Patristic Studies in the Twenty-First Century: Proceedings of an International Conference to Mark the 50th Anniversary of the International Association of Patristic Studies 9782503559193, 2503559190

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PATRISTIC STUDIES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY PROCEEDINGS OF AN INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE TO MARK THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF PATRISTIC STUDIES Edited by Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony Theodore de Bruyn Carol Harrison

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© 2015 Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

Cover picture: Madaba Mosaic Map, The Holy City of Jerusalem © Archivio Fondazione Terra Santa, Milano

D/2015/0095/153 ISBN 978-2-503-55919-3 Printed in the E.U. on acid-free paper

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Carol Harrison - Theodore de Bruyn Introduction 9

KEYNOTE Susan Ashbrook Harvey Patristic Worlds 25

OVERVIEW OF PATRISTIC STUDIES Martin Wallraff Whose Fathers? An Overview of Patristic Studies in Europe 57 Marcin R. Wysocki Between Western and Eastern Traditions: Polish Patristic Studies after World War II 73 Dennis Trout The State of Patristics in North America 89 Francisco García Bazán Los estudios patrísticos en Sudamérica y el Caribe 107 Satoshi Toda Patristic Studies in East Asia (Mainly in Japan) 125 Bronwen Neil Patristics in Australia: Current Status and Future Potential 145 Michel Willy Libambu La contribution des études patristiques à la théologie africaine : L’étude des Pères de l’Église à l’école théologique de Kinshasa (1957-2013) 163

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Adolph Martin Ritter The Origins of AIEP 195 Angelo Di Berardino The Development of the AIEP/IAPS 209 Jean-Noël Guinot Éditer et traduire les écrits des Pères dans Sources Chrétiennes : regard sur soixante-dix ans d’activité éditoriale 221

PATRISTICS AND THE CONFLUENCE OF JEWISH, CHRISTIAN, AND MUSLIM CULTURES Averil Cameron Patristic Studies and the Emergence of Islam 249 Emanuel Fiano The Construction of Ancient Jewish Christianity in the Twentieth Century: The Cases of Hans-Joachim Schoeps and Jean Daniélou 279 Timothy Pettipiece Manichaeism at the Crossroads of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Traditions 299 PATRISTICS BETWEEN EASTERN AND WESTERN CHRISTIAN TRADITIONS Columba Stewart osb Patristics beyond ‘East’ and ‘West’ 317 Barbara Crostini A Meeting-Point between East and West: Hesychius of Jerusalem and the Interpretation of the Psalter in Byzantium  343

PATRISTICS AND THEOLOGY Christoph Markschies Patristics and Theology: From Concordance and Conflict to Competition and Collaboration? 367 Lenka Karfíková The Fifth Theological Oration of Gregory Nazianzen and the Historical Contingency of Revelation 389

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Eimhin Walsh Formation from the Fathers: The Place of Patristics in the Theological Education of Clergy 405 Reuven Kiperwasser - Serge Ruzer Syriac Christians and Babylonian Jewery: Narratives and Identity Shaping in a Multi-Religious Setting 421 PATRISTICS, LITERATURE, AND HISTORIES OF THE BOOK Mark Vessey ‘La patristique, c’est autre chose’: André Mandouze, Peter Brown, and the Avocations of Patristics as a Philological Science 443 Dominique Côté Les ‘Pseudo-Clémentines’ et le choix du roman grec 473 Tina Dolidze Patristics – as Reflected in Georgian Spiritual and Intellectual History

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Yonatan Moss The Rise and Function of the Holy Text in Late Antiquity: Severus of Antioch, the Babylonian Talmud, and Beyond 521 PATRISTICS AND ART Robin M. Jensen Integrating Material and Visual Evidence into Early Christian Studies: Approaches, Benefits, and Potential Problems 549 Anne Karahan Patristics and Byzantine Meta-Images: Molding Belief in the Divine from Written to Painted Theology 571 PATRISTICS AND ARCHAEOLOGY Bernard J. Mulholland Identification of Early Byzantine Constantinopolitan, Syrian, and Roman Church Plans in the Levant and Some Possible Consequences

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Eirini Panou The Church of Mary in the Probatic Pool and the Haghiasmata of Constantinople 635

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CAROL HARRISON   THEODORE DE BRUYN Durham University University of Ottawa President of AIEP/IAPS, 2007-2011 President of AIEP/IAPS, 2011-2015

INTRODUCTION

The Association Internationale d’Études Patristiques (AIEP) / International Association of Patristic Studies (IAPS) had a long gestation. The idea of an international association was proposed by Michele Pellegrino at the Fourth International Conference on Patristic Studies in 1963. Over the next two years the idea was advanced by Henri-Irénée Marrou, initially among French scholars and then more widely. The Association was founded at a colloquium convened at the Sorbonne on 26 June 1965, with a provisional Executive Committee comprising Henri-Irénée Marrou, President, Jacques Fontaine, Secretary, Pieter G. van der Nat, Treasurer, and Kurt Aland and Frank L. Cross, Vice-Presidents. Finally, the Association was formally constituted with a duly elected Executive Committee and Council at the Fifth International Conference on Patristic Studies in 1967. 1 The preparation of this volume of papers to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Association had an equally long gestation. The idea of a conference to mark the anniversary was initially suggested at a meeting of the Executive Committee in 2010. The proposal to hold the conference in Jerusalem in 2013 was presented to the Council at the Sixteenth Interna-

1 The paper in this volume by Adolf Martin Ritter, President of the Association from 1983 to 1991, reflects on the state of Patristics in Europe in the decades leading up to the formation of the Association. The paper by Angelo Di Berardino, President of the Association from 1999 to 2003, describes the history of the Association in the decades after its founding.

10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107509

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tional Conference on Patristic Studies in 2011. The conference was convened on 25-27 June 2013 in Jerusalem under the auspices of the Center for the Study of Christianity in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, fifty years after an association was first proposed. This volume of papers will be published, we hope, in time for the Seventeenth International Conference on Patristic Studies in 2015, fifty years after the Association was founded. No single conference or collection of papers can embrace the range, diversity, and richness of the scholarship that has been the raison d’être and life of the Association, which now has more than 870 members in over 50 countries. In planning the conference, the Executive Committee sought to bring together established and newer scholars to reflect on two aspects of the Association and its field of study: the state of Patristics in different regions of the globe, and the multiple perspectives and disciplines currently brought to bear on the field. We envisioned holding the conference somewhere in the Mediterranean basin that, two millenia ago, generated the literatures and practices that we study, and consequently accepted with gratitude the offer of the Center for the Study of Christianity in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to host and support the conference. Opening the conference with a lecture on ‘Patristic Worlds’, Susan Ashbrook Harvey conjured up an extraordinarily sensuous picture of the diverse, pluralistic – often competing and confused – worlds which formed the context for the emergence of the multifaceted aspects of early Christian life and thought. As she vividly put it, anticipating much of what was to characterise the conference, ‘Twenty-first century patristic scholarship takes as its hallmark to approach antiquity as a multiplicity of worlds, an entire prism split open’. The papers published here are only a selection of those presented at the conference. We shall not attempt a synthetic overview of all the papers, but we would like to offer a few remarks on the two foci of the conference. First, the study of Patristics in different regions of the globe. Six scholars were invited to address the state of Patristics in their particular region: Europe, North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Several other presenters described the situation in particular countries (such as Poland) or settings (such as theological education). 10

INTRODUCTION

As might be expected, one’s initial impression in listening to the different regional presentations was that of difference or – as Martin Wallraff, who addressed the state of Patristics in Europe, put it – of ‘otherness’ or ‘alterity’. One was struck, first of all, by the sheer ‘otherness’ of fellow patristic scholars, working in contexts – geographical, cultural, political, social, linguistic, and confessional – quite alien to one’s own. The sense of otherness was further compounded by the different types of institutions, the diverse disciplines, and the divergent titles or designations in which patristic scholars appeared to be pursuing their inquiries world-wide. Indeed, the more one listened, the more unsettling the otherness became, for it was evidently not simply a matter of person, place, or position, but of the very subject which should have been their common, unifying foundation: Patristics itself. Who were the ‘fathers’? We were told that they certainly were not Europeans; it was noted that some, but not all, were Africans; we did not have to be told that they were not Asian. Moreover, who or what are they the ‘fathers’ of? These were not questions which could be given a straightforward answer, but were rather ones which prompted an awareness that the subject is as diverse as its modern practitioners, and that the worlds ancient Christians inhabited were as complex as our own multireligious, multi-racial twenty-first century contexts of shifting, often porous, linguistic, cultural, and geographical boundaries. Interestingly, it is precisely within this otherness and diversity that each of our presenters identified the strength and relevance of Patristics in the twenty-first century to lie. In Kinshasa the study of Patristics is especially valued for its contribution to the challenge which the African Church faces in making the Christian revelation, its doctrines and practices, relevant to the cultural, social, and religious traditions of a country in which it appears to be a relatively new and alien entity – in short, the challenges of enculturation. In Japan, Patristics is similarly valued as a relevant model for Christian existence in a county where, again, Christianity is a relatively new, minority, and alien addition to a culture which still has many customs derived from ‘paganism’ – Toda Satoshi’s word for the prevailing Japanese religious culture. The same cannot, of course, be said of Europe, but even there, amidst so much diversity and historic divisions, as Wallraff ob11

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served, we have need to reflect on our own identities in dialogue with the ‘fathers’. In this context he interestingly commented, in relation to Eastern Europe, ‘It is my impression that European Patristics has not yet fully understood or exploited the potential of Eastern Europe and the Orthodox tradition. The Berlin Wall and the iron curtain came down, but there are still many mental curtains in our heads... Maybe our common “fathers” and research on them could contribute to a deeper understanding.’ In North America the situation is again different. In the past fifty years, as Dennis Trout explained, the study of early Christian literature and culture has engaged the interest and imagination of scholars in an array of academic disciplines. What of similarities? There were obvious ones: each regional presenter described the academic study of Patristics in terms of the same fundamental elements which we will all recognise: editions of ancient texts and translations into today’s languages; notable academic institutions; centres of research; conferences; journals; series; associations or societies. It was at once reassuring and rather amusing to realise that, whether one is in Berlin, Kinshasa, or Kyoto, patristic study is undertaken and shared through much the same channels. It gives us a sense of the durability and promise of Patristics or – and several presenters commented on this ‘or’ – the study of early Christian literature and culture. Obvious though these fundamental elements are, they also tell us something about the future of the field, whether under the rubric of ‘Patristics’ or some other rubric. We can comment on only a few of them. First, the preparation of editions and translations, particularly translations. As Martin Wallraff observed, we are indebted to Europe for the monumental series of critical editions of patristic literature – to which now scholars from around the world contribute – and to the largest collections of translations in French, Italian, German, and Spanish. We are also well served with English translations, thanks to the work of generations of scholars in the anglophone world. In countries outside these linguistic domains, however, translation is a priority. We see this, notably, in Japan, as Toda Satoshi explained in detail, but also in South America, as Francisco García Bazán mentioned, and Eastern Europe, as several papers presented during the conference noted. The value of this work for the continuing 12

INTRODUCTION

relevance of early Christian literature and its academic study cannot be underestimated. How many of our (undergraduate) students read Greek and Latin, let alone Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Aramaic, Arabic...? We have yet to see how translations in multiple languages will shape the future study of Patristics, locally or globally. The variable academic setting for scholars of early Christian literature and culture will also shape our future. This is apparent within both ecclesiastical and secular institutions. In some countries ‘Patristics’ and ‘Patrology’ are still standard elements of curricula in theological faculties. But this is waning, even, for example, in Europe or South America, where there is a strong tradition of ecclesiastically founded universities with faculties of theology. Other disciplines – biblical studies, pastoral care, social justice, current theological approaches – take precedence. The consequences for faculty appointments and regular courses in early Christian history and literature are obvious. The same is true, mutatis mutandis, in countries where the study of early Christian culture and writings has found a home in other faculties. In the current panoply of departments and disciplines there is no such thing as ‘Patristics’. The scholars and students who come to conferences on ‘Patristics’ in fact work and study in departments of classics, history, religious studies, literature and culture, art history. They identify as specialists in Late Antiquity, Byzantine Studies, early Christianity, Religious Studies, Coptic Studies, Syriac Studies and so on. In some ways they are as vulnerable, institutionally, as their counterparts in ecclesiastical institutions. But this leads to a related – and very reassuring – similarity around the world. Institutional variability and vulnerability has meant that scholars find a home, foster interest in the field, and flourish on the strength of their sheer quality as researchers, their efforts to create opportunities for discussion and research, and their trans-disciplinary creativity. In Australia, for example, where theology was formally excluded from the curriculum of the older universities, there are two flourishing centres for the study of early Christian (or patristic) literature, one in Australian Catholic University, the other in Macquarie University, each now with a cluster of scholars cultivated by and 13

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around a remarkable ‘mother’ or ‘father’, as Bronwen Neil put it. Similarly, in South America, centres for the study of early Christian literature have developed around a number of energetic scholars. In Argentina and Chile, as García Bazán reports, they have supervised a generation of doctoral students who in turn have extended the reach of the field. The same can be said for North America, where the institutional settings for students and scholars are more numerous. One thinks of the influence of Peter Brown in opening up the field of Late Antiquity, the work of Elizabeth Clark in bringing women, gender, and sexuality to the fore, the centre established at Universtité Laval under a succession of scholars for the study of the Nag Hammadi codices, to name only a few. There has been, one might add, a cross-cultural dimension to this. One notable feature to emerge in both an African and a Japanese context is what we might describe as the impressive practice of academic ‘mentoring’, in which an older and more established faculty has enabled and assisted an emerging group of scholars to establish themselves and to participate in an international academic context: Kinshasa has strong links with Leuven; Kyoto with Australian Catholic University. Likewise in South America, as García Bazán mentioned, the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum in Rome has been responsible for the formation of many patristic scholars. In North America there has been a further enriching effect of the varied academic settings. There the expansion of the study of early Christian literature since the 1960s coincided with a growth in departments of religious studies and an increasing diversity of theoretical interests in both theology and religious studies. As Dennis Trout recounted, these were conducive to new approaches to early Christian literature and culture – approaches drawing on anthropological models, feminist theory, Foucauldian discourse analysis, and much more, resulting in an array of what are commonly called ‘turns’: linguistic, social-scientific, material, cultural. These have developed alongside, and increasingly in conversation with, studies dealing with traditional theological loci or individual authors, both the ‘heavyweights and less well-known writers’, to use Trout’s phrase. So far the tent of ‘Patristics’ (as in the North 14

INTRODUCTION

American Patristics Society or the Canadian Society of Patristic Studies) has been large enough for all to gather in, even if there are periodic discussions as to whether that is the right name for the canopy. (The same is true, as Wallraff observed, in Europe, where most scholars go by another name except when they attend a patristic conference!) But if the past offers any clue to the future, then shifts in institutional settings and academic currents will affect not only whether ‘Patristics’ continues to be a field of study but also where and how it is studied. This was the second focus of the conference in Jerusalem: the multiple perspectives and disciplines that shape the field of study called ‘Patristics’. The Association’s first Bulletin d’information et de liaison, published in 1968, explicitly acknowledged the persectives and disciplines of the field in the way it presented the scholarly activity of its members. The section ‘histoire du christianisme’ included, inter alia, ‘antiquité et christianisme, ‘christologie’, and ‘liturgie’, and was complemented by ‘sciences auxilières’: art and archaeology, codicology, epigraphy, and papyrology. A second section ‘langues et littératures’ encompassed studies of usage, genre, themes or motifs, and the reception and interpretation of scripture. The final section, devoted to studies of patristic sources or authors, was organized, after the second century, under the headings ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’. The conference held in Jerusalem continued and expanded this tradition, inviting papers on the themes ‘Patristics and the confluence of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim cultures’, ‘Patristics between between Eastern and Western Christian traditions’, ‘Patristics and theology’, ‘Patristics, literature, and histories of the book’, ‘Patristics and art’, and ‘Patristics and archaeology’. The papers presented at the conference revealed how complex it is to reflect on Patristics in an inter-disciplinary persepective: a shift in the horizon of the researcher or the field will entail additional linguistic and philological competencies; a reconsideration of analytical categories; critical reflection about method when bringing disciplines to bear on each other; awareness of ideological or confessional commitments. Two days of the conference were devoted to papers 15

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on such aspects of research in Patristics. We highlight some of the observations of the plenary speakers. 2 Columba Stewart, opening the session on Eastern and Western Christian traditions, stated what proved to be a recurring leitmotiv: ‘We need to complicate the problem’. With the echoes of diversity, difference, and otherness still echoing in our minds from the regional presentations, this was a note which resonated rather than jarred. In order to do justice to the multiracial, multi-cultural, and multi-lingual nature of both early Christianity and modern scholarship, a certain degree of complication was, we could assume, both inevitable and, if we were prepared to be unsettled by it, positively informative and illuminating. Rather than attempting to capture the butterfly of ancient Christianity and to pin it down for analysis, the regional presentations had already made us aware that it was perhaps best captured by positively embracing its elusive, complex diversity, on the wing, as it were. The first comfortable assumption to be thrown overboard was the very idea of East and West; the Patrologia Graeca and Patrologia Latina; the Greek East and the Latin West; Constantinople and Rome. One of the most significant features of the last century of patristic scholarship, Stewart noted, was ‘the break out from this binary view’ of the early Church to include a much broader range of cultures and languages into our understanding of Late Antiquity. What we now study is, as he strikingly put it, simply the ‘epiphenomena of waves of thought’ thrown up by vast, shifting currents of history and peoples. In short, Patristics is not a subject that will stay still, but is characterised by a fragmentary, fleeting fluidity: its texts are often missing or partial; its authors and peoples were transported by evangelism, pilgrimage, or exile into complex, overlapping, ever-changing linguistic and cultural identities. Stewart illustrated some of these shifting ebbs and flows with the example of language: it was used in diverse forms and contexts, which shifted with the people who spoke it. 2  We are regrettably unable to publish all of the invited or submitted papers from the conference, including two of the plenary lectures. Nevertheless, we offer observations on all the thematic lectures in order to convey a sense of the themes of the conference.

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INTRODUCTION

Not only was bi-lingualism the norm for ancient peoples, but also multi-lingualism; – in Eastern Asia Minor not only Greek was used, but also Armenian, Syriac, Kurdish, Georgian, and Arabic. Moreover, language often had a ‘high’ and a ‘low’, or a literary and a spoken, form, and cross-currents of linguistic influence led to some rather unexpected literary ‘microclimates’. Stewart also remarked on the growing importance of languages such as Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and Georgian as biblical translations and vernacular liturgies were created. Robin Jensen’s presentation, which opened the session on Patristics and Art, also provokingly ‘complicated the problem’, this time by asking not only how we should interpret the artefacts which have been washed up from the shifting waves of antiquity, but also who is best qualified to do the interpreting. Although this material evidence – sculpture, mosaics, wall paintings, buildings, etc. – generally has the advantage of at least staying still for us, it too, she argued – like the languages and peoples of Stewart’s presentation – is extremely difficult to pin down for analysis. While Jensen advised us to be as suspicious of these artefacts as we are of texts, and for much the same reasons, she first of all encouraged us to be suspicious of ourselves, and of our aims and preoccupations as textual scholars. Obviously, we do not do the material evidence justice if we exploit it simply to confirm the insights we have reached through textual study; indeed, more often than not, it actually contradicts them, and only occasionally does it complement them. Indeed, she urged that it would be a mistake to expect complementarity, for our text-based concerns are not necessarily, or usually, the ones which will allow the material evidence to be appreciated for what it frequently is: the product of popular piety, the oral traditions and beliefs of marginal groups, or a commission driven ‘as much by social status as by piety’. It was telling, therefore, that for his presentation on Patristics and Archaeology, 3 focusing on holy sites in Jerusalem, Yoram Tsafrir turned not to apologetic, exegetical, theological, or homiletic works, but to a genre expressive of popular piety as 3  Yoram Tsafrir, ‘Aelia Capitolina and the Holy City: The Roles of Patristic Literature and Archaeological Research in the Study of Late Antique Jerusalem’.

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well as social status: the itinerary of a pilgrim, in this instance the miraculous pilgrimage of Peter the Iberian. His vita illustrates what Columba Stewart observed about the cultural fluidity of the period: its subject is a Georgian prince who was educated as a hostage of the court of Constantinople and then embraced a monastic life in Palestine; its author is still plausibly John Rufus, born in the Roman province of Arabia, educated in Beirut, priest in Antioch, and companion of Peter in his monastic peregrinations in Palestine; the work itself was written in Greek but is now preserved in Syriac. How can we – or a text – possibly do justice to such cultural layering? Between the account of Peter’s night-time journey and the results of archaeological investigations there is a complementarity of a sort. With the help of archaeological reports, maps, and reconstructions one can piece together the route that Peter took and imagine in three dimensions the churches where he prayed. This complementarity is, however, partial and impermanent. As Tsafrir noted throughout his lecture, there is much we do not know because there are no remains or the remains are inaccessible, and the interpretation of the remains we have may be more or less debatable. Still, archaeologists can call attention to silences and omissions born of the interests and perspectives of writers. In the Jerusalem of the Life of Peter the Iberian the ruined Temple Mount, the largest holy place in the city, does not exist. For a sense of its meaning for Jews in Late Antiquity Tsafrir turned, poignantly and disconcertingly, to a biblical commentary by Jerome. Christoph Markschies’ paper stood back firmly from the rolling waves of either textual or material evidence to consider the more fundamental relation between Patristics and Theology. Again, we were unsettled from any comfortable assumptions that might remain by a picture of the shifting currents of mutual suspicion which have characterised the changing fortunes of Patristics. Beginning with a portrait of theologica patristica harmoniously wedded to theology in the context of confessional debates through to the eighteenth century, Markschies described how Patristics subsequently became separated from Theology as a result of the more secularised context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century academic study, which took place in public institutions, motivated by the search for a seemingly more objective, so-called 18

INTRODUCTION

‘scientific’ (non-confessional and non-dogmatic) scholarship. As a counterweight to this movement, Markschies considered those scholars and scholarly trends which have attempted to reconcile the two parties on the grounds that each, in fact, needs the other: Gadamer; De Lubac, Danielou and Nouvelle Theologie; Anglican, Roman Catholic and Orthodox ressourcement. Even in Protestantism, where the separation between Theology and Patristics seems to continue unabated, Markschies was able to cite Professor Ritter’s arguments for the significance of early Christian traditions, both for ecumenical dialogue and for what he termed ‘cultural confidence’ or ‘cultural self-reassurance’, on the basis that we cannot hope to understand ourselves or others unless we understand the past and recognise it as our own. While scholars who associate with a Christian tradition as theologians or historians have thus negotiated various raisons d’être for their study of early Christian writings, the same texts have engaged the critical imaginations of scholars who do not so identify. In his paper Mark Vessey took us back to a moment before the founding of the Association Internationale d’Études Patristiques that would, in hindsight, anticipate streams of scholarship that now flow widely over the terrain of early Christian writing. In a lecture given at the Third International Conference on Patristic Studies in Oxford in 1959, André Mandouze slipped the moorings of prior approaches to the history of early Christian literature to embark on the exploration of the literary ‘effects’ of early Christian texts – notably, for Mandouze, Augustine’s Confessions. These effects cannot be contained within a single academic discipline; there is always ‘something else’. At the next Oxford patristic conference in 1963 Peter Brown presented a paper on Augustine’s attitude to coercion in which Brown read Augustine’s writings against the Donatists precisely in order to bring out ‘something else’: a sense of what shaped Augustine’s attitude and motivated his actions. Since then we have seen an ever-increasing flow of studies of the discursive effects of early Christian texts. These studies were – and are – in search of ‘something else’, most often, an understanding of how texts expressed attitudes toward the body, women, Jews, heretics and ‘pagans’, and in so doing constructed the identity of ‘self’ in relation to ‘others’. 19

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This brings us, finally, to the paper of Aryeh Kofsky on studying Patristics as an ‘outsider’. 4 His observations arose from his experience as a Jewish patristic scholar. Despite wide learning in Christian tradition and close association with Christians of various denominations, certain Christian sensibilities would elude him. At the same time, he found Jewish patristic scholars to be alert to aspects of the theological and political culture of early Christians that have eluded Christian scholars or been of no interest to them. Thus Jewish patristic scholars have noted commonalities between Ephrem of Syria’s biblical interpretation and rabbinic approaches to scripture. They have examined the christologies of Aphraat and Theodore of Mopsuestia in relation not to emerging Christian orthodoxy but to a local Christian-Jewish matrix, arriving at a different rationale for their views. They have exposed the dynamics of Christian appropriation of Jewish tradition, knowledge, and space, which constructed Jews as the ‘other’ to be displaced by Christians. The ‘hybridity’ – Kofsky’s phrase – that motivates such observations and investigations can, of course, take many forms. Indeed, one can discern hybridities of various types – some acknowledged, others not – in scholars who read early Christian texts in search of ‘something else’, to return to Vessey’s theme. Therein lies the as-yet unexplored richness of the textual, material, cultural, and political field of ancient Christianity. Indeed, as Averil Cameron argued in her public lecture at the conference, we are only beginning to appreciate the field’s relevance for the study of early Islam, an area of exploration that requires its own hybribities. Cameron’s wide-ranging essay surveys recent scholarship that, in different ways, approaches the origins of Islam from the perspective of late antique studies. She points out that some of the relationships or influences proposed by scholars do not correspond to what we know from other sources (textual, epigraphical, archaeological) about Jewish and Christian groups in late antiquity, and suggests a number of areas where expertise in the debates and currents of late

4  Aryeh Kofsky, ‘Studying Patristics as an Outsider: Does It Make a Difference?’.

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antique Christianity could contribute to a richer understanding of the context of early Islam. Perhaps to an extent that we did not anticipate, all the thematic papers were studies in complexity. But these complications were ultimately revealed, like the diversity and otherness evoked by the regional presentations, to be a strength: Patristics – or the field by any of its other names – is not fixed and sorted, but alive, changing, and adapting to the twenty-first century and its particular contexts and cultures. A final word, of thanks. We are deeply appreciative of the willingness of the Center for the Study of Christianity in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to support and host the conference, and we owe a great deal to Professor Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Director of the Center, and her very able assistant, Daniel Salem, for seeing to the details of its organization. The publishing house Brepols, which has had a long association with the Association as the printer of its Bulletin d’information et de liaison and Annuaire, very kindly agreed to publish the proceedings, and welcomed the editors at the offices of Corpus Christianorum in Turnhout for several weeks of editorial work in February 2014. Dr. Paolo Sartori, the editor responsible for the volume at Brepols, has been a joy to work with.

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KEYNOTE

SUSAN ASHBROOK HARVEY Brown University

PATRISTIC WORLDS

The conference celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Association Internationale d’Études Patristiques / the International Association of Patristic Studies brought together colleagues from six continents. 1 The rich program demonstrated at every turn the diversity, vitality, and originality that characterize the study of patristics today as a global enterprise. If there was ever a homogeneous ‘world’ of patristic study, that world is now, in the twenty-first century, wholly diversified and complexified. Similarly, if there was ever a notion of an ancient ‘patristic world’ (in the singular), twenty-first century patristic scholarship takes as its hallmark to approach antiquity as a multiplicity of worlds, an entire prism split open. My task is to offer a window into ancient Christianity that I hope honours and marks important changes in patristic scholarship over recent decades, changes now fundamental as we move forward in a new century. Taking a cue from the fifth century Greek historian Sozomen, I will first locate ancient Christianity as a religion amidst the religious pluralism that was its given social and political context. This pluralism was a highly fraught matter. Religious competition and religious confusion framed ancient Christian practice in tense, agonistic terms, constantly 1  I am grateful to the AIEP/IAPS planning committee for the opportunity to participate in this conference; and especially to Carol Harrison, Theodore de Bruyn, and Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony for their extraordinary generosity and hospitality. My discussion here has benefitted greatly from conversations with conference participants. I have addressed some of the issues and themes here raised, for different purposes, also in the essay ‘Sensing More in Ancient Religion’, Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift, 89 (2013), p. 97-106.

10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107510

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evident in the public, civic spaces so important for ancient religious expression. Then, taking the example of sacred song from Syriac tradition, I will ask what kinds of voices we might hear when we take diversity and pluralism seriously. In this instance, those voices will be Syriac, female, and lay, all bespeaking locations sorely understudied by patristic scholars until recent years. 2 In both scenarios, I raise the issue of religion encountered and expressed within a sensing body. Just as patristic scholars have come to contextualize Christianity politically and socially in a religiously diverse ancient world, so, too, must we contextualize theology and doctrine – pillars of patristic study – within the embodied religious lives of ancient believers. For this paper, I confine myself to Christianity after the legalization under Constantine, between the fourth and sixth centuries: Christianity in Late Antiquity. I hope by this brief exploration – representative only of my own ‘particular, even idiosyncratic’ interests, as Dennis Trout admonished during the same AIEP/IAPS conference – to suggest avenues that open and refract the multiple ‘worlds’ that patristic scholars navigate, both in our ancient sources and now, in our contemporary settings.

1. Religion in a Sensing Body Sozomen’s Ecclesiastical History provides a gripping narrative of the tumultuous religious changes that filled the fourth and fifth century Roman Empire. Among his chapters is an account of the annual festival held at the Oak of Mamre, in Palestine. 3 This festival commemorated the events recounted in Genesis 18, of the patriarch Abraham’s surprising visit from three unnamed heavenly messengers. In the biblical story, the visitors were not identified. But they did foretell the miraculous birth that would follow in the next year, of a son for the barren marriage of the elderly Abraham and Sarah. To these visitors, Abraham 2  I make no effort to chronicle the huge body of scholarship that documents these changes. The present volume provides ample testimony of the shifts in scholarly concerns, methodologies, and interests, and the papers are themselves prime examples of the results. 3  Soz., h.e., 2.4. Bidez, (SC, 306), p. 245-249; Hartranft NPNF2 II, p. 261.

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and Sarah had offered abundant hospitality, in a scene familiar to late antique Christians from its (perhaps frequent?) depiction in church decoration. 4 Writing about a century after the events described, Sozomen claimed the festival had been hugely popular among a diversity of religious groups. Jews, Christians, and pagans all came to join the celebration; for, Sozomen explained, all understood the story from within their own religious traditions. Jews claimed their descent from Abraham; Christians understood the visitors to have been Christ accompanied by two angels; and pagans saw the event as an instance of divine visitation such as their own sacred stories often recounted. The occasion, accordingly, belonged to all; and so, too, the festival. Thus, Sozomen explained, This [brilliant] [lampran] feast is diligently frequented by all [peoples] [pasi][...] This place was moreover honoured fittingly [prosphoros] with religious exercises. Here some prayed to the God of all; some called upon the angels, poured out wine, burnt incense, or offered an ox, or he-goat, a sheep, or a cock. 5

Sozomen’s account continued with a description of the various pieties performed during the festival’s duration. Without necessarily identifying which practice belonged to which religion, he mentioned an array of ritual actions, undertaken through a diversity of media. Pilgrimage, prayer, supplication, libations, incense, and animal sacrifice were all prominent. Sozomen mentions further that faithful visitors dedicated votive offerings, carefully crafted and saved over the previous year, on behalf of their families. Women adorned themselves with special attire. There were public processions, undertaken with decorum. Attendees 4 For example, the image is extant among the mosaics in Santa Maria Maggiore (5th cent.) in Rome, and San Vitale (6th cent.) in Ravenna. Eusebius describes its depiction in an image at Mamre itself that has not survived; Eus., d.e. 5.9. See the discussion by R. Jensen, ‘Early Christian Images and Exegesis’, in Picturing the Bible: the Earliest Christian Art – ed. J. Spier, New Haven, London, 2007, p. 64-85. On rabbinic and patristic exegesis for Genesis 18, see E. Grypeou, H. Spurling, ‘Abraham’s Angels: Jewish and Christian Exegesis of Genesis 18-19’, in The Exegetical Encounter between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity – ed. E. Grypeou, H. Spurling (Jewish and Christian Perspectives Series, 18), Leiden, 2009, p. 181-203. 5  Soz., h.e., 2.4 – trans. Hartranft NPNF2 II, p. 261(adapted).

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slept in tents which, although public and of mixed populations, were nonetheless orderly. Next to the Oak stood Abraham’s famed well. There, Sozomen reported, pagans lit burning lamps, and poured offerings into the well: wine, cakes, coins, myrrh, and incense, to such an extent that the water was undrinkable during the festival’s duration. The events were well and generously attended. However, Sozomen reports, one year Constantine’s motherin-law Eutropia attended. Apparently scandalized, she apprised the emperor of the situation. Constantine at once rebuked the bishops of Palestine for their negligence in allowing ‘impure libations and sacrifices’ to defile the holy site. He further issued a letter with instructions to dismantle and destroy the existing altar and religious images. In their place, the emperor ordered the construction of a church, henceforth to be the only location of religious activity at Mamre – now to be known exclusively as a Christian holy place. 6 Sozomen’s account of the festival at the Oak of Mamre allows us to posit a definition of religion in antiquity. Here we see religion as a relational system, serving to interlace human and divine orders, in terms that also account for human social orders: families, communities, ethnicities; gender, class, office; the living and the dead. Further, this was a relational system constituted through ritual practices such as those enumerated above. Ritual behaviors of these sorts further constructed and contributed to traditions of sacred stories, sacred places and spaces, and sacred time, categories delineating the human-divine relation on which religions were premised. Sozomen identified the people attending the festival at Mamre as Jews, Christians, or pagans (whom he called Hellenes). Yet he also presented these multiple identities as sharing the basic presuppositions and orientations of ‘religion’ as here defined: a relational system, conjoining divine and

6  Soz, h.e., 2.4. Eusebius of Caesarea also recorded the letter in his Life of Constantine – ed. Av. Cameron, S. G. Hall, p. 141-143. For important analysis of the cultic activity at Mamre in late antiquity, see A. Kofsky, ‘Mamre: A Case of a Regional Cult?’ in Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land – ed. A. Kofsky, G. G. Stroumsa, Jerusalem, 1998, p. 19-30; and N. Belayche, Iudaea-Palaestina: the pagan cults in Roman Palestine (second to fourth centuries), Tübingen, 2001, p. 96-104.

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human orders, comprised of familiar ritual practices and special traditions for time and space. 7 Religion as Sozomen presents it was furthermore an embodied matter. Its practices were physically performed and enacted, embodied by habit and habitually perceptible. Ritual instruments and objects were crafted, handled, offered, displayed; processions were joined or witnessed. Incense and sacrifice scented the air; special foods were eaten, special clothing worn. Religious practices were conducted with the body; they were encountered and experienced through the senses. Furthermore, their sensory aspects were also expressive, and even revelatory, for participants and observers alike. 8 Even from Sozomen’s somewhat reserved account, we can grasp a basic cultural system of virtues and vices with respect to ancient religious practices. These virtues and vices are apparent to the modern reader – as they were to the ancient participant or observer – through the sensory qualities Sozomen chose to highlight. His descriptions underscored traits of light, brilliance, and radiance; ordered decorum, lively variety, and generosity. At the same time, although he stressed that the pieties displayed at Mamre were ‘fitting’ (prosphoros), other traits clearly earned his disapproval: excess, impropriety, impurity (here denoting disorder), and irreverence. Attention to the sensory qualities of religious practice was apparently important for right or proper religious activity. But it was also, in literary terms, an effective rhetorical strategy allowing an author like Sozomen to differentiate true from false religions. This was particularly important in contexts where one might not immediately grasp where the differences lay, because the practices could appear to be the same. Neither the given fact of religious pluralism, nor the frequency of shared practices, should mislead the modern reader on the matter of religious tolerance in the ancient world. Even in a multi-religious event such as the festival at Mamre prior to Constantine’s intervention, the context was not one of con7  On the shared sensibilities of religions in the Roman Empire, see especially J. Rives, Religion in the Roman Empire, Malden, 2007, p. 13-53. 8  S. A. Harvey, ‘The Senses in Religion: Piety, Critique, Competition’, in A Cultural History of the Senses – ed. C. Classen, vol. I: Antiquity – ed. J. P. Toner, London, 2014, p. 91-113.

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vivial, shared celebration. Rather, as the imperious (and imperial!) conclusion to Sozomen’s account made clear, the mood was tense, agonistic, and competitive. Indeed, Late Antiquity was characterized by a pervasive, often belligerent culture of religious critique and competition. 9 Religious communities were continually assessing and re-assessing their own practices, even as they expressed frequent disdain for those of other traditions. 10 They were concerned as much with their own effectiveness, appropriateness, and ‘success’, as with their differentiation from those whose religion they did not accept. Critique was the tool, competition the tone for such differentiation; religious polemics were the prevailing mode of expression. In all of this, the senses played an important rhetorical role, just as they carried crucial significance as intrinsically functional elements of ritual practices. 11 Sozomen’s account of the events at Mamre was as much about the dangers of religious confusion within a context of competition – the inability to distinguish true religion from false religion – as it was about the triumph of Christianity, in his view the ‘right’ religion. In fact, such confusion and competition were something of a theme throughout his Ecclesiastical History. 12 This passage from Sozomen, well-known to patristic scholars, raises themes for the study of ancient Christianity that have gained increasing purchase in recent decades: religion as a shared yet contested aspect of late antique society; religious pluralism as an agonistic and polemical context for Christian piety; and the sensing body as intrinsically functional for religious practice as well as religious understanding. These themes provide the frame in which to set the matter of patristic voices.

2. Religious Voices, Public Spaces Sozomen’s account of competing celebrations at Mamre raises further questions. Amidst the diversity of practices, whose voice  E.g., H. A. Drake, ‘Intolerance, Religious Violence, and Political Legitimacy in Late Antiquity’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 79 (2011), p. 193-235. 10 A point well made by D. Ullucci, The Christian Rejection of Animal Sacrifice, New York, 2012, passim. 11  Harvey, ‘Senses in Religion’. 12 E.g., Soz., h.e. 5.17 (confusion regarding incense practices); 8.8 (competing Arian and Nicene choirs in Constantinople). 9

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was heard, by whom, and with what import? For these questions I turn to voices from the margins, geographically and perhaps also socially: those in Syriac, of women’s choirs leading the laity in song. During the fourth century, Syriac hymnography underwent important changes in form, content, and performance over its earlier renditions. 13 The changes are markedly evident in the work of the greatest of all Syriac liturgical poets, Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373). 14 In form, Ephrem developed the madraˉshê: hymns devoted to doctrinal instruction, utilising different metrical patterns, arranged in stanzas, punctuated by short refrains. 15 In content, Ephrem gave notable attention to the Bible in a decidedly canonical form: Old and New Testaments, explored and woven together through rich tapestries of typology. As for performance: Ephrem’s hymns were apparently sung at evening vigil services, performed in civic churches (as opposed to monastic ones) with women’s choirs and lay participation. 16 In some of his hymns, Ephrem referred to the women’s choirs and 13  On the development of Syriac hymnography, see F. Cassingena-Trévedy, ‘L’hymnographie syriaque’, in Les liturgies syriaques – ed. F. Cassingena-Trévedy, I. Jurasz (Études syriaques, 3) Paris, 2006, p. 183-219. 14  See especially S. P.  Brock, The Luminous Eye: the Spiritual World Vision of St. Ephrem the Syrian, Kalamazoo, 1992; S. H. Griffith, ‘Faith Adoring the Mystery’: Reading the Bible with St. Ephraem the Syrian, Milwaukee, 1997. 15   On the madraˉshê specifically, see S. P. Brock, ‘Poetry and Hymnography (3): Syriac’, in the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies – ed. S. A. Harvey, D. G. Hunter, Oxford, 2010, p. 657-671; Griffith, ‘Faith Adoring the Mystery’, p. 10-11; M. Lattke, ‘Sind Ephraems Madraˉ šeˉ  Hymnen?’, Oriens Christianus, 73 (1989), p. 38-43. 16  A. Palmer, ‘  “A Lyre without a Voice”: the Poetics and Politics of Ephrem the Syrian’, ARAM, 5 (1993), p. 371-399; Id., ‘A Single Human Being Divided in Himself: Ephraim the Syrian, the Man in the Middle’, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies, 1.2 (1998 [2010]), p. 119-163, in partic. p. 128-133; S. A.  Harvey, ‘Performance as Exegesis: Women’s Liturgical Choirs in Syriac Tradition’, in Inquiries into Eastern Christian Worship: Acts of the Second International Congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgy – ed. B. J. Groen, S. Alexopoulos, S. Hawkes-Teeples (Eastern Christian Studies, 12), Leuven, 2012, p. 47-64. For the development of the Syriac liturgy and the daily offices in the context of eastern Christianity see, e.g., J. Mateos, Lelya-Sapra: Essai d’interpretation des matines chaldeennes (OCA, 156), Roma, 1959; Id., La célébration de la parole dans la liturgie Byzantine (OCA, 191), Roma, 1971; P. Bradshaw, Daily Prayer in the Early Church, Oxford, 1982, p. 72-110; R. Taft, The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West: the Origins of the Divine Office and its Meaning for Today, Collegeville, 1986, esp. p. 225-248.

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also to the congregation’s singing. This was an era of expanding liturgical splendor for Christians in general. The new pattern of hymns with stanzas and refrains, appearing also in Greek and Latin around this same time, allowed for the continuation of congregational singing – a basic feature in early Christian worship – with the emerging use of trained choirs and chanters. 17 According to sixth century Syriac sources, Ephrem in fact established the long-lasting practice of Syriac women’s choirs, though he himself made no such claim. 18 But by the fifth century, women’s choirs were mandated by canonical regulation for Syriac civic churches within the Roman Empire and also in the Persian Empire. 19 An important component of ancient Syriac liturgical practice, these choirs remain a living tradition to this day in the Middle East as well as in diaspora Syriac communities in Europe, North America, Scandinavia, and elsewhere. 20 Late antique Christian sources in Greek or Latin occasionally refer to choirs of nuns participating in special liturgies: for example, at the Easter liturgy in Jerusalem, or for important funerals or civic occasions. 21 Yet in Syriac tradition alone, it would

17  Above all, see now C. Page, The Christian West and its Singers: the First Thousand Years, New Haven, 2010, p. 29-88. 18 See the anonymous Syriac vita, chapter 31-32; and Jac. Sar., ‘Homily on Ephrem’, where this is a major theme throughout. 19   Harvey, ‘Performance as Exegesis’. For example, ‘Rules of Rabbula’, rules 20, 27; ‘Maruta Canons’, canons 26, 41. 20 See now S. Bakker Kellog, ‘Fragments of a Liturgical World: Syriac Orthodox Christianity and the Dutch Multiculturalism Debates’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2013. 21 See the texts conveniently collected in J. McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, Cambridge, 1987, e.g. at p. 73-74 (#152, Gr. Nyss. from the Life of Macrina, on the singing at her funeral); p. 104-105 (#225, Eus., h.e., 3.19.1-4 on a convent choir in Antioch); p. 112-113 (#242-243, Egeria on the Jerusalem choirs). The scholarly convention that women were forbidden from singing in church in Late Antiquity is based on a highly influential article by J. Quasten, ‘The Liturgical Singing of Women in Christian Antiquity’, Catholic Historical Review, 27 (1941), p. 149-165; also in Id., Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity – tr. B. Ramsey, Washington, D.C., 1983, p. 75-86. Although Quasten himself cited a number of texts referring to women’s liturgical singing, including the Syriac evidence, he insisted that women’s singing was eliminated from Christian liturgical practice during the patristic era. Unfortunately, recent scholarship continues to cite his conclusions: R. MacMullen, The Second Century: Popular Christianity A.D. 200-400, Atlanta, 2009, p. 15; Page, The Christian West and its Singers, p. 5.

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seem, did women’s choirs have a place in the ordinary, and daily, worship of the civic community, whether village or city. Their prominence in the public context of liturgical piety appears to have been unusual, perhaps even problematic, in the broader late antique culture. 22 All three of the above noted elements – form, content, and performance – contribute to how we might understand the sound of Ephrem’s hymns, for which we have no surviving evidence of the music itself. According to the anonymous sixth century Life of Ephrem the Syrian, Ephrem began to compose madraˉshê as a strategy against heresy. 23 Recognising the dangers and prevalence of ‘foul’ doctrines, Ephrem was alarmed that heretics dispersed their teachings in hymns of ‘alluring and ungodly sounds’, captivating ‘the simple folk of the cit[ies]’ with ‘attractive melodies’ mixed with ‘godlessness’. 24 Ephrem’s response was to fight song with song. He ‘took arrangements of melodies and songs and mixed [true doctrine] [lit: ‘fear of God’] in them, and offered to hearers an antidote at once agreeable and wholesome’. 25 Just as importantly, he ‘prepared troops for battle against those heresies’. Calling upon the consecrated virgins called Daughters of the Covenant, he established them as choirs to sing his compositions. 26 Here, in the anonymous Life, and also in an important homily on Ephrem by the great Syriac poet and homilist Jacob of Sarug (d. 521), the women of these choirs were referred to as ‘teachers’ (in the feminine form), malphaˉnyaˉthâ, a weighty term in Syriac, connoting learning, authority, and wisdom. 27 They were des22  A point emphasised by K. McVey, ‘Ephrem the Kitharode and Proponent of Women: Jacob of Serug’s Portrait of a Fourth-Century Churchman for the Sixth-Century Viewer and its significance for the twenty-first century ecumenist’, in Orthodox and Wesleyan Ecclesiology – ed. S. T. Kimbrough, Crestwood, NY, 2007, p. 229-253. 23  Syriac vita, chapter 31. 24  Syriac vita, chapter 31; Amar, (CSCO, 630 / Scr. Syr. 243), p. 76. 25   Syriac vita, chapter 31; Amar, (CSCO, 630 / Scr Syr. 243), p. 78. 26  Syriac vita, chapter 31; Amar, (CSCO, 630 / Scr Syr. 243), p. 77-78. On the Daughters of the Covenant, see S. A.  Harvey, ‘Revisiting the Daughters of the Covenant: Women’s Choirs and Sacred Song in Ancient Syriac Christianity’, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies, 8.2 (2005 [2009]), p. 125-149. 27  Syriac vita, chapter 31; Amar, (CSCO, 629/ Scr Syr. 242), p. 71; Jac. Sar., ‘Homily on Ephrem’, vv. 41-42, Amar, p. 35.

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ignated as such, because their singing taught the true doctrines of the church through what became something of an official ministry of music. 28 They were also described in martial imagery that blends a strong military chord into the otherwise harmonious depiction of Ephrem leading the choirs in song. We will return to the matter of performance in due course. But first, we must consider the content of Ephrem’s chosen weaponry. Ephrem’s hymns are drenched with a sumptuous biblical knowledge, displayed with dazzling poetic artistry. 29 Old and New Testament adorn his verses, sometimes with dizzying virtuosity. 30 In part, such attention to biblical content bespoke a major agenda of the fourth century: the need for biblical education, as converts streamed into Christian churches in unprecedented numbers while Christianity rose in political and cultural ascendency. Yet for Ephrem, the biblical focus was not triumphal. It was clearly, and pragmatically, polemical. Out at the eastern edges of the Empire, in the cities of Nisibis and Edessa where Ephrem lived and wrote, Nicene Christians were hardly in the majority. Other religions, and other Christianities, touted other bibles with other canons. Much of Ephrem’s emphasis on canon lay here, in his polemical insistence on right canon, and on ownership of Old as well as New Testament. He was explicit about this in the Hymns on Virginity, where he sang of the three harps of God – the Old and New Testaments, and nature itself – in opposition to Jews and Marcionites. 31 Hence he summoned the church to song: Blessed are you, O Church, whose congregation sings with three glorious harps. Your finger plucks the harp of Moses and [the harp] of our Savior and [the harp] of nature. 32 28  I have emphasised the teaching aspect of the Syriac women’s choirs in S. A.  Harvey, ‘Singing Women’s Stories in Syriac Tradition’, Internationale Kirchliche Zeitschrift, 100.3 (2010), p. 171-189. 29   Brock, Luminous Eye; Griffith, ‘Faith Adoring the Mystery’; Palmer, ‘ “Lyre without a Voice” ’. 30  Ephrem’s Bible differed in certain respects from what would become ‘standard’ canon. He utilised the Diatessaron, for example, on which he wrote an excellent commentary; and did not know the book of Revelation. S. P.  Brock, The Bible in the Syrian Tradition, Piscataway, NJ, 20062, p. 17-19, 31-37. 31  Ephr., Hymns on Virginity (hereafter H Virg), Hymns 28-30. 32  Ephr., H Virg 27.4; McVey, p. 383.

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One hears Ephrem’s insistence on the canon once again as combative in his Hymns on Nativity. 33 For example, in Nativity 1, Ephrem presented a magisterial panorama of biblical history as he extolled what came to fulfillment in the birth of Christ. 34 The verses sing through lists of Old Testament prophets, tapestries of the messianic lineage, recountings of the sacred generations from Cain and Abel through to Moses and Aaron and the biblical kings. Did Ephrem think his congregations would recognize all of these names and allusions, with their specific stories in mind? Surely not. But as his verses wend their course, punctuated repeatedly by the congregation’s refrain, ‘Glory to You, Son of our Creator!’, 35 the sung dialogue drives home the claim that the stories, generations, prophecies, triumphs, and sufferings of the Hebrew Bible can only – as Ephrem presents them – be rightly grasped and rightly understood in and through the birth of Christ, the Messiah. Moreover, the Messiah can only be rightfully understood in and through these inherited biblical histories. Throughout this entire cycle of hymns, then, one hears battle with Jews, Marcionites, and others for the ownership of scripture. 36 At the same time that he battled for and with a particular canon, Ephrem utilised biblical instruction to present moral exemplars: figures to be revered, meditated on, and emulated by faithful Christians. Hence he depicted biblical men and women as characters of virtue with short, vivid images to hold in the mind, incised in memory by the metrical patterns of song. His presentation of biblical women is especially striking, for in these instances his verses allude to the singing of the Syriac women’s choirs. They invoke the women’s singing as public in impact and civic in implication.

  Ephr., Hymns on Nativity (hereafter H Nat).   Ephr., H Nat 1; McVey, p. 63-74. 35  Ephr., H Nat 1, refr.; McVey, p. 64. 36 See especially C. Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria (Patristic Monograph Series, 20), Washington, D.C., 2008; S. H.  Griffith, ‘Setting Right the Church of Syria: Saint Ephrem’s Hymns Against Heresies’, in The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in Honour of Robert A. Markus – ed. W. E. Klingshirn, M. Vessey, Ann Arbor, 1999, p. 97-114. 33 34

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In the Hymns on Nativity, for example, Ephrem sang of doubts engendered by the Virgin Mary’s pregnancy. He compares the calumny she suffered among the Hebrew women to the slandering in his own time of Christian virgins, and apparently of the virgin choirs, by others in the city. 37 Ephrem sings of consecrated virginity as the choice to undertake marriage to Christ rather than to a mortal spouse. 38 Rather than a renunciation of sexuality, virginity was thereby an embrace of sexuality’s purpose, dedicated to a different goal than that of social need. In these verses, we hear how abrasive the Christian valuing of lifelong celibacy appeared to a late antique society not yet convinced of its worth; monasticism had not yet gained its respected place. 39 Ephrem confronts the slandering of virgins as a malicious response to virtuous female devotion, a devotion which, in his Nativity hymns, might require women to make sexual choices of shocking public ramifications. Rather than playing down the element of public scandal, Ephrem highlights this as a virtue. He emphasizes it dramatically, calling on Christian women – and, by implication, his choirs – to take their public stance of faith with boldness and holy impudence. He holds up the example of the scandalous foremothers of the messianic lineage: Tamar the daughter-in-law of Judah who ‘stole’ pregnancy in her widowhood; Rahab the prostitute who discerned salvation in Joshua and his troops; Ruth the gleaner who brazenly climbed into Boaz’s bed. 40 Each of these, Ephrem sings, pursued their Lord and his purpose with single-hearted devotion, fearing neither scandal nor shame in their love for God. ‘Because of You,   On the slandering of virgins: e.g., Ephr., H Nat 9, 12, 15.  E.g., Ephr., H Nat 8.21; 12 (passim); 17.5-8, 11; H Virg 1-3 (passim); 15.4,6; 25.10,16,17. 39  A point well made by P. Brown, ‘The Notion of Virginity in the Early Church’, in Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century – ed. B. McGinn, J. Meyendorff, J. Leclerq, New York, 1985, p. 427-443. For the emergence of Syriac ascetic and monastic traditions, see S. H.  Griffith, ‘Asceticism in the Church of Syria: the Hermeneutics of Early Syrian Monasticism’, in Asceticism – ed. V. Wimbush, R. Valantasis, New York, 1995, p. 220-245. 40 E.g., Ephr., H Nat 1. 12 (Tamar), 13 (Ruth), 33 (Rahab); H Nat 9. 7 (Tamar, Ruth, Rahab), 8-11 (Tamar), 12-16 (Ruth). See S. A. Harvey, ‘Impudent Women: Mt 1: 1-16 in Syriac Tradition’, Parole de l’Orient, 35 (Actes du Xe Symposium Syriacum) (2010), p. 65-76. 37 38

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[O Christ]’, he sings repeatedly in Nativity 9, women committed shocking scandals; 41 ‘By You [O Christ] honourable women made themselves contemptible’. 42 Yet this is exemplary: Ruth lay down with a man on the threshing floor for Your sake. Her love was bold for Your sake. She teaches boldness to all penitents. Her ears held in contempt all [other] voices for the sake of Your voice. 43

Again, in Nativity 15, the Virgin Mary herself glories in the slander she endures, knowing her justification is sure: Behold, I am slandered and oppressed, but I rejoice. [...] For if Tamar was acquitted by Judah, how much more will I be acquitted   by You! 44

In Ephrem’s hymns, real and imagined women’s voices converged amidst the congregation whose response here was the refrain, ‘Glory be to You, my Lord, and through You to the Father, on the day of Your nativity!’. 45 Voice nested within voice. The Virgin Mary was slandered in the biblical story; virgins (the choir) were slandered in the civic order; the Nicene congregation was slandered amongst competing congregations and religions. In Ephrem’s verses, the (women’s) choir led the church to sing out boldly, in confidence of the truth they proclaimed. Their boldness of voice had been earned by the Virgin Mary’s own boldness, which had undone the shame women inherited from Eve: Let chaste women praise that pure Mary. Since in their mother Eve their disgrace was great, behold in Mary their sister their triumph was magnified. 46

  Ephr., H Nat 9. 7, 10, 11; McVey, p. 126.   Ephr., H Nat 9. 13; McVey, p. 127. 43   Ephr., H Nat 9. 14; McVey, p. 127. 44  Ephr., H Nat 15. 7-8; McVey, p. 146-147. 45  Ephr., H Nat 15, refr.; McVey, p. 146. 46  Ephr., H Nat 22.N23; McVey, p. 183. 41 42

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The biblical model justified and also enhanced the work of the women’s choirs, as their voices taught a witness proclaimed not only by the words they sang, but further by the sound of their singing: the sound of maligned but faithful virgins. The model of biblical women in bold and scandalous declaration of faith was furthered in Ephrem’s presentation of New Testament women in his Hymns on Virginity. Here again, he portrayed their models in terms that appear unconventional whether for the biblical accounts or for Ephrem’s own social order. In Virginity 26, for example, Ephrem celebrates an entire cascade of women whom Jesus encountered in his ministry: Martha and Mary the sisters of Lazarus; the Sinful Woman who anointed Christ’s feet with oil and kisses; the Woman who called a blessing from the crowd; the Hemorrhaging Woman; the Widow with two mites; the Canaanite Woman; the Widow of Nain; Jairus’s Daughter; the mother of James and John; and Pilate’s Wife. 47 Each he praises in turn, in verses punctuated by the refrain, ‘To You be praises from all!’. 48 His praises are vivid, even startling: Blessed are you, Martha, who without fear served the One [Christ] feared by all. [...] Blessed are you, Martha, to whom love gave The confidence that opened your mouth. By the fruit Eve’s mouth was closed while she was hidden among the trees. Blessed is your mouth that sounded forth with love. 49

In the biblical account in Luke 10, 38-42, Martha complained to Jesus, who rebuked her in return. Yet Ephrem delights in Martha’s bold speech, and more, in this hymn. To the Woman who called to Jesus from the crowd, and whom Jesus rebuked in Luke 11, 27, Ephrem sings, ‘Blessed are you, woman, whose voice became / a trumpet’. To the Canaanite Woman whom Jesus at first dismissed in the gospel (Matth. 15, 21-28), Ephrem exults, ‘Blessed are you who broke through the obstacle fearlessly’. 50   Ephr., H Virg 26; McVey, p. 377-381.   Ephr., H Virg 26, refr.; McVey, p. 377. 49  Ephr., H Virg 26.2-3; McVey, p. 377. 50  Ephr., H Virg 26.5, 9; McVey, p. 378-379.  47 48

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The gospel accounts present these women as an affront in their own times, evident in Jesus’s behavior. Yet Ephrem highlights them as exemplars of faith, notable for boldness of action and especially boldness of voice. Again, we must hear the women’s choirs singing these verses and leading the congregation in their responses of praise. The resonance between biblical story, liturgical performance, and social world was palpable. Elsewhere in these hymns, Ephrem speaks of the Canaanite Woman as one ‘whose love bellowed out’. 51 Similarly, he exalts the Samaritan Woman who encountered Jesus at the well in John 4. In Virginity 22, Ephrem praises her as one ‘reproached’ and ‘slandered’, yet ‘her head was high / and her voice was authoritative’. 52 In Virginity 23, with the congregation’s repeated refrain, ‘Glory to the Discoverer of all!’, 53 Ephrem extols the Samaritan Woman because truth was made known through her voice – as indeed it was through the choir’s voice: O, to you, woman in whom I see a wonder as great as in Mary! For she from within her womb in Bethlehem brought forth His body as a child, but you by your mouth made Him manifest as an adult in Shechem, the town of His father’s household. Blessed are you, woman, who bought forth by your mouth light for those in darkness. 54

Above all else, it is her voice that Ephrem praises: Your voice, O woman, first brought forth fruit, before even the apostles, with the kerygma [Syr: karuˉzuˉtâ]. [...] Blessed is your mouth that He opened and confirmed. 55

Christ spoke to the Woman; she listened and responded by proclaiming the gospel to her people. In liturgy, words were

  Ephr., H Virg 34.7; McVey, p. 413.   Ephr., H Virg 22.7; McVey, p. 356-357. 53  Ephr., H Virg 22, refr.; McVey, p. 361. 54  Ephr., H Virg 23.4; McVey, p. 362. The Syriac for verses 4 and 5 employs terms that explicitly engage the physicality of conception and birthgiving for both Mary and the Samaritan Woman (CSCO, 223/ Scr Syr 94), at p. 82. 55  Ephr., H Virg 23.7; McVey, p. 363. 51 52

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sung, heard, and responses sung forth, in orchestrated exchange between chanter (Ephrem), women’s choir, and congregation. In Ephrem’s hymns, words were not only intellectual tools for understanding; they were bodily acts of hearing and speech, which served to actualise divine purpose. Gender is highlighted in these verses on multiple levels. Notably, the women’s boldness of speech breaks social customs presumed in the biblical accounts and apparently also by Ephrem’s own audience. The image of the Samaritan Woman engages gender as well as ethnicity in a rhetorical strategy that plays upon marginality: both underscore the unlikelihood and therefore the power of the encounter with Christ. Yet there is more: in Syriac liturgy, gender and ethnicity were literally utilised to perform the teaching of truth, as the sound of the Syriac women’s choirs embodied and enacted the very moral of the Samaritan Woman’s story. Truth sounded forth from Syriac women’s voices, despite social constraint or calumny. Ephrem’s hymns exalted women’s voices. But he delighted further to name all the types and ranks of voices contributing to liturgical celebration: Let the chief pastor weave together his homilies like flowers, let the priests make a garland of their ministry, the deacons of their reading, strong young men of their jubilant shouts, children of their Psalms, chaste women of their songs, chief citizens of their benefactions, ordinary folk of their manner of life. Blessed is He who gave us so many opportunities for good! 56

What mattered in these combined, yet distinct, voices of worship?

3. Sounding voices In the gathered presence of the church as a whole, Ephrem rejoiced at the sounds of collective song.  E.g., Ephr., H Res 2.9; Brock, Kiraz, p. 177.

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Blessed are you, O church [...] Blessed are your voices [...] Your mouth is a censer, and your voices like sweet spices rise up on your festivals! 57

It was a sound to which he called every believer: ‘Let us glorify with all our mouths the Lord of all means [of salvation]’. 58 Just as his hymns joined the voices of his choirs to those of biblical women, so, too, they joined the voices of the congregation to the voices of natural and supernatural order. For sounding voices were Ephrem’s characterisation of these orders at their most glorious. In his Hymns on Paradise, Ephrem reflected on Paradise as a place of resounding splendor, with ‘thunderous sound,’ ‘blaring trumpets’, voices ‘crying’, ‘harps and lyres’, ‘shouts of hosanna’, cries of ‘alleluia’, ‘seraphs with their chants’, ‘cherubs with their wings’, voices and music for which ‘there is no comparison here below’. 59 Such a view had characterized biblical depictions of worship in human communities, as in the Psalms; and in heavenly ones, in prophetic accounts such as Isaiah 6 or Revelation 5. For Christians and Jews, creation itself had been an act of thunderous sound. 60 In Ephrem’s Nativity hymns, that original commotion was (fittingly) echoed in the thunderous clamor of the second creation, the birth of Christ, as heaven and earth together sounded their joy with clamor, thunder, loud voices, cries, shouts, and proclamations. 61 The sound of such singing, he urged, should pour forth in triumph. At the Easter vigil, he sang: This joyful festival is entirely made up of tongues and voices: Innocent young women and men sounding like trumpets   and horns While infant girls and boys resemble harps and lyres;

  Ephr., H Nat 25. 2; McVey, p. 200.   Ephr., H Nat 3.19; McVey, p. 87. 59 E.g., Ephr., H Par 5.11, 11.2, 14.9. Discussed in B. Varghese, ‘Saint Ephrem and the Early Syriac Liturgical Tradition’, St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 56:1 (2011), p. 17-49. 60  See now D. MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History, New York, 2013, p. 11-50; and, for example, Jac. Sar., ‘the First Day of Creation’. 61 E.g., Ephr., H Nat 6.21-24; H Nat 7.1. 57 58

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Their voices intertwine as they reach up together towards  heaven, Giving glory to the Lord of glory. 62

And to this splendid chorus, the congregation sang the refrain: ‘Blessed is He for whom the silent have thundered out!’ 63 Such a celebration of volume perhaps befits the hymn-writer, whose job in part required rousing people to enthusiastic participation. But an appreciation of loud-sounding worship recurred in other kinds of literary sources that mention or refer to liturgical celebration. If the volume somehow mirrored divine (or at least, biblical) counterparts, it also, undoubtedly, carried social implications in the context of late antique religious competition. Loud choirs in public spaces proclaimed proud witness to one’s religious loyalties. Histories, chronicles, letters, and hagiographies referred to dueling choirs in late antique cities all across the Empire. 64 Triumphalism both social and political laced such accounts, as well as a conscious attention to religious ritual as public performance. It is important for scholars to remember how much religious activity took place outdoors, in public, widely accessible spaces: as processions through city streets, or in marketplaces or other civic areas. 65

  Ephr., H Res 2.2; Brock, Kiraz, p. 171.   Ibid. 64  Again, see the examples in McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, p. 72 (#148, Gr. Naz. on the congregation at Caesarea); p. 101-102 (#218, Socr. on Nicenes and Arians in Constantinople); p. 102-103 (#219, Soz. on factions in Antioch); p. 105-106 (#227, Thdt. on Melitians in Alexandria). The public ethos of polemic continued, apparently also contributing to the development of Jewish liturgical poetry, particularly piyyut. See, e.g., W. van Bekkum, ‘Anti-Christian Polemics in Hebrew Liturgical Poetry (Piyyut) of the Sixth and Seventh Centuries’, in Early Christian Poetry: A Collection of Essays – ed. J. Den Boeft, A. Hilhorst (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 22), Leiden, 1993, p. 297-308. 65   The classic study remains J. F.  Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship: The Origins, Development, and Meaning of Stational Liturgy (OCA, 228), Rome, 1987. See further, e.g., T. F.  Mathews, The Clash of Gods: a reinterpretation of early Christian art, Princeton, 19992; N. Andrade, ‘The Processions of John Chrysostom and the Contested Spaces of Constantinople’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 18.2 (2010), p. 161-189. For an important Syriac instance, J. Khoury-Sarkis, ‘Recéption d’un évèque syrien au vie siècle’, L’Orient Syrien, 2 (1958), p. 137-184. 62 63

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But there was also an aesthetic sensibility that understood loud sound as an appropriate adornment of religious ritual; and further, that encouraged participation in those terms in order to express willing and active presence on the part of the congregation. Hence the Syriac women’s choirs were praised in descriptions that mention their loud singing with appreciation. Syriac liturgical instructions, whether in commentaries or sermons, called for the congregation to follow suit: to offer their own voices ‘loudly’, ‘with shouting’. 66 Such aesthetic views contributed to the formative, or instructive, aspects of Christian worship. A hymn-writer or choral leader such as Ephrem, might cultivate an awareness of bodily engagement with sound – whether voicing or hearing – in verses such as we have been considering. A homilist could do likewise in a more explanatory mode. Just so did Jacob of Sarug, itinerant priest and bishop serving in the eastern Syriac-speaking areas of the Roman Empire during the late fifth and early sixth centuries. 67 In lyrically crafted poetic homilies, Jacob provided important evidence about the Syriac women’s choirs, in contexts where he instructed the congregation about liturgy, its performance, and their own forms of participation in it. In these passages, he emphasised the importance of voices sounded forth in speech or song, and voices received by listening. Both modes of voice or sound involved hearing as a sensory act of potent affective quality, on persons and on the world. 68 In the homily he dedicated to Ephrem, Jacob emphasised gendered sound as crucial to the truth of Bible and liturgy as proclaimed by Ephrem’s hymns. 69 Hence he highlighted the

66  E.g., Jac. Sar., ‘On the Partaking’, l. 203-340. Cfr the East Syriac liturgical homily, wrongly ascribed to Narsai, ‘Hom. 17: An Exposition of the Mysteries’, at p. 6. Ephrem repeatedly summons the congregation to sing out their joy: e.g. H Nat 22 and 25. Jacob of Sarug’s festal homilies often end with a summons to the whole of creation – including the congregation – to sing forth loudly. 67 See now Jacob of Serugh and his Times: Studies in Sixth-Century Syriac Christianity – ed. G. A.  Kiraz, Piscataway, NJ, 2010. 68  For an important new consideration of listening in early Christian culture more broadly, see now C. Harrison, The Art of Listening in the Early Church, Oxford, 2013. 69  Jac. Sar., ‘Homily on Ephrem’.

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import of the women’s choirs, arguing from various directions. Just as Moses led the Hebrew women in triumphant song at the Red Sea, so, too, did Ephrem lead the Syriac women to sing praise to the Deliverer of All (v. 45-50, 78-97). In former times women kept silence in church, because their mouths were shut by the disobedience of Eve (v. 40-41). Now the obedience of Mary has opened the mouths of women; they can sing forth ‘without shame’, with faces unveiled (v. 108-113). Women should sing loud praise just as the men, because the sacraments gave proof of their equality. Jacob invoked the voice of Ephrem exhorting the women to sing: You put on glory from the midst of the waters like your  brothers; render thanks with a loud voice like them also. You have partaken of a single forgiving body with your  brothers, and from a single cup of new life you have been refreshed. A single salvation was yours and theirs (alike); why then have you not learned to sing praise with a loud voice? 70

Thus Jacob employed in turn typological, theological, sacramental, and ultimately eschatological justifications for the liturgical role of the women’s choirs. These he presented to his congregation as the very terms by which Ephrem exhorted women to sing. Jacob thereby instructed his congregation in the voice of Ephrem instructing the women. Once again, voice nested within voice: voices remembered in liturgical song became the voices of the participants themselves. At the same time, Jacob’s intoned encomium was laced with references to the sound of the women. ‘The gatherings of the glorious [church] resound with their melodies’. 71 They sing their praises with ‘sweet melodies’ and ‘joyful sound’. 72 Or again, their sound is ‘serene’, ‘as sweet song with a pure melody’. 73 The churches rang ‘with the pure voices of pious women’ who

  Jac. Sar., ‘Homily on Ephrem’, v. 105-107; Amar, p. 51.   Jac. Sar., ‘Homily on Ephrem’, v. 41b; Amar, p. 35. 72  Jac. Sar., ‘Homily on Ephrem’, v. 46, 48, 59; Amar, p. 37, 39. 73  Jac. Sar., ‘Homily on Ephrem’, v. 99-100; Amar, p. 49. 70 71

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‘make their chants instructive melodies’, ‘with soft tones’. 74 By such descriptors, Jacob underscored attention to the sound of the women, in addition to the words, or teaching, or truth, which they sang. The content of their song was important, to be sure. But Jacob’s point was that the sound of the women’s voices in the liturgy rendered witness to God’s salvific actions, for ‘yonder in the kingdom, men and women are equal’. 75 The women’s choirs enacted God’s saving dispensation by giving voice in a verbal icon that performed what it signified. The congregation participated in that salvific enactment by hearing their voices. Gendered voices – sung and heard – were essential to the wholeness and to the efficacy of the salvation process. 76 Himself one who chanted homilies of prolonged duration, Jacob often commented to his congregations on the importance of listening in liturgy. 77 He chided them for restless, distracted behavior; 78 he exhorted their careful attention; he praised them when they listened well. These were more than exhortative clichés. Rather, for Jacob, listening and hearing were primary modes of liturgical participation. They were physical acts, bodily encounters, of profound impact on an individual and on the congregation as a whole. Thus he exhorted: Both the speaker and the listeners are co-workers; the word of the one who speaks and of the one who gives   heed is the same. From the speaker and the listeners, one eulogy goes up to the One who fashioned for us a mouth and ears in his  wisdom. 79

Jacob expounded this view in various homilies, admonishing that listening affects one’s person: sounds work on the soul, for   Jac. Sar., ‘Homily on Ephrem’, v. 101, 114, 152; Amar, p. 49, 53, 65.   Jac. Sar., ‘Homily on Ephrem’, v. 43b; Amar, p. 35. 76   Harvey, ‘Singing Women’s Stories’. 77   S. A.  Harvey, ‘To Whom Did Jacob Preach?’, in Jacob of Serugh and his Times – ed. G. A. Kiraz, p. 115-131. 78 E.g., Jac. Sar., ‘On the Partaking’, l. 115-128. Jac. Sar., ‘Homily on Ephrem’, v. 128-129, 139-169. 79  Jac. Sar., ‘On the Tower of Babel’, l. 69-74; Butts, p. 14. 74 75

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good and for ill. The sounds of the city pulled the soul in many directions. The sounds of funerals (with their ‘wailing women’) were distressing; 80 sounds of the theatre seduced and led astray; 81 the marketplace distracted, gossip misled. 82 By contrast, he argued in ‘On the Partaking of the Holy Mysteries’, the sound of liturgy also impacted the soul, moulding its well-being, forming its disposition. 83 He urged the importance of listening and hearing as active forms of liturgical presence through the course of Psalms, hymns, scripture readings, and homilies. He drew attention to the women’s choir: ‘Pay heed to the hymns (sung) by the virgins with glorious voices / that the wisdom of the Most High has given to the congregations’. 84 The repetition of these ‘holy hymns’, in particular, would soothe, order, and comfort the soul. 85 When Jacob turned to the congregation’s own voice as liturgical contribution, it was with a sense of bringing liturgy to its culminating fulfillment. Together the people must ‘call out’ their prayers, ‘sing truthful songs’, bless, sanctify, chant, and beg for forgiveness ‘with a loud voice’. 86 They must voice their prayers aloud, and their voices must be heard: by the city, which would resound with wondrous truth instead of lies, deceits, and filth; 87 by Satan, who would be annoyed by hymns and prayers; by God, who would offer forgiveness and mercy to the faithful. 88 Indeed, in a homily on Elisha he sang out to God: The sound of Your praise [O Lord] thunders awesomely   among the congregations, and through it the impudent song of idolatry was silenced. From Your hymns, Your sermons, and Your teachings the entire inhabited world shouted out and thundered to sing  praise. 89   Jac. Sar., ‘On the Partaking’, l. 157-158; Jac. Sar.,’On the Departed’.   Jac. Sar., On the Spectacles, passim. 82  Jac. Sar., ‘On the Partaking’, l. 53-72, 89-110, 265-278. 83  Jac. Sar., ‘On the Partaking’, l. 129-188. 84  Jac. Sar., ‘On the Partaking’, l. 131-132; Harrak, p. 18. 85  Jac. Sar., ‘On the Partaking’, l. 171-176; Harrak, p. 22. 86  Jac. Sar., ‘On the Partaking’, l. 189-320; Harrak, p. 23-38. 87  Jac. Sar., On the Spectacles, passim. 88  Jac. Sar., ‘On the Partaking’, l. 244-256, 261-264. 89  Jac. Sar., ‘On Elisha IV’, l. 21-30; Kaufman, p. 176. Jacob goes on to note the power of the women’s singing, in particular. 80 81

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In his festal homilies, Jacob sang in repeated cascades of glory, naming all the ranks of all the faithful who joined their voices to celebrate the feast: earthly and heavenly, in the natural world and in the human order. In these (loud and) shimmering lists of singing liturgical participants – a veritable topos for his festal homilies – Jacob presented his vision of a truly ordered cosmos, in which all persons and all things would have their rightful place and their rightful voice. Each would sound their contribution; each would be heard. 90

4. Patristic Worlds Syriac voices from the patristic past are lush with poetic grandeur and crafted elegance. They elicit admiration (or at least, the admiration of Syriac scholars!) for the many ways in which they differ from, but also resonate with, their better known Greek and Latin counterparts. Ironically, by their very differences, Syriac voices set in dramatic relief many of the silences that patristic scholars have come to mourn as our knowledge has broadened and deepened in these past fifty years. My comments here have focused on the voices of those we most often lack in our ancient sources: the voices of languages other than Greek or Latin, the voices of women, the voices of ordinary laity. Yet all these remain missing voices, even when remembered by our sources. No known Syriac text authored by a woman survives to us from pre-modern times. As far as we know, the women’s choirs did not compose their own hymns, but sang the verses of male hymnographers, brilliant or otherwise as they were. Moreover, in Syriac as in Greek or Latin, the voice of the ‘ordinary’ layperson lies beyond our grasp. Nonetheless, these texts remind us, in their own distinctive terms, that such voices did sound forth. In the past fifty years we have come to appreciate the diversity of the ancient Christian world in far richer, more complex terms than scholars had previously accounted for or recognised. The global present necessitates such awareness; our own times call us to such a chal-

 E.g., Jac. Sar., ‘On Palm Sunday’, l. 275-304.

