Saint John of Damascus
Last of the Church Fathers
Join me today to meet a saint who grew up among Muslims and became the last of the Church Fathers.
Name: Mansur ibn Sarjun, John
Life: c. 660 - c. 750 AD
Status: Saint
Feast: December 4
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Brother Cosmas the monk knew from his studies that not so long ago the world had been stable.
Brother Cosmas had missed that stable period by a couple of hundred years. It had ended when the Western Roman Empire had fallen two centuries ago, and barbarian armies had pushed into Italy. For the last two centuries, the people of Calabria, in the South of Italy, the toe of the Italian boot, had been trying to rebuild. They had done pretty well, all things considered. Calabria had been re-conquered and absorbed into the Eastern Roman Empire, and was ruled directly from Constantinople. Civilization thrived. Monasteries grew. And then, right about when Brother Cosmas had mastered his studies and was ready to become a teacher in his own right, a new power had arrived, and everything became unstable again.
For a thousand years, one of the basic certainties of life in the ancient world was the divide between the civilizations of the East, very roughly on one side of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, and the West, on the other side. This certainty had outlasted most of the empires who represented East and West. In the East had been the Persians, who became Parthians, Sassanids, and Persians again. In the West had been Greece, Macedonia, and Rome. In brother Cosmas’ time, armies began coming from the area between the two empires, what had always been borderlands. And they were coming quickly.
In the fateful year of 632, when Brother Cosmas was probably a boy, the ancient division of the world into East and West had begun to break down. The Eastern Romans and the Persians had fought - as they so often did. At the moment of maximum exhaustion, a man named Mohammed had died in the East of modern Saudi Arabia. His death had unleashed a wave of violence and conquest that rolled outward, East and West.
Two years after the death of Mohammed, the banners of Islam flew over the city of Damascus, in the Southwest of modern Syria. The city had changed hand recently, being conquered by the Persians, then reconquered by the Eastern Roman Empire. The process was made easier by the skillful negotiations of the Lord Treasurer of the city, the Christian Mansur ibn Sarjun. He was a Syrian whose name showed the strange changing of the times: Mansur, son of Sergius. The Muslim invaders were generally happy to have locals like Mansur continue to run the administration of government. It was part of what allowed their conquest to take place as quickly as it did.
By 649, Islam had gobbled up the island of Cyprus, and was moving along the coast of North Africa. By 651, the Persian empire had been swallowed up completely. By 654, Rhodes was gone. Crete was under attack, as was Sicily, and the Muslims ravaged the coasts of Italy. And it was probably during these turbulent years that Muslim slavers raided the coast of Calabria, where they found Brother Cosmas, too old to fight or flee. He was bundled aboard a slave ship, headed East. Final destination: Damascus.
Damascus had always been an important city, but not long ago, as Brother Cosmas learned, it had become the capital of the new dynasty that we remember as the Umayyad Caliphate. There were still Christians in the city - men like Sarjun, the son of Mansur, who had by now taken over his father’s position as Lord Treasurer of the city.
By the time the slaves arrived in Damascus, many of the slaves had come to rely on Brother Cosmas. The old man prayed with them and encouraged them to be confident. He told them not to be afraid. That was why it came as a shock to everyone, slaves and slavers alike, when Cosmas seemed to be afraid to die. Cosmas wasn’t finding any buyers - no one wanted an old monk - and the slavers had been talking about just killing him. Now they tauntingly asked if he, who had encouraged others, was afraid of death himself. Our accounts make Cosmas sound almost amused at the question. No, he explained, he wasn’t afraid to die. He was sad, sad that he had spent his whole life learning, and now he would die without ever having a student. And as it happened, at that moment a rich man was walking by the slave market and heard what was being said: Sarjun ibn Mansur, the Lord Treasurer.
Sarjun had been looking for a teacher for his unusually bright son, whom Sarjun had named after his own father, Mansur. Young Mansur was growing up among the greatest men of the Caliphate - his playmate was a future Caliph. But Christian teachers were in increasingly short supply. Now, Sarjun realized that Brother Cosmas might be the man for the job. He bought the monk and offered him freedom on condition that he would stay in the household for as long as it took to oversee the education of young Mansur.
And so it was that, in distant Damascus, where he had been brought as a slave, Brother Cosmas finally found his first student.
Mansur proved to be an excellent student. He absorbed literature, philosophy, history, theology, and poetry. He began to write poetry himself. Eventually, when Mansur was a man, Cosmas told the family that he had nothing left to teach. The old monk went out into the deserts of Palestine. There were monks there, monks who had ferociously clung to orthodoxy in the controversies of the past. Brother Cosmas would live out his life among them.
As for Mansur, he inherited his father’s position as Lord Treasurer of Damascus. He did a good job, keeping the confidence of the Caliph. But then something happened, something that made Mansur reconsider his life and leave the position that his family had held for three generations. The story of what took place is part of the tradition of Mansur’s life.
It all began, we read, because Brother Cosmas had educated Mansur a little bit too well. Mansur looked at the great theological debates of his day and thought that the most important arguments were not being made. He could do better.
The Eastern Roman Empire was arguing about icons. Was it right to venerate God and the saints using images and statues? Or were these statues what God had forbidden when He forbids the making of graven images?
In past times, when Christians had lived among pagans, no one had asked this question. Everyone knew that a statue or image became an idol through a ritual that invited a god to use the image or statue as a body. If no one performed this ritual, an image was just an image. But now Christians were no longer arguing with pagans. They were getting hit with arguments from Muslims, who did oppose the making of images, and Christians did not know how to defend themselves.
In Constantinople, the anti-icon faction - the iconoclasts - grew in power, until they managed to recruit an emperor, Leo III. Leo had used his power to ban the veneration of icons.
