Justified True Belief

(●) The last of the Greek fathers: a civil servant’s son in Muslim Damascus who became a desert monk and gathered seven centuries of Christian thinking into one book. + Most of the fathers of the church lived inside the Roman world and wrote with an emperor somewhere over their shoulder. John did not. He was born in Damascus about forty years after the city surrendered to the armies of Islam, into an Arabic-speaking Christian family that kept the tax records for the new Muslim rulers, and he spent the second half of his life in a monastery in the Judean desert, well outside the reach of Constantinople. That accident of geography turned out to matter enormously. When the Byzantine emperor Leo III began tearing down the church’s painted images in the 720s, the one theologian who could answer him at full volume without being arrested was the one living under a caliph. He is called the last of the Greek fathers because he closed an era rather than opened one. His great book, the Fount of Knowledge, does not argue for a new position; it gathers the settled Greek Christian tradition, from Athanasius and the Cappadocians through Maximus, and lays it out in order, with the philosophy a reader needs put first, like a glossary at the front of a manual. In the preface he promised to say nothing of his own. That modesty is exactly why the book travelled: four centuries later, translated into Latin, it became the nearest thing the medieval West had to a textbook of Greek theology, and Thomas Aquinas cites “Damascene” on page after page. Here is the fact a reader will remember. In 754 a council of three hundred and thirty-eight bishops, meeting at Hieria under the emperor Constantine V, cursed him by name, using the Arabic family name Mansur to brand him a Saracen sympathizer. He had been dead about five years and buried in a cliff-side monastery, and the empire could not reach him alive or dead. Thirty-three years later a different council, at Nicaea, reversed the verdict.

(●) c. 675 AD: Born in Damascus into a Christian family that had kept the city’s accounts straight through its conquest. + Damascus fell to the Muslim armies in 635 AD, and by the terms of its surrender the Christians of the city kept their churches and, for a while, their jobs. Someone had to know where the money was. John’s grandfather, Mansur ibn Sarjun, was the Byzantine official who handled the city’s finances, and the later chroniclers credit him with a hand in the surrender itself; his father, Sarjun ibn Mansur, ran the fiscal administration of Syria for the Umayyad caliphs for decades, until about the year 700. The Umayyads were the dynasty that ruled the young Muslim empire from Damascus itself, so this was no provincial post at the edge of things. It was the treasury of the capital. The Arabic names are the family’s own, and John’s was Yuhanna ibn Mansur ibn Sarjun. No other father of the church came out of a family that went on keeping the books for the men who had conquered it. His birth is usually put at about 675 or 676 AD, on the strength of later biographies rather than any document of his own lifetime, so every date in his early life is an estimate. What is not in doubt is the world he woke up in. Syria in the 680s was still overwhelmingly Christian in population and Greek in its paperwork, ruled by a Muslim dynasty that had not yet decided how much of the old order to keep. A boy in that house learned Greek for the church and the schoolroom, Arabic for the street and the office, and learned early that a Christian could hold a good position under a ruler who denied the Trinity outright.

(●) c. 690 AD: He was educated by a captive, if the story the later biographies tell is true. + The Lives of John written centuries after his death, first in Arabic and then in Greek, tell a story his contemporaries never recorded. His father, they say, went down to the slave market where prisoners taken at sea were being sold, and found among them a monk from Sicily named Cosmas, weeping. Asked why, Cosmas answered that he grieved not for himself but because he would die with all his learning still inside him and no one taught. Sarjun bought him, freed him, and set him to teach his son and an orphaned boy the family had taken in, also called Cosmas. Under him the two learned grammar, music, astronomy and theology, and both grew up to write hymns the Eastern churches still sing. Whether the scene happened as told, nobody can say; it belongs to the kind of edifying biography that likes a good market-place miracle. But something in it fits the man. John writes like someone drilled in the Greek philosophical vocabulary until it was second nature, and his first instinct, whenever an argument gets hard, is to stop and define a term. The other Cosmas is solid history: he became bishop of Maiuma, near Gaza, and John dedicated his greatest book to him.