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lenge. In the work of this present volume, we see how manifold the fruits of such labor can be. From such a perspective, we might well consider ancient religion to be encapsulated in the sensory experience of the sound of song: the voicing and hearing of hymns, scripture, prayers, instruction, and praise. Such songs were heard and sung, amidst other, competing, and rival contexts; religious, social, and political. They were sung and heard amidst layered practices, such as those described by Sozomen: amidst incense, lights, processions, offerings, objects, adornments, food, and wine; sung and heard individually and collectively, amidst competing religions and rival groupings, in languages familiar and foreign. It is the multiplicity of voices from a plenitude of worlds that we, as scholars, seek to hear as patristic studies move forward in the twenty-first century.

Bibliography 1. Primary Sources Eus., d. e. = Eusebius of Caesarea, demonstratio evangelica – ed. I. A. Heikel (GCS, 6), 1913, M.22.13. Eus., v. c. =  Eusebius of Caesarea, de vita Constantii – ed. and tr. Av. Cameron, S. G. Hall, Eusebius: the Life of Constantine, Oxford, 1999. Eus., h. e. = Eusebius of Caesarea, historia ecclesiastica – ed. E. Schwartz (GCS, 2), 1903-8, M.20.45. Ephr., H Nat = Ephrem Syrus, Hymns on the Nativity – ed. and tr. E. Beck in Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Nativitate (Epiphania) (CSCO, 186-187 / Scr. Syr. 82-83), Louvain, 1959 [Eng. trans. K. McVey, Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns, New York, 1989, p. 61-217]. Ephr., H Par = Ephrem Syrus, Hymns on Paradise – ed. and tr. E. Beck in Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Paradiso und contra Julianum (CSCO, 174-175 / Scr. Syr. 78-79), Louvain, 1957 [Eng. trans. S. P. Brock, St. Ephrem the Syrian, Hymns on Paradise, Crestwood, NY, 1990]. Ephr., H Res = Ephrem Syrus, Hymns on the Resurrection – ed. and tr. E. Beck in Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Pascha-hymnen (de  Azymis, de Crucifixion, de Resurrectione), (CSCO, 248-249 /

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Scr. Syr. 108-109), Louvain, 1964. H Res 2 [Eng. trans. S. P. Brock, G. A.  Kiraz, Ephrem the Syrian: Select Poems, Provo, UT, 2006, p. 169-179]. Ephr., H Virg = Ephrem Syrus, Hymns on Virginity – ed. and tr. E. Beck in Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Virginitate (CSCO, 223-224 / Scr. Syr. 94-95), Louvain, 1962 [Eng. trans. K. McVey, Ephrem the Syrian: Hymns, New York, 1989, p. 261-468]. Jac. Sar., Homilies = Unless otherwise noted, I cite from the bilingual Syriac-English editions in the series edited by S. P. Brock, G. A. Kiraz, The Metrical Homilies of Mar Jacob of Sarug, Piscataway, NJ, 2008 and ongoing. The homily number in parentheses indicates the number in the edition of P. Bedjan, S. P. Brock, Homilies of Mar Jacob of Sarug / Homiliae Selectae Mar-Jacobi Sarugensis, Piscataway, NJ, 20062, 6 Vols. Jac. Sar., ‘On the Departed’ = H. Connolly, ‘A Homily of Mar Jacob of Serugh on the Memorial of the Departed and on the Eucharistic Loaf ’, in Downside Review, 29 (n. s. 10) (1910), p. 260270 [Eng. trans.]. Also ‘ “On the Reposed”, by Mar Jacob, Bishop of Serugh (†521)’ – trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery [D. Miller], The True Vine, 5 (1990), p. 41-53. Jac. Sar., ‘Homily on Ephrem’ = ‘A Metrical Homily on Holy Mar Ephrem by Mar Jacob of Serug’ – ed. and tr. J. P. Amar (PO, 47), Turnhout, 1995, p. 5-76. Jac. Sar., ‘On Elisha IV’ = ‘IV: About Naaman the Edomite and his disciple, Gahzi (Hom. 119)’ in Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Elisha – tr. S. A. Kaufman, Piscataway, NJ, 2010, p. 169-205. Jac. Sar., ‘the First Day of Creation’ = Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on the Six Days of Creation: ‘the First Day (Hom. 71A)’ – tr. E. G. Mathews, Jr., Piscataway, NJ, 2009. Jac. Sar., ‘On Palm Sunday’ = Jacob of Sarug, ‘On Palm Sunday (Hom. 18)’ – tr. T. Kollamparampil, Piscataway, NJ, 2008. Jac. Sar., ‘On the Partaking’ = Jacob of Sarug, ‘On the Partaking of the Holy Mysteries, (Hom. 95)’ – tr. Amir Harrak, Piscataway, NJ, 2009. Jac. Sar., On Spectacles = ‘Jacob of Serugh’s Homilies on the Spectacles of the Theatre’ – ed. and tr. C. Moss, Le Muséon, 48 (1935), p. 87-112. Jac. Sar., ‘On the Tower of Babel’ = Jacob of Sarug, ‘On the Tower of Babel (Hom. 33)’ – tr. A. M. Butts, Piscataway, NJ, 2009. ‘Maruta Canons’ = The Canons Ascribed to Maruta of Maipherqat and Related Sources – ed. and tr. A. Vööbus (CSCO, 439-440 / Scr. Syr. 191-192), Louvain, 1982.

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Ps. Narsai, ‘Hom. 17’ = Ps. Narsai, ‘Homily 17: An Exposition on the Mysteries’, in The Liturgical Homilies of Narsai – tr. R. H. Connolly (Texts and Studies, 8), Cambridge, 1909, p. 1-32. ‘Rules of Rabbula’ = ‘The Rules of Rabbula for the Clergy and the Qeiama’, in Syriac and Arabic Documents Regarding Legislation Relative to Syrian Asceticism – ed. and tr. A. Vööbus (Papers of the Estonian School of Theology in Exile, 11), Stockholm, 1960, p. 34-50. Soz., h. e. = Sozomen, historia ecclesiastica – ed. J. Bidez – tr. A. J. Festugière, in Sozomène, Histoire ecclésiastique: Livres I – II (SC, 306), Paris, 1983 [Eng. trans. C. D. Hartranft NPNF2 2, Grand Rapids, 1989]. Syriac vita = The Syriac Vita Tradition of Ephrem the Syrian – ed. and tr. J. P. Amar (CSCO, 629-630 / Scr. Syr. 242-3), Leuven, 2011.

2. Secondary Sources N. Andrade, ‘The Processions of John Chrysostom and the Contested Spaces of Constantinople’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 18.2 (2010), p. 161-189. S. Bakker Kellog, ‘Fragments of a Liturgical World: Syriac Orthodox Christianity and the Dutch Multiculturalism Debates’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2013. J. F. Baldovin, The Urban Character of Christian Worship: The Origins, Development, and Meaning of Stational Liturgy (OCA, 228), Rome, 1987. N. Belayche,  Iudaea-Palaestina: the pagan cults in Roman Palestine (second to fourth centuries), Tübingen, 2001. P. Bradshaw, Daily Prayer in the Early Church, Oxford, 1982. S. P. Brock, The Bible in the Syrian Tradition, Piscataway, NJ, 20062. S. P. Brock, The Luminous Eye: the Spiritual World Vision of St. Ephrem the Syrian, Kalamazoo, 1992. S. P. Brock, ‘Poetry and Hymnography (3): Syriac’, in the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies – ed. S. A. Harvey, D. G. Hunter, Oxford, 2010, p. 657-671. P. Brown, ‘The Notion of Virginity in the Early Church’, in Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century – ed. B. McGinn, J. Meyendorff, J. Leclerq, New York, 1985, p. 427-443. F. Cassingena-Trévedy, ‘L’hymnographie syriaque’, in Les liturgies syriaques – ed. F. Cassingena-Trévedy, I. Jurasz (Études syriaques, 3), Paris, 2006, p. 183-219.

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H. A. Drake, ‘Intolerance, Religious Violence, and Political Legitimacy in Late Antiquity’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 79 (2011), p. 193-235. S. H. Griffith, ‘Asceticism in the Church of Syria: the Hermeneutics of Early Syrian Monasticism’, in Asceticism – ed. V. Wimbush, R. Valantasis, New York, 1995, p. 220-245. S. H. Griffith, ‘Faith Adoring the Mystery’: Reading the Bible with St. Ephraem the Syrian, Milwaukee, 1997. S. H. Griffith, ‘Setting Right the Church of Syria: Saint Ephrem’s Hymns Against Heresies’, in The Limits of Ancient Christianity: Essays on Late Antique Thought and Culture in Honour of Robert A. Markus – ed. W. E. Klingshirn, M. Vessey, Ann Arbor, 1999, p. 97-114. E. Grypeou, H. Spurling, ‘Abraham’s Angels: Jewish and Christian Exegesis of Genesis 18-19’, in The Exegetical Encounter between Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity – ed. E. Grypeou, H. Spurling (Jewish and Christian Perspectives, 18), Leiden, 2009, p. 181-203. C. Harrison, The Art of Listening in the Early Church, Oxford, 2013. S. A. Harvey, ‘Impudent Women: Mt 1: 1-16 in Syriac Tradition’, Parole de l’Orient, 35 (Actes du Xe Symposium) (2010), p. 65-76. S. A. Harvey, ‘Performance as Exegesis: Women’s Liturgical Choirs in Syriac Tradition’, in Inquiries into Eastern Christian Worship: Acts of the Second International Congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgy – ed. B. J. Groen, S. Alexopoulos, S. Hawkes-Teeples (Eastern Christian Studies, 12), Leuven, 2012, p. 47-64. S. A. Harvey, ‘Revisiting the Daughters of the Covenant: Women’s Choirs and Sacred Song in Ancient Syriac Christianity’, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies, 8.2 (2005 [2009]), p. 125-149. S. A. Harvey, ‘The Senses in Religion: Piety, Critique, Competition’, in A Cultural History of the Senses – ed. C. Classen, Vol. I: Antiquity – ed. J. P. Toner, London, 2014, p. 91-113. S. A. Harvey, ‘Sensing More in Ancient Religion’, Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift, 89 (2013), p. 97-106 S. A. Harvey, ‘Singing Women’s Stories in Syriac Tradition’, Internationale Kirchliche Zeitschrift, 100.3 (2010), p. 171-189. S. A. Harvey, ‘To Whom Did Jacob Preach?’, in Jacob of Serugh and his Times – ed. G. A. Kiraz, p. 115-131. Jacob of Serugh and his Times: Studies in Sixth-Century Syriac Christianity – ed. G. A. Kiraz, Piscataway, NJ, 2010. A. Kofsky, ‘Mamre: A Case of a Regional Cult?’ in Sharing the Sacred: Religious Contacts and Conflicts in the Holy Land – ed. A. Kofsky, G. G. Stroumsa, Jerusalem, 1998, p. 19-30.

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R. Jensen, ‘Early Christian Images and Exegesis’, in Picturing the Bible: the Earliest Christian Art – ed. J. Spier, New Haven, London, 2007, p. 64-85. J. Khoury-Sarkis, ‘Recéption d’un évèque syrien au vie siècle’, L’Orient Syrien, 2 (1958), p. 137-184. M. Lattke, ‘Sind Ephraems Madraˉšeˉ Hymnen?’, Oriens Christianus, 73 (1989), p. 38-43. D. MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History, New York, 2013. R. Macmullen, The Second Century: Popular Christianity A.D. 200400, Atlanta, 2009. J. Mateos, La célébration de la parole dans la liturgie Byzantine (OCA, 191), Rome, 1971. J. Mateos, Lelya-Sapra: Essai d’interpretation des matines chaldeennes (OCA, 156), Rome, 1959. T. F.  Mathews, The Clash of Gods: a reinterpretation of early Christian art, Princeton, 19992. J. McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, Cambridge, 1987. K. McVey, ‘Ephrem the Kitharode and Proponent of Women: Jacob of Serug’s Portrait of a Fourth-Century Churchman for the SixthCentury Viewer and its significance for the twenty-first century ecumenist’, in Orthodox and Wesleyan Ecclesiology – ed. S. T. Kimbrough, Crestwood, NY, 2007, p. 229-253. C. Page, The Christian West and its Singers: the First Thousand Years, New Haven, 2010. A. Palmer, ‘ “A Lyre Without a Voice”: the Poetics and Politics of Ephrem the Syrian’, ARAM, 5 (1993), p. 371-399. A. Palmer, ‘A Single Human Being Divided in Himself: Ephraim the Syrian, the Man in the Middle’, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies, 1.2 (1998 [2010]), p. 119-163. J. Quasten, ‘The Liturgical Singing of Women in Christian Antiquity’, Catholic Historical Review, 27 (1941), p. 149-165. J. Quasten, Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity – tr. B. Ramsey, Washington, D.C., 1983. J. Rives, Religion in the Roman Empire, Malden, 2007. C. Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem’s Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria (Patristic Monograph Series, 20), Washington, D.C., 2008. R. Taft, The Liturgy of the hours in East and West: the Origins of the Divine Office and its Meaning for Today, Collegeville, 1986.

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D. Ullucci, The Christian Reflection of Animal Sacrifice, New York, 2012. W. Van Bekkum, ‘Anti-Christian Polemics in Hebrew Liturgical Poetry (Piyyut) of the Sixth and Seventh Centuries’, in Early Christian Poetry: A Collection of Essays – ed. J. Den Boeft, A. Hilhorst (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 22), Leiden, 1993, p. 297-308. B. Varghese, ‘Saint Ephrem and the Early Syriac Liturgical Tradition’, St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 56.1 (2011), p. 17-49.

Abstract Over the past fifty years, patristic scholars have shown increasing interest in the diversity and pluralism of the ancient Christian world. This paper marks these changes by presenting two ‘windows’ into Christianity of the patristic era. First, the Greek historian Sozomen presents aspects of religious pluralism that bear upon how scholars understand ancient Christianity as a religion. Second, Syriac liturgical poetry provides an example of the diverse voices patristic scholars have increasingly come to value in recent years. In both cases, I seek to emphasise religion as an embodied experience, physically performed and sensorily engaged. This perspective itself marks a recent turn in scholarly attention, one that again brings to light the multiplicity of Christianity during the patristic era. This paper will not argue a thesis, but rather present considerations for re-thinking the ancient Christian world in larger, more diverse terms than have characterised patristic scholarship in other times and places.

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MARTIN WALLRAFF Universität Basel

WHOSE FATHERS? AN OVERVIEW OF PATRISTIC STUDIES IN EUROPE

An overview of patristic studies in Europe in just a few pages is not only a difficult task. It is an impossible mission. Too many projects, people, and phenomena would have to be mentioned. Although things may gradually change in the twenty-first century, it is no exaggeration to say that in the fifty years covered by the history of the Association Internationale d’Études Patristiques (AIEP) more than half of patristic research worldwide has been carried out in Europe. It would be a futile debate to clarify whether it was actually sixty or seventy percent or even more. It is to be hoped that this will change – and that this change will happen not just because research in Europe declines due to lack of resources and fading cultural presuppositions, but mainly because of growing interest elsewhere (and hence an overall intensification). It is my conviction that the quality of ‘our’ material and the general development of Christianity worldwide justify such intensification. For the present overview I resisted the temptation to give a short ‘best of’ list. Rather, I opted for a different solution. In my first section I will share a few general thoughts on Europe and Patristics. I will then mention just a few initiatives or institutions, pars pro toto, without any claim to give an exhaustive or representative cross-section, and I will finally reflect on a few recent and not-so-recent developments. It is almost superfluous to say that all this is highly subjective, and marked by personal experience, opinion, and limits.

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1. Whose fathers? – paternity and alterity My considerations start from the observation that many patristic scholars in Europe teach and do research in contexts where their field of competence is not actually called ‘Patristics’. Most relevant chairs bear names like ‘Religious Literature of Late Antiquity (Littérature religieuse de l’Antiquité tardive)’, ‘Ancient Church History (ältere Kirchengeschichte)’, ‘History of Christian Antiquity (Histoire de l’Antiquité chrétienne)’, ‘Ancient Christian Literature (Letteratura cristiana antica)’, ‘Historical Theology’, or many others. There is actually a surprising variety of designations – and a surprising consciousness of unity in reconciled diversity (if I may use this ecumenical terminology). All over the continent people dealing with Origen, Athanasius, and Augustine consider themselves patristic scholars, tend to come to patristic conferences, and often are members of the Association Internationale d’Études Patristiques, although at home they are disguised under different names. The different designations often lead to different roots in the various cultural contexts: national, religious, academic. Sometimes these roots are of great historical interest, and sometimes they are not: they merely lead to idiosyncrasies of local politics, with very limited interest only to those who are involved actively or passively in some phase of reforming or deforming European institutions of higher education. It must be stressed, however, that the use or non-use of the term ‘Patristics’ does not depend on the religious or secular context. There are state faculties where the term is used, and ecclesiastical institutions where it is not used. Apparently, the term ‘Patristics’ constitutes a relatively strong identity ad intra, whereas it does not immediately convey a clear message ad extra. Actually, even in academic contexts many colleagues from other disciplines would not even know the term. It may well be that this ambiguity of ‘Patristics’ ultimately derives from its literal meaning: It implies fatherhood, and in the last decades this aspect has become less clear or even somewhat embarrassing. Who fathered what child? Of course, there are good studies on the historic origins of the concept of ‘fathers’, on the ‘patristic principle’, etc. 1 There is also a broad and some  T. Graumann, Die Kirche der Väter. Vätertheologie und Väterbeweis in den

1

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what diffuse opinion that the fathers are Church fathers – and more than that. 2 They somehow belong to the origins of ‘our’ European culture. A narrow definition in an ecclesial (or even denominational) sense would be too technical; a broader definition remains vague and arbitrary. However, most Church fathers are not European, and if they fathered children, then it was not the European culture (of which they could not and did not know anything, because it originated much later). Even the most important and well known European Church father is not European at all: Augustine of Hippo was an African bishop and theologian. This, of course, has always been true, but as part of a process of globalisation and pluralisation European scholars become more and more aware of it. For me personally this became clear in a vivid manner, when I attended an African American church in Washington, D.C., where St. Augustine was proudly presented in the stained glass windows in a very ostensibly African way. 3 Today, the fathers cannot (and should not) be read in a ‘teleological’ perspective, i.e., in a direct ancestral line from Jesus Christ to the Fathers, from there to the Latin (and Christian) culture of the European Middle Ages, to the theologians of the age of Reformation and post-Reformation, to European scholarship today. Today Europe may be in search of a common narrative and identity – after a long phase of postmodern delight in diversity and plurality. But the fathers do not easily lend themselves to Kirchen des Ostens bis zum Konzil von Ephesus (431) (Beiträge zur Historischen Theologie, 118), Tübingen, 2002; A. Merkt, Das patristische Prinzip. Eine Studie zur theologischen Bedeutung der Kirchenväter (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 58), Leiden, 2001; M. Fédou, Les Pères de l’Église et la théologie chrétienne, Paris, 2013. 2  Already Henri-Irénée Marrou in his opening lecture of the first Oxford Conference on Patristic Studies in 1951 claimed the Church fathers as a source of the classical humanism that post-war Europe needed. (The lecture was printed only in 1976; it served as a programmatic opening contribution to a homonymous collection of articles: H.-I. Marrou, ‘Patristique et humanisme’, in Id., Patristique et humanisme. Mélanges, Paris, 1976, p. 25-34.) 3  St. Augustine Catholic Church, ‘the Mother Church of African American Catholics in the Nation’s Capital’; the church was built in the nineteenth century for an Irish parish in the historicizing style of the time. Most stained glass windows of the original building survive (in their European pseudo-medieval style) – except for the one mentioned in the text.

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such a purpose. Charlemagne often is pushed into this role, at times even Constantine, but not patristic literature. On the other hand, European scholarship is still very strong in Patristics, but there is no such thing as a monopoly. What does this all mean? One thing for sure: the distance has grown. This is true in many respects, not least for the languages. In all European countries the knowledge of Greek and Latin has significantly decreased in the last fifty years. The impact and the presence of Christian traditions in the public realm have also decreased. The consciousness of different approaches to Patristics and scholarship elsewhere, outside Europe, is gradually growing. Today, the fathers are not as naturally ‘our’ fathers as they were half a century ago. It is my hypothesis that the significance and the importance of patristic studies does not decrease with the growing distance. On the contrary, there is a new interest in patristic studies under the paradigm of ‘otherness’. The new Munich ‘Centre for Ancient Worlds’ (plural!) runs a graduate school for ancient studies under the name of ‘Distant Worlds’. 4 Patristics is explicitly included in this context. It may well be that the fathers continue to be Church fathers, i.e., that they have a vital identifying role for Christian believers. But firstly this is not important for all scholars in the field (there are many non-Christians or nonbelievers), and secondly, even for Christian theologians the constitution of a Christian identity is not necessarily the main reason for the interest in ‘our’ texts. As I said at the beginning, the quality of ‘our’ material is so high, that the interest is justified, maybe even stronger under the paradigm of alterity. The fathers speak for themselves, and they will make their voice heard also in the future, also in Europe. Patres suorum ipsorum interpretes.

2. Who does what where? – institutional aspects Quibus rebus dictis, it must also be said that we all still owe a great deal to European scholarship. I will mention a few concrete 4  ‹www.mzaw.uni-muenchen.de/dw/›; in what follows I limit myself often to giving internet addresses (URLs). The most accurate and up-to-date information on many projects can be found in the internet, although URLs may change over time. All addresses were correct in July 2014.

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achievements of the last fifty years. This will be only illustrative, as I said, without any claim to being exhaustive. First of all, most patristic texts are to be read in European editions. This is certainly true for the older editions, like the Maurists and others, mostly reprinted in Migne’s monumental Patrologia. Although most fathers are not European, they come to us in European clothes, as it were. It is also true for most recent critical editions. As is well known, the most important series are the Corpus Scriptorium Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL) originally from Vienna, now Salzburg, 5 the Griechische Christliche Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte (GCS) from Berlin 6 and the Corpus Christianorum from Turnhout in Belgium. 7 All three are older than half a century, and thus older than AIEP, but they all continued to flourish in these years. In all three cases, the institutional background is neither a university nor a religious institute, but an academy of science in Austria and in Germany, and an independent foundation in Belgium. To name but a few recent developments: For the Corpus Christianorum, the last decades were characterized by an extension of the original programme. The corpus publishes not only Latin fathers, but also a Greek series, apocryphal texts, and a very prolific ‘medieval continuation’. The Vienna corpus is still known under this name (and they still operate in Vienna), 5   ‹www.csel.eu›; the new ‘Festschrift’ of the project contains relatively little on its history: Edition und Erforschung lateinischer patristischer Texte. 150 Jahre CSEL – ed. V. Zimmerl-Panagl, L. J. Dorfbauer, C. Weidmann, Berlin, 2014, cfr. in particular C. Harrauer, ‘ “...die Akademie ist in eine sehr fatale Lage gekommen”. Schlaglichter aus den Anfängen des CSEL’, in ibid., p. 289-311. The older contribution by M. Zelzer, ‘Ein Jahrhundert (und mehr) CSEL. Evaluation von Ziel und Veröffentlichungen’, Sacris Erudiri, 38 (1998-1999), p. 75-99, continues to be useful. 6  The series is published by de Gruyter (‹www.degruyter.com/view/serial/ 16240›); it is affiliated to the project at the Berlin academy (‹www.bbaw.de/ forschung/bibelexegese›; see below). For the early history of the project, cfr. the magisterial work of S. Rebenich, Theodor Mommsen und Adolf Harnack. Wissenschaft und Politik im Berlin des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, 1997, in partic. p. 129-222. After the re-unification of Germany a ‘Neue Folge’ of the series was launched (1995-). For the preceding volumes a useful overview can be found in S. Rebenich, Adolf von Harnack. Protokollbuch der Kirchenväter-Kommission 1897-1928, Berlin, 2000, p. 163-173. 7  ‹www.corpuschristianorum.org›; cfr. J. Leemans, ‘Fifty Years of Corpus Christianorum (1953-2003). From Limited Edition Project to Multi-located Scholarly Enterprise’, in Corpus Christianorum 1953-2003. Xenium Natalicium. Fifty Years of Scholarly Editing – ed. J. Leemans, Turnhout, 2003, p. 9-55.

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although officially the project is now domiciled in Salzburg. It is concentrating on (without being limited to) Augustine. The project at the Berlin academy had been officially closed but was officially re-launched in 2010 under the new name ‘Late antique Biblical exegesis in Antioch and Alexandria’. The series, however, continues to be called Griechische Christliche Schriftsteller, and continues to publish what its name says. The production of useful editions is, of course, not limited to these major series, but I want proceed to a different area. The last fifty years have seen an extraordinary production of translations into various European languages. The pioneer of all later activities has been the series Sources chrétiennes, founded in the 1940s by the Jesuits Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou. 8 When Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses appeared in 1941, in war-shaken Europe, in occupied France, nobody could foresee that this modest volume would become the first of now several hundred, many of which have become milestones in our field. In the present volume the contribution by Jean-Noël Guinot pays homage to this extraordinary story of success. Many other similar initiatives would have to be mentioned. The closest relatives are, perhaps, the German Fontes Christiani and the recently launched Italian Sources chrétiennes. 9 Italy, by the way, is extremely prolific in the sector of translations, accompanied or not by the original text. (And to my knowledge, Italy is the only European country, maybe the only country worldwide, where you would find patristic literature in average book shops at train stations, sometimes even minor ones.) Let me mention, honoris causa, only Scrittori greci e latini of the Fondazione Lorenzo Valla, Biblioteca patristica, Collana di testi patristici, and several fathers’ Opera omnia

8  ‹www.sourceschretiennes.mom.fr›; cfr. É. Fouilloux, La collection «Sources chrétiennes». Éditer les Pères de l’Église au xxe siècle, Paris, 1995. 9  The ‘Fontes’ (whose spiritus rector was the late Wilhelm Geerlings, 19412008) are a prolific and wide-ranging series. In four sub-series more than 120 volumes have appeared since 1991. With the exception of the third sub-series (Brepols), the publisher is Herder. Further information can be found on ‹www.mueze.uni-muenchen.de/fontes_christiani/›. The first volume of the Italian series appeared in 2006 (Cipriano di Cartagine, L’unità della Chiesa – ed. P. Siniscalco, P. Mattei, A. Carpin, Rome, 2006); the publisher is Edizioni Studio Domenicano.

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of the publisher Città nuova. 10 Many of these volumes (along with their introductions) do not only serve the purpose of diffusion to a larger audience, but constitute serious contributions to academic research. I have to pass over in silence various precious initiatives in other languages like Oxford Early Christian Texts or Bibliothek der Griechischen Literatur in order to be able to remain in Italy, and to come to a different institutional aspect. I am talking about the founding of the Patristic Institute Augustinianum in Rome in 1969. 11 Whereas the Sources chrétiennes belong to the prehistory of the Second Vatican Council (they are to be seen in the context of nouvelle théologie, which forms one of the roots of the new spirit in the Roman Catholic Church), the Patristic Institute is a ripe fruit of the Council. It was founded with the intention to make the voice of patristic thought and patristic competence heard in the Roman Catholic Church worldwide. Apart from this, the Institute is particularly successful in creating a bridge between the patristic activities in state universities and the ecclesiastical realm. This is achieved primarily by means of annual conferences, whose proceedings are a useful tool of the research. 12 There would be many other smaller or larger institutions to be mentioned: the Paris Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, the Franz Joseph Dölger-Institut zur Erforschung der Spätantike in Bonn, the Zentrum für Augustinus-Forschung in Würzburg, etc. 13

10  The Scrittori greci e latini started in 1974. The series is published by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, and among its numerous volumes appear both patristic and non-patristic texts (‹http://collane.librimondadori.it/scrittorilatini-e-greci›). Biblioteca patristica started in 1984; it has produced around fifty volumes so far and is published by Edizioni Dehoniane (‹www.dehoniane.it›). The Collana di testi patristici (only translations) is very productive: nearly 250 volumes since 1991. The publisher is Città Nuova (‹editrice.cittanuova.it›). The same publisher produces Opera omnia of authors like Ambrose, Gregory the Great, and others (reprint of Latin text without apparatus, Italian translation). 11  ‹www.patristicum.org›; the history of the institute still remains to be written (for the time being, cfr. only a few remarks on the homepage). 12  The proceedings are regularly published in the series Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum (first volume 1967), cfr. ‹www.patristicum.org/it/pubblicazioni› (also for the journal Augustinianum). 13  The respective URLs are: ‹www.etudes-augustiniennes.paris-sorbonne.fr›, ‹www.antike-und-christentum.de›, ‹www.augustinus.de›.

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Rather than listing names of institutions, I wish to mention a few concrete activities, in particular conferences. Apart from single conferences, which take place all the time everywhere, there are a few significant series of events, first and foremost the mythical Oxford conferences. They take place every four years, organized primarily, but not exclusively by our colleagues in England. Over the last fifty years they have become more and more international in a worldwide sense. It is certainly true to say that this is the one occasion where Patristics becomes visible globally. It is probably also true to say that the growth in quantity is not always and not necessarily a growth in quality. In any case, the ever more voluminous conference proceedings Studia Patristica are an impressive witness to the vitality of our field. 14 Among smaller and more specialized events is the successful series of Colloquia Origeniana. Eleven conferences on Origen have already taken place, the last was in summer 2013 in Aarhus in Denmark on the topic ‘Origen and Origenism in the History of Western Thought’. 15 Likewise, there is a fruitful series of colloquia on Gregory of Nyssa. 16 A few events on Augustine have been organized by the Würzburg centre and/or by the Augustinianum.

14  The proceedings of the last conference of 2011 filled eighteen (!) volumes: Papers Presented at the Sixteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford 2011, 18 vols. – ed. M. Vinzent (Studia Patristica, 53-70), Leuven, 2013. The early volumes appeared in East Berlin (vols. 1-2, ed. K. Aland [Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, 63-64], Berlin, 1957). When this became impossible for political reasons, the series passed to Peeters Publishers in Belgium. 15 Proceedings appear in the series Bibliotheca ephemeridum theologicarum Lovaniensium. The last published volume is Origeniana decima. Origen as Writer. Papers of the 10th International Origen Congress, University School of Philosophy and Education ‘Ignatianum’, Kraków, Poland, 31 August – 4 September 2009 – ed. S. Kaczmarek, H. Pietras, A. Dziadowiec (Bibliotheca ephemeridum theologicarum Lovaniensium, 244), Leuven, 2011. 16  The next event will be the XIII International Colloquium in Rome in September 2014 (‹www.gregoryofnyssa.org›). Proceedings appear in the series Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae. The last published volume is Gregory of Nyssa. The Minor Treatises on Trinitarian Theology and Apollinarism. Proceedings of the 11th International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa (Tübingen, 17-20 September 2008) – ed. V. H. Drecoll, M. Berghaus (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 106), Leiden, 2011.

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However, the most important contribution to the research on the bishop of Hippo is certainly the impressive AugustinusLexikon, whose fourth volume is now in course of publication. 17 Generally speaking, German scholarship has a certain predilection for monumental encyclopaedias. The most conspicuous case in our field is the Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, which has now come to the letter ‘N’ and whose thorough and well documented articles are known worldwide. 18 Along with the journal Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum and the series of monographs (Ergänzungsbände, 1964-; there is also a Kleine Reihe, 2004-), the Dölger-Institut in Bonn provides an excellent forum of research. Speaking of journals and series, again the list would be very long, and by naming a few, I cannot avoid committing more than just venial sins of omission. Vigiliae Christianae continues to be a point of reference (and an important contribution by our colleagues in the Netherlands), although it is now supplemented by the Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum / Journal of Ancient Christianity, founded in 1997. More or less in the same timespan the Italian journal Adamantius has made its extraordinary career from a tiny newsletter to a voluminous annual of international research on Origen and related topics. 19 ‘Augustine and beyond’ could be the motto of journals like Augustinianum and Revue d’études augustiniennes et patristiques. Obviously, patristic scholars continue to publish in distinguished journals of related fields, especially antiquity (like Gnomon), history of Christianity (like Cristianesimo nella storia) or theology (like Journal of Theological Studies) – and many others. It would be very easy to go on with an enumeration of initiatives, institutes, journals, series, conferences, editions, etc. I also completely refrain from mentioning single names of significant scholars, both deceased and living, and – among the latter – both

17  Augustinus-Lexikon – ed. C. Mayer et al., 3 vols., Basel 1986-2010. The second fascicle of the fourth volume has reached the letter ‘O’. 18  Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum. Sachwörterbuch zur Auseinandersetzung des Christentums mit der antiken Welt – ed. T. Klauser et al., 25 vols., Stuttgart, 1950-2013. 19 The first volume appeared in 1995 with 36 pages. In the following years it gradually grew to a veritable Jahrbuch: 84 pages in 1996, 128 in 1997, 268 in 1998, and 362 in 1999. By 2008 Adamantius had grown to 724 pages!

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present at the Jerusalem conference and not. This is, maybe, the most serious drawback of my presentation, because ultimately behind all initiatives there are always individuals with their personal energy and imagination – and some of them were and are remarkable. Let me only say in passing that our scholarly community significantly contributed to European societies in general. Patristic scholars have served as archbishop of Canterbury or as president of the Humboldt University of Berlin. Others have been named cardinal or dame of the British empire, 20 or have received other high honours. Rather than naming a few and offending others, I wish to come to my third section and final remarks.

3. What has changed and what will change? – diachronic aspects Speakers on the state of Patristics in various parts of the world were asked in a letter to identify ‘trends in the discipline of Patristics’. This is not easy to do, because Europe as a continent is too heterogeneous. Whereas it would probably be correct to see in Peter Brown’s works a leading paradigm for a whole generation of North American scholars (with exceptions, of course), there is no such thing for Europeans. Methods and research topics in Paris and in Tübingen, in Rome and in Oxford are quite different. There is a broad variety of approaches in terms of confessional or linguistic or cultural backgrounds. And, fortunately, there is also a variety of languages spoken. Pieces of serious scholarship continue to be published at least in the four main European languages (English, French, German, and Italian), maybe in a few others as well. On the whole, what I would call the ‘Swiss principle’ works astonishingly well, i.e., everyone speaks and writes in his or her own language – and hopes that others will understand. The smaller language groups, however, adopt more and more English as their lingua franca.

20 Rowan Williams (archbishop of Canterbury 2002-2012), Christoph Markschies (president of Humboldt University of Berlin 2006-2010), Prosper Grech (cardinal 2012), Averil Cameron (DBE 2006), to name but a few (still living).

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If I had to identify a trend in terms of contents, I would probably mention the growing interest in Origen. In the last fifty years in Europe, studies on the Alexandrian theologian have been flourishing in a surprising way. 21 The discovery of a manuscript with unknown homilies on the psalms in April 2012 was the icing on the cake. The publication of the text in the GCS series, edited by Lorenzo Perrone, is imminent. 22 It is quite remarkable, that the one father who attracts particular attention is not really a father but, technically speaking, a condemned heretic. This observation may lead back to my initial remarks on paternity. Apparently, being a father is not an objective category; the question ‘who is a father for whom?’ is more complex. Another observation may also shed some light on this: the useful Nuovo dizionario patristico e di antichità cristiane obviously contains a lemma ‘patrologia/patristica’. But then it also contains – quite surprisingly – an article on ‘matristica’ (which is even longer). 23 This does not necessarily mean that new female authors have been discovered; it is more a sign of contemporary sensitiveness, a new approach to paternity, again a grown sense of distance between a world of fathers and a world in which fathers and mothers define their roles in new and more equal ways. I will come back to these considerations. Before doing so, let me single out two more ‘trends’, or rather one anti-trend and one future trend. The first is a development in the last decades which I see as a regrettable loss. I am talking about the loosened ties between Patristics and Christian archaeology. It is certainly true that we are living in a time of growing specialization, sometimes over-specialization, and it also true that contents and methods of Christian archaeology have now reached a very high level of professionalization which makes it difficult for outsiders to

21   For the Colloquia Origeniana see above n. 15; for the journal Adamantius see above n. 19. 22  Now in print: Origenes, The New Homilies on the Psalms. A Critical Edition of Codex Monacensis Graecus 314 – ed. L. Perrone (Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte, Neue Folge, 19), Berlin, 2015. 23  A. Hamman, J. Leal, ‘Patrologia-Patristica’, in Nuovo Dizionario patristico e di antichità cristiane – ed. A. Di Berardino, 3 vols., Rome, 2006-2008, III, col. 3967-3972; K. E.  Børresen, ‘Matristica’, in ibid., II, col. 3149-3156.

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give competent contributions. However, I cannot refrain from thinking that the growing distance is not only due to specialization but also to an unfortunate history of emancipation from theology. This process has different manifestations in different European countries, but there are remarkable structural parallels. Christian archaeology originated in and grew out of theology. This is again a story of problematic paternity. Emancipation can be a healthy and normal process in a father-relationship. Loss of contact would be to the detriment of both sides. Patristics in Europe is in a privileged situation because large parts of the relevant archaeological evidence is on European territory, in European museums, or within one or two hours of flight distance. If my diagnosis of this anti-trend is correct, it would be my hope that it can be stopped. As for the future trend I mentioned, this is another hope for development in our field. It is my impression that European Patristics has not yet fully understood and exploited the potential of Eastern Europe and of the Orthodox tradition. The Berlin wall and the iron curtain in Europe came down, but there are still many mental curtains in our heads. Various nationalisms and confessionalisms play a role in this, at times also linguistic barriers. In the 1990s and 2000s there was a certain political and ecumenical impetus to overcome these limits. Maybe our common ‘fathers’ and research on them could contribute to a deeper understanding. It is my personal hope that this is a future trend in European Patristics. This would certainly include but not primarily concentrate on the relationship to early Islam. If this happens, this again will shed new light on the idea of fatherhood. The Norwegian author of an article ‘matristica’ in an Italian dictionary will have different ideas from an Orthodox theologian in Bulgaria or a Catholic philologist in Poland. My concluding remarks come back to the beginning. The distance is growing, I said, and the fathers gain some new interest also under the perspective of otherness. However, this does not necessarily mean that we have to abandon the category of fatherhood (and, maybe, motherhood) altogether. Paternity and alterity do not automatically exclude each other. Maybe paternity in the univocal sense of normativity has lost its meaning. Since the days of the Second Vatican Council the normative pressure 68

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on our field has weakened. We are in search of a new, a more adult form of paternity. Our fathers today are neither (simply) Church fathers nor fathers of the European culture, but mothers and fathers of a world with complex religious interactions and multiple religious identities. What we need is a dialogic relationship with the fathers, a relationship where our own identities are also at stake. Even the experience of growing distance shows how important our authors are in defining our positions today and in finding our ways towards a European and global future. I look forward to fifty more years of patristic research in Europe, and fifty more years of AIEP.

Bibliography 1. Primary Sources Cipriano di Cartagine, L’unità della Chiesa – ed. P. Siniscalco, P. Mattei, A. Carpin, Rome, 2006. Origenes, The New Homilies on the Psalms. A Critical Edition of Codex Monacensis Graecus 314 – ed. L. Perrone (Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderte, Neue Folge, 19), Berlin, 2015.

2. Secondary Literature Augustinus-Lexikon – ed. C. Mayer et al., 3 vols., Basel, 1986-2010. K. E. Børresen, ‘Matristica’, in Nuovo Dizionario patristico e di antichità cristiane – ed. A. Di Berardino, 3 vols., Rome, 2006-2008, II, col. 3149-3156. Edition und Erforschung lateinischer patristischer Texte. 150 Jahre CSEL – ed. V. Zimmerl-Panagl, L. J. Dorfbauer, C. Weidmann, Berlin, 2014. M. Fédou, Les Pères de l’Église et la théologie chrétienne, Paris, 2013. É. Fouilloux, La collection «Sources chrétiennes». Éditer les Pères de l’Église au xxe siècle, Paris, 1995. T. Graumann, Die Kirche der Väter. Vätertheologie und Väterbeweis in den Kirchen des Ostens bis zum Konzil von Ephesus (431) (Beiträge zur Historischen Theologie, 118), Tübingen, 2002. Gregory of Nyssa. The Minor Treatises on Trinitarian Theology and Apollinarism. Proceedings of the 11th International Colloquium on Gregory

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of Nyssa (Tübingen, 17-20 September 2008) – ed. V. H. Drecoll, M. Berghaus (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 106), Leiden, 2011. A. Hamman, J. Leal, ‘Patrologia-Patristica’, in Nuovo Dizionario patristico e di antichità cristiane – ed. A. Di Berardino, 3 vols., Rome, 2006-2008, III, col. 3967-3972. C. Harrauer, ‘ “...die Akademie ist in eine sehr fatale Lage gekommen”. Schlaglichter aus den Anfängen des CSEL’, in Edition und Erforschung lateinischer patristischer Texte. 150 Jahre CSEL – ed. V. Zimmerl-Panagl, L. J. Dorfbauer, C. Weidmann, Berlin, 2014, p. 289-311. J. Leemans, ‘Fifty Years of Corpus Christianorum (1953-2003). From Limited Edition Project to Multi-located Scholarly Enterprise’, in Corpus Christianorum 1953-2003. Xenium Natalicium. Fifty Years of Scholarly Editing – ed. J. Leemans, Turnhout, 2003, p. 9-55. H.-I. Marrou, ‘Patristique et humanisme’, in Id., Patristique et humanisme. Mélanges, Paris, 1976, p. 25-34. A. Merkt, Das patristische Prinzip. Eine Studie zur theologischen Bedeutung der Kirchenväter (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 58), Leiden, 2001. Origeniana decima. Origen as Writer. Papers of the 10th International Origen Congress, University School of Philosophy and Education ‘Ignatianum’, Kraków, Poland, 31 August – 4 September 2009 – ed. S. Kaczmarek, H. Pietras, A. Dziadowiec (Bibliotheca ephemeridum theologicarum Lovaniensium, 244), Leuven, 2011. Papers Presented at the Sixteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford 2011, 18 vols. – ed. M. Vinzent (Studia Patristica, 53-70), Leuven, 2013. Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum. Sachwörterbuch zur Auseinandersetzung des Christentums mit der antiken Welt – ed. T. Klauser et al., 25 vols., Stuttgart, 1950-2013. S. Rebenich, Adolf von Harnack. Protokollbuch der Kirchenväter-Kommission 1897-1928, Berlin, 2000. S. Rebenich, Theodor Mommsen und Adolf Harnack. Wissenschaft und Politik im Berlin des ausgehenden 19. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, 1997. M. Zelzer, ‘Ein Jahrhundert (und mehr) CSEL. Evaluation von Ziel und Veröffentlichungen’, Sacris Erudiri, 38 (1998-1999), p. 75-99.

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Abstract Europe has a special relationship with the ‘fathers’. Although Patristics deals with Church fathers (and not fathers or mothers of European history/culture), there is a closeness which has gradually weakened in the last decades. Patristic research in Europe is still very lively, but it has to redefine its paradigms. The article argues that a deepened reflection on paternity and alterity can contribute to this process. Europe has given and still gives a considerable contribution to Patristic research in a multi-religious and globalized world.

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MARCIN R. WYSOCKI The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland

BETWEEN WESTERN AND EASTERN TRADITIONS: POLISH PATRISTIC STUDIES AFTER WORLD WAR II

In Lublin, now the largest centre of patristic studies and the largest academic city in Poland, there are two very wellknown places: the Catholic University founded in 1918 – at one time the only Catholic university between the Elbe and Tokyo – and the German concentration camp Majdanek. But there is also another very interesting place. In the castle there is a chapel. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that the architectural form is an example of the northern Gothic style popular in Poland, built of red brick, with soaring narrow windows. The chapel, dedicated to the Holy Trinity, contains some Byzantine frescoes of the fifteenth century, unique in such a building and territory. Combining East and West, the chapel is a peculiar symbol of Polish religion, tradition, and culture, and is also a perfect image of Polish patrology and patristic studies, which in the last half century were developed on the basis of Eastern and Western traditions, thanks to people coming from East and West. This chapel is also a perfect example of the history of Poland and Polish patristic studies in one other way. In the years 1823-1826 during the conversion of the castle into a prison, the church was incorporated into the neo-Gothic buildings and became a prison chapel. It was plastered inside and out, so that the precious frescos were partly destroyed and hidden for years. In the 1940s the castle as a communist security services prison was a place of torture and death for many people who were fighting against the communist system. In the 1950s the castle and the chapel were restored, leading to the uncovering and restoration of paintings 10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107512

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that now can be seen in all their splendour. And so it was with Polish patrology. 1 The nineteenth century, despite the partition of Poland, left a few, but very important works such as Bruno Czapla’s about Gennadius (1872-1926) 2 and Gustav von Działowski’s about Isidore of Seville (1872-1940). 3 In that time two very promising scholars Józef Bilczewski (1860-1923) 4 and Arkadiusz Lisiecki (1880-1930) 5 became bishops and left academic life for pastoral work. The interwar period resulted in – along with the revival of the free Poland – the foundation of chairs of patrology in four faculties of theology (Cracow, Lviv, Lublin, Vilnius) and the publication of the first series of Polish translations of the writings of the church fathers. The Pozna´n series entitled The Writings of the Church Fathers was initiated by Bishop Lisiecki and led by classical philologist Prof. Jan Sajdak. In the years 19241937 nineteen volumes were published in that series, most of which were translations of early Western writers such as Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius, and Augustine. Unfortunately, financial problems and the outbreak of the Second World War interrupted the issuing of volumes as well as the development of patristic studies. Professors and intellectuals were arrested, and some were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. Universities and libraries were destroyed and plundered; students either gave their lives in the fight for the homeland or interrupted their 1  Generally about the history of Polish patristics see: J. M. Szymusiak, Zarys dziejów patrystyki, in Dzieje teologii katolickiej w Polsce – ed. M. Rechowicz, III/1, Lublin, 1976, p. 67-103; J. Sajdak, Studia patrystyczne w Polsce, Poznan´, 1931; A. Bober, Studia i teksty patrystyczne, Cracow, 1967, p. 177-192 (about the Jesuits in Polish patristics); A. Bober, ‘Wkład nauki polskiej do badan´ nad antykiem chrzes´cijan´skim’, Studia Theologica Varsaviensia, 9.1 (1971), p. 21-50; A. Bober, Patrystyka w Polsce, in Słownik wczesnochrzes´cijan´skiego pis´miennictwa – ed. J. M. Szymusiak, M. Starowieyski, Poznan´, 1971, p. 578-584; M. Starowieyski, ‘Uwagi o patrologii w Polsce’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 11-20. 2   B. Czapla, Gennadius als Literarhistoriker, Münster, 1898. 3   G. von Działowski, Isidor und Ildefons als Litterarhistoriker. Eine quellenkritische Untersuchung der Schriften De viris illustribus des Isidor von Sevilla und des Ildefons von Toledo, Münster, 1898. 4 See W. Urban, ‘Arcybiskup Józef Bilczewski jako archeolog chrzes´cijan´ski’, Vox Patrum, 6-7 (1984), p. 363-370. 5 See Cz. Mazur, ‘Ks. Biskup Arkadiusz Lisiecki inicjator serii “Pisma Ojców Kos´cioła w polskim tłumaczeniu”  ’, S´la˛skie Studia Historyczno-Teologiczne, 18 (1985), p. 113-120.

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education for several years. Patristic studies also suffered their losses. For example, the entire set of printed volumes as well as the manuscripts prepared for printing in the series The Writings of the Church Fathers had been destroyed by Germans troops entering Poznan´. But there was light in the darkness of war. For Prof. Tadeusz Sinko, for example, the preparation of a translation of the works of the Church Fathers was a kind of refuge from the whistle of bombs and roar of air strikes. During war he translated works of John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil the Great, and Gregory of Nyssa, encouraged by the Rev’d Ferdynand Machaya from Cracow. There was an inclination to the Eastern Fathers, in defiance of the Western invaders. 6 It is worth recalling here the patristic circle of the University of Wrocław (Breslau before the war), which until 1945 was a part of the Reich and later was joined to Poland. It surely belongs to the Western tradition of patristic studies. There had been a revival of interest in patristics at the university in the early twentieth century (with a slight delay compared to the European renaissance of studies of Christian antiquity), especially when the Chair of Church History was directed by the disciples of J. H. Reinkens 7 and H. Laemmer, 8 foremost among them by Prof. M. Sdralek, founder of the Wrocław school of Church History. 9 One of his students was the Rev’d Prof. Berthold Altaner, who directed the Chair of Church History at the University of Wrocław in the years 1929-1933 and taught patrology and the history of the Church. 10 He came from Góra S´wie˛tej  See M. Starowieyski, ‘Uwagi o patrologii w Polsce’, p. 12.  See A. Młotek, ‘Badania nad antykiem chrzes´cijan´skim na Wydziale Teologicznym we Wrocławiu 1811-1945’, in Id., Teologia katolicka na Uniwersytecie Wrocławskim, Wrocław, 1998, p. 117-145; J. Overath, ‘Die KatholischTheologische Fakultät Breslau und Erste Vatikanische Konzil’, Archiv für Schlesische Kirchengeschichte, 35 (1977), p. 227-237. 8  See R. Bäumer, ‘Laemmer, Hugo’, in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 6, Freiburg i. Br., 19612, col. 767-768. 9 See H. Schiel, ‘Max Sdralek – der Bergrdunder der Breslauer Kirchengeschichtsschule, im Bannkreis von Franz Xawer Kraus’, Archiv fur schlesische Kirchengeschichte, 35 (1977), p. 239-284. 10 See J. Mandziuk, ‘Ks. Bertold Altaner (1885-1964) – wybitny patrolog wrocławski’, S´la˛skie Studia Historyczno-Teologiczne, 18 (1985), p. 107-112; A. Bober, ‘Od Rauschena do Altanera’, Przegla˛d Powszechny, 231 (1951), p. 388-405. 6 7

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Anny (Mount of St. Anna) in Silesia and studied the history of the Church at the University of Breslau, where he wrote his habilitation in 1919. Before him, the Rev’d Prof. F. J. Dölger held the Chair, from 1926 to 1929. Although both researchers were in residence at the University of Breslau for only a few years, the scholarly rank they represented had an impact on the interest of Christian antiquity and on the scientific level of these studies in Wroclaw theological circle. 11 They remain a point of reference for not only the present scientific circle of Wrocław, but also the whole patristic community in Poland. Unfortunately, after 1945 from the East came another inhuman system to Poland, even more hostile to the Church and to theology: communism, which also did not facilitate the development of patristic studies. The closing of faculties of theology, harassment of professors, prohibition of travel abroad, persecution of students and potential candidates in theology, limiting of paper for printing theological books and patristics as well – these were only some of the obstacles that the Polish patrologists had to face under communism. But patristic studies developed and – it seems – in a pretty good way. All the above helps us understand properly the next decades of patristic studies in Poland. In the post-war circle of Polish patrologists we find the following names just after war: the Rev’d Prof. Jan Czuj (18861957), 12 the Rev’d Prof. Marian Michalski (1900-1987), 13 the Rev’d Prof. Jan Maria Szymusiak, SJ (1920-1987), 14 and two women, Prof. Leokadia Małunowiczówna (1910-1980) and Prof. Janina Niemirska-Pliszczyn´ska (1904-1982) – but they were classic philologists rather than patrologists. The subject of their works were mainly the Eastern fathers of the Church – Clement of Alexandria, Athanasius of Alexandria, Gregory

 See E. Kleineidam, Die katholisch-theologische Fakultät der Universität Breslau 1811-1945, Cologne, 1961; A. Młotek, Badania nad antykiem chrzes´cijan´skim, p. 119-120. 12 See W. Kania, ‘Ks. Jan Czuj – wybitny krzewiciel mys´li patrystycznej w Polsce’, Tarnowskie Studia Teologiczne, 8 (1981), p. 357-364. 13 See E. Staniek, ‘Ks. Marian Michalski (1900-1987)’, Vox Patrum, 1213 (1987), p. 545-546. 14  See the whole issue of Vox Patrum dedicated to Prof. Szymusiak, Vox Patrum, 16 (1989). 11

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of Nazianzus – but they also studied Augustine and Cyprian. In 1956 Prof. Szymusiak published a critical edition of two apologies by Athanasius in the series Sources Chrétiennes. 15 The main patristic centres were initially in Lublin and Cracow, and from the 1960s Warsaw as well. Staff was lacking in the first decades after the Second World War, but, as always, there was the brighter side of life in this very difficult time. In 1950 the publishing house PAX started publishing an excellent series of translations that contains mainly works of the Eastern church fathers (Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Theodoret), the ecclesiastical historians, but also some writings of Augustine. To date, thirty-eight volumes have been published. 16 In 1969, in Warsaw, an important series of translations of early Christian writers began to be published, Writings of Early Christian Writers (Pisma Starochrzes´cijan´skich Pisarzy or PSP), which so far has produced sixty-seven volumes, some in the form of several fascicles. 17 In this series appear mainly works of two writers: Origen and Augustine. In the same year – 1969 – the Interdepartmental Research Centre on Christian Antiquity was founded in Lublin, with the help of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, the future Pope John Paul II, under the direction of Prof. Szymusiak and Prof. Małunowiczówna. 18 Patristic studies were divided in this period – one can say – equally between East and West, although there were also innovative studies in that time on Gnosticism, especially on the texts from Nag Hammadi, initiated by the Rev’d

  Ath., Apol. Const., Fug. – ed. J. M. Szymusiak (SC, 56), Paris, 19581.  See W. Stawiszyn´ski, Bibliografia patrystyczna 1901-2004. Polskie tłumaczenia tekstów starochrzes´cijan´skich pierwszego tysia˛clecia, Cracow, 2005, p. 20-21. 17 See W. Stawiszyn ´ski, Bibliografia patrystyczna 1901-2004, p. 23-26. About the series see H. Pietras, ‘Seria Pisma Starochrzes´cijan´skich Pisarzy w ocenie patrologa’, Studia Antiquitatis Christianae, 11 (1995), p. 31-34; J. Strzelczyk, ‘Znaczenie serii Pism Starochrzes´cijan´skich Pisarzy z punktu widzenia historii staroz˙ytnej i wczesnos´redniowiecznej, Studia Antiquitatis Christianae, 11 (1995), p. 43-53; S. Longosz, ‘Pisma Starochrzes´cijan´skich Pisarzy na tle innych polskich serii patrystycznych’, Studia Antiquitatis Christianae, 11 (1995), p. 61-74. 18 See S. Longosz, ‘Mie ˛dzywydziałowy Zakład Badan´ nad Antykiem Chrzes´cijan´skim KUL jako propagator mys´li wczesnochrzes´cijan´skiej w Polsce’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 21-38; S. Longosz, ‘Mie˛dzywydziałowy Zakład Badan´ nad Antykiem Chrzes´cijan´skim’, in Ksie˛ga Pamia˛tkowa w 75-lecie Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego. Wkład w kulture˛ polska˛ w latach 19681993 – ed. M. Rusecki, Lublin, 1994, p. 604-610. 15 16

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Prof. Wincenty Myszor. 19 As well, the very helpful Dictionary of Early Christian Literature, edited by Prof. Szymusiak and Prof. Starowieyski, was published during this period. 20 In 1977, the journal Studia Antiquitatis Christianae was started in Warsaw. Unfortunately, the restrictions imposed by the state, lack of paper, and old printing methods did not facilitate the publication of numerous works on patrology; such works remained in patristic circles in the form of manuscripts or academic scripts. As a result of the earlier published translations, mostly Eastern fathers and the most important Western fathers such as Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine were studied and interpreted. The discussion was most often of dogmatic and moral topics. As a result of the work of these three teams – PAX, PSP, and the Interdepartmental Research Centre on Christian Antiquity – and of others as well, often quite independently of each other, there were a lot of instruments in Poland in the 1970s, including a number of translated works, to guide research into Christian antiquity. The 1960s and 70s was also a time to harvest the fruits of the development of scientific staff after the damages of war: the Rev’d Wojciech Kania (1911-2000), 21 the Rev’d Prof. Waclaw Eborowicz (1915-1994), 22 the Rev’d Prof. Andrzej Bober, SJ (1917-1986), 23 the Rev’d Prof. Szczepan Pieszczoch (1921-2004), 24 the Rev’d Prof. Ludwik Gładyszewski (1932-

19 See W. Myszor, ‘Polskie badania nad gnostycyzmem’, Vox Patrum, 3637 (1999), p. 187-192. 20  Słownik wczesnochrzes ´cijan´skiego pis´miennictwa – ed. J.  M. Szymusiak, M. Starowieyski, Poznan´, 1971. 21  See S. Longosz, ‘Ks. Wojciech Kania (1911-2000)’, Vox Patrum, 12-13 (1987), p. 9-19; S. Longosz, ‘Wykaz drukowanych prac ks. Wojciecha Kani’, Vox Patrum, 12-13 (1987), p. 27-38. 22  See A. Eckmann, ‘Z˙ycie i działalnos´c´ ks. Wacława Eborowicza’, Vox Patrum, 15 (1988), p. 557-561; Cz. Mazur, ‘Wykaz drukowanych prac ks. Wacława Eborowicza’, Vox Patrum, 15 (1988), p. 563-574. 23 See S. Longosz, ‘Andrzej Bober SJ (1917-1986) jako filolog i patrolog’, Vox Patrum, 10 (1986), p. 395-410; S. Longosz, ‘O. Andrzej Bober SJ’, Vox Patrum, 6-7 (1984), p. 9-17; S. Longosz, ‘Wykaz drukowanych prac o. A. Bobera’, Vox Patrum, 6-7 (1984), p. 21-40. 24 See B. Czyz ˙ ewski, ‘Ksia˛dz Szczepan Pieszczoch (1921-2004) – człowiek, który prawdziwie kochał Ojców Kos´cioła’, Vox Patrum, 46-47 (2004), p. 893898.

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2009), 25 the Rev’d Prof. Emil Stanula (1935-1999), 26 the Rev’d Prof. Edward Staniek, 27 the Rev’d Prof. Wincenty Myszor, 28 the Rev’d Prof. Marek Starowieyski, 29 the Rev’d Prof. Bogdan Cze˛sz, and the Rev’d Prof. Franciszek Dra˛czkowski. 30 Unfortunately in the seventies, but earlier as well, there was only a small number of laity among the patrologists. They sadly could not afford the expensive studies; they were persecuted and deterred from the scientific work; they were not given passports to travel, for example, to the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum in Rome, where they could have deepened their knowledge of the fathers of the Church and studied early Christian writers. There were people like Prof. Ewa Wipszycka, who was well known abroad because of her studies on Christian antiquity, but they were not patrologists sensu stricto. The 1980s was a period of further development of the patristic series mentioned above. Despite the difficult political and economic situation in Poland, the year 1981 was the year when the journal Vox Patrum, well known around the world, was founded. Its first editor-in-chief was the Rev’d Prof. Stanisław Longosz, 31 who held that position until 2012. Sixty-one vol See B. Czyz˙ewski, ‘Ks. Ludwik Gładyszewski (17 IX 1932 – 19 XII 2009). Prawdziwy miłos´nik antyku chrzes´cijan´skiego i filologii klasycznej’, Vox Patrum, 53-54 (2009), p. 1105-1110. 26 See A. Ste˛pniewska, ‘Ksia ˛dz profesor Emil Stanula’, Vox Patrum, 32-33 (1997), p. 7-14; S. Longosz, ‘Wykaz drukowanych prac ks. Prof. E. Stanuli’, Vox Patrum, 32-33 (1997), p. 15-26. 27 See J. W. Z ˙ elazny, ‘Ksia˛dz Profesor Edward Staniek’, Vox Patrum, 55 (2010), p. 17-19; J. W. Z˙elazny, ‘Wykaz drukowanych prac ks. prof. dr. hab. Edwarda Stan´ka’, Vox Patrum, 55 (2010), p. 21-27. 28  See the whole issue of Vox Patrum dedicated to Prof. Myszor: Vox Patrum, 57 (2012). 29  See T. Skibin´ski, ‘Ksia˛dz Profesor Marek Starowieyski’, Vox Patrum, 49 (2006), p. 13-18; T. Skibin´ski, ‘Wykaz drukowanych prac Ks. Prof. Marka Starowieyskiego’, Vox Patrum, 49 (2006), p. 19-46. 30 See M. Wysocki, ‘Dies annorum nostrorum sunt septuaginta anni... (Ps 90,10). Z˙ycie i działalnos´c´ naukowa ks. prof. Franciszka Dra˛czkowskiego’, in Fructus spiritus est caritas. Ksie˛ga Jubileuszowa ofiarowana Ksie˛dzu Profesorowi Franciszkowi Dra˛czkowskiemu z okazji siedemdziesia˛tej rocznicy urodzin, czterdziestopie˛ciolecia ´swie˛cen´ kapłan´skich i trzydziestopie˛ciolecia pracy naukowej – ed. M. Wysocki, Lublin, 2011, p. 29-39; M. Wysocki, ‘Wykaz opublikowanych prac ks. prof. dr hab. Franciszka Dra˛czkowskiego’, in ibid., p. 41-49. 31 See ‹www.voxpatrum.pl/voxp_eng.html›. About Prof. Longosz see A. Ste˛pniewska, ‘Ksia˛dz Profesor Stanisław Longosz: filolog, patrolog, dy25

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umes of this highly regarded journal have been published. Unfortunately, the research conditions of the seventies lasted until 1989, when Poland threw off the communist yoke. Many valuable works were written and published, but in small quantities, since large print runs were impossible. However, at this time, scientific staff grew significantly. The Rev’d Prof. Antoni Z˙urek, the Rev’d Prof. Henryk Pietras, the Rev’d Prof. Jerzy Pałucki, and others joined the group of early Christian scholars. With the collapse of communism in Poland, the scientific situation changed. There were new possibilities for publishing translations and dissertations; theological works were written and published; the borders were opened, and one could go without difficulty to the most important patristic centres such as Rome, Oxford, and Paris. Therefore the number of Polish patrologists increased significantly after 1989. Among them are the Rev’d Prof. Józef Naumowicz, the Rev’d Prof. Mariusz Szram (an expert in Origen), the Rev’d Prof. Norbert Widok, the Rev’d Prof. Jan Z˙elazny, and others. This was also the time of the foundation and development of new patristic series. The series Sources of Theological Thought was founded in Cracow in 1996 (Z´ródła Mys´li Teologicznej or Z´MT) – seventy-two volumes thus far; 32 the series The Monastic Sources (Z´ródła Monastyczne or Z´M) was founded in the Benedictine Abbey in Tyniec (near Cracow) in 1993 – sixty-seven volumes thus far; 33 and a small series, the Library of the Church Fathers (Biblioteka Ojców Kos´cioła or BOK) was established in 1992 – twenty-six volumes thus far. 34 The range of patristic topics expanded, as researchers turned to littleknown early Christian writers. Among the fields hitherto absent in Polish patristic studies, Syrian patrology appeared, thanks to the Rev’d Prof. Jan Z˙elazny from Cracow. 35 But the writers of the East continued to be enthusiastically received, probably

daktyk, załoz˙yciel i redaktor Vox Patrum’, Vox Patrum, 52.1 (2008), p. 25-38; J. Figiel, ‘Wykaz drukowanych prac ks. prof. Stanisława Longosza’, Vox Patrum, 52.1 (2008), p. 39-60. 32  See W. Stawiszyn´ski, Bibliografia patrystyczna 1901-2004, p. 29-30. 33 See W. Stawiszyn ´ski, Bibliografia patrystyczna 1901-2004, p. 31-32. 34 See W. Stawiszyn ´ski, Bibliografia patrystyczna 1901-2004, p. 14-15. 35 See J. Woz ´niak, ‘Polska Syrologia’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 209-233.

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because of the greater availability of their works in Polish translation. Along with this strong influence of the Eastern writers and the increasing importance of the spiritual sphere of life, there appeared a juridical approach so characteristic for the West. In 2001, in the series Sources of Theological Thought, the first volume of the Acts of the Ecumenical Councils was published (with the text in Greek, Latin, Polish, and if necessary also in Syriac), followed by The Synodal Acts, also in the original languages. Among the themes taken up in this series, eschatological issues and those related to anthropology and spirituality were especially popular. In recent years, to our great joy, patristic studies has become very popular among students and graduate students. Every year about eighty theses (master’s and doctoral) on Christian antiquity are written and defended in Polish patristic centres, of which the most important are Lublin, 36 Cracow, 37 and Poznan´. 38 At the Faculty of Theology of the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin there are four chairs focused on early Christian studies: the Chair of Greek Patrology, the Chair of Latin Patrology, the Chair of Patristic Theology and Literature, and

36   About the history of the patristics centre in Lublin see F. Dra˛czkowski, ‘Katedra Patrologii w Katolickim Uniwersytecie Lubelskim (rys historyczny)’, in Tysia˛c imion Chrystusa. Seminarium Patrystyczne KUL 1983-1993 – ed. J. Pałucki, Lublin, 1994, p. 9-15; J. Pałucki, ‘Katedra patrologii w Katolickim Uniwersytecie Lubelskim – kierunki badan´’, in Sympozja Kazimierskie pos´wie˛cone kulturze ´swiata póz´nego antyku i wczesnego chrzes´cijan´stwa – ed. B. Iwaszkiewicz-Wronikowska, I, Lublin, 1998, p. 145-152; F. Dra˛czkowski, P. Szczur, ‘Wkład Katedr Patrologii KUL w przybliz˙anie nauki Ojców Kos´cioła’, Vox Patrum, 3637 (1999), p. 39-51; F. Dra˛czkowski, ‘Wkład Katedr Patrologii w historiografie˛ kos´cielna˛’, in Rola i miejsce Instytutu Historii Kos´cioła KUL w historiografii – ed. J. Walkusz, Lublin, 2010, p. 19-26; P. Szczur, ‘Wkład Katedry Patrologii Greckiej w historiografie˛ kos´cielna˛’, in Rola i miejsce Instytutu Historii Kos´cioła KUL w historiografii – ed. J. Walkusz, Lublin, 2010, p. 27-31; M. Ziółkowska, ‘Katedra Patrologii Łacin´skiej’, in Rola i miejsce Instytutu Historii Kos´cioła KUL w historiografii – ed. J. Walkusz, Lublin, 2010, p. 33-48; M. Szram, ‘Rola i znaczenie Katedry Historii Kos´cioła w Staroz˙ytnos´ci Chrzes´cijan´skiej IHK KUL w rozwoju historiografii’, in Rola i miejsce Instytutu Historii Kos´cioła KUL w historiografii – ed. J. Walkusz, Lublin, 2010, p. 49-57. 37  About the history of the patristics centre in Cracow see J. W.  Z ˙ elazny, ‘Dzieje patrystyki w s´rodowisku krakowskim (Zarys)’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 85-96.  38 About history of the patristics centre in Poznan ´ see B. Czyz˙ewski, ‘Wkład s´rodowiska poznan´sko-gniez´nien´skiego w badania nad literatura˛ wczesnochrzes´cijan´ska˛’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 97-108.

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the Chair of the History of the Church in Christian Antiquity. The faculty includes professores emeriti the Rev’d Prof. Franciszek Dra˛czkowski and the Rev’d Prof. Stanisław Longosz, and seven current members of the Department of Church History and Patrology. 39 In Poznan´, in the Faculty of Theology at the Adam Mickiewicz University, the Office of Patristic Theology comprises six researchers. At the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Cracow there is a Department of Dogmatic Theology in the Faculty of Theology, which includes the Chair of Patrology and two researchers; other scholars conduct patristic studies in other institutes and faculties in the university. In Torun´, in the Faculty of Theology at Mikołaj Kopernik University, two patrologists work in the Institute of Patrology and Christian Antiquity, and others work in other institutes of the university. At the University of Opole there is a Chair of Church History and Patrology with two patrologists. 40 Warsaw is represented by the Chair of Patristic Theology at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyn´ski University. Wrocław, with its great history of patristic studies described above, nowadays has the Chair of the History of the Church in Antiquity and Patrology at the University of Wrocław. A Chair of Patristic Theology also exists at Szczecin University. The Theological Faculty in Tarnów with the Chair of Patrology and Church History was of great importance for the development of patristic studies in Poland, 41 and the University of Silesia in Katowice, with the Institute of the Patristic Theology and Church History, has specialized first of all in Gnosticism. Of course many patrologist work in clerical seminaries all over Poland, as well as in institutions abroad, for the Holy See and at universities in Rome. Polish patrologists belong to the Polish Patristic Section at the Scientific Commission of Episcopate of Poland (now about 120 members), 42 and they meet every year for the three days, pre  See ‹www.ihkip.pl›; ‹www.kul.pl/227.html›.   About the history of the patristics centre in Opole see N. Widok, ‘Wkład s´rodowiska opolskiego w badania nad antykiem chrzes´cijan´skim’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 109-116. 41 See A. Z ˙ urek, ‘Wkład s´rodowiska tarnowskiego w badania nad antykiem chrzes´cijan´skim’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 117-134. 42 See ‹http://pater.z.win.pl/›. About the history and influence of the Polish Patristic Section see B. Cze˛sz, ‘Zasługi Sekcji Patrystycznej przy Komisji 39 40

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senting papers on an appointed theme. In 2014 the meeting took place in Gniezno, where the theme of the discussions was spiritual anthropology in the patristic times. Polish patrologists have returned to the tradition of organizing every three years the International Patristic Conference, held in Lublin at the Catholic University of Lublin, where the Holy Trinity Chapel reminds us of the importance of Eastern and Western traditions for our studies. In this spirit, in October 2013 a conference entitled ‘Between religio licita and religio regalis. The Church and Theology at the Time of the Transformations (for the 1700th Anniversary of the “Edict of Milan”)’ took place. It is worth noting that patristic studies are becoming more and more popular among lay people who have more opportunities to study early Christian thought. It can be said that after war and communism Polish patristic studies have found their proper place in the Polish, European, and in worldwide patristic family. Every year many works and studies are published on the fathers of the Church by Polish patrologists, aware that patristic studies must ‘breathe with two lungs’ – Western and Eastern tradition – a basis of long-standing in the history of Polish patristic studies.

