St. John of Damascus E-Book

J. H. Lupton

• Herausgeber: Charles River Editors
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 253

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The Pergamum Collection publishes books history has long forgotten. We transcribe books by hand that are now hard to find and out of print.

Das E-Book St. John of Damascus wird angeboten von Charles River Editors und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:
damascene; prayer; sermon; writing; orthodox; free; chrysostom

Leseprobe

PREFACE.

The fact that this little volume is one of a series on a settled plan, and with well-defined limits, may obviate in some measure the charge of presumption to which the author would otherwise have been liable. For to portray, in anything like due proportion, such an historical character as John of Damascus, would require a far larger canvas and a hand of more varied powers. It is not indeed too much to say that, for any adequate representation of such a character, a threefold ability would be needful. For besides his position as a theologian of the Eastern Church, we have to regard him as closely connected with the rise of Mahometanism; and, further still, as a Christian poet, whose hymns are sung by myriads at this very day. But while feeling how incomplete, on that account, such an essay as the present one must of necessity be, the author has endeavoured to make it of some little value, as the result of an attentive study of the writings of St. John Damascene.

In the spelling of Arabic or Mahometan names, no attempt at uniformity has been made. Hardly any two writers agree in this respect; and hence, when a quotation has been made from any authority on the subject, the form there found has been retained. This may explain some apparent inconsistencies.

Besides the special acknowledgments recorded in the notes, mention should here be made of the advantage gained from two works, the Hymns of the Eastern Church, by the late Dr. Neale, and the articles in La Belgique (1861) on S. Jean Damascène, by M. Félix Nève. The excellent monograph of Dr. Joseph Langen, Johannes von Damaskus (1879), did not come into the author’s hands till the greater part of his own work was completed; but a few remarks or corrections due to it have been inserted. It was only at the last moment also that he learnt that the Funeral Hymn of St. John of Damascus, of which a rendering is given at p. 150, had been already translated by Dr. Littledale, and published in the People’s Hymnal. Had he been aware of this in time, he would gladly have availed himself of the abler version.

St. Paul’s School,

November 25th, 1881.

ST. JOHN OF DAMASCUS.

CHAPTER I.DAMASCUS.

In giving an account of any eminent man, it is natural to bestow some attention on the place from which he sprang. Just as our knowledge of some scarce plant could not be thought complete if we had no information about the soil in which it grew, so we can seldom understand fully the life and character of a great man without studying the surroundings amidst which he was born. But the strength and importance of this connecting link vary very considerably in different cases. The history of a Cyril is closely interwoven with that of Alexandria in his time; that of Gregory with Nazianzus; that of our own Bede with Jarrow and Monkwearmouth. But in the case of John of Damascus, while his native city has given him the name by which he is always distinguished, its influence upon his character and the ultimate course of his life does not seem to have been important. In his extant writings he makes little or no allusion to it. Events which happened there were no doubt the immediate cause of a great and decisive change in his career. But that change—the change from the excitement of state affairs to the seclusion of a monastery—was probably due to the bent of his own mind, and would have equally taken place amid other surroundings. It is with the Convent of St. Sabas, or with Jerusalem, that we associate the really prolific period of his life. When there, Damascus was to him but one spot in that outer world which he had forsaken. From that time forward we fail to discern that it had any special interest for him.

Still, as being after all the place in which he first drew breath, Damascus cannot fail to have a strong interest for anyone studying the life of this distinguished scion of it. And even apart from this, Damascus has claims on our regard such as few other cities possess. For it is probably the most ancient city now standing in the world. It was existing in the days of Abraham, whose steward Eliezer was a native of it. Josephus ascribes its foundation to Uz, a grandson of Shem. Its chequered fortune during the reigns of the kings of Israel is familiar to us from the Bible story. While Rome was as yet scarcely founded, one long term of the history of Damascus was being brought to a close by its capture by Tiglath-Pileser, when its leading inhabitants were carried away captives to Kir. For a long period after this, partly from its being but an appanage of the Assyrian empire, and partly from the subsequent rise of the rival city of Antioch, it remained in comparative obscurity. A passing compliment to its beauty and importance by Strabo, a notice of the alabaster found there by Pliny, and the somewhat strange epithet of “windy” applied to it by Lucan, are the chief allusions to be met with in classical authors. When Pompey overran Syria, it was brought under Roman sway. In the time of St. Paul it was subject to the rule of the King of Petra, having lately been transferred to that government by Caligula. To the Apostle Paul no spot could be fraught with associations of intenser interest than Damascus. Near its walls was the scene of that heavenly vision which changed the whole life of the man who changed the world. No perils that he afterwards went through seem to have made a deeper impression on his mind than his escape as a fugitive from its battlements. The “street that is called Straight” still remains, running for the length of a mile due east and west; but alas! how changed. In those days it was one hundred feet in width, and divided by Corinthian colonnades into three avenues; while midway along its course the wayfarer passed under a Roman triumphal arch of noble proportions. Now, “remains of the colonnades and gates may still be traced, but time has destroyed every vestige of their original magnificence. At present the street, instead of the lordly proportions which once called forth the stranger’s admiration, has been contracted by successive encroachments into a narrow passage, more resembling a by-lane than the principal avenue of a noble city.”

