Month: March 2025

I have completed my translation of the so-called “Jerusalem Life” of St. John Damascene, or John of Damascus.  It is the same as the individual chunks posted earlier, but with bible references and additional footnotes.  As usual, I make this file public domain.  Do whatever you like with it, personal, educational or commercial.

Here are the files:

• Life of St John Damascene – 2025 (PDF)
• Life of St John Damascene – 2025 (Word .docx)

The files can also be found at Archive.org here.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to this, especially Diego, without whom it would never have been done!

Well, I thought that I was pretty much done with the Life of John Damascene, but it seems not.

Over the weekend, I printed off the whole thing, and got to work with a pen, highlighting errors.

People forget the power of paper.  Even in my days as a professional software engineer, I sometimes found it useful to print out a whole program on paper, and work on the listing with different coloured biros.  Some of the younger staff raised their eyebrows; but you just cannot get a picture of the whole thing nearly so well on a screen. Paper is a valuable tool.

I was delighted to find that in general the translation reads well.  There are quite a few typos, but nothing significant.  Which is really rather pleasing, and not at all expected.

So I sat down today to process the print-out into the electronic text.  My eye fell on the first query, in chapter one – a word underlined that read slightly awkwardly.  So I looked again at the Latin and found that it did not fit my translation well.  Then I went to look up the file with the Greek analysis; and I found that there wasn’t one.  I hadn’t started saving the same working files to disk until chapter 5.

Any translation project is like this.  You cannot just launch into it.  You have to learn how to do it.  You have to devise a way of working.  When you start out, you don’t know what you’re doing, and what will work.

Which means that, when you have reached the end of the text, and learned how to do it as you go, you will almost invariably have to go back to chapter 1 and redo it, and a number of subsequent chapters.

A little investigating reveals the story.  When I started this project, I originally intended simply to blast the old Latin translation through Google Translate and ChatGPT, interleave the results with the Latin, and make a quick translation that way.  Not ideal, but better than nothing.

But then… scope creep.  I obtained the Greek text, and started interleaving a machine translation of that also, just to keep things sensible.  And then I started doing a real analysis of the grammar and syntax of the Greek, and working with that for each sentence.

In chapter 1, I was still really thinking about the Latin.  By chapter 40 I had long since ceased to have any such idea.

Which means that the early chapters will have to be done again, properly, from the Greek; at least until I reach a place where I had started to do so.

I remember that something similar happened when I was working on John the Deacon’s Life of St Nicholas.  It’s inevitable in any non-trivial piece of work; that by the time you reach the end, you’ve become a better craftsman than you were when you started.

Oh well.  I shall call it “phase 2”.

The final section.  Cosmas comes to help John.  Less helpfully the patriarch of Jerusalem ordains them both as priests.  John returns to Mar Saba.  His work  against the iconoclasts receives the endorsement of St Stephen the Younger.  Death of John, and prayer of the author of the Life, also named John.

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35.^[1]  In writing books he had Cosmas to encourage him, and as a partner in publishing songs.  John becomes a presbyter of the Church of Jerusalem.

Supporting him in his labours was the dignified^[2] Cosmas [the Younger], who was his brother in the Holy Spirit, who was a sharer with him in teachings, in his spiritual ascent, and in ascetic practice.  Likewise he [Cosmas] also wisely imitated John in his spiritual labours in hymns, and he sang forth melodious harmonies to the church, with the lyre and with his voice in psalmody, having presented his own body to God as a drum^[3] through the mortification of his passions, and made himself into a ten-stringed psaltery, by skillfully and wisely tuning the five-fold sense of the body and the corresponding faculties of the soul.  Then Cosmas was ordained as bishop of Maiuma by the patriarch of Jerusalem; not willingly, but he yielded under compulsion, and, having shepherded his flock well, and as a friend of God, he reached a good old age, and departed to his fathers; rather, he journeyed to God.  As for John, the patriarch of Jerusalem^[4] summoned him by the inspiration of God, and ordained him to praise the Lord ‘in the chair of the elders.’

36.^[5]

But the high-soaring eagle, returning once more to the Lavra of the God-bearing Saba, and entering once more his own nest, did not take to heart that commandment of Solomon^[6], that elders are worthy of double honour,^[7] but instead, as if redirecting it, he turned it against himself, saying that elders should strive for double humility; that elders should practice asceticism twice as much as before; that elders should engage in double contests, not only against the passions of the  body, but also against those [passions] of the soul, and the hidden [passions], which often escape the notice of those who practice asceticism unless they are exceedingly watchful, and then their inner man is defiled without their even realizing it.  Now such hidden passions are: deceit, envy, arrogance, hidden arrogance, vanity disguised as humility, meddling in the affairs of others, which leads to many vices of speech, self-importance, anxious wavering, a deceitful disposition, pride in bodily humility, self-indulgence disguised as self-control, insistence on one’s own will, the pursuit of money for insignificant matters, clothing beyond that allowed by rule, from which arises disagreement with the brothers, and the unnoticed snare of pride.

37.^[8]  He reviews and revises his writings and books.

