632 FOURTH PERIOD. A. D. 590-1049.
minology of the period, and its proof that Christians preceded the Arabs in their study of Aristotle, by one hundred years. The second part of the trilogy, the "Compendium of Heresies,"1 is a description of one hundred and three heresies, compiled mostly from Epiphanius, but with two sections, on the Moham medans and Iconoclasts, which are probably original. A con fession of faith closes the book. The third, the longest, and by far the most important member of the trilogy is " An accurate Summary of the Orthodox Faith."2 The authors drawn upon are almost exclusively Greek. Gregory ^Nazianzen is the chief source. This part was apparently divided by John into one hundred chapters, but when it reached Western Europe in the Latin translation of John Burgundio of Pisa, made by order of Pope Eugenius III. (1150),3 it was divided into four books to make it correspond in outward form to Peter Lombard's Sen tences. Accepting the division into four books, their contents may be thus stated : Bk.L, Theology proper. In this he main tains the Greek Church doctrine of the single procession of the Holy Spirit. Bk. II. Doctrines of Creation (severally of angels, demons, external nature, paradise, man and all his attributes and capacities); and of Providence, foreknowledge and predesti nation. In this part he shows his wide acquaintance with natural science. Bk. III. Doctrine of the Incarnation. Bk. IV. Mis cellaneous subjects. Christ's passion, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, session ; the two-fold nature of Christ : faith ; bap tism ; praying towards the East; the Eucharist; images; the Scriptures ; Manichseism ; Judaism ; virginity ; circumcision ; Antichrist ; resurrection.
The entire work is a noteworthy application of Aristotelian categories to Christian theology. In regard to Chris tology he
1 Tlepl aipioKwv ev avvrofiia, L c. col. 677-780.
2"E/«Jo<7<f aKpipw Tfx bp$oM!;ov 7n<m>«c, I. c. col. 789-1228.
8 The exact date rests upon the statement of John of Brompton that the translation was made in the same year in which the Thames was frozen over, t. e. in the Great Frost of 1150. Cf. Lupton, p. 70.
2 144. JOHN OF DAMASCUS. G33
repudiates both Nestorianism and Monophysitism, and teaches that each nature in Christ possessed its peculiar attributes and was not mixed with the other. But the divine in Christ strongly predominated over the human. The Logos was bound to the flesh through the Spirit, which stands between the purely divine and the materiality of the flesh. The -human nature of Jesus was incorporated in the one divine personality of the Logos (Euhypostasia). John recognizes only two sacraments, properly so called, i. c. mysteries instituted by Christ — Baptism and the Lord's Supper. In the latter the elements are at the moment when the Holy Ghost is called upon, changed into the Body and Blood of Christ, but how is not known. He does not therefore teach trausubstantiation exactly, yet his doctrine is very near to it. About the remaining five so-called sacraments he is either silent or vague. He holds to the perpetual virginity of Mary, the Mother of our Lord, and that her conception of Christ took place through the ear. He recognizes the Hebrew canon of twenty- two books, corresponding to the twenty-two Hebrew letters, or rather twenty-seven, since five of these letters have double forms. Of the Apocrypha he mentions only Ecclesiasticus and Wisdom, and these as uncanonical. To the New Testament canon he adds the Apostolical Canons of Clement. The Sabbath was made for the fleshly Jews — Christians dedicate their whole time to God. The true Sabbath is the rest from sin. He extols virginity, for as high as angels are above men so high is virginity above marriage. Yet marriage is a good as preventive of unchastity and for the sake of propagation. At the end of the world comes Antichrist, who is a man in whom the devil lives. He persecutes the Church, kills Enoch and Elijah, who are supposed to appear again upon the earth, but is destroyed by Christ at his second coming.1 The resurrection body is like Christ's, in that it is
1 Migne, I o. col. 1217.