St. John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (review)

Andrew Louth's book is a fresh reconsideration of John Damascene's literary corpus in its historical and theological context. Part 1 provides a biographical reconstruction. Part 2 assesses John's Fountainhead of Knowledge (the trilogy, projected by John himself but so organized only posthumously, of his Dialectica, On Heresies, and On the Orthodox Faith) together with ancillary polemical and doctrinal writings. Part 3 explores John's achievement as a theologian of icons and as a liturgical poet.

Louth depicts John as standing at the end of the creative era of Greek patristic thought (attested by his abundant use of florilegia) but addressing that thought to a new age of expanding Islam and Christian iconoclasm, in which the monastic communities of Arab-occupied Palestine, despite their remoteness from Byzantium, played a strategic role in articulating responses to Manicheans, Monothelites, Muslims, imperial icononclasts, and other challengers to the Byzantine theological synthesis. It took time, as Louth shows, for John's influence actually to be registered beyond Palestine; indeed, even his groundbreaking treatises in defense of icon veneration did not initially command the broad attention of iconoclasts and iconodules.

The strength of Louth's monograph is its demonstration that "tradition" and "originality" are not polar opposites in John Damascene. By careful study of John's writings one discovers the subtle originality of his clarifications and refinements and his ability, in common with that of his predecessor Maximus, to integrate an exacting theological logic with an ascetically-grounded contemplative vision. One interesting example, only briefly touched on by Louth, is John's anti-Monothelite treatment of the issue (carried over from Maximus) of whether Christ assumed not only a natural human will (thelēsis) but also that "gnomic" will which fallen human beings exercise in "deliberating" about the good and developing moral dispositions. Like Maximus, John recognized the multiple meanings of gnômē, and he repeated Maximus's rejection of calculation or deliberation in Christ, but he may have gone beyond Maximus in allowing for gnômē in Christ understood in the innocent sense of the final object of volition he shared with the Father. From the ostensible ambiguity of language John retrieved new insight.

As a monk and contemplative, however, he also knew the limits of theological language. For example, in contrasting the perichorēsis within the Trinity as a perfect mutual coinherence of persons with the "asymmetry" of the incarnation, in which the divine nature alone instituted the perichorēsis of natures in the hypostasis of the Christ, John rendered himself vulnerable to the criticism of "swamping" Christ's humanity. But as Louth asserts, John was willing to sacrifice some clarity about the humanity of Christ in order to protect what for him was genuinely a mystery of the faith.

In John the science of "patristics" had really begun inasmuch as he represented a new urgency to read authoritative texts in their original context. A classic case highlighted by Louth appears in John's defense of icons, where he cites Basil's statement that the honor paid to the Son, qua Image of the Father, extends to the Father himself. Such an argument appeared to play into the hands of iconoclasts who could in turn argue that, given the consubstantiality of Son and Father, material icons of Christ would necessarily pose themselves as consubstantial with his divinity. John, however, remembering that Basil in his treatise had used the analogy of venerating the image of the Emperor as tantamount to venerating the Emperor himself (such that the glory of the image was inseparable from the Emperor himself without implying consubstantiality), effectively reclaimed Basil for the iconodules.

Louth demonstrates how John's defense of the icons rather than being an occasional theology amounted to a vindication of the very character of christocentric faith itself, resting on the foundations of the "architectonic significance" of images in the created order and on the incarnational dimension of image theology. Images at every level bespoke the mediated nature of revelation and...