The Fount of Knowledge

The Fount of Knowledge (Pege gnoseos) is St. John of Damascus’s three-part theological encyclopaedia, composed at Mar Saba around 743 for his foster-brother Cosmas, Bishop of Maiuma. Its tripartite design — the Dialectica, On Heresies, and the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith — moves from philosophical tool, through the catalogue of error, to the exposition of the faith, and constitutes the first great systematic summa of Christian theology.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Work and Its Occasion

The Fount of Knowledge (Greek Pege gnoseos; the title is sometimes rendered Fountain Head of Knowledge) is the most ambitious of John’s writings and among the last he composed. It was written at the request of Cosmas of Maiuma, John’s adoptive brother and fellow monk at the Great Lavra of St. Sabas (Mar Saba), who had recently been raised to the episcopate. Because the prefatory letter addresses Cosmas as bishop, and Cosmas was consecrated Bishop of Maiuma (near Gaza) in 743, the work cannot have been composed before that year — hence the conventional dating of c. 743 (Louth, St John Damascene, 2002, pp. 30–31; cf. the prefatory dedication printed in Chase, FOTC 37).

The work is in three parts, each with a distinct function. John himself describes the plan in his preface to Cosmas: he will first set out “what is best in the writings of the Greek philosophers” as a propaedeutic; then “set forth in order the absurdities of the heresies”; and finally “set forth the truth” — so that the reader, having a tool, a warning, and a treasury, may “discern the genuine coin from the counterfeit” (Preface to the Fount of Knowledge; trans. Chase, FOTC 37). The three parts are:

The Philosophical Chapters (Kephalaia philosophika), known by its Latin title the Dialectica — a christened Aristotelian-Porphyrian logical toolkit.
On Heresies (De Haeresibus) — a catalogue of one hundred heresies, ending with the first Christian theological notice of Islam.
The Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (Ekdosis akribes tes orthodoxou pisteos; De Fide Orthodoxa) — the dogmatic synthesis proper.

The first two parts are treated in 04 — Philosophy and Heresies (the Dialectica and On Heresies); the third has its own dedicated file.

“I Shall Say Nothing of My Own”: The Method of Synthesis

The governing principle of the entire work is announced in the preface. John disavows novelty and declares himself a compiler of the Fathers. In Chase’s translation he writes that he will “say nothing of my own, but … gather together into one those things which have been worked out by the most eminent of teachers and make a compendium” (Preface; trans. Chase, FOTC 37). Andrew Louth notes that John “twice, towards the beginning of his great Fountain Head of Knowledge … asserts that ‘I shall say nothing of my own’” — a programmatic statement of method, not mere modesty (Louth, St John Damascene, 2002, pp. 5, 88).

The same self-understanding governs the dogmatic part. The Nicene-and-Post-Nicene Fathers prologue to the Exposition describes John’s aim as “not to strike out views of his own or anything novel, but rather to collect into one single theological work the opinions of the ancients which were scattered through various volumes,” likening him to a bee who “culled on every hand the flower of their opinions, and concocted most sweet honey of soundest doctrine” (Prologue, NPNF II/9). The bee-and-honey image — a commonplace of the florilegium tradition — is exactly apt: John’s genius lies in selection, ordering, and the forging of precise terminology, not in doctrinal invention.

This makes the work a florilegium raised to the level of system. Behind nearly every chapter stand identifiable Fathers — the Cappadocians, Cyril of Alexandria, pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Leontius of Byzantium, and above all St. Maximus the Confessor, whose Christological and cosmological synthesis John transmits in ordered, teachable form (Louth, St John Damascene, 2002, chs. 5–7). What John adds is architecture and exactness: he is the great codifier who gives the patristic inheritance a shape that can be taught, memorised, and defended.

Philosophy as Handmaid

The placing of the Dialectica first expresses a deliberate epistemology. For John, philosophy — pruned of pagan error — is the servant of theology, supplying the clear definitions of substance (ousia), hypostasis, nature, person, and the Porphyrian predicables that the dogmatic disputes of the previous three centuries had shown to be indispensable. The crises over the Trinity and the person of Christ had been, in large part, contests over the meaning of words; John’s response is to fix the vocabulary before expounding the mysteries (Louth, St John Damascene, 2002, ch. 3). The structure of the Fount thus dramatises the relation of reason to revelation: logic clears the ground and sharpens the instruments; the catalogue of heresies marks the wrong turnings; and only then is the faith expounded.

Error Catalogued, Truth Expounded

The second part, On Heresies, performs the negative office. Drawing its first eighty entries chiefly from the Anakephalaiosis (Recapitulation) of Epiphanius of Salamis’s Panarion and other sources, and adding later and original notices at the end — including the celebrated chapter on “the heresy of the Ishmaelites” — it inventories the deviations against which orthodoxy must be defined (see On Heresies). The third part then states the faith positively and in order. The movement tool → error → truth is the logical spine of the whole.

The First Systematic Summa

The Fount of Knowledge is widely regarded as the first true theological summa — the first work to gather the entire range of Christian doctrine (knowledge of God, Trinity, creation, providence, anthropology, Christology, the sacraments, the veneration of icons, and the last things) into a single, logically ordered, comprehensively argued whole, prefaced by its philosophical and heresiological tools (Louth, St John Damascene, 2002, ch. 2; cf. the characterisation of the work as “the first real Summa Theologica” in the older handbook tradition). In this it anticipates by some four centuries the Western Summae and Sentences it would help to make possible. Its third part in particular became the standard dogmatics of the Christian East and, in Latin translation, a foundational source for medieval scholasticism (see The Exact Exposition).

John’s achievement is therefore double. As a compiler, he preserved and transmitted the patristic consensus at the close of the age of the Fathers, standing as a kind of seal upon the Greek tradition that ran from Athanasius and the Cappadocians through Cyril to Maximus. As a systematiser, he gave that consensus a form — at once philosophically equipped, polemically alert, and dogmatically ordered — that no earlier Christian writer had attained, and that would shape theological education in both halves of Christendom for the better part of a millennium.

References

John of Damascus. Saint John of Damascus: Writings (Preface and the three parts of the Fount of Knowledge). Translated by Frederic H. Chase, Jr. Fathers of the Church 37. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1958.
John of Damascus. Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (with the translator’s Prologue). Translated by S. D. F. Salmond. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 9. 1899.
Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Kotter, Bonifatius, ed. Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, vols. I (Institutio elementaris, Dialectica) and II (Expositio fidei). Patristische Texte und Studien 7, 12. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1969, 1973.
Epiphanius of Salamis. Panarion (Adversus Haereses), with the Anakephalaiosis drawn upon by John in On Heresies.