On Virtue and Prayer

St. John of Damascus the monk of Mar Saba left an ascetic and prayerful legacy alongside his dogmatics — though it is a legacy in which the secure and the merely attributed must be carefully sorted. This file treats On the Virtues and Vices (read in The Philokalia under his name, its authenticity contested), the great florilegium Sacra Parallela (its disputed attribution and its immense value for preserving lost texts), his concise definition of prayer from the Exact Exposition, and his teaching on fasting and the passions.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

On the Virtues and Vices

Among the writings circulated under John of Damascus’s name is the short ascetic treatise On the Virtues and Vices of the Soul and Body, included in The Philokalia, volume 2, in the translation of Kallistos Ware and Philip Sherrard (The Philokalia, vol. 2, “On the Virtues and the Vices,” attributed to St. John of Damaskos). The work catalogues the powers of the soul and body, then arrays the virtues against the corresponding vices, in the diagnostic manner of the desert ascetic tradition. Its attribution is not secure. The text appears to be a later enlargement of the schema of the eight evil thoughts (the tradition of Evagrius and St. John Cassian’s “eight spirits of evil”), and its complex textual history has led scholars to treat its Damascene authorship as traditional rather than established (the Philokalia itself prints it under his name while the work’s relation to the earlier eight-thoughts literature is noted in the scholarship on the Damascene corpus; cf. Louth, St John Damascene, Oxford 2002, on the difficulty of the spuria). It is cited here, in keeping with this collection’s method, as attributed to John of Damascus — a genuine witness to the Sabaite ascetic tradition he inhabited, whoever penned it (cf. METHODOLOGY.md §3).

What the treatise transmits is the standard architecture of Orthodox ascetic psychology: the passions are not natural but disordered movements of natural powers; the virtues are the same powers rightly ordered; and the spiritual life is the patient labor of praxis — purification of the passible part of the soul — as the necessary ground of contemplation (theoria). It enumerates the virtues of the body (temperance, fasting, vigil, manual labor) and of the soul (the cardinal virtues, faith, hope, love, humility, discernment), and sets against them the answering vices, so that the reader is given a diagnostic map of the inner life. This is the common inheritance of the Philokalia, and the treatise’s presence in volume 2 placed it, under the Damascene’s authority, at the center of the eighteenth-century Athonite revival of hesychast spirituality. That the question of its precise authorship remains open does nothing to lessen its representative value: it is a faithful condensation of the tradition John of Damascus inhabited as a monk of Mar Saba, and the tradition received it as his.

The Sacra Parallela

John’s most monumental contribution to the spiritual literature of the Church — if it is his — is the vast florilegium known as the Sacra Parallela (“Sacred Parallels”). A florilegium is a topically arranged anthology of excerpts; the Sacra Parallela gathers passages from Scripture and the Fathers under headings of doctrine, ethics, and asceticism, so that the reader seeking guidance on a virtue, a vice, or a point of teaching could find the relevant authorities collected in one place. As originally conceived it comprised three books — on God, on man, and on the virtues and vices — later consolidated into a single alphabetical sequence (the Sacra Parallela, structure and history summarized at the OrthodoxWiki/Wikipedia entry, used here only to locate the scholarship; cf. Louth, St John Damascene, ch. 2).

The attribution to John of Damascus is questioned. A tenth-century manuscript credits the work instead to “Leontios the priest and John,” the latter unidentified, and modern scholars regard the Damascene authorship as probable-but-uncertain rather than secure (Louth, St John Damascene, ch. 2, which treats the florilegia among the works of disputed or composite authorship). Whatever its author, its importance is not in doubt: as a compilation of excerpts it preserves citations from patristic works that are otherwise lost, making it a primary tool for the recovery of texts that survive nowhere else. The finest witness, Parisinus Graecus 923 (ninth century), is moreover “the largest and only illuminated Greek florilegium to have survived from the Byzantine era,” its roughly 1,658 marginal illustrations a key source for reconstructing pre-iconoclastic miniature cycles. The Sacra Parallela thus has a double value — devotional, as a sourcebook for the spiritual life, and scholarly, as a vault preserving fragments of a lost patristic library.

The florilegium form itself is worth pausing over, because it is so characteristic of the mind the tradition associates with John of Damascus. The whole tenor of his enterprise is gathering rather than originating: as the Exact Exposition compiles the dogmatic deposit of the Fathers into a single ordered manual, so the Sacra Parallela compiles their moral and ascetic wisdom into a single topically arranged reference. Whether or not the same hand made both, the two works share an aim — to render the inheritance of the Church accessible, locatable, teachable. This is the genius of late patristic synthesis: not a new revelation but a faithful arrangement of the old, such that a Christian seeking counsel on anger or almsgiving or the fear of God could find the relevant voices of Scripture and the saints assembled under one heading. That the Sacra Parallela incidentally preserved texts which would otherwise have perished is the providential dividend of that humble, compilatory labor.

