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

THE GREEK CHURCH IN THE EIGHTH CENTURY. 43
raised to their highest power, to be tested by their
relation to the highest Person, to have reached the
point where profound speculation and daily practice
meet and lose themselves in each other. Contem
plated from another side, this debate is worthy of
all the contempt which indifferent onlookers bestow
upon it, as upon every other great topic of divinity.
For the persons who were engaged in it were utterly
frivolous. For them the whole subject involved a
theory, and nothing more a theory in which the
most violent passions might be engaged, but which
demanded no faith, which led to no moral act. The
controversy was the more detestable because such
living interests seemed to be concerned in it,
while it
was, in fact, but an exercise for the subtlety of an
exhausted, emasculated race, which had talked and
argued itself into inanition and death. The historian
of human inquiries has no right to pause long upon
this monothelete controversy, merely because he
perceives how much was implied in it. He is to
measure debates, not by their abstract importance,
but by their effects on the world."
The language in which the writer just quoted
describes the intellectual condition of the Greek
Church at this period is perhaps too strong.
And
yet there is much to An justify it. age of compila
tion is rarely an age of discovery as well. But it was
essentially to compilation, to stringing together catena,
or series of comments from the Greek fathers on
passages of Holy Scripture, that expositors of the
sacred volume at this time devoted themselves. The
increased knowledge of dialectic, drawn from a more