Every Orthodox icon rests on a theology, and much of that theology was first put into words by a monk of the Church of Antioch's world: St John of Damascus. Writing in the eighth century, outside the reach of the Byzantine emperor, he answered the iconoclasts with arguments that the Seventh Ecumenical Council later made its own.

A Christian of Umayyad Damascus

John was born in Damascus in the late seventh century, when the city was the capital of the Umayyad caliphate. His family was Christian and held a senior place in the administration of the caliphs, and John himself served there before leaving public life. He became a monk at the monastery of Mar Saba in the Judean desert near Jerusalem, where he spent the rest of his life writing, teaching and composing hymns. He died around the middle of the eighth century. The Church commemorates him on 4 December.

The iconoclast crisis

In the 720s the Byzantine emperor Leo III began to move against the veneration of icons, and in the following decades images were removed and destroyed. Because John lived under Muslim rule, the emperor could not silence him. He wrote three treatises, known together as On the Divine Images, defending the icons.

His arguments

John's defence is built on a few clear ideas:

  • The Incarnation. The invisible God cannot be depicted. But in Christ God became visible and took flesh. "When the Invisible One becomes visible to flesh," John writes, "you may then draw a likeness of His form." To refuse to depict Christ is, in effect, to doubt that He truly became man.
  • Worship and veneration. John distinguishes worship (latreia), which is due to God alone, from veneration or honour (proskynesis), which may be shown to holy persons and things. The honour given to an icon passes to the person it depicts.
  • Matter. God worked our salvation through matter, through the body of Christ, the wood of the Cross and the water of baptism. Matter is not to be despised.
  • The Church and the emperor. John insisted that it is not for emperors to legislate for the Church on matters of faith.

Vindication at Nicaea

The iconoclast Council of Hieria in 754 condemned John by name. Thirty-three years later, in 787, the Second Council of Nicaea, the Seventh Ecumenical Council, restored the veneration of icons and adopted the distinction between worship and veneration that John had set out. After a second period of iconoclasm, icons were finally restored in 843, an event the Orthodox Church celebrates every year on the first Sunday of Lent, the Sunday of Orthodoxy.

In icons

A well-known tradition holds that John's right hand was cut off on false charges and restored after he prayed before an icon of the Mother of God. The icon associated with this story, the "Three-Handed" Theotokos (Tricherousa), shows a third hand in silver at the bottom of the image. John himself is usually painted as an elderly monk, often wearing a distinctive head covering, holding a scroll with words from one of his hymns or writings.

For the Church of Antioch, St John of Damascus is more than a theologian of images. He is one of its own, a reminder that the defence of the icon was first written in the lands where Antiochian Orthodox Christians still live and pray.