Icons and John of Damascus

Go to an Eastern Orthodox church and you will see people bowing to a picture and kissing it.  This is very disconcerting to a Protestant. It was just as controversial in the 700s as it is today. It was defended by John of Damascus, one of the prime heroes of the church.  John (ca. 675–749) is known as the great compiler and summarizer of the orthodox faith and the last great Greek theologian. He was born right after the Muslims overran Syria and his father was an administrator in the Byzantine Empire who continued to work for the Umayyad Caliph. His family was Arab-Syrian Christian. John may have had an early job in the Muslim court; we don’t know. He was certainly a polymath (a whiz in many things--math, art, theology and government.)  In that era, Muslims were on a constantly victorious march and could afford to be tolerant and content just to take over rule of formerly Christian countries, using the established officials.

 At age 41, in 716, John entered a monastery outside of Jerusalem and was ordained a priest. When the Byzantine emperor Leo in 726 issued a decree forbidding images (icons), John forcefully resisted. In his Apostolic Discourses he argued for the legitimacy of the veneration of images, which earned him the condemnation of the Iconoclast Council in 754. What needs to be understood about an icon (image) is that it may seem to be just a painted picture, but it is first a written Word of God.  “Icon” is Greek for image, used in scripture repeatedly to signify that Christ was God’s image/icon, and we are too.  God’s Word is an image/icon put in the form of symbols on a page. (Strange way of expressing it. Protestants might choke if told not to bring their Bible-icon to church.) And we confess that Jesus is this image/icon/”real physical matter” that is God in the flesh, John asserted.  In 787, John’s defense was presented to the Council at Nicea and the church ruled in favor of icon use.  But the practice of praying with a picture icon is more widespread in the Orthodox Church than the Roman Catholic Church.

John wrote the first definitive defense of the Christian faith against Islam and was highly critical of the Quran. His Fount of Wisdom was a massive summary of Christian truth from previous Christian theologians.  He wrote treatise after treatise against the heresies that plagued the Eastern world.  His defense of the orthodox faith left a lasting stamp on all of Christendom.  In the Lutheran Service Book are two hymns by John of Damascus, both Paschal (Easter) hymns:  “The Day of Resurrection” and “Come, You Faithful, Raise the Strain”.

John of Damascus is both a saint in the Catholic Church and the leading hero of the Eastern Orthodox faith. But he receives little mention among historians, perhaps a result of their secular bias.

Church changes that demanded Reformation

 

            By the end of the Middle Ages many people had concluded the church needed reform.  What had caused this and where did the church loose it?

            The Germanic Lombards invaded northern Italy in the 500s and began overrunning small Italian principalities down the peninsula which had been formerly retaken by the Eastern Roman Emperor, Justinian.  By 750, Lombards had conquered almost all of Italy (including Ravenna, the new Provincial capital and seat of the Papacy) except the Duchy of Rome.  The Pope had one ally, the Frankish kings.  King Charles Martel had driven back the Muslims at the Battle of Tours in 732, saving Christendom.  His son, Pepin III then defeated the Lombards and took over central Italy.  He made the Lombards sign a peace and gave the Italian territories to the Pope in 756.  Suddenly Popes had land and politics to deal with, as if they were kings. For 800 years barbarians overran Europe.  Worst were the last two, Magyars (Hungarians) and Vikings in the 10^th century.. But then suddenly Stephen of the Magyars and Canute of the Danes converted to Christianity.  Europeans were stunned to find there were no more barbarians. All of Christendom believed they had been saved by God –much more so than by their own feckless kings. As a result, the Papacy rose in admiration throughout the West.  The Pope in 999 was Sylvester II who was also the First French Pope.  He was a wonderful church father as well as a scholar who had assembled learning from the East.  Use of the abacus in math, celestial globes of the heavens, Euclidean geometry, the astrolabe for ship navigation, Roman surveying and music theory were some of his accomplishments.