Prayer: “The Ascent of the Mind to God”

The one securely Damascene definition of prayer comes in the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, in the chapter on the prayer of Christ. There John gives the formula that would echo through the whole tradition: “Prayer is an uprising of the mind to God, or a petitioning of God for what is fitting” (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition III.24, “Concerning prayer”; trans. NPNF II/9). The definition is itself an inheritance — its first limb derives from Evagrius and St. Nilus (“prayer is the ascent of the intellect to God”), and John, characteristically, fixes the received wisdom in a form so compact it became standard. He sets it in a christological frame: Christ, who as God needed nothing, prayed in his humanity both to teach us and to show that his human mind truly turned in filial dependence to the Father (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition III.24; trans. NPNF II/9).

This definition undergirds the later Orthodox theology of prayer as the raising of the nous — the gathering of the mind out of dispersion and its standing before God — which is the inner aim of the structured prayer rule and the goal of the Jesus Prayer alike (cf. The Prayer Rule, where the same understanding of prayer as standing with the mind in the heart before God is set out from St. Theophan the Recluse). John’s twofold definition — ascent and petition — holds together the contemplative and the supplicatory dimensions that the tradition would always insist belong together: prayer is neither mere request (which can decay into a transaction) nor mere wordless ascent (which can decay into self-absorption), but the whole movement of a rational creature toward its God, asking of him “what is fitting.” The compactness of the formula is exactly what made it portable. It passed, through the Damascene’s authority, into the Byzantine catechetical mind and from there into the prayer books, so that the definition a beginner first meets when asking “what is prayer?” is, very often, John’s.

Fasting and the Passions

In the same ascetic register, John treats fasting and the passions as the praxis that prepares the soul for prayer. In the Exact Exposition he sets the theology of the human person — the appetitive and incensive powers, the passions as movements of the soul, the voluntary and the involuntary — that grounds all ascetic effort (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.22, “Concerning passion and energy,” and the following chapters on the powers of the soul; trans. NPNF II/9). The passions, on this account, are the disordered surplus of natural appetites; fasting and self-control (enkrateia) are the discipline by which the bodily appetites are brought back under the rule of reason, so that the mind is freed for its proper ascent. Whether read in the dogmatic anthropology of the Exposition or in the ascetic schema of the On the Virtues and Vices attributed to him, John’s teaching is the common Orthodox conviction that virtue is natural and passion is the corruption of nature, and that fasting is medicine, not punishment — the restoring of a disordered nature to its created order (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.22; cf. On the Virtues and Vices [attrib.], Philokalia vol. 2).

This connects his ascetic teaching directly to his Christology, and the connection is not incidental. The whole point of the two-wills doctrine John systematized is that Christ healed the human will from within, willing humanly and rightly where Adam had not (see The Two-Wills Inheritance). The ascetic life is the appropriation of that healing: by fasting, vigil, and the cutting off of the passions, the Christian’s own natural will is brought back from its gnomic wavering toward the steady orientation to the good that Christ’s humanity possessed perfectly. Praxis and prayer are therefore not self-improvement but participation — the laborious recovery, in each believer, of the rightly ordered human nature that the incarnate Word restored. So the same John who fixed the dogmatic vocabulary of the union also transmits, in his definition of prayer and his account of the passions, the practical discipline by which that union bears fruit in the deification of the believer. The dogmatician and the ascetic are one mind.

See Also

• On Death and Consolation — the other face of his spiritual teaching, the theology of dormition
• The Prayer Rule — the structured practice his definition of prayer undergirds
• Prayers for the Departed — the disputed-attribution method this collection follows
• Christology — the anthropology of soul and will presupposed by his ascetic teaching

References

• John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, II.22 (on passion and the soul’s powers) and III.24 (on prayer). c. 743. Trans. NPNF II/9 (ed. Schaff and Wace); also trans. Frederic H. Chase, Jr., Fathers of the Church 37 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1958).
• John of Damascus (attrib.). On the Virtues and the Vices (On the Virtues and Vices of the Soul and Body). In The Philokalia, vol. 2, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. (Attribution traditional; the work is a developed form of the earlier “eight thoughts” literature.)
• John of Damascus (attrib.). Sacra Parallela (Hiera Parallela). PG 95–96. Attribution questioned (a tenth-century manuscript credits “Leontios the priest and John”); preserves fragments of otherwise-lost patristic texts. Finest witness: Parisinus Graecus 923 (9th c.).
• Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, esp. chs. 1–2.
• The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 2. Comp. St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth; trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.