An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith

An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith is a work by John of Damascus (743).

Core claims

• The Exact Exposition is not a work of original theology but a deliberate act of psychological containment — John of Damascus constructs an architecture of inherited speech precisely to wall off the destabilizing energies of what cannot be known, making the text a masterclass in how apophatic limits function as ego-boundaries against numinous inflation.
• By insisting that the knowable and the utterable belong to different orders, John anticipates by a millennium the depth-psychological recognition that symbolic cognition and discursive cognition are incommensurable — the same structural insight that drives Jung’s distinction between sign and symbol.
• The Christological core of the Exposition — “perfect God and perfect Man, of two natures… yet to one composite person” — functions as the doctrinal form of what Edinger would call the ego-Self axis: two irreducible realities held in paradoxical union without collapse, the precise structure whose failure produces psychopathology.

Related questions

• How does John of Damascus’s distinction between the knowable and the utterable compare to Evagrius Ponticus’s teaching in the Praktikos that contemplation must penetrate beyond all distinct images — and does John’s formulaic precision correct a danger Evagrius left unresolved?
• In what ways does John’s refutation of Monophysitism and Nestorianism mirror Edinger’s account in Ego and Archetype of inflation and alienation as the two pathological poles of the ego-Self axis?
• How does Hilary of Poitiers’s argument in De Trinitate that “a lower nature cannot understand the principle of a higher” function as an epistemological foundation for the apophatic limits John of Damascus codifies — and what does this imply for Jung’s claim that the God-image is not identical with God?

See also

• Library page: /library/myth-and-religion/damascus-exact-exposition-orthodox/

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