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

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THE GREEK CHURCH IN THE EIGHTH CENTURY. 41
nature of Christ s will was maintained. Christianity,
as it seemed to him, forms the exact mean betwixt
the too narrow apprehension of the idea of God in
Judaism, and the too broad one of the deification of
nature in paganism and this mean is ; expressed by
the doctrine of the Trinity. The highest end of the
whole creation he supposed to be the intimate union
into which God entered with it
through Christ; when,
without detriment to His immutability, He assumed
human nature into personal union for the purpose of
becoming man
rendering humanity godlike God :
without change of his own essence, and receiving
human nature into union with Himself without its
losing aught that belongs to its peculiar essence. It
was with a view to secure this point, that he attached
so much importance also to the articles
touching the
union of the two natures, in which each retains,
without change,
its own peculiar properties. It is
an instructive comment on the passions that can be
roused by such seemingly abstruse and speculative
doctrines, to note what was the end of the saintly
Maximus," as he is often called. After being banished
to a fortress in Thrace, where he was kept imprisoned
in the hope of a recantation, he was dragged back
again to Constantinople, and there publicly scourged,
his tongue cut out, and his right hand severed from
the wrist in this circumstance again recalling what
is recorded of John of Damascus. He was then
banished once more to the region of the Lazi, the
ancient Colchis, and there died, in 662, from the
injuries he had undergone. Still severer, if possible,
were the sufferings endured in the same cause a few