Saint John of Damascus: His Encounter with Islam

Saint John of Damascus: His Encounter with Islam

If the non-believer asks you to show them your faith, take them into church and place them before the icons - Saint John of Damascus, ca. 676-749AD

 
Introduction:

In the surviving works attributed to Saint John of Damascus, there are two that deal with what he felt was the monotheistic heresy of Islam; they are On Heresies and Dispute Between a Saracen and a Christian.

 
The authenticity of both works has been doubted by some scholars.  If however, some or all of the writings are from “the Damascene,” they constitute the earliest explicit theological writings on Islam by a Christian theologian. The use of explicit theological works is used here, because the writings of Anastasios of Sinai, while written earlier were merely observations of some Islamic traditions from the Qur’an.  

 
What is unique about St. John’s writings on Islam is that they are totally from his own reflections and does not draw from previous writings of the Fathers of the Church as was usual in his theology.  If he is the first to address the theological problem of Islam, then his work reveals the pressure Christians are under from their Islamic rulers, to defend their faith against the attacks of Islamic teachers.    

 
On Heresies:

The final chapter On Heresies identifies the Muslims as the “religion of the Ishmaelites that leads people astray and prevails up to the present.” He refers to Muslims as Ishmaelites from Ishmael and Hagarenes from Hagar.  Sometimes he employs the term Saracens possibly meaning from Sarah or as a generic term for Eastern or Arab.  During his time Islam was not seen by Christians as a universal religion but as the religion of the Arabs.  

 
Unlike today, Islam was in its infancy and identified with the Arabs who had been for centuries independent tribes conducting trade between Europe, Africa, and the Middle East (Near-East).  Now under Islam they had joined together and began conquering Christian North Africa and the Syriac-Christian Near-East. Such had been the fate of Damascus, a once great Christian capital now during the life of “the Damascene,” under Arab Muslim rule.    

 
Saint John mentions that they, the Arabs had been polytheists, then during the reign of the Eastern Roman Emperor Herakleios, a false prophet named Muhammad had arisen.  For St. John the work of Muhammad consisted of a fashioning together a monotheism from the Old and New Testaments under the influence of an Arian Assyrian Christian Monk, Bahira, who he (Muhammad) was friends with. 

He sums up Muhammad’s teachings as: One God who is creator of everything, who neither begets or is begotten.  Christ is a word of God and his spirit, created and a slave, born of the Virgin Mary.  Christ in Muhammad’s teaching was nor crucified, did not die, but was assumed into heaven because God loved him.  St. John criticizes the teachings of Muhammad as being claims of revelation without any witnesses, who made false comparisons with Moses and spoke of revelations in his sleep.  St. John condemns the Islamic attacks on Christians with their teaching of shirk or idolatry for accusing Christians of actually worshipping the Cross (remember Muhammad did not believe Jesus had been crucified).

 
Saint John’s Defense of Christianity:

St. John states that Sacred Scripture proclaims that Christ is the Son of God and God.  If Christ is the Word of God, then to deny that Christ is God is to deny the divinity of the Word of God, as a result of which he calls the Muslims mutilators of God
He accuses the Muslims of worshipping the Ka’ba (the cubed shrine in Mecca) and discredits their Abrahamic traditions concerning the Ka’ba.  

 
Attacking the Qur’an (Koran) in the Surah entitled the Woman, he criticizes the Muslim allowance for polygamy and divorce.  

 
St. John says that Muhammad has no claim to prophetic authority and his descriptions of Paradise are unfounded.  

 
He ends with a list of Muslim teachings without comment: mandatory circumcision and circumcision of women, no sabbath and no baptism, dietary laws that only partially reflect the Old Testament and prohibition against the drinking of wine. 

 
A modern interpretation of Islam from the writings of St. John of Damascus:

Islam was not fully formed by the time of the death of Muhammad in 632, but was, in part, a reaction to the success of the Arab conquests of the Middle East in the 630s and 640s.  From a movement inspired by apocalyptic Judaism, the possible heretical teachings of the Arian monk Bahira and found its identity in the supposed revelations made to Muhammad.  The development of the religion took some decades, and only towards the end of the seventh century did become something recognizable as Islam as is understood today.  

 
St. John’s account, if written about the turn of the century, would fit such a picture.  The clear sense of Islam as a pseudo-prophetic religion, focusing on the unity and transcendence of God, John’s understanding of Islam as finding its identity in Ishmael (as opposed to Isaac), his rather fluid awareness of the scriptural status of the revelations made to Muhammad (awareness of written traditions, most, but not all, of which were soon to find their place in the Qur’an): all this fits such as picture.  

 
Dispute Between a Saracen and a Christian: 

Reflects questions of disputation between Christians and Muslims, but also between Muslims.

Christological Questions of course are of utmost importance
Reconciliation of free will with divine predestination, a Muslin problem.
Nature of creation, and the question about the created and uncreated status of God’s Word.
The nature of the Qur’an, as being created or uncreated.  (Leading to the teaching of Ibn Hanbal who established the Islamic tradition of seeing the Qur’an as uncreated, against the Islamic Mu’tazilite teachings)

 
St. John defends the divinity of Christ by arguing for the eternity of the attributes of God, such as Word and Spirit, which he claims are ascribed to Christ in the Qur’an itself: the Muslim must accept the eternity of these attributes, for the alternative would be that before their creation God was without his Word and Spirit (an argument St. Athanasius had made much of against the Arians).  He also remarks that to deny the uncreatedness of God’s Word and Spirit is dire heresy among the Muslims, and those who made such a denial could be in fear for their lives.  Eventually, this lead to a distinction between the words of God as created and the Word of God as uncreated.

 
Conclusion:

Saint John of Damascus like Saint Isaac of Nineveh (the Syrian) lived in a time in which the newly formed religion of Islam had conquered the formerly Christian Syriac Christian Middle East (Near-East).  

 
The Arab tribes who had never been united and had fought each other for centuries to control the trading routes through Arabia, had grown in power and riches and found unity in the monotheism of Islam.  By grafting their new religion onto the Judeo-Christian tradition as the fulfillment of that previous monotheism, it allowed them to justify by divine selection their rule over the former monotheists, Jews and Christians and to destroy the pagan faiths that lingered around them.   

 
Saint John of Damascus is one of the first Christian thinkers to expose the weakness of the Islamic position as concerns theology and their interpretation of Sacred Scripture. While his theological legacy is often linked to his beautiful Mariology and other writings; he understood the growing threat of Islam upon the Christian world and its mission to evangelize.  

 
- Rev. David A. Fisher