Tradition in St. John of Damascus, The Fount of Knowledge

This is the second in my series on the worldview of St. John of Damascus.

The Fount of Knowledge: Text and Structure

Before beginning our discussion on St. John's worldview, it would first be prudent to give an account of our primary text. The Fount of Knowledge has a long and varied history of transmission by manuscript. The prefatory letter, which we will be examining extensively, indicates the following form, in which it is often known today: Philosophical Chapters or Dialectica, On Heresies, and the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. However, these have been received variously, with most manuscripts only containing the preface, the Dialectica in one of two recensions, and the Exposition, with the On Heresies as a kind of appendix, if included at all. Only one manuscript preserves the text as we have received it. In his research of all of the above, the scholar Andrew Louth has been led to two conclusions which we shall follow in this paper; 1) that the Fount of Knowledge is one of the Damascene's later works, left unfinished at his repose, and 2) that the tripartite form in which it has been constructed is the saint's mature intention. Louth cites in defense of his argument the prefatory letter itself, chapter 2 of the longer recension of the Dialectica's reference to the text as a “compendium of all knowledge”, the unfinished character of this recension, and the varied manuscript tradition itself as pointing to these conclusions. These seem likely, and so I will be following Louth in this essay, namely that St. John intended the text in more less the same form as we now have it, but that it was unfinished at the time of the saint's repose.1

To return to the structure, the text as described by St. John is composed of three unequal parts; the Dialectica, the On Heresies, and the Exact Exposition. The first part is that which is derived from the dialectical, or rhetorical works of Aristotle and consists almost wholly of material from the Categories, with large supplements from later commentaries like the Eisagoge of Porphyry.2 This material is supplemented in a few key places with terms of importance for Christian theology, namely ousia or essence, hypostasis or self-existent person, prosopon or person as manifest in personality,  physis or nature, enhypostaton or self-existence, and anhypostaton or non-self-existence. Otherwise the saint largely adapts pagan material.3

The On Heresies is a list of errors, in which are included various forms of paganism, the philosophical schools, sects of Judaism, the various Christian heresies proper, Manichaeism and Islam. The latter two, along with Messalianism, a somewhat nebulous constellation of monastic errors, receive especially thorough treatment, and it is worth noting the saint also wrote separate apologetic texts against them.4 Much of this work seems to be lifted from other collections of heresies, in particular the Panarion of Epiphanios of Salamis.5 His selection though is characteristic of his views in general; namely that he has a broad view of “heresy” which is largely oriented toward error per se without the more modern connotation of being divergent opinions within a single religious grouping. In terms of the world-view of the Damascene, this means that error takes on a much broader lens, referring to all incorrect metaphysical and mystical perceptions of the universe. We shall examine this in more detail below in that section dedicated to pagan learning. Suffice it for now to remark that this makes St. John's position vis-a-vis other religions, Christians heresies, and intellectual schools fundamentally related to his Christian worldview.

It is in the last section, the Exact Exposition, that this view is most evident in terms of the selection and arrangement of material. The text has been arranged into four books by J.P. Migne in Patrologia Graeca,6 which modern editions follow. They contain a heterogeneous mix of material, consisting of Christian theology, natural science, and religious customary. Roughly speaking, while all four contain scriptural and theological content, they can be characterized as follows: the first deals directly with the nature of the Triune God, the second with natural science, cosmology, and anthropology, the third with Christology, and the last with Christian practices. This mixture fulfills the Damascene's promise in the Dialectica to give an account of all knowledge. Moreover I would contend this mixture not accidental. Structurally much of the text, by topic, seems to me to follow the Nicene Creed, beginning in book one with the One God in Three Persons, moving to “All things visible and invisible” in book two, then to Christology in book three, covering all the historical sections of the Creed and their implications, and ending with baptism, custom, and the eschaton, or end of the world, in book four.7 This said, this observation must be made with reservations, chiefly, that some elements are lacking. There is for instance no section dedicated to the Church in book four, as observed by Fr. Georges Florovsky. The latter further comments that the material is unevenly collected, and that the longest portion is Christological, in which he “senses that these were urgent and disturbing topics only recently.”8  Thus gaps are likely accounted for by their relatively low degree of controversy. There is also, perhaps, the chance that these sections were not completed by the saint before his repose, but here I am merely speculating, and the evidence from the saint's other apologetic works does not incline heavily towards this view.9 In either case, the material is meticulous in its composition, and displays, as we shall see presently, the same investigative method throughout; a consistent worldview.

1  Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: tradition and originality in Byzantine theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pgs. 31-37

2 Porphyry was a disciple of the Neoplatonist Plotinus, who compiled the works of his master, and in addition wrote a very famous commentary on Aristotle's categories.

3 Louth 38-43

4 Louth 61-83

5 Louth 56-60

6 Patrologia Graeca, and its companion series Patrologia Latina, are comprehensive collections of the Church Fathers compiled by the French monk J.P. Migne, who arranged and edited the material.

7 It is worth noting other, more recent Orthodox dogmatic texts have substantively followed this structure, to greater or lesser degrees, cf. Fr. Michael Pomazansky's Orthodox Dogmatic Theology and Fr. Dumitru Staniloae's six volume The Experience of God, the former of which is particularly recommended by this author.

8 Fr. Georges Vasilievich. The Byzantine Fathers of the Sixth to Eighth Century. Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987. Ch.7

9 Namely his works on Islam, Iconoclasm, Manichaeism, and the Messalians, see Louth, Ch. 5