St. John of Damascus
The Patron Saint of Eighth Day Institute
by Erin Doom
Feast of St. John of DamascusAnno Domini 2010, December 4
JOHN of DAMASCUS: an eighth-century Byzantine saint; most famous for his defense of icons, his monastic handbook of theology (On the Orthodox Faith), and his hymnography.
PHILOSOPHER: As a man in love with God, St. John is a true philosopher. His own definition of philosophy, based on the Greek roots of the word, sheds light on its true nature and object: "Philosophy, again, is the love of wisdom. But true wisdom is God. Therefore, the love of God, this is true philosophy."
THEOLOGIAN: St. John is also a theologian. For him, however, a theologian is not someone who can eloquently articulate a system of abstract propositions about God, but rather one who knows God intimately and is able to talk about Him to the extent that he has experienced Him. Evagrius of Pontus, a fourth-century monk, articulates this view of theology most clearly: "If you are a theologian, you truly pray. If you truly pray, you are a theologian.
POET: St. Porphyrios asserts, "Whoever wants to become a Christian must first become a poet." If a poet is characterized as one who is gifted at the perception and expression of the beautiful, then this bold claim is more understandable and St John qualifies as a poet par excellence, particularly in his use of imagery to express the beauty of the Lord. As the most articulate defender of icons, he understood the vital role of imagery in helping finite humans understand an infinite God. Indeed, in all of his works, the poet in St. John emerges as he masterfully crafts a magnificent display of imagery in his attempts to describe the Church's experience of an indescribable and incomprehensible God.
PREACHER: St. John's poetic abilities are especially apparent in his homilies. His reputation for being an eloquent preacher is confirmed by the epithet commonly connected to his name: Chrysorrhoas (Greek for "flowing with gold"). Significantly, all of his surviving homilies were composed for a specific liturgical feast. For St. John, participation in the annual cycle of fasts and feasts promotes the spiritual life by both inspiring one to imitate and enabling one to participate in the life of Christ and all His saints.
HYMNOGRAPHER: St. John's poetry shines most brilliantly in his hymnography. Although he penned hymns for many liturgical feasts, his most renown include those composed for funerals and for Easter. As a hymnographer, he harvests the rich tradition of patristic theology and, using both precise conceptual terminology and rich poetic imagery, transforms it into song and celebration: "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death."
MONK: As a Palestinian monk, St. John joined a rich monastic tradition that established itself as the guardian of orthodox Chalcedonian Christology. The primary purpose of monasticism is to practice spiritual disciplines that facilitate the healing of the human person by restoring a harmonious relationship between body, mind, and soul. The path for such healing was made possible by the incarnation. The debate over the nature and person of Christ is therefore of utmost importance. St. Gregory the Theologian, whose influence on St John is profound, puts it this way: "What is not assumed cannot be healed."
OUR HERO: The life of St. John of Damascus is an inspiration for all Christians: as philosopher, he inspires us to love Wisdom; as theologian, he inspires us to truly pray; as poet, he inspires us to perceive and describe the beauty of an indescribable God; as preacher, he inspires us to imitate the life of Christ and all His saints through the liturgical year; as hymnographer, he inspires us to sing and celebrate Christ's victory over death; as monk, he inspires us to choose the narrow way of self-denial as the path to healing and salvation; and as our hero, he inspires us to renew culture through faith and learning.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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