St. John of Damascus, doctor of the Church, reposed on this day around 750. As early as August of 636, the Romans suffered a devastating defeat at the River Yarmouk in Syria from a people they previously had considered primitive camel herders. Following the battle, the province of Syria along with its capital Damascus was surrendered to the Rashidun Caliphate. In a few years, Byzantine Armenia fell, followed by Egypt and Palestine. The populations in these areas often welcomed Islamic rule, expecting alleviation from taxation from Constantinople and an end to the imposition of Imperial Orthodoxy. As was the case later in Constantinople following the Ottoman conquest or in Petrograd following the Bolshevik revolution, many former imperial bureaucrats continued in the service “under new management.” St. John’s grandfather preserved his post as head of the taxation department after Damascus was taken over by the Arabs. Saint John (Arabic name Yūḥana ibn Manṣūr ibn Sarjūn) thus came from the first generation to be born under Arab rule, sometime in the mid-late seventh century. He also worked as a tax collector until he withdrew from the world and joined monks in Palestine. The Palestinian monks were at the forefront of the struggles for Orthodox faith as it was expressed at the council in Chalcedon and against the followers of Origen (one of their teachings was that of the pre-existence of the soul). This combative environment may explain why St. John wrote his most famous treatise, the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, not long before his death in 750. In this book, St. John treated Islam not as a distinct religion, but rather as a heretical offshoot of Christianity. It is worth noting that, at this point, the Islamic rulers were not proselytizing among their non-Muslim subjects. They were content with merely collecting taxes and controlling the military. St. John’s deep integration into the Islamic world made him an enemy of the Roman Empire. At the iconoclast council of Hieria in 754, St. John was personally anathematized under his Arabic name of Mansur. Regardless, St. John’s distinction between worship (latreia) and veneration (proskynesis) later became a cornerstone of Orthodox theology of images. The world in which the great teacher of the Orthodox Church lived was very different from the recently homogeneous world of the Roman Empire. As in today’s world, the Orthodox in this new environment had to foster an identity based on partaking in the same theology rather than sharing the same imperial identity. Source: Priest Andrew Louth, “Ioann Damaskin,” Pravoslavnaia Entsiklopedia. | 
