The Three Treatises Against Those Who Attack the Holy Images

Between roughly 726 and 730, John of Damascus composed three Apologetic Treatises Against Those Who Attack the Holy Images (Logoi apologetikoi pros tous diaballontas tas hagias eikonas), the foundational literary defense of icon veneration. Written from the safety of the caliphate beyond the reach of the iconoclast emperors, the three are not independent works but successive reworkings of a single case. This file describes their occasions, their relation to one another, and their central arguments, quoted from Louth’s translation (PPS 24).

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Occasion: Leo III’s Measures

The iconoclast crisis opened when the emperor Leo III the Isaurian moved against the public veneration of icons — traditionally dated to 726, with the removal of the icon of Christ from the Chalke Gate of the imperial palace, and more formal measures by 730 (see Icons and Iconoclasm). John responded from Palestine, a subject not of the emperor but of the caliph. This is the decisive fact about the treatises’ freedom: as Louth notes, John “wrote from the safety of the Umayyad Caliphate,” where imperial decrees had no force, and could therefore say plainly what no bishop within the empire dared (Louth, St. John Damascene, Oxford 2002, ch. 7; Louth, PPS 24, Introduction). The treatises are usually dated c. 726–730, the first written in the first heat of the controversy, the others following as it deepened. [Disputed: the precise dates and the interval between the three treatises are debated; the corpus is securely placed in the years around 726–730, in the reign of Leo III, but the spacing of the three is reconstructed from internal evidence (Louth, PPS 24, Introduction).]

The Relation of the Three

The three treatises cover much the same ground three times over, and their relationship is one of progressive reworking rather than continuation:

The First Treatise is the fullest and most spontaneous statement of the case — the argument as John first marshaled it, ranging widely over Scripture, the Fathers, the nature of images, and the kinds of veneration.
The Second Treatise is, in large part, a simplification and re-presentation of the first, pitched more directly and accessibly, occasioned by a sharpening of the imperial measures; it trims and clarifies rather than adds.
The Third Treatise is the most systematic and ordered of the three — the place where John sets out his formal taxonomy of images and of the kinds of veneration in schematic form, producing what is in effect a small treatise on the theology of the image (Louth, St. John Damascene, ch. 7; Louth, PPS 24, Introduction).

Read together, they show John refining a single argument toward the precision that the later tradition — Theodore the Studite, and the Horos of Nicaea II — would build upon (see Theology of the Image).

The Central Arguments

The Incarnation Permits the Image

John’s foundational move is to ground images in the Incarnation. The Old Testament prohibition held while God was invisible; the Incarnation changed the terms:

“In former times God, without body or form, could never be depicted. But now, when God is seen clothed in flesh, and conversing with men, I make an image of the God whom I see.” (John of Damascus, First Treatise I.16; trans. Louth, PPS 24)

To refuse to depict the incarnate Christ, John argues, is implicitly to deny that the Word truly took flesh — the defense of the image is a defense of the reality of the Incarnation (developed in Theology of the Image).

“I Do Not Worship Matter”

Against the iconoclast charge that to honor a material image is to worship matter — to lapse into idolatry — John answers with his most famous sentence, turning the dignity of matter back upon his opponents:

“I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake, and deigned to inhabit matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. I will not cease from honouring that matter which works my salvation. I venerate it, though not as God.” (John of Damascus, First Treatise I.16; trans. Louth, PPS 24)

He continues that to despise matter as unworthy is the error “of the Manichees” — for the same God who became flesh sanctifies water in baptism, oil in chrism, and bread and wine in the Eucharist (John of Damascus, First Treatise I.16; cf. Third Treatise III.34). [The wording above follows Louth’s PPS 24 translation of I.16; older renderings (e.g. NPNF) give “the Creator of matter” for “the God of matter,” and some editions translate proskynō as “venerate” rather than “worship” — the Greek does not lexically separate the two verbs, which is precisely the point John must clarify with his next argument.]

Proskynesis and Latreia

The heart of John’s answer to the charge of idolatry is a careful distinction between two kinds of honor, which the iconoclasts had collapsed into one:

Latreia — adoration, the absolute worship owed to God alone, to the divine nature.
Proskynesis — veneration, relative honor, which may rightly be shown to creatures and holy things: to the saints as God’s friends, to the Cross, to the Gospel book, to holy places, and to icons. This honor does not terminate in the material object but passes through the image to its prototype.

John insists that “the honour given to the image passes to the prototype” (quoting St. Basil), so that the one who venerates the icon venerates not wood and paint but the person depicted, and through the saints, God Himself (John of Damascus, First Treatise I.14; Third Treatise III.26–40; trans. Louth, PPS 24; cf. Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18.45). In the Third Treatise he sets this out as a formal classification of the kinds of veneration, just as he classifies the kinds of image (see Theology of the Image for the taxonomy).

