St. John of Damascus and the Defense of the Icons

St. John of Damascus (c. 676–749), writing from the safety of the Umayyad Caliphate in the first years of iconoclasm, composed the Three Treatises on the Divine Images, the foundational apology for the icon. This file sets out his case: the incarnational ground, the sanctification of matter, the careful distinction of the kinds of image and the kinds of veneration, and the appeal to the Church’s tradition — the arguments Nicaea II would receive.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Man and the Setting

John of Damascus — Arabic Mansur ibn Sarjun, from a prominent Christian family that served in the fiscal administration of the Umayyad Caliphate — was, by the time he wrote against the iconoclasts, a monk of the monastery of Mar Saba in the Judean desert (or was moving toward it), living under Muslim rather than Byzantine rule (Andrew Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology, Oxford, 2002, ch. 1–2; see St. John of Damascus). This political fact is not incidental: because he was beyond the reach of the iconoclast emperors, John could write freely what no bishop inside the empire could safely say, and it was he, more than any figure inside Byzantium, who gave the first iconoclasm its theological answer (Louth, St John Damascene, ch. 8). The iconoclasts felt the sting: the iconoclast Council of Hieria (754) anathematized him by name, punning cruelly on his family name Mansur (Acts of Nicaea II, Session 6; Louth, St John Damascene, ch. 8).

The three treatises — Contra imaginum calumniatores orationes tres, “Three Orations against those who slander the holy images” — were written over a span of years in the 720s–730s, the second and third partly recasting and expanding the first; the third is the most systematic and contains John’s fullest classifications (John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, trans. Andrew Louth, SVS Press, 2003, introduction; critical ed. B. Kotter, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, vol. 3, De Gruyter, 1975). John presents himself not as an innovator but as a transmitter of the Fathers, appending to each treatise a florilegium of patristic testimonies in support of images (Louth, St John Damascene, ch. 9; Kenneth Parry, Depicting the Word, Brill, 1996, ch. 7).

The Incarnational Ground

The base of John’s whole case is the Incarnation, treated in the collection’s file on The Image of God and the Incarnation. Its hinge is his most famous sentence: “In former times God, being without form or body, could in no way be depicted. But now, since God has appeared in the flesh and lived among human beings, I make an image of the God who can be seen” (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.16; trans. Louth). The icon is possible because and only because God has become visible; to make the icon of Christ is to confess the reality of His flesh, and to forbid it tends toward denying that He truly became man (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.4–8; II.5).

The Sanctification of Matter

John couples the incarnational argument with a theology of matter that answers the iconoclast charge that painted images are “dead” and “lifeless” matter unworthy of the holy. Against any dualist contempt for the material, John insists that matter is God’s good creation (Genesis 1:31) and that God has now dignified it beyond measure by becoming material: “I do not venerate matter, but I venerate the Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake, and deigned to dwell in matter, and through matter accomplished my salvation; and I will not cease to reverence the matter through which my salvation was accomplished” (John of Damascus, Three Treatises I.16; trans. Louth). He points to the whole economy of material means of grace — the wood of the Cross, the ink and pages of the Gospel book, the water of Baptism, the oil and myron, the bread and wine of the altar — as the company to which the icon belongs (John of Damascus, Three Treatises II.14; see The Holy Mysteries). The icon is thus not an exception to be defended but an instance of a pervasive Christian truth: that God saves embodied persons through material things (Louth, St John Damascene, ch. 9).

The Kinds of Image and the Kinds of Worship

John’s most technical and durable contribution is his double classification, laid out most fully in the third treatise, which prevents the whole debate from foundering on equivocation.

