Saint John of Damascus Collection

Name: Saint John of Damascus Collection
Author: John of Damascus

Saint John of Damascus Collection is a work by John of Damascus (743).

Core claims

The Exposition of the Orthodox Faith is not an original theological treatise but the first systematic anthology of patristic consensus, making John of Damascus the inventor of the theological summa form that Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas would later adopt for the Latin West.
Barlaam and Ioasaph represents the most remarkable case of Buddhist narrative colonized by Christian monasticism, functioning not as interfaith borrowing but as a polemical weapon in the Iconoclastic Controversy — the story’s entire architecture subordinates Eastern legend to eighth-century icon theology.
John’s defense of holy images in On Holy Images rests on a depth-psychological insight that Western iconoclasm systematically represses: that the human mind cannot reach the immaterial except through the material, and that the destruction of images does not purify worship but annihilates the composite nature of the worshiper.

How does John of Damascus’s argument in On Holy Images that “our minds cannot reach God’s throne without the help of corporeal things” compare with James Hillman’s defense of the imaginal in Re-Visioning Psychology — are they making the same epistemological claim from different centuries?
In what ways does the narrative transformation of the Buddha legend in Barlaam and Ioasaph illuminate Joseph Campbell’s thesis in The Hero with a Thousand Faces that the monomyth persists through radical cultural reframing rather than despite it?
John of Damascus’s Exposition of the Orthodox Faith explicitly rejects original thinking in favor of compiling patristic consensus — how does this stance relate to Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious as a repository of inherited psychic forms that no individual authors?