The Florilegia

To each treatise John appended a florilegium — a dossier of patristic testimonies, quoted at length, from Fathers such as Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, and others, together with narrative exempla of the Church’s traditional use of images. The point was to demonstrate that the veneration of images was not an innovation but the inherited practice and teaching of the Church (Louth, St. John Damascene, ch. 7; Louth, PPS 24, Introduction). This method — argument secured by a chain of authoritative citations — is characteristic of John’s whole theological manner and would become the model for the florilegia read into the Acta of Nicaea II.

The Tradition of Images Is Ancient

Bound up with the florilegia is John’s appeal to history. The veneration of images, he argues, is not an eighth-century novelty but the inherited custom of the Church: he points to the image of Christ “not made by hands” (the acheiropoietos), to the icons attributed to St. Luke the Evangelist, and to the established liturgical use of images in churches as evidence that the practice he defends is apostolic in spirit and immemorial in fact (John of Damascus, First Treatise I.22–27; trans. Louth, PPS 24). The iconoclasts, on this reading, are the innovators, breaking with a tradition the Church has always held.

Scripture Itself Commands Images

John also turns the iconoclasts’ own scriptural weapon against them. They cited the Decalogue’s prohibition of graven images; John answers that the same Law that forbade idols commanded sacred images — the gold Cherubim overshadowing the mercy seat of the Ark (Exodus 25:18–22), the bronze serpent Moses raised in the wilderness (Numbers 21:8–9), the carved and woven figures of the Temple. God’s prohibition was of idols — images of false gods, worshipped as gods — not of sacred images as such; and what was permitted in shadow before the Incarnation is the more fitting now that God has appeared in the flesh (John of Damascus, First Treatise I.15; trans. Louth, PPS 24). The Old Testament, rightly read, is on the iconodules’ side.

The Place of the Treatises in John’s Work

The icon treatises are John’s most famous works, but they are continuous in method and conviction with the rest of his corpus. The same author who classified the kinds of image and veneration here would, in the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, devote a chapter (“Concerning images,” IV.16) to a compressed restatement of the same doctrine, setting icon-veneration within the whole architecture of the faith (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition IV.16; trans. NPNF II/9). The treatises are thus not an occasional outburst but the polemical front of a unified theological vision — the conviction that the visible and material can bear the holy, because God Himself has made it so in becoming flesh. That conviction is the subject of the companion file, Theology of the Image.

Why the Treatises Endured

The treatises mattered out of all proportion to their length because John did three things at once that no earlier writer had combined. He gave the iconodule cause a clear theological foundation in the Incarnation, rather than leaving icon-veneration as mere custom; he supplied the conceptual distinctions — image and prototype, latreia and proskynesis — that allowed the practice to be defended against the charge of idolatry without embarrassment; and he documented both with a florilegium that demonstrated continuity with the Fathers. When the iconoclast crisis resumed in the ninth century and again at Nicaea II, defenders of icons reached for exactly these tools. The treatises thus became the iconodule arsenal — not because John was a Byzantine insider (he was the opposite) but because, writing freely from outside, he had thought the matter through to the bottom while others were still reacting (Louth, St. John Damascene, ch. 7). Their afterlife in the Horos of 787 is traced in the companion file (see Theology of the Image).

It is worth adding that the treatises also display John’s pastoral tact. He repeatedly anticipates the plain believer’s worry — am I worshipping wood? — and answers it not by lofty abstraction but by the homely analogies of everyday Christian life: one kisses the Gospel book without worshipping parchment; one honors the emperor’s image in his absence; one venerates the Cross without adoring its timber. These are the arguments of a man addressing ordinary Christians under pressure, anxious that they not be shamed into abandoning a practice that is in fact right. That accessibility — the simplifying second treatise especially — helps explain why the works traveled so well and were so often excerpted: they could be read by bishops in council and by monks at prayer alike (Louth, PPS 24, Introduction).

References

John of Damascus. Three Treatises on the Divine Images (Apologetic Treatises Against Those Who Attack the Holy 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. (Ch. 7, on the icon treatises.)
Kotter, Bonifatius, ed. Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, vol. 3: Contra imaginum calumniatores orationes tres (PTS 17). Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975. (The standard critical edition of the treatises, cited in place of PG 94 except where a column is independently verified.)
Basil the Great. On the Holy Spirit 18.45. Trans. NPNF II/8.
John of Damascus. Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Trans. NPNF II/9 (ed. Schaff and Wace, 1899).