St. John of Damascus and the Summing Up

Writing from a monastery outside the empire, under Muslim rule and beyond the reach of any Christian emperor, St. John of Damascus gathered three centuries of christological argument into a synthesis that has served the Church ever since. He classified the parties in On Heresies, argued directly with the separated churches in Against the Jacobites and On the Composite Nature against the Acephali, and set out the settled doctrine in the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. His method is as instructive as his conclusions: he states his opponents’ position in their own words, and then argues.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Setting

St. John of Damascus (c. 675–749) belonged to a distinguished Christian family of Damascus that had served in the fiscal administration under the Umayyad caliphs; he left that service to become a monk, traditionally at the Lavra of St. Sabbas near Jerusalem, and was ordained priest of the Church of Jerusalem. He wrote in Greek, in the heartland of the old Antiochene and Palestinian churches, in a region where Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian communities lived side by side, and — decisively — outside the Byzantine empire (Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, chs. 1–2).

That last fact governs the character of his polemic. He had no imperial power to appeal to and none to fear; his Chalcedonian arguments could not be enforced by anyone and were addressed to neighbours he met. He argues; he does not legislate.

His great encyclopaedic work is the Fount of Knowledge (Pēgē gnōseōs), in three parts: the Philosophical Chapters (or Dialectica), which supplies the technical vocabulary; On Heresies, a catalogue; and An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, the synthesis (trans. Frederic H. Chase Jr., Saint John of Damascus: Writings, Fathers of the Church 37, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1958; critical edition B. Kotter, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, 5 vols., Berlin: de Gruyter, 1969–1988). Alongside these stand a set of shorter Christological treatises: Against the Jacobites, On the Composite Nature, against the Acephali, Against the Nestorians, and On the Two Wills in Christ (Kotter, vol. 4; Louth, 2002, ch. 6).

On Heresies and the Naming of the Parties

On Heresies is a catalogue of heresies from the beginning; for the earlier entries the Damascene depends heavily on St. Epiphanius’ Panarion, and the later entries — those of his own centuries — are his own contribution. Among these he treats the Nestorians, the Eutychians, those he calls the Acephali (“headless,” the radical anti-Chalcedonians who would follow no patriarch) and the Aposchistae (“separatists”), and the Monothelites. The same work contains his celebrated notice on the “Ishmaelites” — the earliest sustained Christian description of Islam (John of Damascus, On Heresies, in The Fount of Knowledge; trans. Chase, FOTC 37; Louth, 2002, ch. 4; Sahas, John of Damascus on Islam, Leiden: Brill, 1972).

The classification is worth noticing because it is precise where later handbooks became careless. The Damascene knows the difference between Eutyches, who denied that Christ’s flesh is consubstantial with ours, and the parties who rejected Chalcedon while confessing the double consubstantiality; he treats them under different heads and refutes them by different arguments. He wrote Against the Jacobites — that is, against the Severan Syrian church — and separately On the Composite Nature against the Acephali, because he understood that these were positions requiring distinct answers. He does not simply throw “one nature” at all of them and call it Eutychianism. Section 08 of this collection takes this as its model.

The Argument of Against the Jacobites

The Damascene’s polemical method is to fix the vocabulary first and then let the fixed vocabulary do the work — the method of the Philosophical Chapters, applied.

His starting distinction is that nature is not hypostasis. Physis / ousia names what a thing is, the common; hypostasis names the particular that subsists. He grants his opponents at once the point they insist on: no nature exists unhypostatized, in the abstract, apart from a concrete subject. But he denies the inference they draw from it — that therefore a nature just is a hypostasis, so that to number two natures is to number two subjects. A nature exists in a hypostasis without being one, and Christ’s human nature has its concrete existence in the hypostasis of the Word: it is enhypostatic (John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith III.9; Against the Jacobites, in Kotter, vol. 4; Louth, 2002, ch. 6; see One Hypostasis and the Communication of Idioms).

Against the formula “one composite nature,” he presses the consequence directly. If the incarnate Christ is one composite nature, then ask what he is consubstantial with. He cannot be consubstantial with the Father, for the Father is not composite. He cannot be consubstantial with us, for we are not divine-human composites. A composite nature is a nature of its own kind, and everything of that kind shares it — so Christ would belong to a third species, sharing his nature with neither God nor man, and the double consubstantiality confessed by Nicaea and by the separated churches themselves would fall. The Damascene therefore accepts composition, but locates it where it does no damage: the hypostasis is composite, not the nature. Christ is “one composite hypostasis” in two natures — one who, made up of divinity and humanity, in each of which he remains consubstantial with those who share it (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition III.3, III.9; On the Composite Nature, against the Acephali, in Kotter, vol. 4; Louth, 2002, ch. 6).

