The Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith

The Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (Ekdosis akribes tes orthodoxou pisteos; De Fide Orthodoxa) is the dogmatic third part of St. John of Damascus’s Fount of Knowledge — the first comprehensive systematic theology of the Christian East. Transmitted in a continuous Greek sequence of one hundred chapters, it was divided in the West into four books, and through Burgundio of Pisa’s 1153/54 Latin translation became a foundational source for Peter Lombard’s Sentences and the scholastic tradition.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Structure: One Hundred Chapters, Four Books

In the Greek manuscripts the Exact Exposition is a single continuous work of one hundred chapters (kephalaia). The familiar division into four books is a Western convention, adopted in the Latin tradition (and reflected in the standard editions and in NPNF II/9) to ease reference and study; it does not correspond to any division in John’s own text. The four-book scheme distributes the hundred chapters as follows: Book I = chapters 1–14; Book II = chapters 15–44; Book III = chapters 45–73; Book IV = chapters 74–100 (so the Lequien arrangement reproduced in Migne and NPNF; cf. Louth, St John Damascene, 2002, ch. 4). It is worth keeping both numberings in view, since older citations (including NPNF) use the four-book form while critical work follows the continuous chapter count.

Contents Mapped

The work proceeds in the order of the economy of salvation — from God in himself, through creation and the fall, to the incarnation and its fruits.

Book I (chs. 1–14): God and the Trinity

Book I is theology proper. It opens famously: “That the Deity is incomprehensible, and that we ought not to pry into and meddle with the things which have not been delivered to us by the holy Prophets, and Apostles, and Evangelists” (I.1, NPNF II/9). John sets out the apophatic principle that the divine essence is unknowable, then offers rational proofs of God’s existence, the doctrine of the one God, the eternal generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit, the Holy Trinity (I.8), and the divine names and attributes — what may and may not be said of God. This is the chapter-region the repository’s Trinitarian treatment draws on for the Damascene’s distinction between the unknowable essence and the God made known through his attributes and operations (see Orthodoxy Guide: The Holy Trinity).

Book II (chs. 15–44): Creation, Cosmos, Providence, Anthropology

Book II treats the created order: the angelic powers and their orders, the heavens and the elements, the visible cosmos, paradise, and the creation of man. It contains the angelology and cosmology the repository cites, and culminates in the great chapter “On Man” (II.12 in the four-book division = ch. 26), John’s anthropology — man as a microcosm and a “second world,” composed of soul and body, made in the image and toward the likeness of God, set as a king over creation. The book closes with the doctrine of providence, foreknowledge, and free will (chs. 39–44), distinguishing what lies “in our power” from what does not, and defending divine foreknowledge against fatalism.

Book III (chs. 45–73): Christology

Book III is the heart of the work and John’s most original synthesis: the doctrine of the incarnation, set out with technical exactness. Here he gathers the whole conciliar inheritance — Chalcedon’s “two natures without confusion, change, division, or separation,” the hypostatic union, the communicatio idiomatum (the exchange of properties), and the doctrines of enhypostasia (Christ’s human nature subsisting in the hypostasis of the Logos) and perichoresis (the mutual interpenetration of the natures) — and the dyothelite teaching of two natural wills and operations inherited from Maximus the Confessor (see 07 — Perichoresis and Enhypostaton). He affirms the Theotokos: “she gave birth not to a mere man, but to true God — not God bare, but God incarnate” (III.12, NPNF II/9), and the deification of Christ’s humanity by its union with the Word (III.17). The repository’s core Christology file already cites III.3, III.4, III.9, III.12, and III.14–15; the present file keeps to those anchors (see Orthodoxy Guide: Christology).

Book IV (chs. 74–100): Sacraments, Icons, Scripture, Eschatology

Book IV gathers the remaining loci. It treats the consequences and worship that flow from the incarnation: faith and baptism, the Eucharist (IV.13) — where John teaches that by the invocation of the Holy Spirit the bread and wine are made the very Body and Blood of Christ, a true change and not a figure — followed by chapters on the veneration of the saints, their relics, and the holy images (IV.16), where the iconodule argument of his Three Treatises is compressed into the dogmatic frame. Further chapters cover Scripture, the cross, the direction of prayer, virginity, the genealogy of the Lord and the Theotokos, and the last things: the resurrection (IV.27) and the final consummation, with which the work closes. The repository’s anchored citations from this book — IV.13 (Eucharist), IV.14–16, and IV.26–27 — are retained here for consistency.

Influence in the East: The Dogmatics Handbook

In Byzantium the Exact Exposition became, quite simply, the handbook of dogmatic theology — the standard textbook from which the faith was taught, quarried by later writers, and treated as the authoritative summation of the Greek Fathers (Louth, St John Damascene, 2002, ch. 4). It set the agenda and much of the vocabulary for all subsequent Orthodox dogmatics; modern Orthodox systematic theologies still organise their material along recognisably Damascene lines, and John is invoked as the saint who “sealed” the patristic age. His distinction between the incomprehensible essence and the God known through his attributes and energies is taken up explicitly in the Russian seminary tradition (Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, “Our Knowledge of God”; cited in Orthodoxy Guide: The Holy Trinity).

Influence in the West: Burgundio, Lombard, and the Schoolmen

The work’s Western career is one of the most consequential transmissions of Greek theology into the Latin world. A first partial Latin version was made in the early twelfth century, but the decisive translation of the whole was produced by Burgundio of Pisa in 1153/54, at the request of Pope Eugenius III (Backus, “John of Damascus, De fide orthodoxa: Translations by Burgundio …,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 49, 1986). Burgundio’s rendering reached Rome just as Peter Lombard was completing his Sentences (c. 1155–1158); the Lombard, encountering the translation on a Roman visit, drew on it extensively, citing the Exposition repeatedly and embedding Damascene formulations into the very textbook that would govern theological education in the medieval universities (Backus, 1986; Louth, St John Damascene, 2002, p. 285). Through the Sentences — the standard textbook every aspiring master had to gloss — John of Damascus thus entered the bloodstream of Latin scholasticism, and was cited directly and reverently by Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and their successors. Few Greek Fathers exercised so direct an influence on the structure and content of Western systematic theology.

See Also

• The Fount of Knowledge — the encyclopaedic whole of which this is the third part
• The Dialectica — the philosophical vocabulary presupposed throughout Book III
• 07 — Perichoresis and Enhypostaton — the technical Christology of Book III
• Orthodoxy Guide: Christology — where III.3, III.4, III.9, III.12, III.14–15 are already cited
• Orthodoxy Guide: The Holy Trinity — Book I’s essence/attributes framework

References

• John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (Ekdosis akribes tes orthodoxou pisteos). Translated by S. D. F. Salmond. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 9. 1899. [Four-book division; chapters cited as I.1, II.12, III.3–17, IV.13–27.]
• John of Damascus. The Orthodox Faith, in Saint John of Damascus: Writings. Translated by Frederic H. Chase, Jr. Fathers of the Church 37. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1958.
• Kotter, Bonifatius, ed. Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos II: Expositio fidei. Patristische Texte und Studien 12. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1973. [Critical Greek text; continuous 100-chapter numbering.]
• Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Backus, Irena. “John of Damascus, De fide orthodoxa: Translations by Burgundio (1153/54), Grosseteste (1235/40) and Lefèvre d’Etaples (1507).” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 49 (1986): 211–217.
• Pomazansky, Michael. Orthodox Dogmatic Theology. Translated by Seraphim Rose. Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1984.