Bibliography 1. Primary Literature Ath., Apol. Const., Fug. = Athanasius Alexandrinus, Apologia ad Constantium, Apologia de fuga sua – ed. J. M. Szymusiak (SC, 56), Paris, 19581.

2. Secondary Literature R. Bäumer, ‘Laemmer, Hugo’, in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 6, Freiburg i. Br., 19612, col. 767-768.

Episkopatu w koordynowaniu studiów i propagowaniu mys´li Ojców Kos´cioła w Polsce’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 159-166; M. Szram, ‘Sekcja Patrystyczna przy Komisji Episkopatu Polski ds. Nauki Katolickiej’, in Mie˛dzy sensem a bezsensem ludzkiej egzystencji. Teologiczna odpowiedz´ na fundamentalne pytania współczesnego człowieka. VIII Kongres Teologów Polskich, Poznan´ 13-16 wrzes´nia 2010 – ed. D. Bryl, B. Kochaniewicz, E. Kotkowska, J. Nawrot, Poznan´, 2012, p. 556-559.

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A. Bober, ‘Od Rauschena do Altanera’, Przegla˛d Powszechny, 231 (1951), p. 388-405. A. Bober, Studia i teksty patrystyczne, Cracow 1967, p. 177-192. A. Bober, ‘Patrystyka w Polsce’, in Słownik wczesnochrzes´cijan´skiego pis´miennictwa – ed. J. M. Szymusiak, M. Starowieyski, Poznan´, 1971, p. 578-584. A. Bober, ‘Wkład nauki polskiej do badan´ nad antykiem chrzes´cijan´skim’, Studia Theologica Varsaviensia, 9.1 (1971), p. 21-50. B. Czapla, Gennadius als Literarhistoriker, Münster, 1898. B. Cze˛sz, ‘Zasługi Sekcji Patrystycznej przy Komisji Episkopatu w koordynowaniu studiów i propagowaniu mys´li Ojców Kos´cioła w Polsce’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 159-166. B. Czyz˙ewski, ‘Ks. Ludwik Gładyszewski (17 IX 1932 – 19 XII 2009). Prawdziwy miłos´nik antyku chrzes´cijan´skiego i filologii klasycznej’, Vox Patrum, 53-54 (2009), p. 1105-1110. B. Czyz˙ewski, ‘Ksia˛dz Szczepan Pieszczoch (1921-2004) – człowiek, który prawdziwie kochał Ojców Kos´cioła’, Vox Patrum, 46-47 (2004), p. 893-898. B. Czyz˙ewski, ‘Wkład s´rodowiska poznan´sko-gniez´nien´skiego w badania nad literatura˛ wczesnochrzes´cijan´ska˛’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 97-108. F. Dra˛czkowski, ‘Wkład Katedr Patrologii w historiografie˛ kos´cielna˛’, in Rola i miejsce Instytutu Historii Kos´cioła KUL w historiografii – ed. J. Walkusz, Lublin, 2010, p. 19-26. F. Dra˛czkowski, ‘Katedra Patrologii w Katolickim Uniwersytecie Lubelskim (rys historyczny)’, in Tysia˛c imion Chrystusa. Seminarium Patrystyczne KUL 1983-1993 – ed. J. Pałucki, Lublin, 1994, p. 9-15. F. Dra˛czkowski – P. Szczur, ‘Wkład Katedr Patrologii KUL w przybliz˙anie nauki Ojców Kos´cioła’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 39-51. A. Eckmann, ‘Z˙ycie i działalnos´c´ ks. Wacława Eborowicza’, Vox Patrum, 15 (1988), p. 557-561. G. von Działowski, Isidor und Ildefons als Litterarhistoriker. Eine quellenkritische Untersuchung der Schriften De viris illustribus des Isidor von Sevilla und des Ildefons von Toledo, Münster, 1898. Dzieje teologii katolickiej w Polsce – ed. M. Rechowicz, III/1, Lublin, 1976. J. Figiel, ‘Wykaz drukowanych prac ks. prof. Stanisława Longosza’, Vox Patrum, 52.1 (2008), p. 39-60.

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W. Kania, ‘Ks. Jan Czuj – wybitny krzewiciel mys´li patrystycznej w Polsce’, Tarnowskie Studia Teologiczne, 8 (1981), p. 357-364. E. Kleineidam, Die katholisch-theologische Fakultät der Universität Breslau 1811-1945, Cologne, 1961. S. Longosz, ‘Mie˛dzywydziałowy Zakład Badan´ nad Antykiem Chrzes´cijan´skim KUL jako propagator mys´li wczesnochrzes´cijan´skiej w Polsce’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 21-38. S. Longosz, ‘Wykaz drukowanych prac ks. Prof. E. Stanuli’, Vox Patrum, 32-33 (1997), p. 15-26. S. Longosz, ‘Pisma Starochrzes´cijan´skich Pisarzy na tle innych polskich serii patrystycznych’, Studia Antiquitatis Christianae, 11 (1995), p. 61-74. S. Longosz, ‘Mie˛dzywydziałowy Zakład Badan´ nad Antykiem Chrzes´cijan´skim’, in Ksie˛ga Pamia˛tkowa w 75-lecie Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego. Wkład w kulture˛ polska˛ w latach 1968-1993 – ed. M. Rusecki, Lublin, 1994, p. 604-610. S. Longosz, ‘Ks. Wojciech Kania (1911-2000)’, Vox Patrum, 12-13 (1987), p. 9-19. S.  Longosz, ‘Wykaz drukowanych prac ks. Wojciecha Kani’, Vox Patrum, 12-13 (1987), p. 27-38. S. Longosz, ‘Andrzej Bober SJ (1917-1986) jako filolog i patrolog’, Vox Patrum, 10 (1986), p. 395-410. S. Longosz, ‘O. Andrzej Bober SJ’, Vox Patrum, 6-7 (1984), p. 9-17; S. Longosz, ‘Wykaz drukowanych prac o. A. Bobera’, Vox Patrum, 6-7 (1984), p. 21-40. J. Mandziuk, ‘Ks. Bertold Altaner (1885-1964) – wybitny patrolog wrocławski’, S´la˛skie Studia Historyczno-Teologiczne, 18 (1985), p. 107-112. Cz. Mazur, ‘Wykaz drukowanych prac ks. Wacława Eborowicza’, Vox Patrum, 15 (1988), p. 563-574. Cz. Mazur, ‘Ks. Biskup Arkadiusz Lisiecki inicjator serii “Pisma Ojców Kos´cioła w polskim tłumaczeniu”‘, S´la˛skie Studia Historyczno-Teologiczne, 18 (1985), p. 113-120. A. Młotek, ‘Badania nad antykiem chrzes´cijan´skim na Wydziale Teologicznym we Wrocławiu 1811-1945’, in Id., Teologia katolicka na Uniwersytecie Wrocławskim, Wrocław, 1998, p. 117-145. W. Myszor, ‘Polskie badania nad gnostycyzmem’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 187-192. J. Overath, ‘Die Katholisch-Theologische Fakultät Breslau und Erste Vatikanische Konzil’, Archiv für Schlesische Kirchengeschichte, 35 (1977), p. 227-237.

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J. Pałucki, ‘Katedra patrologii w Katolickim Uniwersytecie Lubelskim – kierunki badan´’, in Sympozja Kazimierskie pos´wie˛cone kulturze ´swiata póz´nego antyku i wczesnego chrzes´cijan´stwa – ed. B. Iwaszkiewicz-Wronikowska, I, Lublin, 1998, p. 145-152. H. Pietras, ‘Seria Pisma Starochrzes´cijan´skich Pisarzy w ocenie patrologa’, Studia Antiquitatis Christianae, 11 (1995), p. 31-34. J. Sajdak, Studia patrystyczne w Polsce, Poznan´, 1931. H. Schiel, ‘Max Sdralek – der Bergrdunder der Breslauer Kirchengeschichtsschule, im Bannkreis von Franz Xawer Kraus’, Archiv fur schlesische Kirchengeschichte, 35 (1977), p. 239-284. T. Skibin´ski, ‘Ksia˛dz Profesor Marek Starowieyski’, Vox Patrum, 49 (2006), p. 13-18. T. Skibin´ski, ‘Wykaz drukowanych prac Ks. Prof. Marka Starowieyskiego’, Vox Patrum, 49 (2006), p. 19-46. Słownik wczesnochrzes´cijan´skiego pis´miennictwa – ed. J. M. Szymusiak, M. Starowieyski, Poznan´, 1971. E. Staniek, ‘Ks. Marian Michalski (1900-1987)’, Vox Patrum, 12-13 (1987), p. 545-546. M. Starowieyski, ‘Uwagi o patrologii w Polsce’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 11-20. W. Stawiszyn´ski, Bibliografia patrystyczna 1901-2004. Polskie tłumaczenia tekstów starochrzes´cijan´skich pierwszego tysia˛clecia, Cracow, 2005. A. Ste˛pniewska, ‘Ksia˛dz Profesor Stanisław Longosz: filolog, patrolog, dydaktyk, załoz˙yciel i redaktor Vox Patrum’, Vox Patrum, 52.1 (2008), p. 25-38. A. Ste˛pniewska, ‘Ksia˛dz profesor Emil Stanula’, Vox Patrum, 32-33 (1997), p. 7-14. J. Strzelczyk, ‘Znaczenie serii Pism Starochrzes´cijan´skich Pisarzy z punktu widzenia historii staroz˙ytnej i wczesnos´redniowiecznej’, Studia Antiquitatis Christianae, 11 (1995), p. 43-53. P. Szczur, ‘Wkład Katedry Patrologii Greckiej w historiografie˛ kos´cielna˛’, in Rola i miejsce Instytutu Historii Kos´cioła KUL w historiografii – ed. J. Walkusz, Lublin, 2010, p. 27-31. M. Szram, ‘Sekcja Patrystyczna przy Komisji Episkopatu Polski ds. Nauki Katolickiej’, in Mie˛dzy sensem a bezsensem ludzkiej egzystencji. Teologiczna odpowiedz´ na fundamentalne pytania współczesnego człowieka. VIII Kongres Teologów Polskich, Poznan´ 13-16 wrzes´nia 2010 – ed. D. Bryl, B. Kochaniewicz, E. Kotkowska, J. Nawrot, Poznan´, 2012, p. 556-559.

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M. Szram, ‘Rola i znaczenie Katedry Historii Kos´cioła w Staroz˙ytnos´ci Chrzes´cijan´skiej IHK KUL w rozwoju historiografii’, in Rola i miejsce Instytutu Historii Kos´cioła KUL w historiografii – ed. J. Walkusz, Lublin, 2010, p. 49-57. J. M.  Szymusiak, ‘Zarys dziejów patrystyki’, in Dzieje teologii katolickiej w Polsce – ed. M. Rechowicz, III/1, Lublin, 1976, p. 67-103. N. Widok, ‘Wkład s´rodowiska opolskiego w badania nad antykiem chrzes´cijan´skim’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 109-116. J. Woz´niak, ‘Polska Syrologia’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 209233. M. Wysocki, ‘Dies annorum nostrorum sunt septuaginta anni... (Ps 90,10). Z˙ycie i działalnos´c´ naukowa ks. prof. Franciszka Dra˛czkowskiego’, in Fructus spiritus est caritas. Ksie˛ga Jubileuszowa ofiarowana Ksie˛dzu Profesorowi Franciszkowi Dra˛czkowskiemu z okazji siedemdziesia˛tej rocznicy urodzin, czterdziestopie˛ciolecia ´swie˛cen´ kapłan´skich i trzydziestopie˛ciolecia pracy naukowej – ed. M. Wysocki, Lublin, 2011, p. 29-39. M. Wysocki, ‘Wykaz opublikowanych prac ks. prof. dr hab. Franciszka Dra˛czkowskiego’, in Fructus spiritus est caritas. Ksie˛ga Jubileuszowa ofiarowana Ksie˛dzu Profesorowi Franciszkowi Dra˛czkowskiemu z okazji siedemdziesia˛tej rocznicy urodzin, czterdziestopie˛ciolecia ´swie˛cen´ kapłan´skich i trzydziestopie˛ciolecia pracy naukowej – ed. M. Wysocki, Lublin, 2011, p. 41-49. W. Urban, ‘Arcybiskup Józef Bilczewski jako archeolog chrzes´cijan´ski’, Vox Patrum, 6-7 (1984), p. 363-370. J. W. Z˙elazny, ‘Ksia˛dz Profesor Edward Staniek’, Vox Patrum, 55 (2010), p. 17-19. J. W. Z˙elazny, ‘Wykaz drukowanych prac ks. prof. dr. hab. Edwarda Stan´ka’, Vox Patrum, 55 (2010), p. 21-27. J. W Z˙elazny, ‘Dzieje patrystyki w s´rodowisku krakowskim (Zarys)’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 85-96. M. Ziółkowska, ‘Katedra Patrologii Łacin´skiej’, in Rola i miejsce Instytutu Historii Kos´cioła KUL w historiografii – ed. J. Walkusz, Lublin, 2010, p. 33-48. A. Z˙urek, ‘Wkład s´rodowiska tarnowskiego w badania nad antykiem chrzes´cijan´skim’, Vox Patrum, 36-37 (1999), p. 117-134.

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Abstract In the past – and also the present – the geographical location of Poland has been a challenge for the Polish Church and Polish theologians. Poland’s position between the great powers and between Eastern and Western traditions has had a major impact on the development of theology there. After the Second World War there has been a significant growth in patristic studies and in interest in these studies. The present paper reviews the development and achievements of Polish patristics. It traces over sixty years of post-war patristic studies in Poland, describing the main areas of research, the main series of translations and journals, and the most eminent researchers and centres. It allows one to appreciate the current position of Polish patristic studies in the European and global context.

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DENNIS TROUT University of Missouri-Columbia

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It is a humbling honor to address this audience, at this storied university, in a city so rich in traditions that inform our work. I thank the staff and administration of Hebrew University for their gracious hospitality and our organizers for the many hours they have devoted to planning this historic conference. I also wish to express my gratitude for the invitation that brought me here to speak on ‘the state of Patristics in North America’, while also admitting, however, that the anxiety of inadequacy that spurred my initial recusatio has only become more acute in recent months. The North American continent is home to more than four thousand colleges and universities. In the United States alone there are more than five hundred departments or programs in religious studies, most of them supporting at least one scholar who works in or close to our discipline. Furthermore, neither my academic home nor my professional training would seem to recommend me to be at this lectern today. For although I have served as the President of the North American Patristics Society for two years (2010-2012), I have had little formal training in anything called Patristics. I was educated largely by ancient historians; I teach in and am the chairman of a department of Classical Studies; my research in recent years has centered upon the literary and cultural clues lurking in lines of Latin poetry inscribed on stones from late ancient, albeit Christian, Rome. I have been on the Editorial Board of a journal entitled the Journal of Early Christian Studies and I am currently a book review editor for the Journal of Late Antiquity. Apart from that two-year presidency, the word ‘Patristics’ comes up in surprisingly short supply on my 10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107513

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curriculum vitae. But my excuses fell on deaf ears – and, for better or worse, here I am. I say these things not merely as an apologia for the shortcomings of my remarks today but also to illustrate something that seems to me to be intrinsic to the current state of Patristics in North America. Many of us who ‘do Patristics’ on that continent have a second foot planted firmly upon some other academic or intellectual terrain – a departmental home or an ancillary field: English Literature, Classical Studies, Ancient History, Philosophy, and, of course, Religious Studies and Theology – or we may be independent scholars, sometimes connected with religious orders or the ministry, sometimes simply free agents. Relatively few of us are fully-fledged ‘Professors of Patristics’. What we do share, of course, is a set of overlapping interests that revolve around a more or less predictable set of writings inscribing traces of the cultural and religious forces reshaping society, literature, spirituality, and the imagination in the late ancient Mediterranean world and its hinterlands. Nevertheless, despite this common core of resources, the variety of our professional affiliations and training ensures that almost every individual perspective on our field, as well as the methodologies and questions that inform it, will seem to others peculiar if not idiosyncratic. I will return to this point – for it seems to me to be both the bedrock of our disciplinary strength and the source of our greatest challenge – but at the moment I want to assure you that I have tried to override the particularity of my own perspective by enlisting the wisdom of generous friends whose feet are differently planted. My plan, then, is to proceed from the concrete towards the abstract. I will begin by surveying the professional landscape in which North American Patristics scholars currently live by considering the primary professional structures and organizations that shape their interactions and determine the venues in which they speak and publish. From there I will move on to offer thoughts about several trends and the issues they raise for scholars and students alike.

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1. Current Structures and Organizations 1.1. Organizations and Venues I start with three related questions: First, how do those who work in the field of Patristics in North America organize their professional lives? Second, where do they meet to share ideas and deliver talks and papers? And, finally, where do they publish their front-line work, especially the articles that often first announce their ideas and projects? The answers to these questions can yield a kind of rudimentary map of the ‘real world’ of North American Patristics – Patristics on the ground, as it were. From there, perhaps, we can more effectively reach for the aether of more critical questions about our field, its health, and its future. Patristics scholars in North America have typically and still do belong to and attend the annual meetings of a wide range of professional societies friendly to our interests. Among the oldest and largest are the American Philological Association (founded in 1869), the Society of Biblical Literature (1880), the American Society of Church History (1888), and the American Academy of Religion (established under that name only in 1964 but originating in 1909 as the Association of Biblical Instructors, with National added as a prefacing adjective in 1922). The large annual meetings of these professional societies all regularly accommodate the work of Patristics scholars although Patristics is only a portion (often a small one) of their areas of coverage. Historically, of course, Patristics (in an earlier guise) was a foundational component of several of these Societies and one of them, The American Society of Church History (1888), was itself founded in the home of Philip Schaff, organizer and editor of the long influential Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series. From an organizational point of view, however, the ‘modern era’ of Patristics in North America began in the 1970s. In that decade two dedicated societies were founded. In December of 1970 the first meeting of the North American Patristic Society (not officially Patristics until 2002) was held in New York in conjunction with the annual convention of the American Philological Association. Two years later, in 1972, NAPS had its own first president, Bruce Metzger. Until 1981, when it first met independently in Chicago (at Loyola University), the Society 91

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continued to meet in conjunction with the annual conferences of the American Philological Association (APA) while also sponsoring paper sessions at the annual meeting of the American Society of Church History or at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, first organized in 1962 by the Medieval Institute of Western Michigan University (in Kalamazoo, Michigan). Some seventy-five people attended that first meeting of NAPS in 1970; today (May 2013) membership in the Society stands at 864. Since 1972 NAPS has had thirty-three presidents and has held twenty-four independent meetings, while convening with strong representation every fourth year at the Oxford Patristics Conference (established in 1951). And indeed, it was at one of those quadrennial Oxford meetings, in 1975, five years after the North American Patristic Society was founded, that a group of Canadian scholars ‘huddled together’ at Oxford (as Robert Kitchen put it to me in an email) to form the Canadian Society of Patristics Studies (CSPS). That second North American society dedicated specifically to the study of Patristics now meets annually as part of the Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences. In short, since the 1970s Patristics has had two North American ‘homes’, NAPS and the Canadian Society – a critical index of current visibility, identity, and disciplinary strength. I should round out this survey by drawing attention to several other organizations that also consistently provide congenial North American venues for Patristics papers. The Byzantine Studies Conference was established in 1975 and a short history of the BSC penned by Alice-Mary Talbot in 1999 notes that papers on ‘late antiquity’ have typically comprised nearly half of the conference program. The 1990’s also saw the establishment of the Society for Late Antiquity, which since then has sponsored not only the biennial Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity conferences, most recently at the University of Ottawa (March 2013), but also annual paper sessions at Kalamazoo’s International Medieval Congress and at the convention of the American Philological Association. Finally, I might note that, in addition to these more historically focused meetings, the conferences sponsored by the Augustinian Institute of Villanova University and those organized by the Center for Catholic 92

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and Evangelical Theology, publishers since 1991 of the journal Pro Ecclesia, regularly nurture the interface of Patristics and historical or contemporary theology. In short, although Patristics scholars can still be found presenting papers at a wide range of allied historical and theological venues, as NAPS and the Canadian Society have matured Patristic studies in North America have gained both energy and traction through concentration and centralization. The programs of NAPS and the Canadian Society provide an impression of the results. Roughly twenty-five to thirty-five scholars attend and give papers at the annual meeting of the latter, which has a membership of about seventy-five (the 2013 program of the Canadian Society included some twenty-five papers). By way of contrast – and in part because many Canadian scholars journey to Chicago in late May – the two-and-a-half day meeting of the North American Patristics Society now regularly draws between 350 and 370 attendees, including a small number from Europe and Australia. Last spring’s program boasted seventy-two separate paper sessions, each session featuring three or four speakers. The first NAPS program in 1970 show-cased three papers. Not a bad rate of growth – and clear testimony to the current academic interest in Patristic studies in North America. 1.2. Publication A further index to this interest can be found in the establishment in recent years of two new journals specializing in or favorably disposed towards work in Patristics. In 1993 NAPS began publication of the Journal of Early Christian Studies (JECS). Its first co-editors were stalwarts of the North American Society, Elizabeth Clark and Everett Ferguson. Eventually Patout Burns succeeded Ferguson as co-editor with Clark; and since 2005 the Journal’s sole editor has been David Brakke. At twenty years of age, the Journal has been successful beyond all expectations. It regularly attracts high quality submissions from both leading and junior scholars – including the work of many in this room today. Between 2005 and today the Journal has had an average acceptance rate of 26%, and with a current individual circulation of nearly 1400 (quite respectable for a young specialist 93

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journal) JECS must be considered the leading venue for publication of work in Patristics in North America. Rather more recently, in 2008, the Society for Late Antiquity, sponsor of the Shifting Frontiers Conferences, spawned the first issue of the Journal of Late Antiquity (JLA), which like the Journal of Early Christian Studies, is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. The Journal of Late Antiquity, a semiannual journal of approximately 400 pages per year (and likewise home to articles by members of this association), has won multiple publishing awards in its infancy. As its title suggests, it has a potentially wider purview than the Journal of Early Christian Studies but the overlap in content and readership between the two journals is significant: three of the six articles in a recent fascicle of JLA (Fall 2012), those by Samuel Collins on the mosaics of Milan’s San Vittore, by Sigrid Mratschek on Melania the Elder and an unknown governor of Palestine, and by Jacob Ashkenazi and Mordechai Aviam on late antique monasteries in Western Galilee – could just as easily have appeared in the pages of the Journal of Early Christian Studies. Together then these two young journals offer a focus for work in or relevant to Patristics that far surpasses in point and power the scattering of effort across the run of journals in classics, theology, and history that for so long (and lest I seem ungrateful, thankfully still) offered us the only North American pages in which to present our work to a wide academic audience. Moreover, it hardly needs to be pointed out that not a few of the best books that have appeared in our field in recent years first ‘broke through’ in articles in JECS and JLA. Indeed, more could be said here about the critical importance to the field of Patristics in North America of such book series as the Transformation of the Classical Heritage published by the University of California Press, whose first volume appeared in 1981 under the general editorship of Peter Brown – or of the University of Pennsylvania’s equally revolutionary (in its own way) series, Divinations: Re-Reading Late Ancient Religion, which published its first volume (Cynthia Baker’s Rebuilding the House of Israel: Architecture of Gender in Jewish Antiquity) through Stanford University Press in 2002. From its inception Divinations has been co-edited by a leading Patristics scholar and former 94

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President of NAPS, Virginia Burrus. These two book series (and other initiatives like them such as Michigan’s Recentiores: Later Latin Texts and Contexts, established in the 1990s) have significantly enhanced the cachet of our discipline in academic circles. Nevertheless, a closer look at their titles and contents, already known to many of you – together with a survey of the recent annual programs of NAPS and the Canadian Society – will also raise the question of just what, in fact, our discipline is. Just what are we doing when we ‘do’ Patristics? I suspect, this survey of North American Patristics ‘on the ground’ – its organizational frameworks and publishing venues – has already provoked that question for some of you.

2. Convergences and Appropriations: Expanding and Claiming the Field 2.1. Programs and Journals Even a quick glance at the programs of the most recent meeting of the North American Patristics Society or of the Canadian Society – or a rapid perusal of the Table of Contents of almost any issue of the Journal of Early Christian Studies – or a survey of the titles in the Divinations Series – will make it clear that, if we define Patristics in terms of the sort of work that many scholars present in these venues, then North American Patristics scholarship has considerably extended its reach in recent decades. The handful of nineteenth-century Protestant scholars associated with seminary programs and divinity schools who, as Elizabeth Clark has shown in detail in Founding the Fathers (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) initiated academic study of the ‘Fathers’ largely to rebut contemporary European Pantheism, German Biblical criticism, and Catholic post-apostolic doctrinal development, would surely be hard pressed to recognize in these programs the discipline they ‘Founded.’ Confessional and theological perspectives certainly remain vital, even central, to today’s conversations, of course, but our conferences and journals now also thrive on the fresh air that swept into the Roman Empire with the discovery of ‘Late Antiquity’. It is also hardly coincidental that that ‘discovery’ was itself more or less contemporary 95

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with the 1970s birth and infancy of both NAPS and the Canadian Society. Peter Brown’s catalytic The World of Late Antiquity appeared in 1971; seven years later he began an academic residency in the United States (Berkeley 1978-86; Princeton 19862011) that has trained nearly two generations of scholars, many of whom now hold professorial positions in history, religion, and classical studies departments in North American colleges and universities – and whose own graduate students are often on the NAPS and Canadian Society’s programs. Peter Brown’s presence and influence runs deep – paralleling and intermingling with the rising stream of North American Patristics and Patristics scholars since the 1970s. But that is to get ahead of the story. What do we learn from those conference programs and journal titles that will help us better understand the state of Patristics in North America? I think we will see first of all that Patristics in North American is at once conservative and innovative. Consideration of the more than 200 papers presented at the recent NAPS meeting reveals the abiding centrality of works and authors that have consistently formed the core of later twentieth-century patrologies – from Johannes Quasten to Angelo di Berardino to Hubertus Drobner. So, too, questions of historic or systematic theology governed many, perhaps half, of the paper sessions: Christology, soteriology, pneumatology, anthropology, grace and freewill, Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, and other long familiar categories and names. Yet, the works of the trio just named (as well as similar heavyweights and less well-known writers) also provide the bulk of the material for lines of inquiry that have only climbed to prominence in the last twenty years: issues of gender, sexuality, and the body; the poetics of asceticism; literary and rhetorical studies; and critical and theoretical approaches to identity formation or the ideology of the book. At the same time art historical and archaeological approaches have introduced ranges of evidence typically absent from the standard patrologies – though tellingly they have a prominent place in such newstyle manuals as Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David Hunter’s Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (Oxford University Press, 2008) or Philip Rousseau’s Companion to Late Antiquity (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). 96

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This diversity and range of inquiry is confirmed by merely glancing at the last few years of the Journal of Early Christian Studies: the ‘fathers’ are thriving but are also being asked to answer questions inconceivable a generation ago: so it is that demons in the Cappadocians and ‘child sacrifice’ in Egyptian monastic culture jostle Marcion’s reading of Paul and the theology of Evagrius of Pontus. For another index consider the four most recent NAPS presidential addresses (also published in JECS), which have engaged the culture of compassion in late ancient Christianity; Augustine’s queer theology of marriage; funerary poetry and social history; and codicology and text criticism. This expansion of the horizons of Patristics, whereby the discipline might seem to be laying claim to territory once considered well outside its boundaries, may, however, also look like a set of ‘convergences’ when seen from other points of view – at least that is the term that seemed best to define the harvest of a recent (and preliminary) panel of North American scholars asked to ponder the state of their field. 2.2. The NAPS panel At last month’s meeting of the North American Patristics Society (May 2013) I asked six Patristics scholars (three of them past presidents of NAPS and one vice-president at the time) to speak briefly on themes that they would identify as crucial to our understanding of ourselves and contemporary Patristics in North America: Elizabeth Clark addressed historical perspectives; Virginia Burrus Women’s and Gender Studies; Robin Jensen material evidence and visual culture; Robin Darling Young Syriac Studies; David Eastman New Testament Studies; and finally, Paul Blowers considered the revived relationship between Patristics and contemporary theology and philosophy. Several comments on the panelists’ observations – and a few additional thoughts – are in order here, especially as the panelists’ remarks prompted discussion of the fundamental question (left unresolved) of whether, in fact, we do the right thing – that is represent ourselves accurately – when we (in North America) call our field of study ‘Patristics’. To understand why such a basic question arose (or more accurately was resurrected) let me backpedal a bit. 97

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Two of the six panelists discussed the ways in which new questions and newly appreciated resources have altered the landscape of Patristic studies on our continent: Virginia Burrus has been at the forefront of the changes she discussed, for her own work has consistently challenged us both to consider how issues of the body, gender, and sexuality informed the texts, the history, and the theology that we study, and also to see such issues as deeply complicit in, not peripheral to, the shapes that Christianities assumed in the age of the Fathers. Her review of trends and scholarship charted the evolution of these matters from the feminist theology and historiography of the 1960s to the sophisticated and theoretically informed cultural studies of the last decade. In a sense, she observed, the call issued in the 1970s by such scholars as Rosemary Radford Reuther and Elizabeth Clark for ‘more history, less theology’, was answered so masterfully by such studies as Peter Brown’s Body and Society (Columbia University Press, 1988) and Averil Cameron’s Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire (University of California Press, 1991), that during the last five years two out of every three issues of the Journal of Early Christian Studies contain at least one article focused on women, gender, or sexuality. This ‘mainstreaming’ of gender studies, self-evident in the mid-1990s impact of books by Susanna Elm, Vasiliki Limberis, Kate Cooper, and Teresa Shaw, among others, does mean that the sharper edges of the once revolutionary ‘Matristics’ have been dulled but clearly, as Burrus noted, the study of gender and sexuality is ‘alive and well’ in North American Patristic circles (and, we might add, graduate schools). Several of the articles catalogued by Burrus naturally bridge women’s studies and the study of material culture, for traces of the lives of many women are often found only there. It was this material turn in Patristics that attracted the attention of Robin Jensen. Professor Jensen will, in fact, be speaking on this topic in this conference. I will here only highlight her observation that one move crucial to the integration of art historical and archaeological evidence into Patristics on its own terms has been growing acceptance of the fact that objects and images must be approached with the same critical acumen now readily accorded to texts: a baptistery’s form and iconography, for example, often 98

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participate in the same kinds of discursive and rhetorical strategies that require us to read the ‘Fathers’ with the eyes of literary critics. To the two specific examples of contemporary methods and questions just reviewed, we could easily add many others, for the cultural turn in Patristics has brought to the fore a vast array of new approaches to even old material: rhetorical, literarycritical, historicist, cognitive, and psychological. The pathways are paved with new methodologies. There are also, it seems, many more pathways converging on Patristics from new or newly reimagined lands. Our panel considered three of them. Robin Darling Young described how Syriac language training and Syriac studies are now firmly anchored in a number of North American colleges and universities: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, Catholic University, the University of Chicago, and St. John’s University, by way of example. Moreover, like gender studies, Syriac Studies, she observed, has won a place at the table of early Christian studies in such universities as Duke (which in 2011 hosted the sixth quadrennial meeting of the Syriac Studies Symposium), Brown, the Universities of Tennessee and Oregon, and Toronto, typically through the work of individual scholars associated with those institutions. Again, the programs of the annual NAPS meeting or the Tables of Contents of the Journal of Early Christian Studies (which recently published a lengthy piece by Fergus Millar on ‘The Evolution of the Syrian Orthodox Church’) will confirm this claim. At the same time, Young recognized that the further advancement of Syriac studies will require continued production of the kinds of critical editions too easily taken for granted by scholars of Latin and Greek Christianities. In this respect, she observed, Syriac Studies lags behind and this gap impedes engagement by Syriac specialists with the cultural studies agenda now characteristic of other areas of early Christian studies in North America. Though our panel did not include a Coptic specialist, I suspect he or she would have echoed this observation. The point was made, in fact, by Anne Boud’hors in a survey of ‘The Coptic Tradition’ that she wrote for the Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2012), wherein she noted that ‘many [Coptic] texts still remain unedited or have not even been identified’ (225). At the same time, not unlike the energy 99

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generated in Syriac circles by the focus on Ephrem, in Coptic studies, as both James Goehring and David Hunter remarked to me, the Nag Hammadi texts provided a spur to the development of Coptic programs in North America – with the difference, of course, that New Testament scholars were initially at the forefront of engagement with the Nag Hammadi material. The other focus in Coptic studies, however, has been Pachomian monasticism and asceticism, which have been more naturally claimed for Patristics. That is, Coptic studies in the United States, as Goehring further observed, has been largely ‘corpus’ driven and the result has been somewhat detrimental to the profile of Coptic Studies in North America, as evidenced by the relatively few Coptic sessions on the NAPS program. Furthermore, that is the case despite the fact that Coptic programs and centers can be found at Yale, Claremont Graduate University, and Catholic University while individual Coptic scholars are associated with a number of departments of religion or history in North American colleges and universities (Brown, Mary Washington, Ohio State, the University of the Pacific, Canisius College, and Virginia Commonwealth University, for example). Before turning to two other convergences, I might add, first, that ancient Armenian and Georgian Christianities still remain rather marginal in North American Patristic Studies, and, second, that the massive amount of material collected at the Dumbarton Oaks website under the link ‘Resources of Syriac Studies’ and at the homepage of the International Association for Coptic Studies, suggests that electronic resources may hold one of the keys to the advancement of areas of study whose scholars are thinly spread across a large globe. Different in kind from the efforts of Syriac and Coptic scholars to integrate their work with the broader world of North American Patristics – but not necessarily divergent in effect – are (first) the newly forged connections between New Testament Studies and Patristics and (second) the re-staging of lines of communication between late ancient Christianity and contemporary theology and philosophy. David Eastman carefully delineated the forces compelling New Testament scholars to take more seriously and read more critically writers of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries. Apart from a need for fresh air (and new disserta100

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tion topics) in the potentially stifling confines of that short book, Eastman recognizes several factors encouraging this realignment: first, the increased emphasis on reception studies manifest in such books as Margaret Mitchell’s The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation (Westminster John Knox Press, 2002); second, the lure for New Testament textual critics of Patristic witnesses to the New Testament text, witnesses whose importance was made clear as well as controversial by Bart Ehrman’s The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture (Oxford University Press, 1993) as well as several of the essays included in Ehrman’s 2006 Studies in the Textual Criticism of the New Testament (Brill); and third a ‘shift within American evangelicalism.’ This latter reorientation has set a high enough premium upon texts, authors, and a period once considered irrelevant that some evangelical colleges have established programs in Early Christian Studies and evangelical publishers – such as InterVarsity Press, which is about to bring out the English language edition of 2008’s Nuovo dizionario patristico – have begun to offer their readers Patristic text and commentary series. This final observation by Eastman led quite naturally to Paul Blowers’ consideration of the ways that contemporary philosophers and theologians, across the faith and critical spectrum, are now working to retrieve and recover the writings of the patristic period. In this enterprise, Catholic ressourcement scholars, Orthodox theologians, and post-modern philosophers are no less invested than Professor Eastman’s evangelicals. This process is exemplified for Blowers by the ‘paleo-orthodoxy’ of Thomas Oden, by Dan William’s clarion call, Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism (Eerdmans, 1999), by JeanLuc Marion’s ‘phenomenological reading of the Fathers’, by the papers collected in George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou’s Orthodox Readings of Augustine (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), and by Morwenna Ludlow’s meta-textual reading of ancient and post-modern ‘readings’ of Gregory of Nyssa in Gregory of Nyssa: Ancient and (post)modern (Oxford University Press, 2007). The vitality and breadth of this PatristicsTheology-Philosophy interface is further evident in the agenda of the journal Pro Ecclesia, whose issues regularly feature a section entitled ‘Doctores Ecclesiae,’ as it was as well in the recent (2009) 101

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organization of a conference at the University of Colorado by Morwenna Ludlow and Scott Douglass. The meeting’s chief aim was ‘to interrogate the assumptions which underlie contemporary reading of the fathers.’ Moreover, Blowers noted how such interpretive work naturally blends with the efforts of the late Kwame Bediako, whose Theology and Identity: The Impact of Culture upon Christian Thought in the Second Century and in Modern Africa (Regnum Books, 1992) sought to explicate African theology in the post-missionary era by interrogating Christian identity formation in a select group of early Christian writers. In all these cases, diverse as their intellectual and confessional aims may be, the patristic period serves as a reservoir of authors, ideas, and models that can be recovered and relocated for intellectual profit. And in this case, it seems clear to me, as I juxtapose the examples adduced by Professor Blowers with the papers of this conference’s prolific third theme (‘Patristics and Theology’) that, in this respect, North American Patristics shares in a truly international enterprise. In short, then, based on this panel’s considerations, we might deem two broad trends to be characteristic of Patristics in North America. One expresses the desire of Patristics scholars to appropriate, develop, and deploy methodologies and evidential data that can facilitate new lines of inquiry and yield novel perspectives. The other represents the new or re-energized convergence of relative outsiders – New Testament Scholars and contemporary theologians and philosophers, for example – upon the heartland of Patristic texts and ideas. That two-fold scheme is artificial to a degree, and needs to be complemented by the lively persistence of historical theology, but articulated this way it draws attention to the crucial issue of disciplinary boundaries and definition that emerged in the discussion that ensued in the wake of our panelists’ presentations. As one of the presenters observed (and several others implied) the current study of Patristics in North America has become increasingly ‘diverse and decentered.’ This can be seen as mostly a good thing. But what else can happen when a discipline’s center seems to get mushy and its boundaries to blur? What is in a name?

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3. What’s in a name: History and Identity Quite a bit, it might seem. The flagship journal of the North American Patristics Society bears the title Journal of Early Christian Studies; the same Society’s twenty-five-year-old Patristic Monograph Series (over which NAPS assumed control in 1986) is soon to be reborn under a title that almost surely will not contain the word ‘Patristics’ but is quite likely to include the adjectives ‘early’ and ‘Christian.’ Equally telling, perhaps, is the fact that InterVarsity Press will publish Professor Di Berardino’s Nuovo dizionario patristico e di antichità cristiane as the Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity. And then there is my own vita, in which (as I noted earlier) ‘Patristics’ is notable for its relative absence. Pondering these nominal variations can take us back to where we began. In a chapter titled ‘From Patristics to Early Christian Studies’, which leads off the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (2008), Elizabeth Clark observed that later twentiethcentury North American scholars were particularly well positioned to help move Patristics further on from any single-minded grounding in theology: for evidence she pointed to the organization of American academic life in secular or secularized colleges and universities, the rapid growth of non-confessional ‘religious studies’ programs in the 1960s and 70s, and the location of many North American practitioners outside departments of theology (or even religion). These same conditions are also among the powerful forces driving the quest for titles and nomenclature that can denominate a more inclusive, maybe updated, Patristics. For as Clark also noted, the discipline in North America was impelled by an explosion of new questions and methods informed by developments in the humanities and social sciences to make the journey from one designator (Patristics) to another (Early Christian Studies). In North America, study of the Fathers, which still honors the place of theology, historical theology, and even theology in different modes, is nevertheless, a bristling, multidisciplinary enterprise with room for many voices, past and present. Moreover, as noted earlier, the rise of Late Antiquity, has added even more variations to the theme: for proof, one need only consider the overlaps (as well as gaps) in coverage among the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian 103

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Studies (2008), Philip Rousseau’s Companion to Late Antiquity (2009) and Scott Johnson’s Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity (2012), which, in fact, offers the surveys of the Armenian Church and the Coptic Tradition that the Handbook of Early Christian Studies lacks. Where then are the boundaries between early Christian, late antique, and Patristic studies? For some, this fuzzy situation is made even more discomforting by another source of irritation: the gulf between Patristics’ nineteenth-century theologically bounded self-definition and the far more open horizons established, not always without sweat and tears, by its current practitioners. It has been remarked that the discipline’s originating confessional theological agenda are no longer the inspiration for many, perhaps most, now working with the texts and material of Patristics and that the training offered by North American academic institutions is now just as (or even more) at home in departments of history, religion, classics, and art history than in departments of theology. Therefore, funding, too, is often tied to these academic affiliations. Is it, indeed, time for a new name? Recently Denis Feeny, announced that the Board of the venerable association over which he presided voted in favor of just that. For 144 years, since 1869, that association has been the American Philological Association; if the membership agrees in July (as, in fact, they did), it will become the Society for Classical Studies. Like Patristics, ‘philology’ no longer seems to everyone up to the task of describing the activity of many of the society’s members. The Modern Language Association (founded in 1883) long ago siphoned off most of those ‘philologists’ not concerned with Greek and Latin; and ‘philology’ itself, Feeny lamented, has become a term both increasingly inaccessible to ‘the general public’ as well as unrepresentative of what ‘classicists’ now do (which, of course, is not far removed on some fronts from what many of us do in the wake of the cultural turn). 1 Moreover, it is said that such a high-minded word, ‘philology’, risks drastically handicapping the ability of the modern APA to play ‘ever broader roles as an academic,

 ‹http://apaclassics.org/index.php/apa_blog/apa_blog_entry/4041/›.

1

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professional, and public resource’. Whether ‘Classical Studies’ can save the day for the APA remains to be seen, but there are reasons for Patristics scholars in North America to watch closely and be sympathetic to philology’s plight – we whose journals and programs are also coyly shying away from a term with potential representational shortcomings and marketing problems. What should we do? In the 2007 English translation of his Comprehensive Introduction to the Fathers of the Church (Hendrickson), Hubertus Drobner stated his preference for reserving ‘patristic’ and ‘patristics’ to indicate the time period of the Fathers; the study of ‘ancient Christian literature’ he would prefer to designate ‘patrology’. Moreover, although he admitted that such study must now of necessity be ‘literary’, patrology’s ‘subject issue’ was ‘a theological one’. ‘Modern patrology’, he conceded, ‘is the study of ancient Christian literature in its entirety, in all its aspects, bringing all the appropriate methods to bear’. Patristics in its North American guise, we might say, has become the study of late ancient Christian culture ‘in its entirety, in all its aspects, bringing all the appropriate methods to bear’. If we like that definition then it seems to me we can keep the term Patristics, which is, of course, what the membership of the North American Patristics Society decided to do some twenty years ago. If we don’t care for it, or if we suspect that, like philology, Patristics is deeply mired in pathways too inaccessible and rutted for our age, then we might join our Classicist neighbors in a move to some more relevant ‘field of studies’, early Christian, perhaps, or late ancient. I don’t want to exaggerate the issue. Every conclusion I have reached in the course of preparing this talk suggests to me that the field of Patristic studies is prospering in North America largely because its boundaries are open and its policies of emigration and immigration are liberal. But all of us here also know very well that what you call something matters – and that is a conversation we should not shy away from for it can bring us together just as easily as divide us.

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Abstract This paper offers a set of reflections upon the state of patristic studies in North America. It first surveys the professional landscape of patristic studies on the North American continent by discussing the roles and history of several scholarly organizations, the primary conferences at which patristics scholars meet and present their ideas, and some of the main outlets for the publication of relevant work. Throughout its course the essay highlights the interdisciplinary nature of patristic studies in its North American setting, a trend that has accelerated with the convergence of patristic studies and the expanding field of late antique studies. This development, it suggests, has both broadened the scope of North American patristic studies and presented the discipline with a number of new challenges. Several of the latter are treated through attention to five specific areas: modern historical perspectives, women’s and gender studies, material and visual culture, Syriac studies, New Testament Studies, and contemporary theology. The paper closes by posing the question of whether or not the term Patristics is still adequate to the task of defining the many kinds of vital work that “patristics scholars” now do.

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LOS ESTUDIOS PATRÍSTICOS EN SUDAMÉRICA Y EL CARIBE

La región sudamericana y del Caribe abarca una extensa zona geográfica y cultural, subdividida en una gran cantidad de países, pero a la que dan unidad histórica, lingüística y cultural desde hace más de quinientos años las lenguas española y portuguesa. En estas lenguas se traducen principalmente del griego, del latín y del copto las fuentes y autores de la patrística y se escriben, transmiten y enseñan las explicaciones, exégesis y estudios que versan sobre estos conocimientos. Lo primero que se debe advertir es que en los últimos cincuenta años la producción sobre el tema en la región ha sido muy desigual, y en muchos países prácticamente inexistente. En primer lugar, por lo tanto, debe advertirse que no ha sido posible detectar una actividad de estudios patrísticos en el nivel de la investigación y de la enseñanza en todos los países sudamericanos y caribeños. En segundo lugar que en los países en los que se ha podido descubrir este tipo de actividad, en varios casos se comprueba que ha sido desigual, asistemática o escasa, pero digna de ponerse de relieve. Y en tercer lugar, hay que aclarar también un fenómeno que merece atención. En la medida en que se avanza hacia el Sur de este inmenso subcontinente, es posible señalar una actividad sin interrupciones, estable y asimismo en crecimiento – con las lógicas vicisitudes que son propias de naciones jóvenes pertenecientes al cono austral del planeta −, en algunos países, particularmente en las repúblicas de Chile y de la Argentina. La descripción e inventario que se ofrece sigue el orden geográfico de norte a sur, utilizando los materiales que nos ha pro10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107514

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porcionado una documentación que se caracteriza por ser errátil, pero básicamente haciendo uso de las informaciones que gentilmente nos han sido proporcionadas por corresponsales de diversos países.

1. México Los estudios patrísticos en México han tenido un desarrollo limitado en los últimos cuarenta años. Lo dicho tiene sus razones. Antes del año 1992, cuando el gobierno mexicano otorgó validez oficial a los estudios eclesiásticos, las instituciones eclesiásticas debían dar constancia de planes de estudio en los que la enseñanza de la religión estaba proscrita. Se pusieron en práctica diversas formas de presentación para mantener programas educativos religiosos en las instituciones católicas. La Reforma Liberal, suprimió la Universidad Pontificia y en 1932 luego de las guerras de los Cristeros, fue definitivamente clausurada. En 1982 se abre nuevamente y en 1992 el gobierno mexicano le concede reconocimiento oficial. Esto explica en parte la precariedad de los estudios eclesiásticos en México. Durante los últimos veinte años los estudios patrísticos se han concentrado en garantizar la preparación de profesores de esta materia en los seminarios y ubicar asimismo los estudios patrísticos en las universidades no confesionales en los departamentos de cierta afinidad: Filosofía, Historia, Filología y Arte. Se pueden encontrar ponencias y conferencias de temas patrísticos en los congresos y reuniones de antropólogos y estudiosos de las religiones. Existe asimismo un Instituto Patrístico de México que preside el Maestro Presbítero José Alberto Ibáñez Hernández. El mencionado Instituto ha iniciado un programa de publicaciones de divulgación. Existe asimismo un reciente proyecto denominado ‘La introducción de los textos patrísticos en la Nueva España’ en colaboración con la Biblioteca Nacional de México. En lo que se refiere al personal docente y de investigación se cuenta con un buen número de egresados de la licenciatura de Patrología del Instituto Patrístico Agustiniano de Roma que avalan la posibilidad de concretar proyectos de investigación en un futuro cercano 1. 1 Informaciones proporcionadas por el Dr. Luis Gonzaga Ramos Gómez Pérez, OP, León, Guanajuato. En las revistas mexicanas Analogía Filosófica,

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2. Colombia En Colombia los estudios patrísticos se concentran en dos Universidades: la Pontificia Universidad Javeriana de los Jesuitas en Bogotá y la Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana de la Arquidiócesis de Medellín. En Bogotá se distinguen los profesores Alfonso Rincón por sus estudios sobre el lenguaje en san Agustín y Alfonso Flórez por sus estudios sobre Agustín de Hipona y el conocimiento. Canal de difusión de estos estudios es la revista Universitas Philosophica y la editorial correspondiente. La biblioteca de la Universidad Javeriana es rica en fuentes patrísticas en ediciones canónicas. En la Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, ha habido traducciones y ediciones bilingües de textos de san Agustín con introducciones históricas hechas por el profesor Felipe Castañeda. En Medellín, sobresalen los estudios de los profesores Alberto Ramírez, Guillermo Correa, Gonzalo Soto y Diego Uribe. Sus órganos de publicación son las revistas Escritos, Cuestiones Teológicas y la editorial de la Universidad. Del P. Alberto Ramírez sobresale un estudio sobre Melitón de Sardes y la Pascua, el profesor Guillermo Correa ha publicado el De musica de Agustín, el profesor Diego Uribe ha publicado sus cursos de Patrología y traducciones de textos latinos patrísticos y el profesor Gonzalo Soto ha editado estudios sobre el lenguaje y la mística en Agustín. Además las Etimologías de Isidoro de Sevilla y la mística en Dionisio Areopagita. Los autores mencionados han realizado sus estudios en las Universidades de Lovaina, Roma, Salamanca, Bogotá, Quebec y Medellín. Allí han estado en contacto con patrólogos, filólogos y con ediciones canónicas de excelencia. Sobre la historia del cristianismo sobresalen los estudios del estudioso jesuita P. Alberto Gutiérrez, profesor en las Universidades Javeriana y Gregoriana 2.

3. Perú Es digno de notar la esmerada traducción del Adversus Haereses de Ireneo de Lyon por Carlos Ignacio González, SJ, Facultad Anámnesis, Mathema, Mayéutica, Logos, oportunamente se publican trabajos de Patrística. 2  Noticias facilitadas por el profesor Gonzalo Soto Posada.

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de Teología Pontificia y Civil de Lima, Centro de Investigaciones Teológicas, como un número especial de la Revista Teológica Limense, con tres índices agregados, de Textos bíblicos, de Vocablos gnósticos y generales e Índice general 3.

4. Brasil Los estudios Patrísticos en Brasil tienen un marco central en relación con el Concilio Vaticano II, que contribuyó activamente para el reconocimiento y valorización de la Patrística dentro de la vida cristiana. De esta manera la reflexión sobre los estudios patrísticos en Brasil si se vincula con algunas referencias anteriores, encuentran su marco central, como se ha dicho, en el Concilio Vaticano II. Los diversos medios teológicos brasileños se beneficiaban de las colecciones de textos de los Padres. El material producido en Europa era en general utilizado en los textos originales, sin traducción En los ambientes monásticos se cultivaba asimismo su estudio. En sus bibliotecas todavía hoy, se encuentran las tradicionales publicaciones patrísticas, en particular las Patrologías griega y latina de Migne. En el período inmediato anterior al Concilio Vaticano II se puede comenzar mencionando a Fray Paulo Evaristo Arns, OFM, quien a su regreso al Brasil en 1953, luego de doctorarse en Letras en París, en la Sorbonne, con una tesis sobre san Jerónimo publicó varios artículos sobre Patrística en la Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira. Conjuntamente con su presencia en Brasil, fue fundamental el impulso que el Concilio Vaticano II dio a los Estudios Patrísticos, cuyas influencias se fortalecieron a partir de la década de los años setenta, durante la que tuvo lugar una irrupción de trabajos sobre Patrística en las Facultades de Teología. Surgían las Fontes da Catequese, presentando periódicamente textos traducidos de los Padres. Al frente de esta iniciativa estaba Paulo Evaristo Arns, a esa altura obispo de San Pablo. El 4 de mayo de 1970 el Papa Pablo VI fundaba el Instituto Patrístico Agustiniano y en el año 1972

3  Iren., Haer. = San Ireneo de Lyon Contra los herejes. Exposición y refutación de la falsa gnosis – ed. C. I. González (Revista Teológica Limense 34), Lima, 2000. En esta sede se continúa publicando la Revista Teológica Limense que ocasionalmente aporta algún trabajo teológico en relación con los estudios patrísticos.

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se produjo un hecho que llena de orgullo a los patrólogos brasileños: Fray Fernando Antonio Figueiredo Alem, OFM, fue el primer doctor del recientemente creado Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum. En la década de los ochenta se publica una nueva colección de textos patrísticos con el nombre de Padres da Igreja. Responsable de la colección fue el citado Fray Fernando Figueiredo. Él también organizó y publicó durante los años 1983-1990 un Curso de Teología Patrística en tres volúmenes, que abarcan los siglos I a V. La aparición de la Teología de la liberación en Brasil produjo algunos frutos para los estudios patrísticos. Se publicó la colección Pais e Maes da Igreja. A partir de textos patrísticos, los volúmenes de la colección se desenvolvían dentro de una óptica más social. Otro hecho importantísimo en la década de los años ochenta fue la iniciativa del teólogo holandés Leonardo Meulenberg, quien contando con subsidios extranjeros apoyó mucho el estudio del período patrístico a nivel nacional. Se creó un órgano divulgador para promover esos estudios abierto a teólogos de diversas denominaciones cristianas: el CEPAMI (Centro Ecumênico de Estudos dos Pais e Mâes da Igreja). Casi todo este material estaba dirigido a un público no especializado, aunque interesado en los temas patrísticos. En 1995 la Editorial Paulus lanzó una colección de Patrística, de traducciones con un estudio introductorio. Cuenta hasta el momento con treinta volúmenes publicados y es la colección más amplia de textos patrísticos publicados en Brasil. Unos diez años después una nueva iniciativa marcaría un impulso para los estudios patrísticos. Durante el XV Congreso Eucarístico Nacional, realizado en Florianópolis en mayo del 2006, fue creada una revista científica exclusivamente dedicada a la Patrística: Cadernos Patrísticos-textos e estudos. Editor responsable es el Profesor Pbro. Dr. Edinei Da Rosa Cândido del Instituto Teológico de Santa Catarina (ITESC). Esta revista difiere de las propuestas anteriores por su carácter estrictamente académico con la publicación de artículos del área de Teología y Ciencias Patrísticas con más de 200 páginas, en números temáticos, habiendo publicado hasta el presente nueve números. Es evidente que en Brasil, los comienzos de los estudios patrísticos fueron promisorios, pero que en los últimos años se produjo 111

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una discontinuidad, tanto en la cantidad de doctores y magister en Patrística, como en las pocas horas cátedras dedicadas a la Teología patrística en las facultades. Otro problema casi crónico ha sido el aislamiento de los estudiosos de la Patrística frente a los biblistas, liturgistas, moralistas y otras disciplinas teológicas, porque los patrólogos brasileños trabajan aislados. Este grave inconveniente del aislacionismo, sin embargo, ya está en vías de solución, pues si hasta el 2011 Brasil no tuvo un representante en la Association Internationale d’Études Patristiques (AIEP), a partir del último encuentro de Patrística en Chile, organizado por el Pbro. Dr. Samuel Fernández, fue posible conocer y entablar contacto con el Pbro. Dr. Edinei Da Rosa Cândido, a quien se augura que realice una promisoria tarea 4.

5. Chile Los Estudios Patrísticos en Chile tienen continuidad desde hace más de cuarenta años. Un relato preciso del P. Sergio Zañartu escrito en un artículo publicado en la revista chilena de difusión internacional, Teología y Vida, puede servir de hilo conductor de esta historia, que tiene una firme proyección en el presente de los estudios patrísticos en América del Sur. Relataba el P. Zañartu: Sorpresivamente llegó a la Facultad de Teología una carta soñadora de Oscar Velásquez, quien hacía su Master sobre Platón, en Cambridge, Inglaterra. Proponía organizar seminarios patrológicos abiertos del tipo de los congresos patrísticos en Oxford. Recuerdo que me sonreí escéptico. Pero el sueño, aguijoneado por el entusiasmo del profesor Velásquez, pudo más que la realidad y desató su propia dinámica. Hasta la fecha, las Facultades de Filosofía y Teología ya han organizado cinco seminarios de Estudios Patrísticos. El primero se realizó en 1977 5. 4 Informe proporcionado por el profesor Edinei Da Rosa Cândido en ‘Proposta para publicações patrísticas no Brasil e América Latina: os 6 anos dos Cadernos Patrísticos’. Recientemente ha concluido una tesis sobre Antonio Orbe el Dr. Francisco Berrizbeitía de Sao Paulo, ver F. Berrizbeitía, ‘Antonio Orbe, pionero de una nueva pedagogía de la teología de los siglos II y III’, Gregorianum, 94 (2013), p. 377-387. 5  S. Zañartu, ‘El estudio de los Padres de la Iglesia en la Facultad de Teología desde 1967 hasta el presente. Impresiones’, Teología y Vida, 40 (1999), p. 439.

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En este relato del P. Zañartu escrito en 1999, se sintetizan el pasado, el presente y probablemente el futuro de los patrólogos chilenos. La crónica es sustancial. El P. Zañartu había llegado en 1967 a la Facultad de Teología de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, luego de haber estudiado en París. En Chile, realizó bajo la guía del profesor Juan Ochagavía – a su vez próximo al P. A. Orbe – su tesis doctoral sobre Ignacio de Antioquía. Con su acostumbrado entusiasmo, el P. Zañartu introdujo nuevas metodologías en el estudio de los Padres y fue así como los alumnos comenzaron a profundizar en el estudio de un Padre de la Iglesia a su elección. El resultado fue promisorio, ya que en un currículo relativamente inflexible y un poco escolar, este método despertó vivo interés en varios alumnos. Este método fue continuado por otra de las personas clave en esta historia: la Hermana Anneliese Meis. 6 Al respecto y con una generosidad intelectual que conmueve, el P. Zañartu agrega: Antes de continuar quiero destacar la gran bendición de Dios que ha sido la docencia e investigación de la profesora Anneliese Meis, quien se ha convertido en la madre de los estudios patrológicos en nuestra Facultad 7.

La Hermana Anneliese Meis, realizó su tesis doctoral en Chile sobre ‘La fórmula de fe “Creo en el Espíritu Santo” en el siglo II’. Su tarea como formadora en estudios patrísticos ha sido inmensa: ha dirigido numerosísimas tesis sobre Patrística en autores como: Orígenes, Gregorio de Nyssa y Dionisio Areopagita. Actualmente es la directora del Doctorado en Teología de la Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Sin lugar a dudas el P. Sergio Zañartu y la Hermana Anneliese Meis fueron los progenitores de esta importante tarea, a ellas se les sumó la pujante iniciativa de Oscar Velásquez, quien además de ser un notable especialista en san Agustín creó en un esfuerzo conjunto de la Facultad de Filosofía y Teología, el círculo ‘Platónico Patrístico’, que se reunía regularmente a leer e inter-

6 Ver Multifariam. Homenaje a los profesores Anneliese Meis, Antonio Bentué y Sergio Silva – ed. S. Fernández, J. Noemi, R. Polanco (Anales de la Facultad de Teología, 1; Suplementos a Teología y Vida), Santiago, 2010. 7  S. Zañartu, ‘El estudio de los Padres’, p. 440.

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pretar detenidamente los textos de Platón y de los Padres. A estos tres nombres claves que formaron una auténtica tríada patrística, es necesario agregar la de una nueva generación de patrólogos, cuyo nivel de producción tanto en los planos de investigación como de publicación y docencia ha dado excelentes resultados: el Pbro. Dr. Samuel Fernández, quien realizó su licenciatura y tesis de doctorado en el Institutum Patristicum Augustinianun sobre Orígenes 8 y ha realizado importantes traducciones al castellano de la obra del maestro alejandrino. También continúa con la tarea de organizar los Seminarios Internacionales de Patrística; el Pbro. Dr. Rodrigo Polanco con una tesis realizada en Chile, bajo la dirección del P. Zañartu sobre la encarnación en el Adversus Haereses de San Ireneo, la Dra. Eva Reyes doctorada en la Facultad de Teología de la PUC con una tesis sobre Gregorio de Nyssa, Pamela Chávez de la Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades de la Universidad de Chile con una tesis sobre san Agustín, Cristian Sotomayor, Claudio Pierantoni, la Dra. Giannina Burlando, y otros. Cabe agregar que desde la década de los años setenta, los patrólogos de Chile estuvieron representados en la AIEP, lo que les permitió estar actualizados con las últimas publicaciones y eventos académicos que se realizaban en el mundo. A modo de apretada síntesis podemos resumir las fortalezas con que cuentan los Estudios Patrísticos en Chile: la más completa biblioteca en la temática de Iberoamérica, una Maestría en Teología con mención en Patrística, que es la primera creada en la América Española, la realización de ocho Seminarios Internacionales de Patrística estando ya organizado el noveno sobre ‘El De principiis de Orígenes’. Estos Encuentros de Patrística han permitido tanto el diálogo de especialistas de Iberoamérica, como la presencia de académicos de varios lugares del mundo 9. Numerosísimos artículos publicados sobre patrística en revistas prestigiosas de teología y de filosofía: Teología y Vida, Diadokhé. Revista de Estudios de Filosofía Platónica y Cristiana, Seminario de Filosofía. 8  S. Fernández, Cristo médico según Orígenes. La actividad médica como metáfora de la acción divina (Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum, 64), Roma, 1999. 9  S. Zañartu, ‘El estudio de los Padres’. Ver asimismo J. Ochagavía, Visibile Patris Filius. A Study of Irenaeus’ Teaching on Revelation and Tradition (Orientalia Christiana analecta, 171), Roma, 1964.

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6. Argentina Una breve síntesis de los estudios patrísticos en Argentina como actividad de investigación colectiva, debe remontarse a comienzos de la década de los setenta, en el momento en que el doctor José Pablo Martín y el autor de este informe académico publican sus tesis de Doctorado en Teología y de Licenciatura en Filosofía, respectivamente sobre: El Espíritu Santo en los orígenes del cristianismo y Gnosis. La esencia del dualismo gnóstico 10. Poco tiempo después se inician las relaciones institucionales con la AIEP. Ambos estudiosos de la Patrística y su contexto tardo-antiguo, se habían formado en centros de estudios superiores argentinos y en Roma con conocidos investigadores de la Patrística: Vincenzo Loi (Pontificia Università Salesiana) y Antonio Orbe, SI, (Gregoriana). Los dos investigadores asimismo son autores de una extensa producción bibliográfica centrada, respectivamente, en el campo de los padres apostólicos y apologistas del siglo II y de los escritores eclesiásticos alejandrinos, extendiéndose a Filón el Judío, en el caso de José Pablo Martín y en el área del gnosticismo y sus vínculos filosóficos por parte del responsable del presente informe académico. El Dr. José Pablo Martín es en años más recientes el editor de Teófilo de Antioquía, A Autólico, Ciudad Nueva, Madrid, 2004 y el director de la edición española de Filón de Alejandría, Obras Completas, edición programada en ocho volúmenes, de los que se han publicado la mitad de la edición 11. En cuanto a la actividad de quien les habla ha realizado el esfuerzo de introducir en los mundos de habla española y portuguesa parte de las versiones de los códices en copto de la Biblioteca de Nag Hammadi, desde su juventud: ‘Sobre la resurrección (Epístola a Reginos)’ 12, y posteriormente cuando fue convo10   J. P. Martín, El Espíritu Santo en los orígenes del cristianismo, Zurich, 1971; F. García Bazán, Gnosis. La esencia del dualismo gnóstico, Buenos Aires, 19782. 11  Filón de Alejandría, Obras Completas – ed. J. P. Martín, 8 vols., Madrid, 2009-: I (2009), II (2010), III (2012), V: (2009). Hay asimismo una versión anterior de Obras Completas de Filón de Alejandría – tr. J. M. Triviño, 5 vols., Buenos Aires, 1975-1976. 12  F. García Bazán, ‘Sobre la resurrección (Epístola a Reginos): Traducción, Introducción, y Comentario’, Revista Bíblica, 38.2 (1976), p. 147-178.

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cado desde la Península para la edición colectiva de los Textos gnósticos. Biblioteca de Nag Hammadi, en coedición con Antonio Piñero y J. Montserrat Torrents 13. Asimismo es traductor del Papiro Berolinensis 8502, el Códice de Bruce y el Códice de Askew (Pístis Sophía) que forman parte de los dos volúmenes hasta ahora publicados 14. Igualmente ha desarrollado una necesaria actividad de traductor del griego y del latín para poder internarse en el comentario de autores y escritos que son insoslayables en el desarrollo de la Patrística: Numenio de Apamea, Oráculos Caldeos, Plotino, neopitagóricos, herméticos y Filón de Alejandría en colaboración con el amplio proyecto filoniano de José Pablo Martín. Los dos investigadores citados, así como también el Dr. Héctor Padrón, Profesor Emérito de Historia de la Filosofía Medieval de la Universidad Nacional de Cuyo (Mendoza), han desarrollado una labor continua en la iniciación y consolidación de la investigación y el desarrollo de los estudios patrísticos en las universidades y centros de estudio de la Argentina. Han abierto una huella en la dirección de tesis de doctorado, proyectos de investigación y formación de discípulos que ahora son profesores e investigadores en casas de altos estudios en toda la geografía del país 15. El Dr. José Pablo Martín ha dirigido al Dr. Marcelo Boeri (Santiago de Chile), el estoicismo y los Padres, y a la Dra. Marta Alesso (Universidad Nacional de La Pampa), Filón y Padres Apostólicos.

13   Textos gnósticos. Biblioteca de Nag Hammadi – ed. A. Piñero, F. García Bazán, J. Montserrat Torrents, 3 vols., Madrid, 1997-2000; O livro secreto de João – ed. A. Piñero, F. García Bazán, J. Montserrat Torrents (Biblioteca Nag Hammadi, I), Lisboa, 2005; Evangelhos gnósticos – ed. A. Piñero, F. García Bazán, J. Montserrat Torrents (Biblioteca Nag Hammadi, II), Lisboa, 2005; A revelação de Pedro – ed. A. Piñero, F. García Bazán, J. Montserrat Torrents (Biblioteca Nag Hammadi, III), Lisboa, 2005. 14  La gnosis eterna. Antología de textos gnósticos griegos, latinos y coptos – ed. y tr. F. García Bazán, 2 vols., Madrid, 2003-2007; El evangelio de Judas – ed. F. García Bazán, Madrid, 2006. 15  Ver también de M. Bergadá, ‘La concepción de la libertad en el De hominis opificio de Gregorio de Nyssa’, Stromata, 24 (1968), p. 243-263, y A. Caturelli, El hombre y la historia. Filosofía y teología de la historia, Buenos Aires, 1959.

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El Prof. Héctor Padrón ha colaborado en la formación del Dr. Rubén Peretó Rivas, director del Centro de Estudios Filosóficos Medievales de la Universidad Nacional de Cuyo y que realiza una activa tarea tanto en la organización de congresos en Estudios Medievales y Patrísticos, como en la dirección de becarios y doctorandos. Francisco García Bazán ha dirigido casi una decena de estudiosos. La mayoría de estos estudiosos orientan a su vez a una nueva generación de humanistas y patrólogos 16. También es necesario mencionar el importante trabajo académico y de investigación que se realiza en la Universidad Católica Argentina, con sede en Buenos Aires. Allí se pueden mencionar al Pbro. Dr. Hernán Giudice, doctorado en el Institutum Patristicum Augustinianun, y a la Lic. Viviana Félix, especialista en Justino Mártir. Los estudiosos argentinos de la Patrística colaboran estrechamente con sus colegas chilenos desde hace más de tres lustros participando en los Seminarios de Patrística cada cuatro años y desarrollando proyectos de investigación conjuntos como la publicación de Diadokhé. Revista de Estudios de Filosofía Platónica y Cristiana, iniciada su edición en 1998 y que se mantiene hasta la fecha (codirectores Oscar Velásquez y Francisco García Bazán). Meritoria es la tarea que lleva a cabo por Internet el Pbro. Dr. Enrique Contreras (Abad del Monasterio de Santa María de los Toldos), conocido anteriormente junto con 16  Dra. Patricia Ciner, Orígenes (San Juan); Dr. José María Nieva, Dionisio Areopagita (Tucumán), Dr. Claudio Calabrese, San Agustín, quien ha publicado San Agustín de Hipona, Interpretación literal del Génesis – tr. C. Calabrese (Colección de Pensamiento Medieval y Renacentista, 78), Pamplona, 2006, y actualmente revista en la Universidad de la Vera-Cruz de Zacatecas (México); Dr. Juan Carlos Alby, San Ireneo y los gnósticos (Santa Fe); Lic. Graciela Ritacco, Corpus Dionysiacum y Proclo (San Miguel-Buenos Aires); Lic. Marta Cristina Simeone, San Agustín y la Academia Platónica (Buenos Aires), Lic. Leandro Pinkler, los misterios y los Padres; J. B. García Bazán, Los gnósticos naasenos (Buenos Aires). En junio y diciembre de 2012 codirigidos por Mireille Hadas-Lebel y Francisco García Bazán y por Jean–Daniel Dubois y Francisco García Bazán, presentaron sus tesis de doctorado en L’École Pratique des Hautes Études, Sorbonne, la doctora Magdalena Díaz Araujo y el Dr. Mariano Troiano sobre los temas: ‘La représentation de la femme et l’invention de la notion du “peché de la chair” d’après la Vie grecque d’Adam et Eve’ y ‘Le Demiurge gnostique et le cosmos’, respectivamente.

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Roberto Peña por sus introducciones al estudio de los Padres griegos y latinos 17. Últimamente Horacio E. Lona y Alberto C. Capbosco, han publicado una Introducción a la historia de la literatura cristiana en los tres primeros siglos 18, y años antes Pablo A. Cavallero, editó la traducción de las Obras de Dionisio Areopagita en dos volúmenes, con notas y comentarios propios y de Graciela Ritacco de Gayoso. 19 En San Miguel de Tucumán, el P. Edgardo M. Morales doctor por el Instituto Patrístico Agustiniano y colaborador de Sources Chrétiennes con su participación en Trois vies de moines, 20 ha publicado también una Introducción a la patrología 21. Sorprende también en Argentina la cantidad de congresos y jornadas en temas de Patrística que se llevan a cabo. Se organizan en las siguientes provincias argentinas: Buenos Aires, Mendoza, Rosario (Santa Fe), Tucumán y San Juan 22. 17  E. Contreras, R. Peña, Introducción al estudio de los Padres del período pre-niceno, Monasterio Ntra. Sra. de los Angeles, 1991; Id., El contexto histórico eclesial de los Padres latinos. Siglos IV-V, Luján, 1992; Id., Introducción al estudio de los Padres latinos. De Nicea a Calcedonia, Monasterio Ntra. Sra. de los Angeles, 1994. El mencionado patrólogo se concentra actualmente en una biblioteca digital del conjunto de las obras de los Padres traducidas al castellano. Las entregas son semanales y es un ágil instrumento de trabajo para difundir a los autores patrísticos, que están medianamente difundidos en el mundo de habla española. La tarea se comenzó con la obra de Clemente Romano y actualmente se editan las obras de Clemente de Alejandría. 18  H. E. Lona, A. C. Capbosco, Introducción a la historia de la literatura cristiana en los tres primeros siglos, Buenos Aires, 2012. 19  Dion. Ar., C.h., E.h., Myst., Ep. = Dionisio Areopagita, Jerarquía celestial, La jerarquía eclesiástica, La teología mística, Epístolas – ed. P. Cavallero (Obras maestras del pensamiento), Buenos Aires, 2007; Dion. Ar., D.n. = Dionisio Areopagita, Los nombres divinos – ed. P. Cavallero (Obras maestras del pensamiento), Buenos Aires, 2008. 20  Hier., Vita Pauli, Vita Malchi, Vita Hilar. – ed. E. M. Morales, tr. P. Leclerc (Sources Chrétiennes, 508), Paris, 2007. 21  E. M. Morales, Introducción a la patrología, Buenos Aires, 2008. Diego M. Santos y Pablo Ubierna, han editado también, El Evangelio de Judas y otros textos gnósticos, Buenos Aires, 2009 y la Dra. Claudia D’Amico dirige en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Buenos Aires un equipo de investigadores, que trabaja en la cátedra de Historia de la Filosofía Medieval, la versión latina del Asclepio hermético. 22   Buenos Aires: Jornadas de Filosofía Medieval organizadas por los Dr. Ricardo Diez y Raquel Fisher en la Academia Nacional de Ciencias de Buenos Aires. Jornadas de Filosofía e Historia de las Religiones celebradas anualmente durante la primera quincena de octubre en la misma institu-

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En San Juan no sólo se ha llevado a cabo del 8 al 10 de agosto de 2012 el Primer Congreso Internacional de Estudios Patrísticos sobre ‘La identidad de Jesús: unidad y diversidad en la época de la Patrística’ organizado por el Instituto de Estudios Patrísticos y el Rectorado de la Universidad Católica de Cuyo en San Juan y que superó largamente a los cien participantes, sino que en cuanto a carreras específicas, en su seno funciona la primera Diplomatura en Estudios Patrísticos, creada por la iniciativa de las autoridades de la Universidad Católica de Cuyo 23. Es digno de subrayar, además, la apreciable cantidad de becarios del CONICET que realizan tesis de postgrado en temas de Patrística y que superan a otras especialidades. Quizás haya sido esta suma de factores favorables al desarrollo de los estudios patrísticos en el Cono Sur de América lo que permitió una importante presencia de participantes argentinos, chilenos y brasileños en el XVI Congreso Internacional de Estudios Patrísticos celebrado en Oxford en Septiembre del 2011, ocasión en la que los especialistas iberoamericanos en Patrística, pudieron abrir grupalmente puentes de vinculación y colaboración activa con la acción patrística internacional. Con ocasión de la ción. Edita asimismo las actas en el Anuario EPIMELEIA. Estudios de Filosofía e Historia de las Religiones Jornadas de Patrística organizadas por la Sociedad Argentina de Teología. Simposio Internacional Helenismo y Cristianismo organizado bianualmente por la Dra. Marta Alesso y el Dr. José Pablo Martín, en la Universidad de General Sarmiento. Jornadas de Estudios Patrísticos Orden de San Agustín. Mendoza: Congresos Anuales y bianuales sobre temas referidos a Estudios Medievales y Patrísticos organizados por el Dr. Rubén Peretó Rivas, en la Facultad.de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. Rosario (Santa Fe): Jornadas de Filosofía Patrística y Medieval, organizadas por la Dra. Silvana Filippi, titular de la cátedra de ‘Historia de la Filosofía Medieval y del Renacimiento’ y Directora del Centro de Estudios Patrísticos y Medievales de la Escuela de Filosofía de la Facultad de Humanidades y Artes de la Universidad Nacional de Rosario. Tucumán: Jornadas de Estudios sobre Pensamiento Patrístico y Medieval, organizadas por el Dr. Fr. Juan José Herrera en la Facultad de Humanidades de la Universidad del Norte Santo Tomás de Aquino (UNSTA). 23  Estas iniciativas, dirigidas por la Rectora Dra. María Isabel Larrauri, han sido concretadas por el Decano de la Facultad. de Filosofía, Lic. Jorge Bernat, y los presbíteros Lic. Ángel Hernández y Lic. Pedro Fernández y cuenta con la colaboración de prestigiosos especialistas nacionales e internacionales. De esta Diplomatura surgió el Instituto de Estudios Patrísticos que muestra en su haber la iniciativa y organización del Congreso Internacional de Patrística antes mencionado.