The kinds of image. “Image” (eikon) is not one thing. John distinguishes: (1) the natural image — the Son, who is the consubstantial and living Image of the Father by nature; (2) the image in God’s foreknowledge and will — the divine “predeterminations” or ideas of things to be made; (3) man, made “according to the image” of God by imitation; (4) the images Scripture uses to represent invisible realities in bodily form (the cherubim, the symbolic visions of the prophets); (5) the typological image that prefigures what is to come (the bronze serpent, the Ark, the burning bush as types); and (6) the commemorative image that records past persons and events for remembrance — and it is to this last kind that the painted icon belongs (John of Damascus, Three Treatises III.16–23; Louth, St John Damascene, ch. 9; Parry, Depicting the Word, ch. 3). The point of the taxonomy is that the icon is an image by imitation and relation, categorically unlike the natural Image (the Son is God’s image by nature and consubstantiality; the icon shares no essence with its prototype), and that Scripture is itself full of God-given images of the other kinds — so “image” cannot be condemned as such.

The kinds of worship. In parallel, John distinguishes the kinds of proskynesis (veneration), separating the absolute worship of latreia, due to God alone, from the many forms of relative honor rightly given to creatures, holy places, and holy objects — and he shows from Scripture that such relative proskynesis is licit and commanded (Abraham bowing to the Hittites, the people bowing before the Ark and the Temple) (John of Damascus, Three Treatises III.27–40; see Image and Prototype). Icon-veneration falls among the relative honors; it is never latreia. Together the two classifications form the grammar Nicaea II would dogmatize: the icon is a commemorative image venerated with relative honor that passes to its prototype, and it is no idol and no rival to the worship of God (Nicaea II, 787, Horos; Jaroslav Pelikan, Imago Dei, Princeton, 1990, ch. 6).

The Appeal to Tradition

Finally, John argues that the veneration of images is not an innovation but the received tradition of the Church, handed down from the apostles and confirmed by long usage, and that it is not to be overturned by imperial fiat. “We do not change the everlasting boundaries which our fathers have set, but we keep the tradition just as we received it,” he writes, appealing to the unwritten as well as the written tradition (John of Damascus, Three Treatises II.12; cf. II.16; Louth, St John Damascene, ch. 9). He cites the ancient Christian use of images, the image of Christ “not made by hands” (the Camuliana/Edessa tradition), and the icons ascribed to St. Luke — traditions the collection treats source-critically elsewhere (see The Icons of Christ and The Icons of the Theotokos and the Saints) — and above all the patristic florilegia he appends, marshalling the earlier Fathers as witnesses. The appeal to tradition also carries an ecclesiological point that would recur throughout the controversy: that the definition of doctrine belongs to the Church and her councils, not to the emperor, and that the iconoclast emperors had overstepped by legislating on the faith (John of Damascus, Three Treatises II.12, on the limits of imperial authority; Louth, St John Damascene, ch. 8). In all of this John set the terms — incarnational ground, sanctified matter, the two classifications, the appeal to tradition — on which the whole later defense, from Nicaea II to Theodore the Studite, would build.

See Also

• The Image of God and the Incarnation — the incarnational ground John founds the case on
• Image and Prototype — the kinds of image and of veneration
• Theodore the Studite and the Christological Argument — the sharpening of John’s case in the second iconoclasm
• The Seventh Ecumenical Council (787) — where John’s theology was received
• St. John of Damascus — the full collection on the Damascene
• Orthodoxy: Icons and Iconoclasm — the hub essay this collection expands

References

• John of Damascus. Three Treatises on the Divine Images. Trans. Andrew Louth. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press (PPS), 2003. (I.4–17; II.5–16; III.16–40: the incarnational ground; the sanctification of matter; the kinds of image and of worship; the appeal to tradition.) Critical edition: B. Kotter, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, vol. 3. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975.
• Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (The life and setting; ch. 8–9 on the treatises.)
• Parry, Kenneth. Depicting the Word: Byzantine Iconophile Thought of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries. Leiden: Brill, 1996. (John’s taxonomy and florilegia.)
• Pelikan, Jaroslav. Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
• The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787). Trans. Richard Price. 2 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. (The anathema of John at Hieria; the reception of his theology.)
• Scripture: Genesis 1:31.