(Updated July 18, 2025)
This Author Quote Archive collects pertinent quotes from the Church Father, St. John of Damascus.
Next to each quote are the Topic Quote Archives in which they are included.
This Quote Archive is being continuously updated as research continues. Quotes marked with “***” have not yet been organized into their respective Topic Quote Archives.
Treatises
St. John of Damascus, Treatise 1: Defense Against Those Who Attack the Holy Images
- The Papacy and the Invincibility of the Church | §66
- Christendom: The Spiritual and Temporal Powers, and the Conversion of the Empire | §66
(§66)1
Since many priests and emperors have been endowed with wisdom that comes to Christians from above, from God, and have been distinguished for their piety, their doctrine, and their lives, and many synods of holy and divinely inspired fathers have taken place, why does no one attempt to explain these things? We shall not suffer a new faith to be taught. “For a law has come out from Sion,” the Holy Spirit declares in prophecy, “and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem” (Isa. 2:3). We shall not suffer different things to be thought at different times, changing with the seasons, and the faith to become a matter of ridicule and jest to outsiders. We shall not suffer the custom of the fathers to be subject to an imperial constitution that seeks to overthrow ecclesiastical laws. For this is not the way of the fathers; for it is piratical for these things to be imposed by force, and they shall not prevail…These things are matters for synods, not emperors, as the Lord said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them” (Matt. 18:20). It was not to emperors that Christ gave the authority to bind and loose, but to apostles and to those who succeeded them as shepherds and teachers.
St. John of Damascus, Treatise 3: Against Those Who Attack the August and Holy Images
(§26)2
The Son of God did not become 102 | 103 an angelic nature hypostatically; the Son of God became hypostatically a human nature. Angels do not participate in, nor do they become sharers in, the divine nature, but in divine activity or grace; human beings, however, do participate in, and become sharers of, the divine nature, as many as partake of the holy Body of Christ and drink his precious Blood; for it is united to the divinity hypostatically, and the two natures are hypostatically and inseparably united in the Body of Christ of which we partake, and we share in the two natures, in the body in a bodily manner, and in the divinity spiritually, or rather in both in both ways, not that we have become identically, or rather in both ways, not that we have become identical [with God] hypostatically (for we first subsisted, and then we were united), but through assimilation with the Body and the Blood.
St. John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith (c. 730-743)
[I]f God the Word of His own will became man and the pure and undefiled blood of the holy and ever-Virginal One made His flesh without the aid of seed, can He not then make the bread His body and the wine and water His blood?…For just as God made all that He made by the energy of the Holy Spirit, so also now the energy of the Spirit performs those things that are supernatural and which it is not possible to comprehend unless by faith alone…
And the apostle says: “Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sits in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God” (2 Thess. 2:3-4); “in the temple of God” he said; not our temple, but the old Jewish temple. For he will come not to us but to the Jews: not for Christ or the things of Christ, wherefore he is called Antichrist.
Footnotes
- St. John of Damascus, Andrew Louth, trans., Popular Patristics Series, Vol. 24: St. John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 57. ↩︎
- St. John of Damascus, Andrew Louth, trans., Popular Patristics Series, Vol. 24: St. John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 102-103. ↩︎
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