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mencionada actividad un grupo de estudiosos argentinos, chilenos y brasileños pudieron durante el desarrollo de este último Congreso en Oxford proyectarse de manera muy positiva en vistas al futuro desarrollo de los Estudios Patrísticos en Sudamérica y el Caribe. Lo expresado avanzó por dos iniciativas: a) Porque con ponencias atinentes se pudo mostrar una parte de lo que se hace en relación con la Patrística en nuestros países de habla y cultura hispanolusitana. Lo expresado se concretó a partir del ofrecimiento hecho por los integrantes del Comité Organizador del Congreso, quienes le permitieron a Iberoamérica llevar a cabo un workshop de dos tardes. En la ocasión se expusieron trabajos sobre la situación de cada país y asimismo ponencias vinculadas a las diversas líneas de investigación de los especialistas iberoamericanos. Además, por indicación expresa de dicho Comité, se solicitó que uno de los trabajos a cargo de la Dra. Patricia Ciner que marcó las líneas centrales que ha seguido esta exposición, se presentara en las sesiones ordinarias del congreso a fin de que pudiera ser escuchado por un número importante de participantes. b) Porque, además, por primera vez en la historia de la AIEP, obtuvo la Vicepresidencia un estudioso hispanoamericano: el chileno, Dr. Oscar Velásquez 24.

24  Brevemente expondremos ambos logros. Con respecto al primer punto bastará con registrar el cronograma de los temas expuestos en el workshop de Oxford del martes 9 y 12 de agosto sobre ‘Los estudios patrísticos en Latinoamérica I y II’. Ambas actividades presididas por el Prof. Rubén Peretó Rivas. I: Oscar Velásquez, ‘La historia de la patrística en Chile: un largo proceso de maduración’; Pedro Fernández, ‘A diez años de la iniciación de los Estudios Patrísticos en la Universidad Católica de Cuyo. San Juan-Argentina’; Francisco Bastitta Harriet, ‘¿Dios consecuente con la decisión humana? Una interpretación de un pasaje del De vita Moysis de Gregorio de Nyssa’. II: Rubén Peretó Rivas, ‘La acedia en Evagrio Póntico. Entre ángeles y demonios’; Viviana Félix, ‘La influencia del platonismo medio en Justino a la luz de los estudios recientes sobre el Didaskálikos’; Graciela Ritacco, ‘El Bien, el sol, y el rayo de luz según Dionisio del Areópago’; Hernán Giudice, ‘Prisciliano de Avila y el apóstol Pablo’. En cuanto a la elección del Dr. Oscar Velásquez como Vicepresidente de la AIEP (2011-2015) se debe puntualizar que accedió al cargo por la votación unánime en Oxford de los miembros correspondientes de los países con afiliados activos de la AIEP.

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7. Conclusiones: mirando al futuro Actualmente las Obras Completas de Filón de Alejandría dirigidas por José Pablo Martín siguen su curso; la traducción y estudio de Sobre los principios de Orígenes bajo la dirección de Samuel Fernández estará próximamente concluida, así como el Comentario al Evangelio de San Juan del mismo Orígenes, trabajo de Patricia Ciner y Francisco García Bazán. De este autor se ha publicado en Buenos Aires, La biblioteca gnóstica de Nag Hammadi y los orígenes cristianos 25. Son obras grupales e individuales confirmadas. Asimismo la decena de publicaciones periódicas de la región continúan su curso normal, igual que la actividad docente de seminarios y cursos y las de extensión a través de congresos, jornadas y conferencias. Se podría concluir con unas palabras sobre lo imprevisto que súbita y sorpresivamente inunda de agradecimiento el corazón del hombre. Si el año 2013 se inició con la sorpresa de la renuncia canónica de un Papa y la súbita ascensión al pontificado del Papa Francisco, sudamericano, es posible la esperanza de que estas iniciativas inesperadas se reflejen en nuestros estudios y anhelos de ecumenismo.

Bibliografía 1. Fuentes Primarias A revelação de Pedro – ed. A. Piñero, F. García Bazán, J. Montserrat Torrents (Biblioteca Nag Hammadi, III), Lisboa, 2005. Dion. Ar., C.h., E.h., Myst., Ep. = Dionisio Areopagita, Jerarquía celestial, La jerarquía eclesiástica, La teología mística, Epístolas – ed. P. Cavallero (Obras maestras del pensamiento), Buenos Aires, 2007. Dion. Ar., D.n. = Dionisio Areopagita, Los nombres divinos – ed. P. Cavallero (Obras maestras del pensamiento), Buenos Aires, 2008. El evangelio de Judas – ed. F. García Bazán, Madrid, 2006. El Evangelio de Judas y otros textos gnósticos – ed. D. M. Santos, P. Ubierna, Buenos Aires, 2009. 25  F. García Bazán, La biblioteca gnóstica de Nag Hammadi y los orígenes cristianos, Buenos Aires, 2013.

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Evangelhos gnósticos – ed. A. Piñero, F. García Bazán, J. Montserrat Torrents (Biblioteca Nag Hammadi, II), Lisboa, 2005. Filón de Alejandría, Obras Completas – ed. J. P. Martín, 8 vols., Madrid, 2009-. Hier., Vita Pauli, Vita Malchi, Vita Hilar. = Hieronymus Stridonensis, Vita S. Pauli, Vita S. Hilarionis, Vita Malchi – ed. E. M. Morales, tr. P. Leclerc (Sources Chrétiennes, 508), Paris, 2007. Iren., Haer. = San Ireneo de Lyon Contra los herejes. Exposición y refutación de la falsa gnosis – ed. C. I. González (Revista Teológica Limense 34), Lima, 2000. La gnosis eterna. Antología de textos gnósticos griegos, latinos y coptos – ed. y tr. F. García Bazán, 2 vols., Madrid, 2003-2007. Obras Completas de Filón de Alejandría – tr. J. M. Triviño, 5 vols., Buenos Aires, 1975-1976. O livro secreto de João – ed. A. Piñero, F. García Bazán, J. Montserrat Torrents (Biblioteca Nag Hammadi, I), Lisboa, 2005. San Agustín de Hipona, Interpretación literal del Génesis – tr. C. Calabrese (Colección de Pensamiento Medieval y Renacentista, 78), Pamplona, 2006.

2. Fuentes Secundarias M. Bergadá, ‘La concepción de la libertad en el De hominis opificio de Gregorio de Nyssa’, Stromata, 24 (1968), p. 243-263. F. Berrizbeitía, ‘Antonio Orbe, pionero de una nueva pedagogía de la teología de los siglos II y III’, Gregorianum, 94 (2013), p. 377387. A. Caturelli, El hombre y la historia. Filosofía y teología de la historia, Buenos Aires, 1959. P. Ciner, ‘Los estudios patrísticos latinoamericanos en perspectiva internacional’, Cuadernos Monásticos, 180 (2012), p. 11-20. E. Contreras, R. Peña, Introducción al estudio de los Padres latinos. De Nicea a Calcedonia, Monasterio Ntra. Sra. de los Angeles, 1994. E. Contreras, R. Peña, El contexto histórico eclesial de los Padres latinos. Siglos IV-V, Luján, 1992. E. Contreras, R. Peña, Introducción al estudio de los Padres del período pre-niceno, Monasterio Ntra. Sra. de los Angeles, 1991. S. Fernández, ‘La patrología en los 40 años de Teología y Vida’, Teología y Vida, 41 (2000), p. 310-327.

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S. Fernández, Cristo médico según Orígenes. La actividad médica como metáfora de la acción divina (Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum, 64), Roma, 1999. F. García Bazán, La biblioteca gnóstica de Nag Hammadi y los orígenes cristianos, Buenos Aires, 2013. F. García Bazán, Gnosis. La esencia del dualismo gnóstico, Buenos Aires, 19782. F. García Bazán, ‘Sobre la resurrección (Epístola a Reginos): Traducción, Introducción, y Comentario’, Revista Bíblica, 38.2 (1976), p. 147-178. H. E. Lona, A. C. Capbosco, Introducción a la historia de la literatura cristiana en los tres primeros siglos, Buenos Aires, 2012. J. P. Martín, El Espíritu Santo en los orígenes del cristianismo, Zurich, 1971. Multifariam. Homenaje a los profesores Anneliese Meis, Antonio Bentué y Sergio Silva – ed. S. Fernández, J. Noemi, R. Polanco (Anales de la Facultad de Teología, 1; Suplementos a Teología y Vida), Santiago, 2010. E. M. Morales, Introducción a la patrología, Buenos Aires, 2008. J. Ochagavía, Visibile Patris Filius. A Study of Irenaeus’ Teaching on Revelation and Tradition (Orientalia Christiana analecta, 171), Roma, 1964. S. Zañartu, ‘El estudio de los Padres de la Iglesia en la Facultad de Teología desde 1967 hasta el presente. Impresiones’, Teología y Vida, 40 (1999), p. 439-444.

Abstracts América del Sur y el Caribe, abarca una extensa región geográfica y cultural, subdividida en muchos países. Los idiomas español y portugués han constituido una unidad lingüística por más de 500 años. Las fuentes y autores patrísticos han sido traducidos en estos dos idiomas, y la investigación y la enseñanza también se han llevado a cabo en estas lenguas. Durante los últimos cincuenta años en esta región, la producción sobre el tema ha sido desigual y en algunos países casi inexistente. En los países en los que ha habido algunas señales de actividad, también ha sido desigual; pero en la medida en que nos movemos hacia el sur, la actividad ha ido en crecimiento, particularmente en Brasil, Chile y Argentina.

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South America and the Caribbean cover a vast geographical and cultural region, subdivided into many countries. The Spanish and Portuguese languages have afforded it a linguistic unity for over 500 years. The patristic sources and authors have been translated into these two languages, and research and teaching have been carried out in these languages. Over the last fifty years in this region, research in the field has been uneven, in some countries even non-existent. In the countries where there have been some signs of activity, it has also been uneven; but as one moves south, activity has been increasing, particularly in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina.

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1. Prologue I have to begin this paper by confessing my inability to cover the entire region of East Asia. In China, at least in mainland China, no significant group of scholars seems to be active in the field of patristic studies; on the other hand, it is only to be expected that in South Korea, which is one of the most active Christian countries, not only in Asia but in the entire world, people are interested in Christian history and thought. In recent years, many scholars who are apparently of Korean origin have been publishing in international languages the results of their research in the field of biblical studies, either in the form of books or articles; and one can doubtless observe the same tendency also in the field of patristic studies, albeit to a lesser extent. And needless to say, any assessment of the current situation should take patristic studies in South Korea published in the Korean language into account. However, this last task I am unable to assume because of my very poor knowledge of the Korean language. 1 Thus, although some activities in East Asia will be mentioned later, in which Korean patristic scholars are also involved, this paper will be basically limited to what has happened in Japan in the field of patristic studies. My apologies for not duly covering patristic studies in South Korea, and also in Taiwan and Hong Kong, of which I have to confess again my total ignorance.   Naturally I sought the cooperation of Korean researchers in patristic studies in this matter, but regrettably the task was of such enormity that it was not feasible for them to provide assistance. 1

10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107515

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2. A brief history of patristic studies in Japan 2.1 Educational institutions It is not very easy to identify a clear starting point for patristic studies in Japan, but since patristics is a field adjacent to a much more popular field, biblical studies, some general notion can be obtained by taking a look at the development of the latter, more precisely the history of the translation of the Bible into Japanese. After some tentatives, the first systematic translation of the Bible into Japanese was accomplished in the 1880s (the New Testament in 1880, the Old Testament in 1887). This translation project was led largely by missionaries coming from foreign countries, and apparently the translation was made not from the original languages, but mainly from English. The New Testament translation was criticized for stylistic and other reasons, and a revised translation, this time possibly working from the original Greek, was started in 1910 and finished in 1917. One can say that, to a certain extent, this reflects the development of biblical studies in Japan. The influence of missionary activities can also be seen in the setting up of educational institutes. To mention only a few at the university level: – Meiji Gakuin University, 2 (which derives from an English academy founded by Mr and Mrs J. C. Hepburn in 1863; the university itself was established in 1949); – Aoyama Gakuin University 3 (which derives from the activities of missionaries from the Methodist Episcopal Church of the United States, who established three schools in the 1870s; the university itself was established in 1949); – Rikkyo University 4 (which derives from a private school founded in 1874 by Channing Moore Williams, an Episcopalian missionary; the university itself was established in 1922);

2  The term ‘Gakuin’ itself means ‘academic institute’ and has no specifically Christian connotations. The URL of the university is ‹http://www.meijigakuin. ac.jp/index_en.html›. All URLs referred to in this article were accessed on 20 June 2013. 3  The URL of the university is ‹http://www.aoyama.ac.jp/en/›. 4  The URL of the university is ‹http://english.rikkyo.ac.jp/›.

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– Kanto Gakuin University 5 (which derives from a Baptist seminary founded in 1884 in Yokohama; the university itself was established in 1949); – Toˉhoku Gakuin University 6 (which derives from Sendai Theological Seminary founded in 1886 by Oshikawa Masayoshi 7 and W. E. Hoy; the university itself was established in 1949); – Kwansei Gakuin University 8 (which was founded in Kobe in 1889 by Dr Walter Russell Lambuth, a missionary of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, USA., as a small private institution with two departments, a theological school and a middle school; 9 the university itself was established in 1932); – Seigakuin University 10 (which derives from Seigakuin Seminary founded in 1903; the university itself was established in 1988).

There are other universities as well, which are based on Christian principles and thus can be called Christian universities in a broad sense of the term, and which were founded by indigenous Japanese. Among these universities are: – Doˉshisha University 11 (which derives from Doˉshisha Academy founded in 1875 by Niijima Joˉ, 12 who graduated from Andover Theological Seminary in the preceding year; the university itself was established in 1920); – Tokyo Woman’s Christian University 13 (founded in 1918 as a university-level educational institute, but institutionally different from a university – its first president being Nitobe Inazoˉ – and raised to the status of a full-fledged university in 1948; only women are admitted);   The URL of the university is ‹http://univ.kanto-gakuin.ac.jp/› (in Japanese).   The URL of the university is ‹http://www.tohoku-gakuin.ac.jp/en/›. 7  In this paper I use the Japanese order of the name, i.e., one’s family name is followed by one’s given name or (in the appendix) the first letter of the given name. 8  The URL of the university is ‹http://global.kwansei.ac.jp/index.html›. 9  See ‹http://global.kwansei.ac.jp/about/about_005742.html›. 10  The URL of the university is ‹http://www.seigakuin.jp/english/index. html›. 11   The URL of the university is ‹http://www.doshisha.ac.jp/en/›. 12  The alternative spelling of his family name ‘Neesima’, used on the Website of the Doˉshisha University, is the one used by himself. 13  The URL of the university is ‹http://office.twcu.ac.jp/o-board/twcu-e/ text/index.html›. 5 6

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– International Christian University 14 (founded in 1953 after some years of post-World-War-Two intensive preparation, during which the Japan International Christian University Foundation [JICUF] was established in New York in 1948 to coordinate fund-raising efforts in the USA); – Tokyo Union Theological Seminary 15 (which derives its origin from the merger of several seminaries; the university was established in 1949); – Japan Lutheran College and Seminary 16 (which derives from a Lutheran seminary founded in 1909 in Kumamoto; the university itself was established in 1964).

The two seminaries mentioned above are universities (Daigaku) according to the Japanese system of education. Of course many other seminaries exist in Japan, but they are not universities (Daigaku) in the Japanese system of education. Each of these universities or colleges hitherto mentioned is loosely or closely affiliated with a Protestant church. Universities or colleges affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church include: – Sophia University 17 (founded in 1911 as Joˉchi Gakuin, and raised to the status of a full-fledged university in 1928; today Joˉchi Gakuin is the headquarters of various educational institutes, among which Sophia University is the most prominent institute); – Nanzan University 18 (which derives from Nanzan Junior High School established in 1932 by a missionary of Societas Verbi Dei (SVD); the university itself was established in 1949); – Notre Dame Seishin University 19 (founded in 1886 by the Congregation des Sœurs de l’Enfant-Jésus de Chaufailles, and from 1924 continued by the Sisters of Notre Dame of Namur; the university itself was established in 1949; only women are admitted).   The URL of the university is ‹http://www.icu.ac.jp/en/›.   The URL of the university is ‹http://www.tuts.ac.jp/11/english/index. html›. 16  The URL of the university is ‹http://www.luther.ac.jp/english/index. html›. In its English name it still retains the word ‘seminary’, but in Japanese its official name from 1996 onward, literally translated, is ‘Lutheran Gakuin University’. 17  The URL of the university is ‹http://www.sophia.ac.jp/eng/e_top›. 18  The URL of the university is ‹http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/English/index. html›. 19  The URL of the university is ‹http://www.ndsu.ac.jp/english/›. 14 15

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Among all these universities or colleges, only a few have departments specifically dedicated to the study of theology or to the study of Christianity in general. 20 Earlier, more universities had either seminaries or faculties of theology, but many of them have ceased to exist. Japan is really a ‘heathen’ country, in the sense that Christians constitute a very tiny minority (less than one per cent) of the total population; not surprisingly, therefore, all the universities hitherto mentioned are private universities. On the other hand, it is the national rather than the private universities that play pivotal roles in university education of Japan. How then are Christian studies, and specifically patristic studies, represented in national universities? To the best of my knowledge, the only national university that has a permanent section explicitly dedicated to the study of Christianity is Kyoto University. 21 A department of Christian Studies was established there in 1922, originally as a subsection of the Department of Religious Studies. 22 Needless to say, this department of Christian Studies is not limited to studies in Christian antiquity. However, the chair of the department was held by scholars such as Hatano Seiichi (1877-1950), who worked not only on religious studies in general, but also on Christian studies (especially on Christian origins), 23 and Ariga Tetsutaroˉ (1899-1978) who began his academic career with research on Origen of Alexandria. 24 Because of that, students interested 20 On the Protestant side, besides the two seminaries mentioned above, Doˉshisha University and Kwansei Gakuin University have undergraduate and graduate schools of theology, and Rikkyo University has a graduate school of Christian studies. On the Catholic side, Sophia University has the faculty, as well as graduate school, of theology, and Nanzan University has the department of Christian studies at the undergraduate level and the graduate program in Christian thought in its graduate school of humanities. 21   The URL of the university is ‹http://www.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en›. 22   For the history of the Department of Christian Studies in Kyoto University, see Kyoto Daigaku Hyakunen-shi. Bukyoku-shi hen [History of a Hundred Years of Kyoto University. History of Departments], I, Kyoto, 1997, p. 84-87 ‹http://hdl.handle.net/2433/152982›. 23 The second volume of his complete works (published in 1969 in six volumes by Iwanami Shoten) comprises the following treatises: The Origins of Christianity; Primitive (i.e. Earliest) Christianity; The Life of Paul; and Paul. 24 His Studies on Origen (see n. 26) is based on his doctoral dissertation, ‘A Study of Origen as a Christian Personality (Union Theological Seminary, 1936).

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in studies in Christian antiquity (and more precisely patristic studies) came to Kyoto University to pursue their doctoral studies in this department; especially during the period of Ariga’s professorship. 25 Ariga can be regarded as one of the earliest Japanese scholars who specialized in early Christian studies, including patristic studies. 26 2.2. Scholarly associations So far we have seen Christian (or theological) studies from the viewpoint of university education. However, to promote research in the relevant field, associations or societies of scholars are fundamentally important. These are called ‘gakkai’ in Japanese. In the field of Christian studies, the largest gakkai in Japan is Nihon Kirisuto-kyoˉ Gakkai (the Japan Society of Christian Studies), 27 founded in 1952. The aforementioned Ariga was one of the founding members of this gakkai, and its journal Nihon-no Shingaku (Theological Studies in Japan) from time to time publishes articles in the field of patristic studies. 28 However, since this gakkai covers, or at least presumes to cover, the entire history of Christianity all over the world, it is too broad to be called an association of patristic studies. Closer to patristic studies are the following two gakkai. The first is Chuˉsei Tetsugaku Kai (the Japanese Society of Medieval Philosophy), 29 also founded in 1952. As its name indicates, 25 After Ariga, Mizugaki Wataru (1935-), who assumed the chair after Ariga’s successor and is now emeritus, supervised doctoral studies in patristics of various scholars of the younger generation. However, the current chair of the department of Christian studies, who is the successor of Mizugaki’s successor, specializes in other matters than patristics. It seems much more difficult now to study patristics in this department of Kyoto University. 26   The collected works of Ariga was published posthumously in 1981 in five volumes by the publisher Soˉbunsha, comprising the following titles: I: Studies on Origen; II: A Commentary to the Epistle to the Hebrews; III: Symbolic Theology (with some articles pertaining to historical theology); IV: The Problem of Ontology in Christian Thought (studies on Hayatologia [a neologism based on the Hebrew verb haˉyaˉ]); V: Belief, History and Practice (miscellaneous works, both scientific and edifying). 27  The URL of the society is ‹http://www.gakkai.ac/jscs/› (in Japanese). 28  The journal can now be viewed at ‹https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/browse/ nihonnoshingaku›. 29  The URL of the society is ‹http://jsmp.jpn.org/› (in Japanese).

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this gakkai specializes in Western medieval philosophy, but its journal Chuˉsei Shisoˉ Kenkyuˉ (Studies in Medieval Thought) occasionally publishes articles on Augustine and other church fathers for obvious reasons. Another gakkai which should be mentioned here is Kirisuto-kyoˉ shi gakkai (The Society of Historical Studies of Christianity, Japan), 30 founded in 1949. Although this gakkai is mainly composed of scholars specializing in the history of Christianity in Japan, its journal Kirisuto-kyoˉ Shigaku (Journal of History of Christianity) from time to time publishes articles in the field of patristic studies. To come to the specific field of patristics, there is a group of scholars – a group of a more private, voluntary nature – which is called Kyoˉfu Kenkyuˉ-kai (the Japanese Society for Patristic Studies). 31 I will continue to call this society a ‘group’, because, institutionally, it is not so organized as those societies referred to above as ‘gakkai’. This group was inaugurated in 1977, and its founding members include Mr Kato Shinroˉ, Mr Izumi Harunori, and the Rev’d Fr K. Riesenhuber, SJ, among others. During the first decade of the group, Augustine and medieval thought were the two major subjects dealt with in its regular meetings. And for some time (the starting point was probably around the middle of the 1980s) the group also functioned as one of the branches involved in a large-scale project of publishing a Japanese translation of patristic as well as medieval Christian literature. This project resulted in the publication of twenty volumes plus one explanatory supplementary volume between 1992 and 2002, and it is now known as the series Chuˉsei Shisoˉ Genten Shuˉsei (Corpus fontium mentis medii aevi; see the appendix below). Patristic literature is found in the first five volumes of the series. 32 From 1994 this group of patristic scholars has been publishing its Japanese journal Patorisutika (Patristica), which mainly publishes papers read in its regular meetings; sometimes it contains lectures given in its regular meetings, including lectures from such invited scholars as Prof. Dr Charles Kannengiesser, Dr Neil B. McLynn, Prof. Peter Brown, and Prof. Dr Pauline Allen (twice).   The URL of the society is ‹http://shsc.jp/› (in Japanese).   The URL of this group is ‹http://jpnpatristics.wordpress.com/›. 32  See the Appendix, no. 4, below. 30 31

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2.3. Translations Since the large series of translations of patristic as well as medieval Christian literature has just been mentioned, it would be good to note here to what extent patristic literature is rendered into Japanese. First of all, there is a series of translations of Augustine’s works, which now counts more than thirty volumes. The year 2013 saw publication of another two volumes of the series: translations of Augustine’s letters, including some of the ‘newly’ discovered letters. 33 There is also a series of translations of Greek and Latin patristic literature, which began in 1987 with the translation of the first part of Contra Celsum by Prof. Demura Miyako. Several volumes of the series still remain to be published, so it is a long-run translation project. 34 Another Japanese scholar, the Rev’d Fr Odaka Takeshi, OFM, published translations of several works of Origen in another series, among which the De principiis, the Commentarii in Iohannem, and the Commentarii in Epistulam ad Romanos may be mentioned. 35 There are of course other translations which were published individually and separately, such as the Apologeticum of Tertullian, 36 the De trinitate of Augustine, 37 the Itinerarium of Egeria, 38 and the Apophthegmata (CPG 5560, translated twice). 39 Needless to say, translation goes hand in hand with the study of patristic materials. In this context, mention should be made of a bibliography compiled by Prof. Walter Dunphy and published in the Bulletin d’information et de liaison of the Inter-

  See the Appendix, no. 2, below.   See the Appendix, no. 3, below. 35  See the Appendix, no. 1, below. 36  Tert., Apol. – tr. Kanai H., Mito, 1984 (CPL 3). 37   Aug., Trin. – tr. Nakazawa N., Tokyo, 1975 (CPL 329). 38  Egeria, Itinerarium – tr. O ˉ ta T., Tokyo, 2002 (CPL 2325). 39 The first translation is by Furuya Isao, published by Akashi Shobo ˉ, Tokyo, 1986; the second translation is by Tani Ryuˉichiroˉ and Iwakura Sayaka, published by Chisen Shokan, Tokyo, 2004. For reference, I happen to have in hand a Japanese rendering of the De incarnatione Verbi of Athanasius by Kanai Iichiroˉ, published by Shinsei-doˉ, Tokyo, 1931. However, most probably this is not a direct translation from Greek. All the other translations hitherto mentioned are direct translations from either Greek or Latin (unless otherwise stated). 33 34

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national Association of Patristic Studies. 40 The bibliography covers the period from 1986 to 1996, giving a general overview of what happened in this period in the field of patristic studies in Japan. Before and after this period, Japanese scholars have continued publishing their studies in patristics in various ways. Last but not least, mention should be made of a book published of course in Japanese, which is a sort of companion volume to the study of Augustine. The studies referred to in this companion are almost entirely in Japanese; sixty-nine studies are referenced (excluding translations of Augustine’s works), and they include forty-seven books or articles written by Japanese authors. In passing, one can add that there are also translations of secondary literature, such as Andrew Louth’s The Origins of Christian Mystical Tradition, 41 and Vladimir Lossky’s Thélogie mystique de l’Eglise d’Orient. 42 Several books of Peter Brown have also been translated. 2.4. Internationalization Earlier the name of Prof. Pauline Allen was expressly mentioned, because she is one of the key figures for the change of patristic studies in Japan and East Asia, a change which led to a kind of ‘internationalization’ of patristic studies in the region. To speak solely about the Oxford patristic conference (for convenience’ sake), since it is a kind of Mecca (to say ‘Jerusalem’ in this context is regrettably not correct) for patristic studies all over the world: from a relatively early period there were some Japanese scholars who attended the conference. 43 At that time, however, the participation of Japanese scholars was not

40   W. Dunphy, ‘Recent Studies of Patristics in Japan (1986-1996)’, Bulletin d’information et de liaison, 29 (1997), p. 108-129. 41  Translated by Mizuochi Kenji and published by Kyobunkwan, Tokyo, in 1988. 42  Translated by Miyamoto Hisao and published by Keiso ˉ Shoboˉ, Tokyo, 1986. For reference, one of the earliest translations specifically related to patristic studies is a translation published in 1969 by Takeda Makoto et al. of F. L. Cross, The Early Christian Fathers. 43  According to the published volumes of the series Studia Patristica, the late Prof. Imamichi Tomonobu seems to be the earliest Japanese participant in the

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regular. To the best of my knowledge, the earliest regular participant seems to have been Prof. Demura Miyako, a specialist of Origen who has regularly participated in the conference since 1983 (i.e., the ninth conference). But still, Japanese patristic studies were not so well represented on the international scene. The situation began to change around the beginning of the third millennium. The impulse for the change came from the close contact Prof. Demura Kazuhiko, husband of Miyako, had around the end of the 1990s with a group of Australian patristic scholars headed by Prof. Allen. Prof. Allen and her excellent disciples such as Dr Bronwen Neil and Dr Geoffrey Dunn have since been strongly and continuously engaged in encouraging Japanese patristic scholars to go abroad and read their papers in international conferences, beginning with the Oxford conference. And in order to ‘institutionalize’ their effort, so to speak, in 2003 the Western Pacific Rim Patristics Society was created (renamed Asia-Pacific Early Christian Studies Society around 2007), and it was determined that each year except for the year of the Oxford conference, patristic scholars of the western Pacific rim region (Australia, Japan, Korea, etc.) would get together in either Australia or Japan. (In 2010 a meeting was held for the first time in Korea.) Patristic scholars of neighbouring regions also come to the meeting; there are some regular participants from Russia, and in 2009 three scholars came all the way from South Africa to the meeting in Japan, apparently because of the powerful connection of Prof. Allen with that southernmost country. Moreover, in response to the effort of our Australian colleagues, Japanese patristic scholars increasingly go abroad to participate in international conferences. For the Japanese participants of the Oxford conference of 2011, it was a milestone that Prof. Demura Kazuhiko, who is their leader, read a plenary paper during the conference. I hear that this event came about thanks to the kind consideration of Dr Neil McLynn, who was then on the organizing com-

conference: Imamichi T., ‘Die Notizen von der Metamorphose der klassischen Ethik bei den griechischen Kirchenvätern’, Studia Patristica, 5 (1962), p. 499507.

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mittee of the conference. And we are now trying to publish Patristica, a European-language journal published by the aforementioned ‘group’ of patristic studies, more frequently and in a more regular fashion, with Dr Kamimura Naoki as the editorin-chief.

3. Epilogue I would like to finish my pauvre presentation with the following question: what is the significance at all of patristic studies in Japan, not only for Japan itself, but for the whole of Christendom? Of course we have to show by ourselves that we, Japanese patristic scholars, can make contributions to patristic studies at the international level, and in this connection mention can be made of an interesting remark of Prof. Demura Kazuhiko: he observed that, curiously enough, patristic literature may be much more relevant in Japan than in the West, because in Japan there still remain plenty of customs deriving from paganism in the GrecoRoman sense of the term. 44 This remark of Prof. Demura seems basically correct; thus from religious point of view, one can say that Japan is rather an ancient country. At the same time, it is well known that Japan is one of the most advanced countries in the world as far as the material aspect of civilization is concerned. The real question, then, is to what extent patristic studies can be meaningful in such a country, in which antiquity and modernity (or even hyper-modernity) co-exist. The answer to this question is yet to come, and we, Japanese patristic scholars, hope that by tackling this and other questions we can someday make some unique contributions to patristic studies at large.

44  A rough translation of Prof. Demura’s remark is as follows: ‘In the sense that this non-Christian country saw the arrival of Christianity only about a century and some decades ago (or some four hundred and fifty years ago, even if we go back to the period when Christianity was propagated in Japan by Francesco Xavier and other Catholic, mainly Jesuit, missionaries), Japan is precisely in the same position as the Roman Empire of the early Christian centuries where church fathers were tackling with pagan classical culture’; Demura K., ‘Patristic Studies as Both Old and New Challenge’, Chuˉoˉ Hyoˉron (Chuˉoˉ Review; Chuˉoˉ University), 261 (Autumn 2007), p. 32-37 at 35 (in Japanese).

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Appendix: Major translation projects The following list presents, in chronological order, the major projects for the translation of patristic texts into Japanese. For reference, for each translation the number of the Clavis patrum graecorum (CPG) or the Clavis partrum latinorum (CPL) is provided wherever possible. 1. Kirisuto-kyoˉ Koten Soˉsho (Collection of Christian Classics), edited by P. Nemeshegyi, SJ, and published by Soˉbunsha, Tokyo. – Vol. 1 (1963, tr. Kumagai K.): Possidius, Vita Augustini (CPL 358). – Vol. 2 (1963, tr. Kumagai K.): Augustinus, De moribus ecclesiae catholicae (CPL 261). – Vol. 3 (1963, tr. Kumagai K.): Ambrosius, De sacramentis (CPL 154). – Vol. 4 (1964, tr. Kumagai K.): Augustinus, De catechizandis rudibus (CPL 297). – Vol. 5 (1965, tr. Kumagai K.): Leo I, Sermones xcvi (CPL 1657). – Vol. 6 (1965, tr. Kumagai K.): Cyprianus, De bono patientiae (CPL 48) and Epistulae 5, 8, 52, 54, 56, 57, 77 (CPL 50). – Vol. 7 (1967, tr. Ieiri T.): Prudentius, Cathemerinon liber (CPL 1438) and Psychomachia (CPL 1441). – Vol. 8 (1970, tr. Kumagai K.): Augustinus, De sermone Domini in monte (CPL 274). – Vol. 9 (1978, tr. Odaka T.): Origenes, De principiis (CPG 1482). – Vol. 10 (1982, tr. Odaka T.): Origenes, In Canticum canticorum libri iv (CPG 1433) and In Canticum canticorum homiliae ii (CPG 1432). – Vol. 11 (1984, tr. Odaka T.): Origenes, Commentarii in Iohannem (CPG 1453). – Vol. 12 (1985, tr. Odaka T.): Origenes, De oratione (CPG 1477) and Exhortatio ad martyrium (CPG 1475). – Vol. 13 (1986, tr. Odaka T.): Origenes, Disputatio cum Heracleida (CPG 1481). – Vol. 14 (1990, tr. Odaka T.): Origenes, Commentarii in Epistulam ad Romanos (CPG 1457). – Vol. 15 (1992, tr. Odaka T.): Athanasius Alexandrinus, Epistulae iv ad Serapionem (CPG 2094); Didymus Alexandrinus, De spiritu sancto (CPG 2544). – Vol. 16 (1995, tr. Kumagai K.): Gregorius I, Homiliae xl in evangelia (CPL 1711).

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2.

Augusutinusu Chosaku-shuˉ (translation of Augustine’s works), published by Kyobunkwan, Tokyo. A translation of the relevant section of the Retractationes is appended to each individual work.

– Vol. 1 (1979, tr. Shimizu M.): Contra Academicos (CPL 253), De beata vita (CPL 254), De ordine (CPL 255), Soliloquia (CPL 252).

– Vol. 2 (1979, tr. Shigeizumi T.): De inmortalitate animae (CPL 256), De quantitate animae (CPL 257), De magistro (CPL 259), De vera religione (CPL 264).



– Vol. 3 (1989): De libero arbitrio (CPL 260, tr. Izumi H.), De musica (CPL 258, tr. Hara M.).

– Vol. 4 (1979, tr. Akagi Y.): De utilitate credendi (CPL 316), De fide et symbolo (CPL 293), De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum (CPL 290), Enchiridion ad Laurentium, seu de fide, spe et caritate (CPL 295).

– Vol. 5.1 and 5.2 (1993-2007, tr. Miyatani Y.): Confessiones (CPL 251).



– Vol. 6 (1988, tr. Katoˉ T.): De doctrina christiana (CPL 263).



– Vol. 7 (1979, tr. Okano M.): De duabus animabus (CPL 317), Contra Fortunatum Manichaeum (CPL 318), Contra epistulam fundamenti Manichaeorum (CPL 320), De natura boni (CPL 323), De bono coniugali (CPL 299).



– Vol. 8 (1984): De baptismo contra Donatistas (CPL 332, tr. Sakaguchi K., Kaneko H.), Epistula 185 seu De correctione Donatistarum (CPL 262, tr. Kaneko H.).

– Vol. 9 (1979, tr. Kaneko H.): De spiritu et littera (CPL 343), De natura et gratia (CPL 344), De perfectione iustitiae hominis (CPL 347).

– Vol. 10 (1985): De gratia et libero arbitrio (CPL 352, tr. Koike S.), De correptione et gratia (CPL 353, tr. Koike S.), De praedestinatione sanctorum (CPL 354, tr. Kaneko H.), De dono perseverantiae (CPL 355, tr. Katayanagi E.).



– Vol. 11-15 (1980/1982/1981/1980/1983): De civitate Dei (CPL 313, lib. 1-3, tr. Akagi Y., Izumi H.; lib. 4-5, tr. Akagi Y., Kaneko H.; lib. 6-7, 10, tr. Nomachi A.; lib. 8-9, tr. Shigeizumi T.; lib. 11-14, 22, ˉ shima H.; lib. 17-18, 21, tr. Okano M.; tr. Izumi H.; lib. 15-16, tr. O lib. 19-20, tr. Matsuda T.).

– Vol. 16 (1994, tr. Katayanagi E.): De Genesi ad litteram 1-9 (CPL 266). – Vol. 17 (1999, tr. Katayanagi E.): De Genesi ad litteram 10-12 (CPL 266), De Genesi ad litteram imperfectus liber (CPL 268).

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– Vol. 18.1 (1997), Enarrationes in psalmos (CPL 283, psal.  1-8, ˉ shima H.; psal. 23-29, tr. Sakai M.; tr. Kon Y.; psal. 9-22, tr. O psal. 30-32, tr. Kikuchi S.). – Vol. 18.2 (2006), Enarrationes in psalmos (CPL 283, psal.  33-38, 45, tr. Tani R.; psal. 39-43, tr. Sakai M.; psal. 44, tr. Hanai K.; psal.  46-47, tr. Shibumura M.; psal.  48-50, tr. Nakazawa T.; psal. 51-53, tr. Nozawa T.). – Vol. 19-20 are yet to come. – Vol. 21 (1996, tr. Shigeizumi T.): Sermones 51-79 (CPL 284). – Vol. 22 (2001, tr. Shigeizumi T.): Sermones 80-116 (CPL 284). – Vol. 23 (1993): Tractatus in Evangelium Ioannis (CPL 278, no. 1-11, 21-23, tr. Izumi H.; no. 12-20, tr. Mizuochi K.). – Vol. 24 (1993): Tractatus in Evangelium Ioannis (CPL 278, no. 24ˉ shi41. tr. Kaneko H.; no. 42-47. tr. Kidani B.; no. 48-54, tr. O ma H.). – Vol. 25 (1993): Tractatus in Evangelium Ioannis (CPL 278, no. 5592, tr. Shigeizumi T.; no. 93-124, tr. Okano M.). – Vol. 26 (2009): Expositio quarumdam propositionum ex epistula ad Romanos (CPL 280, tr. Okano M.), Sermones 151-178 (CPL 284, tr. Tauchi C., Kamimura N.), In Ioannis epistulam ad Parthos tractatus (CPL 279, tr. Shigeizumi T.). – Vol. 27 (2003): De continentia (CPL 298, tr. Kon Y.), De agone christiano (CPL 296, tr. Mori Y.), De opere monachorum (CPL 305, tr. Miyatani Y.), De fide rerum invisibilium (CPL 292, Shigeizumi T.), De fide et operibus (CPL 294, tr. Demura K.), Epistula 147 (CPL 262, tr. Kikuchi S.). – Vol. 28 (2004, tr. Izumi H.): De Trinitate (CPL 329). – Vol. 29 (1999): De peccatorum meritis et remissione et de baptismo paruulorum (CPL 342, tr. Kaneko H.), De gratia Christi et de peccato originali (CPL 349, tr. Kaneko H.), Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum (CPL 346, tr. Hata H.). – Vol. 30 (2002, tr. Kaneko H.): Contra Iulianum (CPL 351). – Suppl. vol. 1 (2013, tr. Kaneko H.): Epistulae 2-4, 7, 9-17, 21, 22, 28, 29, 34, 37, 38, 40, 42, 47-50, 60, 65-67, 71, 73, 83, 84, 86, 91, 93, 95, 97-101, 105, 108, 110, 115, 118, 120, 122 (CPL 262). – Suppl. vol. 2 (2013, tr. Kaneko H.): Epistulae 124, 126, 128, 130, 133, 144-146, 150, 159, 166, 173-175, 177-179, 186, 187, 189, 191-194, 200, 203, 209-211, 214, 215, 217, 220, 227-229, 231, 232, 245, 246, 254, 258, 262, 268, 269 (CPL 262), Epistulae nuper in lucem prolatae 1A, 2, 4, 6, 10, 22 (CPL 262a).

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3. Kirisuto-kyo Kyoˉfu Chosaku-shuˉ (Translation of the Works of the Church Fathers), published by Kyobunkwan, Tokyo.

– Vol. 1 (1992): Iustinus, Apologia (CPG 1073, tr. Shibata Y.), Id., Dialogus cum Tryphone Iudaeo 1-9 (CPG 1076, tr. Mikoda T.). – Vol. 3.1-2 (1999/2000, tr. Kobayashi M.): Irenaeus Lugdunensis, Adversus haereses 3-4 (CPG 1306). – Vol. 8-9 (1987/1997, tr. Demura M.): Origenes, Contra Celsum 1-2, 3-5 (CPG 1476). – Vol. 12 (2010): Melito Sardensis, De Pascha (CPG 1092, tr. Kanoˉ M.) and Fragmenta (CPG 1093, tr. Kanoˉ M.); Aristides, Apologia (CPG 1062, tr. Itani Y.); Athenagoras, Supplicatio pro Christianis (CPG 1070, tr. Itani Y.). – Vol. 13 (1987, tr. Toki S.): Tertullianus, Adversus Praxean (CPL 26) and De pallio (CPL 15). – Vol. 14 (1987, tr. Suzuki I.): Tertullianus, Apologeticum (CPL 3). – Vol. 16 (2002, tr. Kidera R.): Tertullianus, De paenitentia (CPL 10), Ad uxorem (CPL 12), De exhortatione castitatis (CPL 20), De monogamia (CPL 28), De pudicitia (CPL 30), and De corona (CPL 21). – Vol. 22 (1990, tr. Toki S., Toki K.): (translation from the collection of texts compiled by H. Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, Oxford, 1972).

4. Chuˉsei Shisoˉ Genten Shuˉsei (Corpus fontium mentis medii aevi), published by Heibonsha, Tokyo. In case the work in question is not mentioned in either CPG or CPL, the name of that work is presented, as closely as possible, in accordance with F. Cavallera, Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Graeca. Indices, Turnhout, 1990 (repr.). The contents of vol. 1-5, which contain patristic literature, are as follows:

– Vol.  1, Early Greek Fathers – ed. Odaka T., 1995: Doctrina xii apostolorum (Didache) (CPG 1735, tr. Sugizaki N.); Iustinus, Dialogus cum Tryphone Iudaeo 48-76 (CPG 1076, tr. Hisamatsu E.); Theophilus Antiochenus, Ad Autolycum (CPG 1107, tr. Imai T.); Irenaeus Lugdunensis, Demonstratio praedicationis apostolicae (Epideixis) (CPG 1307, tr. Kobayashi M., Kobayashi R., from French); Clemens Alexandrinus (tr. Akiyama M.), Stromata 5 (CPG 1377) and Quis dives salvetur (CPG 1379); Hippolytus Romanus, Contra Noetum (CPG 1902, tr. Odaka T.); Origenes (tr. Odaka T.), In Genesim homiliae 1, 4, 8, 13 (CPG 1411) and In Exodum homiliae 5-7 (CPG 1414) and In Numeros homilia 27 (CPG 1418); Gregorius Thaumaturgus (tr. Odaka T.), Confessio fidei (CPG 1764) and Ad Theopompum de passibili et impassibili in Deo (CPG 1767,

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from Latin); Methodius Olympius, Convivium decem virginum (CPG 1810, tr. Demura K., Demura M.); Eusebius Caesariensis, Demonstratio evangelica 3 (CPG 3487, tr. Hisamatsu E.); Athanasius Alexandrinus, Vita Antonii (CPG 2101, tr. Odaka T., from Latin). – Vol.  2, Greek Fathers of the Fourth Century – ed. Miyamoto H., 1992: Arius (tr. Odaka T.), Epistula ad Eusebium Nicomediensem (CPG 2025) and Epistula ad Alexandrum Alexandrinum (CPG 2026); Epistula Arii et Euzoii ad Constantinum imperatorem (CPG 2027, tr. Odaka T.); Alexander Alexandrinus, Epistula encyclica (CPG 2000, tr. Odaka T.); Eusebius Caesariensis, Epistula ad ecclesiam Caesariensem (CPG 3502, tr. Odaka T.); Athanasius Alexandrinus, Oratio de incarnatione Verbi (CPG 2091, tr. Odaka T.); Cyrillus Hierosolymitanus, Mystagogiae (CPG 3586, ˉ shima Y.); Basilius Caesariensis, Regulae fusius tractatae tr.  O (CPG 2875, tr. Kuwabara N.) and Homilia in hexaemeron 1 (CPG 2835, tr. Demura K.) and Epistulae 2, 22, 210 (CPG 2900, tr. Demura K.); Gregorius Nazianzenus, Orationes 27-31 (CPG 3010, tr. Ogino H.) and Epistulae 101-102 (CPG 3032, tr. Odaka T.); Gregorius Nyssenus, In Canticum canticorum homiliae 5-6 (CPG 3158, tr. Miyamoto H.), De opicifio hominis (CPG 3154, tr. Akiyama M.), and Oratio catechetica magna (CPG 3150, tr. Shinozaki S.); Iohannes Chrysostomus, De incomprehensibili dei natura homiliae (CPG 4318, tr. Kanzaki S.). ˉ mori M., – Vol.  3, Late Greek Fathers and Byzantine Authors – ed. O 1994: Evagrius Ponticus, Practicus (CPG 2430, tr. Satoˉ M.); Nestorius, Ad Cyrillum Alexandrinum II (CPG 5669, tr. Odaka T.); Cyrillus Alexandrinus (tr. Odaka T.), Epistula 4 Ad Nestorium (CPG 5304), Epistula 17 Ad Nestorium (CPG 5317), Epistula 39 Ad Iohannem Antiochenum (CPG 5339), Epistula 45 Ad Successum episcopum Diocaesareae (CPG 5345), and Quod unus sit Christus (CPG 5228); Ps.-Macarius (tr. Tsuchihashi S.), Sermones 18-22, 24, 25 (CPG 2412) and Epistula magna (CPG 2415); Ps.-Dionysius Areopagita (tr. Kon Y.), De coelesti hierarchia (CPG 6600), De mystica theologia (CPG 6603), and Epistulae x (CPG 6604-6613); Iohannes Climachus, Scala paradisi (CPG 7852, hom. 27-30, tr. Tezuka N.); Maximus Confessor, Capita de caritate 1-200 (CPG 7693, tr. Tani R.); Iohannes Damascenus, Expositio fidei 1-14, 45-81 (CPG 8043, tr. Odaka T.); Theodorus Studita, Antirrhetici 1 adversus iconomachos (tr. Torisu Y.); Symeon Iunior Theologus, Capitula practica et theologica (tr. Shinozaki S.); Michael Psellus, Epistola ad Ioannem Xiphilinum and Philosophica minora ˉ mori M.), Défense (tr. Takahashi H.); Gregorius Palamas (tr. O des saints hésychastes (1e pt., 3e question) and Homiliae 34-35

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in Transfigurationem Domini; Nicolaus Cabasilas, Liturgiae exposition 24-41 (tr. Ichise H.). – Vol.  4, Early Latin Fathers – ed. Katoˉ S., 1999: Tertullianus (tr. Satoˉ Y.), De baptismo (CPL 8), De testimonio animae (CPL 4), and Ad martyras (CPL 1); Novatianus, De bono pudicitiae (CPL 69, tr. Shioya J.); Cyprianus (tr. Yoshida K.), De dominica oratione (CPL 43), De catholicae ecclesiae unitate (CPL 41), De lapsis (CPL 42), De opere et eleemosynis (CPL 47), and De mortalitate (CPL 44); Lactantius, De ira Dei (CPL 88, tr. Takahashi H.); Marius Victorinus, Ad Candidum Arrianum (CPL 96, tr. Takahashi M.) and Hymni iii de Trinitate (CPL 99, tr. Tasaka S.); Hilarius epioscopus Pictaviensis (tr. Demura K.), De trinitate 2-3 (CPL 433) and Hymni iii e cod. Aretino (CPL 463); Ambrosius, Exameron 1 (CPL 123, tr. Ogino H.); Hieronymus (tr. Arai Y.), Vita S. Pauli (CPL 617) and Epistulae 21-22 (CPL 620); Prudentius, Liber Apotheosis (CPL 1439, tr. Katoˉ T.); Paulinus Nolanus, Carmen 31 (CPL 203, tr. Katoˉ T.); Sulpicius Severus, Vita Martini Turonensis (CPL 475, tr. Hashimoto T.); Pelagius, Ad Demetriadem (CPL 737, tr. Kamada I.); Augustinus, De Trinitate 15 (CPL 329, tr. Katoˉ S., Kamimura N.), De ordine monasterii (CPL 1839a, tr. Shinozuka S.), and Praeceptum (CPL 1839b, tr. Shinozuka S.); Cassianus, Conlatio 1 (CPL 512, tr. Ichise H.); Prosper Aquitanus, Epistula ad Rufinum de gratia et libero arbitro (CPL 516, tr. Hikasa K.); Leo I, Epistula 28 (CPL 1656, tr. Katoˉ K.); Caesarius episcopus Arelatensis (tr. Matano S.), Regula monachorum (CPL 1012) and Statuta sanctarum virginum (CPL 1009). – Vol.  5, Late Latin Fathers – ed. Nomachi A., 1993: Boethius, In Porphyrii Isagogen commentorum editio duplex (CPL 881, tr. Ishii M.), Quomodo Trinitas unus Deus ac non tres dii (CPL 890, tr. Sakaguchi F.), and Liber contra Eutychen et Nestorium (CPL 894, tr. Sakaguchi F.); Benedictus abbas Casinensis, Regula (CPL 1852, tr. Furuta G.); Cassiodorus, Institutiones (CPL 906, excerpts, tr. Tago T.); Martinus episcopus Bracarensis, De correctione rusticorum (CPL 1086, tr. Sudoˉ K., Bekku Y.); Gregorius I, Dialogorum 2 (CPL 1713, tr. Yauchi Y.); Isidorus episcopus Hispalensis (tr. Kanetoshi T.), Originum 6 (CPL 1186) and De viris illustribus (CPL 1206); Ildefonsus episcopus Toletanus, De virorum illustrium scriptis (CPL 1252, tr. Kanetoshi T.), Defensor monachus Locogiacensis, Scintillarum liber (CPL 1302, tr. Kanetoshi T.).

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Bibliography 1. Primary sources

(excluding translations listed in the appendices) Apophthegmata – tr. Furuya I., Tokyo, 1986. Apophthegmata – tr. Tani R., Iwakura S., Tokyo, 2004. Ath., Inc. = Athanasius Alexandrinus, Oratio de incarnatione Verbi – tr. Kanai I., Tokyo, 1931. Aug., Trin. = Augustinus episcopus Hipponensis, De Trinitate – tr. Nakazawa N., Tokyo, 1975. ˉ ta T., Tokyo, 2002. Egeria, Itinerarium – tr. O Tert., Apol. = Tertullianus, Apologeticum – tr. Kanai H., Mito, 1984.

2. Secondary literature Ariga T., Collected Works, I: Studies on Origen; II: A Commentary to the Epistle to the Hebrews; III: Symbolic Theology; IV: The Problem of Ontology in Christian Thought; V: Belief, History and Practice, Tokyo, 1981. F. L. Cross, The Early Christian Fathers – tr. Takeda M. et al., Tokyo, 1969. Demura K., ‘Patristic Studies as Both Old and New Challenge’, Chuˉoˉ Hyoˉron (Chuˉoˉ Review; Chuˉoˉ University), 261 (Autumn 2007), p. 32-37. W. Dunphy, ‘Recent Studies of Patristics in Japan (1986-1996)’, Bulletin d’information et de liaison, 29 (1997), p. 108-129. Hatano S., Collected Works, II: The Origins of Christianity; Primitive (i.e. Earliest) Christianity; The Life of Paul; and Paul, Tokyo, 1969. Imamichi T., ‘Die Notizen von der Metamorphose der klassischen Ethik bei den griechischen Kirchenvätern’, Studia Patristica, 5 (1962), p. 499-507. Kyoto Daigaku Hyakunen-shi. Bukyoku-shi hen [History of a Hundred Years of Kyoto University. History of Departments], I, Kyoto, 1997, p. 84-87. V. Lossky, Thélogie mystique de l’Eglise d’Orient – tr. Miyamoto H., Tokyo, 1986. A. Louth, The Origins of Christian Mystical Tradition – tr. Mizuochi K., Tokyo, 1988.

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Abstract Focusing mainly on the situation in Japan, this paper presents a brief historical survey of patristic studies in East Asia, and touches upon various topics, such as Japanese educational institutions (especially universities) founded on principles which can be deemed Christian, major societies of scholars of Christian studies in Japan, and how patristic scholars in East Asia have become more and more involved in international activities related to patristic studies, beginning with the Oxford patristic conferences. Lastly, the possible significance of practicing patristic studies in Japan is briefly discussed. The appendix presents a list of past major projects for the translation of patristic texts into Japanese.

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PATRISTICS IN AUSTRALIA: CURRENT STATUS AND FUTURE POTENTIAL

1. The location of patristics in secular or religious institutions of higher learning 1.1. The ‘sandstone’ universities The secular foundation of our older universities – informally called ‘sandstone’ universities – means that while most had departments of studies of religion, classics, and history, they were not allowed to have schools of theology or divinity. Our secular universities were founded with the intention that theology degrees would not be awarded. Of the original ‘sandstone’ institutions, founded in the mid to late 1800s, several have one or two staff working on patristics under other guises, such as history of Late Antiquity or Byzantium. At the University of Queensland, John Moorhead, Professor Emeritus of Medieval History, has recently been working on a social history of the late antique papacy. Roger Scott, Associate Professor Emeritus in Byzantine Studies at the University of Melbourne, has done valuable work on early and middle Byzantine chroniclers, partly while a visiting fellow of the Center for the Study of Christianity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose staff members, under the leadership of Prof. Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, have graciously hosted this fiftieth-anniversary celebration of AIEP. 1.2. Theological colleges Since the foundation of the British colonies in Australia, training in theology, and in patristics in particular, was the province 10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107516

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of church-run institutions, predominantly founded by the Anglican and Catholic Churches. These colleges were seen as providing basic theological training for priests and missionaries in that far-flung continent when it was no longer practical to send clergy to train in the United Kingdom. Many of these small institutions have amalgamated in recent decades into several large, multi-denominational institutions, which are in the process of gaining accreditation as universities: for example, the Melbourne College of Divinity, now including the Jesuit foundation, Yarra Theological Union; the Australian College of Theology, founded 1891 by Church of England to allow its priests to train in Australia, and awarded self-accrediting status as a national theology education provider in 2004; 1 and the Sydney College of Divinity. The latter has recently been expanded to include St Andrew’s Greek Orthodox Theological College, the only Orthodox seminary in Australia, now part of Sydney College of Divinity. 2 St Andrew’s has a strong concentration of patristic scholars and students, and under the capable leadership of the Very Reverend Dr Doru Costache, has convened an annual symposium since 2010 on Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Cyril of Alexandria. These symposia are increasingly ecumenical with keynote speakers from outside the Orthodox tradition. The next symposium will be convened jointly at St Andrew’s in September 2014 by Dr Costache and Dr Adam Cooper of the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, on the theme: ‘From Alexandria to Cappadocia and 1  The Australian College of Theology includes eighteen smaller institutions, many of them in regional areas and one in New Zealand: Anglican Youthworks, New South Wales; Bible College of South Australia, South Australia; Crossway College, Queensland; Laidlaw College, Auckland, New Zealand; Malyon College, Queensland; Mary Andrews College, New South Wales; Melbourne School of Theology, Victoria; Morling College, New South Wales; Presbyterian Theological Centre, New South Wales; Presbyterian Theological College, Victoria; Queensland Theological College, Queensland; Reformed Theological College, Victoria; Ridley Melbourne – Mission and Ministry College, Victoria; School of Christian Studies, New South Wales (associated with Macquarie University); Sunshine Coast Theological College, Queensland; Sydney Missionary and Bible College, New South Wales; Trinity Theological College, Western Australia; and Vose Seminary, Western Australia. 2  See ‹www.sagotc.edu.au›.

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Back Again’. In July 2013 St Andrew’s hosted a round-table on Maximus the Confessor, at which Prof. Paul Blowers (Emmanuel Christian Seminary, Tennessee), Adam Cooper, Doru Costache and Bronwen Neil presented papers. The roundtable format generated a lively discussion with a high level of lay participation. The Coptic Church has a seminary and study centre at Doncaster, Melbourne, which convenes a regular patristics seminar, including one on Cyril of Alexandria and another on John Chrysostom. 1.3. Patristics in the Catholic tradition In Australia only one institute awards pontifical degrees, the Catholic Institute of Sydney, Strathfield. Its lecturers are required to have a papal mandatum, or approval to teach theology. Several Catholic educational institutions teach theology, and by association, patristics, the largest being Australian Catholic University (ACU), which casts its net across five eastern states on six campuses (Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Ballarat, Canberra, and from 2014 incorporating the former School of Theology from Flinders University, Adelaide). University of Notre Dame, which has branches in Perth and Sydney, is another Catholic education provider with a post in patristics. 1.4. Patristics in the newer (concrete) universities In the 1960s and 1970s, a new crop of universities sprang up, which did not have limitations on their course offerings in theology. Other recently founded universities with at least one post in patristics include Charles Sturt University, Bathurst (now the home of St Francis Theological College, the Anglican seminary formerly located in Brisbane); University of Newcastle, Newcastle, a leader in theological research; Flinders University, Adelaide; and Macquarie University, Sydney. The Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra is the home of one of our most eminent patristic scholars, Graeme Clarke. A Professor Emeritus of History, Prof Clarke has held a great many fellowships, chairs, and other academic positions, including stints as Associate Dean, Deputy Dean, and Acting Dean of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He was one of the very 147

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early recipients of Australian Research Council grants for his archaeological surveys in Syria and other projects, from 1969. Prof. Clarke is currently Adjunct Professor in the School of Social Sciences, ANU, and Honorary Secretary of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has been named the winner of the Merit Medal awarded by the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens for his distinguished contributions to classical studies and classical archaeology in 2009. He is also the editor of the recent Sources Chrétiennes volume of Cyprian’s De lapsis. 3 Prof. Clarke is one of the founding fathers of patristic studies in Australia, together with Prof. Edwin Judge (Macquarie University, Sydney), and the late Prof. Eric Osborne (Latrobe University, Melbourne). Working in secular institutions, these scholars from a range of confessional backgrounds (Catholic, Anglican, and Evangelical) established patristics as a discipline of scholarly merit in its own right, regardless of denominational affiliation.

2. Areas of scholarly strength At Macquarie University, the Department of Ancient History houses the Ancient Cultures Research Centre. This centre was founded by two Australian Byzantinists, Prof. Alanna Nobbs (recently retired) and Prof. Samuel Lieu, the latter being the recipient of a Discovery Outstanding Research Award by the Australian Research Council for a project entitled ‘Skilfully Planting the Trees of Light – Manichaean Texts in Chinese’. 4 Incidentally, out of more than 700 projects funded by the Australian Research Council in 2013, this was one of only two 3  Cypr., Laps. (SC, 547). Prof Clarke has updated the edition of M. Bévenot (CC SL, 3) by the addition of eighteen manuscripts to the apparatus criticus. 4  The project is described by its Chief Investigators as follows: ‘Manichaeism spread rapidly and successfully along the Silk Road and arrived in China before the Tang dynasty. This project will throw light on Manichaean missionary techniques through close examination and full publication of the surviving texts in Chinese from Dunhuang and Turfan and their parallels in Middle Iranian, Old Turkish and Coptic’. Cited from the Australian Research Council website, ‹http://arc.gov.au/pdf/DP13/DP13_Listing_by_all_State_Organisation.pdf› [accessed 31 October 2013].

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projects with the self-nominated Field of Research classification ‘Religion and Religious Studies’. (The other successful project in this area was a New Testament economic-history project, ‘The Sacred Economy’, at University of Newcastle). Three other members of this centre deserve special notice. Its director, Dr Malcolm Choat, is an internationally recognised specialist in Coptic studies, whose most recent research project focused on literacy and scribal practices in late antique Egypt. 5 Associate Professor Andrew Gillett is well known for his work on diplomatic missions from late antique Gaul. Dr Ken Parry is a specialist in Orthodox studies. The Ancient Cultures Research Centre co-publishes the Brepols series Studia Antiqua Australiensia, which includes several volumes on patristic themes. 6 The Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Monash University is home to mediaevalist Constant Mews, who has worked on medieval rhetoric, Gregory the Great and the Roman liturgy, and ancient letter writing. 7 2.1. Centre for Early Christian Studies (CECS) On 1 May 1997 the Centre for Early Christian Studies (CECS) began its existence, and its office since then has been located at the McAuley Campus of ACU in Brisbane. In 1998 it became the first research centre within ACU to receive the special endorsement of the Senate of that institution for the reason that it profiled the mission of the university in a special way. In 2000 the Centre became one of the University’s flagship areas, a status which it held until the end of 2003, when it was designated a University Priority Research Centre. At the end of 2013, the research activities of CECS were brought under 5  See the project description at the website for the Ancient Cultures Research Centre, ‹http://mq.edu.au/research/centres_and_groups/ancient_ cultures_research_centre/› [accessed 31 October 2013]. 6  See n. 24 below. 7 Prof. Mews is currently working on a government-funded Discovery Outstanding Research Award project, ‘Encountering diversity: communities of learning, intellectual confrontations and transformations of religious thinking in Latin Europe, 1050-1350’. See further ‹http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/ medieval-renaissance-centre› [accessed 31 October 2013].

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the auspices of a newly-created institute, the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry. The creation of the institute is meant to inspire greater inter-disciplinary collaboration, to create and maintain a critical mass of fifteen to thirty scholars (proven by mathematical researchers to be the perfect number to catalyse an explosion of creativity), and to eliminate the existence of so-called ‘silos’ which are single-focus, insular research groups. The winds of institutional change are spreading a chill through the bones of patristics scholars in particular. Among research centres internationally, CECS is unique in its combination of two academic fields that lie at the heart of the Christian intellectual tradition, namely New Testament studies and the reception of the Bible in the early Church down to the end of the seventh century. The seventeen members of the Centre, who come from four of ACU’s six campuses, have made it their task to conduct quality research which has been published in journals and university presses of the highest calibre. Our research foci include the languages and literatures of early Christianity and Late Antiquity (Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, and Chinese) as well as history, theology, philosophy, art history, and Greek and Latin text editions. Our success in gaining ‘Category 1’ external grant funding over the past twenty-one years reflects the quality and vibrancy of our research environment in early Christian studies. Limited university funding for international scholarships has allowed us to increase our higher degree research enrolments over the past year. We have also applied for much-needed postdoctoral fellowship funding. There is plenty of room for strategic expansion in this area, although the difference in academic calendars in Australia and the rest of the known world poses a constant challenge, with most international candidates finishing their studies elsewhere towards August or September, while Australian semesters begin in January or July. Among its members CECS has three Fellows of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (the peak body, actually the only body, representing the interests of the humanities to government and the wider community), and scholars who serve on the editorial boards of top-ranking journals such as the Journal 150

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of New Testament Studies, Journal of Early Christian Studies, and Theological Studies, and the series published by the Society of Biblical Literature. These memberships help us to build the publication profiles of early career scholars and research students. 2.2. Funding imperatives All external funding comes from the Australian Research Council, to which we are greatly indebted. We do not have a separate funding body for the Humanities in Australia, meaning that humanities projects compete with researchers in science and technology for a fairly limited pool of funding. Many of these projects involve the edition, translation, and commentaries upon Latin and Greek texts, a species of academic production that is not recognised by the Department of Training and Education as a book, unless it is accompanied by a hefty introduction demonstrating ‘original research’. Government-funded projects from the early 1990s to mid-2000 (a period which appears in retrospect to have been a ‘Golden Age’ for the funding of ‘pure basic’ research) included the following: ‘The Letters of Innocent I: A Critical Edition and Translation’ (G. D. Dunn); ‘The Life of Maximus the Confessor, Recensions 2 and 3’ (P. Allen and B. Neil); ‘The Dating and Provenance of the Sermons of John Chrysostom’ (W. Mayer); ‘The Letters and Homilies of Severus of Antioch’ (P. Allen and Y. Nessim Youssef). ‘The International Mariology Project’ led by Leena Marie Peltomaa (Vienna) and Pauline Allen (ACU) aimed to produce, via an interdisciplinary, dispassionate, and scientific study of early Mariology: (1) a chronological inventory of all Greek, Latin and Syriac texts containing references to Mary and of all images of Mary and relevant archaeological evidence up till the Council of Ephesus; (2) an alphabetical list of all Marian epithets; and (3) an encyclopaedia, drawing out in articles and surveys the implications of the data collected. The stress on an objective, non-confessional approach to the sources was partially dictated by funding constraints. Recent projects, however, have increasingly been shaped according to the need to demonstrate that they meet a perceived national benefit. Some of these are listed below. 151

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1. Bishops of Rome. Geoffrey Dunn held a prestigious Australian Research Council Fellowship (2007-2012) for his project, ‘The Clash of Sacred and Secular Authority in the Letters of Innocent I’. An edition and translation of Innocent’s letters are being prepared for CC SL. 8 Dunn’s application for funding of his edition of and commentary on the letters of Popes Zosimus and Boniface was badged as a study of ‘Religious Conflict in the Early Fifth Century’, using Weberian conflict theory. Dunn has recently edited a volume of papers presented at the Oxford Patristics Conference in 2011 on the Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity. 9 In 2013 Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil completed an introduction to, translation of, and commentary on selected letters of Pope Gelasius I for publication in Brepol’s new series Adnotationes. 10 An annotated translation by Allen and Neil of approximately 150 letters of Pope Hormisdas is also in preparation. 2. Crisis management. The Gelasian letters project was part of a

larger project by Allen and Neil on ‘Crisis Management in Late Antiquity: The Evidence of Episcopal Letters (410-590 ce)’, crisis management (including in the area of climate change) being a topic of general interest in the 2000s. 11 A further volume on crisis management in Jewish and early Christian literature was produced by members of CECS in 2012. 12 3. Sermons and letters of Augustine of Hippo, John Chrysostom,

and Leo the Great. A three-year project on ‘Poverty and Welfare in Late Antiquity’, targeted three key episcopal figures: Augustine of Hippo, John Chrysostom, and Leo the Great. The relevance of the project was to understand how the Christian   Innoc., Epist. (CC SL, forthcoming).   The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity – ed. G. D. Dunn, Farnham, forthcoming. 10  B. Neil, P. Allen, Letters of Gelasius (492-496). Micromanager and Pastor of the Roman Church (Adnotationes), Turnhout, 2014. 11  P. Allen, B. Neil, Crisis Management in Late Antiquity. A Survey of the Evidence of Episcopal Letters (410-590 ce) (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 121), Leiden, 2013. 12  Ancient Jewish and Christian Texts as Crisis Management Literature. Thematic Studies from the Centre for Early Christian Studies, – ed. P. Allen, D. Sim, London, 2012. 8 9

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Church throughout history has helped or neglected to help the poor and marginalised in society. 13 4.

Other episcopal letters. Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil’s project on ‘Crisis Management in Late Antiquity’, already mentioned above, led to a fruitful collaboration with a Japanese team led by Kazuhiko Demura on ‘Crisis in the Age of Augustine’. A volume of selected papers is being prepared for publication from the symposium series ‘Epistolary conversations: Letters and Letter Collections in Classical and Late Antiquity’, convened by Bronwen Neil (ACU) and Andrew Gillett (Macquarie University). 14 The volume includes contributions by New Testament scholars David Sim, Brent Nongbri, and Ian Elmer, and international patristic scholars Wolf Liebeschuetz, Samuel Rubenson, and Adam Schor.

5.

Religious conflict in Late Antiquity. Members of CECS are now focusing on the study of inter- and intra-religious dialogue and conflict in the first seven centuries of Christianity – relations between Christianity and Judaism, paganism, and Islam have been the subject of their recent publications. A Discovery Project proposal, entitled ‘Negotiating Religious Conflict between Rome and Byzantium Through Letter-writing in the Seventh Century, An Era of Crisis’, which builds on previous work by Allen, Dunn, and Neil on papal letters and religious conflict, has been funded for 2014 to 2016.

3. Trends in the discipline(s) of patristics Somewhat paradoxically, the study of the first centuries of Christianity has been vastly assisted by recent technological advances in the fields of information dissemination and publication. These breakthroughs – online teaching, print-on-demand, e-books and e-journals – have largely allowed us to conquer the tyranny of distance that afflicted Antipodean scholarship for many 13  A bibliography of secondary literature on John Chrysostom studies may be found online at ‹http://www.cecs.acu.edu.au/chrysostombibliography.html› [accessed 15 August 2013]. This site is regularly updated by Wendy Mayer, and is an invaluable resource for Chrysostom scholars. 14  Collecting Early Christian Letters. From the Apostle Paul to Early Christianity – ed. B. Neil, P. Allen, Cambridge, forthcoming.

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decades (while also making us notorious globe-trotters). Recent trends in the discipline reflect these advances. 3.1. Interdisciplinarity or fusion Australian patristics scholars increasingly endeavour to cross traditional divides, e.g., between Classics and Christian literature; New Testament and early Christian studies; archaeology and literary studies; social history and theology; Christian and early Islamic history; studies in Late Antiquity. Necessity has surely been the mother of invention here, as we scrabble to achieve or maintain ‘critical mass’ in an increasingly uncertain economic climate. 3.2. Handbooks The field of patristic studies is by no means alone in its proliferation of handbooks and companion volumes, aimed not just at scholars in the field but also at students and the interested layperson. Byzantine studies and late antique studies have seen the same explosion of broad public interest. The publication of these handbooks has been much enabled by the appearance of the e-book, which has the added advantage of being able to be continually updated as new secondary sources appear. The uptake of e-books has been particularly avid in Australia, where the distance from North American, British, and European publishing houses means long delays and high retail prices. Currently in preparation are three handbooks under Australian editorship: the Oxford Handbook of Maximus Confessor, 15 A Brill Companion to Gregory the Great, 16 and the Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Patristic Reception. 17 3.3. Dictionaries and encyclopedias The ongoing multi-volume edition of the Brill Encyclopedia of Biblical Reception (online) will be a valuable resource for patristic scholars whose institutions can afford the subscription. 15   Oxford Handbook of Maximus Confessor – ed. P. Allen, B. Neil, Oxford, forthcoming. 16  A Brill Companion to Gregory the Great – ed. B. Neil, M. Dal Santo, Leiden, 2013. 17  Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Patristic Reception – ed. K. Parry, Oxford, forthcoming.

