but in the absence of any way of establishing a chronology, we cannot trace the development of his theological learning, It is very likely that John's acquaintance with Islam (which, as we shall see, was not negligible) went back to his days at the Umayyad coutt;”) but the monks of Palestine knew about Islam too.
There is one work which one might be tempted to date early: his treatise against the Manichees. There are two reasons for suggesting this: first, the very slight manuscript tradition this work has, which might be explained by the fact that it was not available at his monastery; secondly, its restrained use of patristic quotation, and greater reliance on arguments formulated by John himself. But, as the reader can see, the argument is in danger of becoming circular.” Two of John's works (Against the Jacobites and On Right Thinking) are associated with the name of Peter II, metropolitan of Damascus, whom an eighth-century Monophysite theologian, writing against John's Christology, refers to as ‘[John's] bishop’ (the former treatise was written at Peter's request, the latter is dedicated to him).” But, since Peter lived until 743, when, according to Theophanes, he was martyred for his opposition to Islam,* long after John had become a monk, these treatises do not necessarily belong to his early period in Damascus. The only works we can date with some confidence are his treatises against the iconoclasts: if they are concerned with Byzantine iconoclasm (which seems to me certain), they must be later than 726, and their interrelationships and the precise historical references in the second treatise enable one to suggest some sort of chronology.” If that is a secure inference, then there is another date we can establish, for, as Eustratiades has pointed out, John writes in this treatise with the assured authority, not just of a monk, but of a priest.”
If the works themselves give little hint of their place in John's life and theological development, the same can be said for the light they shed on John's preoccupations and the preoccupations of those for whom he wrote, save in general terms. There is, clearly, a concern for doctrinal orthodoxy: practically everything John writes is concerned with this. What this concern amounts to is something we shall consider in some detail later on. But it is difficult to introduce much greater specificity. The doctrine of Christ is clearly of great importance, and he defends Orthodox teaching principally against the Monophysites; he is equally passionate in his attacks on Monothelitism, which can be found even in his homilies (Nestorianism seems much less pressing).”” The Maronites, a group of Lebanese Christians who embraced Monothelitism, are specifically mentioned in On Right Thinking* This brief treatise is perhaps, because of its very brevity, of interest here, for it contains a confession of faith, covering, first, the Trinity (betraying little anxiety about the procession of the Spirit, simply asserting that ‘he has the Father as cause and fount, going forth from him, not by way of begetting but by way of proceeding’); secondly, Christological doctrine, explaining Orthodox teaching very clearly, with Monophysites and Monothelites in view (Rect. 2—4); then, brief chapters on the Thrice-Holy Hymn (Reet. 5) and the Six Oecumenical Synods (Reef. 6), and a final chapter expressing his allegiance to Peter II, in which he mentions heretics he has proscribed, not only the Maronites, but also the Manichees. None of this is very surprising; it is in accordance with what is generally thought to have been the religious situation in Palestine and Syria in John's day. His homilies yield a few further details.*° He mentions Origenism as a heresy (Sabbat. 6. 5-7). There are occasional places where he seems to have in mind Muslim objections to Christianity: the charge of idolatry (Barb. 4; Dorm. 11. 15, where the charge is honouring Mary as a ‘goddess’); the remark, or taunt, as John seems to take it, that Christ was a ‘slave’,*' which might simply reflect the Muslim view of Christ as one of their prophets, and therefore a true ‘Muslim’ (which means ‘slave of God’). These hints do not add up to much, but do suggest something of the concerns and preoccupations of John and his fellow Christians.
John's works fall into roughly three categories: exposition and defence of Orthodoxy, sermons, and liturgical poetry. In composing these works, he was entering into a tradition that extended back to the Apostles, but which in a particular way had evolved from the time of the establishment of monastic settlements in Palestine in the fifth century, and had assumed a special role in the century after the conquest of the Middle East by the Arabs in the seventh century. For from the fourth century onwards, Palestine had become a centre of pilgrimage for Christians. The monasteries that grew up in the region around Jerusalem gained much of their fame, and their wealth, from their connection with the Holy Sites. Their link with the pilgrims, and their patronage by the Emperor, also meant that they were aware of a wider Christian world beyond their immediate Palestinian context. A major consequence of this cecumenical awareness emerged in the years following the Synod of Chalcedon which met in 451. This synod issued a Christological Definition of Faith, according to which Christ was defined as a single person existing in two natures. Many of the Christians of the East, from Syria to Egypt, greeted with dismay this decision, as it seemed to them to introduce an ultimate duality into Christ, and thereby to betray the teaching of the great patriarch of Alexandria, St Cyril, whose clear emphasis on the unity of Christ had been vindicated at an earlier synod held at Ephesus in 431. The monks of Palestine, while yielding to none in their veneration of Cyril, supported the Synod of Chalcedon, and thereby found themselves at the heart of a controversy about the unity of Christ that was still alive in the days of St John of Damascus, nearly three centuries later.