From the time of St. Paul onwards it continued under the dominion of Rome till its capture by the Saracens in a.d. 634. The incidents of that capture may be more properly noticed when we come to speak of the Mahometan rule in Syria. Its subsequent fortunes, after the seat of Mahometan rule had been transferred to Bagdad, in 763, may be very briefly related. After being unsuccessfully besieged by the Crusaders in 1148, it was taken by Tamerlane in 1400, and destroyed by fire the following year. In 1516 it fell into the hands of the Turks, who retained possession of it till 1832, when it was captured by Ibrahim Pacha. The greater indulgence shown to Christians from that date excited the bitter animosity of the Mahometan population, who have the reputation of being the greatest fanatics in the East. “The steady advance of the Christian community in wealth and numbers during the last thirty years,” says a writer in 1868, “has tended to excite their bitter enmity. In July, 1860, taking advantage of the war between the Druses and Maronites, and encouraged also by the Turkish authorities, they suddenly rose against the poor defenceless Christians, massacred about six thousand of them in cold blood, and left their whole quarter in ashes.” “Such is the last act,” he adds, “in the history of Damascus.” Though still the largest city of Asiatic Turkey, with a population in 1859 of 150,000, the prosperity of Damascus is on the wane. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1870 dealt it a heavy blow, by diverting much of the traffic that had hitherto passed through it by caravans. It is a somewhat strange retribution that the opening of a new water-way should thus undo the prosperity that Damascus has so long owed to its own fertilising streams.

For it is not too much to say that to its streams of water this ancient city has owed; not only its prosperity, but its very existence. “Are not Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?” was a question that Naaman might well ask, as he turned indignantly from the prophet’s door. Travellers have vied with one another in describing the unrivalled beauty of those streams. “The juice of her life,” says one well-known writer, “is the gushing and ice-cold torrent that tumbles from the snowy sides of Anti-Lebanon. Close along on the river’s edge, through seven sweet miles of rustling boughs and deepest shade, the city spreads out her whole length, as a man falls flat, face-forward on the brook, that he may drink and drink again: so Damascus, thirsting for ever, lies down with her lips to the stream, and clings to its rushing waters.” Standing, as it does, at the western extremity of the great desert plain of El-Hauran, which stretches away right to the Euphrates, no city of any size could have existed here, unfed by such living waters. “Without the Barada” (the ancient Abana), says Porter, “the plain would be a parched desert; but now aqueducts intersect every quarter, and fountains sparkle out in almost every dwelling, while innumerable canals extend their ramifications over the vast plain, clothing it with verdure and beauty.”

To what a degree the city and its surrounding orchards literally drink in the waters of its two streams, may be gathered from the fact that after they have escaped from its suburbs they flow with greatly-diminished volume to a lake, or cluster of three small lakes, a few miles east of Damascus, and there lose themselves, there being no outflow from the banks. The Barada is the principal stream, and brings down a considerable body of water. The ’Awaj, or Phege, the ancient Pharpar, is a less important river, but better for drinking purposes, for which it is chiefly employed by the inhabitants. The use of the water of the Barada is observed to be often attended by goître. At the edge of a plain thus fertilised, some sixty miles from the sea at Beirût, with the snowcapped summits of Anti-Libanus looking down upon it to the north and west, and its white dwellings embosomed in green foliage, stretching away towards the south and east, stands this most ancient of cities. The dirt and disorder of its streets, when one passes within the walls, in strange and unwelcome contrast to the beauty of the gardens without, seem a token of the misgovernment of its present rulers. Around it is nature’s paradise; man’s wilderness is within. Such as it is now in its better aspect, it was twelve hundred years ago. And it must make us think more highly of the devotion of John Damascene, that he could forsake, not only the glittering prospects of worldly ambition, but this fairest of earth’s fair cities, for the dreary solitude of his cell by the Dead Sea.

CHAPTER II.THE MONASTERY OF ST. SABAS.

