Scripture and Revelation in John of Damascus
Christ, the true and unique Word of God
The first and most important authority to which St. John Damascene appeals to is divine self-revelation. He always, as seen above, makes sure to mention to his reader that knowledge is from above, and that it requires a teacher. He most explicitly refers to the authority of Holy Scripture in this regard. In the Scripture Saint John sees the Word of God speaking. He says, “in sacred Scripture let us hear the voice of Him who is the wisdom and power of God the Father.” He likewise says that in our fallen state he, “schooled [fallen man] in many ways,... by the Law and the Prophets,...”1 He also refers to the hidden meanings of scripture, and encourages his reader, “let us read once, twice, many times.” He discusses the classical distinction between letter and spirit, saying “the gate is the letter, but the bridal chamber within the gate is the beauty of the thoughts hidden behind the letter,... the Spirit of Truth”2 So our understanding of the sacred writings is aided by Christ the Teacher, who sends us “another comforter”(cf. John 14:6) in the Scriptures, the Spirit of Truth, “who spoke by the prophets3” hidden within the words. And this quest, this journey into the scriptures is deeply personal and mystical, it is interactive. Louth says it well when he says, “[t]his reading and pondering the scriptures is a work of love: the one who pursues it enters into a bridal relationship with Christ, and delights in the truth discovered in the bridal chamber.”4 This loving relationship, and the quest for knowledge and truth in God as a loving end, makes the Scripture, as God's self-revelation, “embellished and adorned by the sayings of the divinely inspired prophets, and the divinely taught fishermen,”5 a primary source for authority for St. John, and a direct interaction with God's historical revelation.
This latter is made clear in the way St. John prefaces his uses of scripture. He uses declarative statements; there is no ambiguity about their truth content and he doesn't question them or deny them. A brief sampling should suffice. In speaking of the creation of time, “He made the ages who exists before the ages, of whom the divine David says: 'from to eternity and to eternity thou art (Ps 89:2)', and the divine Apostle; 'By whom also he made the ages.(Heb 1:2)'”6 Regarding the creation of the earth, “Our God, who is glorified in trinity and in unity, Himself, 'made heaven and earth, and all things that are in them.(Ps. 145:6)'”7 In regards to God's ineffability, “'No man hath seen God at any time: the only-begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.(John 1:18)'”8 Regarding Eden, “He prepared a sort of kingdom for [man], in which he might dwell and lead a blessed and blissful life. And this divine paradise prepared in Eden by the hands of God was a treasure house of every joy and pleasure (cf. Gen 2:8-15).”9 Regarding man's creation, “God made man innocent,... He made him a living being to governed here, and then to be removed elsewhere (cf. Gen 1:26-28).”10 This sampling is meager, but it gives the reader a sense of the authority with which the Scriptures are imbued. The saint declares Scripture, in its existence as the enduring revelation of God through Christ, is not the subject of debate as other forms of knowledge might be.
Lest the saint be accused of a crude literalism, however, he emphasizes the Scripture's letter is not described as an end, but an entry, and the Damascene exhorts, “let us not be satisfied with arriving speedily at the gate, but rather let us knock hard, so that the door of the bridal chamber might be opened,” and he reveals that, “the bridal chamber within the gate is the beauty of the thoughts hidden behind the letter.”11 He points out also that, “in sacred Scripture we find many things said symbolically of God as if He had a body, one should know,... we are unable to think or speak of the divine, lofty, and immaterial operations of the Godhead unless we have recourse to images, types, and symbols,”12 and so we must be aware of the different kinds of speech in Scripture. Thus St. John strikes a balance between treating Scripture as literal and as symbolic. Both are integral to how he understands the Scriptures.
The the reality of the text must be emphasized, especially to a modern audience, as it is easy to dismiss Biblical texts as mythology, especially the Old Testament, but to do so would undermine St. John's essential worldview. Florovsky calls this attitude a commitment to the “hieratic realism” of the gospel.13 What is meant by this? It means the radical incarnational aspect of the scriptural text; that the Scriptures are to be taken as a serious revelation of the Truth, what C.S. Lewis has called the “true myth.” We shall see below that this is not, per se, a detailed explanation of the mechanical or structural aspects of the world, but it is a truthful, a real, account of things. To remove this from the equation is to relapse into a form of gnostic Christianity; a disincarnate reality. But the text of Scripture has a “literal,” a real value corresponding to factual truth. As we have seen St. John is categorical that God Himself makes the universe, he plants the garden in Eden, etc. This is “hieratic realism,” the sacred reality in which St. John is writing. It is the impregnation of reality by the acts of God, by His direct intervention which is revealed to us by the Scriptural histories, and most of all by the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. This is a reality suffused with sacred content by the action of God in history. That this historical content exists does not exhaust the Scriptural content, as we have mentioned above. Like the incarnate God-man, the Scripture has also a spiritual, divine content revealed in its symbolic understanding.
We have said the letter is an entry, it is a necessary means to understanding what lies beyond. This deeper meaning lying beneath the outer covering of words does receive primacy of place, just as in Christ the unseen divinity takes precedence to His humanity, so also in the relationship of the literal to the symbolic in the text. This divine content can only be perceived by the pure, or at least those undergoing purification. It is as one's eye becomes clean that one can discern the spirit behind the letter and pass the doorway. Yet how is this discernment to take place? Within the bounds of the Church, where holiness is tasted and the Word and Spirit are actively leading mankind into union with God. In that light we shall discuss the contribution of the Church Fathers and the Sacred Tradition kept intact by them in St. John of Damscus's understanding of knowledge.
1 John
of Damascus. Saint John of Damascus, Writings. Translated by
Frederic H. Chase, Jr. Vol. XXXVII. Washington, D.C.: CUA Press,
1970. pg.
267
2 Ibid
pg. 9
3 Nicene-Constantinopolitan
Creed
4 Louth,
Andrew. St
John Damascene: tradition and originality in Byzantine theology.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. pg. 45
5 John of
Damascus, Writings pg. 6
6 Ibid
pg. 203
7 Ibid pg. 210
8 Ibid
pg. 165
9 Ibid
pg. 230
10 Ibid
pg. 234
11 Ibid pg.
8
12 Ibid pg. 191
13 Florovsky,
Fr. Georges Vasilievich. The Byzantine Fathers of the Sixth to
Eighth Century. Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987. ch. 7
No comments:
Post a Comment