Striving to uproot these things from his mind, John added labour upon labour, and even more so spiritual labours. Focusing his mind, and pulling together what he had earlier laboured over, he reviewed these things [his books], refining, polishing and meticulously correctly the diction, meaning, rhythm and structure; and wherever the ornamentation was overly florid and somewhat excessive, he reduced it out of prudence, so that his writings might avoid anything like ostentation or frivolity.  As a result, anyone who carefully examines his works of this kind will perceive the depth of thought and the elegance of expression, combined with grandeur.^[9]  And who, upon reading his writings, would not praise his zeal for piety? How [marvellously] did he distribute his wealth of wisdom to all, seeing that, from the talent of knowledge that he had received, he did not merely double it but increased it tenfold.  For I refrain from raising the number further, to avoid seeming to be exceeding the limits in the gospel.  For it is plainly not right to speak beyond the proper limits.

38.^[10]  Stephen the Younger^[11] praises John Damascene.

Divine zeal prevailed on him to such an extent that, fighting for the laws of God, he struck at those in Constantinople who were destroyers and desecrators of the holy images, first from Damascus and a second time from Palestine.  A native of that great city, who had the same name as the protomartyr struck down^[12] for the sake of Christ, he was likewise struck down for the sake of his image and ascended into heaven.^[13]  For this reason he mentioned the books of John, and his anathemas from afar against the impious, and he called him a man of God. But although he [John] was never anointed with the unction of the episcopate (for the truth must not be concealed), he must still be regarded as crowned with the band of martyrdom; for it was because of his extraordinary zeal for piety that the calumny was brought against the pious man, because of which his hand was cut off.

39.^[14] Death of John.

He spent his life living in this way, and when he had completed his ascetic journey, and kept the faith – indeed he propagated it with his books and strengthened it through his teaching, and through his labours he is still confirming, upholding and strengthening it to this day – he ascended to Christ whom he loved.  And now he does not see Him in an image, nor adore Him in likeness, but beholds Him face to face,^[15] gazing with unveiled face^[16] upon the glory of the blessed Trinity.  For these reasons, it was right for us to praise in words to the best of our ability this athlete, this ascetic, this ornament of the church, this herald of truth, the athletic one, and the teacher of doctrine, and instructor of the unlearned.  This is not in order that we might acquire even the least bit of glory for ourselves, but so that so that he in turn will remember us in heaven, and that we may be filled with His heavenly glory even while [we are] still dwelling on earth: that glory which David testifies dwells within the princess, namely within the royal soul, saying, “All the glory of the princess is within.”^[17]

40. ^[18]

Forgive me, O thrice-blessed man, and be my fervent and steadfast intercessor before God, because I, who share your name, found this excellent collection, made by someone else, as the man was able, in a simple style, and written in the Arabic language and script; and, out of longing for this work, and with as much diligence as I could muster, I have translated and revised^[19] it, [guided] by your corrections, or, where need be, your instructions.^[20]  Grant me also to be a spiritual worshipper of the Trinity entirely beyond the body, living wholly in contemplation, wholly sanctified in the fire^[21] of divine love, but still dwelling in the body, so that, when I depart from the flesh with detachment, I may present myself with boldness with you before God; to Whom be glory, forever and ever. Amen.

The End of the Life of the holy and great John of Damascus.  This has been collated with its own antigraph.^[22]

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I will gather up all the sections and create a final version shortly.

1. ^[1]35 in the Bollandists and the modern edition, 34 in the Lequien and PG.↩
2. ^[2]κόσμιος.↩
3. ^[3]“τύμπανον”, “tympanum.”↩
4. ^[4]Lit. “the one steering the helm of Jerusalem.”↩
5. ^[5]36 in the Bollandists and the modern edition, 35 in the Lequien and PG.↩
6. ^[6]The PG text prints “Apostle”, but neither Lequien nor any manuscript gives this.↩
7. ^[7]1 Tim. 5:17.↩
8. ^[8]37 in the Bollandists and the modern edition, 36 in the Lequien and PG.↩
9. ^[9]σεμνότης. Lequien translates as “majestate”, “majesty.”↩
10. ^[10]38 in the Bollandists and the modern edition, 37 in the Lequien and PG.↩
11. ^[11]A Byzantine monk executed in 764 by Constantine V for his opposition to iconoclasm.  An orthodox saint.↩
12. ^[12]The idea is of blows with a blunt object.↩
13. ^[13]This sentence and those that follow make up a single sentence in Greek.↩
14. ^[14]38 in Lequien and PG.↩
15. ^[15]1 Cor. 13:12: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.”↩
16. ^[16]Cf. 2 Cor. 3:18: “But we all, with unveiled face beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory,”↩
17. ^[17]Psalm 44:14 Vulg; Ps. 45:13↩
18. ^[18]40 in the Bollandists and the modern edition, 39 in the Lequien and PG.↩
19. ^[19]The word is “transform”.↩
20. ^[20]I.e. in a vision.↩
21. ^[21]ὁλοκαύτωσις, sacrifice of a burnt-offering. ↩
22. ^[22]Antigraph: a manuscript from which a copy (the apograph) is made.↩