On the south side of the Wady en-Nâr, or Valley of Fire, the name given to the lower part of the Kidron Valley where it approaches the Dead Sea, stands the Mar Saba, or monastery of St. Sabas. The same circumstance causes the gorge, a little higher up, to bear the name of Wady er-Râhib, or Monks Valley. The savage wildness of the scene, and the sense of utter desolation around, have always left a deep impression on the minds of travellers. To the east rise the precipices, 800 feet high, behind which the blue and glossy waters of the Dead Sea lie glaring in the sun. To the north-west the dry torrent-bed of the Kidron leads up to Jerusalem, here some ten miles distant. The buildings themselves appear to hang like an eagle’s nest on to the precipitous face of the rocks. “Two high towers,” says a recent traveller, “first meet the eye; but on approaching nearer one is bewildered with the pile of massive walls, domes, battlements, staircases, and five splendid buttresses supporting the building on the edge of the precipice from the giddy depths below.” One uniform hue of tawny yellow pervades alike the walls of the convent and the weather-worn cliffs to which they cling; and though, in the opinion of one writer, “the wild grandeur of its situation renders this monastery the most extraordinary building in Palestine,” the general impression drawn from the view of it seems to be that of utter dreariness. But perhaps no better description can be given than in the words of one of the latest visitors to it. After speaking of the terrible heat that prevailed, unrelieved by a blade of grass or a breath of wind, the writer continues:—“the silence of the desert surrounds it, and only the shrill note of the golden grackle, or the howl of a jackal, breaks this solemn stillness. Not a tree or shrub is in sight; walls of white chalk and sharp ridges shut out the western breeze, and the sigh of the wind in the trees is a sound never heard in the solitude. The place seems dead. The convent and its valley have a fossilised appearance. Scarcely less dead and fossil are its wretched inmates, monks exiled for crimes or heresy, and placed in charge of a few poor lunatics. Ladies are not admitted into the monastery, but we were provided with a letter to the Superior. A little iron door in a high yellow wall gives admission from the west; thence a long staircase leads down into a court before the chapel. The walls within are covered with frescoes, some old, some belonging to the time when the monastery was rebuilt, in 1840, by the Russian Government. Greek saints, hideous figures in black and grey dresses, with stoles on which the cross and ladder and spear are painted in white, stand out from gilded backgrounds. Against these ghosts of their predecessors the monks were ranged in wooden stalls or miserere benches with high arms, which supported their weary figures under the armpits. The old men stood, or rather drooped, in their places, with pale, sad faces, which spoke of ignorance and of hopelessness, and sometimes of vice and brutality; for the Greek monk is perhaps the most degraded representative of Christianity, and these were the worst of their kind. Robed in long sweeping gowns, with the cylindrical black felt cap on their heads, they looked more like dead bodies than living men, propped up against the quaint Byzantine background. . . . The floor of the church was unoccupied, and paved with marble; the transept was closed by the great screen, blazing with gold, and covered with dragons and arabesques and gaudy pictures of saints and angels on wood. A smell of incense filled the church, and the nasal drawl of the officiating priest soon drove us away to the outer air. . . . . The convent pets came about us, the beautiful black birds with orange wings, which live only in the Jordan Valley, and have been named ‘Tristram’s grackle,’ after that well-known explorer. They have a beautiful clear note, the only pleasant sound ever heard in the solitude; and the monks have tamed them, so that they flock round them to catch raisins, which they pounce upon in mid air. In the valley below the foxes and jackals also come for alms, the monks throwing down loaves for them. . . . . . . Yet even for these poor outcasts in the stony wilderness, lifeless and treeless though it be, nature prepares every day a glorious picture, quickly fading but matchless in brilliance of colour: the distant ranges seem stained with purple and pink; in autumn the great bands of clouds sweep over the mountains with long bars of gleaming light between them; and for a few minutes, as the sun sets, the deep crimson blush comes over the rocks, and glorifies the whole landscape with an indescribable glow.”

