An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith

Summary

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. The work is divided in printed editions into four books and one hundred chapters. Book I deals with God: that he is incomprehensible yet has made himself known, that his existence can be shown from the changeable world, and that he is one God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. John explains the language used of God, including the names and the ways Scripture speaks of God's body or emotions. Book II treats creation: angels and demons, the heavens, light, the elements, the earth, paradise and human nature, with chapters on the soul, the passions, free will and providence. These chapters draw on ancient science as well as theology. Book III concerns the incarnation: Christ as one person in two natures, divine and human, each with its own will and operation, and Mary as Mother of God (Theotokos). Book IV covers the resurrection and ascension, faith, baptism, the cross, the Eucharist, the veneration of saints, relics and icons, the canon of Scripture, the origin of evil, the Sabbath, virginity and marriage, and finally the Antichrist and the resurrection of the dead. In the chapter on images, John repeats Basil's principle that honour paid to an image passes to its prototype, the reasoning that he defended at length against the Byzantine iconoclasts. The Exposition is clear and compact rather than original. Thomas Aquinas and Peter Lombard quoted the Latin version, and Orthodox seminaries used it for centuries.

Top Lessons

• Knowing and not knowing God

  John begins by stressing that God is beyond comprehension while also giving a long ordered account of what can be said.

• Matter can carry the holy

  The defence of images, relics and sacraments rests on the belief that God became flesh and used matter for salvation.

• Synthesis as a kind of scholarship

  John presents himself as a gatherer of earlier wisdom rather than an original thinker.

• For the Christian reader

  John of Damascus is honoured in both East and West as the last of the great Greek fathers and is a Doctor of the Church in the Catholic tradition. Writing as a Christian under Muslim rule, he gathered the teaching of earlier fathers on the Trinity, creation and the Incarnation into an ordered summary later used in the Latin schools. His defence of images rests on the Incarnation (John 1:14; Colossians 1:15).

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