St. John Damascene, priest, doctor of the Church

St. John Damascene is also known as St. John of Damascus and St. John Chrysorrhoas, Greek for the golden speaker. He was a great scholar and theologian of the East whose influence was so great that he had an impact on great minds of the West, particularly St. Thomas Aquinas.

St. John was born in Damascus, Syria, in 675, at a time when the Mideast was rapidly changing. The power and culture of the Greeks and Romans had come to an end. The Muslims conquered Damascus in 635 and the city has been under Muslim rule for forty years.

St. John was born into an upper-class Christian family and he was raised in the faith. He was extremely well educated in theology, philosophy, and science by a monk from Sicily who had been captured and brought as a prisoner to Syria. He gained fluency in Greek and Arabic. His father, although a Christian, was a high-ranking financial officer who raised taxes for the Moslem Umayyad caliphs. St. John succeeded his father as finance minister or “grand vizier” to the caliph of Damascus. He was widely respected for his competence, fairness, and humility. His work ended abruptly in 700 when the Moslems shifted their policies toward Christians. He resigned, distributed his wealth, and became a monk at the monastery of St. Sabas (also Sabbas or Bar Saba) in the desert on the outskirts of Jerusalem at the age of 25.

St. John spent his time in prayer and contemplation, study and writing. He was a prolific author and wrote on a wide range of topics. His most important work was The Fount of Knowledge, a three-part volume that addressed philosophy, heresies, and orthodox theology. The final section was a summary of the teachings of the earlier Greek fathers and dealt with the Trinity, creation, the Incarnation, the Church, the Sacraments, and the Second Coming of Christ. He had a special devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and he wrote about her Immaculate Conception, Assumption, and how she is the Mother of God. The book was later translated into Latin and entitled De Fide Orthodoxa, Regarding Orthodox Faith. He was the first person of the East to develop a comprehensive synthesis of Christian dogma.

In 726 the Byzantine emperor, Leo III, issued an edict that prohibited the veneration of sacred images such as icons, statues, and paintings of Jesus, Mary, and the saints, and a campaign was instituted to seek and destroy these sacred objects. St. John vigorously opposed the emperor’s iconoclasm, and he wrote several poignant pieces that vigorously defended the Catholic position and explained the value of prayer before sacred images. He wrote, “It is not the material that we honor but what it represents; the honor paid to images goes to the one who is represented by the image.” The emperor was outraged but was unable to retaliate because, ironically, he was under the protection of local Muslim officials.

After thirty-five years as a monk, St. John was ordained to the priesthood in 735 at the age of 60. The focus of his final fourteen years was contemplative prayer. He also composed a number of Marian hymns, preached homilies on the Blessed Virgin Mary, and wrote an Office of the Dead.

St. John died at the monastery of St. Sabas in 749 at the age of 74, the last of the Greek fathers. He was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XIII in 1890.