Upon the scene thus strikingly described, the eyes of John of Damascus, the monk of St. Sabas’ Convent, whose life we are attempting to relate, must often have rested. He must often have felt how, in the ascent one way up the valley to Jerusalem, and the descent by “horrible abysses” to the Dead Sea in the other direction, there was, as a Greek pilgrim in recent times expressed it, “the image of our life.” It was here that St. Sabas, nearly two centuries before, had fixed his dwelling; a famous anchorite of Cappadocian origin, whose character for sanctity stood so high, that when, about the year 483, he made a journey to Constantinople to intercede with the Emperor for the anchorites of Jerusalem, Justinian went outside the city to meet him, and fell on his knees before him. Round the cave chosen by Sabas for his cell in this lonely wilderness, a cave from which tradition says that he had first to eject the previous occupant, a lion, other hermits quickly settled, and thus was formed the Laura of St. Sabas. The founder is said to have survived to the age of 94 years, dying in 532; and his tomb, “gilded and adorned in the usual tawdry manner of the Greeks,” is still shown under a dome, in the middle of a small paved court in the monastery. Here lived those three hermits of the sixth century, Xenophon, and his sons Arcadius and John, who “every day saluted each other from the threshold of their caves, not being able to speak because of the distance.” And here, in due time, came John Damascene and his foster-brother Cosmas. But before we speak of the events which led him to take this step, and to exchange Damascus with its rushing waters for the awful solitudes of the Valley of Fire, a few words seem needful on the state of society at the time, and the form of government under which his native city had then passed.

CHAPTER III.THE MAHOMETAN RULE IN SYRIA.

It has been often remarked that the fire of Mahometanism was long in kindling, but, when once alight, it spread a conflagration around with unexampled rapidity. The Prophet himself had reached the age of forty before he announced his mission. For eleven years more, from 611 till his flight from Mecca in 622, he appeared to make little or no way with his fellow-tribesmen, the Kuraish; to be dashing himself vainly against a rock; to be growing old, with the bitter consciousness of failure. His abandoning Mecca was itself an acknowledgment of defeat. And yet, as the event showed, it was a step towards victory. “The germs of future success,” says a military critic, “had been planted in the midst of seeming discomfiture. He departed, carrying away with him the flower of the Kuraish. Abou Bakr, Omar, Ali, Talha, Zobair, and the other ‘companions of Muhammad,’ left none equal to themselves, when they shook the dust of their ancestral city from off the soles of their feet. . . . The seventy men who followed the Prophet to Medina, not merely drew away the heart’s blood from the Kuraish—they planted in the city which gave them shelter an imperium in imperio, bound together by the strongest of all ties, the sense of a Divine calling.” The same preparedness of the soil to receive the seed, which made the teaching of Mahomet take root and germinate so quickly at Medina, was the cause also of the rapid spread of Mahometan conquests soon afterwards. At Yathrib, better known thenceforward as Medina, “the City,” the feuds of the Arabs and the Jews—and, when the latter were subdued, the internecine feuds of the Arab tribes of Aus and Khazraj—had ended in a general feeling of insecurity and weariness of war, such as makes men cast about for a strong ruler to govern them. They were, in fact, on the point of so choosing Abdallah, son of Obay, when the arrival of Mahomet seemed to furnish them with the very leader whom they sought.

In like manner, when the armies of Islam began to invade the adjoining countries, Egypt on the west and Syria on the north, their success might seem at first out of all proportion to the means employed, or to the time consumed. But the conflagration spread rapidly because the trees were dry. Just as the citizens of Yathrib had been weakened by their long-continued blood feuds, so the inhabitants of Syria and Egypt were in a state of religious, as well as civil, disunion and weakness. The majority in both those countries were Nestorians or Monophysites, “depressed by the imperial laws, and ready to welcome the enemies of the Byzantine Court as deliverers.” The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint: such might almost be the language applied to Christendom at this time. The Emperor Heraclius, but lately the conqueror of Chosroes, the deliverer from the Persian yoke of Syria and Egypt, was wasting away through sickness, and constrained to look on and see these provinces again lost to the empire. Among his subjects there was the spectacle of “sect opposed to sect, clergy wrangling with clergy, upon the most abstruse and metaphysical points of doctrine.”

Beyond this, there was all the advantage, on one side, of the enthusiasm which novelty alone will sometimes inspire. The religion of Mahomet was a new thing upon the earth. And there was the far more potent and enduring enthusiasm which is born of conviction—the decision of action arising from fresh and sharply-cut impressions. The soldier who “saw hell with its fires blazing behind him if he fled, paradise opening before him if he fell,” would be hard to beat. And indeed it was not till Christendom had learnt this lesson, and the counter-enthusiasm of the Crusades was aroused, that the tide of Mahometan conquest was seriously checked.

What has been said may lessen the surprise that any reader might feel at observing, for the first time, the suddenness of the growth of Islam. Within thirteen years from the Hegira, within three years from Mahomet’s death, the armies of the new faith had appeared before Damascus.

