Three Treatises on the Divine Images
Three defences of the veneration of images, written in Greek by a monk living under Arab rule while the emperor Leo III was moving against icons. They are the fullest statement of the case for images by a writer of the time.
Read the text at sourcebooks.fordham.edu ↗The same translation as a scanned book (Internet Archive) ↗
John, called “son of Mansur” after his family, belonged to the Christian community of Syria and Palestine, which had been under the caliphs for nearly a century. That put him beyond the reach of the emperor whose policy he attacked. The second treatise speaks of the patriarch Germanus as “punished and become an exile”, so it was written after January 730. The treatises carry long files of quotations from the fathers.
His argument runs on two lines. The commandment against images was given when God had not been seen, but since the Word took flesh the God who was seen may be depicted: “I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake.” And the honour paid to an image is of a different kind from the worship, latreia, owed to God alone. He adds that emperors have no authority to legislate for the church. The iconoclast council of 754 condemned him by name as “Mansur”, and the council of 787 took up his distinction.
Cited in
- AD 726–730, estimated date