(●) c. 700 – 706 AD: The caliphate switched its records to Arabic, and he left public life for a monastery in the Judean desert. + The caliph Abd al-Malik decided that the empire of Islam should keep its books in Arabic rather than Greek, and with that decision the usefulness of families like John’s came to an end. His father was dismissed around 700, and his son al-Walid carried the policy further. Whether John himself held office is one of the genuinely open questions about him: the later Lives say he inherited his father’s post and served the caliph directly, and no Umayyad document survives to confirm or deny it. What everyone agrees is that at some point in these years, plausibly around 706, he left Damascus for good. He went to Mar Saba, the monastery Sabas had founded in 483 AD in the gorge of the Kidron southeast of Jerusalem: a stack of cells and chapels cut into the face of a cliff above a dry riverbed, eight or nine miles east of Bethlehem and a world away from a treasury office. Monks have lived there almost without a break from that day to this. He was ordained a priest, by tradition at the hands of John V, the patriarch of Jerusalem, and the date sometimes given for it, 735 AD, comes from the same late sources and should be held loosely. One consequence of the move was invisible at the time and decisive later. Mar Saba lay in territory ruled from Damascus, not Constantinople. When the emperor began to make theological demands, John was a subject of somebody else.

(●) 726 AD: Leo III turned against the church’s painted images, and John answered him from outside the empire. + The emperor Leo III had saved Constantinople from an Arab siege, and he had a theory about why God had let matters get so desperate in the first place. Around 726 AD he moved against the icons, the painted images of Christ and the saints that filled Byzantine churches and homes, and by about 730 he had issued a formal edict against venerating them. Venerating an image, in the practice he was attacking, meant bowing to it, kissing it, setting a lamp or a candle before it: the ordinary gestures of respect a Greek-speaking Christian would also have made to a bishop or to the emperor’s portrait. The campaign took its name from what it did to the pictures themselves. Iconoclasm is Greek for image-breaking, and the men who carried it out are known as the iconoclasts. Later Byzantine chroniclers report that an icon of Christ over the Chalke gate of the imperial palace was taken down and that a crowd rioted; no writer of Leo’s own generation mentions the scene, and historians now hold it loosely. The emperor’s case was not silly, and it came in two parts. The second commandment forbids carved images and likenesses (Exodus 20:4), which is as plain a prohibition as a reader could ask for. And the Israelites at Horeb saw no form when God spoke to them, which the text itself presses on them as a warning (Deuteronomy 4:15). Behind both lay the sharp new challenge of Islam, whose mosques had no pictures at all and whose armies kept winning. John wrote three treatises against the policy, the first of them within a few years of the edict. He wrote them in plain Greek for ordinary Christians rather than for the court, and he loaded the later ones with quotations from earlier fathers so that a reader could see he was defending something old. His central answer was not about art at all. It was about the Incarnation, God the Son taking a real human body and living a human life in it (T3). He could do this because Leo could not touch him. Later Byzantine writers noticed the same thing with irritation, and the iconoclast council of 754 said so in as many words when it anathematized him as a man of evil name and Saracen opinions. To anathematize a man was to curse him formally and pronounce him cut off from the church, which is the heaviest sentence an assembly of bishops could pass and the only one they could reach him with. A monk in a Palestinian cliff face, writing in Greek for readers inside an empire whose police could not cross the border, is one of the odder shapes Christian freedom of speech has taken.

(●) c. 730 – 749 AD: In the desert he wrote the book that summarized the Greek fathers and the hymns still sung at Easter. + The last twenty years or so at Mar Saba were the productive ones. Out of them came the Fount of Knowledge, dedicated to his foster brother Cosmas, bishop of Maiuma, and built in three parts that work like the three stages of an education. First the Philosophical Chapters, a short course in the vocabulary a theological argument needs: what a nature is, what a person is, what it means to call something an accident, which is a feature a thing can lose and still be itself, the way a man is still the same man after his hair goes grey. Then On Heresies, a hundred short chapters cataloguing every wrong turn Christian thought had taken, the first eighty of them condensed from an earlier catalogue by Epiphanius. Then An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, a hundred chapters running from the nature of God through creation, providence, the person of Christ, the sacraments and the resurrection. The last chapter of the middle part is the one historians reach for. It is among the earliest Christian accounts of Islam to survive, and the first to set out Muslim belief at any length, written by a man who had lived his whole life among Muslims (T5). He also wrote hymns, and it is here that his afterlife has been longest and least noticed. A canon, in the Eastern churches, is not a rule or a list of books but a form of hymn: eight or nine linked sections, called odes, each one hung on one of the songs of Scripture and sung straight through in a single service. The canon John composed for Easter night, known in the East as the Golden Canon, is still sung in Orthodox churches every year. In 1862 an English clergyman named John Mason Neale translated its first ode, and the result went into hymnbooks all over the English-speaking world as “The day of resurrection.” A congregation in an English village singing that at Easter is singing words worked out in a cave above a dry riverbed in the Judean desert.