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Other online dictionaries that are bigger than Ben Hur include: the Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity, 18 the Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity, published progressively online, 2011-2015, 19 the Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation, 20 and The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Gender Studies. 21 3.4. From nouvelle théologie to neo-conservatism The requirement to teach for seminaries affects curriculum and content, but also allows us to keep ecclesiastical Latin and patristic Greek courses alive. The place of biblical languages is increasingly under threat, and course offerings seem to diminish year by year. The requirement for seminarians to have at least basic training in Latin has helped to sustain enrolments in ecclesiastical Latin, which is taught online only at ACU and now Melbourne College of Divinity, and face-to-face at the Catholic Institute of Sydney. Many more institutions offer koinê Greek and Hebrew as part of their biblical studies offerings. A working knowledge of Latin and/or Greek, which used to be mandatory for those wishing to undertake postgraduate studies in patristics, is increasingly difficult to insist upon as a criterion for enrolment.

4. Journals and publishers devoted to patristics Several well-established publishing houses have joined forces with universities to produce and distribute works on patristics. St Pauls Press publishes the Early Christian Studies series of monographs and texts with translation, now up to sixteen volumes. 22

  Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity – ed. F. Haarer, Oxford, in press.   Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity. Authors, Texts, Ideas, and their Reception – ed. P. van Geest, D. G. Hunter, B. J. Lietaert Peerbolte, Leiden, 2011-. 20  Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation – ed. P. Blowers, P. Martens, Oxford, forthcoming. 21  The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Gender Studies – ed. J. M. O’Brien, Oxford, 2014. 22  Orders are processed online at ‹http://www.cecs.acu.edu.au/monographseries.htm› [accessed 31 October 2013]. The series is moving from paperback to hardback format, which will mean some increase in production costs, although these are kept to a minimum by the advent of print-on-demand. 18 19

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These include the proceedings of the new conference series ‘Early Christian Centuries’. 23 As mentioned above, Brepols copublishes with Macquarie University the Studia Antiqua Australiensia series, whose editor-in-chief is Samuel Lieu. 24 Another Macquarie staff member, Ken Parry, has been appointed editor of a new Brill series, Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity. Recent conference proceedings of the Asia-Pacific Early Christian Studies Society have been published in Scrinium. Revue de patrologie, d’hagiographie critique et d’histoire ecclésiastique, 25 which is edited by Basil Lourié in St Petersburg. The journal of St Andrew’s Greek Orthodox Theological College, Phronema, under the editorship of Doru Costache, has slowly but surely raised the profile of patristic studies in Australia. Australian Catholic University’s Australian e-Journal of Theological Studies also has some patristic content and is freely available online. 26

5. Patristic societies and conferences Since 1996, CECS has convened an international conference every three years, in Sydney or Melbourne. 27 The Early Christian Centuries conferences have become an integral part of the work of the Asia-Pacific Early Christian Studies Society (APECCS), established by Professors Pauline Allen (ACU) and Shinro Kato (Sacred Heart University, Tokyo) in 2003. My Japanese colleague Satoshi Toda has talked at this conference about the origins of this society, which has an annual gathering 23  Men and Women in the Early Christian Centuries – ed. W. Mayer, I. Elmer (Early Christian Studies, 17), Brisbane, 2014. 24   The first two volume in the series appeared in 2006: M. Choat, Belief and Cult in Fourth-Century Papyri (Studia Antiqua Australiensia, 1), Turnhout, 2006; B. Neil, Seventh-century Popes and Martyrs. The Political Hagiography of Anastasius Bibliothecarius (Studia Antiqua Australiensia, 2), Turnhout, 2006, an account of the exile of Pope Martin I (649-653). 25  For further details on Scrinium, see ‹http://scrinium.ru/news› [accessed 31 October 2013]. 26  Sample articles are available freely online at ‹http://aejt.com.au/› [accessed 31 October 2013]. 27  The next Early Christian Centuries conference will be held in Brisbane in 2016: for further details see ‹http://www.earlychristiancenturies.com.au/› [accessed 31 October 2013].

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except every fourth year, when the Oxford Patristics Conference is held. Asia-Pacific Early Christian Studies Society brings together scholars from Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Philippines, and Russia. Membership is free and includes a biannual e-newsletter, currently edited by Dr Naoki Kamimura of Tokyo Metropolitan University. The sharing of information and resources, so critical to scholars outside the traditional centres of Europe and North America, has been facilitated by this sort of electronic exchange. Previously entitled ‘Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church’, these conferences encompass themes between the first and the seventh centuries, from Pauline literature, the New Testament, Jewish, Gnostic, pagan, late antique, and proto-Islamic perspectives. They have attracted prestigious international patristics scholars such as the Reverend Professor Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, Professor Philip Rousseau, former director of the Center for the Study of Early Christianity (Catholic University of America), and Emeritus Professor Andrew Louth (Durham University). There are opportunities for literature, art, architecture, liturgy, monasticism, philosophy, and the material remains of the early Christian centuries to be explored in these conferences, each of which has a theme. The theme chosen for the 2013 conference was ‘Men and Women in the Early Christian Centuries’, and keynote speakers were Claudia Rapp (University of Vienna), Mathijs Lamberigts (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), and New Testament scholar Elaine Wainwright (University of Auckland). The inclusion of both New Testament scholars and those in late antique and reception studies allows us to reach critical mass. Forty-five short papers were presented at the conference, by scholars from Japan, Greece, Canada, Italy, Russia, Bosnia, Australia, and New Zealand. 28 Six volumes of conference proceedings have been published, from 1996 to 2012. 29   See n. 23 above.  The first five volumes appeared in the series Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church. The sixth volume appeared as Studies in Politics and Religion in the Early Christian Centuries – ed. D. Luckensmeyer, P. Allen (Early Christian Studies, 13), Brisbane, 2010. All volumes are published by St Pauls Press, ‹http://www.cecs.acu.edu.au/conferenceproceed.htm› [accessed 31 October 2013]. 28 29

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6. Funding for research activities in patristics 6.1. Government funding The Australian Research Council offers minimal funding to the humanities, and even less to theology. The abolition of research fellowships for mid-career scholars has hit postdoctoral researchers very hard. They have been replaced by Future Fellowships, mainly intended for Australians who wish to return from overseas. The extension of the Future Fellowship scheme to 2014 has just been announced in August 2013, even while the announcement of the current round of Future Fellowships is six months late at point of writing, due to the election of a new federal government in September 2013. The three-year election cycle has huge repercussions for the long-term funding of any research in this country. 6.2. Postdoctoral fellowships Individual universities offer their own postdoctoral scholarships for one to three years. 6.3. International PhD scholarships These are offered by the government (Australian Research Council Australian Postgraduate Awards) and by individual universities. They are highly competitive, and tend to run from the beginning of the calendar year, i.e. January. They include international tuition fees and a living allowance. 6.4. Visiting international scholars ACU grants to the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy one or two fellowships per year for the Distinguished Visiting Scholars scheme, worth $10.000 each for travel and accommodation. Past fellows hosted by CECS include Philip Rousseau, Kazuhiko Demura, Shigeki Takahashi, Johan Leemans, and Paul Blowers. Other long-term visitors to CECS include Kazuhiko Demura (our first visiting fellow from Japan), current AIEP president Theodore de Bruyn, Mary Cunningham, Charles Kannengiesser, Pamela Bright, Satoshi Toda, Miyako Demura, and Leena Marie Peltomaa. In July-August 2013 we were privileged to host Nathalie 158

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Rambaud, who has been commissioned to edit two volumes of John Chrysostom’s homilies for Sources Chrétiennes. Dr Rambaud will return for another sabbatical in Brisbane in 2014.

7. What does the future hold for patristics in Australia? This is a critical period for the disciplines that come under the umbrella of patristics, not just in Australia but world-wide, with funding for the humanities generally at an all-time low due to the recent global financial crisis in 2008. Some options for the future, I would suggest, are: martyrdom; obscurantism; secularisation; survival through adaptation; demystification; and/or increasing vocationalism. The first two options are sadly self-explanatory. An increasing degree of secularisation is inevitable, and should perhaps be embraced as broadening public interest in the early Christian centuries, their literature, and their material culture. The rebadging of the ‘Prayer and Spirituality in the Early Church’ conferences to ‘Early Christian Centuries’ was a move made in recognition of the need to de-mystify and secularise our scholarly undertakings so as to reach a broader audience. Similarly, patristic research and the teaching of patristics needs to adapt if it is to survive. This includes making it increasingly vocational; for example, the teaching of elementary Latin to seminarians will focus necessarily on the Vulgate and liturgical texts. As mentioned above, it is increasingly limiting to insist upon a working knowledge of Latin and/or Greek as a criterion for enrolment in postgraduate studies in patristics. The second best option is to offer bridging courses for those who need to improve their language skills at the beginning of their candidature. Lest the future appear too bleak, the words of the late Queen Mother, Elizabeth, at the opening ceremony of Flinders University (Adelaide) in 1966 are peculiarly apt to the past and future study of patristics in Australia: The enterprising way in which this new [discipline] has been brought into existence deserves praise and commendation ... it has from the outset the best of both worlds. Freedom of action and room for manoeuvre, which are the prerogatives of a new institution... These are good foundations on which to build.

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Bibliography 1. Primary sources Cypr., Laps. = Cyprianus episcopus Carthaginensis, De lapsis – ed. G. W. Clark, tr. M. Poirier (SC, 547), Paris, 2012. Innoc., Epist. = Innocentius I, Epistulae – ed. and tr. G. D. Dunn (CC SL), Turnhout, forthcoming. Narrationes de exilio sancti papae Martini – ed. and tr. B. Neil, Seventhcentury Popes and Martyrs: The Political Hagiography of Anastasius Bibliothecarius (Studia Antiqua Australiensia, 2), Turnhout, 2006.

2. Secondary literature A Brill Companion to Gregory the Great – ed. B. Neil, M. Dal Santo, Leiden, 2013. P.  Allen,  B.  Neil, Crisis Management in Late Antiquity. A Survey of the Evidence of Episcopal Letters (410-590 ce) (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 121), Leiden, 2013. Ancient Jewish and Christian Texts as Crisis Management Literature. Thematic Studies from the Centre for Early Christian Studies – ed. P. Allen, D. Sim, London, 2012. Brill Encyclopedia of Early Christianity.  Authors, Texts, Ideas, and their Reception – ed. P. van Geest, D. G. Hunter, B. J. Lietaert Peerbolte, Leiden, 2011-. M.  Choat, Belief and Cult in Fourth-Century Papyri (Studia Antiqua Australiensia, 1), Turnhout, 2006. Collecting Early Christian Letters. From the Apostle Paul to Early Christianity – ed. B. Neil, P. Allen, Cambridge, forthcoming. Men and Women in the Early Christian Centuries (Early Christian Studies, 17) – ed. W. Mayer, I. Elmer, Brisbane, 2014. B.  Neil,  P.  Allen, Letters of Gelasius (492-496). Micromanager and Pastor of the Roman Church (Adnotationes), Turnhout, 2014. Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity – ed. F. Haarer, Oxford, in press. Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical Interpretation – ed. P. Blowers, P. Martens, Oxford, forthcoming. Oxford Handbook of Maximus Confessor – ed. P. Allen, B. Neil, Oxford, forthcoming. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Bible and Gender Studies – ed. J. M. O’Brien, Oxford, 2014.

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Studies in Politics and Religion in the Early Christian Centuries (Early Christian Studies, 13) – ed. D. Luckensmeyer, P. Allen, Brisbane, 2010. The Bishop of Rome in Late Antiquity – ed. G. D. Dunn, Farnham, forthcoming. Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of Patristic Reception – ed. K. Parry, Oxford, forthcoming.

Abstract The purpose of this presentation is to offer an overview of the history, development, current status, and future currents within patristics in Australia. I cover seven basic areas: 1. the location of patristics in secular or religious institutions of higher learning; 2. areas of scholarly strength; 3. trends in the discipline(s) of patristics including the endangered species of biblical languages; 4. journals and publishers devoted to patristics; 5. patristic societies and conferences; 6. funding for research activities in patristics (including opportunities for postgraduates and visiting fellows). I close with some speculations on the future of patristics in Australia, which faces economic and cultural challenges that are not unique to it alone.

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MICHEL WILLY LIBAMBU Université Catholique du Congo

LA CONTRIBUTION DES ÉTUDES PATRISTIQUES À LA THÉOLOGIE AFRICAINE : L’ÉTUDE DES PÈRES DE L’ÉGLISE À L’ÉCOLE THÉOLOGIQUE DE KINSHASA (1957-2013) Notre exposé tente de présenter une synthèse des études et des recherches patristiques menées au sein de la Faculté de Théologie de l’Université Catholique du Congo, afin de mettre en relief leur contribution dans l’élaboration de la théologie qui se fait dans le continent noir. Pour ce faire, notre propos comprend trois points essentiels : le cadre d’études et de recherches, le défi de l’actualisation des Pères de l’Église dans le contexte africain d’aujourd’hui et la contribution des études patristiques dans les domaines de la théologie africaine.

1. Le cadre d’études patristiques à l’école théologique de Kinshasa Appelée communément école théologique de Kinshasa, l’actuelle Faculté de Théologie de l’Université Catholique du Congo fut fondée au sein de l’Université de Lovanium par le décret Afrorum amplissimas regiones de la Congrégation des Séminaires et Universités Catholiques, du 25 avril 1957. Ce document lui conféra le titre d’Université Catholique, comprenant en son sein une faculté de théologie. Elle devint, en ce moment, la première institution théologique universitaire de l’Afrique noire, au dessus des grands séminaires. Dès sa création, elle eut le bonheur d’avoir dès le départ les spécialistes intéressés aux études des Pères. Le professeur Alfred Vanneste, spécialiste du péché originel, avait étudié selon la tradition de Louvain et de Rome, l’histoire de ce dogme en remontant à Augustin. Le professeur Franz Bontinck, d’origine belge comme Vanneste, fut aussi formé à Rome, précisément à la faculté d’Histoire ecclésiastique de l’Univer10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107517

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sité Grégorienne ; il occupa dès le départ la chaire d’Histoire de l’Église et de Patrologie. C’est seulement cinq ans après son ouverture que la faculté a eu ses premiers docteurs parmi lesquels on peut citer : Léon Lesambo, l’actuel évêque émérite du diocèse d’Inongo, qui a travaillé sur la foi chez Clément de Rome (1963) et Joseph Ntedika qui étudia la question de la prière pour les défunts dans la liturgie latine du cinquième siècle. Ce dernier deviendra le premier doyen congolais et titulaire de la chaire de Patrologie et histoire des dogmes dès les années 1970. Dans cette perspective, le premier débat sur la théologie africaine a connu la participation des spécialistes belges (de Louvain) et français (de l’Institut Catholique de Paris et de la Sorbonne). On note singulièrement la participation des patrologues et historiens du christianisme ancien Jean Daniélou en tant que doyen de l’Institut Catholique de Paris, Joseph Moingt, et tant d’autres. On doit aussi signaler la présence à Kinshasa de Basile Studer, avant sa célèbre carrière à l’institut patristique Augustinianum de Rome. Issu d’une tradition de plus de cinquante ans, le programme des cours actuel comprend une moyenne de 180 heures de formation en Patrologie et histoire des dogmes, sans compter les cours de préparation générale comme le Latin, le Grec, la Philosophie patristique et l’Histoire de l’Église antique. Comme on peut le comprendre, le cadre d’études va au-delà du programme, pour prendre en compte les activités de l’Association des Patrologues Africains et des sociétés scientifiques internationales en cette matière. 1.1. Le programme des cours 1 Dans le programme des cours de la Faculté de Théologie de l’Université Catholique du Congo, on étudie les deux aspects – Patrologie et Patristique – sous la rubrique Patrologie et Histoire des dogmes. Une telle approche a l’avantage, surtout dans une faculté de théologie, d’initier les futurs théologiens à passer des études de « Patrologie pure » aux études dogmatiques, plus 1  Secretariat general academique, Programme d’études. Année académique 2012-2013, Université Catholique du Congo, Kinshasa, 2013, p. 45-47, 49, 52, 54-55, 59, 63.

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utiles à la réflexion théologique. Celles-ci, à la différence des études patristiques faites dans les facultés des lettres, de philologie ou d’histoire, forment les théologiens en aiguisant leur sens critique sur le plan dogmatique. Au niveau du Graduat (Licence LMD) : il y a trois cours. Le premier initie les étudiants aux Pères de trois premiers siècles et comprend deux parties. La première, fondamentalement encyclopédique, indique la notion, l’histoire, l’importance et les instruments de travail en Patrologie et Histoire des dogmes. À la lumière du document sur la Congrégation pour l’Éducation Catholique basé essentiellement sur l’importance des Pères de l’Église dans la formation sacerdotale, on souligne la dynamique entre l’Écriture, la Tradition et la culture ambiante dans la formulation des dogmes. La deuxième partie aborde la littérature des Pères apostoliques, des apologistes, des anti-gnostiques et antihérétiques du premier et du deuxième siècle. Ici, on étudie particulièrement Clément de Rome, Ignace d’Antioche, Polycarpe, Justin le martyr, Irénée de Lyon. Pour le troisième siècle, l’étude porte sur Tertullien, Hippolyte de Rome, Novatien, Cyprien de Carthage, Clément d’Alexandrie et Origène. Le deuxième cours initie les étudiants aux Pères de la littérature grecque de la période allant du Concile de Nicée (325) à la fin de la patristique (749). II présente les Pères Grecs selon les divers arcs que voici : du Concile de Nicée (325) au Concile de Constantinople (381) (lutte contre l’arianisme, le sémi-arianisme) : Athanase, Didyme l’aveugle, Basile de Césarée, Grégoire de Nysse, Grégoire de Nazianze ; du Concile d’Ephèse au Concile de Chalcédoine (lutte contre le nestorianisme et le monophysisme) : Cyrille d’Alexandrie, Jean Chrysostome, Théodoret de Cyr ; de Constantinople II (553) à la fin de la patristique (lutte contre le monothéisme et l’iconoclasme) : Maxime le Confesseur et Jean Damascène. En ce qui concerne le troisième cours de Patrologie et histoire des dogmes, on étudie les Pères Latins, c’est-à-dire ceux qui ont utilisé le latin comme langue de littérature chrétienne de 325 à la fin de la patristique en Occident (636). Après avoir relevé les caractéristiques communes sur le plan linguistique, culturel, politique, géographique et théologique, le cours s’applique à en présenter les modèles. Il s’agit principalement de : 165

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Hilaire, Ambroise, Jérôme, Léon de Grand, Fulgence de Ruspe, Grégoire le Grand et Isidore de Séville. Notons par ailleurs que ces trois cours sont complétés par l’Histoire de l’Église en Afrique où l’on insiste sur les récits des martyrs et la Bible latine à Carthage et à Hippone. On traite aussi de l’Egypte chrétienne des origines à la conquête arabe (642), d’Axoum chrétien et de la Nubie chrétienne. Au niveau de Licence (Master I et II LMD), les cours de Patrologie et histoire des dogmes, sont des cours thématiques servant de modèle pour la recherche personnelle des étudiants dans le domaine de la Patristique. Ils sont enseignés de manière cyclique et alternée : Questions approfondies des Pères Grecs et Questions approfondies des Pères Latins. Enfin, au niveau du Diplôme d’Études Approfondies et du doctorat, la Faculté de Théologie organise des séminaires sur divers thèmes de théologie patristique, proposée aux jeunes chercheurs pendant leur formation. A ce niveau, on insiste sur l’approche du texte en langue originale dans l’analyse de différents thèmes. L’insistance porte singulièrement sur l’apport des Pères africains à la théologie. C’est ici que se dessine la dimension de la théologie patristique africaine où les candidats sont invités à apporter leur contribution par un travail écrit. 1.2. L’Association des Patrologues Africains (ASPA) Outre les cours théoriques, les étudiants formés à Kinshasa bénéficient du travail des chercheurs réunis dans l’Association des Patrologues Africains (ASPA), fondée en mars 1992 à l’initiative des Professeurs et Assistants de l’Université. L’on commença par l’inventaire des mémoires de licence et des thèses de doctorat en Patrologie, présentés à la Faculté de Théologie Catholique de Kinshasa depuis sa fondation. La liste ainsi dressée se complète peu à peu, depuis la lettre circulaire de juin 1992, annonçant à la communauté scientifique internationale la naissance de l’Association. 1.3. Les relations avec les Associations internationales On le sait, depuis sa création, la Faculté de Théologie a gardé des relations très étroites avec l’Université Catholique de Louvain 166

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qui lui a confié la première équipe des maîtres pour la formation des premiers docteurs en Théologie patristique. Pour l’instant, la faculté entretient un rapport étroit avec le Center of Early African Christianity (CEAC, Pennsylvanie, USA), et l’Association Internationale d’Études Patristiques. Le projet de coopération sud-sud pour la formation de la relève des professeurs de Patrologie-Patristique entre la Faculté de Théologie de Kinshasa et l’Institut Catholique de l’Université Catholique d’Afrique Centrale est en voie d’élaboration.

2. Le défi herméneutique de l’actualisation des Pères de l’Afrique aujourd’hui : accent sur l’inculturation Le problème de la rencontre entre le christianisme et les cultures date du début de l’Église. Car, l’inculturation de la foi chrétienne concerne aussi bien l’insertion que l’appropriation du message évangélique dans les cultures des peuples à l’image du Christ, Verbe de Dieu qui est venu habiter parmi nous. Ainsi, la pensée des Pères de l’Église devient de plus en plus importante dans le continent africain, surtout à cause du défi de l’inculturation, cheval de bataille de la théologie africaine 2. Ici on insiste sur l’héritage du paléo-christianisme africain à la lumière de l’exhortation post-synodale Ecclesia in Africa : « En réalité, du iie au ive siècle, la vie chrétienne dans les régions septentrionales de l’Afrique fut très intense et occupa une position d’avant-garde, aussi bien dans le domaine de la théologie que dans celui de la littérature chrétienne. Des noms remontent aussitôt à la mémoire, ceux des grands docteurs et écrivains, comme Origène, saint Athanase, saint Cyrille, flambeaux de l’École d’Alexandrie, et pour l’autre partie de la côte méditerranéenne de l’Afrique, ceux d’un Tertullien, d’un saint Cyprien, et surtout celui de saint Augustin, une des lumières les plus brillantes de la chrétienté » 3. De manière particulière, on met en relief le lexicon theologicum 2  M. W.  Libambu, ‘Inculturation et problèmes des sources chez les Pères de l’Église. Leçons sur les lectures augustiniennes du Timée de Platon’, Revue africaine de théologie, 62 (2007), p. 169-188. 3  Jean Paul II, Exhortation apostolique post-synodale Ecclesia in Africa’, Acta Apostolicae Sedis, 88 (1996), § 31.

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grec et latin de cet héritage. La question se pose de manière inévitable : comment les Pères ont-ils exprimé dans leur contexte culturel le message de la Révélation divine ? Il s’agit d’une épreuve herméneutique qui consiste à interroger les Pères de l’Église sur l’actualité de l’Église d’Afrique 4. A la lumière de ce qui précède, nous tirons les leçons du point de vue historique, épistémologique, doctrinal et linguistique. 2.1. Sur le plan historique : la contextualisation La première leçon à tirer des études patristiques en Afrique concerne l’histoire. Elle consiste à prendre au sérieux le contexte d’émergence des œuvres des Pères de l’Église avant d’en cerner le contenu. Car toute pensée, toute doctrine est le fruit d’un contexte. Ce contexte est dynamique, tant il est vrai qu’il se rapporte à l’histoire humaine, marquée par les aléas du temps et de l’espace. La contextualisation prend en considération le temps et le lieu à partir desquels l’auteur s’exprime 5 ; elle met en avant le rôle de l’histoire dans la compréhension des textes des Pères. Le patrologue cherche à comprendre leurs textes dans un mouvement de va-et-vient entre le passé et le présent. Il s’efforce de combler la distance culturelle qui le sépare d’une époque déjà révolue et à laquelle appartient l’auteur du texte ; il s’applique à se rendre contemporain du texte pour se l’approprier afin de découvrir le monde du texte qui s’offre à lui par la lecture. L’étude sur la vie, l’œuvre et la doctrine des Pères requiert la connaissance de l’antiquité dans sa confrontation avec l’histoire du christianisme, même dans ses expressions les plus banales 6. Précisément, il est question de mettre en relief le contexte de la fides catholica, en lien avec l’organisation de la cité antique. Tout cela fait surgir de graves interrogations auxquelles les Pères devaient répondre, comme chrétiens, théologiens et pasteurs.

4  Cfr. J. Ntedika Konde, ‘La théologie au service des glises d’Afrique’, Revue africaine de théologie, 1 (1977), p. 24. 5 Cfr. E. Coreth, Grundfragen der Hermeneutik. Ein philosophischer Beitrag, Freiburg, 1969, p. 211. 6 Cfr. H. R.  Drobner, Patrologia, Roma, 1992, p. 7.

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2.2. Sur le plan épistémologique : les paradigmes d’interprétations La théologie de l’inculturation exige une connaisance très étendue, en particulier des principaux problèmes de l’histoire de la théologie en Afrique depuis les origines du christianisme. Il s’agit de pénétrer la profondeur des cultures tant occidentales qu’africaines.  L’histoire est utile pour nous aider à trouver des paradigmes d’interprétations en vue de dérégionnaliser la pensée des Pères en rejoignant leurs structures epistémologiques d’interprétation sous-jacentes. Il faudrait un travail d’ « interprétation », c’est-à-dire de lecture entre les lignes pour retrouver les paradigmes argumentatifs des Pères étudiés. « Cet examen des sources doit nous assurer une sérieuse information biblique et historique, pour que nous puissions comprendre les doctrines et les institutions et les usages apportés par les missionnaires, et dont les églises d’Afrique vivent encore. Il faut que nous puissions interroger et interpréter critiquement les éléments apportés, et être à même de discerner ce qui est à prendre et à laisser, ce qui est essentiel, absolu en tant que parole divine, et ce qui n’est que relatif, contingent, accessoire et caduc en tant que discours humain ; et que nous sachions nous inspirer des leçons de l’histoire et de l’expérience chrétienne pour inventer les solutions les mieux adaptées à nos propres situations » 7. L’insistance sur l’étude des sources de la Révélation nous paraît capitale pour comprendre l’inculturation comme recherche des paradigmes culturels d’interprétation des données de la foi. Cette interdisciplinarité s’impose pour rétablir le contexte d’élaboration et de surgissement des doctrines des Pères en lien avec l’origine des institutions chrétiennes. « Dans cette étude, il s’agit d’un effort de recherche positive, portant sur les doctrines et les faits contenus dans la Bible et la Tradition chrétienne » 8. C’est que l’Écriture a offert aux Pères le cadre lexical utile non seulement pour l’élaboration de leurs doctrines, mais pour les besoins de la cause qu’ils défendaient.

  Ntedika Konde, ‘Théologie au service’, p. 6-7.   Ibid., p. 6.

7 8

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2.3. Sur le plan doctrinal : expression dogmatique et morale Par l’étude des sources, la tâche du patrologue consiste à déterminer les origines probables de la pensée des Pères dans les doctrines de leurs prédécesseurs, païens ou chrétiens, pour autant qu’ils leur aient servi de point d’appui dans la recherche des solutions durant les controverses, aussi bien antipaïennes qu’antihérétiques. Dans son processus d’affirmation, la théologie a besoin de garder ses liens avec les sources aussi bien traditionnelles que patristiques (la Bible et l’héritage des dogmes) 9. Chacun de ces domaines constitue un terroir à partir duquel pourront surgir les nouvelles synthèses théologiques par un travail d’appropriation et de reprise systématique. En effet, la recherche des sources en théologie africaine est avant tout et fondamentalement un problème de filiation intellectuelle et donc, d’attitude critique vis-à-vis des devanciers dans une communion de pensée qui va en deçà des textes pour en rejoindre les structures argumentatives les plus cachées. Il est question de justifier non seulement les provenances des principes et théories, mais aussi les raisons de leur intégration dans les schémas d’interprétation des dogmes chrétiens. C’est entre autres le problème de la réception de la théologie patristique dans le contexte africain. Ceci confère inévitablement à la démarche théologique de l’inculturation un caractère hautement interdisciplinaire. C’est ici qu’intervient l’argument de poids au profit de toute recherche sur l’inculturation : le message de la Révélation est si riche qu’il ne peut être exprimé uniquement de manière pleine et absolue par une seule culture 10. 2.4. Sur le plan linguistique : le passage aux langues africaines Sur le plan linguistique, on pose le problème de la pertinence des traductions des textes et du lexique théologique des Pères en langues africaines. Dans quelle mesure le génie culturel afri9  T. Tshibangu, La théologie africaine. Manifeste et programme pour le développement des activités théologiques en Afrique, Kinshasa, 1987, p. 31. 10 Cfr. M. W.  Libabmu, ‘L’influence de l’herméneutique d’Augustin sur Thomas d’Aquin. Notes d’histoire de l’exégèse patristique et médiévale’, Revue africaine de théologie, 57 (2005), p. 49-62.

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cain peut-il enrichir l’explication théologique et catéchétique des textes fondateurs de la tradition ecclésiale ? Cette démarche rigoureuse et patiente favorisée par la connaissance des langues locales s’impose comme une voie obligée pour l’élaboration d’une théologie inculturée à partir de la connaissance des langues anciennes (le latin, le grec, le syriaque, le copte). Il y a en Afrique, dès le deuxième siècle, le mouvement de latinisation des textes les plus importants de la philosophie grecque. L’Occident païen utilisait déjà la traduction du Timée de Platon selon Cicéron et Calcide. Les textes les plus importants de l’école d’Alexandrie passent par l’école de Milan pour rejoindre par la suite l’Afrique du Nord. Par le voyage, les Pères apprécient ce qui se passe ailleurs et le traduisent dans leur langue. Au treisième siècle les traductions juives et arabes permettent de découvrir Aristote qui donne l’élan nouveau aux recherches dans les écoles théologiques. D’où le paradoxe. Le latin qui était la langue des soldats, des cultivateurs et des juristes, devient la langue de la philosophie et de la théologie. Par rapport à la linguistique africaine, l’on ne doit rien négliger : il n’y a pas de langue philosohique ni théolgique par nature. Tout dépend de ce que l’on veut dire ! Le « miracle » réalisé par les Pères de l’Église et les auteurs de l’époque médiévale par l’invention de certains mots, comme trinitas, resurrectio, transubstantiatio est assez éloquent. Faire la théologie en langue européenne doit continuer, mais sans négliger les recherches sur nos langues. Les emprunts, les calques sémantiques et la créativité constituent les procédés de toute langue en évolution. Pour la rennaissance de la pensée africaine, les langues locales sont utiles en vue de l’assimilation des éléments de notre culture et du message de la Révélation. D’où l’importance des études par des spécialisations en langues étrangères et locales afin d’arriver à récolter les éléments du patrimoine culturel et linguistique qui constituent le point de départ des dictionnaires théologiques africains. Il s’agit d’investir pour le futur. On traitera singulièrement de la problématique de la traduction des énoncés de la foi dans les langues africaines, de nouvelles acceptions pour la rendre plus accessible et plus significative. C’est ce que nous appelons l’actualisation (Aktualisierung) des données de la foi par le traducteur. Ce qui suppose la connaissance de l’histoire, de la grammaire et de la 171

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théologie pour mieux apprécier la contribution de la Patristique en théologie africaine 11.

3. La contribution des études patristiques à la théologie à la théologie africaine À presque plus de cinquante ans du débat qui a fait naître la théologie africaine, les historiens ne cessent de rappeler non seulement ses origines modestes dans le débat entre Tharcisse Tshibangu et Alfred Vanneste, tous deux alors respectivement étudiant et professeur à la faculté de Théologie de l’Université Lovanium du Congo 12. Le premier, alors étudiant, revendiquait la valorisation d’une théologie africaine contre son maître, Vanneste, tenant de la théologie universelle. La célébrité dudit débat est liée au fondement épistémologique légitimant et valorisant le contenu d’une théologie dite africaine. Cela s’entend. « Les formateurs de la faculté sont venus avec la décision de former de véritables théologiens de métier, et non les monnayeurs, des vulgarisateurs des résultats des recherches fondamentales menées ailleurs » 13. Ce n’est pas tout. L’intérêt du débat est surtout historique dans la mesure où la première génération des théologiens de cette école de Kinshasa s’étaient formés à la méthode historique soit à Louvain soit à Paris pour montrer qu’historiquement parlant, il n’y a jamais eu de « théologie universelle », mais toujours des théologies particulières, quoique plus tard universalisées. On l’aura constaté, les théologiens, s’étant singulièrement appropriés de la méthode herméneutique, qui privilégie le contexte, avaient ouvert la voie à une nouvelle épistémologie, une nouvelle voie d’approche soulignant l’importance des études historiques et patristiques pour soutenir la théologie africaine 14. 11  Cfr. M. W.  Libambu, ‘Pour une actualisation du Symbole des Apôtres en Afrique’, Revue africaine de théologie, 59-60 (2006), p. 31-46. 12 Cfr. B. Bujo, ‘Introduction au débat Tshibangu-Vanneste’, in Théologie africaine au xxie siècle. Quelques figures – ed. B. Bujo, J. Ilunga Mayu, I, Kinshasa, 2004, p. 186-188. 13  J. Ntedika Konde, ‘La Faculté de théologie de Kinshasa et la société. Formation en profondeur et engagement total’, in La théologie et l’avenir des sociétés – ed. L. Santedi, Paris, 2010, p. 225. 14  E. Ntakarutimana, ‘Où en est la théologie africaine ?’, in La théologie et l’avenir des sociétés – ed. L. Santedi, Paris, 2010, p. 237 : « Il est vrai qu’il

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De telles études justifient et fondent à elles seules la pertinence des études patrologiques et patristiques pour éclairer la question des sources chrétiennes, à côté des sources traditionnelles, de la théologie africaine. La théologie patristique africaine est plutôt une réflexion théologique, principalement faite par des africains ou des africanistes, qui se fonde sur la Patristique (science de l’antiquité chrétienne ou l’histoire des dogmes) et la Patrologie (l’étude de la vie et des écrits des Pères). Précisément, il s’agit de mettre en lumière la contribution des études patristiques aux questions les plus préoccupantes de la théologie en Afrique. 3.1. Les questions de théologie fondamentale Cette partie de notre exposé vise à mettre en lumière la contribution des études patristiques en théologie telle qu’élaborée à l’école de Kinshasa. Comme on pourra le constater, la pensée née de la faculté théologique de Kinshasa, la première des institutions universitaires en Afrique subsaharienne, a fait école sous la lumière du Concile Vatican II. C’est dans ce contexte de relecture des ouvertures de ce concile pastoral de « l’Église sur l’Église » que tout prend racine. Chaque document a fait l’objet d’examen et de discussion sérieuse en public dans le cadre des assises dénommées « semaines théologiques de Léopoldville » dont la première se tint en 1963. Y ont été invités : J. Daniélou, J. Moingt, B. Studer, etc. 3.1.1. La théologie fondamentale : la dimension herméneutique de la théologie

Dans la Semaine théologique organisée par la Faculté de Théologie en 1972, on a examiné la question du rapport entre foi et langage. Les participants ont pris en compte la question du rôle de la culture dans l’expression de la foi depuis l’Église naissante jusqu’à nos jours. De ce fait, on a reconnu l’unité de la foi par rapport à la pluralité linguistique ou culturelle. C’est toute la y a d’autres secteurs qui ont fait l’objet de recherches fécondes qui ne sont pas évoqués ici, notamment le bouillonnement dans le domaine de l’éthique, les réflexions sur les fondements et les pratiques de la liturgie, les essais de droit canoniques, les recherches de patrologie et dans d’autres secteurs ».

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question de l’inculturation du message de l’hébreu au latin en passant par le grec. Du coté des biblistes et exégètes, le Cardinal Laurent Monsengwo, alors professeur dans cette même faculté, ramenait la question au niveau de l’histoire de l’exégèse. Il s’est appesanti sur la question de la traduction du message pour tirer les leçons de la Version de la Septante. Il y montre clairement que la traduction de la parole de Dieu de l’hébreu au grec est une histoire des transpositions culturelles qui ne se réalise pas sans la maîtrise des sens de l’Ecriture 15. Sa pensée fut prolongée dans le domaine de la Patristique par la contribution de Joseph Ntedika qui examina la question chez Augustin, spécialement en revisitant l’œuvre magistrale du maître africain qu’est le De doctrina christiana. Et Mgr Ntedika d’écrire : « Au lieu de rejeter en bloc la civilisation gréco-latine, comme certains chrétiens rigoristes l’avaient fait, Augustin trouve que la culture traditionnelle est riche de bons éléments qu’un chrétien prudent et éclairé pourra dégager pour les utiliser avec profit pour sa foi » 16. Il était question de montrer la dimension herméneutique de la théologie en tant que réécriture théologique du texte canonique. La théologie en tant que « réécriture de l’Ecriture » permet de réduire la distance culturelle entre les premiers destinataires et ceux des temps postérieurs. 3.1.2. La question de Dieu et ses implications sur le dialogue interreligieux (Lumen Gentium)

Le problème de Dieu, à la Faculté de Théologie de Kinshasa, occupa une position de choix 17. Il permit de préciser le rapport entre le christianisme et la culture africaine. Dans la lecture du document conciliaire Lumen Gentium, les chercheurs trouvèrent le point de départ pour renouveler leurs recherches. La jeune Faculté de Théologie de Kinshasa eut le bonheur de se confron15   L. Monsengwo, ‘Le problème herméneutique de la traduction du message. Leçons de la Version de la Septante’, in Foi chrétienne et langage humain, Kinshasa, 1978, p. 47-63. 16  J. Ntedika Konde, ‘Saint Augustin et l’interprétation de la parole de Dieu’, in Foi chrétienne et langage humain, Kinshasa, 1978, p. 162-172. 17  Cfr. ‘Troisième Semaine théologique de Kinshasa (juillet 1967)’, Revue du clergé africain, 3 (1967), p. 233.

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ter avec la pensée de Jean Daniélou, alors doyen de la Faculté de Théologie de l’Institut Catholique de Paris, durant les assises de la quatrième Semaine théologique tenue en juillet 1968. Ce dernier, dans une conférence au titre fort attendu, commença par clarifier la notion de la religion qui est l’expression fondamentale de l’homme face au mystère de l’infini 18. Outre les bases bibliques et conciliaires, Jean Daniélou s’appuie sur la théologie des Pères pour fonder la théologie des religions non-chrétiennes. Il évoque principalement les Pères orientaux qui parlaient de la praeparatio evangelica et des semina Verbi dans toutes les religions. On rappelle à juste titre ici la doctrine de Clément d’Alexandrie 19. Notons en passant que la dixième Semaine théologique de Kinshasa tenue en juillet 1975 reviendra sur la question de manière plus large dans le cadre de l’évangélisation en Afrique contemporaine. Le patrologue Ntedika insistera sur l’apport des Pères de l’Église pour reconnaître la valeur sotériologique des religions non-chrétiennes en s’appuyant singulièrement sur Justin, Clément d’Alexandrie et Augustin. Craignant la mauvaise interprétation de la pensée patristique pour bloquer l’ouverture au dialogue avec les autres religions, le même Daniélou observait qu’il fallait craindre deux tendances extrêmes : d’une part, de pousser l’idée d’extra ecclesiam nulla salus, d’où la course au baptême des païens pour les sauver. D’autre part, sous prétexte des déclarations du Concile Vatican II sur l’appartenance à l’Église, il se trouve des gens qui jugent inutile de s’occuper encore des païens, parce que ceux-ci seront quand même sauvés. L’auteur, tout en insinuant la question de la place de Jésus Christ dans le salut de tous les hommes, avait suscité de longs débats sur le lien entre nature et grâce, création et rédemption 20. En guise de prolongement de ce thème, on retient la contribution du professeur Feenstra de l’Université Libre de Kisangani, sur la sentence bien connue dans l’Église antique extra ecclesiam 18   J. Ntedika Konde, ‘Valeur sotériologique des religions non-chrétiennes’, in L’évangélisation dans l’Afrique d’aujourd’hui. Actes de la dixième Semaine théologique de Kinshasa, du 21 au 26 juillet 1975, Kinshasa, 1980, p. 22. 19 Cfr. J. Danielou, ‘La théologie des religions-non chrétiennes’, Revue du clergé africain, 5 (1968), p. 502. 20 Cfr. ibid., p. 503.

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nulla salus lors de la quatrième Semaine théologique de Léopoldville, aujourd’hui Kinshasa, en juillet 1968 21. Cette conférence, prononcée devant le grand historien du christianisme Jean Daniélou, avait pour visée d’inviter les théologiens africains à une interprétation authentiquement africaine qui sera la contribution de l’Afrique à la théologie mondiale. Il se rapportait au témoignage de l’Église de l’Afrique du Nord au temps d’Augustin. Dans son ouvrage intitulé : la théologie africaine, Mgr Tharcisse Tshibangu soulignait que l’évocation de cette parole des Pères servait à soutenir l’argument des propagateurs de la théologie du salut des âmes. « Fermement appuyée sur l’adage extra ecclesiam nulla salus, la théologie du salut des païens disqualifiait logiquement les traditions culturelles et religieuses des peuples, en l’occurrence des peuples africains. Le langage mobilisateur des vocations missionnaires et de la charité chrétienne se fondait, a écrit H. Maurier, surtout sur la pitié que devait inspirer la triste situation spirituelle, morale et humaine des peuples sauvages non-chrétiens » 22. On le comprendra mieux plus tard. Lorsque la question de l’originalité du christianisme se posera dans le contexte des dialogues des religions, les études patristiques retourneront sur cet adage pour clarifier le contexte initial du propos de saint Cyprien que certains théologiens de mauvaise foi considéraient comme une barrière au dialogue interreligieux. Très vite on commença à promouvoir des études théologiques sur les religions traditionnelles africaines. En 1968 parut l’article d’Henri Maurier qui montrait que les religions traditionnelles africaines, outre l’approche descriptive, avaient besoin des approches systématiques. « Nous concluons ce bref essai en faisant l’aveu suivant : une théologie authentiquement chrétienne des religions non-chrétiennes doit souhaiter la constitution de théologies païennes du christianisme ! En un mot : la réciprocité ! Si je situe le païen par rapport à ma foi, il peut bien me situer moi-même par rapport à sa religion » 23. Mais, le maître le plus incontesté dans la recherche des voies du dialogue entre le chris21  Cfr. Y. Feenstra, ‘Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus’, Revue du clergé africain, 24 (1969), p. 180-190. 22  Tshibangu, La théologie africaine, p. 7. 23  H. Maurier, ‘Approche théologique des religions africaines’, Revue du clergé africain, 1 (1969), p. 4-5.

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tianisme et les religions africaines, ce fut Vincent Mulago qui étudia de fond en comble les religions traditionnelles africaines sur base de cinq échantillons de la culture congolaise. Il s’agit de la conception de Dieu chez les peuples Mongo, Bakongo, Baluba, Bashi et Banyarwanda 24. En 1975, lors de la dixième Semaine théologique, Mulago y reviendra 25. De plus, Bernardin Muzungu fit la synthèse critique de sa pensée à l’occasion de la dix-septième Semaine théologique de Kinshasa qui célébrait en même temps le départ en éméritat de Mulago en 1989, dans une conférence sur « Religions traditionnelles africaines et théologie africaine » 26. D’autres recherches comme celles de Gustave Hulstaert 27, Célestin Malengu 28 et Armand Duval se poursuivirent en marge du colloque 29. Ce dernier évoqua ainsi la question de l’Islam compte tenu de son expérience des Missionnaires d’Afrique à l’Est du Congo. Après ce tumulte sur l’utilisation patristique de la question du salut, il se posa le problème du dialogue interreligieux dans un contexte africain aussi bien chez les théologiens que chez les patrologues. Ceci sera l’œuvre de la Soeur Josée Ngalula de clarifier le débat, dans une conférence publique sur l’actualité des Pères de l’Église en Afrique à la Faculté de Théologie en 2005. Sa clarification a permis aux théologiens africains de reprendre le débat sur une voie de certitude historique qui donnerait lieu entre autres aux contributions originales. Il est donc clair que pour l’école théologique de Kinshasa, cet adage revu historiquement ne constitue pas un obstacle à la théologie africaine

24  V. Mulago, ‘La conception de Dieu dans la tradition Bantoue’, Revue du clergé africain, 3 (1967), p. 272-299. 25  V. Mulago, ‘Religions traditionnelles et christianisme. Point de vue d’un catholique’, in L’évangélisation dans l’Afrique d’aujourd’hui, Kinshasa, 1980, p. 77-83. 26  B. Muzungu, ‘Religions africaines et théologie africaine’, in Théologie africaine. Bilan et perspectives, Kinshasa, 1989, p. 71-93. 27   G. Hulstaert, ‘La notion bantoue de Dieu’, Revue du clergé africain, 1 (1968), p. 184-188. 28  C. Malengu, ‘Le Dieu des bantous est-il un Dieu Père ?’, Revue du clergé africain, 3 (1967), p. 514-529 29  A. Duval, ‘La pré-mission et le dialogue avec les non-chrétiens’, Revue du clergé africain, 5 (1969), p. 485-506.

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du dialogue interreligieux. C’est entre autres l’idée-force de l’œuvre du théologien Léonard Santedi qui apportera une contribution substantielle intitulée : « Hors de l’Église point de salut » 30. 3.1.3. L’unité de la foi et pluralisme (traduction et inventivité des formules dogmatiques)

Sous ce titre, nous regroupons toutes les questions suscitées dans le contexte conciliaire sur la réception et l’expression de la foi dans les jeunes églises. Du coté des africains, il faudrait retenir avant tout la position de Tharcisse Tshibangu qui, par sa thèse, montrait le rapport entre l’intelligence de la foi et les voies non-occidentales dans l’expression de la théologie 31. La position fut exprimée dès les assises de la Semaine théologique de Kinshasa en juillet 1968. La question fut étudiée aussi par le jeune Alphonse Ngindu lorsqu’il publia en 1967 un article du même son de cloche : « Unité et pluralité de la théologie » 32. Ce dernier s’inscrivait en faux contre la pensée de P. Elders, de l’Université de Nanzan à Naya au Japon qui, étudiant le rapport entre le christianisme et la culture grecque, concluait : la culture grecque demeure le seul véhicule valable et providentiel pour le christianisme. Ce propos choquant conduit les chercheurs africains à continuer le débat sur le plan de principe en utilisant l’histoire. La Semaine théologique de 1972, sur la foi chrétienne et le langage humain en témoigne largement. A l’issue de ce colloque, on est fixé sur le pluralisme comme un fait historiquement attesté en théologie. Il ne restait qu’à passer au travail de traduction et d’invention des formules dogmatiques. Sur le plan concret, les patrologues et les théologiens dogmaticiens emboîtent le pas à leurs collègues biblistes qui, depuis plu-

30   L. Santedi Kinkupu, ‘Hors du monde, point de salut. Réflexions sur le salut chrétien en Afrique à l’heure de la mondialisation’, in Repenser le salut chrétien dans le contexte africain. Actes de la XXIIIe Semaine théologique de Kinshasa, du 10 au 15 mars 2003, Kinshasa, 2004, p. 161-185. 31  T. Tshibangu, ‘L’intelligence de la foi et voies non occidentales’, Revue du clergé africain, 5 (1968), p. 503-505. 32  A. Ngindu, ‘Unité et pluralité de la théologie’, Revue du clergé africain, 6 (1967), p. 593-615.

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sieurs années, s’occupaient de la traduction des formules bibliques dans les langues africaines. C’est le cas des travaux réalisés par la Révérende Josée Ngalula, qui fit sa thèse sous la direction de M. Cerbelaud à Lyon en étudiant le vocabulaire théologique des Pères de Carthage (Tertullien et Cyprien) pour ensuite examiner sa réception dans l’Église de Kinshasa. Dans la même perspective, nous-mêmes, après des discussions théoriques sur l’expression théologique en langues africaines, avons publié un article sur la traduction lingala du symbole des apôtres en précisant le mouvement de latinisation des mots africains dans les formules dogmatiques de la profession de foi 33. Nous y avons examiné attentivement le passage de la grammaire latine à la grammaire théologique en passant par la grammaire culturelle. Ceci suppose le procès d’interculturalité. 3.2. Les questions de théologie systématique Les questions soulevées au niveau de la théologie systématique sont essentiellement liées à la dogmatique. Sont particulièrement concernées, les disciplines suivantes : la christologie, l’ecclésiologie, la théologie des ministères, ainsi que la théologie du péché, de la pénitence et de la réconciliation. 3.2.1. La christologie 34

La christologie, en théologie africaine a évolué, du moins au début, à l’ombre de la grande problématique de Dieu. Il s’agissait de trouver l’originalité du Dieu des chrétiens par rapport au Dieu des africains. La tendance, à l’époque, avait privilégié les études 33 Cfr. M.  W. Libambu, ‘Nkoma Nayambi bwa bapostolo. Bolimboli katekisimo o mokili mwa Afrika’, Revue africaine des sciences de la mission, 4 (1996), p. 29-40 (article en lingala) ; J. Ngalula Tshianda, ‘L’Église qui croit jusqu’à ce qu’elle possède toutes les langues. Analyse des terminologies chrétiennes en usage à Carthage et à Kinshasa’, thèse, Université Catholique de Lyon, Lyon,  2000 ; Id., La mission à la rencontre des langues humaines, Kinshasa, 2003. 34  J. Ntedika Konde, ‘Le Christ-fondement et option fondamentale de vie selon Saint Augustin’, in Les titres christologiques dans la patristique, Kinshasa, 2001, p. 53-72 ; M. W. Libambu, ‘Maladie et guérison chez les Pères de l’Église. Note théologique sur la métaphore Christ-médecin’, in Maladie et souffrance en Afrique : l’Église interpellée par la pandemie du SIDA. Actes de la XXIVe Semaine théologique de Kinshasa, du 21 au 26 février 2005 Maladie et souffrance en Afrique, Kinshasa, 2007, p. 85-104.

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sur les religions traditionnelles africaines. La question du Christ, dans cette perspective, n’avait pas posé ni suscité de grands débats jusque vers les années 1980 au moment où la théologie de la libération issue de l’Amérique latine était en vogue, car elle mettait d’une certaine façon, en vedette le titre de Christ libérateur. C’est justement dans ce contexte que l’on organisa la douzième Semaine théologique de Kinshasa, en juillet 1977 sous le thème évocateur : Libération en Jésus Christ. Le colloque montrait suffisamment l’intérêt pour les Africains à s’attacher au thème sur le plan culturel, politique et religieux. Sur ce point, on mit l’accent sur une christologie libératrice à la lumière d’une exégèse néotestamentaire fouillée et équilibrée. Les précisions patristiques ont été complétées par le Professeur Ntedika sur un thème plus vaste : « Le salut dans l’Église ancienne ». Sur le plan dogmatique, on a connu, contre toute attente, la conférence du chanoine Vanneste sur le titre « Christ libérateur », qui inaugure le début officiel des recherches sur les titres christologiques en Afrique» 35. L’auteur, partant du constat d’actualité, examine le problème christologique tel qu’il se pose autour des années 70-80, en soulignant la réception de la christologie de Chalcédoine jusqu’à l’époque contemporaine. C’est ainsi que l’Association des Patrologues Africains (ASPA), sous l’instigation de Mgr Joseph Ntedika, dirigea la publication d’un volume en 2001, sur les titres christologiques dans la patristique. Tout se concentre sur une question de fond : qui est le Christ pour les africains ? Parmi les contributions de fond, on note celle de Mgr Ntedika sur le Christ fondement. Dans un autre registre, à l’occasion de la vingt-quatrième Semaine théologique, nous avions continué les recherches en mettant en lumière la métaphore Christus medicus. Dans l’optique fonctionnelle, on actualise les titres christologiques de l’Église antique comme Christ fondement, Christ médecin, Christ-restaurateur, Christ pédagogue, Christ-récapitulation, Christ-rassembleur, etc.

35  A. Vanneste, ‘Le Christ libérateur : approche dogmatique’, in Libération en Jésus-Christ. Actes de la douzième Semaine théologique de Kinshasa, du 25 au 30 juillet 1977, Kinshasa, 1980, p. 118-119.

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3.2.2. Ecclésiologie

Après le Synode qui se termina par l’exhortation apostolique Ecclesia in Africa, où le Pape Jean-Paul II rappelle la contribution de l’Afrique à la théologie universelle à l’époque patristique, un autre colloque saisit l’occasion pour souligner la contribution actuelle de l’Église d’Afrique en ecclésiologie. Il s’agit de la contribution du concept « Église-famille » de Dieu que les patrologues africains et africanistes ont associé au concept « Église- fraternité » 36. Précisément, nous mettons en exergue la contribution de valeur inestimable de Michel Dujarier, français d’origine, qui a été professeur de Patrologie au séminaire de Ouidah, au Bénin. Invité à Kinshasa, il eut l’occasion de présenter la synthèse de ses recherches en concluant : « C’est notre fraternité avec le Christ qui fait de nous les frères et les sœurs, non pas l’inverse. C’est cette fraternité en Christ qui fait l’Église et qui la définit. C’est donc cette fraternité christique qu’il faut mettre en relief avant toute chose, car c’est elle seule qui nous permet de surmonter le mur qu’établit trop souvent le lien naturel de sang. Si nous percevons clairement cette fraternité en Christ, alors nous pourrons vivre vraiment » 37. L’auteur met en relief, à partir du grec (adelphotes) au latin (fraternitas), le symbole de désignation de l’Église au quatrième siècle pour exprimer le mystère de la divinisation de l’homme. On part donc de la fraternité humaine à la fraternité spirituelle. De son côté, le patrologue et historien des dogmes Joseph Ntedika montre la récurrence de cette expression dans les propositions de 8, 24, du Synode avant la rédaction de l’exhortation Ecclesia in Africa, en relation avec l’expression « église domestique ». L’auteur montre en aval les sources de ces expressions chez les Pères de l’Église, notamment chez Jean Chrysostome et Augustin 38.

36   J. Ntedika Konde, ‘L’Église-famille chez les Pères de l’Église’, in Églisefamille, église-fraternité : perspectives post-synodales. Actes de la XXe Semaine théologique de Kinshasa, du 26 novembre au 2 décembre 1995, Kinshasa, 1997, p. 223-237 ; M. Dujarier, ‘L’Église fraternité chez les Pères de l’Église’, in ibid., p. 213-221. 37 Dujarier, ‘L’Église fraternité ’, p. 221. 38 Cfr. Ntedika Konde, ‘L’Église-famille’, p. 223-237.

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3.2.3. La théologie des ministères

La question se fait jour lors de la Semaine théologique de Kinshasa, en 1979, qui a traité des ministères et services dans l’Église. Les changements intervenus dans le monde et dans l’Église remettent en question les formes traditionnelles du ministère ecclésial. Les assises voulaient examiner, comme il est déjà survenu dans l’histoire de l’Église, ce qui est appelé à disparaître et ce qu’il faut inventer. Il se posait concrètement la question des « ministres laïcs » expérimentés dans l’Archidiocèse de Kinshasa sous l’inspiration du Cardinal Malula. Pour ce faire, tout en se consacrant sur le ministère sacerdotal (épiscopat 39, presbytérat, diaconat), le colloque concentrait son attention sur une question capitale : Comment concevoir le ministère épiscopal dans les Églises d’Afrique ? Le colloque réservait également une place centrale à la question de la vie consacrée et du service dans l’Église. Parmi les intervenants, un patrologue de renom, Joseph Moingt, prit la parole pour revisiter la question des ministères dans l’Église antique. Tout en affirmant le principe hiérarchique des ministères, l’auteur n’excluait pas le principe de dynamisme ministériel qui pourrait conduire au nouveau ministère sous la mouvance de l’Esprit. Mais, il fallait une longue justification théologique pour parvenir au statut reconnu des ministres laïcs 40. En guise d’approfondissement des questions de ministères, Mgr Joseph Ntedika, publiait en 1988, un article d’envergure sur la théologie des ministères dans les lettres de Saint Cyprien. Il se limitait singulièrement aux lettres I et III. L’auteur soumettait à un nouvel examen les textes de ce Père africain « afin que les options qui doivent engager l’avenir de l’Église soient prises en pleine connaissance de cause » 41.

39  Cfr. M. W.  Libambu, ‘La sainteté de l’évêque. Cas de saint Augustin’, Revue africaine des sciences de la mission, 22-23 (2007), p. 55-77. 40  J. Moingt, ‘Les ministères des communautés’, in Ministères et services dans l’Église. Actes de la huitième Semaine théologique de Kinshasa, 23-28 juillet 1973, Kinshasa, 1979, p. 63-66. 41  J. Ntedika Konde, ‘La théologie des ministères dans les lettres I et III de la correspondance de saint Cyprien’, Revue africaine de théologie, 23-24 (1988), p. 79.

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Dans la ligne du prolongement des discussions qui ont suivi notre exposé, le professeur Mapwar tenta de résoudre cette question particulière relevant de la pastorale des malades dans le contexte de l’Église qui valorise les ministères laïcs : « Un laïc peut-il imposer les mains dans l’Église catholique ? ». A l’occasion des Mélanges in Memoriam au Professeur René De Haes en 2007, Faustin Mapwar revoit la pratique de l’imposition des mains dans l’Écriture et la tradition patristique 42. La pertinence de la question s’impose au regard de la prolifération des sectes qui conduit les patrologues à approfondir la connaissance sur les sectes dans le monde antique et particulièrement la secte manichéenne à l’époque d’Augustin 43. 3.2.4. La théologie du péché, de la pénitence et de la réconciliation

La théologie de la pénitence et de la réconciliation a bénéficié au départ des études fort fouillées du professeur Vanneste sur le péché originel 44 où il s’inspire abondamment de la doctrine de saint Augustin. Replaçant le traité augustinien le De peccatorum meritis dans son contexte, l’auteur finit par conclure : « Pour Augustin, c’était un peu le cas. Car il ne voyait aucun inconvénient à reprendre en les explicitant même davantage certaines conceptions de son temps. Pour nous, au contraire, qui sommes obligés – comme nous le disions au début – de repenser la doctrine du péché originel de la façon la plus radicale, l’argumentation de l’évêque d’Hippone ne peut constituer qu’un point de départ. Mais un point de départ tout à fait sûr et qui semble pouvoir servir de base à l’élaboration d’une théologie du péché originel démythisé et répondant aux exigences de la critique moderne » 45. Ainsi, la neuvième Semaine théologique de 1974   J. F.  Mapwar, ‘Un laïc peut-il imposer les mains aux malades ?’, in La théologie au service de la société. In memoriam Professeur René De Haes – ed. A. Kabasele, Kinshasa, 2007, p. 385-400. 43  M. W.  Libambu, ‘Incidences trinitaires de la lutte antimanichéenne en Afrique romaine à l’époque de saint Augustin’, in Histoire du christianisme en Afrique. Évangélisation et rencontre des cultures.  Mélanges offerts au professeur Abbé P. Mukuna Mutanda – ed. F. J. Mapwar, A. Kabasele, M. W. Libambu, Kinshasa, 2010, p. 75-92. 44 Cfr. A. Vanneste, ‘La théologie du péché originel’, Revue du clergé africain, 5 (1967), p. 492-513. 45  Vanneste, ‘La théologie du péché originel’, p. 502. 42

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s’est révélée comme le lieu de synthèse et d’évaluation des études africaines sur le péché, la pénitence et la réconciliation. Au cours de ces assises, le Professeur Ntedika apporta sa contribution sur la pratique pénitentielle dans l’Église ancienne 46. 3.3. Les questions de théologie pratique Ces questions proviennent essentiellement du vécu de la foi dans le contexte africain en tant que question spéciale de l’évangélisation en profondeur. Elle concerne la morale politique, sociale et écologique. 3.3.1. La théologie socio-politique (Gaudium et spes)

Sous l’inspiration du Concile Vatican II, et spécialement de la lecture de Gaudium et spes, nous avons déjà évoqué la contribution d’A. Dondeyne qui soulignait en 1964, lors de la Semaine théologique et pastorale de Léopoldville, la présence de l’Église dans le monde d’aujourd’hui 47. Le colloque avait axé ses discussions sur trois questions d’envergure : Qu’attend le monde de l’Église ? Qu’apporte l’Église au monde ? Comment peutelle lui faire comprendre son message original et transcendant ? Pour cerner de plus près les questions dans le contexte africain, la Semaine théologique de juillet 1968, eut le bonheur de suivre la conférence de Henri Maurrier sur l’insertion de l’Église dans le monde africain 48. Le professeur Waswandi marqua sa présence, lors de la Semaine théologique de 1979, par l’intervention sur la politique des droits des pauvres chez les Pères de l’Église. Et l’auteur de souligner : « Les Pères de l’Église nous ont témoigné sous différentes formes que le combat contre la misère est une œuvre de solidarité qui suppose une confiance totale mutuelle entre l’Église, l’État et les

46   J. Ntedika Konde, ‘La pratique de la pénitence dans l’Église ancienne’, in Péché, pénitence et réconciliation : tradition chrétienne et culture africaine. Actes de la neuvième Semaine théologique, du 22 au 27 juillet 1974, Kinshasa, 1980, p. 269280. 47  A. Dondeyne, ‘Présence de l’Église au monde d’aujourd’hui’, Revue du clergé africain, 3 (1966), p. 206-216. 48  H. Maurier, ‘Insertion de l’Église dans le monde africain et problématique de la doctrine chrétienne’, Revue du clergé africain, 1 (1969), p. 315-323.

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indigents pour que le bonheur soit à la portée de tous. L’option préférentielle pour les pauvres est une victoire de la fraternité universelle contre la situation de misère, qui accable l’homme dans son corps et dans son âme » 49. L’impulsion donnée par de telles études patristiques et surtout dans le contexte de liberté d’expression favorisa d’autres études en marge des Semaines théologiques. Il suffit de rappeler notre conférence inaugurale en 2005 à l’Université Saint Augustin sur le thème capital : « Saint Augustin et le contexte socio-politique de son temps » 50. De surcroît, la persistance de l’actualité socio-politique obligea les organisateurs de la Semaine théologique tenue à l’occasion du jubilé d’or de la Faculté de Théologie de Kinshasa sous une forme plus large : « La théologie et l’avenir des sociétés ». On mit à l’honneur la théologie africaine devant les défis et les enjeux des sociétés humaines. L’étude patristique proposée à ces assises portait un titre hautement significatif: « Cité de Dieu comme avenir des sociétés. Le projet socio-théologique d’Augustin » 51. « Ceci remet à nos yeux la valeur de la cité de Dieu, non seulement comme cité des anges bons, mais aussi celle des hommes de bonne volonté. Cette cité céleste commence sur terre et s’accomplit en Dieu, en qui se trouve l’avenir de toutes les sociétés humaines » 52. Or la vie en Dieu est source de paix, de justice et de réconciliation dans la cité. D’où la contribution des études patristiques dans la recherche de la paix en Afrique dans une situation des conflits ethniques et armés 53.

49  K. N.  Waswandi, ‘La politique des droits du pauvre chez les Pères de l’Église’, in Églises et démocratisation en Afrique. Actes de la dix-neuvième Semaine théologique de Kinshasa, du 21 au 27 novembre 1993, Kinshasa, 1994, p. 200. 50   M. W.  Libambu, ‘Saint Augustin et le contexte sociopolitique de son temps. Combat pour l’avènement de la Cité de Dieu’, in Saint Augustin et la situation du Congo Démocratique. Actes des dixiemes Journées philosophiques du Philosophat Saint-Augustin, Kinshasa, 2007, p. 30-43. 51  Cfr. M. W. Libambu, ‘Cité de Dieu comme avenir des sociétés. Le projet socio-théologique d’Augustin’, in La théologie et l’avenir des sociétés. Colloque du cinquantenaire de la Faculté de théologie de Kinshasa, avril 2007 – ed. L. Santedi, Paris, 2010, p. 191-213. 52  Libambu, ‘Cité de Dieu’, p. 213. 53 Cfr. M. W.  Libambu, ‘Réconciliation, justice et paix chez saint Augustin’, in L’Église en Afrique au service de la réconciliation, Yaoundé, 2009, p. 68-75.

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3.3.2. Souffrance, maladie et guérison

Le thème de la souffrance, maladie et guérison constitue une question spéciale de la théologie du salut. Des études furent menées dans le domaine biblique, dogmatique et pastoral. Rappelons ici les publications de René De Haes 54, Gilbert Shimba qui situent le problème dans le contexte de la prolifération des sectes. Dans le cadre du colloque international du Centre d’étude des religions africaines, le professeur Ntedika apporta une contribution sur la question des maladies mentales dans les sectes à la lumière de la pensée d’Augustin 55. Mais l’attention des patrologues fut réveillée par les travaux de la vingt-quatrième Semaine théologique tenue en 2005 sous le titre général : « Maladie et souffrance en Afrique. L’Église et la pandémie du Sida ». Face à l’urgence et à la gravité du sujet, la contribution patristique ramena la question sur l’expérience des Pères de l’Église : « Maladie et guérison chez les Pères de l’Église» 56. A coup sûr, une telle contribution fait prendre conscience de la dimension pratique de la théologie patristique. Elle est également unitaire et globale d’autant plus que la théologie patristique revêt la dimension disciplinaire de la recherche pour promouvoir la pastorale de la santé qui puisse prendre en compte les défis majeurs de l’heure : la foi à l’épreuve de la maladie. 3.3.3. Écologie comme actualisation de la théologie de la création 57

Dans cette perspective, la théologie comme science interprétative rappelle aux écologistes la triple question des Pères concernant la création, celles de la cause, de l’usage et de la finalité de la création à la lumière du donné révélé. De par son statut épis  R. De Haes, ‘Le ministère de guérison’, Revue africaine de théologie, 9 (1985), p.  31-41 ; Id., ‘Sectes et guérison’, Cahier de religions africaines, 28-29 (19931994), p. 405-418. 55  J. Ntedika Konde, ‘Les phénomènes parapsychologiques dans la spéculation augustinienne face à notre projet de société’, in Religions traditionnelles africaines et projet de société. Actes du cinquième Colloque international du C.E.R.A., Kinshasa, du 24 au 30 novembre 1996, Kinshasa, 1997, p. 341-364. 56  Libambu, ‘Maladie et guérison’, p. 85-104. 57  M. W. Libambu, ‘Création du monde et bonté de Dieu chez saint Augustin. Les tâches du discours théologique sur l’écologie’, Revue africaine de théologie, 56 (2004), p. 187-207. 54

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témologique, l’éco-théologie africaine actualise la doctrine des Pères sur la création face à l’évolution des sciences du cosmos, sans oublier le lien avec l’ « anthropo-théologie » 58.

4. Conclusion Notre propos visait à souligner la place et la contribution des études patristiques dans l’élaboration de la théologie africaine. Tout revient sur une question de fond : quelle est la contribution des études africaines dans l’évolution de la théologie en Afrique aujourd’hui ? Les réflexions, occasionnées par la tenue du colloque à l’occasion des cinquante ans de l’Association Internationale d’Études patristiques montrent que cette contribution a été déjà faite en amont, si on en croit l’histoire de la théologie africaine au sein de la Faculté de Théologie de l’Université Catholique du Congo. Pour ce faire, notre propos s’est divisé en trois points essentiels. Au premier point, nous avons montré l’existence de la tradition patristique dans les objectifs de la formation des étudiants. A l’heure actuelle le cursus prévoit au moins trois cours d’études patristiques obligatoires pour tous les étudiants, deux cours obligatoires pour les étudiants de licence en dogmatique et un séminaire d’étude approfondie de Patrologie pour ceux qui se préparent au doctorat. Cette insistance sur les sources prévient les étudiants du danger de passer à pieds joints de l’Écriture à la théologie moderne. Au deuxième point, il a été question de préciser les axes d’études au sein de la Faculté de Théologie de Kinshasa. Il s’agit avant tout des études critiques des sources du paléo-christianisme africain. Ici, les Pères d’origine africaine ont une place de choix. On s’intéresse aussi bien au contenu de leur pensée qu’au contexte qui a fait émerger leur doctrine théologique. Ensuite, suivant les besoins de l’Église d’Afrique, la doctrine des Pères est évoquée pour l’actualisation grâce à la théologie de la reprise. C’est une théologie des théologies. Autrement dit, c’est une relecture des doctrines théologiques des Pères de l’Église en vue d’une insertion dans « l’aujourd’hui» des africains. 58 Cfr. L. Ndolela, ‘La justice dans le De Officiis de saint Ambroise. Un cas de christianisation de la morale païenne’, thèse, Faculté Catholique de Kinshasa, Kinshasa, 1970.

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C’est pourquoi, au troisième point, nous avons tenté de mettre en lumière la contribution des études et recherches des patrologues aussi bien de la faculté que ceux venus d’ailleurs, dans la genèse et l’évolution de la théologie dite « africaine ». Cette multitude des thèmes traverse la vie de l’Église du Congo au moment de la réception du Concile Vatican II, surtout dans ses documents sur l’Église, l’activité missionnaire, les religions non-chrétiennes, la liturgie et la vie consacrée. C’est dire que le travail théologique élaboré à la Faculté de Théologie de Kinshasa est le résultat de la prise au sérieux des recommandations du Concile et surtout des documents des souverains pontifes sur la prise en charge du patrimoine glorieux de l’Église d’Afrique. De cette réception des documents du Magistère de l’Église, les théologiens africains ont pu mettre en chantier une théologie de l’inculturation qui accorde une place de choix à l’étude des sources patristiques.

Bibliographie Littérature secondaire B. Bujo, ‘Introduction au débat Tshibangu-Vanneste’, in Théologie africaine au xxie siècle. Quelques figures – ed. B. Bujo, J. Ilunga Mayu, I, Kinshasa, 2004, p. 186-188. E. Coreth, Grundfragen der Hermeneutik. Ein philosophischer Beitrag, Freiburg, 1969. J. Danielou, ‘La théologie des religions-non chrétiennes’, Revue du clergé africain, 5 (1968), p. 501-503. R. De Haes, ‘Sectes et guérison’, Cahier de religions africaines, 28-29 (1993-1994), p. 405-418. R. De Haes, ‘Le ministère de guérison’, Revue africaine de théologie, 9 (1985), p. 31-41. A. Dondeyne, ‘Présence de l’Église au monde d’aujourd’hui’, Revue du clergé africain, 3 (1966), p. 206-216. H. R.  Drobner, Patrologia, Rome, 1992. M. Dujarier, ‘L’Église fraternité chez les Pères de l’Église’, in Églisefamille, église-fraternité : perspectives post-synodales. Actes de la XXe Semaine théologique de Kinshasa, du 26 novembre au 2 décembre 1995, Kinshasa, 1997 p. 213-221.

