 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Behind Enemy Lines – John of Damascus The first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word Byzantine is probably exaggerated and unnecessary complexity in honour of the Eastern Empire's formidable and intricate bureaucracy. The second thing to come to mind, though, might be the concept of orthodoxy in honour of the Empire's equally formidable and intricate theological tradition. The term comes from the Greek words otos and doxa, meaning correct belief, and of course it features in the title of the Greek Orthodox Church. The doctrines of that church emerged from late antiquity and the early Byzantine period, a time of fierce debate as to which religious beliefs are, in fact, correct. To be an Orthodox Christian was, obviously, to reject paganism and the two other Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, which was seen as superseded by the Incarnation and the Gospels, and Islam, which was seen more unfavourably still as an outright heresy. Orthodoxy also meant rejecting certain teachings that had been adopted by other Eastern Christian communities during centuries of controversy over the Trinity and the nature, or indeed natures, of Christ. No one text, church council, or theologian was solely responsible for establishing the theology of the Orthodox Church, but a few key figures were particularly important in that process, among whom we must count John of Damascus. He would eventually be honoured as a theological authority alongside the late ancient Church Fathers whose ideas animate his own writings, like the Cappadocians, the Pseudo-Dionysius, and Maximus the Confessor. John's influence was fundamentally due to his having been on the correct side of all the religious debates of his day, or at least the side of these debates that would eventually be acknowledged as correct in the Orthodox tradition. He catalogued and rebuked the various sorts of heretical belief that lay outside what he saw as the true faith, including Islam. He was a stalwart defender of Chalcedonian Christianity and, as we saw last time, also a fierce advocate of the veneration of icons, and this at a time when the Emperor in Constantinople was promulgating iconoclasm. It may seem strange that this champion of Eastern Orthodoxy should have lived outside the borders of the Byzantine Empire. Actually though, this makes perfect sense. Living as he did in the Umayyad Empire in the first half of the 8th century, John could not take the dominance of his version of Christianity for granted. As his name indicates, he was born in Damascus, to a Greek-speaking Christian family of well-praised administrators who managed to flourish despite the transition to Islamic rule. In the Syria of his day, and in Palestine, where he would become a monk, John lived among a religiously diverse population with plenty of opportunity for debate between Christian and Jew, Christian and Muslim, and between Chalcedonians, like himself, and other Christian groups. As we know from our look at philosophy in Syriac and Armenian, these groups included the Nestorians, a group with a strong presence in the East, which emphasized the duality of Christ as both divine and human, and the Monophysites, who on the contrary insisted that Christ has only one nature which unites both his divinity and humanity. There were also the Monothelites, who adopted a compromise position according to which divinity and humanity come together in Christ's single will. Hence their name, which comes from the Greek words mono and thalasis, meaning one and will. John wrote polemics against all these groups, maintaining the line established at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and already defended by Maximus. This meant distinguishing two natures in Christ, seeking to safeguard his unity with reference to the single existing person in which these natures resided. Following the same line of thought, John also rejected another compromise formula which would acknowledge Christ's two natures but ascribe to him a single activity or Energaea. As we noted in the introduction to this series on Byzantine philosophy, Aristotle had already used the word Energaea meaning by it actuality as opposed to potentiality, so it's a concept familiar from ancient philosophy and the other medieval traditions. But the word Energaea is being used in a somewhat more specific way here to refer to the activity that proceeds from a given nature, the way heat comes from fire. This is the basis of John's objection to the Monothelites. If Christ had two natures, he cannot have had only one activity because every nature generates an activity of its own. Similarly, John's response to the Nestorians and Monophysites turns on the Greek technical term hypostasis, which can be found in late ancient texts but with a somewhat different connotation. Christ has two natures but is still a single unified being because he is only one hypostasis. Roughly this means that he was a single existent. We'll find out what it means less roughly in a couple of minutes. If you're tempted to ask what in the world any of this has to do with philosophy, a perusal of John's masterwork The Fountain of Knowledge might help answer your question. It's a massive text of three parts, the first of which is called Philosophical Chapters. This part is a kind of textbook which gathers together definitions and explanations of basic terms and concepts drawn from both Christian authorities and also pagan authors, whom he calls the outside philosophers. Sometimes John contrasts the teachings of the pagans and the Christian fathers, but for the most part the Philosophical Chapters read like an elementary introduction to logic and other philosophical basics that could have been handed to pagan students by a pagan professor in antique Alexandria. This textbook is supposed to prepare the reader for tackling the remaining two parts of the work, called respectively On the Orthodox Faith and On Heresies. John's fame and importance rest above all on the second part of The Fountain. On the Orthodox Faith was translated into Latin and became a major source for the scholastics. You'll see it cited on many pages of Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, for example, and