            This gave the popes a wedge to open the door to further power.  Pope Gregory, in the mid 1000s, advocated reform for the clergy.  Priests and Bishops should be celibate, could not pay for their offices, and bishops were to be chosen by the pope (rather than popular election or kingly appointment).  This was controversial. But by 1198 when Innocent III became pope, the ideas had become accepted.  He demanded that the papacy be superior to all kings as well as all Christendom.  And since church councils were blessed by the Pope, they were declared to be correct in all judgments.  If a country chose its king by their own succession, not consulting the Pope, he used the Interdict—all people of the realm were excommunicated until they relented. The Fourth Lateran Council was called and declared the clergy were to be celibate and a higher form of human than the laity. Jews were declared blasphemers of Christ and pograms began. Innocent started the 4^th Crusade against the Muslims in the Holy Land.  It didn’t end well, when the Crusaders lost.  On the way home they sacked Constantinople, a Christian ally, and put a Latin ruler in place.  Another papal crusade against the (South France) Albigensian heresy ended in genocide. Innocent established two mendicant orders to do his missions and politics, the Francisans and Dominicans.  Franciscans ran elementary schools and Dominicans ran the colleges and had a monopoly on all teaching.  This was strongly challenged by the Reformation.  Dominicans held that reason could deduce more teaching than the Bible contained. After Innocent died in 1216, St. Lutgarda had a dream in which he cried out for help to her to get him out of purgatory (He had refused to bow his head during the Nicene Creed).  She prayed him out and thus the notion of purgatory went from theory to accepted fact. One of Innocent’s loyal Franciscans, Peter Olivi, advanced the idea of papal infallibility, (when the Pope speaks doctrinally,ex cathedra, his word is held infallible).  This idea too, was controversial. It had advocates and detractors at the time of Luther.  Catejan was a strong advocate who used it to condemn Luther.  Papal Infallibility was not formalized by the Catholic Church until 1870.

            Innocent III, it would seem, was anything but innocent.  Disagreement with many of the assertions of the 13^th century surrounding his papacy formed the heart of the Reformation. It should be noted that while Protestants had a Reformation, Catholics who stayed loyal also had a Reformation in the Council of Trent 1563, and continue to reform in Vatican II and III into the present day. Thus many modern Catholics are critical of Popes on social matters and quite a few, like those who headed an internal investigation of the priest sex scandals, are advocates of abolishment of celibacy.  

Utterly Tragic history between Old and New Testaments

 

The piece of Jewish history we are missing from the Bible (between Testaments) is like a horror show of Jews gaining then wasting independence with immoral rulers.  It began with Greeks overthrowing the Persians who ruled Palestine. In 323BC Alexander the Great died and the empire was divided between 4 generals.  Seluceus got Syria and Palestine and his dynasty ruled Israel for 160 years. But things went poorly. Judas Maccabeus and sons, Jonathan and Simon,led a guerilla revolt against Antiochus IV Epiphanes, Antiochus had a statue of Zeus built over the altar in the Temple at Jerusalem,164 BC, then offered a pig to Zeus as sacrifice. The “Abomination of Desecration” was too much for the Jews who fought a war led by the Maccabe brothers and won independence.  Simon succeeded brother Jonathan and was declared High Priest, National Governor, and Commander of the Army. Maccabean heirs=Hasmonean Dynasty.  But Simon was assassinated by the Ptolemies of Egypt in 134 BC. 

            John Hyrcanus, Simon’s son, came to power.  “Hyrcanus” indicates his close ties to Greek culture (Hellenization), and he hired a mercenary army to battle the Seleucids, whose Syrian empire was breaking up.  The Samaritans opposed Hyrcanus. They were a group composed of Jews left behind from the Babylonian Captivity 400 years before who had intermarried with Arabs and altered their faith into a pseudo-Judaism. Their language, Aramaic, became dominant and hence became the tongue of Jesus.  Hyrcanus laid siege to Samaria, destroyed their temple atop Mt. Gerizim, but he didn’t try to gather them back into the Jewish traditions.  He then conquered Edom and forced  the Idumeans (as Edomites are called) to convert, at least in name only.  Conquest, not faith, was the motivation for Hyrcanus.

            Aristobulus I succeeded Hyrcanus and ruled for just one year.  More Greek than anything, he wore a crown and took the title of ‘king’ rather than ‘ethnarch’ as his forebears had done. His brother Alexander Janneus then became king and married his widow, Salome Alexandra. He was a ruthless ruler who even killed another brother.  In a 6-year war with the Pharisees (sect which disagreed with the priestly succession), he killed 50,000 Jews. He fiercely defeated the Ptolemaic Empire of Egypt, the Nabateans (Arab traders south of Dead Sea), the Decapolis and Transjordan (northern Greek-settled areas).  But he was so sacrilegious as High Priest, his own people rebelled.  He refused to perform the water libation ceremony properly, pouring the water on his feet instead of the altar.  The crowd gasped and began to pelt him with citrons. Continued criticism led him to kill 6000 people in Jerusalem. An insurrection resulted with Seleucid help.  After narrowly defeating the dissidents, he had 800 Pharisees crucified.  On his deathbed, 76 BC, he gave power to his wife Salome, who was evidently the power behind the thrones.

