An eleventh century icon showing St John Damascene (left) and his adopted brother Cosmas, working on the ordering of Byzantine chant in the eight tones we know today. Without St John, such images would be forbidden to Christians.
Part 1 of 2
MANSUR Bin Sarjun was a Christian in the Syrian court of the Roman Emperor Heraclius the Great, who ruled in Constantinople from 610 to 641. After the Muslims captured Syria in 634, Mansur’s son Sarjun served the new Caliph in the same capacity.
Sarjun liberated a Sicilian slave named Cosmas, and engaged him to tutor his son John, together with an orphan (also named Cosmas) whom Sarjun had adopted. In the Roman way, they studied Christian and secular subjects from music to astronomy and mathematics, as well as virtues such as prayer and humility. But John decided against the civil service, and both he and Cosmas became monks.
Islamic rule in Syria was comparatively liberal, for which John was doubly grateful: not only was he allowed to resign such a prestigious post to pursue his Christian calling, but he was also protected from the wrath of Roman Emperor Leo III when in 730 the Church of Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, strictly forbade the making of religious images.*
* Icons were banned throughout the Roman Empire in 730, and restored at the Council of Nicaea in 787; the ban was revived in 815 and abolished in 843. The restoration of the icons is commemorated on the first Sunday of Lent each year, as ‘The Triumph of Orthodoxy’. See our post The Restoration of the Icons.
Précis
John Damascene was the son of a seventh-century Syrian civil servant, early in the Islamic era. John and his brother Cosmas, an adopted orphan, were thoroughly educated, and later renounced their secular careers to become monks. Far from inhibiting their calling, living among Muslims actually helped when in 730 John was embroiled in a controversy over Christian art. (57 / 60 words)
Part Two
The vaults of Worcester Cathedral. Most English cathedrals were stripped of their colourful interiors in the sixteenth-century Reformation, but Worcester gives us an idea of how their makers intended them to be experienced. The Reformers, like Leo III back in the eighth century, were determined to be Biblical in their faith but unfortunately their reading of the Bible was patchy. True, God forbade the making of images in the Ten Commandments; but in his plans for his Temple at Jerusalem he also commanded the making of images of plants, animals, men’s faces, and angels. John Damascene’s more complete mastery of the sources allowed him to defend the use of religious art while placing due limits on it so that it did not cross the line into idolatry.
Emperor Leo, whose armies were faring badly against the Arabs, had been persuaded that the making of icons of Christ and his saints was the kind of idolatry for which Israel’s kings had lost battles. John knew better and, out of the reach of Leo’s soldiers,* busily disseminated learned treatises so thoroughly grounded in the Scriptures that they were instrumental in overturning the ban in 787, nearly forty years after John’s death in 749. Towards the end of his life, John composed his masterwork, The Fount of Knowledge, a comprehensive review of Scripture and tradition that was essential reading for centuries afterwards across East and West alike.*
John and his adopted brother Cosmas were, much like their English contemporary St Bede, not only scholars and preachers but also gifted in poetry and music. They composed many collects and hymns (sometimes in friendly competition with each other) and gathered more;* and they established principles of chanting that can still be heard today throughout the Eastern churches. Together, they had an astonishing impact on worldwide Christianity, and we will always have them to thank for those beautiful, mysterious icons, windows on another world.
* John was not completely protected from Leo. According to tradition, the Emperor’s spies tricked Caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik into thinking that John was a traitor and it cost John his hand — though that was not the end of the story. See our post The Third Hand.
* John’s most famous hymn is Αναστάσεως ημέρα (anastáseos iméra), the Canon for Easter Day or Paschal Canon, done into English verse by J. M. Neale (1818-1866) as ‘The day of resurrection! Earth tell it out abroad!’. A prose translation of the whole hymn can be found at OrthoChristian. It includes the hymn ‘The Angel cried’ sung in the weeks after Easter. The liturgical book called the Great Ochtoechos (hymns upon the eight tones), which dates back to the ninth century and came from the Monastery of Stoudios in Constantinople, is based on earlier work which the monks at Stoudios credited to St John Damascene and his brother Cosmas.
* The best-known part of this work is called An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith or in Latin, De Fide Orthodoxa. It was much relied on not only in the East but also (thanks to a Latin translation that was not always reliable) in the West, and ‘the Damascene’ was lovingly and reverently cited on many occasions by Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).
Précis
John, living in a Muslim land, was free to oppose the ban on religious art imposed at home by the Roman Emperor and his clergy, and contributed significantly to its repeal, though he did not live to see it. He also wrote an influential treatise on theology, and joined Cosmas in composing many of the Eastern churches best-loved hymns. (59 / 60 words)
