John of Damascus
The last of the Greek Fathers and author of the first full Eastern dogmatic summary. He supplies the sentence that closes off a whole line of argument: we have learned that generation and procession differ, and the nature of that difference we in no wise understand.
John served in the Umayyad administration in Damascus before entering the monastery of Mar Saba, and wrote from inside the new Islamic world rather than the Christian empire. *On the Orthodox Faith*, the third part of his *Fount of Knowledge*, is the first attempt to set out Eastern doctrine as a single ordered whole, and it became the standard reference for both East and West.
One sentence of it decides a question this Library has spent a great deal of time on. Having distinguished the Son's generation from the Spirit's procession, he adds that we have learned there is a difference between them, and the nature of that difference we in no wise understand. It is an ordinary piece of apophatic caution and it has a sharp logical consequence: an inventory of exactly two kinds cannot be argued to be complete when the tradition confesses it cannot say what makes the two kinds different.
Where this comes up
Sources
- John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa I.8