Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith

The third and largest part of St John of Damascus’ Fount of Knowledge, written at the Lavra of St Sabbas in the eighth century, after a book of philosophical definitions and a catalogue of heresies. It sets out in a hundred chapters what the Greek Fathers had taught: the one God and the Trinity, creation, angels and man, providence, the incarnate Christ with His two natures and two wills, the Theotokos, and then baptism, the Eucharist, the veneration of icons and the resurrection. Its method is announced at the start of the whole work: to say nothing of his own, but to gather what the most eminent teachers had worked out. It was the Church’s textbook for centuries. Burgundio of Pisa translated it into Latin in the 1150s, divided into four books, and Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas both drew on it, so it is the channel through which much of the Greek Fathers’ theology reached the medieval West.