A determining moment in this controversy occurred in 516, when imperial policy under the emperor Anastasios inclined towards those who abjured Chalcedon. The Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem, Elias, had been deposed, and his successor John was being forced to anathematize Chalcedon. However, with the support of thousands of monks from the Judaean desert, led by St Sabas, the founder of the Great Laura, by tradition John's monastery, John the patriarch was able to withstand the coercion of the military ruler (the dux) of Palestine, also called Anastasios, so that, instead of anathematizing Chalcedon, John anathematized those who condemned the synod.” Such became the historic link between the monks of Palestine and Chalcedonian Orthodoxy, that, as Flusin has put it, ‘the function of the monasteries of Palestine was to be one of the strongholds, perhaps, for the East, the very hearth of Chalcedonianism’.*
This link between Palestinian monasticism and synodical Orthodoxy took a new form in the seventh century. On the one hand, imperial policy, under the emperor Herakleios and his sons, once again sought, if not to disown Chalcedon, at least to make peace with those who had historically rejected it. By endorsing first Monenergism (the doctrine that Christ has a single ‘theandric’, divine—human activity) and then Monothelitism (the doctrine that Christ has but a single [divine] will), the Emperor was able to reconcile to the Imperial Church many of those who rejected Chalcedon. In reality, few had any illusions about the nature of this compromise, despite the careful way in which these doctrines were expressed: Theophanes records the Jacobites and Theodosians (the local names for those who rejected Chalcedon in Syria and Egypt respectively) boasting, ‘It is not we who have communicated with Chalcedon, but rather Chalcedon with us by confessing one nature of Christ through the one energy.’ It was a Palestinian monk, a native of Damascus, St Sophronios, elected patriarch of Jerusalem in 634, who led the opposition to Monenergism. In 638 Monothelitism was promulgated in the imperial E&shesis, and it was Sophronios's disciple St Maximos the Confessor who was to take up the baton from his mentor (who died in 638), and lead the defiance to the imperial will, an act which was to lead to his death, condemned, mutilated, and in exile, in 662. After St Maximos's death, it was the monks of Palestine who almost alone in the East came to assume the role of guardians of Orthodoxy. For most of the eastern part of the Byzantine Empire abandoned Orthodoxy in obedience to the imperial will (the West was more steadfast, not least because most of the West was beyond the power of the Emperor, though, after initial defiance, culminating in the death in exile of Pope Martin, who had supported Maximos, in 655 Rome seems to have wavered, in the persons of Pope Martin's nearest successors), and even after the restoration of Orthodoxy at the Sixth Oecumenical Synod in 680-1 (the third to be held in Constantinople), the Christians in the capital seem to have yielded easily to the imperial will, acceding to a brief revival of Monothelitism in 712 under Philippikos, and then from 726 onwards the imperial imposition of iconoclasm.
The year 638, that of the Monothelite E&shesis, was also the year in which Sophronios, as patriarch of Jerusalem, surrendered what was now the Christian holy city to Caliph Umar: which leads us to the other defining factor in the link between Orthodoxy and Palestinian monasticism in the seventh century. For the situation in Palestine itself changed—forever, as it turned out—as a result of the Arab conquest of the Middle East. Theological matters ceased to be a matter of the imperial will (or resistance to it): there was created, under the caliphate, a kind of level playing field so far as religious doctrine was concerned. To begin with the Arab rulers seem to have shown little inclination towards proselytism (save towards other Arabs), so that Christians of all varieties—those who accepted synodical Orthodoxy; those who rejected Chalcedon out of loyalty to St Cyril of Alexandria (often called ‘Monophysites’); those who had been condemned at the Synod of Ephesus at which Cyril had been victorious, called by their enemies ‘Nestorians’ after the patriarch of Constantinople deposed at that council; Monenergists; and Monothelites—now existed alongside one another, and also alongside those belonging to other religions, not least Jews, who had been much encouraged by the fall of Christian Jerusalem, first to the Persians in 614 and then to the Arabs in 638, and probably also Samaritans and Manichees, both groups survivors of imperial persecution in the sixth century. It is probably this new situation that accounts for the sudden emergence of Christian—Jewish dialogue (or anti-Jewish vituperation) in the seventh century,® and also for the growth of controversial literature, often in the form of dialogues, in which the issues (mostly Christological) between the different varieties of Christianity were argued out. With the intra-Christian debate, in particular, the issues were often very technical, involving philosophical terms such as ‘essence’ and ‘person’, and concepts such as the will. Already in the writings of Maximos we find lists of definitions of such concepts, drawn both from the classical philosophers and their successors in Late Antiquity and from the writings of the Christian Fathers. But it was not only a matter of definition of terms, the arguments themselves had to be sound, and so we find in the seventh century the development of simple books of logic designed for Christian controversialists, drawing on the logical treatises of Aristotle and later philosophers, such as Porphyry and the sixth-century Aristotelian commentators of Alexandria.” The monks of Palestine found themselves not only defending, almost alone in the East, the Orthodoxy of the Byzantine councils, but also refining that Orthodoxy and defining it more precisely in this new situation of open controversy.
