st. john of damascus (676-749 - Cristo Raul

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CONCLUSION. 2 1 1
of Ptolemy. In any case, poor, even childishly poor,
as his acquaintance with many branches of human
learning must now be thought, if
compared with
modern standards, he yet has left us, such as it is,
something approaching a system of logic, of ethics,
and of natural philosophy.
What he has done but feebly and imperfectly in
the department of secular knowledge, he has done far
more fully and completely in that of theology. Here,
too, it is chiefly as a framer of systems that we are
indebted to him : his work is of the nature of an
encyclopaedia. Making theology a part of philo
sophy, as Aristotle had done before him, he applied
to it a philosophic method. Taking for his basis the
existence of God, as demonstrable by reason, he
organizes step by step the whole body of religious
and Christian truth. 1 He is thus the progenitor of
scholasticism.
Though this proposition has been
disputed, as an exercise for academic
2
skill, it is still
the all but unanimous verdict, that the great treatise
on the "Orthodox Faith" was "the
starting-point of
the scholastic system that afterwards grew to such
proportions in the West. There will, no doubt, _be
very different opinions on the value of the service
1
See De Gerando :
Histoire comparee," 1823, t. iv., p.
159, quoted by Neve in the article in "La
referred to.
Belgique"
before
2
As by F. H. J. Grundlehner, in his "Johannes Damascenus :
Academisch Proefschrift, Utrecht, 1876, p. 257. I regret that
I did not meet with this work till my own was all but com
pleted. The author gives a translation in Dutch verse of some
of the hymns of Damascenus.
P 2