Mansur thought people were missing the point. For one thing, they weren’t reading on in Exodus, where shortly after the prohibition on graven images, God tells Moses to make a serpent out of brass, and to adorn the Ark of the Covenant with images. These are images, but not idols. Mansur also wasn’t impressed by critiques from Muslims. If Christians were going to be accused of worshipping icons, Mansur pointed out that by the same token Muslims could be accused of worshipping the Kabah, the big black building in Mecca. But instead of arguing over who was an idolater, Mansur drew on his philosophical training to show that we didn’t have to have this silly debate in the first place.
Mansur borrowed an insight from a previous saint to make the point: the Emperor Leo III’s face was stamped on the coins of the empire. Did anyone think that Leo himself was on the coin? Did anyone have trouble telling the difference between the emperor and a coin? And if not, if that seemed silly, why stir up all this confusion about images in the case of Christ and the Saints? Mansur summed up his position:
I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake, and deigned to inhabit matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. (Mary Allies translation)
Now the Emperor Leo III, so the story goes, was not pleased when he realized that Mansur had entered the debate. At first there was little the emperor could do to a lord from another empire - but then the imperial spies had an idea. They forged a letter to Leo, supposedly from Mansur, suggesting that the fortifications of Damascus were weak and the time was right for an attack. Then the spies made sure the letter came into the hands of the Caliph.
Mansur was called before the Caliph. The forgery was good, and he admitted that it looked like his handwriting. All he could do was say that he was loyal, and point to his record of loyal service. Loyalty was not enough, and the Caliph responded by ordering that Mansur’s writing hand be chopped off.
Mansur returned to his house in agony and humiliation. He poured out his pain in prayer before an icon of Our Lady. When he finally got to sleep that night, he dreamed about her, and dreamed that she had healed his hand. In the morning, Mansur discovered that his hand had been restored.
Tradition has it that the Caliph, upon seeing the miracle, humbly apologized to his Lord Treasurer. At first, Mansur responded as a wealthy Christian lord might. He accepted the apology, and used his wealth to finance the writing of a grand icon, made of precious metals and stones and showing Our Lady with Christ on her lap. Near the bottom left of the picture, Mansur commissioned an image of the miracle that had started everything: his right hand in silver, gathering up the robes at the feet of the infant Christ. Today, the icon is one of the treasures of Mount Athos.
Time passed. Mansur must have wondered whether the strange miracle in his life had been about nothing more than a healing. Was it really God’s plan for Mansur to live as a treasurer in the Umayyad Caliphate? And an alternative came to mind. It was the last lesson of his old teacher, Brother Cosmas, who had left Damascus behind, to find the monks of Palestine. As Mansur thought about what his old teacher had done, he realized he was feeling the same vocation. Mansur said his farewells at the court in Damascus, gave away what he had, and followed the path of Brother Cosmas out toward Jerusalem.
At the monastery, Mansur had to choose a new name. He became Brother John, and entered the monastery as a novice.
Early on, a senior monk gave Brother John a task. The monks survived in part by weaving and selling baskets. Brother John was told to take the baskets to market in far away Damascus. The old monk told him the price he was going to charge. It was ridiculously high.
It was a test - a test of humility. The older monk knew that it was no easy thing for a great lord to become a humble novice. John was an expert in money, in knowing what a thing was worth. Would he argue or point out the impossibility of selling the baskets at this price? In fact, John simply took the baskets to market in Damascus, and sat through the day as people laughed at the one-time lord who apparently wanted to get rich selling baskets. Finally, someone who had once been John’s servant felt pity, and bought the baskets, and John returned to the monastery. The old monk nodded, and the lessons continued.
In time, John ceased to be a novice. He became a monk, and a priest. The old monk had stopped John from writing poetry, but relented when he had a vision of Our Lady saying that she wanted John to write. The monks of Palestine had always been known for their orthodoxy. Now John began to gather their traditions, their insights, and weave them together with scripture and the great Christian thinkers of the past in statements of orthodoxy, and in hymns and Christian poetry.
John was also a philosopher. His careful method is on full display in one of his books, the Fountain of Wisdom, in which he offers a simple, readable survey of philosophy. What is philosophy, he begins by asking? Many people have said many things about it. Philosophy is the study of nature. It is the art of learning to die. Philosophy teaches a man theosis, the drawing near to God. Philosophy is the place where other arts and sciences sort out their differences, and organize themselves in order of priority. But all of these definitions are secondary to the old, old definition, the definition given by Pythagoras when he named the art a thousand years before: philosophy is the love of wisdom. And to this John adds:
Now again philosophy is the love of wisdom. But true wisdom is God. And so the love of God is true philosophy. (My translation)
If the Emperor Leo III had hoped to shut John up, his plan had backfired completely. In a time of uncertainty, John became one of the voices spelling out a careful, considered orthodoxy, using history and argument to drive back the heresies of his time. In a large work on heresies, John tackled a question that many Christians weren’t sure how to think about: Islam. He argued that Islam should be understood as another Christian heresy, a misguided attempt by Mohammed to make sense of the theories of a heretical Christian monk.
Even in his time, John of Damascus, the voice from the desert, was controversial. He kept writing. From an occupied land, as the Umayyad Caliphate began to be more repressive and his colleagues and friends were martyred, John fiercely defended Christian orthodoxy. Even after his death, the wise men of the Church would grapple with his legacy. As the iconoclast controversy raged, John of Damascus would be condemned and denounced, only for the condemners and denouncers to be forgotten as Christian turned back to John of Damascus, until in time he would be recognized for what he was: the last in that line of great men who articulated what we believe, the last of the Church Fathers.
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