(●) c. 749 AD: He died at Mar Saba, and five years later an imperial council cursed him by name. + The tradition puts his death on 4 December 749 AD at the monastery, and there is nothing to set against it, though the year is not certain. He was buried at Mar Saba, and his tomb was shown to pilgrims there for centuries before his relics were moved. What happened next is the measure of how much his three treatises had cost the imperial party. In 754 AD the emperor Constantine V assembled a council at Hieria, across the water from Constantinople, and three hundred and thirty-eight bishops declared the veneration of images a heresy. They went out of their way to anathematize the dead monk in Palestine, and they did it under his family’s Arabic name, Mansur, which was the point: it let them present the defender of icons as an Arab collaborator rather than a Roman churchman. The insult is a backhanded compliment. Bishops do not curse a man five years in his grave unless his books are still doing damage.

What He Taught

(T1) What God is in himself cannot be known, and everything we truly say of him tells us what he is not or what he does. + Think of what you know about someone you have never met. You may know that they are not tall, not married, and not from around here; you may know that they built the house you live in and pay for your schooling. You could fill a page and still not be able to say what it is like to be that person. John begins his theology exactly there, and he is unusually blunt about it: the existence of God is plain, and the essence of God is not available to us at all. This way of speaking has a name. Theologians call it apophatic theology, or the negative way: saying what God is not, because our words are all borrowed from created things and none of them fits him without stretching. God is not a body, not made, not changeable, not bounded by space. John had learned the method from Gregory of Nazianzus and from the writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius, an unknown author of around the year 500 who sent his books out under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian who believed when Paul preached at the Areopagus (Acts 17:34). The borrowed name is why later scholars attached the “Pseudo” to him. John pushes the method hard. Even when we do say something positive, calling God good or wise or just, we are describing how he stands toward us rather than reporting his nature. Two things keep this from collapsing into a shrug. The first is that John holds the knowledge of God’s existence to be planted in everyone by nature, and creation itself to proclaim him, so that ignorance of the divine essence is not ignorance that there is a God. The second is revelation. God said things, and those things can be received and held. The limit is on our reach, not on his speech, which is why a man who insists that God is incomprehensible could then write a hundred orderly chapters about him.

(Q) "God then is infinite and incomprehensible and all that is comprehensible about Him is His infinity and incomprehensibility." + Source: An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book I, chapter 4 (S. D. F. Salmond translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 9). The chapter is headed “Concerning the nature of Deity: that it is incomprehensible,” and it comes immediately after the chapter arguing that there is a God, which is the order John wants: first that he is, then that what he is lies beyond us. The sentence that follows in the same paragraph draws the practical conclusion, that calling God good or just or wise tells us the qualities of his nature and not the nature itself (T1).

(T2) The three persons of God live inside one another, so the one God is not a committee of three. + Peter and Paul share a nature. They are both human, both rational, both mortal, and if you want to say what they have in common you have to think about it rather than look at it, because the two of them are standing in different places, doing different things, on different days. That is how sharing a nature works everywhere in the created world: the common thing is real but it is worked out by the mind, while the separateness is what you actually see. John’s claim is that with God the two halves trade places. With Peter and Paul, the separateness is what you see and the shared nature is what you have to work out. With the Father, the Son and the Spirit it runs the other way: the oneness is the plain fact, and it is the distinction between the three that thought has to keep hold of, because they are not standing in different places at all. Each is wholly in the others. He is drawing on a word the Greek fathers had been reaching for, perichoresis, which means something like mutual indwelling or interpenetration: not three beings side by side, and not one being wearing three masks, but three who each contain and are contained by the others without any mixing or blurring. His authority for it is the Lord’s own words, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:11). His picture for it is worth keeping. Imagine three lamps in one small room. There are genuinely three flames, and you could put out one and leave two burning; yet there is one light in the room, and no line on the wall marks where the light of the first lamp stops and the second begins. John writes of three suns cleaving to each other and giving out one conjoined light. The image is not a proof, and he knows it is not; it is a way of holding two things at once that a bare formula makes impossible to hold.

(Q) "The subsistences dwell and are established firmly in one another. For they are inseparable and cannot part from one another, but keep to their separate courses within one another, without coalescing or mingling, but cleaving to each other." + Source: An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book I, chapter 14 (S. D. F. Salmond translation). “Subsistence” is Salmond’s rendering of the Greek hypostasis, the word English versions of the creeds usually give as “person.” John is listing the properties of the divine nature, and this is the one that holds the rest together: the three are not merely alike but indwell each other, which is why he can add two sentences later that there is one and the same motion of all three (T2).