it was also rendered into Old Slavonic and Arabic, enabling it to become a mainstay of Christian theology across much of the globe. It offers what its title promises, a comprehensive explanation and defense of the religious doctrines that John accepted as Orthodox, and would indeed become accepted as Orthodox by the Greek Church in due course. Now, this is most certainly a work of theology, but it is not for nothing that John has prepared the way with a survey of basic philosophical concepts. For one thing, he is convinced that we can rely on natural human reasoning, albeit that he grounds this assumption in the further assumption that reason was given to us by God. For another thing, to explain and establish his theological teachings, he often needs first to clarify how he sees various philosophical issues. This is well illustrated by the correct beliefs about Christ expounded in On the Orthodox Faith. Since he is trying to explain here the special case where divinity is somehow united to humanity, John has to tell us what humanity is in the cases that are not so special. Here too, he's dealing with a standard bit of terminology familiar from earlier Greek philosophy, namely phusis, or nature. This is where we get the word physics, that is, the study of nature. For John, a nature is the same thing as the essence or being of something. Thus the nature of a giraffe is just what makes giraffes to be the sort of thing they are. In itself, a nature like this is not an individual thing, because it is shared among all the beings that have the same nature. The essence of giraffe belongs to all giraffes, and furthermore we can grasp this nature in our minds as a general or universal concept. By contrast, an individual giraffe, like Hiawatha, comes about when the giraffe nature exists concretely, and when this happens we can speak of hypostasis. So now we can explain more clearly what John means by this term. A hypostasis is the instantiation of a nature or essence in one particular individual. He uses this idea to account for the Trinity, where we have only one divine nature that is instantiated in three persons, each of which is its own hypostasis. John also uses it to account for the Incarnation. Christ is only one hypostasis, but with two natures, both divine and human, thus ratifying the Chalcedonian formula. Now this might sound pretty strange. How can a single individual exemplify two natures, especially two such different natures, one created and one uncreated? This would be as if Hiawatha were somehow simultaneously a giraffe and a lion, which would at least mean she wouldn't have to venture far to find dinner, but seems metaphysically absurd. John's response would be that the difference between the two natures in Christ is precisely why they cannot coalesce to become one single nature, as the Monophysites held. In general, it is possible for things with various natures to come together and mix, as when the elements fuse to form a complex body. But in that sort of case, the two natures being mixed together are lost. Fire and water are taken up into the compound body and are no longer present as elements. By contrast, if Jesus was indeed both fully human and fully God, as Christianity requires, then he must have had two natures that were preserved and not lost by being commingled. We do have some hope of understanding how this is possible, because there is another case of two natures remaining unmixed in one single hypostasis, namely the case of an ordinary human. Each of us has both a soul and a body, and these two parts retain their different natures, as we can see from the fact that souls are able to outlive the body. Another case John is fond of mentioning is a burning hot sword, where the nature of fire occurs together with the nature of iron. He compares the soul's presence in body to the fire's presence in the sword, and points out that both the fire and iron retain separate activities, the fire burning and the iron cutting. A problem here, about which John seems surprisingly relaxed, is that it now sounds as if Christ actually had three natures, namely his divine nature and then the two natures that make up any human, corresponding to body and soul. His response here would seem to be that the body and soul natures are not, so to speak, on the same level as the divine and human natures. They are rather sub-natures that form parts of the human nature. Another philosophically interesting dimension of John's discussion of humanity, his philosophical anthropology if you will, comes with his polemic against monotheletism. In attempts to mollify those who wanted to be more protective of Christ's unity, it had been proposed that Christ had only one will. And why not? Indeed, what would it even mean for a single hypostasis or person to have multiple wills? Then it would seem I could will to do something, while also willing not to do it, leading to a stalemate. to see the giraffe enclosure at the zoo, even while choosing to see the lions instead. But following Maximus on this point as well, John argues that will is like activity. It is tied inextricably to nature, so that if there are two natures, there are two wills. Normal humans do not have two wills, since our power for willing has to do only with our souls and not our bodies. In fact, it has to do with our power of rationality, which expresses itself in deliberative choice, a manifestation of self-control that is impossible for non-human animals. Christ had such a will also, but his situation was of course different from that of a normal human because he had access to divine omniscience. Thus, neither God nor Christ, as incarnated, actually has to deliberate between alternatives, but rather simply chooses what is good. Given this, there is no possibility that the divine and human wills in Christ would come into conflict, and the same goes for his activity. What looks to us to be a single action can in fact be a manifestation of both divine and human nature, something especially clear in a miracle like walking on water, which required both a human body for walking and a divine nature for doing something that is naturally impossible. The nuance and sophistication of John's response to his Christian opponents is not, in truth, matched by his