December 4

St. John Damascene, i.e., John of Damascus,

Priest and Doctor of the Church


    John was born in Damascus, in Syria, to a Christian family, in the latter part of the 600s AD. 

     He is of major importance in the history of the Eastern Church, and is one of the great Fathers and Doctors of the entire Church.  


     He lived during the change from the ancient Syrian culture shared by the Eastern Church, to Islamic culture, which was spreading by means of military and political power in the Middle East.  John of Damascus began his career as a Treasurer in the Islamic Caliphate.


     Deeply dissatisfied with that, he entered famous Monastery of St. Sabba near Jerusalem, and became a priest there.

   

     He gathered together, and handed down to us, the teachings of the Eastern Fathers who had preceded him.  So John of Damascus is one of the most trustworthy witnesses to the early Church’s traditions in the east. 

 

     He is known for defending the veneration of icons against Muslims and others who would have destroyed them.  He helped to clarify the distinction between worship (which we give only to God) and veneration (of icons and statues).   


     John is known also for his writings on Christian doctrine, and for his beautiful poetry.  


     He was devoted to Our Lady, especially to her Assumption, on which he preached many homilies.  


     He wrote a well-known Statement of Faith, which later strongly influenced the writings of St. Augustine. 


     John of Damascus died today, December 4, AD 749.  


     We honor him today, and ask him to pray for us.      

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Crisis: Persecuted Christians

      Few know the following about the number of Christians killed just for believing in Jesus.  During the last hundred years, the number exceeds the total of Christians killed in all the previous centuries combined --including the period of the Roman Empire.        Today a Christian is martyred for the faith every eleven minutes somewhere in the world.        A shocking 80% of Christians today live where they suffer some form of persecution--that is, not just being looked at funny or mocked, but jailed, denied employment or schooling, beaten,  home burned, or outright killed--just for naming the name of Jesus. +          +          +      Take India, for example.  Last month Kande Munda, a bricklayer, and his wife Bindu began to receive death threats.  Bindu's mother, not a Christian or part of the same community, came to visit.  Villagers raped her to to threaten Bindu into rejecting the Lord.        Kanda and Bindu discussed fleeing their village.  But on June 7 a m
Read more
  St. John of the Cross      One of the ways that Jesus revealed the meaning of the cross for us was when he said, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me” (Mark 8:34b).  That’s the story of John.  His life was a truly heroic effort to live up to his adopted title: “of the Cross.”       He was ordained a priest in the Carmelite order in 1567 at age 25.  Not long afterward, he met a young nun, another Carmelite, who was named Theresa.  We know her as St. Teresa of Avila.  She was promoting a needed reform in the Carmelite order.  A central part of that effort was her rejection of the then-recent, more lax approach to the Carmelite Rule, and her glad adherence to the original form of the Rule, for it had once been an effective resource in the support of holiness within the Church.  St. Theresa convinced St. John of the Cross to do the same.      Once he’d vowed himself to the original Rule, John put all his efforts into the work of building up
Read more
Image
  St. Anselm of Canterbury, Bishop and Doctor          Today is the memorial of St. Anselm of Canterbury, a Bishop and Doctor of the Church.  He was very much a part of the educational aspect of the Church’s amazing history.   Whatever you might think of our country’s current, corrupt universities, our civilization’s system of higher education grew from monasteries and arch-dioceses, because of Christians’ struggles to understand God—and the universe that he’s created.   An explosion of education began in the late 1000s, as the monasteries and the arch-dioceses founded universities.   The first university was founded at Bologna, Italy, by the archbishop.   Very soon came Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge.   Eighty-one  universities were founded during that 100-year period alone—all by the Church.        During the first half of the 1200s, a then-new method of investigation was created.   It was called Scholasticism.   It is a precursor of our modern scientific method.   Scholasticism was fo
Read more