(T3) God cannot be painted, but God became a man who could be seen, and that changed what a painter is allowed to do. + Start with what John concedes, because he concedes more than his opponents expected. Nobody can make a likeness of the invisible, bodiless, uncircumscribed God, he says, and to try is folly and impiety. Uncircumscribed is his word for it, and it means what it sounds like: no line can be drawn around God, because there is no edge of him to draw it at. He agrees that Israel was allowed no image of God at all, and he agrees about the reason: at Sinai the people heard a voice and saw no shape, so any shape they carved would have been a lie about God. On the second commandment as it stood, he thinks the iconoclasts are reading it correctly. His whole argument is that something happened afterwards. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) is not a decoration on the doctrine of God for John; it is the hinge of the case. If God has taken a real human body, with a face that could be recognized across a courtyard, then a painter who paints that face is not inventing a likeness of the invisible. He is recording something that was seen. To refuse on principle to depict Christ, John argues, is to flinch at the very thing that makes the gospel good news: that God did not stay at a distance from matter but entered it. From there he turns on the assumption underneath the emperor’s policy, that physical stuff is too low to carry holy things. Watch what he does with it. Wood was holy at Calvary, cut from a tree like any other tree. A rock held the body of the Lord. The book of the Gospels is ink and skin, and Christians kiss it. The bread on the table is flour. Either treat all of that as beneath God, he says, or admit that God has been using matter to save people all along and stop making an exception for paint. Where does this leave Christians who do not keep icons? John’s reasoning about the Incarnation is common Christian property, and Protestants who reject images in worship have argued the same premise against the same targets, that the Word taking flesh dignifies the material world rather than despising it. The disagreement begins one step further on, at what may be done with the picture once it has been painted, and Christendom has never closed it.

(Q) "Of old, God the incorporeal and uncircumscribed was never depicted. Now, however, when God is seen clothed in flesh, and conversing with men, I make an image of the God whom I see. 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." + Source: Apologia against Those who Decry Holy Images, first treatise, section 16 (Mary H. Allies translation, 1898). The passage is the pivot of the first treatise, and it comes at the end of a long walk through the furnishings of the tabernacle: the ark, the staff, the mercy seat, the carved cherubim God himself commanded. John’s point in listing them is that the law which forbade images of God also ordered a great many images to be made, so the ban cannot have been a ban on the use of matter in worship. Then comes the turn quoted here, and the sentence immediately after it draws the line he never crosses: he venerates matter, he says, but not as God (T3, T4).

(T4) The honour paid to an image passes to the person it pictures, and that honour is not the worship owed to God. + A soldier salutes a flag. A widow keeps a photograph on the mantelpiece and touches it on the anniversary. Neither of them thinks the cloth or the paper is what they love, and if you accused them of worshipping a photograph they would think you had misunderstood something obvious. John’s second line of argument is that ordinary people already know how images work, and that the Greek language of his day had the words to say so. He builds it on a distinction. Latreia is the Greek word for the service and adoration that belongs to God alone, the worship it is idolatry to give to anything else. Proskynesis is a much wider word, meaning a bow or a prostration, and Greek-speaking readers of Scripture kept meeting it in places where nobody thought God was involved: Abraham bowing to the Hittites when he bought a burial cave, Jacob bowing to Esau, Joshua falling before an angel. Honour paid to a superior, John says, is not the same act as the adoration paid to the Creator, and it never was, whatever single English word we use for both. The second half of the argument he takes from Basil of Caesarea, in a formula the Second Council of Nicaea would later make its own: the honour given to the image passes over to the one imaged. Reverence stops nowhere on the wooden panel. It travels through it to Christ, as a salute travels through cloth to a country. His opponents were not without an answer, and their answer was that a line drawn in a dictionary is easier to keep in a treatise than in a village church. That is a fair complaint rather than a cheap one, and it is the complaint that has kept Christians divided about images from his century to ours.

(Q) "The worship of latreia is one thing, and the worship which is given to merit another." + Source: Apologia against Those who Decry Holy Images, first treatise, section 8 (Mary H. Allies translation, 1898). Allies keeps the Greek word latreia untranslated in her English, because the whole difficulty is that English has one word, worship, where John’s Greek has several. The sentence closes his list of Old Testament people who bowed to other people without anyone calling it idolatry, Abraham to the sons of Emmor, Jacob to Esau, Joshua and Daniel to an angel, and the next section turns to what an image actually is (T4).