This was the situation into which John entered: a process of refining and defining the tradition of Christian Orthodoxy. Both by his family background as a Syrian ‘Melkite’ (that is, a supporter of the imperial Orthodoxy of the Byzantine basileus, king, in Syriac, malkd) and by becoming one of the Palestinian monks, with their historic attachment to synodical Orthodoxy, John was committed to that cause. We should see John not as a remarkable individual who was able to reduce the amorphous mass of traditional Orthodoxy to some kind of ‘scholastic’ form, but as the culmination of a tradition of definition that had entered on a new phase a decade or so before his birth, and consequently regard his works as the high point of this phase. But Palestinian monasticism was engaged in more than a prolonged bout of controversial theology: the Faith was not just defended and defined, it was also acclaimed in the weekly celebration of the paschal mystery, and in the celebration year by year of the great events of the history of salvation (or the ‘economy’, oikonomia, as Greek theology calls it), as well as the feast-days of the great saints of the Christian Church. Homilies formed an important part of this celebration, but by the seventh century they were being overtaken by the liturgical poetry with which the worship of the Christian Church—and in particular the wotship of the Christian monastery—was being increasingly embellished. John, as we have seen, was a preacher of renown in his day. He seems also to have been one of the greatest liturgical poets, who contributed particularly to a new development in the monastic office: the canon, a series of verses (or troparia), originally interwoven with the verses of the nine biblical odes, or canticles, that were the backbone of the monastic office of matins (or orthros, the ‘dawn setvice’).*
It is important not to isolate John the monk from the background of the Palestinian monasticism to which he belonged. It is necessary to emphasize this for several reasons. First, the later Byzantine tradition was happy to treat John in isolation, given that the Byzantine Church itself had responded so abysmally to iconoclasm. That one lone monk in Palestine spoke up against iconoclasm could be admitted, but not that he was but one member of a large Christian community that stood fast when Byzantium wavered. In the aftermath of iconoclasm, the Byzantines, especially the patriarchal court, rewrote the history of the period, bringing out the heroic role of the patriarchs Germanos, Tarasios, and Nikephoros in preventing a complete collapse before the imperial will. The resistance of the people and the monks of Palestine did not fit this picture, whereas an isolated voice like John's could be accommodated. Secondly, the community of Palestinian monks was important for John himself. He was no isolated genius, but a participant in an extended collaborative exercise. The history of the dissemination of his works, many of which exist in parallel forms, is, as we shall see in the course of this book, full of puzzles. It becomes less puzzling, if we see John writing for his contemporaries, even if it took a long time, perhaps not much less than a century, for his works to reach Byzantium. The different editions of his great work, The Fountain Head of Knowledge, the different forms of each of the three parts of this work, the different versions of his attack on iconoclasm (which is what the three different treatises really are), and the alternative versions of some of his other treatises (e.g,, On the Two Wills in Christ) make sense if we see John writing for an immediate audience, amongst whom his works were quickly (and thereafter, irrevocably) distributed. Thirdly, John's eventual renown and his place in Byzantine theology are again probably to be seen as part of the general influence of Palestinian monasticism on Byzantium in the wake of iconoclasm. This is usually regarded as part of the reform of Byzantine monasticism initiated in the lull between the two periods of iconoclasm by St Theodore of Stoudios, though it may well have been part of a more general influence of the traditions, not least the liturgical traditions, of the Holy Places on Constantinople.
It is John's theological work, the product of both the intellect and the heart, that is the subject of this book. The work of an individual, no doubt, but of an individual who cared nothing for his own individuality, and lost himself in the tradition that he was enriching and passing on. The immediate context of his theological task should not go unnoticed. When we think of Byzantine Orthodoxy, the theology of the Oecumenical Synods—that is, the synods that spoke for the otkoumene, the (whole) inhabited realm that the Byzantine Emperors claimed to rule under God—we are apt to think of a somewhat trtumphalist progress of Orthodoxy, protected by the Emperor, and both able and willing to call on the power of the State to persecute those who opposed what they called Orthodoxy. There is some truth in this, and it is a truth that is often ugly. But it is a truth that does not apply at all to the theological task in which John was engaged. The process of refining, defining, and celebrating Orthodoxy that John took part in was the work of Palestinian monks, living and working almost literally in the shadow of the mosques of the Dome of the Rock and of Al-Aqsa, newly built on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and overshadowing the Christian Holy Sites, Palestinian monks who belonged to a minority with diminishing power, attacked by other Christians (who called them ‘Maximianists', followers of a monk who had been condemned for heresy by the Byzantine Emperor), and open to attack once again from Jews, Samaritans, Manichees, and eventually Muslims. This Christian Orthodoxy was not the expression of human triumphalism, but something fashioned in the crucible of defeat.
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