Christology Refinements
St. John of Damascus did not invent a new Christology; he consolidated the one the councils and Fathers had hammered out, fixing its vocabulary so precisely that his formulations became the textbook of Chalcedonian orthodoxy East and West. This section treats the two great refinements gathered in Book III of his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith: the terminological synthesis (perichoresis of the natures, the enhypostaton, the composite hypostasis, the communicatio idiomatum) and the dyothelite inheritance received from St. Maximus the Confessor and the Sixth Ecumenical Council.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)
John of Damascus (c. 675–749) stands at the close of the patristic age as its great systematizer. Writing a generation after the Sixth Ecumenical Council (680–681), he inherited a settled but scattered dogmatic vocabulary — Cyril’s hypostatic union, Chalcedon’s two natures, Leontius’ enhypostaton, Maximus’ two wills — and drew it into a single exposition so clear that the Byzantine schools, and later the Latin Scholastics, read Chalcedonian Christology through his eyes. His achievement is one of order and definition rather than discovery; he insisted he was “saying nothing of my own” (John of Damascus, Fount of Knowledge, prologue; trans. Chase, FOTC 37).
The two files take the two faces of that synthesis. The first treats his terminological consolidation: how perichoresis — a word with a christological prehistory in Gregory the Theologian and Maximus — became a precise term for the mutual permeation of Christ’s natures and the coinherence of the Trinity; how the enhypostaton was refined into the doctrine that Christ’s humanity subsists in the Word; and how the communicatio idiomatum was formalized. The second treats his dyothelite inheritance: how he codified Maximus’ natural/gnomic distinction, fixed “two wills, two operations” as settled dogma, and through his polemics against Jacobites and Nestorians made his formulations the standard reference of the whole tradition.
Navigation
| File | Subject |
|---|---|
| Perichoresis and the Enhypostaton | Perichoresis of the natures and of the Trinity; the enhypostaton (Leontius refined); composite hypostasis; the communicatio idiomatum formalized; Exposition III.3–9 |
| The Two-Wills Inheritance | The dyothelite synthesis received from Maximus; natural/gnomic will codified (Exposition II.22, III.14); Gethsemane; the anti-monothelite chapters; polemics against Jacobites and Nestorians; the textbook effect |
See Also
- Christology — the Chalcedonian framework John synthesizes
- Dyothelite Christology — the two-wills doctrine John receives
- Natural and Gnomic Will — the distinction John codifies
References
- John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. Trans. NPNF II/9 (ed. Schaff and Wace).
- John of Damascus. Writings (The Fount of Knowledge). Trans. Frederic H. Chase, Jr. Fathers of the Church 37. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1958.
- Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.