ART. III.-S. JOHN DAMASCENE.

S. Joannis Damasceni Opera omnia. Parisiis: Migne. 1864.

N treating of the greater Fathers of the Church, one cir

cumstance of some importance is often not sufficiently considered. It is remarkable how many of them were almost contemporaries. In other words, the age of patristic literature was a very short one. It is true that books make it last from the death of the Apostle S. John to the middle of the eighth century for the Greeks, and even later for the Latins. But put on one side the early Alexandrian and African writers, omit S. Gregory the Great and Venerable Bede, and the Fathers may almost be said to begin with Athanasius and end with Leo the Great (330-461). It was precisely in the century thus marked out that the great heresies ran their course. Arianism commenced in the youth of Athanasius; Leo gave the death-blow to Eutychianism. After the Council of Chalcedon, the course of Church history passes from the grand to the comparatively insignificant. The spirit of evil seems to abandon his standards and disband his intellectual army, scattering guerilla troops over the land, and playing revengeful antics where he was impotent to strike a great blow. The history of the Monophysite and Monothelite controversies that went on from the fourth Council to the sixth (451-680), for two centuries and a half, is a history of stupid emperors, weak pastors, and foolish populations. And, on the other hand, the intellectual spokesmen of the Church do not altogether exhibit the great qualities of their predecessors. When the whole question was whether a given bishop was or was not telling a lie when he said he received the Canons of Chalcedon, it could hardly be expected that a Cyril or a Basil would undertake to settle the matter. When a theological emperor, instead of keeping the Saracens out of Syria, devoted himself to composing a Typus or an Ecthesis, the eloquence of a Nazianzen would have been thrown away on a people and a clergy who were so demoralized as not to see the folly of it without being told. Theodoret of Cyrus, the last great name that has rendered illustrious the School of Antioch, died about 458, seventeen years after the Fathers of Chalcedon had abstained from condemning his

language about S. Cyril. From his death to the end of the next century but one, hardly a great name appears in Greek patrology, and hardly an eloquent word has been bequeathed to the world from those episcopal sees and intellectual centres of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, that had made themselves so clearly heard against Arius, Nestorius, Apollinaris, and Eutyches. At the beginning of the eighth century, two hundred and fifty years after the death of Theodoret, we seem to meet once more with a hero after the ancient mould in the person of John of Damascus.

The scanty gleanings that time has spared of these barren two centuries and a half are probably, however, to be taken rather as samples than as the complete harvest. There were other sophists, rhetoricians, and philosophers, for instance, than Eneas of Gaza, and his countryman and friend, Procopius, who occupied themselves, as these did, with dialogues in the Platonic manner on the immortality of the soul, with panegyrics of the emperors, descriptions of great churches, and commentaries, rather obscure, not to say crabbed, on various parts of Scripture.

If the writer of the treatises that pass under the name of Denis the Areopagite really lived about the year 500, and was not the Areopagite himself, we should not be far wrong in concluding that there were spirits in decaying Alexandria that were worthy to teach on the soil of Origen, and to inherit the traditions of the schools of S. Mark. On the other hand, perhaps Cosmas Indicopleustes, who went on his pilgrimages by land and water about the time when Constantinople was raging over Origen and the Three Chapters, was a solitary and exceptionable instance. Cosmas, from a merchant, became a monk; in the quiet of his monastery he wrote his travels. Perhaps a few merchants did turn monks in these times; but very few monks cared to write down what they had seen in the world. Evagrius of Antioch was writing his elegant history when S. Gregory the Great was rebuking John the Faster; if there were others like him, we must regret their works have not been spared. Anastasius, the monk of Sinai, who seems to have been, towards the end of the sixth century, the type of what a preaching friar was to be in the thirteenth, has left us in his written controversies and ascetical works no mean idea of the culture and piety of the monastic populations of Arabia. Another Athanasius, almost a contemporary, was Patriarch of Antioch, and translated the Pastorals of S. Gregory the Great into Greek. S. John Climacus was another Sinaite monk, and lived towards the same time. From another great monastery or laura, that of

S. Sabas, near Jerusalem, we have also one or two distinguished names. The monk Antiochus, who lived in the reign of Justinian (527-65), has left us, in his 130 short discourses, a sample of the pastoral teaching of his time. A greater name than he is John Moschus, who after pilgrimages to many monasteries in Syria, Egypt, and even the West, has given the result of his experience and the flower of his multifarious gatherings in the famous Spiritual Meadow, a book that mediæval monks knew as well of as those who first read it upon the burning hills of Judæa. A still greater name is that of S. Sophronius, by birth a Damascene, by education an Alexandrian (as Moschus also most probably was), and then a member of the laura of S. Sabas. If S. Sophronius had written nothing but the great dogmatic letter on the rising Monothelite heresy, his name would be for ever venerable. This letter shows us a bishop, who, without the eloquence or the genius of those who had flourished two hundred and fifty years before, has yet a firm grasp of traditional dogma and a fearless courage in deciding the novel questions of the day about the twofold operation of Jesus Christ. In addition to this great monument, S. Sophronius has left a few ascetical works and discourses, and, not the least pleasing, a considerable amount of simple but elegant verse, on our Lord, the saints, the festivals, and other subjects. A contemporary of Sophronius, though he outlived him by more than twenty years, was S. Maximus, the highborn minister of Heraclius, who became a monk to avoid the troubles of Monothelism, a controversialist when he found it impossible to avoid them, and finally a martyr, in will and merit, for his resistance to Constans and his Typus. The style of S. Maximus is not pleasing, but he is pious, and rich in the mystic sense. His controversial writings, as we have them, are perhaps not fair specimens of his powers, as they seem to have been taken down from the living voice in his conferences with Pyrrhus and others. A characteristic of his writings is his use of scholastic terms.

