John the Grammarian, When Religion Was Magic
Dan Williams
November 12, 2021
Not to be confused with two other
Johns, also Grammarians, men known
for their learning, erudite scholars
of enigmatic knowledge, John VII
was Patriarch of Constantinople
for half a dozen years in the ninth
century, a time when religion was
magic, and early Christians fervently
believed in the potency of icons,
relics, rituals, amulets, saints, spells,
prayers, potions, and healing stones
to perform miracles, onyx, for example,
prevented miscarriages and cleansed
the female body of corruption, this
otherworldly world, where natural
merged with preternatural, where evil
spirits bedeviled all, where people deathly
ill, hopelessly hoping, chained themselves
to churches, where pagan statues were
alive with the power to kill or cure,
where ripples of water in delicate bowls,
lecanomancy, foretold future events,
and astrology, the reading of stars, was
the Word of God, an iconoclast, John
could have been known as The Hammer,
The Cleaner, the Destroyer of Statues,
though the inaccuracies of sources
precludes exact knowing, he smashed
statues, cleaned the clutter, the idolatry,
railed against stoicheiosis, statue magic,
and apotropaic, counter magic, and led
the second wave of Byzantine iconoclasm,
until a relative, wife of his patron, loving
idols more than family, deposed him, then
two centuries later another scholar, John
Skylitzes, attacked the toppled Patriarch,
accusing him of evil sorcery, of conjuring
power from the statues he destroyed, once
powerful, a sage of God’s holy fire, surrounded
by gold mosaics and radiant designs thought
eternal, mere moments of magnificence,
Byzantium was no country for old men.
Dan Williams is the Director of TCU Press and the TCU Honors Professor of Humanities. His second collection of poems, At the Gate, A Refuge of Sunflowers and Milkweed, is forthcoming from Lamar University Literary Press.