            Salome had Pharisee relatives whom she had protected. She brought about peace in the realm by bringing back the Sanhedrin as a supreme court, stocking it with Pharisees. She stripped leadership posts from the Hellenized Sadducees who rivaled them.  And she fortified various cities so that Cleopatra and the Ptolemeies thought twice about attack.  But she ruled for only 9 years and her son Aristobulus II was conspiring to overthrow her the day she died. Thereupon a civil war broke out between Aristobulus II and his brother Hyrcanus II.  Both brothers rejected most Jewish traditions and were essentially Greeks with wives to match. First Hyrcanus, then Aristobulus was defeated, eventually leading to a siege of the Temple Mount which was totally trashed. Finally,63 BC, the Roman General Pompey moved in with Roman legions and a puppet Governor, Herod the Great, to take control of Palestine. Herod emplaced a massive Roman tax system that, over time drove many farmers bankrupt.  By his death in 4 BC, Herod personally owned half the land in Palestine, taken over from destitute farmers.   The Hasmonean dynasty had become a farce of fathers killing sons and wives in power grabs, religious leaders leading Hellenized lives.  That is the world to which Jesus was born.

How Britain became re-Christianized and Civilzed

 

Rome abandoned Britain around 400 AD and the society began to collapse.  The culture was too advanced and complex, too economically interdependent on southern Europe, to continue as it had been and defend itself as Rome had done.  By the time the pagan Saxons, Angles, Danes, Norwegians and Jutes arrived, much had fallen into disarray.  Farming had become subsistence, pottery ceased to be mass produced, brick building disappeared and wouldn’t return until the 14^th century. The invasion by Saxons, et. al. was piecemeal and took place over 200 years. Saxons were illiterate.

            So how did England become literate and Christian again?  A priest at St. Andrews monastery in Rome took the name of Augustine and was commissioned to take a stab at converting Britain. In 601 he was welcomed by Aethelbert, King of Kent, one of the 7 kingdoms (called the Saxon Heptarchy), located in extreme SE England.  Aethelbert had a Christian wife, Bertha, daughter of the king of the Franks. Augustine took up residence in a church that had been vacant for 200 years at Canterbury, was later designated Archbishop. That title comes down to us today. In a short time Aethelbert was baptized and many of his servants. Aethelbert thus became the first Christian English king.

             Augustine failed to gain allegiance of the underground Celtic church but was successful spreading the Gospel. In 625, Edwin, King of Northumbria (far north, next to Scotland), married Aethelbert’s daughter, Ethelburh, who brought along her chaplain, Paulinius. On the day of his first anniversary, Edwin narrowly escaped assassination and Ethelburh gave birth to a daughter.  Sobered by these experiences he promised Paulinius that he would become a Christian if God would give him victory over the West Saxons.  When Edwin won the battle it made him the most powerful king in the Heptarchy. He was baptized in 627 and Northumbria became Christian quickly. The influence of these two kings was compelling for other kings to adopt Christianity. East Anglia lies on the east coast (Suffolk and Norfolk today).  Redwald the king was radically pagan and drove his son, Sigebert, first to Aethelbert’s court and then to exile in France.  In 634 Sigebert returned and took control of the throne.  A devout Christian, he became so involved with the evangelism that in 638 he abdicated (retired) to a monastery and left control to his son. The final kingdom to accept Christianity was Sussex where a deposed king of Northumbria, Wilfrid, worked to bring Saxon nobles to Christ there.

            With the conversion of the Saxons came monasteries, the only place where one could obtain literacy and learning. Culture exploded in England.  In 676, an illiterate herdsman named Caedmon, after an evening of revelry had a vision that commanded him to write poetry for Christ.  In the vision, he recited verses he’d never heard, and to his surprise the following morning he could recite them perfectly. He was introduced to Hilda, abbess of Whitby who verified that he was reciting scripture.  She read him more scripture and he made them into more poetic verses. He spent the rest of his life turning Bible stories into verse, which were memorized and recited all over Dark Age Britain.  Boniface was born in Devonshire  and became a priest with a call to evangelize Europe.  He labored in Frisia (original homeland of the Saxons around present Bremerhaven), Holland and Germany with fearless methods.  He chopped down the sacred oak of Thor and tore down pagan shrines, preached and converted thousands.  He was martyred in Frisia in 754. A monk named Bede at Jarrow wrote The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. It is the primary and sometimes sole source for early English history. Alcuin of York was persuaded by Charlemagne to come teach his French clergy.  He taught Latin, culture, and theology and invented a French style of writing called Caroline Miniscule with small and capital letters that we use today. He taught Charlemagne and most of his court to read and write. He is considered the most significant figure in Western European classical and religious revival that began in the late 700s. The fact that his learning surpassed the Franks shows how fast Old English culture had risen.