~ by Glen Butterworth, SJ

John was born ca. 680, the son of a treasurer in the courts of the great Umayyad Caliphate at Damascus. By the time Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan was ruler of the Islamic unity, John’s father was a high official, this despite his strong Christian faith. Tutored by a captured Sicilian monk, John and his foster brother Cosmas excelled in all their studies and when the father died John was appointed as a chief financial counselor to the Caliph.

From 726 to 729 the Byzantine Emperor Leo III (the Isaurian) issued his famous decrees against the veneration of icons. But iconography was an important element of faith and identity for many Christians; Justinian II had famously added Christ’s image to his empire’s golden coin some thirty years prior. Leo set out to remove explicit symbols of Christianity from his court. In part, Leo was reacting to Abd al-Malik’s rejection of Byzantine coinage; the graven images on the coins conflicted with some increasingly important Hadith teachings. As the Islamic Caliphate continued to spread Abd al-Malik introduced his own currency for broader use, identifiable by its complex but aniconic designs.

From his safe position in the courts of Damascus, John penned several letters criticizing Leo’s presumptive curtailing of the established Christian identity of Byzantium and the threat it posed to the faithful. The Emperor retaliated by forging a letter in John’s name that suggested that he would betray the Caliph and seek to hand Damascus over to the Byzantine Empire. Falling for the ruse, Abd al-Malik ordered that John’s writing hand be severed at the wrist – but by the intervention of the Most Holy Theotokos, Mother of God, the hand miraculously reattached itself. The Caliph was amazed and offered to return John to the courts but John declined and instead entered religious life at the Monastery of St. Sabas near Jerusalem.

And so John became a novice but it was very difficult for his new community to find him a suitable spiritual guide, due to his learning and life experience. Only one of the Christian elders was willing to teach John and for one spiritual experiment he sent John back to Damascus, not as a great emissary but as a simple tradesman. John was given the simple task of selling the baskets that the monastery produced; he was ordered to greatly inflate their cost and so the task seemed impossible. But while he sat in the marketplace John was recognized by a former servant of his who, taking pity on the poor seller, bought all of John’s baskets
at full price.

John of Damascus went on to write many important works including the Fountain of Wisdom. He is a transitional figure in the intellectual life of the Christian faith and is remembered as the last of the great Greek Fathers and the first precursor to would later be called Scholasticism. Indeed, John concentrated his attention on the work of Aristotle; his intimate knowledge of Arabic provided him access to Categories a full century before it was translated for the West