Best of us all the best he be leic, go go, the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you

with the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich online at

History of Philosophy.net.

Today's episode will be an interview about John of Damascus with Andrew Louth, who is

emeritus professor of Patristic and Byzantine Studies at Durham University.

Hi Andrew, thanks for coming on the podcast.

We're going to be talking about John of Damascus, who we've just been looking at in the

podcast can you remind listeners who he was when did he live that sort of thing?

He's born in the probably almost certainly in the third quarter of the seventh century so between

650 675 we're not at all sure and he lived the first part of his life in

Damascus which is why he's called on Damascus.

His family had been the family that had been in charge of the fiscal administration in Damascus under all the regimes of the 7th century,

Zantium, the Persians, then Zantium again, then the Arabs.

They managed to sort of stay there and it's quite likely that John of Damascus

went into the fiscal administration under his father towards the end of the

seventh century and then beginning the next century, it looks as if the caliph decided that the administration was going to become much more Islamic.

And it looks as if it was then that John Damascus left Damascus and went into Jerusalem

where he became a monk where he lived the rest of his life.

Most of his writings I think come from this period when he was a monk in probably in Jerusalem.

The tradition is that he was at the Morris of Marsava, but it's a late tradition and I don't think anybody believes it any longer.

And as a monk he would have been exposed late tradition and I didn't think anybody believes it any longer.

And as a monk he would have been exposed obviously to a great deal of patristic literature,

...