John of Damascus

John of Damascus was a Christian official at the court of the Umayyad caliphs, as his father had been, who withdrew to the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem and wrote, safe from Byzantine authority, the defence of icons against the iconoclast emperors that the Second Council of Nicaea vindicated. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith is the last part of his Fount of Knowledge, a summary of Greek theology from the Trinity to the resurrection, drawn from the Fathers, that became the textbook of the Eastern church and, in Latin, a source for Peter Lombard and Aquinas. He is the last of the Greek Fathers.