(Updated June 27, 2025)
This Quote Archive collects pertinent quotes from the Church Father, St. John of Damascus.
Next to each quote are the topic-based Quote Archives in which they are included.
This Quote Archive is being continuously updated as research continues.
Treatises
St. John of Damascus, Treatise 1: Defense Against Those Who Attack the Holy Images1
QUOTE ARCHIVE | Christendom: The Spiritual and Temporal Powers, and the Conversion of the Empire
(§66)
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.