attack on Islam. Several documents directed against the Muslim faith come down to us under his name, including the final chapter of On Heresies and, probably not in fact by John but close to his thought in spirit, a dialogue between a Christian and a Saracen, or Muslim, which seems to be designed to equip Christian readers with arguments to use in real-life debate. A somewhat later Christian author, who also lived in the Islamic world, Theodore Abu-Qura, took up John's polemic and offered further arguments against what was then a new religion, posing an existential threat to Christianity. That explains the note of alarm detectable in both authors. John begins his chapter on Islam in On Heresies by describing this rival faith as the harbinger of the Antichrist, while Theodore compares it to a virulent disease. But these writings are not hysterical Jeremiahs, or at least not only that. They also address a deep question that arises in times and places where multiple religions compete for adherents—on what basis are we to choose between them? Nowadays we call this the problem of religious pluralism, and both John and Theodore are well aware of it. Alongside more ad hominem arguments, for instance aspersions cast on the character of the prophet, they offer proofs that might convince a neutral referee between the claims of Islam and Christianity. Common and prominent among these are the miracles performed by Moses and by Christ, which were seen by many witnesses. The same cannot be said for the prophet Muhammad, our authors claim, and John shows some knowledge of the Quranic texts by alluding to their own emphasis on the importance of witnesses in legal contexts. Theodore adds the interesting point that, without such independent proof, religion is simply a matter of thoughtlessly adopting the beliefs of Muv-un's parents. John and Theodore formulated these arguments while living among their adversaries, behind enemy lines so to speak. But it's worth remembering that John might have found the Christian Byzantine Empire no more congenial than the Umayyad realm at this time because of his defense of the icons. He was condemned by the Emperor Constantine V in the year 754 for this position, and it's said that the Emperor referred to him as Manzeros, Hebrew for bastard, playing on John's Arabic name Mansur. It's presumably for this reason that John's works started to be influential among Byzantine readers only a century or so after his death, once the icons had been brought back into Orthodox practice and worship. He deals with the issue in On the Orthodox Faith and also in three shorter treatises which gather authoritative testimonies and arguments in favor of venerating the icons. This material also reveals something of how Christians in this period saw the Jews. As we saw, the iconoclast built their case in part on passages in the Hebrew Bible condemning the making of idols. John states that these restrictions were appropriate for the Jews who were indeed at risk of sliding into idolatry, but things have changed with the Incarnation which licenses the use of physical images to represent the divine. While we should not actually worship the images of Christ and the saints, it is appropriate to show them reverence. Actually, in general, we can see created things as images of God. The icons are simply a central instance of the way that spiritual things can manifest themselves in the physical sphere. Thus, we might say that a rose, a flower, and its fragrance are an image of the Trinity. In this sense, the icons are not so much signs and symbols of what they represent as revelations of these things in the world. That example with the rose is a telling one. Like John's comparison of Christ to a fiery sword, it shows that he thinks the careful consideration of natural things can give us insight into the supernatural. We may find it unsettling that he moves so seamlessly from discussing what seem to be philosophical issues like the relation between nature and its individual instantiation to religious questions like the Incarnation or Trinity. But in John's works, there is no disentangling the two. Perhaps there is no more eloquent testimony to this than one of the numerous definitions of philosophy offered in his philosophical chapters, in fact one that I also mentioned in the introduction to this series. Noting that etymologically the word means love of wisdom, John infers that philosophy can be understood as the love of wisdom itself, which is God. Those definitions of philosophy illustrate another feature of John's writing that may unsettle us. He didn't invent any of them. Like the philosophical chapters as a whole, in fact like most of the fountain of wisdom as a whole, they are a patchwork of material drawn from other sources. In the case of John's treatises in defense of the icons, we see him doing little more than offering quotations from a variety of authoritative sources, sometimes with commentary but sometimes without. John's influence as a theologian was, to put it mildly, not owing to his originality. To the contrary, he was above all useful because of his command of many sources, which he wove together into useful and powerful works that are often little more than compilations. And John was not the only one. Some of the most frequently copied and consulted works of Byzantine philosophy were not so much written as gathered. Of course, in this series of episodes, I'm trying to convince you that Byzantine philosophy is genuinely interesting, and at first glance these compilations present something of a problem for that thesis. Can a text that just assembles material from earlier texts really be worth the attention of the historian of philosophy? Rather than ignoring this question in hopes that you won't notice, I'm going to be confronting the topic head on and devoting a whole episode to the question whether such treatises can be philosophically valuable and interesting. First though, I've put together another episode in which we'll be meeting a leading expert on the thought of John of Damascus. In an interview where I already ask whether his compilatory habits should give us pause. So don't hesitate to join me next time as I speak to Andrew Luth here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.