The story of the siege and capture of this ancient and splendid city, “the Granada of the East,” has been often told, and only the barest outlines of it need be retraced here. Elated by the conquest of Bosra, four days march from Damascus, the Saracens, in 634, pressed on to attack this latter city. After single combats and deeds of individual heroism, which made Voltaire draw a parallel between this and the siege of Troy, the garrison were finally shut up within the walls. More than one reinforcement, sent to their aid by Heraclius, was defeated. Werdan, the imperial general, who was despatched with an army of seventy thousand men, was slain, and more than two-thirds of his force perished with him. Then, in their despair, Thomas, the Governor of Damascus, tried the power of religious enthusiasm to rival that which nerved the besiegers to such efforts. “At the principal gate, in the sight of both armies, a lofty crucifix was erected; the bishop, with his clergy, accompanied the march, and laid the volume of the New Testament before the image of Jesus; and the contending parties were scandalised or edified by a prayer that the Son of God would defend His servants, and vindicate His truth.” All was in vain. The impetuous Kaled, “the sword of God,” repulsed a night attack in which the Christians had put forth their last energies; and as he forced an entrance at the eastern gate, Abu Obeidah entered, by capitulation, at the western. The story that Kaled, and his more temperate colleague—the one bent on sacking the conquered city, the other prepared to deal merci fully with it—met in the great church of St. John the Baptist is now discredited. But there is no doubt that from this point the partition of Damascus began; the share of the Arabian conquerors gradually extending, at the expense of their Christian subjects. The metropolitan church itself, the venerable structure that had been restored more than two centuries before by Arcadius, and whose bishop had counted fifteen dioceses under his sway, was divided for a time between the victors and the vanquished. The former took the eastern end; the latter had left to them the western, an emblem of their setting glories. Little more than seventy years after. Walid I., the sixth caliph of the Omeiyades, revoked even this concession, and extorted from the Christians the share they had been permitted to retain in the church. Originally a heathen temple, it passed once more to a worship other than Christian. It is now the Mosque of the Omeiyades, and near it is the tomb of the great Saladin. The fate of the cathedral church is a type of that of the city. Originally shared between the contending parties, the followers of Islam soon gained the predominance. In 661, Moawiyah, from whom the dynasty of the Omeiyades took its name, made Damascus the seat of his government, and lies buried in the “Cemetery of the Little Gate.” Near him are laid three of Mahomet’s wives, and his granddaughter, Fatimeh; and along with them the Arabic historian, Ibn Asaker, from whom much of our know ledge of these events is derived.

It must be confessed indeed that if the Arabs took possession of Damascus, they showed themselves able to appreciate its beauties; and the eulogies of their poets and romancers have compensated for the little notice taken of it by classical writers. The Omeiyad caliphs continued to reside there till Mirwan II., the last of the dynasty, was defeated and slain, in 750, after the disastrous battle on the Zab. When, like a second Alcibiades, the hunted caliph had rushed out from the little building by the Nile in which he had sought a temporary shelter, and fallen, sword in hand, before the lances of his pursuers, his young rival, Abul-Abbas, removed the seat of empire to Bagdad, and there it continued for the next 500 years.

Our ignorance of the exact date of the birth of John Damascene—a subject to be spoken of more fully hereafter—leaves it doubtful which caliph had the most influence upon the fortunes of his family. From the length of his reign (684-705), Abd al Malek is the most deserving attention; and in him, and his successor, Walid I., next after the founder of the dynasty, Omeiyah himself, we must look for whatever elements of greatness are to be found in this race of sovereigns. Passing over these, we find little but a record of indolence and profligacy. “The first Yezid, Sulaiman, the second Yezid and his son Walid, who succeeded the Khalif Hisham—these were one and all royal rakes of that thorough-going type which is to be found only in Oriental countries.” Hisham, whose reign (724-743) is also noticeable, from the period of John’s life it covers, was chiefly swayed by avarice. That he kept his throne so long, was due in measure to the political shrewdness, or cunning, which taught him to balance the two great Arabian factions more evenly against each other, and to allow a due preponderance to the Yemenite tribe. It does not follow that the lot of Christians under such rulers was harder than it might have been under the rule of sincere and more single-minded zealots of the Mahometan faith. A Yezid, who before his accession had scandalised the believers by his avowed fondness for the wine-flask, and for falcons and hounds; a Walid II., who could order a copy of the Koran to be set up before him as a mark for his arrows, having taken offence at some verse in it which smote his conscience, and then pierce it with his arrows, exclaiming the while:—

“You threaten the man proud and rebellious; well, that man proud and rebellious is me.

When you appear before your Master on the day of resurrection, say to Him, Lord, it is Walid who has cut me into shreds.”