John of Damascus (c. 675-749) · CatalogJohn of DamascusJohn of Damascus (c. 675-749) · CatalogSyrian monk of Mar Saba, theologian, hymn writer and defender of icons.
Author
John of Damascus
c. 675-749 · Syrian monk of Mar Saba, theologian, hymn writer and defender of icons
John of Damascus (c. 675–749) was born into a prominent Christian family in Damascus, then the capital of the Umayyad caliphate; his father and grandfather served the caliphs as financial officials, and John may have held a similar post. Around 706 he became a monk at the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem, where he was ordained priest and spent the rest of his life writing. His three treatises defending the veneration of icons answered the iconoclast policy of the Byzantine emperor Leo III. His Fount of Knowledge combines a philosophical introduction, a catalogue of heresies and the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. He also wrote hymns still sung in Orthodox worship.
An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith is the third and longest part of The Fount of Knowledge, a large work composed in Greek by John of Damascus, a monk of the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem, in the mid-eighth century. Rather than offering new ideas, John set out to gather the teaching of the Greek church fathers into one ordered summary, and the result became the standard textbook of Eastern Orthodox theology and, through a twelfth-century Latin translation, an influence on medieval Western scholars.