(T5) The new faith of the Arabs was not a new religion but an old Christian error retold. + The last chapter of On Heresies is a short piece of work with a long shadow: among the earliest Christian accounts of Islam to survive, and the first to set out its teaching at any length, written by a man who had grown up speaking Arabic under Muslim rule, in the city where the caliph pulled down the church of St John the Baptist to raise his great mosque. The striking thing is where he files it. He puts it at the very end of his catalogue of heresies, after the Christian deviations of the centuries just past, and he explains it as one of them rather than as a religion arriving from outside. His explanation for it runs like this. Muhammad, he says, came across the Old and New Testaments, fell in with a monk of Arian views, and put together a teaching of his own from what he had gathered. Arianism was the fourth-century movement that held the Son to be the highest of creatures rather than God, and to John a religion that honoured Jesus as a prophet while denying his divinity looked like Arianism arriving again with new vocabulary. He is honest enough to record what Muslims actually held rather than a caricature of it: that God is one and has no son, that Jesus was born of the virgin Mary and was a prophet, that he was neither crucified nor divine. He names chapters of the Quran, records his own arguments with Muslim neighbours about how a book can be shown to come from God, and answers the charge that Christians are idolaters for venerating the cross. Two things are worth saying about the chapter at once, and they have to be held together. It is a genuine achievement of observation, and for centuries afterwards no Greek writer matched it for first-hand knowledge. It is also polemic, which is to say a piece written to attack and to warn rather than to inquire, aimed at Christians under pressure rather than at the Muslims it describes. Parts of it are second-hand, and parts of it are simply wrong. Those failures are his own work and not some later writer’s misuse of him, so an honest account of him has to name them.

(Q) "There is also the superstition of the Ishmaelites which to this day prevails ..." + Source: On Heresies, the chapter on the Ishmaelites, numbered 101 by Chase and 100 in Kotter’s critical edition of the Greek (Frederic H. Chase translation, Fathers of the Church volume 37, 1958). The opening words of the chapter. “Ishmaelites” is John’s usual term for the Arabs, from Ishmael the son of Abraham and Hagar, and the sentence goes on to call the movement a forerunner of the Antichrist, which tells a reader at once that this is a warning written for Christians under pressure rather than a neutral description. The rest of the chapter is calmer than its first line, and considerably better informed (T5).

(Q) "All things, therefore, that have been delivered to us by Law and Prophets and Apostles and Evangelists we receive, and know, and honour, seeking for nothing beyond these." + Source: An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Book I, chapter 1 (S. D. F. Salmond translation). It stands near the top of the opening chapter of his theology, and it is also the best short account of what he thought he was for. In the preface to the Fount of Knowledge he had promised to say nothing of his own but to gather what the best teachers had already worked out. A writer who set out to add nothing is an odd candidate for lasting influence. He became one anyway, and largely because of that promise rather than in spite of it: a reader in Paris in 1250 who wanted to know what the Greek fathers had settled could not go and ask them, and John had already written it down.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) A council cursed him five years after his death, and a later one reversed the verdict and kept his argument. + The council of Hieria in 754 AD was as official as an assembly could be. The emperor Constantine V called it, three hundred and thirty-eight bishops sat in it, and it declared the making and honouring of icons a heresy. It also singled out the dead Palestinian monk for anathema under his family’s Arabic name, Mansur, cursing him as a man of evil name and Saracen opinions, an insulter of Christ and a conspirator against the empire. No patriarch of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch or Jerusalem took part, and those four sees, together with Constantinople, were the senior churches of the Christian world. Their absence is precisely the ground on which the council’s authority was later denied. In 787 AD the empress Irene convened a council at Nicaea, the town where the church had first met in council four and a half centuries earlier. It restored the veneration of images, and it did so along the lines John had laid down: the distinction between the adoration due to God alone and the honour paid to what represents him, and Basil’s principle that honour given to an image passes to its prototype, meaning the person the picture is a picture of. Nicaea II is received as the seventh ecumenical council by the Orthodox and by Rome, an ecumenical council being one whose decisions the whole church, and not merely one region of it, acknowledges as binding. Its decree was the end of the matter in the East after one further iconoclast revival was put down in 843. There is a lesson in the sequence about where a churchman’s security comes from. The bishops who condemned John held every office and every legal instrument; he held a cell in a cliff. Thirty-three years on, his sentences were in the council’s decree and their council was remembered as a false one.