The death of S. Maximus brings us nearly to the end of the seventh century (662). Twenty years later (680), the sixth Council closed an epoch, and the Monothelite heresy, that had in one shape or another kept emperors and bishops busy for a hundred years, disappears from dignified history, and sinks to a party cry of Jacobite factions in some of the cities that Mahometanism was already advancing to seize. The writers, whose names have been mentioned, are of all classes bishops, monks, ministers, philosophers, historians, ascetics. We can see that, in spite of universal decay, bishops still upheld the faith, monasteries still flourished, VOL. XII.-NO. XXIV. [New Series.]

and literary pursuits still went on in Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria. We see that from the Council of Chalcedon to the second of Constantinople, the great matter of controversy, and the staple of half the writings of the period, was the error of Eutyches and its consequences. We might see, if we studied the history of the time, how one consequence of this endless disputing was an even more conspicuous and remarkable exhibition than had hitherto been given of the supremacy of the Roman See. 66 Acquiescing in the dogmatic letter of the holy Pope Agatho," so run the acts of the sixth Council, "we proclaim in Jesus Christ two natures, with two wills and two proper operations. We have followed the teaching of the Pope, and he has followed the tradition of the Apostles and the Fathers. If we have overcome the enemy, the Supreme Head of the Apostles fought with us; for we had at our head his imitator and his heir, the successor of his chair, the holy Pope, who illustrates Catholic truth by his doctrine. O Prince, new Constantine of a new Arius, ancient Rome has presented to you a profession of faith dictated by God Himself. A letter from the West has brought back the truth. Peter has spoken by the mouth of Agatho." It was the only possible termination to the imbecile strife of a degraded people. No more again shall any heresy spread like a pestilence, from see to see, from Constantinople to Antioch, from Antioch to Palestine and Egypt. A wave of destruction has gathered in the South, and in the roll of its course, sees and churches, religion and civilization, are being swallowed up. Mahomet fled to Mecca in 622. Fourteen years later, Damascus surrendered to the mercies of Caled, the lieutenant of Omar, and the army that Heraclius had assembled to preserve it, the best that the empire could gather together, and not unworthy even of the palmy days of Rome, was routed with terrific slaughter, and driven to Antioch and the sea-coast. Another year (637), and Jerusalem, newly sanctified by the recovery of the Holy Cross from the Persians, opened its gates after four months' siege, and S. Sophronius, the scourge of the Monothelites, arranged, in a personal interview with Omar himself, the sad conditions of the capitulation. Aleppo, Antioch, Cæsarea, city after city, submitted in despair to the Moslem invaders, and before the middle of the seventh century, while yet Heraclius was dictating his Ecthesis, and Constans his Typus, the Crescent was master beyond the chain of Taurus to the north, and from the Tigris and Euphrates to the sea-coast.

Among the prizes that were lost to the empire, and gained by the new infidel power during the six years that it took the Arabs to overrun Syria, there was none that pleased them

more than the city of Damascus. From the eastern slopes of Anti-Libanus descend two streams, which, in the days of Naaman the Syrian, were called the Abana and the Pharphar, but now are known as the Barrada and the Phege. Their waters meet other streams that pour down from northern and southern spurs of the same mountain-range, and the multitude of river-courses wander and cross each other over a hundred and fifty square miles of a plain that lies between the foot of Anti-Libanus and the first sands of the Persian desert.

In the very midst of the greenness and luxuriance with which such unusual wealth of water and the sun of Syria have clothed the favoured plain, stands, and has stood since the days of Abraham, the city of Damascus. How long before Abraham's journeyings Damascus was a city we do not know, but it seems certain, that the very first of Sem's children who wandered that way, towards Arabia, or who struck westward from the valley of the Euphrates, must have renounced a nomad life for ever, when they came upon such a terrestrial paradise. It has been said that Damascus is the most productive spot of the whole globe. Its gardens and orchards, its trees and fruits, above all the singular abundance and beauty of its never-failing waters, have been the theme of glowing descriptions ever since descriptions began to be written. To the Greeks, whom Alexander's conquests had brought thither, it was the "eye of all the East." The Arab writers have celebrated it in poetry and in the poetical prose to which their language lends itself so well, until we no longer wonder to hear them make it the site of Paradise. The Prophet himself is a witness to its more than earthly beauty, for the legend is that once, having climbed Anti-Libanus, he stood upon a high precipice looking to the east, with Damascus at two miles. distance beneath him, and gazed in rapt meditation over the boundless garden, from whose midst the white walls and roofs shone half hidden, and the waters crossed each other in lines of light. His journey that day should have ended in Damascus ; but the story is, that the view of it so moved him, that he would not tempt his frailty by entering it, but turned back and fled; there was but one paradise, he said, designed for man, and, for his part, he was resolved not to take his in this world. Modern travellers, having looked on the city from the same spot on which Mahomet is said to have stood, have written down, that no place in the world offers to the beholder, at a distance, such voluptuous beauty.

This exceptional city, the oldest inhabited site of which there is record in the world, and whose unrecorded history must be yet older, for it is by nature a place for men to con