Sacred Images

By St. John Damascene | Mary H. Allies

“War is toil and trouble,” wrote the poet John Dryden in 1697. Almost a thousand years before, a war in the Byzantine Empire proved no exception to this rule. Yet it was not a war of fire and sword, but of images and words, waged not in the name of domination, but of divine worship. It was the iconomachy—the war of icons—now known as the Iconoclastic Controversy. The Iconoclasts contended, in keeping with the Old Law prohibition of graven images, that depictions of God and his saints had no place in Christian worship; the Iconophiles contested this, distinguishing between worship and veneration to provide a place for sacred imagery in the Christian devotion and liturgy.

Among the Iconophiles, Saint John Damascene was a figure of prime import­ance. In his writings, he asserted that the Incarnation affirms the goodness of creation and bestows on matter the capability, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, of “becoming, through faith, a sign and a sacrament, efficacious in the meeting of man with God.” Translated by Mary H. Allies from the Saint’s Apologetic Treatises Against Those Decrying the Holy Images, and supplemented by three of his sermons on the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Sacred Images is a timeless treatment of a fundamental truth of the Christian faith: that “God saw all that he had made, and found it very good.”

I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake, and deigned to inhabit matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. (Saint John Damascene)

Saint John Damascene (c. 676–749) was the last of the Greek Fathers of the Church. A monk and priest at the monastery of Mar Saba, near Jerusalem, he wrote prolifically on apologetical, liturgical, and theological matters, and composed num­erous homilies. In 1890, Pope Leo XIII proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church.

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Paperback: 164pp.

ISBN: 978-1685954000