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A. Duval, ‘La pré-mission et le dialogue avec les non-chrétiens’, Revue du clergé africain, 5 (1969), p. 485-506. Y. Feenstra, ‘Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus’, Revue du clergé africain, 24 (1969), p. 180-190. G. Hulstaert, ‘La notion bantoue de Dieu’, Revue du clergé africain, 1 (1968), p. 184-188. Jean Paul II, ‘Exhortation apostolique post-synodale Ecclesia in Africa’, Acta Apostolicae Sedis, 88 (1996), p. 5-82. M. W.  Libambu, ‘Cité de Dieu comme avenir des sociétés. Le projet socio-théologique d’Augustin’, in La théologie et l’avenir des sociétés. Colloque du cinquantenaire de la Faculté de théologie de Kinshasa, avril 2007 – ed. L. Santedi, Paris, 2010, p. 191-213. M. W.  Libambu, ‘Incidences trinitaires de la lutte antimanichéenne en Afrique romaine à l’époque de saint Augustin’, in Histoire du christianisme en Afrique. Évangélisation et rencontre des cultures. Mélanges offerts au professeur Abbé P. Mukuna Mutanda – ed. F. J. Mapwar, A. Kabasele, M. W. Libambu, Kinshasa, 2010, p. 75-92. M. W. Libambu, ‘Réconciliation, justice et paix chez saint Augustin’, in L’Église en Afrique au service de la réconciliation, Yaoundé, 2009, p. 68-75. M. W.  Libambu, ‘Inculturation et problèmes des sources chez les Pères de l’Église. Leçons sur les lectures augustiniennes du Timée de Platon’, Revue africaine de théologie, 62 (2007), p. 169-188. M. W.  Libambu, ‘La sainteté de l’évêque. Cas de saint Augustin’, Revue africaine des sciences de la mission, 22-23 (2007), p. 55-77. M. W.  Libambu, ‘Maladie et guérison chez les Pères de l’Église. Note théologique sur la métaphore Christ-médecin’, in Maladie et souffrance en Afrique : l’Église interpellée par la pandemie du SIDA. Actes de la XXIVe Semaine théologique de Kinshasa, du 21 au 26 février 2005 « Maladie et souffrance en Afrique », Kinshasa, 2007, p. 85-104. M. W.  Libambu, ‘Saint Augustin et le contexte sociopolitique de son temps. Combat pour l’avènement de la Cité de Dieu’, in Saint Augustin et la situation du Congo Démocratique. Actes des dixiemes Journées philosophiques du Philosophat Saint-Augustin, Kinshasa, 2007, p. 30-43. M. W.  Libambu, ‘Pour une actualisation du Symbole des Apôtres en Afrique’, Revue africaine de théologie, 59-60 (2006), p. 31-46. M. W.  Libambu, ‘L’influence de l’herméneutique d’Augustin sur Thomas d’Aquin. Notes d’histoire de l’exégèse patristique et médiévale’, Revue africaine de théologie, 57 (2005), p. 49-62.

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M. W.  Libambu, ‘Création du monde et bonté de Dieu chez saint Augustin. Les tâches du discours théologique sur l’écologie’, Revue africaine de théologie, 56 (2004), p. 187-207. M. W. Libambu, ‘Nkoma Nayambi bwa bapostolo. Bolimboli katekisimo o mokili mwa Afrika’, Revue africaine des sciences de la mission, 4 (1996), p. 29-40 (article en lingala). C. Malengu, ‘Le Dieu des bantous est-il un Dieu Père ?’, Revue du clergé africain, 3 (1967), p. 514-529. J. F.  Mapwar, ‘Un laïc peut-il imposer les mains aux malades ?’, in La théologie au service de la société. In memoriam Professeur René De Haes – ed. A. Kabasele, Kinshasa, 2007, p. 385-400. H. Maurier, ‘Approche théologique des religions africaines’, Revue du clergé africain, 1 (1969), p. 4-5. H. Maurier, ‘Insertion de l’Église dans le monde africain et problématique de la doctrine chrétienne’, Revue du clergé africain, 1 (1969), p. 315-323. J. Moingt, ‘Les ministères des communautés’, in Ministères et services dans l’Église. Actes de la huitième Semaine théologique de Kinshasa, 23-28 juillet 1973, Kinshasa, 1979, p. 63-66. L. Monsengwo, ‘Le problème herméneutique de la traduction du message. Leçons de la Version de la Septante’, in Foi chrétienne et langage humain, Kinshasa, 1978, p. 47-63. V. Mulago, ‘Religions traditionnelles et christianisme. Point de vue d’un catholique’, in L’évangélisation dans l’Afrique d’aujourd’hui, Kinshasa, 1980, p. 77-83. V. Mulago, ‘La conception de Dieu dans la tradition Bantoue’, Revue du clergé africain, 3 (1967), p. 272-299. B. Muzungu, ‘Religions africaines et théologie africaine’, in Théologie africaine. Bilan et perspectives, Kinshasa, 1989, p. 71-93. L. Ndolela, ‘La justice dans le De Officiis de saint Ambroise. Un cas de christianisation de la morale païenne’, thèse, Faculté Catholique de Kinshasa, Kinshasa, 1970. J. Ngalula Tshianda, La mission à la rencontre des langues humaines, Kinshasa, 2003. J. Ngalula Tshianda, ‘L’Église qui croit jusqu’à ce qu’elle possède toutes les langues. Analyse des terminologies chrétiennes en usage à Carthage et à Kinshasa’, thèse, Université Catholique de Lyon, Lyon, 2000. A. Ngindu, ‘Unité et pluralité de la théologie’, Revue du clergé africain, 6 (1967), p. 593-615.

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E. Ntakarutimana, ‘Où en est la théologie africaine ?’, in La théologie et l’avenir des sociétés – ed. L. Santedi, Paris, 2010, p. 231-247. J. Ntedika Konde, ‘La Faculté de théologie de Kinshasa et la société. Formation en profondeur et engagement total’, in La théologie et l’avenir des sociétés – ed. L. Santedi, Paris, 2010, p. 217-247. J. Ntedika Konde, ‘Le Christ-fondement et option fondamentale de vie selon Saint Augustin’, in Les titres christologiques dans la patristique, Kinshasa, 2001, p. 53-72. J. Ntedika Konde, ‘L’Église-famille chez les Pères de l’Église’, in Église-famille, église-fraternité : perspectives post-synodales. Actes de la XXe Semaine théologique de Kinshasa, du 26 novembre au 2 décembre 1995, Kinshasa, 1997, p. 223-237. J. Ntedika Konde, ‘Les phénomènes parapsychologiques dans la spéculation augustinienne face à notre projet de société’, in Religions traditionnelles africaines et projet de société. Actes du cinquième Colloque international du C.E.R.A., Kinshasa, du 24 au 30 novembre 1996, Kinshasa, 1997, p. 341-364. J. Ntedika Konde, ‘La théologie des ministères dans les lettres I et III de la correspondance de saint Cyprien’, Revue africaine de théologie, 23-24 (1988), p. 79-98. J. Ntedika Konde, ‘La pratique de la pénitence dans l’Église ancienne’, in Péché, pénitence et réconciliation : tradition chrétienne et culture africaine. Actes de la neuvième Semaine théologique, du 22 au 27 juillet 1974, Kinshasa, 1980, p. 269-280. J. Ntedika Konde, ‘Valeur sotériologique des religions non-chrétiennes’, in L’évangélisation dans l’Afrique d’aujourd’hui. Actes de la dixième Semaine théologique de Kinshasa, du 21 au 26 juillet 1975, Kinshasa, 1980, p. 20-26. J. Ntedika Konde, ‘Saint Augustin et l’interprétation de la parole de Dieu’, in Foi chrétienne et langage humain, Kinshasa, 1978, p. 162-172. J. Ntedika Konde, ‘La théologie au service des églises d’Afrique’, Revue africaine de théologie, 1 (1977), p. 5-30. L. Santedi Kinkupu, ‘Hors du monde, point de salut. Réflexions sur le salut chrétien en Afrique à l’heure de la mondialisation’, in Repenser le salut chrétien dans le contexte africain. Actes de la XXIIIe Semaine théologique de Kinshasa, du 10 au 15 mars 2003, Kinshasa, 2004, p. 161-185. Secretariat general academique, Programme d’études. Année académique 2012-2013, Université Catholique du Congo, Kinshasa, 2013.

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‘Troisième Semaine théologique de Kinshasa (juillet 1967)’, Revue du clergé africain, 3 (1967), p. 233. T. Tshibangu, La théologie africaine. Manifeste et programme pour le développement des activités théologiques en Afrique, Kinshasa, 1987. T. Tshibangu, ‘L’intelligence de la foi et voies non occidentales’, Revue du clergé africain, 5 (1968), p. 503-505. A. Vanneste, ‘Le Christ libérateur : approche dogmatique’, in Libération en Jésus-Christ. Actes de la douzième Semaine théologique de Kinshasa, du 25 au 30 juillet 1977, Kinshasa, 1980, p. 118-119. A. Vanneste, ‘La théologie du péché originel’, Revue du clergé africain, 5 (1967), p. 492-513. K. N.  Waswandi, ‘La politique des droits du pauvre chez les Pères de l’Église’, in Églises et démocratisation en Afrique. Actes de la dixneuvième Semaine théologique de Kinshasa, du 21 au 27 novembre 1993, Kinshasa, 1994, p. 200-202.

Abstracts Notre propos vise à souligner la place et la contribution des études patristiques à l’école théologique de Kinshasa (la Faculté de Théologie de l’Université Catholique du Congo), en République Démocratique du Congo. Tout revient sur une question de fond : quelle est la contribution des études patristiques dans l’évolution de la théologie en Afrique aujourd’hui ? Pour ce faire, notre propos se divise en trois points essentiels. Au premier point, nous montrons l’existence de la tradition patristique dans les objectifs de la formation des étudiants formés à Kinshasa. Au deuxième point, il est question de préciser les axes d’études au sein de la Faculté de Théologie de Kinshasa. Il s’agit avant tout des études critiques des sources du paléo-christianisme africain, en insistant particulièrement sur les Pères d’origine africaine. Ensuite, suivant les besoins de l’Église d’Afrique, la doctrine des Pères est évoquée pour l’actualisation grâce à l’herméneutique de la reprise, en vue d’une insertion dans « l’aujourd’hui » des africains. C’est pourquoi, au troisième point, nous tentons de mettre en lumière la contribution des études et recherches des patrologues aussi bien de la faculté que ceux venus d’ailleurs, dans la genèse et l’évolution de la théologie dite « africaine », notamment en théologie des religions, théologie fondamentale, christologie, ecclésiologie, théologie des ministères, théologie sociale et politique, écologie. Our purpose is to highlight the importance and contribution of Patristics in the theological program in Kinshasa at the Faculty of

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Theology of the Université Catholique du Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo. We address a fundamental question: ‘What is the contribution of patristic studies to the development of theology in Africa today?’ To this end, our paper is divided into three main points. First, we discuss the presence of patristic tradition in the training of students in Kinshasa. Next we explain the areas of study within the Faculty of Theology. Above all, we take into consideration critical studies concerning the origins of African paleochristianity, emphasizing in particular Fathers originating in Africa. Then, in accordance with the needs of the African Church, the teaching of the Fathers is made relevant using a hermeneutic of retrieval, with a view to integrating it into the ‘today’ of Africans. Finally, we call attention to the contribution of the studies and research of patrologists, both those belonging to the Faculty of Theology and those elsewhere, to the genesis and development of ‘African’ theology, mainly in the theology of religion, fundamental theology, christology, ecclesiology, theology of ministries, social and political theology, ecology.

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ADOLF MARTIN RITTER Heidelberg

THE ORIGINS OF AIEP

Dear Colleagues, Ladies and Gentlemen, At the beginning of my report, dealing far more with the prehistory than with the history of AIEP in its first stages, I should like to call the beginning of the last Oxford Conference on Patristic Studies (August 2011) back to our mind. This is the first of seven points; I shall mark the different parts with numbers so that you can easily notice where we stand in each case. 1. Our colleague Guy Stroumsa – now unfortunately obliged to be in Oxford (instead of Jerusalem) – was entrusted with the inaugural lecture and spoke, from John Henry Newman’s pulpit in the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, on ‘Athens, Jerusalem and Mecca: The Patristic crucible of the Abrahamic religions’. 1 This masterly lecture, which I unfortunately could not attend, but have meanwhile read, with the kind permission of the author, will, I am sure, deservedly play a role in the discussions of our conference, too, at least among the participants of the Oxford meeting. The lecturer started (in accordance with his temporary rôle as a pulpit-orator) ‘with an exemplum of sorts’, mentioning ‘three brilliant scholars, who offered singular contributions to our understanding of the Church Fathers’ and, what is more, who ‘recognized the importance and the urgency of our task’, 1  G. Stroumsa, ‘Athens, Jerusalem and Mecca: The Patristic crucible of the Abrahamic religions’, Studia Patristica, 62 (2013), p. 153-168.

10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107518

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namely ‘to reclaim the Church Fathers for the cultural memory of our times’. The first ‘remarkable man’ mentioned, whom he – like many of us – was privileged to meet in person, was Henry Chadwick (who died, as you know, almost exactly five years ago). Chadwick once told him of how, during the sleepless, endless, dreadful nights of the Blitzkrieg [of Nazi-Germany against the British Isles] he set to translate Origen’s Contra Celsum. In those same dark times, in occupied Lyon, the Jesuit Father Henri de Lubac [18961991] was establishing the grounds of the series Sources Chrétiennes, while he was at work on Histoire et esprit: L’intelligence de l’Écriture selon Origène – at great per­sonal cost: the Catholic hierarchy of the times did not appreciate dabbling in heretic writers, even if they were intellectual giants and heroes of Christian faith. For the future Cardinal, as for the future Sir Henry, Origen represented, together with Augustine, the zenith of Patristic thought. During the same years, seemingly protected from the atrocities of war by the Atlantic Ocean, but knowing that his family, his whole people, were suffering martyrdom, literally, under Nazi madness, Harry Austryn Wolfson [1887-1974 – born in Astryna (Yiddish Ostrin) in present-day White Russia, but at that time] at Harvard was also reading the Church Fathers and meditating upon them. His lonely study, at a time when very few in the leading American universities expressed any interest in Patristics, would eventually produce the monumental Philosophy of the Church Fathers: Faith, Trinity, Incarnation, a book published, like Chadwick’s translation of the Contra Celsum and de Lubac’s Histoire et esprit, in the 1950s, at the time of the first Patristic Conferences. Was there anything more improbable than the decision of these three scholars, in the darkness of the night, to seek solace in those early Christian intellectuals who had asked, in so many ways, the perennial question: unde malum? Beyond their theological constructions, the Fathers’ real answer was encapsulated in the wager of faith: justice on earth, and cosmic salvation, would eventually dawn. Chadwick, de Lubac, Wolfson: three humanists for whom studying the Fathers provided a lighthouse in the maelstrom. 2

  Stroumsa, ‘Athens, Jerusalem and Mecca’, p. 153-154.

2

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2. Those dark times unexpectedly emerge in our mind as soon as we begin to occupy ourselves with the origins of AIEP and try to understand what happened and why. As its name implies, the ‘Association Internationale d’Études Patristiques’ started as a French project, after consultations with colleagues in Europe and the U.S.A.; French was for a long time the sole lingua franca (in German ‘Verkehrssprache’); the French capital was its (legal) domicile; its staff were – predominantly – French. But, the main place and chance to put out a feeler beyond the Gallic borders was offered by Oxford, with the International Conferences on Patristic Studies, founded by Frank Leslie Cross and starting in 1951. So it is fitting or, at least, obvious for us, to direct our eyes first to France and thereafter to the British Isles, especially to Oxford. To illustrate the situation – and rank! – of Patristic Studies in France, in the early 1950s, I quote (in selection) the vivid and informative report of a younger German scholar who, after long years of military service and Russian captivity, still stood at the beginning of his academic career. Nevertheless he had the good fortune to be invited to participate in a – brilliantly composed – international congress in Paris, on the occasion of the 1600th anniversary of Augu­stine’s birth. The name of my source is Carl Andresen (1909-1985), 3 my former ‘chief ’ in Göttingen and later a fatherly friend of mine. The spirit in which the famous ‘Congrès International Augustinien’ in Paris (September 1954) commemorated the event just mentioned is al­ready reflected in the title given to the three substantial volumes in which the proceedings of this congress were published: Augustinus Magister; most of you will know them. In the same way, I quote Andresen, the outward appearance of the congress city on the Seine, in which commemorative tablets for the fallen of the French “résistance” were to be seen at every crossroads, must be considered in any description of the intellectual situation. For the participants of the congress, coming from all ends of the world, such “memoriaux” signified a dreadful world, 3  Cfr. C. Andresen, ‘Introduction’ in Zum Augustingespräch der Gegenwart – ed. C. Andresen, 2 vols., Darmstadt, 1981, II, p. 5-8 (shortened).

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not unfamiliar for most of them. They all had, in some way or other, survived, and were saved once more. This feeling created a willingness to overcome the confessional, [national,] and ideological trenches [and] to build bridges of an unexpected range. Not a crisis atmosphere was dominating the Parisian Augustine congress, but the spirit of awakening... 4

A decisive figure on the ‘Comité d’organisation’ of 1954, as well as in the discussions of the Parisian congress, was Henri-Irénée Marrou (1904-1977). Anticipating that the treatment of Augustine’s doctrine De civitate Dei, in the perspective of a theology of history, would become a subject central to the congress discussions, he succeeded in being entrusted with the “rapport” on the various contributions relevant to the subject. 5

For this famous professor of the Sorbonne and impressive exponent of the just mentioned atmosphere, moreover a decidedly homo politicus, the drama, as a constituent part of the economy of salvation, which Augustine had described in his De civitate Dei on a truly universal background, was a road marking through the past, he likewise had to come to terms with, as well as a guide into the future. Augustine, the Church father, became for him, after the catastrophe of the Second World War, the figure-head of a Catholic humanism of Erasmian character [as the sole promising way out of the] crisis of our time. 6 4   The author exemplified this by reporting on the – astonishingly discreet – critique of W. Kamlah’s highly problematic interpretation of De civitate (in his monograph Christentum und Selbstbehauptung. Historische und philosophische Untersuchungen zur Entstehung des Christentums und zu Augustins ‘Bürgerschaft Gottes’, Frankfurt am Main, 1940) by H.-I. Marrou (Augustinus Magister, 3 vols., Paris, 1955, III, p. 194), as well as by the young J. Ratzinger (in his contribution on ‘Herkunft und Sinn der Civitas-Lehre Augustins’, Augustinus Magister, II, p. 965-979). 5  See H.-I. Marrou, ‘La théologie de l’histoire’, Augustinus Magister, III, p. 193-204. Marrou’s personal contribution on ‘Un lieu dit ”Cité de Dieu” ’ (Augustinus Magister, I, p. 101-110) deals, in contrast, with a bagatelle or curiosity. 6 Cfr. Augustinus Magister, III, p. 202. Marrou’s autobiography and his literary bequest testify to this. His posthumously published monograph, Crise de

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3. The influence of Marrou and his numerous pupils (among them, for example, Marguerite Harl – fortunately still living – and André Mandouze (1916-2006)) on France and French Patristics after the war was no less impressive than that of three pioneers of the Nouvelle Théologie, a ‘new’, non-scholastic ‘theology’, which anticipated certain central intentions of the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church, but at the outset ran into stiff opposition. These three pioneers were Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou (1905-1974), both Jesuits, and the Dominican (or Black Friar) Yves Congar (1904-1991); all three outstanding Patristicians, especially the first two; all three closely connected with the above mentioned, cele­brated series Sources Chrétiennes (founded 1942 in Lyons, in ‘unoccupied’ France); all three towards the end of their lives Cardinals of the Roman Catholic church. But it is high time to leave France and go to another country with an almost uninterrupted, brilliant tradition in Patristics: Great Britain. For F. L. Cross (1900-1968), already mentioned, Patristics was not his ‘first (academic) love’. 7 But since his appointment as Lady Margaret Professor and Canon at Christ Church in Oxford (1944 at the latest), his interest in this discipline developed continuously, alongside the beginnings of  The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (together with his close collaborator, Elizabeth A. Livingstone), first published in 1957, with which for many, especially younger English-speaking people with some theological interests, his name became almost synonymous. It is neither possible nor necessary, I think, to explain in detail what motivated him to engage more intensively in the study of the Church fathers. The simple answer seems to be: his own tradition as an Anglican, his general desire for peace and cooperation among scholars and Christians (noticeable fairly early) and, nôtre temps et reflexion chretienne, Paris, 1978, had entirely autobiographical features. For Marrou’s bibliography, see the collections Patristique et Humanisme. Melanges, Paris, 1976, and Christiana tempora. Melanges d’histoire, d’archéologie, d’épigraphie et de patristique, Paris, Rome, 1978. 7 Cfr. the contribution of E. A. Livingstone, ‘Frank Leslie Cross 19001968’ in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church – ed. E. A. Livingstone, Oxford, 19973, p. xxxiv-xxxvii.

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last, but not least, the vitality of Patristic Studies, especially in his own country, among Anglicans as well as Roman Catholics, Orthodox (refugees or converts) and others. Henry Chadwick was only one, though an exceptionally brilliant and promising, representative of this ‘flowering time’. A firm and, I believe, reliable tradition states that one of F. L. Cross’s main motives for organizing international conferences soon after the end of the last world war, was, at least ini­tially, to re-establish relations with Christians in Germany. This is all the more credible because he had studied at Marburg and Freiburg (in the Black Forest), mainly working on ma­terial for his doctoral dissertation on Edmund Husserl, before he took his Ph.D at Oxford in 1930; and, almost immediately after the end of the war, he took part in a British delegation to Germany which had the same goal of restoring broken contacts. Before I touch upon the situation of patristic studies in Germany, two decades after the death of Adolf von Harnack (1930), I should add a few words about the beginnings of the Oxford Conferences on Patristic Studies, so important as presupposition and context of the origins of AIEP. Elizabeth A. Livingstone remembers that: ‘when Patrick McLaughlin,’ an Anglican priest and later Roman catholic lay brother, ‘suggested to [Cross] that a gathering of scholars interested in the study of the Fathers of the Church would further relations between Christians of different denominations, he readily agreed to convene such a meeting’. In the days of the first conference in 1951, ‘the academic nature of the assembly had to be stressed, and even then all members of one of the principal Roman Catholic orders were forbidden at the last moment to attend, on the ground that the gathering was “crypto-ecumenical” ’. This was a severe blow. But about 200 people came, from every continent. The value of the conference for the exchange of views was so obvious that a small delegation asked Cross to arrange another, and since he had, at a late stage, suddenly begun to call the 1951 meeting, “The First International Conference on Patristic Studies”, it was not difficult to see that a series was en­visaged. The Second took place in 1955, and from then until long after his death, the Proceedings were published by the Berlin Academy in Texte und Untersuchungen (specially titled, as you all know, Studia Patristica). The Conferences, at 200

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four-yearly intervals, grew, until that of 1967, opened by Cardinal Pellegrino, was more than double the size of the first, and everyone took part without any denominational distinction. 8 4. Guy Stroumsa spoke in Oxford, in 2011, of the German Adolf von Harnack, as the greatest of all Patristic scholars in modern times. I think it is more appropriate to say with F. L. Cross that in ‘the range of his achievements Harnack was prob(ably) the most outstanding patristic scholar of his generation’. 9 On the one hand it was undoubtedly mainly his achievement when – in connection with a general historicisation of theology, in no way confined to theological liberalism – Christian antiquity became important for Protestant theologians (not only in Germany) as never before. It also met the interest of a wider public, even outside the churches, first of all on grounds that it was a significant scholarly project, to prepare and publish genuinely critical texts of all relevant Christian writers, ‘orthodox’ as well as ‘heretical’, disputed and non-disputed likewise (in the series ‘Die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte’ [GCS]), and that it was within the scope of a thoroughly modern, large-scale research enterprise (the ‘Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft’, founded to a large extent on the suggestion of Harnack, so that he deservedly became its first president until his death). On the other hand, there can be no doubt that his mastery of Patristics, which nobody will call in  See Livingstone, p. xxxvi.  ‘Harnack, Adolf (1851-1930)’, in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, p. 736f. E. A. Livingstone assures us that the ‘Dictionary’ was ‘very largely his own work’ (p. xxxvi), and she must know it! For a well-balanced picture of Harnack’s position within the Patristics (a term he never used) of his generation, see now H.-C. Brennecke, ‘ “Patristik” oder “altchristliche Literaturwissenschaft”? Eine historische Leitwissenschaft der protestantischen Theologie in Deutschland am Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts’, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 15.1 (2011), p. 7-46, together with the contributions of V. H. Drecoll, ‘Die katholische Patrologie an deutschen Universitäten im Jahr 1911’, and P. Gemeinhardt, ‘Die Patristik in Deutschland um 1911 in ihrem Verhältnis zur Religionsgeschichte’, ibid., p. 47-74; 75-98. Cfr. also my paper on ‘Adolf von Harnack und die Frage nach dem Wesentlichen des Christentums in altkirchlicher Perspektive’, in Das ist christlich. Nachdenken über das Wesen des Christentums – ed. W. Härle, Gütersloh, 2000, p. 37-48. See also D. Buda, ‘Some Aspects of Adolf von Harnack’s criticism on Orthodox tradition’, Harvard Theological Studies, 69.1 (forthcoming). 8

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question, had an entirely archaeological or, better, “archivistic” attitude towards its object. That means: from the time he wrote a prize-essay on Marcion, of 476 handwritten pages, as a seventeen year old student, 10 Harnack was concerned with developments he widely interpreted merely as depravations, as ‘defection’ or decline; in any case they were theologically meaningless for him. At precisely this point a remarkable change happened, just a few years after Harnack’s death, 11 given added force after the war. So it was that a new generation of Protestant pa­tristicians from Germany and neighbouring countries, with new ideas, participated in the second Oxford Patristic conference in 1955, and immediately afterwards decided to found a Patristic working (or study) group (‘Patristische Arbeitsgemeinschaft’) with the main goal of studying the relation of Holy Scripture and tradition and other problems of a fundamental relevance, especially in connection with Patristics, and to clarify them in the light of expert lectures on concrete examples and of comprehensive discussions. 12 One of its promoters was Lukas Vischer (19262008), a pupil of Oscar Cullmann and later a leading ecumenist, at that time a reformed pastor in Herblingen near Schaffhausen/ Switzerland; another Heinrich (Heinz) Kraft (1918-1998), a pupil of Hans von Campenhausen, then lecturer in Church History in Heidelberg, where the first meeting took place (1957). The result of this new orientation is, in my eyes, that it contributed to the gradual removal of specifically Protestant shortcomings, and facilitated the ecumenical dialogue in Germany and beyond.

10   S. A.  Harnack, Marcion. Der moderne Gläubige des 2. Jahrhunderts, der erste Reformator. Die Dorpater Preisschrift (1870) (Texte und Untersuchungen 149) – ed. F. Steck, Berlin, New York, 2003. 11 Cfr. my paper on ‘Situationsgerechtes kirchliches Handeln in der Spätantike und heute am Beispiel des Johannes Chrysostomos’, in A. Martin Ritter, Studia Chrysostomica. Aufsätze zu Weg, Werk und Wirkung des Johannes Chrysostomus (ca. 349-407) (STAC, 71), Tübingen, 2012, p. 183-221, in partic. p. 183-185. 12  So often repeated in materials at my disposal, documenting the origins of this study group.

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5.

The revival of patristic studies in Italy deserves to be mentioned, 13 but time constraints unfortunately do not allow for this. I should recall such illustrious names as that of the Salesian Paolo Ubaldi (1872-1934); his pupil Michele Pellegrino (1903-1986), the first professor in ordinary for Ancient Christian literature at an Italian state university and later Archbishop of Torino and Cardinal, as we already heard; the classical philologist Giorgio Pasquali (1885-1952); the philologist and historian Manlio Simonetti (born 1926), member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (since 1977) and holder of the “Ratzinger-prize” 2011 in patristics, donated by the ‘Foundation Benedict XVI’. I hope very much that the following speakers, especially my Italian colleague and friend Angelo di Berardino from the ‘Instituto Patristico Augustinianum’, founded in 1969 and officially inaugurated one year later, will compensate for this deplorable deficiency. But I have no choice. I must now come to an end and describe – at least in extremely broad outline:

6. ‘the origins of AIEP’ 14 – After a series of three or four Oxford conferences it neces­sarily became clear for many, in and outside France, what these conferences could achieve and what they could not. What they were unable to guarantee was: comprehensive information on new projects, new challenges, new instruments of research (instrumenta studiorum), over the space of four years. In France a group of highly qualified people were pre13  See L. Perrone’s very impressive overview on ‘Die italienische Patristik zwischen Altertumswissenschaft und Theologie’ in Zwischen Altertumswissenschaft und Theologie. Zur Relevanz der Patristik in Ge­schichte und Gegenwart – ed. Christof Markschies, Jan van Oort, Leuven, 2002, p. 91-121.  14  After having finished my paper I detected via the Internet, in search of further biographical details referring to Marie-Louise Guillaumin, a ‘Temoignage de Mademoiselle Marie-Louise Guillaumin sur les débuts de l’AIEP (19631983) et son rôle lors de la fondation, recueilli sous forme d’interview par Benoit Gain (vice-président) et Régis Courtray (trésorier et correspondant pour la France), le samedi 17 mai 2008 à son domicile parisien’ (see ‹http://www.aiepiaps.org/sites/all/files/pdf/Interview_avec_Mlle_Guillaumin.pdf›). I was very happy about this finding and used it for correcting and making some details more precise, but persisted in my own conception. The first part of the interview with M.-L. Guillaumin, titled ‘Le demarrage’, was the most useful for me; it is based not only on the memory of Mademoiselle G., temporarily the secretary of Marrou, but on the ma­terial documenting the stretch of road till the official founding of the association (1967).

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pared to undertake this heavy task. In close contact with M. Pellegrino, who immediately after the fourth Oxford conference of 1963 took the initiative, H.-I. Marrou undertook the work of organizer, and Jacques Fontaine (b. 1922) became his most important and very effective collaborator. Fontaine is a well known Latinist and historian of the literatures of Late Antiquity and High Middle Ages, later an ordinary member of the ‘Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres’ and responsible for the ‘équipe latine’ at the ‘Centre de Recherches Lenain de Tillemont’ for almost 20 years. From 1965 a provisional ‘bureau’ existed in Paris, appointed by an informal meeting or colloquium (June 1965) of invited experts from Paris as well as from outside (among them prominent foreigners). The office was composed, besides Marrou and Fontaine, of Pieter G. van der Nat (Leiden) as treasurer, and Kurt Aland (Münster) and H. Chadwick (Oxford) as vice-presidents. They drew up statutes and prepared all the necessary arrangements to bring our association into being and to apply for its legal registration (1967). After endless correspondence and an announcement during the Oxford conference of 1967, the first issue of the ‘Bulletin d’information et de liaison’ appeared in 1968, under the aegis of and as a supplement to Vigiliae Christianae. This issue was distributed using the available addresses of the participants of the Oxford conferences – an Annuaire, with a list of members, their addresses and an indication of their main interests and competencies naturally did not yet exist; it did not appear until 1980. This provision of addresses was not the only help that the founders of AIEP received from the organizers of the Oxford conferences. For example, the first issue of the ‘Bulletin’ included, with the permission of Dr. Cross, the communications regarding the Instrumenta studiorum from the conference in 1967. Oxford remained, on the whole, indispensable for AIEP, because it offered the sole forum for bringing together the large number of members who were participating in the conference, in order to convene general assemblies; to discuss fundamental problems (such as the nature of the ‘bulletins’); to fix the membership fee; to convene the so-called ‘councils’ (Conseils), consisting of a restricted number of elected delegates from the various countries, in order to elect a new Executive; and last, 204

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but not least, to make decisions concerning the applications for membership (according to – initially – fairly severe criteria). A first general assembly at Oxford in 1971 elected as members of the executive: H. Chadwick (Oxford) as president, K. Aland (Münster) and Alberto Pincherle (Rome) as vice-presidents, André Benoit (Strasbourg) as secretary and – already mentioned – Pieter G. van der Nat as treasurer. The next assembly, which met at Oxford in 1975, elected the New Testament scholar and Patristician Willem Cornelis van Unnik (Utrecht) as president, K. Aland once more, this time together with Franco Bolgiani (Torino), the pupil and successor of M. Pellegrino, as vice-president; van der Nat exchanged his former function (as treasurer) for that of the secretary, by far the most demanding, and the researcher at the CNRS in Paris, Marie-Louise Guilllaumin, took over his former post. Unfortunately the secretary died, after a longer illness, in May 1977, and in the following March the president, van Unnik, also died. F. Bolgiani and the Augustinian father Luc Verheijen (as interim president and secretary) took over the unpleasant task of ordering and deciding what didn’t tolerate any further delay, together with the energetic assistance of Mademoiselle Guillaumin. A general assembly under H. Chadwick’s chairmanship during the Oxford conference of 1979 received and discussed the report of activities, made by the interim executive, and released its members. The council elected a new Executive: F. Bolgiani as president; Dom Eligius Dekkers (1915-1999), the founder of the series Corpus Christianorum (1949), based in his Benedictine abbey of St. Peter in Steenbrugge on the outskirts of Bruges/Belgium, and my humbleness as vice-presidents; the Jesuit father Claude Mondésert (1906-1990), co-founder of the Sources Chrétiennes, as secretary; and M.-L. Guillaumin as treasurer. At this point I can stop and transmit the baton to Angelo di Berardino, confining myself to two additional remarks: 7. What might the relevance of such a retrospect be? My answer is, taking up once more a quotation from G. Stroumsa’s Oxford lecture (2011), that ‘we come from many different cultural, intellectual, linguistic and religious backgrounds’ 15 – which is also   Stroumsa, ‘Athens, Jerusalem and Meeca’, p. 153.

15

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true for this Jerusalem conference and marks its main difference from the origins of AIEP. This difference should be considered however not as a pity, but as an unexpected chance and challenge or, better, as a divine grace: to participate in a conference on Patristic studies as guests of the Hebrew University (unfortunately, it is true, not (yet) including Muslim scholars)! My second remark is that progress concerning ecumenical relations (between Christians and Christian churches), and also with regard to interreligious dialogue (between the three Abrahamic and other religions), depends upon a better knowledge of each other and an increasing ability and willingness to rejoice with the other at his achievements and to mourn with him for his losses.

Bibliography C. Andresen, ‘Introduction’ in Zum Augustingespräch der Gegenwart – ed. C. Andresen, 2 vols., Darmstadt, 1981, II, p. 1-39. Augustinus Magister. Congrès International Augustinien, Paris, 21-24 Sept. 1954, 3 vols. H.-C.  Brennecke, ‘ “Patristik” oder “altchristliche Literaturwissenschaft”? Eine historische Leitwissenschaft der protestantischen Theologie in Deutschland am Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts’, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 15.1 (2011), p. 7-46. D. Buda, ‘Some Aspects of Adolf von Harnack’s criticism on Orthodox tradition’, Harvard Theological Studies, 69.1 (forthcoming). V. H.  Drecoll, ‘Die katholische Patrologie an deutschen Universitäten im Jahr 1911’, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 15.1 (2011), p. 47-74. P.  Gemeinhardt, ‘Die Patristik in Deutschland um 1911 in ihrem Verhältnis zur Religionsgeschichte’, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum, 15 (2011), p. 75-98. A. Harnack, Marcion. Der moderne Gläubige des 2. Jahrhunderts, der erste Reformator. Die Dorpater Preisschrift (1870) – ed. F. Steck, Berlin, New York, 2003. W.  Kamlah, Christentum und Selbstbehauptung. Historische und philosophische Untersuchungen zur Entstehung des Christentums und zu Augustins ‘Bürgerschaft Gottes’, Frankfurt am Main, 1940. E. A.  Livingstone, ‘Frank Leslie Cross 1900-1968’, in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Oxford, 19973, p. xxxiv-xxxvii.

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H.-I. Marrou, Crise de nôtre temps et reflexion chretienne, Paris, 1978. H.-I. Marrou, Patristique et Humanisme. Melanges, Paris, 1976. H.-I.  Marrou, Christiana tempora. Melanges d’histoire, d’archéologie, d’épigraphie et de patristique, Paris, Rome, 1978. L. Perrone, ‘Die italienische Patristik zwischen Altertumswisenschaft und Theolgie’ in Zwischen Altertumswissenschaft und Theologie. Zur Relevanz der Patristik in Geschichte und Gegenwart – ed. Christoph Markschies, Jan van Oort, Leuven, 2002, p. 91-121. J.  Ratzinger, ‘Herkunft und Sinn der Civitas-Lehre Augustins’, Augustinus Magister, 3 vols., Paris, 1954, II, p. 965-979. A. M.  Ritter, ‘Adolf von Harnack und die Frage nach dem Wesentlichen des Christentums in altkirchlicher Perspektive’, in Das ist christlich. Nachdenken über das Wesen des Christentums – ed. W. Härle et al., Gütersloh, 2000, p. 37-48. A. M.  Ritter, ‘Situationsgerechtes kirchliches Handeln in der Spätantike und heute am Beispiel des Johannes Chrysostomos’, in A. M. Ritter, Studia Chrysostomica. Aufsätze zu Weg, Werk und Wirkung des Johannes Chrysostomus (ca. 349-407), Tübingen, 2012, p. 183221. G. Stroumsa ‘Athens, Jerusalem and Mecca: The Patristic crucible of the Abrahamic religions’, Studia Patristica, 62 (2013), p. 153168.

Abstract The intention of this report is to integrate the origins of AIEP/IAPS (until the International Conference on Patristic Studies in Oxford 1979) into their political as well as ecclesiastical and thdeological contexts, by illustrating the situation – and rank – of Patristic Studies in different countries, and to outline portraits of the leading figures as vivid as possible.

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I shall start with some personal memories. In 1981 I had a welcome visit from Claude Mondésert, editor of Sources Chrétiennes, when he was in Rome. I had met him in Lyon in 1979, when – with his encouragement and advice – we organized the Dizionario di Patristica e antichità cristiane at at the offices of Sources Chrétiennes. 1 Father Mondésert was in the process of creating a network of national contributors for the Bulletin de information et de liaison. The great names in patristic research in Europe, especially French, are those responsible for the founding of the AIEP/ IAPS. I had the good fortune to know almost all of them personally. The AIEP was founded in in Paris, in 1965: it was above all the work of French scholars, those who were best qualified at that time; but the official establishment occurred in Oxford in 1967. Jacques Fontaine published the first Bulletin in 1968. This first edition was very important, both for the richness of its content and because it contained an outline of the sections into which the bibliographical information would be subdivided. This model was then continually expanded in the subsequent editions. The same Bulletin, to the credit of Lorenzo Perrone, and more recently of Marco Rizzi, has now become a great wealth of information and bibliography. I believe I can say that every volume contains more information than each and every volume of the renowned Bibliographia Patristica, the last edition 1  Encyclopedia of the Early Church – ed. A. Di Berardino, tr. from Italian A. Walford, foreword W. H. C. Frend, 2 vols., Cambridge, 1992.

10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107519

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of which lists bibliography from the years 1988-1990 (numbers 34-35) and was published in 1997. After that volume, it was no longer published. Our Bulletin not only appears annually, but the bibliography is also meticulously updated. The first issue was very useful because it offered a panorama of the study activities and the patristic research of those years. In the Patristic Conferences of Oxford there was a session, stretching over several days, dedicated to the instrumenta studiorum, a section that is no longer extant. Almost all of the speeches from the Conference of 1967 were included in the Bulletin. Fontaine added the following comment: “This update of every four years regarding the important worldwide accomplishments merits being widely spread; now it is something that has been done. For the issue we should wish for the second issue different features, in particular the reports of the most recent conferences or those that are to be held soon, of meetings and talks”. The bibliography that was printed, was neither very long nor very precise; it was rather approximate in its presentation. The secretary had not intended to produce a complete patristic bibliography but instead to point out more recent publications and those in preparation. The first issue furthermore added a list in alphabetic order by nationality, of the centers of research and study: Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, and Italy. The countries with the greatest wealth of activity were Germany, France, and Belgium. The first secretary, Jacques Fontaine, knew how to involve other people and he was intensely active in preparing a second issue, in 1970. This issue was enhanced by the addition of new sections: conventions, information about activities, and useful notices of every sort. It aimed to create a truly international collaboration, which until that time had been quite small in scope and limited to just a few scholars. The intention was to exchange knowledge and create a network of information in order to better coordinate works. 2 The 1970 bibliography was increased in comparison to the first edition. And even the other sections were expanded, with notices about talks and about conferences, news regarding activities and publications; various   Bulletin, 2 (1970), p. 1.

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communications and information from other centers of research. But there was still no mention of the countries of Eastern Europe and of the enterprises under way there. Shortly before the Patristic Conference at Oxford in 1971, Bulletin n. 3 was published – edited, as ever, by Jacques Fontaine. The improvements were noticeable. The idea was reiterated that there was a desire to give notice of studies that were in the course of being completed, or even in preparation; of the theses being elaborated, regarding which names were given both of the candidates and of the directors and readers of the work. Other centers of research and instruction were also highlighted (Israel and Poland). On the 9th of September 1971, on the occasion of the Sixth International Conference on Patristic Studies at Oxford University, a new Executive Committee was elected: Henry Chadwick, president; Kurt Aland and Alberto Pincherle, vice-presidents; André Benoît, secretary; P. G. van der Nat, treasurer. This committee took the place of the preceding one, which had been provisional (1965-1971): H.-I. Marrou, president, with K. Aland and H. Chadwick, vice-presidents; J. Fontaine, secretary; and P. van der Nat treasurer. At that time there were various difficulties in deciding on dues to be paid by the members, who had to deposit the money in a Dutch bank – in their own currency; for a quite small sum it was necessary to go through a complicated banking process. After one year, in 1973, the third issue of the Bulletin was published, edited by André Benoît. The page setting was completely new, with abstracts, composed by the authors themselves, of nearly all the communications given at Oxford. There were some notices of the instrumenta studiorum, but little bibliographical information. In those early years only scholars were members of the AIEP; young students and researchers were not admitted. And rigorous criteria for selection were applied. To be accepted one needed the recommendation of at least two members. The fear was – as M.-L. Guillaumin well recalled – of an invasion of Spaniards and Italians, ill-prepared and of low caliber. The fear was illfounded, because in Spain there were very few scholars interested in Christian Antiquity. In the Spanish public universities there was no teaching on matters relating to Christian Antiq211

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uity and professors only of Roman history, some of whom also took an interest in Christianity – J. M. Blásquez, for example. In the few ecclesiastical faculties there were, no one taught patrology. In fact, in the Annuaire of 1980, the first Annuaire of the series, there was still not a single person from Spain. In Italy, the study of early Christian history in the public universities was spreading; but by 1980 the number of Italian members was still only 18, of whom some were not Italian but only resident in Italy. After the year 1973 the Association confronted a deep crisis that threatened it with the danger of disappearing altogether. As a matter of fact, for six years, from 1974 until 1980 the Bulletin was not published. In 1975, the Seventh International Conference on Patristic Studies was held at Oxford, the first in which I participated. A new Executive Committee was elected: W. C. Van Unnik, president; K. Aland and F. Bolgiani, vice-presidents, P. G. van der Nat, secretary; and M.-L. Guillaumin, treasurer. The Bulletin, which was then the principal work of the committee, could not be prepared due to a series of misfortunes: in May of 1977 at The Hague (Den Haag), P. G. van der Nat, the secretary, fell ill and died; and in March of 1978 the president, Van Unnik, died. Fanco Bolgiani (Turin) and Luc Verheijen (Paris), very dear friends of mine, filled in and thus ensured that the Association would live on. We must thank M.-L. Guillaumin who, with the help of Luc Verheijen, was able to recover the archives and the money from Holland and transfer them to France. In addition, Verheijen and Guillaumin contacted the members of the Association to prepare them for the general assembly at Oxford on the occasion of the Eighth International Conference on Patristic Studies in 1979. This assembly was important for the re-establishment of the AIEP: approval of the revised Statutes, renewal of the General Council of the AIEP, and approval of the tallies and the election of a new Executive Committee: Franco Bolgiani, president; Eligius Dekkers and Adolf Martin Ritter, vicepresidents; Claude Mondésert, secretary; and M.-L. Guillamin, treasurer. A new life began for the Association. Claude Mondésert, aided by personnel from Sources Chrétiennes, prepared the 212

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Bulletin of 1980, which from then on would be published and distributed free by Brepols, in exchange for the addresses of the members. A new section was introduced: giving the names of the paying members of the Association, with their addresses and professional specializations. Thus was inaugurated a new policy: to make the Association better known and to attract new members. The Bulletin was redacted with a view to: promoting acquaintances and contacts among the members of the AIEP; drawing in of as many as possible of those who were interested in Patristic studies; and to make known all that was happening: notices of research, of editions, of projects, of conferences, etc. The Bulletin would now be sent to libraries as well. Reading the list of those who were members in 1980 is a moving experience. The greater number is now deceased, yet many are still active and some are even present at this meeting, here in Jerusalem. There were then 244 members, of whom over half (128) were French or resident in France but from other countries. Only a few were from Eastern Europe and there were a few non-Europeans. The Reverend Père Mondésert, in the introduction, spoke of the difficulties with the postal services in the preparation of the Bulletin and the list of the members. In that period strikes were frequent in Europe, and they happened at different times in the various European nations, thus causing mailed letters to arrive late or to disappear altogether. At times the letters took months to arrive at their destination. In 1983 I inherited the office and the responsibilities of Claude Mondésert; from 1984 until 2000 I prepared 17 Bulletins. Communications were still difficult, especially with Eastern Europe. Today we send the notices, to every destination, by way of e-mail; and they arrive immediately at their destination and without the added costs of postage. But I shall add one more difficulty to the list: many professors sent their letters to us – still – handwritten. It was never easy to decipher their handwriting. Much time was spent and sometimes there was a need to return letters to the sender to ask for clarifications. Inasmuch as many of them were Frenchmen, B. Gain was a great help to me during those years. Gain, moreover, prepared the Annuaire every two years: that is, a little booklet of all the members, with their respective updated addresses. 213

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Now to return to the secretary, Mondésert, who still prepared the Bulletins for the years 1982 and 1983, just as he did the Annuaire, i.e., the updated the list of members. In 1983 the paying members numbered 420; the action of Mondésert and of his collaborators had been efficacious in attracting members of other nationalities. In three years the number increased from 244 to 420. This demonstrated the international vitality of patristic studies and the desire to get to know other scholars. We were in a period of enthusiasm and inception. Many young people were drawn to our studies. In the universities the number of departments dedicated to the study of Christian antiquities increased. In Oxford in 1983, the General Council elected a new Executive Committee on the occasion of the Ninth International Conference on Patristic Studies (5-9 September 1983). In the General Assembly 42 delegates participated. The new Committee was made up of the following: Adolf Martin Ritter, president; William H. C. Frend and Willy Rordorf, vice-presidents; Angelo Di Berardino, general secretary; Germain Hudon (Canada) and Benoît Gain, treasurers. M.-L. Guillaumin, “the historical memory” of the AIEP, was named archivist of the official documents. For the first time a non-European, a Canadian, was a member of the Committee. The aim was to have someone on the American continent who could recruit members in the New World, whether in North America or South America. The Americans – both in Canada and in the United States – had their functioning associations and were not extremely interested in an international association. This new committee immediately introduced something new, the designation “associate member”. This category embraced those members who did not have a permanent teaching appointment or young people who were working on their dissertations. They paid half of the fees and did not have the right to vote. The intention here was to promote and support the young. The  Bulletin of 1985 had on its cover page the official title Association Internationale d’études patristiques with an added subtitle: International Association for Patristic Studies. President Ritter, during his brief introduction in English, expressed the wish that ‘an increasing number of young scholars will make use of the facilities of an associate membership.’ 214

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In order to facilitate the recruitment of new members, the system of payment of the dues was also changed: At first this had been paid in Dutch currency and had to be sent to Holland; then for some years it was paid in French francs. Now people in different countries could send the dues in the national currency to a national correspondent. This method of payment greatly facilitated the increase in membership of the AIEP. The national correspondents collaborated increasingly so as to gather the information that was to be included in the bibliography. New names emerged, as did new centers and new geographical areas. The principal activity of the Association still remained preparation of the Bulletin, in order to make the circulation and exchange of information easier. The Association also began to make use of grants, furnishing books to the countries of Eastern Europe or providing subsidies to their residents so that they could participate in the conferences at Oxford. In number 14 of the Bulletin (1987) the abbreviation AIEP/ IAPS was used for the first time. The use of English increased, but the number of members from North America did not grow, because of the prior existence of the North American Patristic Society (NAPS), which holds meetings annually, except in the years of the quadrennial patristic conference. The Bulletin now comprised more pages and a larger bibliography, and it had a greater international reach. In 1987, at the Tenth International Conference on Patristic Studies, a new committee was elected: A.M. Ritter, president; Stuart G. Hall and Claude Lepelley, vice-presidents; Angelo Di Berardino, secretary; and the two treasurers were confirmed (Germain Hudon and Benoît Gain). The Statutes were revised, and there was now also an English translation of them that was published to encourage a greater international subscription. In the section dedicated to the authors of the Bulletin, the names of the Fathers had previously been written in French. Now they would be written in Latin, because it was more internationally known and understood: for example, Étienne became Stephanus, Didier became Desiderius. There was also something else new. At the end of the Bulletin a new section appeared entitled Nouvelles de la Grèce, with a Greek bibliography written in Greek. This section was made possible by the effective collaboration 215

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of Elias Moutsoulas from Athens. The goal of the Bulletin was not that it should gather bibliographies – there were at that time already instrumenta for that purpose. Rather, it was to publish communications and briefs received from the members of the AIEP/IAPS. For this purpose, although there was a section devoted to epigraphy and to Christian archaeology, the bibliography included was not generous, for there were few scholars in such fields who were members of the Association and in general they did not send bibliographical information. Publicizing works in progress or editions in preparation made it easier for people who were working on the same topics to be in touch with one another and exchange information. This type of information was not in general circulation, and even today it circulates little. For this reason we insisted on specifically signaling the sort of project or work that was being undertaken, in order to avoid the sterile occurrence of two or more people carrying on parallel studies, using the same arguments or those close to one another. Oftentimes it happened that I put into contact scholars who were working on the same research. In Bulletin 19 (1990) the vice-president, Stuart Hall, wrote: The Association helps patristic scholars in Eastern Europe and developing countries where foreign currency is virtually unobtainable by exempting individuals from paying subscriptions. We also make small grants and encourage gifts of books. In the last two years substantial help has been given to colleagues in Romania, where the Association has sent books paid for out of a solidarity Fund; in addition, members have sent books of their own. The chief beneficiaries are the seminaries of Bucharest and Sibiu, where there are able scholars with very little access to modern scholarly literature.

This policy of helping colleagues has continued in the succeeding years and until today. In the Eleventh International Conference on Patristic Studies of 1991, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we enjoyed an increased number of scholars from Central and Eastern Europe and more members of the AIEP/IAPS from these countries. The collaboration between our Association and Dr Elizabeth Livingstone – after Cross, the soul of the Patristic Conference – was always very close in many ways. A new executive committee 216

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was then elected: Robert A. Markus, president; Kevin Coyle and Yves-Marie Duval, vice-presidents; Angelo Di Berardino, secretary; Benoît Gain, treasurer. Preparation of the Bulletin became much easier with the use of the computer. In the Annuaire, e-mail addresses began to be introduced as well as fax numbers, for swifter communication. In 1995 the effective membership of the AIEP/IAPS numbered 620. In 1995, as always at Oxford, a new executive committee was elected: Yves-Marie Duval, president; Pauline Allen (Australia) and Kevin Coyle, vice-presidents; Marc Milhau, treasurer; Angelo Di Berardino, secretary. The AIEP/IAPS was for the first time directly involved in the preparation of the Conference at Oxford, because R. Markus was a part of the organizing committee. In 1996 two issues of the Bulletin were published, one of which was the Annuaire, that is, the index of addresses. Moral support for the Base d’Information Bibliographique en Patristique was agreed upon, directed by R.-M. Roberge at Laval University in Québec. The Bulletin of 1997 (n. 29) contained an ample section, very rich in bibliographical information, set aside for Japan for the years 1986-1996. 3 Normally, Japanese publications were not noted in the Western world’s bibliographies. ‘The aim of this contribution is to draw attention to the flourishing nature of Patristics studies in Japan, and its diversity. Biblical studies, in theology, Augustine, and Thomas, in philosophy, tended to dominate, but as is evident from this large bibliography interest in early Christianity has widened greatly’. 4 The titles are in European languages – especially English – generally translated by the scholars themselves. On the occasion of the Thirteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in 1999 it had been expected to renew elections for the Executive Committee of our Association. But when the committee was elected, there was a division, and the committee was thus constrained to step down. Since it was not possible to elect a new committee, Robert Markus and Markus Vincent were designated to organize a new elec  Bulletin 29 (1997), p. 108-129.   Bulletin 29 (1997), p. 108.

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tion by mail (we did not yet have electronic mail). The outcome of this election was as follows: Angelo Di Berardino, president; Hanns Christof Brennecke and Samuel Rubenson, vice-presidents; Pauline Allen, secretary. The office of treasurer remained vacant. Marc Milhau continued as treasurer for a few months and Angelo Di Berardino prepared the Bulletin in 2000 (n. 33). The committee nominated Marie-Gabrielle Guérard, of Sources Chrétiennes, as treasurer, and she prepared the Annuaire of 2001 (n. 34). The secretary, Pauline Allen, prepared two issues of the Bulletin: 35 (2002) and 36 (2003). On 21 August 2003 a new Executive Committee was elected by the General council. The new office-holders elected were Pauline Allen, president, Hanns Christof Brennecke and Samuel Rubenson, vice-presidents; and John O’Keefe, general secretary. The new Committee co-opted Roberto Palla as treasurer. Following the resignation of John O’Keefe, the Executive co-opted Michael Slusser (Pittsburg) as general secretary. In the Council, the annual dues were fixed at 14 euros and the category of associate membership was abolished. Because of the difficulties of transferring the money from France, in these years it was not possible to consider supporting such initiatives as providing scholarships for student research or supporting the acquisition of books by the libraries in need. Michael Slusser, in 2006, achieved the amazing feat of preparing both the Annuaire – that is, the addresses of all the members – and the Bulletin. The preparation of the Annuaire required much attention, because it was necessary to verify changes of address, insert the names of new members, and remove from the list those who were not paying their dues or were deceased. Such a task is now much easier because of electronic mail and the work of the national correspondents. With 650 members in forty nations, the Association was constantly changing and developing. The work of M. Slusser was also facilitated by the collaboration of the various members of the Association. The archives of the AIEP/IAPS were transferred to the Centre National des Archives de l’Église de France in Issy-les-Moulineaux, where they can now be consulted by appointment. In n. 39 of the Bulletin an old notice written 218

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by Jacques Fontaine, the first secretary, was published, on the history of the foundation of the AIEP/IPAS. 5 The Association, in the meantime, had accumulated a considerable sum of money, whereby it was possible to make available 21 grants to young scholars and enable them to attend the Oxford Conference in August 2007 and present papers. These grants indicated that the Association was now robust and in good health, in terms of both membership and financial security. The makeup of the new Executive Committee elected in Oxford in 2007 was as follows: Carol Harrison, president; Theodore de Bruyn and Benoît Gain, vice-presidents; Lorenzo Perrone, general secretary; Samuel Rubenson, treasurer. As a consequence of the remarkable growth in membership over the years, the section of the Bulletin – almost 200 pages – on new and forthcoming publications, research projects, conferences and doctoral dissertations has grown markedly in size. There are now new members from countries formerly outside our ambit: South Africa, Angola, Armenia, China, Congo, Georgia, Israel, etc. The creation of a website, operative since August 2008, through the work of Theodore de Bruyn, permits a wider circulation of the information and a closer contact with the Executive Committee. The Bulletins from 2004 until 2011 are to be found on the website, a great free service. In this way, too, the Association is at the service of the scholars. The indefatigable Lorenzo Perrone, going beyond tradition, has gathered a vast bibliography in these last years: Bulletin 43 (2009) is one volume of about 280 pages; and n. 44 (2010) has the same number of pages; n. 45 (2011) introduced a novelty: an index of the names of the authors. Since the summer of 2011 we have had a new Executive Committee, which is still in charge and has organized this conference: Theodore de Bruyn, president; Carol Harrison and Oscar Velásquez, vice-presidents; Marco Rizzi, secretary; and Benoît Gain, treasurer. According to the Annuaire of 2012 the members of our Association number 824. The Council fixed the annual dues at 18 euros.

  J. Fontaine, Bulletin 39, p. 4-5.

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The growth of the Association is thanks to all its members, but especially to those who dedicated their time to its development and to the spread of patristic knowledge. Many have freely and generously donated their services in order to create a  communitas studiorum, at the service of friendship, of culture and of knowledge. In my short paper, I have remembered many of them. Finally, I would like to express many and warm thanks to the current Executive Committee for this splendid Conference and my best wishes for the continued good of the Association. The warm welcome I have enjoyed at this prestigious university have made these two days very pleasant. Many thanks to all the local organizers, especially to Brouria BittonAshkelony, Director of the Center for the Study of Christianity and the chair of the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Abstract My paper is intended as a continuation of that of Dr A. M. Ritter, which gave us the background of the foundation of AIEP/IAPS. The AIEP was founded in France, at Paris, in 1965; it was above all the work of French scholars, but it was later officially established at Oxford in 1967. Jacques Fontaine, who died recently, published the first Bulletin in 1968, which was the very model that continually expanded in the following editions, until the last years. After the year 1973 the Association was confronted with a profound crisis, and was threatened with disappearing altogether. As a matter of fact, the Bulletin was not published for six years, from 1974 until 1980. On the occasion of the Eighth International Conference on Patristic Studies in 1979, the Association was refounded with the approval of the revised Statutes; Claude Mondésert, secretary, restarted the Bulletin. In 1983 I inherited the office of Claude Mondésert; I prepared 17 Bulletins, from 1984 till 2000. The life of the association has continually improved up to the present day and membership is steadily increasing, from a wide variety of countries.

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ÉDITER ET TRADUIRE LES ÉCRITS DES PÈRES DANS SOURCES CHRÉTIENNES : REGARD SUR SOIXANTE-DIX ANS D’ACTIVITÉ ÉDITORIALE

Parmi tant d’anniversaires ou commémorations, dont notre époque est friande, la célébration, à Jérusalem, des cinquante ans de l’A.I.E.P. revêt un caractère particulier. D’abord, parce que la notion même de jubilé s’origine dans la tradition juive (Lv 25, 8-17), que reprendra au xive siècle l’Église catholique romaine sous l’appellation d’« année sainte ». Ensuite, parce que les cinquante ans de l’A.I.E.P. coïncident avec les cinquante ans du concile Vatican II, les soixante-dix ans de la collection « Sources Chrétiennes », et le dix-septième centenaire de « l’édit de Milan ». Entre ces quatre anniversaires, célébrés en divers lieux, on perçoit aisément des liens qui, d’une certaine manière, se nouent au sein de l’A.I.E.P. Pareillement, entre cultures juive, chrétienne et musulmane, sans oublier ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler le monde païen, entre traditions chrétiennes d’Orient et d’Occident, entre Byzance et l’Occident médiéval, comme notre colloque tient à le souligner, le dialogue et les échanges, malgré les difficultés, n’ont jamais totalement cessé d’exister. Modestement, la collection « Sources Chrétiennes » entend, elle aussi, y contribuer. Selon l’esprit de ses fondateurs, elle a pour but de donner accès à l’intelligence de textes qui constituent un patrimoine commun, à la fois culturel et religieux, sans volonté apologétique et sans prosélytisme, mais sans oblitérer non plus le message chrétien dont ces textes sont porteurs. Elle le fait dans un esprit ouvertement œcuménique, les Pères étant un lieu de rencontre et de confluence, capable d’aider à surmonter les divisions survenues plus tard entre Orient et Occident, mais aussi à l’intérieur même de la chrétienté occidentale. 10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107520

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Depuis soixante-dix ans, la collection « Sources Chrétiennes » édite donc les textes grecs, latins et orientaux des auteurs chrétiens des premiers siècles, désignés sous l’appellation générique de « Pères de l’Église », quand bien même tous ne remplissent pas stricto sensu les critères requis pour mériter ce titre et qu’une place, certes modeste, soit faite à des femmes, dont deux au moins –  Égérie et Dhuoda – sont des best-sellers de la Collection ! Avant de dresser devant vous, au terme de notre rencontre, un bilan de cette activité éditoriale, je tiens à remercier chaleureusement, au nom de « Sources Chrétiennes », les organisateurs de la Conférence de l’honneur qu’ils ont tenu à lui rendre par leur invitation. Je commencerai par faire un bref historique de la Collection, nécessaire pour bien comprendre un certain nombre d’orientations éditoriales. Je situerai ensuite les éditions de « Sources Chrétiennes » par rapport aux autres grandes collections de textes patristiques. Je soulignerai enfin la nature et l’importance de la contribution de l’Institut des « Sources Chrétiennes » à ce travail d’édition.

1. Historique de la collection « Sources Chrétiennes » 1 1.1. Genèse et naissance de la Collection Un lieu – le scolasticat de la Compagnie de Jésus – un éminent helléniste – le Père Victor Fontoynont –, l’action conjointe de deux hommes au tempérament fort différent – les Pères Henri de Lubac et Jean Daniélou –, tels sont les trois facteurs qui se trouvèrent un jour réunis à Lyon, sur la colline de Fourvière, dans les années 1940, pour donner naissance à la collection « Sources Chrétiennes ». Il faut en ajouter un quatrième, essentiel et déterminant : la décision courageuse prise, dès le début, par les responsables des Éditions du Cerf de soutenir ce projet éditorial. 2 La maison dominicaine, dont le siège est à Paris, venait, en effet, en 1941, de délocaliser à Lyon, alors en « zone libre » – le reste de la France était occupé par l’Allemagne nazie – une 1 Ce rappel historique est grandement tributaire du livre que l’historien lyonnais Étienne Fouilloux rédigea à l’occasion des 50 ans de SC : La collection « Sources Chrétiennes ».  Éditer les Pères de l’Église au xxe siècle, Paris, 1995 [2e édition 2011, augmentée d’une postface, « Sources Chrétiennes : étape 500 », p. 229-243]. 2 Cfr. Fouilloux, La collection « Sources Chrétiennes », p. 27.

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partie de ses activités en y créant une succursale : les « Éditions de l’Abeille ». Malgré bien des difficultés, liées aux circonstances, le contrat passé entre les jésuites de Fourvière et les dominicains du Cerf – les premiers assurant la direction littéraire, les seconds la gestion administrative et financière – permit à « Sources Chrétiennes » de voir le jour et demeure depuis lors, avec la même répartition des tâches, le socle d’une collaboration étroite autour d’un objectif commun. Après une gestation d’environ une dizaine d’années, se concrétisait ainsi l’idée d’une collection de textes patristiques, dont le P. Fontoynont fut en réalité le véritable initiateur et le concepteur. 3 Aux compagnons jésuites réunis autour de lui, il sut faire découvrir la richesse et la nouveauté des écrits des Pères grecs et bientôt recruter parmi eux les premiers collaborateurs de la future collection. Avec H. de Lubac et J. Daniélou sont dressées des listes de textes à éditer et des listes de noms de collaborateurs potentiels pour l’édition du texte et sa traduction, et de théologiens pour certaines introductions. Chacun utilise son réseau de relations pour intéresser au projet et trouver des collaborateurs au-delà de la sphère jésuite. J. Daniélou s’y emploie tout particulièrement dans les cercles parisiens et universitaires auxquels il a accès. Si bien que, fin 1942, aux heures les plus sombres de la guerre, plusieurs éditions sont prêtes ou en voie d’achèvement. Il n’est question alors que de Pères grecs ou byzantins. Cela tient en partie aux circonstances – le groupe d’hellénistes réunis à Fourvière autour du P. Fontoynont, l’intérêt de Lubac pour l’exégèse d’Origène, celui de Daniélou pour Philon d’Alexandrie et Grégoire de Nysse – mais tout autant à la volonté de faire découvrir un pan de la littérature patristique largement méconnu en Occident. Si l’on cite régulièrement les Pères grecs, au moins certains d’entre eux, ils servent surtout d’argument d’autorité : on les lit peu pour eux-mêmes ou seulement en extraits. La volonté des fondateurs est de rétablir l’équilibre qui a été rompu entre Orient et Occident, les deux poumons de la chrétienté, en 3  La collection des Pères H. Hemmer et P. Lejay, Textes et Documents pour l’étude historique du christianisme, en particulier, mais aussi la Collection des Universités de France (CUF) et la Bibliothèque Augustinienne (BA) ont sans aucun doute été des modèles de référence.

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donnant à lire dans leur intégralité les écrits des Pères grecs, et de renouveler ainsi, de l’intérieur, la spiritualité, la vie chrétienne et la théologie. Comme en attestent la plupart des dix-huit premiers volumes de la Collection, la ligne éditoriale initialement retenue est nettement spirituelle, d’inspiration surtout alexandrine, voire néoplatonicienne. Il n’est que de relire, pour s’en convaincre, les deux grandes introductions – aux allures de manifeste – rédigées par H. de Lubac pour présenter les homélies d’Origène sur la Genèse et sur l’Exode, reprises ensuite, dans Histoire et  Esprit. L’intelligence de l’Écriture d’après Origène (Paris, 1950) ; ou celle, à la fois philosophique et spirituelle, de J. Daniélou à son édition de La Vie de Moïse de Grégoire de Nysse, ou encore de C. Mondésert à l’édition du Protreptique de Clément d’Alexandrie, qui achève en ces termes la présentation de celui qu’il juge « l’un des plus séduisants » parmi les Pères grecs : Il serait enfin très intéressant de s’arrêter à la doctrine spirituelle de Clément et à l’influence qu’il exerça sur toute la spiritualité grecque chrétienne. Après Philon, qui, déjà, marque une transition nette entre l’idéal hellénique païen et l’idéal juif, il apparaît un peu comme l’initiateur de cette grande tradition qui compte des noms tels que ceux d’Origène, de Grégoire de Nysse, de Macaire, d’Évagre, de Maxime et de Denys, pour ne citer que ceux-là. Déjà il offre une esquisse de théologie négative, et, sentant bien toute la difficulté de l’ascension jusqu’à Dieu, il s’essaie à marquer les étapes qui conduisent jusqu’à la vision de l’âme guidée par le Logos révélateur. 4

1.2. Des débuts difficiles La publication de La Vie de Moïse et celle de tous les premiers volumes n’alla pas sans mal. Il fallut trouver du papier. Ce n’était chose facile, ni en zone occupée ni en zone libre. On en trouva, mais insuffisamment pour permettre d’éditer le texte grec, ni même la totalité de La Vie de Moïse. Il fut décidé – un choix révélateur de l’intérêt porté à l’exégèse spirituelle – de publier seulement la traduction de la seconde partie du traité – la Contemplation (Théôria) – et de laisser de côté pour l’instant la première  Cfr. SC, 2 bis, Introduction, p. 25-26.

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partie, l’Historia. Il fallut ensuite obtenir le visa de la censure allemande, qui, en raison du titre, vit dans l’ouvrage un instrument de propagande juive, puis pareillement celui des autorités de Vichy. « Sources Chrétiennes » devenait ainsi, en raison des circonstances, un lieu de résistance spirituelle. 5 Malgré ces difficultés matérielles et administratives, la Collection naissante rencontra immédiatement un nombre encourageant de lecteurs, et les premiers volumes parurent à un rythme soutenu. 6 Au sortir de la guerre, la défiance suscitée auprès de censeurs ecclésiastiques par le « groupe de Fourvière » et la « nouvelle théologie », 7 perçue comme un cheval de bataille contre le thomisme, mit un temps en danger, par-delà la personne du P. de Lubac, l’existence même de la Collection. Cette crise sera finalement, elle aussi, surmontée. Pour en mesurer l’importance et les enjeux théologiques, on se reportera à l’analyse documentée qu’en a donnée l’historien Étienne Fouilloux. 8 1.3. La reconnaissance scientifique Une étape importante est franchie après le retour à Lyon de C. Mondésert qui prend en charge le « secrétariat des Sources Chrétiennes » (octobre 1947). Sans en avoir le titre, il devient progressivement le véritable directeur de la Collection, au sens où il fait valoir à son bouillant confrère J. Daniélou que « Sources Chrétiennes » ne peut vivre et se développer sans bénéficier « d’une véritable ‘organisation’, c’est-à-dire d’une ‘administration’ et d’une ‘direction’ au sens quasi industriel des mots », si l’on veut éviter l’improvisation. 9 C. Mondésert ne deviendra directeur en titre de la Collection qu’en 1960, mais la conviction que, sans lui

5 Au moment même où allait paraître la Vie de Moïse, Pierre Chaillet, un des jésuites de Fourvière pressentis pour travailler à la future Collection, fondait les Cahiers du Témoignage chrétien (1941) et s’engageait activement dans la Résistance. 6  Cfr. Fouilloux, La collection « Sources Chrétiennes », p. 88-89. 7   Employée pour la première fois par J. Daniélou dans un article de la revue jésuite Études (‘ Les orientations présentes de la pensée religieuse ’, 1946), cette expression fut en quelque sorte à l’origine de la crise, avant de désigner les positions jugées suspectes des théologiens de Fourvière.  8 Cfr. Fouilloux, La collection « Sources Chrétiennes », p. 115-132. 9 Cfr. ibid., p. 141.

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qui en fut l’infatigable artisan, elle n’aurait pas survécu à d’autres traverses et n’aurait pas connu, à coup sûr, le développement qui fut le sien, lui valut d’être rangé a posteriori (1984) parmi ses fondateurs, aux côtés d’H. de Lubac et J. Daniélou. C. Mondésert comprit rapidement que Sources Chrétiennes ne pouvait s’imposer comme une grande collection de textes qu’à condition de renforcer le caractère scientifique de ses volumes, de trouver dans le monde universitaire français et étranger des soutiens et des collaborateurs, et de tisser des relations suivies avec les grandes collections existantes de textes patristiques ou profanes. Le numéro 50 de la Collection, l’édition princeps de Huit catéchèses baptismales inédites de Jean Chrysostome (éd. A. Wenger), premier ouvrage publié avec le soutien du C.N.R.S., est à cet égard représentatif de ce qu’on a pu appeler, pour souligner cette volonté d’un ancrage scientifique et universitaire pour la Collection, le « tournant Mondésert ». 10 La reconnaissance du C.N.R.S. se traduit, dans ces mêmes années, non seulement par le soutien financier important apporté à la publication des volumes, mais bientôt (1959) par le recrutement du P. Mondésert comme « maître de recherches ». 11 Le recrutement au C.N.R.S. de trois autres jésuites – L. Doutreleau, B. de Vregille, L. Neyrand – suivra, puis celui de plusieurs laïcs jusqu’à la constitution, en 1976, d’une « Équipe de recherche associée » au C.N.R.S. On doit aussi à C. Mondésert la fondation, en 1956, de l’Association des Amis de Sources Chrétiennes, reconnue d’utilité publique en 1960, indispensable à la vie de la Collection et à la survie de l’entreprise. J’y reviendrai. C’est également, dans ces mêmes années 1960, que la Collection inaugure, à la demande des Cisterciens, la Série des Textes monastiques d’Occident, une modeste continuatio mediaevalis, 12 et qu’est lancée, peu après, en marge de « Sources Chrétiennes »,  Cfr. ibid., p. 153 s.   Il avait été recruté auparavant par le C.N.R.S. pour une durée de deux ans (1955-1957), sur un poste de chercheur contractuel, ce qui lui permit de se consacrer à temps plein au développement de la Collection. 12  Les volumes de cette série portaient à l’origine un numéro propre, pour les distinguer des écrits des Pères au sens strict du terme, dont les auteurs médiévaux n’étaient que les héritiers tardifs. 10 11

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l’édition des Œuvres complètes de Philon d’Alexandrie, 13 sous la direction de C. Mondésert, J. Pouilloux et R. Arnaldez. Ainsi peuvent être retracées à grands traits les vingt premières années d’existence de « Sources Chrétiennes ». La Collection présente déjà alors la physionomie qu’on lui connaît aujourd’hui. La présence initialement prédominante des Pères grecs tend peu à peu à s’équilibrer avec l’ouverture, dès 1947, d’une nouvelle série, celle des Pères latins avec Hilaire de Poitiers, Léon le Grand, Ambroise, puis avec celle des auteurs médiévaux. Les Pères orientaux firent eux aussi assez tôt leur entrée dans la Collection, mais restent encore aujourd’hui trop peu représentés pour refléter, dans sa diversité, la richesse du christianisme primitif. 14 La volonté initiale était bien pourtant de faire mesurer au lecteur cette diversité et de lui permettre aussi de replacer les écrits des Pères dans le contexte historique, philosophique et religieux qui leur avait donné naissance. D’où l’intérêt porté à l’héritage juif, à la littérature gnostique ou à la philosophie néoplatonicienne, dont témoignent les introductions de plusieurs volumes, mais aussi à quelques textes hétérodoxes qui trouvèrent place assez tôt dans la Collection. 15 Cela s’explique d’autant plus facilement que la naissance de « Sources Chrétiennes » coïncide avec plusieurs découvertes – celle de Toura en 1941, de Nag Hammadi en 1945, de Qumrân en 1947 – qui ont obligé à relire les écrits bibliques et ceux des Pères avec un regard élargi. Un tel contexte a sans nul doute contribué à renouveler l’intérêt porté à la littérature patristique, comme il le fit pour les études bibliques. Un autre atout pour les « Sources Chrétiennes » naissantes fut le soutien que leur apporta l’historien H. I. Marrou, alors professeur à l’Université de Lyon. Par ses travaux sur Augustin et par son enseignement, il fit s’opérer, dans l’université française, un changement radical du regard porté sur l’Antiquité tardive et la littérature patristique. 16 On lui doit d’avoir grandement   Cette série, inaugurée en 1961, aujourd’hui achevée, comporte 38 volumes.   Sur les 100 premiers numéros (1942-1965), on compte : 66 volumes grecs, 22 latins, 11 médiévaux et seulement 3 orientaux. 15 Ainsi les Extraits de Théodote (SC, 23, 1948), transmis par Clément d’Alexandrie, ou de Ptolémée, la Lettre à Flora (SC, 24, 1949). 16  Cfr. H. I. Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, Paris 1938 ; Décadence romaine ou Antiquité tardive. iiie – vie siècles, Paris, 1977 (posthume). 13 14

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contribué à permettre aux Pères de l’Église de trouver enfin droit de cité dans l’enseignement supérieur et, pour reprendre l’expression de M. Harl, d’« entrer en Sorbonne ». 17 Il leur arrive ainsi d’être régulièrement présents aujourd’hui au programme du concours de l’Agrégation des Lettres et de Grammaire. Le caractère scientifique de l’édition, autant que l’intérêt historique, littéraire ou philosophique du texte, joue évidemment un rôle essentiel dans le choix de l’ouvrage retenu.