(†) The Latin West turned his summary into the textbook it did not have. + For four hundred years almost nobody in western Europe could read him, because almost nobody in western Europe could read Greek. Then, in 1153 or 1154, a Pisan judge and diplomat named Burgundio, who knew both languages from his years in Constantinople, translated An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith into Latin at the request of Pope Eugene III. The timing could hardly have been better. Peter Lombard was at that moment assembling the Sentences, a collection of theological questions answered out of the fathers, and it became the book every European theology student would work through for the next four hundred years. Damascene went into it. After that the citations never stopped. Thomas Aquinas quotes him by that one name, Damascene, hundreds of times across his works, and often at load-bearing moments: the definition of prayer as the raising of the mind to God, the vocabulary for discussing whether Christ had a human will, the standard formulas about what can and cannot be said of the divine nature. What the West took from him was rarely a novel thesis, because he had none to offer. It was reliable access to the settled Greek tradition in an order a student could follow, which for a scholastic, a theologian trained in the medieval schools to build a case by setting objection against objection, was worth more than novelty. Rome named him a Doctor of the Church in 1890, a title reserved for writers whose teaching the church commends to everyone rather than to specialists. The honour was a formality by then; he had been functioning as one since the twelfth century.

(†) Christians have never agreed about how much his argument from the Incarnation proves. + This is the point where Christendom divides, and it divided long before the Reformation gave the quarrel its modern shape. Serious Christians have stood on both sides of it for twelve hundred years, which is reason enough to set out each case at its full strength and let a reader weigh them. - His case. God has taken a body that was seen and touched, so a painted likeness of that body is a record rather than an invention (John 1:14). Honour paid to the likeness travels to the person, as it does with a photograph or a flag. Scripture itself shows people bowing to what is not God without idolatry, and Israel’s own sanctuary was full of images God commanded. To rule paint out on principle is to make an exception for matter that the Incarnation has already overruled. - The objection. The second commandment attaches its prohibition to worship, not to art, and it forbids likenesses used in worship without offering the distinction John needs (Exodus 20:4). At Horeb Israel saw no form, and the text says so as a warning (Deuteronomy 4:15–16). Whatever the treatise distinguishes, the objection runs, the practice in a church blurs it, and the honour meant to pass through the panel stops on the panel for a great many ordinary worshippers. - Where John himself leaves it. He is candid at one point, and it deserves noting. Having made his case from the Incarnation, he adds that the veneration of images is an unwritten tradition of the church, like praying toward the east. Those who require an explicit warrant in Scripture for an act of worship have pressed exactly there; those who hold that the apostles handed on practice as well as text answer with Paul’s charge to hold the traditions taught by word or by letter (2 Thessalonians 2:15). Christians who reject images in worship still take his central premise, that the Word made flesh dignifies matter rather than despising it, and use it against the same enemy he used it against: the assumption that the physical world is too low for God to touch.

(†) Where his own record is weakest: the chapter on Islam is polemic, and parts of it are simply wrong. + John had advantages that most later Christian writers on Islam lacked entirely. He spoke Arabic, he had Muslim neighbours, and he had argued with them. Much of what he reports is accurate, and some of it is confirmed nowhere else so early. That makes the failures in the chapter worth naming plainly rather than passing over, because they are his own and not somebody else’s misuse of him. - He reports material he had not checked. Among the Quranic chapters he lists is one on the she-camel of God, from which he draws several arguments; no such chapter exists in the Quran, which brings up the she-camel of the prophet Salih only in a handful of brief passages. He was working from what he had heard rather than from a copy in front of him, and it shows. - He explains Islam by a rumour. The story that Muhammad got his doctrine from an Arian monk was already circulating among Syrian Christians, and John passes it on as the explanation of the whole movement. It is not evidence, and he offers none for it, which leaves the central explanatory claim of the chapter resting on hearsay. - The register is mockery. He opens by calling the movement a forerunner of the Antichrist and closes sections with ridicule. Whatever the value of that in a warning written for a pressed minority, ridicule is not an argument, and a man who could reason as carefully as he does elsewhere had better tools available. A fair reckoning has to hold both halves. He asked the right question, which is whether a book can be shown to come from God and how anyone would know, and he asked it to Muslims directly rather than about them. But a Christian who wants to answer Islam honestly today has to check him against the Quran rather than repeat him, and where he is wrong the right response is to say so.