On December 4 the Church honors St. John Damascene (c. 675-c. 749), the last of the Greek Fathers and a Doctor of the Church, who defended the veneration of sacred icons against the iconoclast emperors of Constantinople. Born in Damascus, he served as chief councillor of the Umayyad caliph before withdrawing to the Monastery of Mar Saba in the Judean desert, between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, where he spent the rest of his life as a monk and wrote. His On the Divine Images and On the Orthodox Faith are the classic defenses of Christian iconography: the icon, he argued, is not an idol but a window onto the divine — the honour paid to the image passes to the prototype.
John's tomb is in the Mar Saba monastery, which still stands in the ravine of the Kidron in the Judean desert, one of the oldest continuously inhabited monasteries in the world. Pilgrims visiting Bethlehem can reach Mar Saba by a short drive; the monastery is a functioning Greek Orthodox house and is not always open, but its presence in the landscape of the Holy Land — and John's defence of the icons that every Orthodox and Catholic church venerates — makes it one of the theological pilgrimage sites of Christianity.