2. Les éditions « Sources Chrétiennes » Si, depuis l’origine, les volumes de la Collection conservent la même structure et les mêmes caractères fondamentaux, ils ne constituent pas pour autant un ensemble homogène. Tous n’offrent pas une édition critique, à proprement parler, et, si tel est le cas, ces éditions ne présentent pas toutes le même degré d’érudition. Des évolutions se sont produites, dont il me faut maintenant parler. 2.1. Les premières éditions Seules les circonstances, je l’ai rappelé, empêchèrent les premiers volumes de la Collection de paraître avec le texte grec original en regard de la traduction française. Souvent pourtant ce texte avait fait l’objet d’un travail critique, plus ou moins poussé selon les cas, si bien que, dès que la situation économique le permit, une seconde édition parut avec un texte critique : ainsi La  Vie de Moïse (1955), le Protreptique (1949), les Œuvres spirituelles (1955) de Diadoque de Photicé. Ce n’était pas vrai de tous les volumes parus. Aussi plusieurs d’entre eux furent-ils ensuite réimprimés avec la seule traduction française : ainsi le De  opificio de Grégoire de Nysse (SC, 6) 18 ou Le Pré spirituel de Jean Moschus (SC, 12) ; d’autres, entièrement refondus et dotés d’un texte critique, reçurent un nouveau numéro de série : ainsi la  M. Harl, La Bible en Sorbonne ou la revanche d’Érasme, Paris, 2007.   Dans son Introduction, p. 75-76, J. Laplace donne les raisons qui l’ont conduit à suivre pour sa traduction le texte de PG, 44, en l’absence d’une édition critique satisfaisante ; s’il retient quelques variantes fournies par l’édition de G. Forbesius (1855), il juge toutefois cette édition insuffisante. 17 18

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Supplique d’Athénagore (SC,  3), 19 le Journal de voyage d’Éthérie (SC,  21) – devenue entre-temps Égérie 20 –, ou encore les Homélies sur les Nombres d’Origène (SC, 29). 21 Faute de mieux, on se contenta souvent, en ces débuts, de reprendre le texte de la Patrologie grecque ou latine de J.-P. Migne, quitte à l’amender à partir de quelques témoins manuscrits ou d’une édition existante. Telle est la solution retenue par dom B. Botte pour son édition du De sacramentis d’Ambroise (SC, 25 bis). 22 Mais pour l’édition des Sermons de Léon le Grand (SC, 22 bis), l’auteur se contenta de reprendre l’édition Ballerini (Venise, 1755) reproduite par Migne, en attendant l’édition critique annoncée par l’Académie de Vienne. Toutefois, dès qu’il prit en charge la direction effective de la Collection, Mondésert souhaita que, dans la mesure du possible, chaque volume parût accompagné d’un appareil critique. 2.2. Différents types d’édition de texte Pour des raisons similaires, les éditions de « Sources Chrétiennes » présentent toujours aujourd’hui une relative hétérogénéité. S’il existe une édition critique satisfaisante, qui rend inutile un travail « à frais nouveaux » dont l’apport serait insignifiant, le texte de cette édition est reproduit, sans son apparat critique ou avec un apparat critique réduit. Ne sont notées alors que les variantes les plus significatives. Dans tous les cas cependant, un chapitre de l’Introduction présentera les critères suivis par l’éditeur pour la constitution du texte. Cela n’interdit pas à celui qui le reprend pour « Sources Chrétiennes » d’opérer un certain nombre de choix différents de ceux de cet éditeur, à condition de les justifier. Pour prendre des exemples récents, telle est la solution retenue pour la publication dans la Collection des histoires ecclésiastiques de Socrate, Sozomène, Théodoret de Cyr et Évagre le Scolastique, ou encore pour celle de la Défense des Trois Chapitres de Facundus d’Hermiane. G. Bardy avait déjà   Remplacé par SC, 379.   Remplacé par SC, 296. 21  Remplacé par les numéros SC, 415, 442 et 461. 22  Cfr. B. Botte – éd. De sacramentis d’Ambroise de Milan (SC, 25 bis), Paris, 1961, Introd., p. 40-45. 19 20

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adopté cette solution pour l’Histoire ecclésiastique d’Eusèbe de Césarée et la justifiait en ces termes dans son « Avant-propos » : Le texte que nous reproduisons ici est, à peu de choses près, celui qui a été établi par E. Schwartz pour la collection des GCS, Leipzig, 1903. Ce texte est, à bon droit, devenu classique. Les changements que pourront y apporter les éditeurs de l’avenir ne porteront que sur des détails, et il nous semble que les travailleurs d’aujourd’hui sont sollicités par des tâches plus urgentes que la perpétuelle remise sur le métier de textes fort bien publiés déjà par leurs devanciers. 23

Cette pratique est facilitée par les accords d’échange de textes conclus entre « Sources Chrétiennes » et les grandes collections de textes patristiques, notamment le Corpus de Vienne (CSEL), le Corpus de Berlin (GCS) et le Corpus Christianorum (CCSL, CCSG). Du reste, il arrive parfois qu’un même auteur reprenne dans SC, sous la forme d’une editio minor, le texte de l’editio maior qu’il a lui-même fournie au CC – ainsi pour le Commentaire sur le Cantique d’Apponius ou, à terme, pour la Mystagogie de Maxime le Confesseur ; ou encore que, pour un même ouvrage, deux équipes travaillent conjointement, l’une à la constitution du texte critique, l’autre à sa traduction et à sa présentation, comme cela se fait actuellement pour l’édition, dans les GCS et dans SC, du Contre Julien de Cyrille d’Alexandrie. Dans de nombreux cas toutefois, malgré l’existence d’une édition savante, le travail critique exige d’être repris, soit que des témoins du texte aient été négligés ou que de nouveaux témoins aient été repérés, 24 soit que l’édition se révèle insuffisante en raison de choix malheureux opérés par l’éditeur ou de son appartenance à une génération de philologues portés à corriger le texte, à le normaliser ou à l’encombrer de conjectures érudites, souvent inutiles. Sans nullement négliger l’apport de ces 23  Cfr. G. Bardy – éd. Histoire ecclésiastique d’Eusèbe de Césarée, Livres I-IV (SC, 31), Paris, 1952, p. v-vi. 24  Ainsi pour le Livre d’étincelles de Defensor de Ligugé : l’éditeur (H. Rochais) a repris pour SC, 77 le texte de l’édition critique qu’il avait précédemment donnée au CC, 117, mais a tenu compte de deux témoins supplémentaires du ixe siècle et opéré une quarantaine de modifications par rapport à son texte initial. Dans ce cas, c’est donc l’édition de SC qui fait autorité, bien qu’elle reproduise pour l’essentiel le texte publié au CC.

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éditions, il importe donc de repartir des manuscrits, de l’analyse de la tradition manuscrite et de l’histoire de la transmission du texte. Aujourd’hui, généralement, les éditeurs de textes tendent à s’en tenir le plus possible au texte des manuscrits, à éviter les corrections facilitantes et à se garder de conjectures hasardeuses. Ainsi, malgré une base manuscrite souvent étroite, une nouvelle édition des Stromates de Clément d’Alexandrie, des traités de Tertullien, de Cyprien de Carthage, ou de plusieurs traités d’Ambroise, pour ne prendre que ces exemples, a-t-elle paru nécessaire. En réalité, chaque édition de texte a sa spécificité. Il arrive que l’éditeur dispose d’un unique manuscrit, voire seulement d’une édition ancienne réalisée à partir d’un manuscrit disparu. Toutefois, dans le cas d’un manuscrit unique ou d’un texte transmis uniquement dans une traduction de l’original grec, il peut bénéficier parfois d’une tradition indirecte importante – chaînes exégétiques, actes conciliaires, florilèges, citations d’origines diverses –, dont l’apport doit être pris en compte, surtout si elle est antérieure au manuscrit conservé. 25 Inversement le nombre des manuscrits est, en d’autres cas, si important qu’il a de quoi décourager l’éditeur et le conduit généralement à ne retenir pour l’édition de « Sources Chrétiennes » qu’un choix de manuscrits jugé représentatif de la tradition du texte, voire à renoncer à établir un stemma codicum quand il se trouve en présence d’une contamination générale et ancienne entre les manuscrits. 26 Prendre en compte la tradition indirecte présenterait alors généralement peu d’intérêt et ne conduirait qu’à retarder, peut-être sine  die, la parution de l’édition. Ainsi la collection « Sources Chrétiennes » n’a-t-elle jamais envisagé de donner une editio maior des homélies de Jean Chrysostome ou de Basile de Césarée, ni des œuvres de Grégoire le Grand : cela nécessiterait l’existence 25  Ainsi le traité de Théodoret sur La Trinité et l’Incarnation, dont je prépare l’édition, transmis par le seul Vat. gr. 841, bénéficie d’une tradition indirecte importante : extraits grecs dans la Chaîne sur l’Évangile de Luc de Nicétas et la Panoplia Dogmatica d’Euthyme Zigabène ; extraits syriaques dans le Contra Grammaticum de Sévère d’Antioche ; extraits latins de Marius Mercator. 26 Ainsi, pour ne prendre qu’un exemple, en va-t-il des Homélies sur les psaumes de Basile de Césarée, la contamination entre les mss paraissant déjà effective à l’époque des traductions qu’en fit Rufin. 

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d’instituts spécialement dédiés à l’œuvre de ces auteurs, comme l’est l’I.E.A. pour celle d’Augustin. Le choix d’une editio minor a pareillement été fait pour l’édition des Discours de Grégoire de Nazianze, dont le CCSG prépare l’editio maior qui tiendra compte non seulement de la tradition grecque, mais aussi des différentes versions de l’œuvre du « Théologien ». Il arrive, dans certains cas, que l’édition de « Sources Chrétiennes » soit une editio princeps. Ainsi, les Huit catéchèses baptismales inédites de Jean Chrysostome (SC, 50), déjà mentionnées, les commentaires de Didyme l’Aveugle Sur Zacharie (SC, 83, 84 et 85) et Sur la Genèse (SC, 233 et 244), édités à partir des papyrus de Toura par L. Doutreleau et P. Nautin, ou le Livre d’Heures du Sinaï (SC, 486). D’autres éditions présentent des textes en partie inédits : ainsi la Chaîne palestinienne sur le Psaume 118 (SC, 189 et 190) ou le Commentaire sur le Cantique de Nil d’Ancyre (SC, 403). D’autres enfin s’apparentent à une editio maior, ainsi l’édition de l’Apologie d’Aristide (SC, 470), la plus ancienne que nous ayons conservée, puisque cette édition prend en compte la totalité de la tradition du texte : la version syriaque, une métaphrase grecque (le Roman de Barlaam), une autre géorgienne, un fragment arménien, et trois fragments grecs transmis sur papyrus. Si « Sources Chrétiennes » n’a pas pour rôle de procurer à la communauté scientifique des editiones maiores, en raison de l’existence de grandes collections savantes – aux trois grands corpus déjà cités, il faut ajouter : pour Jean Damascène les Patristische Texte und Studien (PTS), pour Grégoire de Nysse les Gregorii Nysseni Opera (GNO), pour les Pères orientaux le Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (CSCO) et la Patrologia Orientalis –, elle se doit de fournir au lecteur un texte solidement établi selon les critères requis aujourd’hui pour toute édition scientifique.

3. La traduction Par rapport aux collections savantes, l’originalité de la Collection est de fournir en vis-à-vis du texte original, grec ou latin dans la majorité des cas, sa traduction. Cela relève non seulement d’une tradition française, mais d’une nécessité impérative si l’on veut 232

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rendre aujourd’hui accessibles les écrits des Pères. 27 Songeons à ce que nous devons non seulement à Jérôme et à Rufin, les traducteurs latins d’Origène, mais aussi à ceux moins illustres ou anonymes qui traduisirent en latin, en syriaque ou en arménien les œuvres de Pères grecs. Ainsi les deux grandes œuvres d’Irénée de Lyon écrites en grec, sont-elles parvenues jusqu’à nous, l’une – son traité théologique Adversus haereses – en traduction latine, l’autre – sa Démonstration de la prédication apostolique – en traduction arménienne. 28 En outre, que l’auteur du texte critique soit ou non son traducteur, il est indispensable qu’il soumette son travail à l’épreuve de la traduction pour vérifier la validité de ses choix, quitte à s’apercevoir parfois de l’impossibilité de maintenir une lectio difficilior ! Contrairement à ce que l’on a pu penser en un temps où seule l’édition critique d’un texte grec ou latin permettait d’établir une réputation de savant, la traduction n’est donc pas un genre mineur. C’est un travail difficile qui exige de celui qui l’entreprend à la fois une grande modestie et des compétences multiples. La seule science philologique n’y suffit pas. 29 L’idéal serait d’offrir, dans tous les cas, une traduction à la fois aisée et fidèle à l’original grec ou latin. Sans doute les règles de la traductologie varient-elles selon les époques, de même que toute traduction reflète un état de langue propre à chaque époque. Aussi est-il périodiquement nécessaire de donner une nouvelle traduction des textes anciens. Le traducteur d’un texte patristique prêtera donc une attention toute particulière à la traduction des termes « techniques » de son auteur en fonction aussi de l’époque et du milieu auxquels il appartient. Qu’il s’agisse d’un vocabulaire exégétique, théologique, philosophique ou ascétique, les mêmes termes ne sont pas toujours porteurs du même sens. On le voit bien dans les débats doctrinaux des ive et ve siècles. Si grande est parfois la difficulté 27  Preuve en est le choix, similaire à celui de SC, retenu par la jeune collection allemande Fontes Christiani (Bochum). 28  Quatre autres traditions fragmentaires doivent néanmoins être prises en compte : deux grecques – le papyrus d’Oxyrrhynque et un ensemble de citations patristiques –, une arménienne et une syriaque. 29  Une solide culture historique, philosophique et théologique, selon les cas, est également nécessaire.

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à traduire certains termes du vocabulaire théologique que le traducteur s’avoue vaincu et choisit de les translittérer, bien que cette solution ne puisse être qu’exceptionnelle, sous peine de rendre illisible la traduction !

4. Introduction, annotation et index L’introduction et l’annotation du texte sont deux autres éléments constitutifs des éditions de « Sources Chrétiennes ». En ce domaine aussi, depuis l’origine, des évolutions ont eu lieu. Il n’est plus nécessaire aujourd’hui de présenter longuement des auteurs qui, depuis longtemps, ont pris place dans la Collection. Ni de justifier le choix d’éditer les écrits de tel Père, pour prévenir d’éventuels censeurs ou marquer une volonté de renouveau à la fois spirituel et théologique, comme le fit H. de Lubac pour les homélies d’Origène. Sauf s’il s’agit d’un auteur moins connu, qui entre pour la première fois dans la Collection – un Nicéphore Blemmydès, par exemple –, toute biographie développée est aujourd’hui superflue. De brèves indications biographiques et historiques, destinées à situer l’œuvre dans la production littéraire de son auteur et dans le contexte qui lui a donné naissance, et un renvoi à des monographies existantes ou aux écrits du même auteur précédemment publiés dans la Collection, suffiront dans la plupart des cas. S’il peut arriver encore que la décision de publier tel ou tel texte demande à être justifiée, ce n’est plus, depuis longtemps, pour des raisons théologiques, mais plutôt à cause du caractère polémique outrancier de certains textes patristiques, ainsi celui des Discours contre les Juifs de Jean Chrysostome ou de certains traités d’Agobard de Lyon, qui risqueraient d’être perçus comme un soutien apporté à l’antisémitisme et de blesser la communauté juive. L’erreur et le danger seraient néanmoins aussi grands de vouloir occulter de tels écrits en raison de contextes particuliers ou, plus encore, pour sauvegarder l’image vénérable de l’auteur ancien. A ce compte, même si l’enjeu n’est pas du même ordre, il eût fallu s’abstenir d’éditer les Discours de Grégoire de Nazianze contre Julien, sous prétexte que leurs outrances et l’injustice des accusations portées contre l’empereur apostat risquaient de ternir la figure du théologien et du poète ! 234

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On attend d’une introduction de « Sources Chrétiennes » qu’elle situe l’œuvre dans son cadre historique et la production de son auteur, en essayant de la dater avec précision autant que faire se peut, qu’elle en indique clairement non seulement le sujet, les thèmes principaux et la structure, en fonction du genre littéraire auquel elle appartient, mais aussi l’intérêt historique, doctrinal ou spirituel. A ces différents chapitres s’ajoute toujours un exposé consacré à la transmission du texte et aux manuscrits retenus pour l’établissement du texte critique. Compte tenu du public visé, il est recommandé de ne pas trop alourdir cette partie de l’introduction, en réservant, si possible, à la publication dans une revue spécialisée, l’étude complète de la tradition manuscrite, dont ne sera fournie ici qu’une présentation synthétique. 30 Sans toujours y parvenir, nous veillons, en effet, à respecter un équilibre entre la longueur du texte, celle de sa présentation et celle de l’annotation. Pareillement, la bibliographie sera sélective et directement utile à l’étude du texte présenté, son but étant de fournir au lecteur qui le souhaite les indications nécessaires pour approfondir telle question ou vérifier le fondement de telle affirmation. Contrairement à ce qui s’est plusieurs fois pratiqué par le passé, pour certains textes, en raison de leur importance doctrinale ou spirituelle, ou encore de la difficulté particulière qui leur était reconnue – l’Adversus haereses d’Irénée de Lyon, la Vie de saint Martin par Sulpice Sévère, les traités de Tertullien ou la Règle de saint Benoît, pour ne citer que ces exemples –, la Collection n’accepte plus désormais de publier indépendamment du volume de texte un volume de commentaires. L’annotation sera toujours une annotation de bas de page, ce qui n’interdit pas la présence de quelques notes complémentaires, synthétiques, rejetées en fin de volume. Comme pour l’introduction, on veillera à ce que les notes n’écrasent pas le texte, mais en facilitent l’intelligence grâce à des parallèles bien choisis, à l’explication succincte d’un point de doctrine ou d’histoire, et attirent l’attention du lecteur sur ce qui en fait la richesse ou l’originalité. A l’évidence, un commentaire ou une homélie exégétique nécessitent 30 Telle fut par exemple la solution retenue pour l’édition des Traités de Marc le Moine – éd. G. M. de Durand (SC, 445, 455), Paris, 1999-2000.

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une annotation plus sobre que celle d’un traité doctrinal ou d’un texte historique. Cette volonté de donner la priorité au texte se traduit enfin par la présence d’un index verborum, toujours sélectif désormais, en raison de l’existence d’outils informatiques qui rendent l’exhaustivité superflue. On ne retiendra donc, en fonction de la nature du texte, qu’un nombre limité de mots, dans la mesure où ils sont représentatifs du vocabulaire exégétique, théologique ou spirituel de l’auteur. L’index scripturaire tient naturellement une place essentielle dans nos éditions, d’autant que les citations bibliques chez les Pères présentent un intérêt particulier pour l’étude des différentes formes du texte de la Bible. 31 L’utilité d’un index des noms de personnes et de lieux n’est jamais aussi grande, bien entendu, que dans un ouvrage à caractère historique.

5. Le rôle de l’Institut des « Sources Chrétiennes Née à Lyon, la Collection « Sources Chrétiennes » y a grandi et s’y est développée entre Saône et Rhône, à proximité de l’Université Catholique dont la bibliothèque complète utilement celle de l’Institut, en particulier pour les revues, et en liaison étroite et statutaire avec l’Université Lumière-Lyon 2 et la Maison de l’Orient et de la Méditerranée-Jean Pouilloux, au sein de l’unité de recherche « Histoire et Sources des Mondes antiques » du C.N.R.S. (HiSoMa). 5.1. Structure de l’Institut L’Institut rassemble autour d’un même projet, l’édition des textes patristiques, deux entités : une unité du C.N.R.S., composante de l’équipe HiSoMa, de sept membres, tous laïcs – deux chercheurs et cinq ingénieurs de recherche, trois hommes et quatre femmes, et « l’Association des amis de Sources Chrétiennes » qui salarie quatre personnes – une assistante de direction, une bibliothécaire chargée également de la publication assistée par ordina31  Témoins les éditions critiques de la Septante procurées par l’entreprise de Göttingen (1931-) et, pour les « vieilles latines », celles de Beuron (1945-).

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teur (P.A.O.), une relectrice et un chercheur associé, un jésuite mis à la disposition de l’équipe par la Compagnie. L’Association fournit également à l’unité C.N.R.S. les locaux qui l’abritent et la logistique nécessaire à son activité. Fondée par des pères jésuites, la Collection fut dirigée de fait par le P. Claude Mondésert, pendant près de quarante ans, puis par son successeur, le P. Dominique Bertrand, de 1984 à 1994. A cette date, selon le souhait de la Compagnie de Jésus, la direction en a été confiée pour la première fois au laïc que je suis, chercheur au C.N.R.S., qui prit également en charge, en 1999, la direction de l’Institut. Depuis 2007, un autre laïc, lui aussi chercheur au C.N.R.S., M. Bernard Meunier, exerce à son tour ces deux fonctions directoriales. A l’intérieur des trois grands domaines couverts par la Collection – grec, latin et oriental –, a été instituée au sein de l’équipe, à partir des années 2000, une répartition des tâches par pôles : trois pôles principaux pour les Pères grecs (Alexandrie, Antioche, Cappadoce) et trois autres pour les Pères latins (Italie, Afrique romaine, Gaule), auxquels s’ajoutent un pôle pour les « Pères Orientaux » (syriaque, arménien, géorgien) et un autre pour le Moyen Âge occidental. Pour des raisons d’efficacité dans le suivi des dossiers et des relations avec les collaborateurs, chaque membre de l’équipe a en charge, sous la responsabilité du directeur, au moins l’un de ces pôles. 5.2. Les collaborateurs de la Collection Telle est donc aujourd’hui la structure qui assure la révision et la préparation des manuscrits en vue de leur publication. Elle bénéficie d’un réseau étendu de collaborateurs, en France et à l’étranger, en Europe surtout, mais aussi en Amérique du Nord et jusqu’en Australie, sans lequel la Collection ne saurait se développer au rythme qui est le sien. Religieux ou clercs, à l’origine, ces collaborateurs sont majoritairement aujourd’hui des laïcs, enseignants d’universités ou chercheurs, de confession chrétienne, mais aussi israélite, voire pour certains agnostiques. Cela tient au fait que l’histoire de l’Antiquité tardive chrétienne et la littérature patristique ont trouvé droit de cité dans l’Université, et que l’exception française d’une université laïque, au sens étroit du terme, a progressivement laissé place à une vision plus 237

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ouverte et moins réductrice de l’héritage gréco-latin. De ce fait, les travaux universitaires sur les auteurs chrétiens des premiers siècles, longtemps demeurés terra incognita, se sont multipliés sous forme de mémoires, de thèses et d’éditions de textes. La réforme récente en France et, dans plusieurs pays européens, de la thèse de doctorat ès lettres a également contribué à élargir le vivier des éditeurs de textes anciens, dont les recherches aboutissent assez régulièrement à une publication dans « Sources Chrétiennes ». Cette situation présente plusieurs avantages. Elle permet d’apprécier le niveau scientifique de la thèse soutenue et l’aptitude de son auteur à opérer les ajustements nécessaires entre un ouvrage destiné à un jury universitaire et un volume de « Sources Chrétiennes » qui s’adresse à un autre type de lectorat. Elle permet aussi, grâce à des contacts suivis avec les professeurs d’université chargés d’un enseignement touchant l’antiquité tardive, de susciter des recherches dans le domaine patristique, voire de constituer une équipe en vue de l’édition d’une œuvre donnée. C’est l’un des rôles des instances scientifiques mises en place depuis la fin des années Mondésert. 5.3. Instances scientifiques Elles sont aujourd’hui au nombre de deux : un Conseil scientifique, qui se réunit une fois l’an, composé des acteurs de l’Institut et d’un représentant de chacune des principales universités ou centres de recherche français délivrant un enseignement touchant l’antiquité tardive chrétienne, 32 et une Commission, émanation de ce même Conseil. Le rôle de celle-ci est de juger de la recevabilité des propositions adressées à l’Institut et de nommer des réviseurs pour les manuscrits déposés, qui présenteront leur rapport au Conseil scientifique. Pour chaque auteur désireux de publier un texte dans « Sources Chrétiennes », les étapes à observer sont les suivantes : 1. Acceptation de la proposition par la Commission et validation par le Conseil ; 2. Convention signée par l’Institut avec l’auteur ; 3. Remise du manuscrit et désignation d’un relecteur ; 4. Rapport scientifique du rappor32  Le Conseil bénéficie régulièrement d’un représentant des universités francophones de Suisse et, plus épisodiquement, d’un représentant des universités d’Italie, avec lesquelles les collaborations sont nombreuses.

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teur devant le Conseil ; 5. Acceptation ou refus par le Conseil du manuscrit pour la publication. Une fois accepté pour la publication, le manuscrit est confié à un membre de l’équipe qui en assure la révision, non seulement pour s’assurer de sa conformité avec les normes de la Collection, précisées dans un volume de Directives, mais aussi pour vérifier l’exactitude de la traduction, la lisibilité et la cohérence de l’apparat critique, l’exactitude des renvois bibliographiques, celle des index, etc. C’est là un travail patient et minutieux, qui suppose d’ordinaire des échanges suivis avec l’auteur auquel peuvent être proposés des aménagements ou des corrections. Ce travail est toujours grandement facilité si des contacts ont été pris très tôt entre l’auteur du manuscrit et un membre de l’équipe.

6. Aide à l’édition des textes fournie par l’Institut Aujourd’hui « Sources Chrétiennes » n’a plus la possibilité de reprendre ou remanier en profondeur des parties entières du manuscrit d’un auteur, comme purent le faire en leur temps les PP. Mondésert, Doutreleau ou Vregille et d’autres membres de l’équipe. Cela se produit encore pourtant, non sans réclamer un gros investissement de la part de la personne qui en est chargée, lorsque la mort a empêché l’auteur de mettre la dernière main à son manuscrit. De manière générale, l’aide fournie aux collaborateurs de la Collection, quelle que soit son importance, est toujours appréciée, voire indispensable. Elle se traduit par la mise à disposition de toute une série d’informations pratiques et de documents que chaque collaborateur ou futur éditeur d’un texte patristique peut trouver sur le site de « Sources Chrétiennes » 33 et charger librement, qui lui fourniront, à côté du volume de Directives, une réponse claire à la plupart de ses questions. Plus largement, la consultation du site permet de connaître les travaux et les projets d’édition en cours, mais aussi les textes libres et ceux que la Collection souhaiterait voir éditer.

33 Adresse du site : ‹http://www.sources-chretiennes.mom.fr› ; liens avec le site des éditions du Cerf et plusieurs autres sites. 

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Elle se traduit aussi par l’organisation, chaque année, depuis bientôt vingt ans, d’une semaine de formation à l’édition des textes anciens, précédée pour celles et ceux qui le souhaitent d’une initiation à la paléographie grecque. Cette « semaine d’ecdotique » accueille régulièrement vingt à vingt-cinq jeunes chercheurs français et étrangers, désireux d’éditer un texte grec ou latin, qu’il soit ou non patristique. La formation, naturellement axée sur l’édition de textes patristiques, comporte une série de conférences générales traitant de chaque aspect de l’ecdotique : la recherche des manuscrits, leur collation, leur classement, la rédaction de l’apparat ; la traduction, l’introduction et les notes; l’attention à porter au texte biblique, à l’histoire et aux realia, et bien sûr au caractère doctrinal du texte. Ces exposés se doublent de travaux pratiques sous la forme d’ateliers de grec ou de latin, animés par les membres de l’équipe, où, par groupes de six ou huit personnes, chacun est amené à parcourir les différentes étapes de l’édition, depuis la lecture et la collation de manuscrits jusqu’à la constitution d’un texte critique, de ses apparats – critique et scripturaire – et sa traduction. L’intégration au sein d’une équipe, parfois internationale, réunie autour d’un projet donné, est une autre manière encore d’apporter un soutien aux collaborateurs de « Sources Chrétiennes », dans la mesure où les échanges sont alors facilités et où s’exerce librement un contrôle mutuel entre spécialistes de disciplines différentes, qu’il s’agisse de l’élaboration du texte critique, de la traduction ou des notes. Ainsi ont été lancés plusieurs chantiers, certains déjà anciens et proches de leur achèvement – l’édition des traités de Tertullien, celle des Discours de Grégoire de Nazianze, celle des Institutions divines de Lactance –, d’autres plus récents pour l’édition des traités de Cyprien de Carthage, des œuvres complètes de Bernard de Clairvaux, des traités de Grégoire de Nysse. Dernièrement ont été mises en place une équipe internationale pour l’édition des traités d’Ambroise de Milan et une autre pour ceux de Jérôme, une équipe franco-italienne pour l’édition des Homélies sur les psaumes de Basile de Césarée, et une équipe franco-allemande pour celle du Contre Julien de Cyrille d’Alexandrie. Un autre grand chantier, le projet Biblindex, destiné lui aussi à apporter une aide aux éditeurs de textes patristiques, a été 240

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récemment ouvert en marge de la Collection, 34 avec le soutien du C.N.R.S. Sous la responsabilité d’un membre de notre équipe, Mme Laurence Mellerin, le projet fédère plusieurs centres de recherche et universités d’Europe. On trouvera sur le site de « Sources Chrétiennes » tous les renseignements souhaités sur cette base informatique qui intègre déjà toutes les données publiées dans Biblia Patristica par le Centre d’Analyse et de Documentation Patristiques (C.A.D.P.) de Strasbourg. Dès aujourd’hui consultable, la base est destinée à s’enrichir de milliers de références supplémentaires, « l’objectif étant à terme de permettre le repérage des citations et allusions bibliques de toute la littérature juive et chrétienne de l’Antiquité et du Moyen Âge ». Déjà, dans son état actuel, avec plus de 650.000 références, elle permet d’accéder à une meilleure connaissance de la Bible des Pères grecs et latins, et, dans un avenir proche, des Pères orientaux. Avec le projet en cours de La Bible d’Alexandrie aux éditions du Cerf, 35 auquel contribuent plusieurs collaborateurs de « Sources Chrétiennes », Biblindex est très représentatif de ce double mouvement de la recherche actuelle, qui va de la Bible aux Pères et des Pères à la Bible, comme pour mieux souligner le lien qui unit les deux domaines de recherche. Telle qu’elle se présente aujourd’hui, avec plus de 560 volumes et un accroissement de 8 à 9 titres nouveaux par an, en moyenne, la Collection « Sources Chrétiennes » offre déjà un panorama assez complet de la littérature patristique. Certes des manques demeurent criants, notamment en ce qui concerne les Pères orientaux. Mais enfin la littérature des trois premiers siècles y est largement représentée : les apologistes et Irénée dans leur totalité, Tertullien en grande partie et aussi Cyprien de Carthage, Clément et Origène pour l’essentiel. On peut déjà y lire, au fil des siècles, une histoire de l’exégèse, de la théologie et de la christologie, du monachisme, de la spiritualité orientale et occidentale. Y suivre aussi, dans une certaine mesure, les diverses expressions de la vie liturgique ou les préoccupations pastorales des Pères concer  Adresse du site : ‹http://www.biblindex.mom.fr›.   Cette collection a entrepris depuis 1986, sous la direction de M. Harl, la traduction en français et l’annotation des livres de la Septante (texte de A. Rahlfs) ; une vingtaine de volumes est déjà publiée. 34 35

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nant l’instruction des fidèles (catéchèses) et la vie chrétienne. Enfin toutes les grandes histoires ecclésiastiques sont désormais publiées, depuis celle d’Eusèbe jusqu’à celle d’Évagre le Scolastique, en passant par celle de Philostorge, la seule à fournir le point de vue d’un hétérodoxe. Ce bilan honorable est dû en grande partie à l’audace et à la ténacité de nos fondateurs, à celle de Claude Mondésert en particulier, au courage des directeurs des éditions du Cerf qui ont pris le risque de courir cette « aventure » 36 en un temps où la prudence semblait le déconseiller, au soutien que le C.N.R.S. a jusqu’ici accordé à « Sources Chrétiennes », à celui que lui apportent les milieux universitaires et la Compagnie de Jésus, et bien sûr au travail quotidien de l’équipe « Sources Chrétiennes ». On ne saurait oublier l’importance que joue depuis cinquante ans l’A.I.E.P. en faveur des études patristiques grâce au réseau que constituent son Annuaire et son Bulletin, grâce aussi aux rencontres quadriennales d’Oxford, un lieu d’échanges privilégié entre chercheurs du monde entier. Ce n’est pas par hasard si J. Daniélou en fut, dès le début, un fidèle participant, et, à sa suite, C. Mondésert qui assura en 1979 le secrétariat de l’A.I.E.P. et manifesta ici encore ses talents d’organisateur, avec l’appui efficace de Mlle M.-L. Guillaumin. 37 C’est là que ce sont noués des contacts nombreux et des amitiés solides.

36  Le mot est emprunté au titre de la conférence que prononça C. Mondésert à Naples, en 1986, intitulée « Sources Chrétiennes : une aventure de quarante-cinq années » et publiée dans Alle sorgenti della cultura cristiana, Naples, 1987, p. 21-46. 37 Voir Bulletin des amis de Sources Chrétiennes, 42 (juin 1980) : « Sans doute la Collection pourrait-elle être encore plus et mieux connue, et devrait-elle avoir une clientèle plus étendue, mais à ces progrès souhaitables deux faits récents apporteront peut-être une contribution efficace : la publication et la diffusion de la brochure Pour lire les Pères de l’Église (Foi Vivante, 196) [...] ; et la prise en charge, par l’Institut des Sources Chrétiennes, du Secrétariat général de l’Association Internationale des Études Patristiques, charge qui nous a été imposée l’an dernier, au Congrès d’Oxford, charge qui est onéreuse à tous points de vue, mais qui permet d’étendre et de perfectionner encore notre réseau de relations internationales. C’est grâce aux longs efforts et à l’esprit méthodique d’une de nos collaboratrices, Marie-Louise Guillaumin, que les archives et la comptabilité de cette Association ont été remises en ordre, après une grande débâcle, suite de maladies et de décès prématurés parmi les responsables ; aujourd’hui, nous venons d’achever la rédaction d’un premier Annuaire et nous préparons pour l’automne un Bulletin d’information sur les travaux en cours, les projets,

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De même que les responsables actuels de notre Association ont récemment relayé un appel en faveur de l’I.E.A., je voudrais à mon tour, en terminant, attirer l’attention des membres de l’A.I.E.P. sur la situation de fragilité dans laquelle se trouve aujourd’hui « Sources Chrétiennes ». Les lecteurs du Bulletin de l’Association des Amis de Sources Chrétiennes ont pu, depuis plusieurs années, constater l’existence d’un déficit important et récurrent, hélas structurel, dans les finances de l’Association des Amis. Il nous a contraints en 2009 à abandonner les locaux que nous occupions dans un bâtiment de l’Université Catholique en raison de notre impossibilité à continuer d’en acquitter le loyer. L’accueil, à titre gracieux pour six ans, dans des locaux appartenant à la Compagnie de Jésus, a permis d’éviter le pire, mais pour un temps limité. D’autre part, la politique actuelle du C.N.R.S. ne laisse pas espérer un renouvellement prochain des postes de chercheurs ou d’ingénieurs, dernièrement partis en retraite. Il devient donc de plus en plus difficile de maintenir le rythme des publications. A cela s’ajoutent la baisse du lectorat, les difficultés que connaît l’édition religieuse surtout scientifique, une inculture grandissante en matière religieuse, en France du moins, la disparition progressive des enseignements du latin et du grec dans nos établissements scolaires et, par voie de conséquence, à l’Université. Sans catastrophisme, il nous faut donc regarder la réalité en face. Je ne voudrais pas achever sur cette note sombre la célébration des cinquante ans de l’A.I.E.P. L’existence de plusieurs collections de textes patristiques, conçues sur un modèle proche de celui de « Sources Chrétiennes », 38 ou proposant à un public plus large une bonne vulgarisation, 39 l’existence de plusieurs revues patristiques, le nombre de personnes qui, le temps de la retraite les publications, les colloques et congrès, et toutes les manifestations de l’activité patristique dans le monde entier » (C. Mondésert). 38 La Bibliothèque Augustinienne, Paris, 1933, précéda de quelque dix ans la naissance de SC, qui vit à sa suite fleurir plusieurs autres collections : Early Christian Texts, Oxford, 1972 ; Corona Patrum, Turin, 1975 ; Biblioteca Patristica, Florence-Bologne, 1980 ; Fontes Christiani, Bochum ; Fuentes Patristicas, Madrid, 1991. 39  Cfr. les collections : Ancient Christian Writers, 1946 ; Fathers of the Church, 1947 ; Collana di Testi Patristici,  1976 ; Les Pères dans la foi,  1977 ; Spiritualité Orientale, 1968 ; Philocalie des Pères neptiques, 1979.

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venu, souhaitent se former dans les domaines de la théologie, de l’exégèse et de la patristique, le succès répété depuis quinze ans de notre semaine ecdotique, l’intérêt et les réactions suscités par des séries télévisées récentes comme Corpus Christi ou Les Origines du christianisme de Gérard Mordillat et Jérôme Prieur, l’écho rencontré dans les milieux cultivés par la découverte de nouvelles lettres, 40 puis de nouveaux sermons d’Augustin, 41 et dernièrement, celle de nouvelles homélies d’Origène sur les psaumes dans un manuscrit de Munich et dans l’original grec, sont autant de signes encourageants. Que les Pères aient encore quelque chose à dire à l’homme d’aujourd’hui et ne soient pas seulement un simple patrimoine à conserver pieusement, cela peut être compris de beaucoup : eux aussi ont cherché à entrer en dialogue avec le monde de leur temps, avec le judaïsme, avec la philosophie, avec d’autres religions, non sans difficultés ou même maladresses ; eux aussi se sont heurtés à l’indifférence, à l’incompréhension, à l’hostilité, mais ont poursuivi leur quête de Dieu et de l’homme. Ils ont en tout cas trop écrit sur la Providence pour que nous doutions de son assistance. Encore faut-il trouver les moyens qui lui permettront de se déployer. Mais surtout, comme l’écrit Michel Fédou dans un ouvrage récent : Aujourd’hui pas plus qu’hier, l’intelligence de la foi ne peut se passer d’une référence vivante aux écrits patristiques. Dire cela ne signifie pas que tout théologien doive être un spécialiste en patrologie, mais que – comme à d’autres époques, bien que de manières nécessairement nouvelles – la fréquentation des Pères doit pour sa part contribuer aux tâches de la théologie. 42

40  En 1975, Johannes Divjak identifiait, à la Bibliothèque municipale de Marseille, un lot de 29 lettres d’Augustin, parmi lesquelles 27 étaient jusque-là totalement inconnues, aujourd’hui éditées dans la Bibliothèque Augustinienne (BA, 46 B), Paris, 1987. 41 En 1990, François Dolbeau découvrait 62 sermons d’Augustin dans un manuscrit de la Bibliothèque municipale de Mayence, édités (latin) par l’inventeur sous le titre Vingt-six sermons au peuple d’Afrique, retrouvés à Mayence (Collection des Études Augustiniennes, 147), Institut d’Études augustiniennes, Paris, 1996 (2e ed. 2009). 42 M. Fédou, Les Pères de l’Église et la théologie chrétienne, Éditions Facultés Jésuites de Paris, Paris, 2013, p. 11.

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Le temps est loin désormais où « Sources Chrétiennes » suscitait des inquiétudes dans les milieux thomistes et semblait à des censeurs sourcilleux favoriser une tentative de subversion de la scolastique ! Le concile Vatican II, auquel furent invités à participer comme experts les PP. H. de Lubac et Jean Daniélou, en a fourni la preuve. Aussi pouvons-nous emprunter encore à M. Fédou les mots qui serviront de conclusion à notre propos : La mémoire des Pères, dès lors qu’elle devient présence, est par le fait même inspiration pour l’avenir. Elle suscite donc de nouveaux langages sur la foi, selon la nouveauté des lieux et des temps. Plus le théologien aura fréquenté les Pères, plus il éprouvera la nécessité intérieure de parler à son propre compte et dans son propre langage (...), parce que le contact même avec leurs écrits lui aura apporté une lumière inattendue, apte à susciter ou à féconder son propre travail d’intelligence de la foi. 43

Bibliographie Littérature secondaire M. Fédou, Les Pères de l’Église et la théologie chrétienne, Éditions Facultés Jésuites de Paris, Paris, 2013. É. Fouilloux, La collection « Sources Chrétiennes » : Éditer les Pères de l’Église au xxe siècle, Paris, 1995, 2e édition, 2011. M. Harl, La Bible en Sorbonne ou la revanche d’Érasme, Paris, 2007. H. I.  Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 2 vols., Paris, 1938. C. Mondésert, ‘Sources Chrétiennes : une aventure de quarante-cinq années’, dans Alle sorgenti della cultura cristiana, Naples, 1987, p. 21-46. ‹http://www.sources-chretiennes.mom.fr›. ‹http://www.biblindex.mom.fr›.

  Ibid., p. 337-338. 

43

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Abstracts La coïncidence de la célébration des cinquante ans de l’AIEP avec les soixante-dix ans de la collection Sources Chrétiennes fournit l’occasion du présent exposé. Une première partie retrace à grands traits l’histoire de la Collection depuis sa genèse, au scolasticat de la Compagnie de Jésus, à Lyon, sur la colline de Fourvière, puis sa naissance dans les années les plus sombres de la guerre et de l’occupation (1941/1942), jusqu’à la reconnaissance scientifique que lui ont apportée le CNRS et l’Université à partir de 1950. Sont mises ensuite en évidence les caractéristiques des éditions de Sources Chrétiennes. Un regard rétrospectif porté sur les premiers volumes permet de mesurer les évolutions qui se sont produites depuis soixante-dix ans. Les exigences scientifiques ont été renforcées, mais la physionomie générale des volumes demeure inchangée, comme la volonté de rendre accessibles au lecteur les écrits des Pères grâce à des introductions substantielles, des traductions fidèles et un appareil de notes et d’index. La dernière partie de l’exposé insiste sur le rôle de l’Institut qui assure la vie de la Collection et sur l’aide qu’il apporte aux chercheurs et aux éditeurs de textes patristiques. The coinciding of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the IAPS with the seventieth anniversary of the Sources Chrétiennes collection provides an opportunity for this essay. Its first part recounts in broad terms the history of the Collection from its origins, in the seminary of the Society of Jesus in Lyon – on Fourvière hill, to its inception in the darkest hours of the war and the occupation (1941-1942), leading to its scientific recognition through the CNRS and the University from 1950 onwards. The paper then highlights the main characteristics of Sources Chrétiennes. A retrospective glance at the first volumes enables the reader to grasp the evolutions that have happened in the last seventy years. The scientific requirements have been strengthened, but the general presentation of volumes remain unchanged, as is the intention to make the writings of the Fathers accessible to the reader thanks to substantial introductions, faithful translations and a system of notes and indexes. The last part of the essay insists on the role of the Institute which is central to the life of the Collection and on the support it provides to researchers and to editors of patristic texts.

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What has Islam to do with patristic studies, and what can patristic studies contribute to our understanding of early Islam? In Jerusalem, in the context of a conference concerned with the discipline of patristic studies, these seem to be questions worth asking. For the most part, scholars of early Islam and of the Qur’an, and patristic scholars, seem to operate in different worlds. Not only are disciplinary boundaries maintained but also methodologies, questions and approaches. I was first struck by this in the 1980s, not in relation to patristic studies, but to late antique history, when I joined with two colleagues in Arabic and in Islamic archaeology to set up a series of workshops and a publication series that became Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam. Our aim was rather simple – to come together and learn from each other. Many volumes have been published in the series since then. 1 However, theology, of a patristic sort, did not feature very much in our enterprise, and a companion series, The Formation of the Classical Islamic World, 2 does not cover patristic themes. What then do patristics and early Islam have to do with each other? I have noticed that in the annual bulletin of the International Association of Patristic Studies there are no sections on

1  Edited by L. I. Conrad, J. Scheiner, Princeton, NJ, currently running to 24 volumes; sadly the volume that should have collected workshop papers on culture and religion has not appeared. 2  Also edited by L. I. Conrad, also far running to 24 titles, but published by Ashgate.

10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107521

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Christianity, or patristics, and Islam (unlike the section on Christianity and Judaism). Yet the question of connection seems all the more worth asking now, when one can detect a distinct current trend towards seeing the emergence of Islam as a phenomenon of late antiquity, and Islam not as a sudden eruption from the deserts of Arabia, but also as a product – in whatever way – of the religious framework of the eastern Mediterranean. We can see this trend among historians of late antiquity and among scholars of the Qur’an and early Islam alike: take for instance a recent publication, the Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity, published in 2012, where we find a chapter by Robert Hoyland with the title ‘Early Islam as a late antique religion’, 3 in which Hoyland lists one by one the features of early Islam that in his opinion are characteristic of late antiquity. It is also commonly stated that Islam was a product of the so-called ‘Judaeo-Christian’ world. One does not have to look as far as the well-known sceptical studies of early Islam by scholars such as John Wansborough, Gerald Hawting or Patricia Crone and Michael Cook, whose book Hagarism came out in 1977, 4 when such current works on the Qur’an as those by scholars such as Angelika Neuwirth or Gabriel Reynolds are also thinking in terms of a late antique context. 5 Within late antique scholarship there has been a decisive turn to the east, to the mixed and culturally and linguistically rich world of the eastern Mediterranean and eastern Christianity; within such a perspective, not only does Byzantium itself seem faraway, but is also hard to accommodate in the new historical scenarios. A recent book by Garth Fowden places the emergence of Islam within an expanded late antiquity that con-

3   R. G. Hoyland, ‘Islam as a late antique religion’, in Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity – ed. S. F. Johnson, New York, 2012, p. 1053-1077. 4  P. Crone, M. Cook, Hagarism. The Making of the Islamic World, Cambridge, 1977; cfr. J. E. Wansborough, The Sectarian Milieu. Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History, Oxford, 1978; G. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam. From Polemic to History, Cambridge, 1999. 5  The Qur’an in its Historical Context – ed. G. S. Reynolds, London, 2008; New Perspectives on the Qur’an. The Qur’an in its Historical Context 2 – ed. G. S. Reynolds, London, 2011; A. Neuwirth, Der Koran als Text der Spätantike. Ein europäischer Zugang, Berlin, 2010; The Qur’an in Context. Historical and Literary Investigations into the Qur’anic Milieu – ed. A. Neuwirth, N. Sinai, M. Marx, Leiden, 2010.

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tinued, in his view, even as late as the first millennium. A very different book by Aziz al-Azmeh is entitled, uncompromisingly, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity. 6 Its author, a specialist in Arabic and Islam, argues for a ‘Palaeo-Muslim’ phase deeply embedded in the religious milieu of late antiquity. 7 In this powerful book he too argues for Islam as a product of late antiquity and places a strong emphasis on the shared concept of universal empire. The establishment of university chairs in the study of the ‘Abrahamic religions’, as has happened recently for instance at both Oxford and Cambridge, indicates another current tendency, whereby the similarities, rather than the differences, between Judaism, Christianity and Islam are made the focus of exploration. 8 In the latter context, the implications of monotheism have become a central topic. 9 Against such a background, the question that has been neglected up to now, of what if anything patristic studies can contribute to the discussion, seems a very pressing one. There may be several reasons why it has not been raised in this form before. The first relates to the prevailing discipline of late antique studies or late antique history, to which Christian materials are of course basic, but which rarely engages in theological, or what we might call patristic issues as such, leaving these for   G. Fowden, Before and After Muhammad. The First Millenium Refocused, Princeton, 2013; cfr. Fowden, ‘The Umayyad horizon’, Journal of Roman Archaeology, 25.2 (2012), p. 974-982. Cfr. A. al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity: Allah and His People, Cambridge, 2014. 7  A. al-Azmeh, Rom, das Neue Rom und Baghdad. Pfade der Spätantike, Carl Heinrich Becker Lecture 2008, Berlin, 2008. However al-Azmeh sees the Christian elements as ‘sedimentary fragments of early Christianity ... preserved in the fringe’ (p. 70). 8  Indeed, Guy Stroumsa, the first holder of the Oxford chair, has addressed some of my present questions in a recent paper, though from the different perspective of a historian of religions and ideas: see G. G. Stroumsa, ‘Athens, Jerusalem and Mecca: the patristic crucible of the Abrahamic religions’, Studia Patristica, 62.10 (2013), p. 153-168, delivered as the opening lecture at the 16th International Patristic Conference in Oxford in 2011; he remarks at p. 156 that ‘patristic literature, in particular, offers a major, if undervalued, testimony to the background of the Qur’anic view of Abraham and of its religion’, in ‘a kind of praeparatio islamica’, in which ‘central tenets of the new religion were already incipient in late antique patterns of thought and behaviour’. 9 Already raised by G. Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth. Consequences of Monotheism in Late Antiquity, Princeton, 1993, and see below. Al-Azmeh downplays the theme, as also patristic and Jewish ‘influences’. 6

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‘theology’, or, after a certain chronological point, to specialist historians or theologians of the Orthodox church. Another reason is the well-known slowness with which Christians of the seventh and eighth centuries seem to have engaged with Islam as a new religion, or, if and when they did, their apparent lack of detailed knowledge. The famous chapter on Islam added to John of Damascus’s On heresies has often been cited as a case in point, all the more surprising if John had the upbringing in Umayyad Damascus ascribed to him in later hagiography. 10 One of the earliest indications of knowledge of specifically Qur’anic themes is found in the Hodegos of Anastasius of Sinai of the late seventh century. 11 Anastasius travelled extensively, and his writings also contain references to Muslims and to Muslim building in Jerusalem. As one would of course expect, awareness of Muslims is also apparent in other seventh-century writings, but it is harder to find Christians engaging with specific teachings. The problem of this chronological gap has been discussed many times, and awareness of what seems to a modern observer to be a rather surprising fact has perhaps also had the effect of discouraging a closer engagement by patristic scholars with actual scholarship on early Islam – and certainly of course vice versa. Put another way, the search for ‘sources’ about early Islam, the intense discussion of its earliest phase of historical development and the excellent recent work done from this point of view on the non-Muslim sources by Robert Hoyland and others, 12 has tended to obscure the sorts of questions which might be of most interest to patristic scholars. The dating of surviving

10   R. Le Coz, Jean Damascène. Écrits sur l’Islam (SC, 383), Paris, 1992. John of Damascus’s treatment of Islam as a Christian heresy is perfectly understandable in the context of his On heresies and its debts to earlier heresiological writing, as Guy Stroumsa has also brought out: G. G.  Stroumsa, ‘Barbarians or heretics? Jews and Arabs in the mind of Byzantium (fourth to eighth centuries)’, in Jews in Byzantium. Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures – ed. R. Bonfil et al., Leiden, 2012, p. 761-776, in partic. p. 772-774. 11 See S. H.  Griffith, ‘Anastasius of Sinai, the Hodegos and the Muslims’, Greek Orthodox Theological Review, 32.4 (1987), p. 341-358. 12 See R. G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It. A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam, 13), Princeton, 1997.

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works is also a key factor, and again, it is not surprising to find that awareness increases in the late seventh and eighth centuries. 13 Investigating Christian-Muslim awareness in that period is very different from positing Christian influences on the very earliest stages of Muhammad’s teaching and its expression in the Qur’an. Finally, we must recognize that a different, but substantial, proportion of the scholarship on Christian and Muslim relations in the early period springs from an inter-faith and interconfessional context. 14 Understandable though it is, this too can act as a determinant of the questions that are asked, or at least constitute a particular set of objectives. There is at present a renewed and intense interest in the origins of Islam, not only among Qur’anic scholars, but also as historians of late antiquity bring the early Islamic period into their purview. I need hardly say that such an enterprise is fraught with difficulties, not least because the Qur’an itself tells us so little about the historical background from which it sprang that the subject has lent itself to some very radical re-interpretation, including the hypothesis, published under a pseudonym, that it originated in a Christian milieu and found expression in Syrian Aramaic rather than Arabic. 15 It is not surprising if, on the one hand, many scholars have and still do accept the basic version presented in the later Arabic sources, the hadith and the sira, or if they have turned, on the other, like Crone and Cook, to what can be gleaned from the non-Muslim contemporary sources. Even accepting an Arabian context for the Qur’an (which is now 13   See for instance V. Déroche, ‘Polémique anti-Judaïque et emergence de l’Islam (viie-viiie siècles)’, Revue des Études Byzantines, 57 (1999), p. 141-161. 14 See for instance The Encounter of Eastern Christianity with Early Islam – ed. E. Grypeou, M. Swanson, D. Thomas, Leiden, 2006; Christians and Muslims in Dialogue in the Islamic Orient of the Middle Ages – ed. M. Tamcke, Beirut, Würzburg, 2007, and especially the major work of David Thomas, Professor of Christianity and Islam, and Nadir Dinshaw, Professor of Interreligious Relations, at the University of Birmingham, as editors of the series The History of Christian-Muslim Relations, published by Brill, with the five-volume Christian and Muslim Relations, a Bibliographical History, also published by Brill, Leiden, 2009-2013. 15  C. Luxenburg, Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran. Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koranssprache, rev. ed., Berlin, 2004. For English translation, see Id., The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran, Berlin, 2007.

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far from being generally agreed), it is often stated that we know much more about Judaea and Palestine in the first century than we do about Arabia in the early seventh. However, recent scholarship does in fact have something to contribute on the penetration of Arabia by Christianity. Furthermore, we also now know from recent scholarship much more about Christianity in the Sasanian empire. It was not simply a matter of a possible encounter with the Greek and Syriacspeaking Christians of the Byzantine empire, previously written off in many accounts as dominated by Monophysites/Miaphysites who were supposed to have welcomed the Arabs because of alienation from the imperial religion of Constantinople. Nor is there any need nowadays to rely on the traditional figure of a Nestorian monk as the likely source of Christian material in the Qur’an. Christians themselves were on the move. A recent study by Joel Walker has revealed the extent of formal religious debates both between Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, and between Christians themselves, sponsored by the Sasanian court, and he and others have written about the travels of East and West Christian holy men in the Sasanian empire. 16 The Spiritual Meadow by John Moschus indicates a dense world of monastic travel within the Roman empire itself. 17 Inside the Sasanian empire, the School of Nisibis produced a line of Christian scholars, exegetes and wandering scholars. It clearly had a scriptorium, as did the Christian monastery founded by Chosroes II at Hulwan in western Iran, 18 while the East Syrian monastery at 16   J. T.  Walker, The Legend of Mar Qardagh. Narrative and Christian Heroism in Late Antique Iraq, Berkeley, 2006; see also P. Wood, ‘We have no King but Christ.’ Christian Political Thought in Greater Syria on the Eve of the Arab Conquest (c. 400-585), Oxford, 2010; Averil Cameron, Dialoguing in Late Antiquity, Washington, D.C., 2014, chapter 2. 17 See P. Booth, Crisis of Empire. Doctrine and Dissent at the End of Antiquity, Berkeley, 2013. 18  Walker, The Legend of Mar Qardagh, p. 329-330. On learning at Qenneshre in Mesopotamia: J. Tannous, ‘You are what you read. Qenneshre and the Miaphysite church in the seventh century’, in History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East – ed. P. Wood, Oxford, 2013, p. 83-102. On Christian Arabs in the Roman empire before Islam, and for the term ‘Arab’, see now F. Millar, Religion, Language and Community in the Roman Near East. Constantine to Muhammad, Oxford, 2014, p. 138-151, with R. G.  Hoyland, Arabia and the Arabs. From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam, Oxford, 2001.

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Kharg in the Persian Gulf had a library with wall niches to hold its books. 19 Probably the most striking development has been in recent scholarship on the kingdom of Himyar in South Yemen (southwest Arabia), which is richly documented in inscriptions and written texts. In the early sixth century this kingdom had a Jewish ruler, who instigated a pogrom of Christians (who had long been established in the kingdom). It provoked a joint expedition from Byzantium and the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia (Axum) across the Red Sea, which established a fifty-year period of Christian rule in the mid-sixth century, which only came to an end when the Sasanians took over in 570 – the traditional year of the birth of Muhammad. There is a wealth of recent scholarship on these events and on the kingdom of Himyar, mainly in French, led by the work of Christian Robin. 20 Glen Bowersock has also recently presented it briefly in two short books in English. 21 The point is that a Christian kingdom existed in southern Arabia during the sixth century, and indeed the sources suggest that the king in that period tried to extend his influence into central Arabia, or even on some accounts, to Mecca. Archaeological evidence also exists of monasteries and Christian settlement in the Gulf and the islands. 22 It is not necessary to  M.-J. Steve, L’île de Kharg: une page de l’histoire du Golfe Persique et du monachisme oriental, Neuchâtel, 2003. 20 Recently C. Robin, ‘Arabia and Ethiopia’, in Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity – ed. S. F. Johnson, p. 247-332, and see I. Gajda, Le royaume de Himyar à l’époque monothéiste, Paris, 2009; Juifs et chrétiens en Arabie aux ve et vie siècles: regards croisés sur les sources (Association des amis du Centre d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance, monographies 32, Le massacre de Najran II) – ed. J. Beaucamp, F. Briquel-Chatonnet, C. J. Robin, Paris, 2010. 21  G. W.  Bowersock, Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity (The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures 2011), Waltham, MA, 2012. Also Id., The Throne of Adulis. Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam, New York, 2013. 22   M. Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest, Princeton, 1984, Introduction; D. Potts, The Arabian Gulf in Antiquity, 2 vols., Oxford, 1990, II; G. R. D.  King, ‘Settlement in western and central Arabia and the Gulf in the sixth-eighth centuries A.D.’, in The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, II: Land Use and Settlement Patterns – ed. G. R. D. King, A. Cameron, Princeton, 1994, p. 181-212; T. Hainthaler, Christliche Araber vor dem Islam. Verbreitung und konfessionelle Zugehörigkeit: eine Hinführung (Eastern Christian Studies, 7), Leuven, Dudley, MA, 2007; B. Finster, ‘Arabia in late antiquity: an outline of the cultural situation in the peninsula at the time of Muhammad’, in The Qur’an in Context – ed. A. Neuwirth, N. Sinai, N. Marx, p. 61-107. 19

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look for evidence of a Christian community in Mecca, as some do, to find possible connections. Many levels of contact were both possible and likely. My point is that even Arabia (if indeed that is where Islam took shape), and certainly the Sasanian empire, were both penetrated by forms of Christianity in the sixth and seventh centuries. 23 In the case of the Sasanian empire, Christians, including both east and west Syrians, formed a substantial part of the population, including the elites. We sometimes tend to think that the Byzantine and Sasanian spheres were insulated from each other. In fact during the sixth-century wars between the two, even before the conquest of the Near East by the Sasanians in the early seventh century, the Sasanians often penetrated far into Byzantine territory, especially Syria and Mesopotamia, and as far as the great city of Antioch. Finally, Chosroes II, shah of Persia in the late sixth and early seventh centuries, was highly sympathetic to Christianity, had a Christian wife, and was a generous patron of the shrine of St Sergius at Resafa in Syria. The point of this historical diversion is to emphasise that scholars often operate within divisions and categories that are much too sharp, a situation which is reinforced or even dictated by disciplinary boundaries. I have noticed for instance that some of the most central contributions from within the field of Islamic or Qur’anic studies which argue for a late antique context do so without actually engaging with the deluge of late antique scholarship in recent years. And of course it also goes without saying that not many late antique scholars actually engage with Qur’anic or early Islamic scholarship either. In recent work I have adopted a different model, referring to the late sixth and seventh centuries in the near East as ‘a region in ferment’, or ‘the turbulent seventh century’. 24 These descriptions do not merely concern political and military events, but also religious currents. Nor do they simply refer to the wellknown religious reactions by Jews and Christians to the Persian 23 Again, the importance of this is denied in al-Azmeh, The Emergence of Islam. 24  Averil Cameron, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, ad 395-700, rev. ed., London, 2011, chapter 8; Late Antiquity on the Eve of Islam – ed. Averil Cameron, Farnham, 2013, p. xxv.

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conquest of the Near East, and especially to the Persian control of Jerusalem in 614, 25 or to the Arab conquests and the arrival of Islam. I use them rather to refer to the widespread and complex religious developments, debates, and divisions that were already taking place and that continued to take place alongside such momentous public events. The momentous changes in the political contours of the eastern Mediterranean that were taking place in the early seventh century happened simultaneously with intense theological and especially Christological debates and divisions which affected the entire Mediterranean world. Even while the Byzantines and the Arabs started to confront each other in the near East, in Anatolia and in Egypt and North Africa in the seventh century, these divisions continued to occupy the attention of emperors and churchmen alike in Constantinople, Carthage, Rome, and the East. In the 630s, the very decade of the first Arab incursions into Syria, the Emperor Heraclius held discussions with Monophysites at Hierapolis, with Armenians at Theodosiopolis, and with Monophysites again in Egypt, all with the aim of bringing these groups together – and with some success. The doctrines of one operation and one will in Christ dominated the middle years of the seventh century, but further discussions also continued with the Armenians at Dvin in 653 under Constans II. 26 It is at least as legitimate to bring some of these contemporary theological concerns into play when trying to understand the contours of early Islam as it is to adopt the strategies currently favoured among Islamicists of appealing to a generalized monotheism, or to a generalized apocalyptic tendency, or positing the existence, and indeed the major importance among the early Believers, of otherwise unattested groups who might have been possible conduits. As already remarked, any attempt to locate the emergence of Islam in a late antique context has to contend with the formidable difficulties inherent in the Qur’an itself – curiously 25 See A. M. Sivertsev, Judaism and Imperial Ideology in Late Antiquity, Cambridge, 2011. 26  The origins and development of Monothelitism are currently receiving new attention: R. Price, ‘Monothelitism: a heresy or a form of words?’, Studia Patristica, 48 (2010), p. 221-232, and see Booth, Crisis of Empire.

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silent about the actual location of Muhammad’s message, and extremely hard to date as a religious document, yet suffused with Jewish and Christian elements. I have tried to suggest first that even if the traditional account of its origin in Arabia is accepted, there were multiple ways in which these elements could have been absorbed and reused. The polytheist pagan environment in Arabia depicted in the later Arabic sources, which has been accepted on its own terms by many scholars in the past, does not cohere with what we actually know now. Moreover, the extent and spread of Arab Christianity before Islam also needs to be emphasized. 27 Even on the traditional view that the Qur’an was written down and edited in the middle of the seventh century in Syria, this would have taken place in a context suffused with existing religious rivalries and discussions. Other views, for instance accepted in a recent book by Stephen Shoemaker, 28 place the editing later, under ‘Abd al-Malik; but then too it would have taken place amid a heady mix of Christian and Jewish elements in late seventh-century Syria. More radical critics, as we have seen, locate the evolution of the message completely outside Arabia, and indeed as emerging not out of an Arabian context at all. With this background, let us look at the arguments for a late antique context that are being offered by specialists on the Qur’an and early Islam. Prominent among them are appeals first to existing monotheistic ideas, then to the prevalence of eschatology in the contemporary Near East, then to the alleged presence of non-Trinitarian Christians, whose beliefs might account for the way in which Jesus is presented in the Qur’an – as a prophet, but in no way as divine. A recent book published in 2010 by one of the most prominent scholars of early Islam, Fred Donner, 29 posits the widespread existence (and membership in the earliest 27   Above, and see G. Fisher, Between Empires. Arabs, Romans and Sasanians in Late Antiquity, Oxford, 2011, and the multi-volume work of I. Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs, Washington, D.C., (1984-). 28  S. Shoemaker, Death of a Prophet, Philadelphia, 2012 (with whose denial of Christianity in Arabia, however, not based on archaeological or epigraphic evidence, I part company); see also S. Shoemaker, ‘Muhammad and the Qur’an’, in Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity – ed. S. F. Johnson, p. 1078-1108. 29  F. M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers. At the Origins of Islam, Cambridge, MA, 2010.

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Islamic community) of such ‘non-Trinitarian Christians’, who were among the first Believers and presumably brought some of these ideas with them. The problem I have also applies to some other recent writing, namely that Donner writes exclusively from within his own discipline, and does not even try to pin down his assumption within the actual historical context of late antiquity. We are not given evidence for the existence or the role of the ‘non-Trinitarian’ Christians posited by Donner, and their identity remains as obscure as that of several groups mentioned in the Qur’an, on which scholars still disagree. As for the ‘Jewish Christians’ who have been posited as having influenced Qur’anic thought, in my view their very existence in this period is highly dubious. They feature in earlier heresiology, but to my knowledge are not mentioned as such in any reliable historical source in late antiquity. Indeed, we owe the evolution of the concept of Jewish Christianity itself to New Testament scholars and theologians of early Christianity, not to historians of late antiquity. 30 Here I must take issue with my respected friend Guy Stroumsa, who has argued for their likely continued existence in several recent articles. 31 Stroumsa fully admits the lack of historical evidence for the period, but appeals to ‘indirect’ sources and commonsense, and places some weight on a reference by John of Damascus to Elkasites and Sampseans. In his 30  For instance, F. De Blois, ‘Islam in its Arabian context’, in The Qur’an in Context – ed. A. Neuwirth, N. Sinai, M. Marx, Leiden, 2010, p. 615-623, in partic. p. 622; Id., ‘Elchasai – Manes – Muhammad: Manichäismus und Islam inreligionshistorischen Vergleich’, Der Islam, 81 (2004), p. 31-48; J. Gager, ‘Did Jewish-Christians see the rise of Islam?’, in The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages – ed. A. H. Becker, A. Yoshiko Reed, Tübingen, 2003, p. 361-372. [See the paper by Emmanuel Fiano in this volume]. 31  G. G. Stroumsa, ‘False prophets of early Christianity’, in Priests and Prophets among Pagans, Jews and Christians – ed. B. Dignas, R. Parker, G. G. Stroumsa, Leuven, 2013, p. 208-232; Id., ‘Jewish Christianity and Islamic origins’, in Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts: Essays in Honor of Patricia Crone – ed. B. Sadeghi et al., Leiden, 2014, p. 72-96; cfr. his ‘Athens, Jerusalem, Mecca’, p. 166: ‘it stands to reason that Jewish Christians, whom we know (sic) were still in existence in the seventh century, and also, perhaps, “Abrahamists”, must be counted among these proximate channels’. Despite this respectful disagreement I must record my deep appreciation to Guy Stroumsa for his kindness and inspiration, especially, but needless to say not only, during his years in Oxford.

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catalogue of heresies, John follows Epiphanius very closely; he equates the Elkasites with the Sampseans, who are like the Ebionites, but adds that the Sampseans live ‘until now’ on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea. 32 This would in any case take us to the eighth century, while the identity of groups such as ‘Sampseans’, ‘Elkasites’ and the like, not to mention ‘Sabians’, Nazoraioi and others in the Qur’anic context, is hotly contested. In my view, both the highly derivative nature of John of Damascus’s On heresies, and its theological rather than historical nature, make it dangerous to rely on this single remark, and particularly so when, as we have seen, Jews and Christians were very far from unknown in the context of Arabia in late antiquity. The Jewish elements in the Qur’an are undoubtedly strong, as also are the Christian ones, but positing their sources by speculating on the basis of controversial references within the Qur’anic text itself is an equally hazardous business. I agree with Robert Hoyland about the methodological risks when he writes that ‘scholars tend to assume, where the Qur’an offers a version of a story or a doctrine that does not conform to the official version, that [...] it reflects the views of some heretical sect that has survived in Arabia. More likely, it is just that it gives us a hint of the broad array of narratives and beliefs that existed below the level of canonized and codified texts.’ 33 This leaves us with monotheism and apocalyptic, or perhaps better, eschatology. The first appears in current scholarship in terms of references to a rising tide of monotheism in the late antique Near East, which is adduced to provide a context for the Qur’anic insistence on one God alone. We find this mode of argument not only among Qur’anic scholars and Islamists (and Patricia Crone now argues that the pre-Islamic pagans were monotheist), 34 but also among late antique historians (a laboratoire of the CNRS

  De haer. 34 (heresy 53), cited by Stroumsa, ‘False prophets’, p. 227.   Hoyland, ‘Early Islam as a late antique religion’, p. 1872; on the dangers within this methodology, see also S. H. Griffith, ‘Al-Nasara in the Qur’an: a hermeneutical reflection’, in New Perspectives on the Qur’an – ed. G. S. Reynolds, p. 1-38; Late Antiquity on the Eve of Islam – ed. A. Cameron, p.  xxix-xxx. 34 P. Crone, ‘The religion of the Qur’anic pagans: God and the lesser deities’, Arabica, 57 (2010), p. 151-200. 32 33

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now exists in Paris to study ancient monotheisms), and it has been given more credence by the emphasis recently laid on the seemingly monotheistic inscriptions of Himyar. 35 According to the sadly deceased American historian Thomas Sizgorich, there was ‘a semiotic koine of monotheistic religiosity within which Islamic narratives took shape’. 36 However, the concept of a ‘pagan monotheism’, applied to Greco-Roman religion, has also come under criticism. 37 As for its applicability to Christianity in late antiquity, suffice it perhaps to say that this was also the very period when within Christianity the cult of saints and the veneration of relics, and indeed images, were proliferating, and to remind ourselves that the strongest message of the Qur’an in relation to Christianity is to assert that God cannot be divided, and God cannot have a son; this suggests that there was not enough monotheism, rather than that the Qur’an was tapping in to an existing trend. There were many voices of anxiety within Christianity itself, and what modern scholars perceive as Christian monotheism must also have looked very different from outside. Finally, apocalyptic. 38 Stephen Shoemaker, himself a patristic scholar who has also written about early Islam, has recently provided a vigorous reassertion of the argument that the pri-

35   For pagan monotheism, and generally, see Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity – ed. P. Athanassiadi, M. Frede, Oxford, 1999; One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire – ed. S. Mitchell, P. Van Nuffelen, Cambridge, 2010; Monotheism between Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity – ed. S. Mitchell, P. Van Nuffelen, Leuven, 2010; P. Athanassiadi, La lutte pour l’orthodoxie dans le platonisme tardif de Numénius à Damascius, Paris, 2006; G. W. Bowersock, ‘Polytheism and monotheism in Arabia and the three Palestines’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 51 (1997), p. 1-10. Among Islamicists, see Crone, ‘The religion of the Qur’anic pagans’, referring to ‘the monotheistic trend’, p. 185-88; G. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam, Cambridge, 1999; Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, e.g. at p. 87, cfr. p. 59 ‘the idea of monotheism was already well established throughout the Near East, including Arabia, in Muhammad’s day’; also F. M. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins. The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing, Princeton, 1998. 36 T. Sizgorich, ‘Narrative and community in Islamic late antiquity’, Past and Present, 185.1 (2004), p. 9-42. 37  See the review of One God. Pagan Monotheism in the Roman – ed. S. Mitchell, P. Van Nuffelen, by C. Addey, Journal of Roman Studies, 101 (2011), p. 259-260. 38  On this see further Averil Cameron, ‘Late antique apocalyptic: a context for the Qur’an?’, in Visions of the End – ed. E. Grypeou, Leuven, forthcoming.

