st. john of damascus (676-749 - Cristo Raul

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SERMONS. 137
light, and has darkness for the guide
of his vision
(c. iv.)-
The more strictly biographical part of the discourse
begins at c. viii., and this chapter may serve as a
specimen of Damascene s style in handling what
need be no more than simple narrative. In a
plain English version it is not, of course, possible
to convey the ornate character of the Greek. After
describing Chrysostom s self-discipline in early youth,
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he proceeds ;
He now goes for instruction to
Meletius, Patriarch of the Church at Antioch, a man
adorned with very many divine graces, whose fame
for holy living and teaching was in every one s
mouth. He received him when now about the age
of eighteen, and became enamoured of the lovely
qualities of his heart. Foreseeing with prophetic eye
the youth s future career, he grounded him in the
doctrines of religion, and gave a serious tone to his
character and manners, and after tracing in him the
fair outlines of truth, thus at length by
the laver of
regeneration portrayed in him the image of Christ,
fairer than the children of men, as shining forth with
the beauty of the Godhead. He was about thirty
years of age, and thus arrived at the perfection both
of his bodily and spiritual stature, when, after being
promoted to the rank of reader and teacher of the
divine oracles, under the impulse of heavenly love he
removed his dwelling to the desert. He sought to
wither up the ever-swelling, ever-fermenting lusts of
the flesh, that the higher nature might not be
enslaved by the lower. For these do both lust, the
one against the other, and the decay of the bodily