This is the sharpest form of the Chalcedonian case, and it should be seen for what it is. It is not the charge that the Jacobites deny Christ’s humanity. It is the charge that their formula cannot secure what they themselves confess — that “one composite nature” and “consubstantial with us in manhood” cannot both be said with the same word physis, and that the way to keep the second is to say what Chalcedon said.

The Exact Exposition

The third part of the Fount of Knowledge is the classical synthesis, and its third book is the Church’s standard christological summary. Its principal theses:

The union is in the hypostasis. “We do not say that the natures are united to each other by composition or confusion, nor by admixture… but rather that they are united to each other in the one hypostasis of the Logos without confusion, without change, and without division” (Exact Exposition III.3).
Enhypostasia. Christ’s human nature has no independent hypostasis; it subsists in the hypostasis of the Word, and is not therefore unreal but concretely personal in him (Exact Exposition III.9).
Two wills and two operations, following Maximus, because will and operation belong to nature (Exact Exposition III.14–15).
The communication of idioms, with its rule: “We do not attribute the properties of the humanity to the Godhead, nor the properties of the Godhead to the humanity… But we attribute both to the one Christ, for he is both God and man” (Exact Exposition III.4).
The Theotokos: Mary is truly and properly Theotokos because “she gave birth not to a mere man, but to true God — not God bare, but God incarnate” (Exact Exposition III.12).
The deification of Christ’s humanity: his human nature is deified by its union with the Word, not by conversion into divinity but by being permeated with divine energy and glory — the paradigm of all human theosis (Exact Exposition III.17).
Circumscription and the icon: because the Word truly assumed a visible, material, circumscribable human nature, Christ can be depicted — the christological argument that becomes central against iconoclasm (John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images; see Holy Icons).

The last point is not a digression. The iconoclast crisis, which broke out in the Damascene’s lifetime, is the Chalcedonian question in another register: whether the humanity of Christ is real, particular, and depictable. A Christology in which the human nature is absorbed or merely notional cannot ground an icon. Chalcedon’s unconfused, undivided two natures are what make the Incarnation paintable.

What the Damascene’s Method Teaches

Three things, and they are the working rules of this collection.

State the opponent’s position in his own words. The Damascene writes separate treatises against the Nestorians, the Jacobites, the Acephali, and the Monothelites, because they are different positions holding different things. He does not compress them into a single caricature, and he does not attribute to the Severans the doctrine of Eutyches. His refutations are the stronger for it, because they engage what was actually said.

Fix the vocabulary before arguing. The Philosophical Chapters exist so that ousia, physis, hypostasis, prosōpon, enhypostaton, idiōma, and energeia mean one thing throughout. Most of the fifth- and sixth-century argument was conducted with these words meaning different things on the two sides. The Damascene’s first move is to stop that from happening again — and it is the reason Section 08 of this collection insists on terminological precision as a service to the reader and not a concession to anyone.

Argue, do not enforce. He had no emperor. He wrote as a monk in a caliphate, addressing Christians he lived among, in a Church that had lost its imperial protection and would never fully recover it. The Orthodox case against the rejection of Chalcedon received its classical form in exactly those conditions — which is worth remembering, since the case is sometimes dismissed as an artifact of Byzantine state power. The Damascene’s argument works without a state, and it is the argument the Church still makes.

References

John of Damascus. The Fount of Knowledge — Philosophical Chapters, On Heresies, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (esp. Book III). Trans. Frederic H. Chase Jr., Saint John of Damascus: Writings, Fathers of the Church 37. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1958; also NPNF, Second Series, vol. 9.
John of Damascus. Against the Jacobites; On the Composite Nature, against the Acephali; Against the Nestorians; On the Two Wills in Christ. Critical edition in B. Kotter, ed., Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, vol. 4. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1981.
John of Damascus. Three Treatises on the Divine Images. Trans. Andrew Louth, Popular Patristics Series 24. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003.
Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Sahas, Daniel J. John of Damascus on Islam: The “Heresy of the Ishmaelites.” Leiden: Brill, 1972.
Kotter, Bonifatius, ed. Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos. 5 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1969–1988.