Today is St. John Damascene day - at least by the LCMS's calendar, and so I wanted to read some of his work. Of course, The Orthodox Faith is in the ECF collection, but I wanted something not as long and heavy. At http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/johndamascus-images.asp I found an early work of his - his defense of Holy Images. It is three related works written over a few years in a popular style against an emperor who wanted to take the images away.
The resulting document is a relatively easy to read introduction to what icons are and are NOT, and how they are a part of the faith. We "Protestants" should read something like this in order to understand our Orthodox and Catholic brothers and sisters, IMHO.
The translation is over a hundred years old, and so is free to use. The transcription that I used, however, is not. Please see the copyright notice at the end for exact details, but since it allows free personal use in both print and electronic form for personal use, so I think that it is legal, but I am not a lawyer.
This is a bit of a quick and dirty paste job. I took the web page, converted the page numbers in brackets to what the pb compiler can understand, took out links, inserted footnotes, and converted greek over to unicode. But the other formatting is from the original.
SDG
Ken McGuire
