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

46 ST. JOHN OF DAMASCUS.
Christ s kingdom on earth must have seemed to
many to be so checked, that the thoughts had no
relief but in the contemplation of the world unseen.
Thus the figurative, spiritualizing tendencies of the
theologian, and the craving for coarse and material
representations of the illiterate, could find their satis
faction together. As the newer Platonism had tried
to sublimate the sensual rites of the old Greek
mythology, so this and
"positive negative mode of
apprehension," 1 this way of conceiving God and
things divine only under images, enabled the teacher
to extract a spiritual meaning from the rude and unartistic
image, or the childish ceremonial, in which
the vulgar delighted.
This may make it less strange
to find that the next
great controversy which agitated the Church, that
with which the name of John of Damascus is so pro
minently associated, was about a subject at first sight
so utterly foreign to the two preceding ones, as the
worship of images. The iconoclastic controversy, as it
is commonly called, was, however, by no means so
disconnected, as might have appeared, from the more
speculative ones already described. It was their
legitimate successor. While the star-gazer moves on
with his eyes intent on the constellations, his feet
fall into the ditch. While the speculative minds
of the Greek Church were thus lost in bewildering
altitudes, the unlearned ones at the other extreme
were fast falling into idolatry.
The term is
hardly too
strong a one. The picture, or the image, which the
1
Cataphatic and Apophatic, to use the actual terms.