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

"
De
"
THE FONS SCIENTLE." 85
may seem to go to the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation,
it is proper to add that, in its strict and
technical sense, that doctrine could not be deduced
from it.
So much space has been given to this important
chapter of the
Fide," that what remains must be
briefly despatched. After a section in honour of the
Virgin Mary, vindicating her right to the title of
Theotokos, or Mother of God, the author passes on to
a favourite subject with him, the worship of images
(c. Ixxxix). He meets the argument drawn from the
absence of any direction for such worship in the Old
Testament, by urging that it was the incarnation, the
presence of God in visible form among men, that
gave a motive and sanction for the practice. To
make the life and actions of Jesus and his followers
more intelligible to the ignorant, the Fathers of the
Church, 1 he says, resolved to set them forth by this
means, for the easier instruction of such as could not
read. At the same time, John
is careful to add that
the honour we pay to images of the saints, or of the
Holy Mother, or to the crucifix, is
only an expression
of the reverence we really feel for what they represent.
The next chapter (c. xc.) is on Holy Scripture. The
books of the Old Testament he makes to coincide
:
in number with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet
that is to say, they amount to twenty-two, of which
five
are double ones, thus making twenty-seven in all,
1
Lequien, in his note on the passage,
admits that for the
first three centuries such a use of images (so far at least as any
adoration of them went) was unknown ;
and that in fact it did
not begin to develope itself until the fifth century.