three heresies, compiled mostly from Epiphanius, but with two sections, on the Mohammedans and
Iconoclasts, which are probably original. A confession of faith closes the book. The third, the
longest, and by far the most important member of the trilogy is "An accurate Summary of the
Orthodox Faith."^894 The authors drawn upon are almost exclusively Greek. Gregory Nazianzen is
the chief source. This part was apparently divided by John into one hundred chapters, but when it
reached Western Europe in the Latin translation of John Burgundio of Pisa, made by order of Pope
Eugenius III. (1150),^895 it was divided into four books to make it correspond in outward form to
Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Accepting the division into four books, their contents may be thus
stated: bk. I., Theology proper. In this he maintains the Greek Church doctrine of the single
procession of the Holy Spirit. bk. II. Doctrines of Creation (severally of angels, demons, external
nature, paradise, man and all his attributes and capacities); and of Providence, foreknowledge and
predestination. In this part he shows his wide acquaintance with natural science. bk. III. Doctrine
of the Incarnation. bk. IV. Miscellaneous subjects. Christ’s passion, death, burial, resurrection,
ascension, session; the two-fold nature of Christ; faith; baptism; praying towards the East; the
Eucharist; images; the Scriptures; Manichaeism; Judaism; virginity; circumcision; Antichrist;
resurrection.
The entire work is a noteworthy application of Aristotelian categories to Christian theology.
In regard to Christology he repudiates both Nestorianism and Monophysitism, and teaches that
each nature in Christ possessed its peculiar attributes and was not mixed with the other. But the
divine in Christ strongly predominated over the human. The Logos was bound to the flesh through
the Spirit, which stands between the purely divine and the materiality of the flesh. The human
nature of Jesus was incorporated in the one divine personality of the Logos (Enhypostasia). John
recognizes only two sacraments, properly so called, i.e. mysteries instituted by Christ—Baptism
and the Lord’s Supper. In the latter the elements are at the moment when the Holy Ghost is called
upon, changed into the Body and Blood of Christ, but how is not known. He does not therefore
teach transubstantiation exactly, yet his doctrine is very near to it. About the remaining five so-called
sacraments he is either silent or vague. He holds to the perpetual virginity of Mary, the Mother of
our Lord, and that her conception of Christ took place through the ear. He recognizes the Hebrew
canon of twenty-two books, corresponding to the twenty-two Hebrew letters, or rather twenty-seven,
since five of these letters have double forms. Of the Apocrypha he mentions only Ecclesiasticus
and Wisdom, and these as uncanonical. To the New Testament canon he adds the Apostolical
Canons of Clement. The Sabbath was made for the fleshly Jews—Christians dedicate their whole
time to God. The true Sabbath is the rest from sin. He extols virginity, for as high as angels are
above men so high is virginity above marriage. Yet marriage is a good as preventive of unchastity
and for the sake of propagation. At the end of the world comes Antichrist, who is a man in whom
the devil lives. He persecutes the Church, kills Enoch and Elijah, who are supposed to appear again
upon the earth, but is destroyed by Christ at his second coming.^896 The resurrection body is like
Christ’s, in that it is immutable, passionless, spiritual, not held in by material limitation, nor
(^894) Εκδοσις ἀκριβὴς τη̑ς ὀρθοδόξου πίστεως. l.c. col. 789-1228.
(^895) The exact date rests upon the statement of John of Brompton that the translation was made in the same year in which
the Thames was frozen over, i.e. in the Great Frost of 1150. Cf. Lupton, p. 70.
(^896) Migne, l.c. col. 1217.