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mary message of Muhammad was to proclaim the imminence of the Hour – the end of things, when all would be judged. 39 This is not the place to discuss the alternative view, which sees Muhammad as primarily a social and moral reformer, but Shoemaker’s emphasis on the imminence of the Hour chimes in with statements common in current scholarship to the effect that, as in the case of monotheism, there was also a general trend towards apocalyptic in the late antique Near East. For Robert Hoyland, this was a ‘spirit’, which ‘early Islam seems to have caught’; 40 for Fred Donner, ‘apocalyptic ideas’ were a particular feature of the religious climate of late antiquity, with an obvious appeal, given what he claims was the ‘harsh’ reality of life in the ‘Byzantine domains’. 41 Finally, in John C. Reeves’s guide to Jewish apocalypses, we read that the ‘apocalyptic imagination’ operated ‘more or less continuously within the broader ethnic or religious framework of the wider Near East’, and that in the seventh and later centuries it was ‘figured as a mentality’; 42 it was ‘a type of narrative’ within a ‘formulaic set of conventions, tropes and figures’. But there are problems here too. Certainly eschatological ideas were common, but it is another matter to argue that they were such a dominant feature of the period as to provide an impetus and explanation for Qur’anic themes whose emphasis is in fact very different. Further, the well-known Jewish apocalypses from the context of the Persian occupation of Jerusalem, and the later and perhaps even better-known Syriac apocalypses such as that of Pseudo Methodius, with their quasi-historical scenarios based on the four kingdoms of the book of Daniel, are both very different from the proclamations of the Hour in the Qur’an. Appeals to something that was allegedly ‘in the air’ in late antiquity do not seem to help very much. In the final section of this paper I would like to turn – inevitably too briefly – to some examples from the side of patristic

  Shoemaker, ‘Muhammad and the Qur’an’; Id., The Death of a Prophet.   Hoyland, ‘Early Islam as a late antique religion’, p. 1066-1067. 41  Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, p. 14-17. 42 J. C. Reeves, Trajectories in Near Eastern Apocalyptic. A Postrabbinic Jewish Apocalypse Reader, Atlanta, 2003, p. 1-2, 4. 39 40

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studies that I think are worth bringing into the discussion. They do not usually feature in studies by Islamicists. Yet the seventh century was an extraordinarily tense time for doctrinal and political developments within Christianity. These are obscured if the Arab conquest of Jerusalem in the 630s is taken as a chronological boundary, as it often has been, and they are also currently the subject of very active historical, as well as patristic, scholarship. Leading some of these developments was Maximus Confessor, possibly the greatest of all Byzantine theologians, as well as being one of our earliest non-Muslim authors to indicate awareness of the Arab incursions. 43 Maximus was in North Africa in the 630s and early 640s, the latter also the decade of Leontius of Neapolis’s Lives of Symeon the Fool and John the Almsgiver (appended to an earlier Life by Moschus and Sophronius). He went from Africa to Rome and was prominent in the Lateran Synod of 649, after which he was arrested by the imperial authorities, taken to Constantinople and made to face exile and death. It is perhaps understandable that most of the huge scholarly literature on Maximus detaches him from what I believe to be his Palestinian background (accepting the value of the hostile Monothelite vita), and deals with his writings only in theological terms. It is sometimes forgotten that Maximus was also a close associate of Sophronius, the future patriarch of Jerusalem, whose works extended much more widely than the field of technical theology: Sophronius was also close to John Moschus, author of the Spiritual Meadow, as explored in a classic article by Henry Chadwick, and now brought out in full detail by Phil Booth. 44 We do not read much in scholarship on early Islam about the monasteries of Palestine, which produced all these authors, and   Ep. 14; see Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, p. 77-78.   Booth, Crisis of Empire; cfr. H. Chadwick, ‘John Moschus and his friend Sophronius the sophist’, Journal of Theological Studies, 25.1 (1974), p. 4174 (repr. in Doctrine and Debate in the East Christian World, 300-1500 – ed. A. Cameron, R. G. Hoyland, Farnham, 2011). On Sophronius see also P. Booth, ‘Sophronius of Jerusalem and the end of Roman history’, in History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East – ed. P. Wood, p. 1-27. An English translation of the Acts of the Lateran Synod of ad 649 by Richard Price, with contributions by Phil Booth and Catherine Cubitt, was published in 2014 in the series Translated Texts for Historians. 43 44

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which were key centres of religious activism in the seventh century, but we probably ought to. As for John of Damascus, later in the Umayyad period, most writers approach him simply as a Byzantine or patristic theologian, perhaps the last patristic theologian. He features straightforwardly as a Byzantine writer for Alexander Kazhdan, who memorably wrote: ‘can we imagine [...] Byzantine literature without John Damaskenos?’ 45 Andrew Louth, in his important book on John, offers a strongly monastic (and to me convincing) context for John’s works. 46 At the same time, the question of whether John was in any sense an original theologian, or an original philosopher, has gained new attention, in the context of a renewed interest in investigating Byzantine philosophy as such, and especially the question of whether Byzantine philosophy is distinguishable from theology. 47 The traditional view of John has been that he has little to offer of interest to philosophers, and a recent article argues strongly that his major work, the Pege gnoseos, or Fount of Knowledge, is entirely derivative in nature; 48 the author does not consider the intriguing question of what the library resources might have been at the Mar Saba monastery in Palestine, but speculates that John might have had a copy of the work of the philosopher Stephanus. Indeed, there is some uncertainty, according to Marie-France Auzépy, about whether John was indeed a monk of Mar Saba, and problems about the sources for his biography which parallel those for Maximus. 49 We cannot – as many scholars do – assume without question the historicity of the later Arabic vitae, or fail to take 45  A. P. Kazhdan, with L. F. Sherry and C. Angelidi, A History of Byzantine Literature, 650-850, Washington, D.C., 1999, p. 3, cfr. p. 74-79. 46   A. Louth, St John Damascene. Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology, Oxford, 2002. 47  For which see Byzantine Philosophy and its Ancient Sources – ed. K. Ierodiakonou, Oxford, 2002; The Many Faces of Byzantine Philosophy – ed. B. Bydén, K. Ierodiakonou, Athens, 2012. 48  J. A. Demetracopoulos, ‘In search of the pagan and Christian sources of John of Damascus’ theodicy: Ammonius, the Son of Hermeias, Stephanus of Athens and John Chrysostom on God’s foreknowledge and predestination and man’s freewill’, in Byzantine Theology and its Philosophical Background – ed. A. Rigo, Turnhout, 2011, p. 50-88. 49  See especially M.-F. Auzépy, ‘De la Palestine à Constantinople: Étienne le Sabaïte et Jean Damascène’, Travaux et Mémoires, 12 (1994), p. 183-218.

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account of the strange silence about John in such sources as we do have for Mar Saba. 50 John’s three orations in defence of images are also of great importance, and again, they tend to feature in works on Byzantine iconoclasm without much discussion of the fact that few if any in Constantinople seem to have known the works themselves. On the other hand, Sidney Griffith has argued in complete contrast that John’s target was nearer home, and that he must be understood in the local sphere of iconoclastic tendencies in the Umayyad context. 51 The fact is that we have no direct contemporary information about John himself. But with their emphasis on the issue of idolatry, his orations on religious images can be placed well within the tradition of the Christian Adversus Iudaeos tradition, which was such a key contemporary element, and which had already begun to incorporate images, that is icons, as an example of the created objects whose veneration Christians needed to defend. Finally, John’s famous extra ‘heresy’ of Islam, the last chapter of his work on heresies, is usually discussed along with other non-Muslim ‘sources for early Islam’, when in fact it entirely fits the patristic and Byzantine structure and tradition of his catalogue of heresies. These famous examples are indicative of the disciplinary divide I mentioned earlier. Whatever theory we adopt about the genesis of the Qur’an and the date of its collation, Islam was still taking shape during the very decades that saw particularly intense theological developments, debates and divisions among Christians. I will take as further examples the cult of the cross and that of the Virgin, which cannot be without interest in view of the presentation of Jesus, Mary, and the crucifixion in the Qur’an. Again, Sidney Griffith is one of the scholars to whom we owe awareness of the centrality of the cross as a badge of Christian identity during the Umayyad period, especially

50 The Life of Stephen the Sabaite (a younger contemporary of John) describes the monastic life at Mar Saba with no mention of John of Damascus; see M.-F. Auzépy, La Vie d’Étienne le Jeune par Étienne le Diacre, Aldershot, 1997. 51 Recently, S. H. Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque. Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam, Princeton, 2008, p. 40-42.

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under ‘Abd al’Malik. 52 The Emperor Heraclius’s symbolic return to Jerusalem in 630 and his restoration of the fragments of the True Cross to Golgotha constituted a momentous act, on the very eve of the Arab invasions of Syria. 53 Somewhat less noted, but closer to the theme of patristic studies, is the distinct increase of emphasis on the cross in this period in liturgy and theological writing; the liturgical feast of the exaltation of the Cross on 14 September gained prominence, homilies were written on the theme of the cross, and the dead Christ began to appear for the first time in crucifixion scenes in eastern Christian visual art. 54 Sure indicators of a changing context, the Christian Adversus Iudaeos texts developed a comprehensive defence of the 52  S. H. Griffith, ‘Images, Islam and Christian icons. A moment in the Christian/Muslim encounter in early Islamic times’, in La Syrie de Byzance à l’Islam, viie-viiie siècles (Actes du colloque international, Lyon, Maison de l’Orient Méditerranéen, Paris: Institut du monde arabe, 11-15 sept. 1990) – ed. P. Canivet, J.-P. Rey-Coquais, Damascus, 1992, p.122-138. 53  Interpreted in apocalyptic terms by G. J. Reinink, ‘Heraclius, the new Alexander. Apocalyptic prophecies during the reign of Heraclius’, in The Reign of Heraclius. Crisis and Confrontation (610-641) – ed. G. J. Reinink, B. H. Stolte, Leuven, 2002, p. 81-94, but see Cameron, ‘Late antique apocalyptic’.  54 Cult: A. Frolow, La relique de la vraie Croix. Recherches sur le développement d’un culte, Paris, 1961; homilies: R. Scott, ‘Alexander the Monk, Discovery of the True Cross’, Eng. trans. with notes, in Metaphrastes, or, Gained in Translation – ed. M. Mullett, Belfast, 2004, p. 157-184; partial ed. and trans. J. Nesbitt, ‘Alexander the monk’s text of Helena’s discovery of the True Cross (BHG 410)’, in Byzantine Authors: Literary Activities and Preoccupations – ed. J. Nesbitt, Leiden, 2003, p. 23-39; for a similar work in Syriac by Pantaleon (BHG 6430), see A. Di Berardino, Patrologia V, Torino, 2000, p. 299, and cfr. Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca, p. 427; dead Christ: J. R. Martin, ‘The dead Christ on the cross in Byzantine art’, in Late Classical and Medieval Studies in Honor of Albert Mathias Friend Jr. – ed. K. Weitzmann, Princeton, 1955, p. 189-196; K. Corrigan, ‘Text and image on an icon of the crucifixion at Mount Sinai’, in The Sacred Image East and West – ed. R. Ousterhout, L. Brubaker, Urbana, Ill., 1995, p. 45-62; defence of representations of the crucifixion and of Christ’s real suffering on the Cross by Anastasius of Sinai: see A. Kartsonis, Anastasis. The Making of an Image, Princeton, 1986, p. 40- 67; Heraclius and the True Cross: C. Mango, ‘Deux études sur Byzance et la Perse sassanide’, Travaux et Mémoires, 9 (1985), p. 91-118; Id., ‘The Temple Mount, ad 614-638’, in Bayt al-Maqdis, Part 1. ‘Abd al-Malik’s Jerusalem – ed. J. Raby, J. Johns, Oxford, 1992, p. 1-16; A. Frolow, ‘La vraie Croix et les expéditions d’Héraclius en Perse’, Revue des études byzantines, 11 (1953), p. 88-105; the theme as part of Heraclius’s public image: Mary  Whitby, ‘Defender of the Cross: George of Pisidia on Heraclius and his deputies’, in The Propaganda of Power. The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity – ed. Mary Whitby, Leiden, 1998, p. 247-273.

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veneration of the physical wood of the Cross against the charge of idolatry, and in the eighth century the Cross was adopted by the iconoclasts in preference to the figural representation of the divine. 55 In the seventh century, Anastasius of Sinai had developed a striking defence of visual representations of the crucifixion and of Christ’s real suffering on the Cross. To this we should add the debates about whether, and in what way, the divine nature of Christ had suffered on the Cross which had divided Christians in the sixth century and which continued to do so in the seventh, 56 when the intense anxieties about the exact relation between the human and divine natures of Christ were inextricably bound up with that of the physical reality of the crucifixion and the capacity of the divine to suffer. It is well known that visual art in the early Byzantine period had preferred not to depict the dead or suffering Christ on the cross, but just as canon 82 of the Council in Trullo (below) asserted the physical humanity of Christ, so too slowly more explicit portrayals of the crucifixion itself began to emerge. Given such a context, the ‘docetic’ denial of the crucifixion in the Qur’an does not seem so surprising; it spoke to direct Christian concerns that had been manifested in the disputes since the late fifth century onwards about the addition to the Trisagion, and among the Julianist groups in the sixth century and later. 57 Babai the Great, for example, catholicos of the Church of the East, who died circa 628, was a strong opponent of the idea that God could suffer. 58 While it is certainly the case that docetic trends had been evident in the earliest period of Christianity, 59 55 See C. Barber, Figure and Likeness. On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm, Princeton, 2002, p. 83-105. 56  Sixth century: see L. Van Rompay, ‘Society and community in the Christian east’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian – ed. M. Maas, Cambridge, 2005, p. 239-266, in partic. p. 252-254. 57   So also Griffith, ‘Al-Nasara in the Qur’an’, p. 32; Julianists: see Hainthaler, Christliche Araber vor dem Islam, p. 32. 58 See J. T. Walker, ‘A saint and his biographer in late antique Iraq: the History of St George of Izla († 614) by Babai the Great’, in Writing ‘True Stories’. Historians and Hagiographers in the Late Antique and Medieval Near East – ed. A. Papaconstantinou, with M. Debié and H. Kennedy, Turnhout, 2010, p. 31-41. 59 R. Goldstein, G. G. Stroumsa, ‘The Greek and Jewish origins of doceticism: a new proposal’, Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum, 10.3 (2007),

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the contemporary debates about whether God could suffer (and whether God could be divided or have a son) provide a more immediate and closer context. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that eastern Christianity in the sixth and seventh centuries saw a resurgence of old anxieties and old disputes which focused on Christological issues still unresolved after Chalcedon. Yet another feature of late sixth- and early seventh-century Christianity was a growing emphasis on the power of saints among Christians, as can be seen in the proliferation of saints’ lives and miracle collections in Greek, Syriac, and the other languages of eastern Christianity. 60 This caused some to question the saints’ power of intercession and the value of their relics; at the same time appearances of saints in visions, and miracles associated with their pictures, were accompanied by anxiety as to the proper visual representation of holy personages. In the late seventh century the famous canon 82 of the Council in Trullo (691-92) sought to regulate the depiction of Christ by requiring Him to be depicted in the flesh, and forbidding Him to be represented symbolically as a lamb, thus asserting the reality of his human nature and suffering. 61 Again, this speaks to p. 423-441; G. G. Stroumsa, ‘Christ’s laughter: docetic origins reconsidered’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 12.3 (2004), p. 267-88. 60 See S. Efthymiades, V. Déroche, with contributions by A. Binggeli and Z. Aínalis, ‘Greek hagiography in late antiquity (fourth–seventh centuries)’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Byzantine Hagiography – ed. S. Efthymiades, 2 vols., Farnham, 2011, I, p. 35-94; S. P. Brock, ‘Syriac hagiography’, ibid., p. 259-83, both with bibliographies; M. Debié, ‘Writing history as ‘histoires’: the biographic dimension of East Syriac hagiography’, in Writing ‘True Stories’: Historians and Hagiographers in the late Antique and Medieval near East (Cultural Encounters in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 9) – ed. A. Papaconstantinou, M. Debié, H. Kennedy, Turnhout, 2010, p. 43-75. 61  Doubts as to the efficacy of saints: An Age of Saints? Power, Conflict and Dissent in Early Medieval Christianity – ed. P. Sarris, M. Dal Santo, P. Booth, Leiden, 2011; anxieties about representation: G. Dagron, ‘Iconophobie et iconodulie’, in G. Dagron, Décrire et peindre. Essai sur le portrait iconique, Paris, 2007, p. 41-63, where this is linked to the issues raised in the Christian Adversus Iudaeos literature; V. Déroche, ‘Tensions et contradictions dans les recueils de miracles de la première époque byzantine’, in Miracle et Karama. Hagiographies médiévales comparées – ed. D. Aigle, Turnhout, 2000, p. 145-163; Averil Cameron, ‘The language of images; icons and Christian representation’, in The Church and the Arts (Studies in Church History, 28) – ed. D. Wood, Oxford, 1992, p. 1-42; Barber, Figure and Likeness; H. Maguire, The Icons of their Bodies: Saints and their Images in Byzantium, Princeton, 1996.

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the docetic and anti-docetic debates, while the anxieties surrounding the proliferation of saints’ cults speak to the Qur’anic insistence on an uncompromising monotheism. Finally, in relation to symbolic interpretations, we can point to the theology of Maximus Confessor’s Mystagogia, a work of the 630s, as being expressive of contemporary preoccupations with representation, in its emphasis on symbolic or mystical interpretation, applied by Maximus to the liturgy. 62 Yet another developing feature in late patristic Christianity concerns the cult of the Virgin, well documented in many recent scholarly contributions. Leslie Brubaker, indeed, would deny any cult of the Virgin until after about 680, but the proliferation of images and anecdotes tell a different story. 63 Stephen Shoemaker, whose work I cited earlier, has also recently translated the earliest hagiographical Life of the Virgin, which he thinks might have been composed by Maximus the Confessor himself, but which in any case he dates to this period. 64 The Virgin features frequently in contemporary anecdotes about miracles and apparitions, and was also often depicted in visual art, not merely in apse mosaics but also in small objects, ivories, and indeed icons. 65  Maximus, Mystagogia, PG 91, 657-717; Cameron, ‘The language of images’, p. 24-40. 63 L. Brubaker has championed the view that relics were initially more important and that images did not become problematic until the late seventh century, before which there was also no cult of the Virgin: see L. Brubaker, ‘Introduction’, in The Sacred Image East and West – ed. R. Ousterhout, L. Brubaker, Chicago, 1995, p. 1-24; Id., ‘Icons before iconoclasm’, in Morfologie sociali e culturali in Europa fra tarda antichità e also medioevo (XLV Settimane internazionale di studi sull’alto Medioevo), Spoleto, 1998, p. 1215-1254; also in L. Brubaker, J. F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era, c. 680-850. A History, Cambridge, 2011, but see Averil Cameron, ‘The anxiety of images: meanings and material objects’, in Images of the Byzantine World: Visions, Messages and Meanings. Studies presented to Leslie Brubaker – ed. A. Lymberopoulou, Farnham, 2011, p. 47-56. The underlying question relates to the definition of ‘cult’, perhaps in fact a word better avoided in this connection. 64 S.  J. Shoemaker, The Life of the Virgin. Maximus Confessor, trans. with introduction and notes, New Haven, 2012, and see further Mother of God. Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art – ed. M. Vassilaki, Milan, 2000; The Cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium. Texts and Images – ed. L. Brubaker, M. Cunningham, Farnham, 2011; B. V. Pentcheva, Icons and Power. The Mother of God in Byzantium, University Park, PA, 2006. 65   The earliest surviving assemblage of icons of the Virgin (panel paintings, mosaics and frescoes) is to be found in Rome, not in Constantinople, for reasons 62

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Her exact role was crucial to any debate about the nature of the Incarnation and in particular the divine and human natures of Christ. Surely our understanding of the Qur’anic portrayal of Mary can only be deepened by awareness of these contemporary developments within Christianity, which went in parallel with renewed and agonizing anxieties about the real suffering and death of Christ. I would argue therefore that while a great deal of attention has been paid by scholars to the Christian and Jewish reactions to the Persian invasions of the early seventh century, and especially to the capture of Jerusalem in 614, much less effort has been expended on the theological developments of the succeeding period and their relevance to the emerging Muslim system. Possible ‘influences’ were multiple, as we have seen. But I would also like to argue for a more holistic view, which neither detaches the theology of such figures as Sophronius, Maximus, and John of Damascus from their near Eastern background nor sees the non-Muslim writers of the period primarily as ‘sources’ for early Islam. Nor, as I have argued, need we posit unattested groups of heterodox Christians who might have conveyed their views to the emerging Muslim community. In his recent book, The Death of a Prophet, to which I have already alluded, the patristic scholar Stephen Shoemaker has made a forceful case for an early stage of Islam which focused on Jerusalem and the Temple. He is not the first to make such a case, and if it were widely accepted it would force us to rethink not only Islamic origins but also Christian and Jewish thinking in the seventh century, in the period after the conquests. I leave this argument aside for now, because Shoemaker’s book also raises deeper questions about methodology, in particular in relation to the case he makes for the application of the methods of New Testament and Biblical criticism to Islamic origins. 66 Even if one is not convinced by all his central arguments, his book challenges to do with the history of both cities; one can also cite the well-known icon of the Virgin and saints at St Catherine’s, Sinai, often dated to the sixth century; for apses, see B. Brenk, The Apse, the Image and the Icon. An Historical Perspective of the Apse as a Space for Images, Wiesbaden, 2010. 66 In the course of which he gives a very useful and detailed overview of scholarship on early Islam, past and present.

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us as patristic scholars to cross the divide, to think outside the box, to review our disciplinary boundaries, and that can only be good. In this paper I avoided the question of direct ‘borrowings’, and still more of ‘sources’ for elements in the Qur’an. Nor have I ventured into the complex issue of the latter’s date and environment. Nor have I aligned myself with the ‘sceptics’ who see it as essentially deriving from a Jewish or Christian background. But it is perhaps worth reiterating the surprising silences in the Qur’anic text – most of all, about the life and actual context of Muhammad and his message. I want to suggest that if Islam is really a ‘religion of late antiquity’, there are other ways of looking at it than by general assertions about monotheism or apocalyptic. The alignment of Islam with a late antique context set out in the recent book by Aziz al-Azmeh takes us even further from the commonly expressed arguments I have discussed here, and will need much closer attention from late antique scholars. At the same time, patristic studies, a discipline that has been greatly enriched in current scholarship by being extended into the worlds of Sasanian Persia and neighbouring eastern cultures, would benefit, I believe, if it took more note of the debates and questions about the beginnings of Islam.

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Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures – ed. R. Bonfil et al., Leiden, 2012, p. 761-776. G. G.  Stroumsa, ‘Christ’s laughter: docetic origins reconsidered’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 12.3 (2004), p. 267-88. J. Tannous, ‘You are what you read. Qenneshre and the Miaphysite church in the seventh century’, in History and Identity in the Late Antique Near East – ed. P. Wood, Oxford, 2013, p. 83-102. L. Van Rompay, ‘Society and community in the Christian east’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Justinian – ed. M. Maas, Cambridge, 2005, p. 239-266. J. T.  Walker, ‘A saint and his biographer in late antique Iraq: the History of St George of Izla († 614) by Babai the Great’, in Writing ‘True Stories’. Historians and Hagiographers in the Late Antique and Medieval Near East – ed. A. Papaconstantinou, with M. Debié and H. Kennedy, Turnhout, 2010, p. 31-41. J. T.  Walker, The Legend of Mar Qardagh. Narrative and Christian Heroism in Late Antique Iraq, Berkeley, 2006. J. E.  Wansborough, The Sectarian Milieu. Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History, Oxford, 1978. Mary Whitby, ‘Defender of the Cross: George of Pisidia on Heraclius and his deputies’, in The Propaganda of Power. The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity – ed. Mary Whitby, Leiden, 1998, p. 247-273. P. Wood, ‘We have no King but Christ.’, in Christian Political Thought in Greater Syria on the Eve of the Arab Conquest (c. 400-585), Oxford, 2010.

Abstract This paper argues for a closer engagement by patristic scholarship with the issues and problems about the emergence of Islam. It starts by discussing recent trends among historians of late antiquity and Islamicists alike to reconceive early Islam as a late antique religion, and moves to suggest that what we now know about the historical background, together with the intense theological debates that were going on among Christians in the eastern Mediterranean during the sixth and seventh centuries provide a ‘thick’ context for Qur’anic themes. Especially (but not only) in view of the recent tendency to absorb early Islam into late antiquity, patristic scholarship and Qur’anic and early Islamic scholarship would do well to come closer together.

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EMANUEL FIANO Duke University

THE CONSTRUCTION OF ANCIENT JEWISH CHRISTIANITY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: THE CASES OF HANS-JOACHIM SCHOEPS AND JEAN DANIÉLOU

As Annette Yoshiko Reed wrote, somewhat reassuringly, at the beginning of a recent overview, ‘[s]cholarship on “Jewish Christianity” is notorious for inspiring confusion’. 1 Here I should like to offer my contribution of confusion to this topic by proposing a re-reading of two works that first reignited the debate on the significance of Jewish Christianity in the twentieth century: Hans-Joachim Schoeps’s 1949 Theologie und Geschichte des Judenchristentums and Jean Daniélou’s 1958 La théologie du Judéochristianisme. 2 After tracing a very brief, and perforce inadequate, chronology of the spread of the notion of Jewish Christianity, I will attempt to assess the labour performed by this category in the systems of thought of Schoeps and Daniélou, who published those two works at a time when the shadows of a recent past were felt to confer great urgency to the investigation of ChristianJewish relations in antiquity. To conclude, I will offer a modest proposal for integrating some aspects of their work into the contemporary study of so-called Jewish Christianity.

1  A. Y.  Reed, ‘Jewish Christianity’, in Oxford Bibliographies Online, 2011 ‹DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780195393361-0032› [accessed 5 April 2014]. 2  H.-J. Schoeps, Theologie und Geschichte des Judenchristentums, Tübingen, 1949; J. Daniélou, Théologie du judéo-christianisme (Bibliothèque de théologie. Histoire des doctrines chrétiennes avant Nicée, 1), Paris, 19581. The two scholars probably knew each other, since Schoeps contributed to a Festschrift for Daniélou: cfr. H.-J. Schoeps, ‘Der Ursprung des Bösen und das Problem der Theodizee im pseudoklementinischen Roman’, in Judéo-Christianisme. Recherches historiques et théologiques offertes en hommage au Cardinal Jean Daniélou (Recherches de Science Religieuse, 60), Paris, 1972, p. 129-141.

10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107522

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Neither Schoeps nor Daniélou invented the term Jewish Christianity. Ferdinand Christian Baur, who is considered the founder of the Tübingen School, is commonly credited with originating the moniker Judenchristentum in a famous article, published in 1831, in which he saw the Catholic Church arising at the end of the second century as the product of a synthesis between the Pauline and Jewish brands of Christianity. 3 In reality, however, the notion predates even Baur’s work. First put forth by the eighteenth-century British deists John Toland and Thomas Morgan, it reached German patristic studies via the mediation of German Church historians such as Lorenz von Mosheim, Johann Salomo Semler, and Johann Karl Ludwig Gieseler, and soon became commonplace in scholarly discourse. 4 Nor were Schoeps and Daniélou the first students of early Christianity to tackle this topic in the twentieth century. However, it was arguably their different (and differently problematic) thematizations of this category, offered at a critical historical juncture, that planted the seeds for the flourishing of Jewish Christianity as a field of studies in contemporary patristics. A re-reading of their treatments, for which the present brief paper can be but an encouragement, is all the more called for at a time when more or less celebratory or thoughtful efforts have begun to be made in order to pull these two thinkers out of the thirty-year-long oblivion to which they had been condemned by some of the circumstances of their lives (and, in the case of Daniélou, even of his death). 5 Hans-Joachim Schoeps (1909-1980), one of the ‘odd fellows’ of twentieth-century politics of religion, 6 would no doubt   F. Ch.  Baur, ‘Die Christuspartei in der korinthischen Gemeinde, der Gegensatz des petrinischen und paulinischen Christentums in der ältesten Kirche, der Apostel Petrus in Rom’, Tübinger Zeitschrift für Theologie, 4 (1831), p. 61-206; cfr. D. Lincicum, ‘F. C. Baur’s Place in the Study of Jewish Christianity’, in The Rediscovery of Jewish Christianity. From Toland to Baur – ed. F. St. Jones, Atlanta, 2012, p. 137-166. 4 Cfr. all the other contributions contained in The Rediscovery of Jewish Christianity. 5 On Daniélou’s death cfr. P. Giuntella, ‘Vietato ai tradizionalisti, scomodo per i progressisti: il cardinale Daniélou e la sua morte scandalosa’, Il margine, 1 (1983), p. 17-23. 6 Cfr. G. Lease, ‘Odd Fellows’ in the Politics of Religion. Modernism, National Socialism and German Judaism (Religion and Society, 35), Berlin, 1995; H.-J. 3

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be wronged by an attempt to summarize in a few words his worldview and controversial legacy. 7 Schoeps’s fervid Prussian nationalism, 8 which initially led him to the persuasion that Jews could have a place in the future the Nazis had in store for Germany, condemned him to an isolation that lasted until his death and – along with his anti-Zionism – resulted in something akin to a damnatio memoriae among contemporary European Jewry and Israeli academia alike. His activism for the decriminalization of homosexuality in Adenauer’s Germany made him a  rara avis among conservatives, who looked at him askance. 9 His understanding of his own belonging to Judaism as mediated not through blood but – in the wake of Salomon Ludwig Steinheim’s theology of revelation – through the Sinaitic covenant set him on the path of a fecund rumination on the conditions of a Lutheran-leaning third way to Judaism, transcending what Hillerbrand, ‘Hans-Joachim Schoeps als Religionswissenschaftler’, in Wider den Zeitgeist. Studien zum Leben und Werk von Hans-Joachim Schoeps (19091980) – ed. G. Botsch, J. H. Knoll, A. D. Ludewig (Haskala. Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen herausgegeben vom Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum für europäisch-jüdische Studien, 39), Hildesheim, 2009, p. 45-62; E. W. Stegemann, ‘Hans-Joachim Schoeps als Interpret frühchristlicher und frühjüdischer Religionsgeschichte’, in Wider den Zeitgeist, p. 31-44; and F.-L. Kroll, Geschichtswissenschaft in politischer Absicht. Hans-Joachim Schoeps und Preußen (Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen und Reden zur Philosophie, Politik und Geistesgeschichte, 61), Berlin, 2010. Schoeps’s works are collected in H.-J. Schoeps, Gesammelte Schriften, 16 vols., Hildesheim, 1990-2005. Cfr. also the contributions included in Wider die Ächtung der Geschichte. Festschrift zum 60. Geburstag von Hans-Joachim Schoeps – ed. K. Töpner, München, 1969. 7  On many of the themes cursorily alluded to in the course of the present discussion of Schoeps’s worldview one can profitably read R. Faber, Deutschbewusstes Judentum und jüdischbewusstes Deutschtum. Der historische und politische Theologe Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Würzburg, 2008. 8 Cfr. H.-J. Schoeps, Bereit für Deutschland! Der Patriotismus deutscher Juden und der Nationalsozialismus. Frühe Schriften 1930 bis 1939. Eine historische Dokumentation, Berlin, 1970. Cfr. also F.-L. Kroll, ‘Hans-Joachim Schoeps und Preußen’, in Wider den Zeitgeist, p. 105-137. 9 Cfr. H.-J. Schoeps, ‘Soll Homosexualität strafbar bleiben?’, Der Monat, 15 (1962), p. 19-27; and Id., ‘Überlegungen zum Problem der Homosexualität’, in Der homosexuelle Nächste – ed. E. Bianchi (Stundenbücher, 31), Hamburg, 1964, p. 74-114. Cfr. also M. Keilson-Lauritz, ‘Hans-Joachim Schoeps, Hans Blüher und der Männerbund. Überlegungen zu Hans-Joachim Schoeps und dem Thema Homosexualität’, in Wider den Zeitgeist, p. 177-198, republished with some modifications as ‘Der selbstmörderische Mut des Professor Schoeps’, in Id., Kentaurenliebe. Seitenwege der Männerliebe im 20. Jahrhundert. Essays 19952010, Hamburg, 2013, p. 116-133.

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he saw as the shortcomings of both Orthodoxy and Jewish Liberalism. 10 Schoeps’s fascination with Christianity, stopping short only of baptism, brought him to inhabit a position of borderline Jew that pleased few. Over a millennium (and possibly almost two millennia) after the so-called parting of the ways, Schoeps’s singular subjectivity reactivated the ancient machinery of religious boundary-setting. Gerschom Scholem famously declared that the twenty-three-year-old author of Jüdischer Glaube in dieser Zeit was better acquainted with Barthian theology than with Jewish history. 11 Karl Barth himself, on his part, considered Schoeps not Christian enough. 12 The Wandervogel prophet and anti-Semitic reactionary extraordinaire Hans Blüher, in a conversation with Schoeps carried out in the last, feverish hours of the Weimar Republic and published in 1933 as Streit um Israel, expressed his anxiety about this callow thinker’s admission that ‘blessed miracles have occurred outside Israel’ and that Jesus was one of those – a statement that appeared to Blüher, and understandably so, as ‘one step over the Rubicon’. 13 It was then almost inevitable that when Schoeps would come to investigate ancient Jewish Christianity he would find in it more than a simple object of detached scholarly inquiry. Schoeps himself, in the foreword to the first, 1937 edition of his Israel und Christenheit, remarked on how his own originality lay

 Cfr. H.-J. Schoeps, Jüdischer Glaube in dieser Zeit. Prolegomena zur Grundlegung einer systematischen Theologie des Judentums, Berlin, 1932; and M. A. Krell, ‘Schoeps vs. Rosenzweig. Transcending Religious Borders’, Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, 52 (2000), p. 25-37. 11 Cfr. G. Scholem, ‘Offener Brief an den Verfasser der Schrift “Jüdischer Glaube in dieser Zeit” ’, Bayerische Israelitische Gemeindezeitung, (15 August 1932), p. 241-244. 12 Cfr. G. Lease, ‘Der Briefwechsel zwischen Karl Barth und Hans-Joachim Schoeps’, Menora. Jahrbuch für deutsch-jüdische Geschichte, 2 (1991), p. 115-120. 13 Cfr. H. Blüher – H.-J. Schoeps, Streit um Israel. Ein jüdisch-christliches Gespräch, Hamburg, 1933, p. 62, 80. Cfr. also J. H. Schoeps, ‘Sexualität, Erotik und Männerbund. Hans Blüher und die deutsche Jugendbewegung’, in Typisch deutsch. Die Jugendbewegung. Beiträge zu einer Phänomengeschichte – ed. J. H. Knoll, J. H. Schoeps, Opladen, 1988, p. 137-154; and Id., ‘Ein jüdisch-christliches Streitgespräch am Vorabend der Katastrophe. Ungedrucktes aus dem 1932 geführten Briefwechsel zwischen Hans Blüher und Hans-Joachim Schoeps’, Menora. Jahrbuch für deutsch-jüdische Geschichte, 13 (2002), p. 313-336. 10

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in being ‘always able to view historical problems theologically, as well as to constantly observe theological problems against the background of history’. 14 He wrote his first monograph on Jewish Christianity from the Swedish exile into which the increasing control of the Gestapo had forced him in 1938. 15 The book was published with the title Theologie und Geschichte des Judenchristentums in 1949 (one year after Marcel Simon’s Verus Israel), 16 following Schoeps’s return to Germany, where his parents had in the meantime encountered death at the hands of the Nazis, and where he had finally been able to begin teaching at a university, in the Bavarian city of Erlangen. In this work Schoeps applied the label of Jewish Christian only to the Ebionites, whom he saw as a prolongation of the primitive Christian community of Jerusalem, and whose most representative literary expression he found in the Pseudo-Clementine corpus. The Ebionites reportedly combined a partial obedience to the Law with faith in Jesus as a non-soteriological Messiah who had earned this dignity by virtue of his perfect conduct. A reading of Schoeps’s memoire Ja, nein, und trotzdem reveals that, although the Jewish scholar could never accept the divinity of Jesus, he was prepared to adhere to an adoptionistic theology, such as the one he attributed to the Ebionites and the Arians. 17 In his statement to this effect Schoeps inaccurately conflated Arius’s radical subordinationism with the adoptionist monarchianism of (his construal of) Ebionitism (a connection much more discerningly, yet still contentiously, explored again thirty years later by Rudolf Lorenz). 18 It is tempting to see this uncharacter14  H.-J. Schoeps, Israel und Christenheit. Jüdisch-christliches Religionsgespräch in 19 Jahrunderten. Geschichte einer theologischen Auseinandersetzung, München, 19613, p. 10. 15  Cfr. J. H. Schoeps, ‘ “Hitler ist nicht Deutschland”. Der Nationalsozialismus, das Exil in Schweden und die Rückkehr von Hans-Joachim Schoeps in die ehemalige Heimat’, in Wider den Zeitgeist, p. 227-248. 16   M. Simon, Verus Israel. Étude sur les relations entre chrétiens et juifs dans l’Empire romain (Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, Série 1, 166), Paris, 1948. 17  H.-J. Schoeps, Ja, nein und trotzdem. Erinnerungen, Begegnungen, Erfahrungen, Mainz, 1974, p. 139. 18  G. Lorenz, Arius judaizans? Untersuchungen zur dogmengeschichtlichen Einordnung des Arius (Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte, 31), Göttingen, 1979.

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istically anachronistic move as revealing of Schoeps’s wish to find his own hybrid theological postures at work as late as the fourth century, at a time when rabbinic Judaism and empire-backed Christian orthodoxy had congealed enough to assume – at least according to the narrative current in his times – the contours of two poles of an unsparing binary logic. Ebionitism, however, did not appeal to Schoeps exclusively by reason of its character of in-betweenness. In his anti-rabbinic eyes, the Ebionitic belief system had the function of revealing the will of God, which undergirded the Torah, as distinguished from the Torah itself. Schoeps’s later, popular book Das Judenchristentum shows him believing that the Ebionites, battled by the Rabbis, held the key to a possible reform of Judaism which would have saved the latter from its fate of Selbstverkapselung. 19 Freed from its legalistic degenerations, Judaism would have thus finally led humankind to Gottesfurcht, a notion fundamental to comprehending Schoeps’s ultraconservative political theology of a divinely ordained restoration of Prussia’s grandeur. 20 Ancient Jewish Christianity, like other images of ambiguous, open-ended, or hybrid religious identity that Schoeps made the object of his attention (such as Paul or the thinkers discussed in his Philosemitismus im Barock), 21 was for him a mirror by means of which to contemplate what has been called ‘his unique positionlessness on the border between Judaism and Christianity’. 22 This mirror, however, must be questioned in relation to Schoeps’s idiosyncratic subjective position as a whole,   H.-J. Schoeps, Das Judenchristentum. Untersuchungen über Gruppenbildungen und Parteikämpfe in der frühen Christenheit, Bern, 1964, p. 104. 20 Cfr. R. Faber, ‘ “Theokratie von oben versus Theokratie von unten”. Die Antipoden Hans-Joachim Schoeps und Jacob Taubes’, in Wider den Zeitgeist, p. 45-62; and H.-Ch. Kraus, ‘Hans-Joachim Schoeps als konservativer Denker’, in Wider den Zeitgeist, p. 159-176. 21  H.-J. Schoeps, Philosemitismus im Barock. Religions- und geistesgeschichtliche Untersuchungen, Tübingen, 1952; Id., Paulus. Die Theologie des Apostels im Lichte der jüdischen Religionsgeschichte, Tübingen, 1959; cfr. D. R.  Langton, ‘Modern Jewish Identity and the Apostle Paul. Pauline Studies as an IntraJewish Ideological Battleground’, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 28 (2005), p. 217-258 at 226-230; and F. Damour, ‘Le retour du fils prodigue? Interprétations juives de Paul aux xixe et xxe siècles: quelques jalons’, Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses, 90 (2010), p. 25-47 at 39-41. 22  M. A.  Krell, ‘Schoeps vs. Rosenzweig’, p. 26. 19

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and as one of the forms assumed by an at times tragic quest for identity in a variety of dimensions (national, erotic, and religious) – a restless engagement that sustained Schoeps’s intellectual creativity throughout his life. Schoeps’s feeling of the ultimate, inescapable untenability of his own liminal position in various realms of human experience surfaces in his writings. The Ebionites, described as standing in the breach to defend Christianity against the dangers of Marcionism and Gnosticism in the second century, 23 did not receive the gratitude they deserved from the then-rising mainstream Christianity. At the end – perhaps not coincidentally – of a short article discussing the confluence, in the sexual morals of the Jewish Christians, of the opposite attitudes towards eros supposedly typical of Judaism and Christianity, Schoeps writes: ‘Denn die Ebioniten wollten eben zu gleichen Teilen wahre Juden und wahre Christen in einem sein’, 24 and entrusts the proscription of this position to Jerome’s lapidary formula: ‘But when they wish to be both Jews and Christians, they are neither Jews nor Christians’. 25 Schoeps’s book sparked a productive debate, and paved the way for more work on the subject. At the outset of his 1958 monograph Théologie du judéo-christianisme, Jean Daniélou (19051974) explicitly announced his desire to do for the orthodox kind of Jewish Christianity what Schoeps had done for its heterodox variety. In other words, the French theologian and historian was keen to draw, a decade after Schoeps, a Jewish Christianity of his own Catholic liking. 26 Daniélou’s book marks an important episode in an engagement with Judaism and non-Christian religions that spanned several decades of his life, and which would bring this Jesuit cardinal, a prominent theorist  Cfr. H.-J. Schoeps, Das Judenchristentum, 102.   H.-J. Schoeps, ‘Ehebewertung und Sexualmoral der späteren Judenchristen’, in Studia Theologica. Nordic Journal of Theology, 2 (1948), p. 99-101. 25  Hier., Epist., 112, 13 (PL 22, 924): Sed dum volunt et Iudaei esse et Christiani, nec Iudaei sunt, nec Christiani. 26 On Daniélou’s views on Jewish Christianity cfr. also W. D.  Davies, ‘Paul and Jewish Christianity according to Cardinal Daniélou. A Suggestion’, in Judéo-Christianisme, p. 69-79; and M. Fédou, ‘Le judéo-christianisme selon Jean Daniélou’, in Actualité de Jean Daniélou – ed. J. Fontaine, Paris, 2006, p. 43-56. 23 24

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of the ressourcement and exponent of the nouvelle théologie, to be called by Pope John XXIII to serve as a peritus in the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). 27 Structured in four parts, respectively devoted to the sources, intellectual milieus, doctrines, and institutions of Jewish Christianity, Daniélou’s monograph famously redefined this historical phenomenon as ‘ l’expression du christianisme dans les forms du Spätjudentum’. 28 Daniélou’s Jewish Christianity (in his view alive from Jesus’s death up to the second Jewish revolt in 135, and later surviving only in Syria) implied no link to the practicing Jewish community, and found expression in the structures of thought typical of Judaism (particularly apocalypticism), while upholding a theology that was, in his words, fully Christian. Daniélou’s monograph is commonly regarded – and rightfully so – as a major historical achievement, despite all its limitations. The criticism directed to it has concerned matters such as its underestimation of Hellenistic and Iranian influences on the allegedly Semitic Late Judaism, its arbitrary periodization, or the simplistic equation the book draws between Jewish Christianity and apocalyptic thought. Here I would like to shift the focus onto Daniélou’s very construction of the category of Jewish Christianity, by suggesting that the hermeneutical framework of Théologie du Judéo-Christianisme is one informed, at least to some extent, by the author’s prominent theological commitments. As in the case of Schoeps, the point is of course not to declare inadmissible the holding of a belief on the part of a historian, or to denounce a particular theological outlook on the relations between Christianity and Judaism as objectionable, but rather to foreground intellectual driving forces that might lie at times unrecognized. For Daniélou, as I would like to suggest, the congeries of phenomena gathered under the label Jewish Christianity represent but one instance in the history of inculturation of the Christian truth. The cardinal himself regarded the book devoted to 27 Cfr. J. Mettepenningen, Nouvelle Théologie – New Theology. Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II, London, 2010, p. 87-95; and M. Fédou, Les pères de l’Église et la théologie chrétienne, Paris, 2013, esp. chapters 2 and 3 (p. 35-82). 28  J. Daniélou, Théologie du Judéo-Christianisme, p. 19.

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Jewish Christianity as the first volume of a trilogy (including Message évangélique et culture héllénistique and Les origines du christianisme latin) 29 representing a history of the cultural expressions of early Christianity. The traditional missiological views that Daniélou shared, in opposition to some of the contemporaneous developments in the ecumenical movements, saw Christ’s word of redemption as needing to be embodied in different human cultures in order to gain efficacy. For Daniélou, religions in and of themselves have no power to save, since salvation is given by Christ alone. 30 The religion of Israel, for all its specificities, was no exception. While some Christian scholars after the Holocaust were attempting to revise supersessionist understandings of the relations between Judaism and the Church, Daniélou was persuaded that the latter’s commitment – pursued on a human, non-theological level – to mount a guard against revivals of Christian anti-Semitism would constitute an adequate response to the events of the Second World War. ‘Il y a une continuité d’Israël’, he said in an exchange de Iudaeiis with André Chouraqui, 29  J. Daniélou, Message évangélique et culture hellénistique aux iie et iiie siècles (Bibliothèque de théologie. Histoire des doctrines chrétiennes avant Nicée, 2), Paris, 1961; and Id., Les origines du christianisme latin (Bibliothèque de théologie. Histoire des doctrines chrétiennes avant Nicée, 3), Paris, 1991. 30 Cfr. J. Daniélou, Le mystère du salut des nations, Paris, 1946; Id., Essai sur le mystère de l’histoire, Paris, 1953; Id., L’avenir de la religion, Paris, 1968; R. E. Vergastegui, ‘Christianisme et religions non-chrétiennes. Analyse de la “tendance Daniélou” ’, Euntes docete, 23 (1970), p. 227-279; M. Sales, ‘La théologie des religions non-chrétiennes’, in Jean Daniélou 1905-1974 – ed. Société des amis du Cardinal Daniélou, Paris, 1975, p. 37-55; L. Gardet, ‘Jean Daniélou et le dialogue des cultures’, in Jean Daniélou 1905-1974, p. 57-61; F. Frei, Médiation unique et transfiguration universelle. Thèmes christologiques et leurs perspectives missionnaires dans la pensée de J. Daniélou (Europäische Hochschulschriften, 23; Theologie, 173), Berne, 1981; D. Veliath, Theological Approach and Understanding of Religions. Jean Daniélou and Raimundo Panikkar. A Study in Contrast, Bangalore, 1988; P. Vithayathil, Jesus and Religions. Jean Cardinal Daniélou’s Theological Understanding of Uniqueness of Christ and Religious Pluralism in the Context of Today’s Christological Debate, Rome, 1999; I. Morali, ‘ J. Daniélou e la teologia della salvezza dei non cristiani in H. de Lubac’, Euntes docete, 53 (2000), p. 29-51; F.-M. Baldé, ‘Inculturation et dégagement de l’Église parmi les nations’, in Actualité de Jean Daniélou, p. 197-201; D. Burrell, ‘Christians, Muslims (and Jews) before the One God. Jean Daniélou on Mission Revisited’, Interpretation, 61 (2006), p. 34-41; M. Meslin, ‘Jean Daniélou et les religions non chrétiennes’, in Actualité de Jean Daniélou, p. 155-164; A. I.  Rodríguez, Cristianismo y religiones en el pensamiento de Jean Daniélou (1905-1974) (Excerpta e dissertationibus in sacra theologia, 51, 3), Pamplona, 2007.

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‘qu’un chrétien accepte pleinement, celle d’Israël constituant un type humain particulier [...] qui a absolument le droit [...] de persister dans l’existence, [...] d’avoir une terre, [...] d’être un peuple parmi les peuples. Mais en ce qui concerne ce que j’appellerais l’Histoire sainte, l’Histoire du salut, ce people ne peut plus être aujourd’hui, pour nous, ce qu’il était dans l’Ancien Testament’. ‘[N]ous’, he added with refreshing frankness, ‘ne pouvons pas renoncer à vous convertir’. 31 Daniélou was of course aware that second Temple Judaism constituted the breeding ground of the Jesus movement. This, however, was for him no real obstacle to viewing Jewish culture as one in which Christianity could be inculturated. From the viewpoint of sacred history such as Daniélou conceived it, the tie between Israel and God’s covenant was severed by the Jews’ collective rejection of Jesus. Thereafter, of the special status granted to Israel by its election there remained only some fond memories, crystallized in the Hebrew Bible. To be sure, the chapter of Jewish Christianity remained a special one in the history of salvation, because God’s relinquishing of Jesusdisbelieving Israel was not without residue. There persisted for Daniélou a mystery of Israel, lying in the fact that the Jewish people taken as a whole, though undeservedly chosen by God to contract with him a covenant, refused to recognize its own glory. 32 But, notwithstanding this mystery, whose solution is projected into the happy ending of the eschaton, the historical phenomenon of Jewish Christianity remained for Daniélou an instance of inculturation. In this manner, Jewish Christian theology ceased to be seen, as it was by Schoeps, as a – to be sure, theologically meaningful – solution of compromise, sought by a particular group at a specific point in history, between the Jewish demands of faithfulness to the Law and the gospel of salvation preached by Jesus. In ancient Jewish Christianity, rather, Daniélou saw the intersection between the transhistorical and supernatural level to which the event of the incarnation pertains and the historical   A. Chouraqui, J. Daniélou, Les juifs, Paris, 1966, p. 94-95.  Cfr. J. Daniélou, Dialogue avec Israël, Paris, 1963, p. 8; and A. Chouraqui, J. Daniélou, Les juifs, p. 26. 31 32

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and natural dimension to which Israel, by now simply an ethnos endowed with its own linguistic, cultural, and religious heritage, had been reduced by its unbelieving. Ultimately, Judaism and Christianity are for Daniélou two incommensurable quantities; one could even say that only the former was for him a religion in the mundane sense of the word. For the Jesuit, however, the missiological interest of the question of Jewish Christianity was not limited to the past: it was also linked to the need for Israel’s conversion in the present day. In his conversation with Chouraqui he mused again: ‘Il y a eu un judéo-christianisme, c’est-à-dire qu’aux origines l’Église primitive a été essentiellement constituée par des juifs qui restaient parfaitement juifs en toutes choses sauf dans le fait qu’ils avaient reconnu en Jésus-Christ le Messie annoncé par les Prophètes et le Fils de Dieu. Aujourd’hui également, il nous paraît extrêmement important que le juif soit juif au sens où, même à l’intérieur d’une famille universaliste comme la famille chrétienne, il puisse y avoir à nouveau une expression juive du christianisme, ceci marquant bien que la judaïcité, si l’on peut dire, fait partie de la plénitude de l’humanité’. 33 In what exactly this form of Christianity would wind up consisting in Daniélou’s mind a couple of generations after the conversion to Christianity of individual Jews is not clear, considering that the cardinal elsewhere in his writings excluded the viability of a Torah-observant Christianity. It is time to summarize. In the portrayals of ancient Jewish Christianity of both Schoeps and Daniélou, I propose, it is possible to read, per speculum in aenigmate, these two writers’ wishes for the Jewish people of their day (and the frustration thereof). On the one hand, Schoeps’s Ebionitism, destined to extinction, offered a clear image of a Judaism defeated by those very historical forces to which it was seeking to sacrifice its immediate, carnal identity in the name of a higher, more inclusive belonging. Der deutsche Vortrupp, the hypernationalistic Gefolgschaft built by Schoeps and composed of German Jews resolved to ‘hold their posts’ and dissolve into the ‘German race’ while retaining their faith in the Jewish God of creation, unmistakably repeated,   A. Chouraqui, J. Daniélou, Les juifs, p. 25.

33

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if with more tragic consequences, the gesture of that curious heresiological and scholarly creature that were the Ebionites. Daniélou, on the other hand, found in ancient Jewish Christianity the image of a Jewish readiness to accept Christ that he could only pray for in contemporary times. Such an acceptance would have allowed the Jewish people to leave its status of outcast among the nations, leading it, as we have seen, to be considered at last as part of the fullness of humanity – a statement that may have to be read as friendly advice and as a coded recipe for avoiding an encore of the recent disasters. If this interpretation of the role of the category of Jewish Christianity in our two authors is correct, it is interesting to notice how for both the German Jew and the French Catholic the ideal focus lies on the first term of the construct, Judaism – a circumstance revealing of the urgent preoccupations that gave rise to the will to define and, in a way, narratively construct this religious phenomenon. These considerations do not detract from the fact that some of the fundamental insights of Schoeps’s and Daniélou’s approaches remain relevant for today’s inquiry into early Christian-Jewish relations. Daniélou’s focus on thought structures, though de-confessionalized, echoes in Daniel Boyarin’s broad project of charting – mostly through a sophisticated analysis of discursive practices – an unbroken morphology of ideas for the continuum of Judaeo-Christianity. 34 In this regard (and I am aware that this may go, so to speak, regressively beyond Boyarin’s intentions), in tackling the problem of the relative position of Jews and Christians in the first centuries ce, a shifting of the focus onto religious constructs and their discursive and material contexts – while retaining awareness of ongoing rhetorical struggles within power structures – could allow us to avoid the impasse of the debate over the very legitimacy of the notion of Jewish Christianity. 35 34  Boyarin himself refers to Daniélou’s project: cfr. D. Boyarin, ‘Rethinking Jewish Christianity. An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (to which Is Appended a Correction of My Border Lines)’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, 99 (2009), p. 7-36 at 33. 35  The bibliography on the debates about the definition of Jewish Christianity is nearly infinite, and any citation would be purely arbitrary. Good guidance is provided in J. N. Carleton. Paget, ‘Jewish Christianity’, in The Cambridge

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Boyarin has made a compelling plea for the dismantling of this category, which he considers to ‘always function as a term of art in a modernist heresiology’. 36 In fact the continuum model Boyarin proposes, asserting the impossibility of identifying two stable identities, would show any appeal to forms of hybridity or co-participation as unwarranted. If, however, we decide to focus on the need to discontinue using the term, how can we avoid the risk of opening the door to Hegel’s night in which all cows are black? And how can we prevent the negative focus on the term from paradoxically resulting in the essentialization of a category commonly utilized for its heuristic and explanatory value? A possible answer might come – though, again, on a descriptive, non-confessional plane – from what Marc Krell described as ‘Schoeps’ seemingly contradictory and multiple Jewish subjectivity’ (mirrored in his construction of Ebonitism), representing ‘a possible model for a Jewish-Christian heterogeneous totality, in which Jewish and Christian identities are intertwined yet not melded together, therefore retaining their difference’. 37 In practical terms, accompanying the reconstruction of rhetorical strategies of boundary-setting with the drawing of a cartography of religious ideas may help neglected connections emerge across a descriptively and historically productive border; after all, a map such as the one proposed by Boyarin can hardly be navigated without the very categories it endeavours to do away with. Eventually, a procedure such as this could enable students of Jewish Christianity to fight the confusion the topic inspires by squeezing, so to speak, as much history as possible out of the texts and contexts they investigate.

History of Judaism, III: The Early Roman Period – ed. W. D. Davies, W. Horbury, J. Sturdy, Cambridge, 2000, p. 731-775; Id., ‘The Definition of the Terms Jewish Christian and Jewish Christianity in the History of Research’, in Jewish Believers in Jesus. The Early Centuries – ed. R. Hvalvik, O. Skarsaune, Peabody, 2007, p. 22-52; and A. Y.  Reed, ‘Jewish Christianity’. 36  D. Boyarin, ‘Rethinking Jewish Christianity’, p. 7. 37  M. A.  Krell, ‘Schoeps vs. Rosenzweig’, p. 26.

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Bibliography 1. Primary sources Hier., Epist. = Hieronymus Stridonensis, Epistulae (PL, 22), Paris, 1845, col. 325-1224.

1. Secondary literature F.-M. Baldé, ‘Inculturation et dégagement de l’Église parmi les nations’, in Actualité de Jean Daniélou – ed. J. Fontaine, Paris, 2006, p. 197-201. F. Ch. Baur, ‘Die Christuspartei in der korinthischen Gemeinde, der Gegensatz des petrinischen und paulinischen Christentums in der ältesten Kirche, der Apostel Petrus in Rom’, Tübinger Zeitschrift für Theologie, 4 (1831), p. 61-206. H. Blüher – H.-J. Schoeps, Streit um Israel. Ein jüdisch-christliches Gespräch, Hamburg, 1933. D. Boyarin, ‘Rethinking Jewish Christianity. An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (to which Is Appended a Correction of My Border Lines)’, The Jewish Quarterly Review, 99 (2009), p. 7-36. D. Burrell, ‘Christians, Muslims (and Jews) before the One God. Jean Daniélou on Mission Revisited’, Interpretation, 61 (2006), p. 34-41. J. N. Carleton Paget, ‘The Definition of the Terms Jewish Christian and Jewish Christianity in the History of Research’, in Jewish Believers in Jesus. The Early Centuries – ed. R. Hvalvik, O. Skarsaune, Peabody, 2007, p. 22-52. J. N. Carleton Paget, ‘Jewish Christianity’, in The Cambridge History of Judaism, III: The Early Roman Period – ed. W. D. Davies, W. Horbury, J. Sturdy, Cambridge, 2000, p. 731-775. A. Chouraqui, J. Daniélou, Les juifs, Paris, 1966. F. Damour, ‘Le retour du fils prodigue? Interprétations juives de Paul aux xixe et xxe siècles: quelques jalons’, Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses, 90 (2010), p. 25-47. J. Daniélou, Les origines du christianisme latin (Bibliothèque de théologie. Histoire des doctrines chrétiennes avant Nicée, 3), Paris, 1991. J. Daniélou, L’avenir de la religion, Paris, 1968. J. Daniélou, Dialogue avec Israël, Paris, 1963. J. Daniélou, Message évangélique et culture hellénistique aux iie et iiie siècles (Bibliothèque de théologie. Histoire des doctrines chrétiennes avant Nicée, 2), Paris, 1961.

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Thema Homosexualität’, in Wider den Zeitgeist. Studien zum Leben und Werk von Hans-Joachim Schoeps (1909-1980) – ed. G. Botsch, J. H. Knoll, A. D. Ludewig (Haskala. Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen herausgegeben vom Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum für europäischjüdische Studien, 39), Hildesheim, 2009, p. 177-198. H.-Ch. Kraus, ‘Hans-Joachim Schoeps als konservativer Denker’, in Wider den Zeitgeist. Studien zum Leben und Werk von Hans-Joachim Schoeps (1909-1980) – ed. G. Botsch, J. H. Knoll, A. D. Ludewig (Haskala. Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen herausgegeben vom Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum für europäisch-jüdische Studien, 39), Hildesheim, 2009, p. 159-176. M. A. Krell, ‘Schoeps vs. Rosenzweig. Transcending Religious Borders’, Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, 52 (2000), p. 25-37. F.-L. Kroll, Geschichtswissenschaft in politischer Absicht. Hans-Joachim Schoeps und Preußen (Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen und Reden zur Philosophie, Politik und Geistesgeschichte, 61), Berlin, 2010. F.-L. Kroll, ‘Hans-Joachim Schoeps und Preußen’, in Wider den Zeitgeist. Studien zum Leben und Werk von Hans-Joachim Schoeps (1909-1980) – ed. G. Botsch, J. H. Knoll, A. D. Ludewig (Haskala. Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen herausgegeben vom Moses Mendelssohn Zentrum für europäisch-jüdische Studien, 39), Hildesheim, 2009, p. 105-137. D. R. Langton, ‘Modern Jewish Identity and the Apostle Paul. Pauline Studies as an Intra-Jewish Ideological Battleground’, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 28 (2005), p. 217-258. G. Lease, ‘Odd Fellows’ in the Politics of Religion. Modernism, National Socialism and German Judaism (Religion and Society, 35), Berlin, 1995. G. Lease, ‘Der Briefwechsel zwischen Karl Barth und Hans-Joachim Schoeps’, Menora. Jahrbuch für deutsch-jüdische Geschichte, 2 (1991), p. 115-120. D. Lincicum, ‘F. C. Baur’s Place in the Study of Jewish Christianity’, in The Rediscovery of Jewish Christianity. From Toland to Baur – ed. F. St. Jones, Atlanta, 2012, p. 137-166. G. Lorenz, Arius judaizans? Untersuchungen zur dogmengeschichtlichen Einordnung des Arius (Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte, 31), Göttingen, 1979. M. Meslin, ‘Jean Daniélou et les religions non chrétiennes’, in Actualité de Jean Daniélou – ed. J. Fontaine, Paris, 2006, p. 155-164. J. Mettepenningen, Nouvelle Théologie – New Theology. Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II, London, 2010.

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Abstract This paper discusses the accounts of ancient Jewish Christianity offered in the aftermath of the Second World War by the Prussian nationalist Jewish intellectual Hans-Joachim Schoeps and the French Jesuit theologian Jean Daniélou. In particular, it investigates how these scholars’ deployment and further development of Jewish Christianity as a historical category served their religious and ideological commitments, and may be seen as expressing their hopes for the Jewish people of their day. I suggest that Schoeps’s treatment of Jewish Christianity should be read in conjunction with his liminal position in a variety of realms, and in particular with his labour of negotiating Jewish identity in tandem with his attraction to Christianity and investment in the Prussian ideal. As for Daniélou, I propose that, in keeping with his theology, he saw Jewish Christianity as an instance of inculturation – replicable in contemporary times – of the Christian faith in a people that, due to its unbelieving, had lost its special role in salvation history. The paper ends with some remarks about the relevance of these two scholars’ treatments for contemporary research on ancient Jewish Christianity.

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TIMOTHY PETTIPIECE University of Ottawa

MANICHAEISM AT THE CROSSROADS OF JEWISH, CHRISTIAN AND MUSLIM TRADITIONS

Mani and the Manichaeans have often served as convenient foils in much of the history of Patristic Studies. More often than not, Mani is simply seen as the arch-heretic par excellence against which the orthodoxy of others can be judged or condemned. He has frequently been viewed as the culmination of everything deviant, degenerate, and foreign to mainstream Christian discourse. Manichaean thought is a spectre that particularly haunts the world of Augustinian studies, where its influence (real or imagined) is almost always portrayed in a dark, negative light. 1 Manichaeans, of course, would have been greatly offended by this tenebrous caricature, but the questions must be asked – what have they contributed to the development not only of Christian tradition, but of late antique traditions in general? Is there anything in their legacy of enduring value? On one level, Manichaeans preserved ideas and traditions abandoned elsewhere in the Jewish and Christian worlds, while on another, Manichaeism serves as an important link between several of the major late antique religious traditions, the implications of which are only starting to be uncovered. In its essence, Manichaeism is a liminal religion. Its unique amalgam of features have often made it difficult to define and classify in relation to neighbouring traditions. Growing up in

1  This is being re-evaluated by J. Beduhn’s recent multi-volume study Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, Volume 1. Conversion and Apostasy, 373-388 ce, Philadelphia, 2009 and Volume 2. Making a “Catholic” Self, 388-401  ce, 2013, Philadelphia, 2013.

10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107523

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mid-3rd century Iran, Mani was well-positioned to produce a far reaching and original religious message. Sasanian Persia, like its Parthian precursor, was religiously diverse. Not only could the Hellenistic traces of Macedonian colonies be felt throughout its territories, but also a strong Jewish and Christian presence manifested itself in a variety of forms – largely in Aramaic, a point I shall return to later. Moreover, Mani would have certainly been exposed to some form of Zoroastrian piety, as well as Indian religious traditions, be they Hindu, Buddhist, or even Jain. 2 This situation is born out, albeit in a somewhat sinister light, by the declaration of the Magian high-priest Kirdir, who under Bahram II famously celebrated his persecution of ‘Jews (yahuˉd), Buddhists (šaman), Brahmans (braman), Syriac Christians (naˉsraˉ), Greek Christians (kristiyaˉn), and Manichaeans (zandıˉk)’ in an inscription. 3 Mani’s openness to other traditions may have intrigued King Shapur, but after the Great King’s death he and his movement were perceived as subversive by both Persian and Roman authorities alike. As a result, the Manichaean movement occupied cultural, political, geographical, and theological spaces at the margins of the Roman and Sasanian worlds. It must be remembered, however, that Manichaeism is not unique in this regard, since, regardless of their later distribution, all of the major religions of the late antique Near East – Jewish, Christian, Muslim – emerged from the very same liminal matrix as Manichaeans themselves. What is forgotten, or wilfully overlooked, is the significant role played by the followers of Mani in this dynamic mix.

2  Gh. Gnoli’ ‘Aurentes’ The Buddhist “arhants” in the Coptic “Kephalaia” through a Bactrian Transmission,’ East and West, 41.1 (1991), p. 359-361; M. Deeg, I. Gardner, ‘Indian Influence on Mani Reconsidered: The Case of Jainism,’ International Journal of Jaina Studies, 4-6 (2008-2010), p. 158-186; I. Gardner, ‘Some Comments on Mani and Indian Religions from the Coptic Sources’, in New Perspectives in Manichaean Research – ed. A. Van Tongerloo, L. Cirillo, Leiden, 2005; T. Pettipiece, ‘The Buddha in Early Christian Literature’, in Millennium 6/2009: Jahrbuch zu Kultur und Geschichte des ersten Jahrtausends n. Chr., Berlin, 2009. 3  Ph. Gignoux, Les quatre inscriptions du Mage Kirdı ˉ r: Textes et concordances, Studia Iranica 9, 1991. See J. Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia: From 550 bc to 650 ad, London, 1996, p. 199.

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1. From Darkness to Light: The Rediscovery of the Manichaean Voice It has indeed taken a long time for Manichaeans to find their rightful place in the scholarly dialogue about late antique religious culture. Long considered little more than a heresiological curiosity, the impact of textual discoveries from the Turfan Oasis in the early twentieth century revolutionized modern Manichaean studies. 4 Unfortunately, in spite of the renewed energy and interest these finds generated, the Turfan texts led scholars down an errant path to a place where Manichaeism was conceptualized as another form of Persian religion, since the fragments retrieved were in various Middle Iranian dialects (Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian) and contained a significant amount of Zoroastrian technical terminology. One scholar in particular resisted this trend. In 1924, F. C. Burkitt gave a series of Donnellan Lectures on The Religion of the Manichees, 5 in which he maintained that Manichaeism took root in a rich, albeit eclectic, Christian soil – soil from Persia to be sure, but Christian soil nonetheless. Burkitt’s interpretation was validated in 1929 when a collection of Coptic manuscripts from Medinet Madi were recognized as once belonging to a Manichaean community. 6 In these texts, dated to the fourth or fifth century – much earlier than those found in Central Asia – the Christian elements come to the fore. For one thing, the Manichaeans call themselves the ‘Holy Church’, and, in the codex containing Mani’s Letters, Mani designates himself ‘an Apostle of Jesus Christ’. 7 This conception was made even more explicit some decades later with the publication of the tiny Cologne Mani Codex, which also 4  A. Stein, ‘Sir Aurel Stein’s Expedition in Central Asia’, The Geographical Journal, 46.4 (1915), p. 269-276. Aside from the many scholarly editions by Sundermann and others, see H.-J. Klimkeit, Gnosis on the Silk Road: Gnostic Texts from Central Asia, New York, 1993 and M. Boyce, A Catalogue of the Iranian Manuscripts in Manichean Script in the German Turfan Collection, Berlin, 1960. 5  F. C.  Burkitt, The Religion of the Manichees, Cambridge, 1925. 6  C. Schmidt, H.-J. Polotsky, ‘Ein Mani-Fund in Ägypten’, Sitzungsberichte der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1933), p. 4-90. See J. Robinson, The Manichaean Codices of Medinet Madi, Eugene, 2013.  7  Already noted by Schmidt, Polotsky, ‘Ein Mani-Fund’, p. 24. 

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contains excerpts from Mani’s correspondence with the same introductory formula embedded into a hagiographic narrative of his early life in a sectarian community. 8 Now, Mani’s fascination with and commitment to Jesus has come even more into focus with the recent publication of remains of yet another Letters codex from Kellis. 9 Here, Mani writes: My good saviour, the witness who is my father: He is [...] my redeemer from [...] all the time, the one whom my eyes gaze upon all the time; it is he who bears witness that you are [...] in [...] in love, like a beloved friend and a brother and a good companion’ (P. Kell. Copt. 53). 10

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, there should be no doubt that Manichaeism represents a parallel stream within the multiform topography of early Christian discourses. Manichaeism, therefore, or more properly the Manichaean Church, is not a ‘Persian’ religion in Christian guise, as was once imagined, but an indigenous form of Persian Christianity. Consequently, Manichaean writings and ideas ought to be considered in any broad-based and genuinely holistic examination of early Christian traditions. The confrontation between this Persian church and the rival ‘orthodoxy’ imported, or relocated by Shapur, 11 from the west is vividly portrayed in the imagined confrontation between the Bishop of Carchar and Mani in the Acts of Archelaus, 12 and more subtly so in the Doctrine of Addai’s overwriting of an earlier Manichaean mission to Edessa. 13 8  Der Kölner Mani-Kodex: Über das Werden seines Leibes: Kritische Edition – ed. A. Henrichs, L. Koenen, Opladen, 1988. 9 See I. Gardner, S. N. C.  Lieu, ‘From Narmouthis (Medinet Madi) to Kellis (Ismant El-Kharab): Manichaean Documents from Roman Egypt’, The Journal of Roman Studies, 86 (1996), p. 146-169; I. Gardner, ‘The Reconstruction of Mani’s Epistles from Three Coptic Codices (Ismant el-Kharab and Medinet Madi)’, in The Light and the Darkness: Studies in Manichaeism and its World – ed. P. Mirecki, J. Beduhn, Leiden, 2001, p. 93-104. 10  I. Gardner, Kellis Literary Texts, 2 vols., Oxford, 2007, II. 11   Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia, p. 201. 12  J. Beduhn, ‘Placing the Acts of Archelaus’, in Frontiers of Faith: The Christian Encounter with Manichaeism in the Acts of Archelaus – ed. J. Beduhn, P. Mirecki, Leiden, 2007, p. 7.  13  H. Drijvers, ‘Addai und Mani. Christentum und Manichäismus im dritten Jahrhundert in Syrien’. in IIIe Symposium Syriacum 1980, Rome, 1983, p. 75-185.

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Even much later Islamic observers, such as ‘Abd al-Jabbar, recorded the Manichaeans’ insistence that they are the followers of Christ who possess the true gospel. 14 Still, in spite of all this mounting evidence, there is still a strong resistance to giving Manichaeans their due. Not so long ago, Michel Tardieu complained that no one really cared about Manichaean readings of the Bible, 15 although Charles Kannengiesser did include a chapter on Mani in his magisterial Handbook of Patristic Exegesis (2004) and Alexander Böhlig’s dissertation Die Bibel bei den Manichäern, which has long circulated privately among scholars, has just been published by Brill (2013). These are important steps, but still more can be done to define the Manichaean contribution to the late antique religious landscape.

2. Sibling Rivalries: Manichaeans and the Religions of the Late Antique Near East So if Manichaeans are to be seen as integral to the interactions and developments of late antique religions, what do such interactions look like? Are they primarily hostile, or mutually influential? Moreover, do they tell us anything about the common environment in which these traditions developed? For one thing, it has long been evident that Mani was greatly influenced by some form of sectarian Judaism, one with important connections to the Dead Sea Scrolls. John Reeves, for example, examined the parallels between Iranian fragments from the Manichaean Book of Giants 16 and certain Aramaic texts from Qumran. 17 Moreover, the publication of the Cologne Mani Codex made it clear that the Elchasaite community in which Mani is said to have been raised also has significant points of con14   J. Reeves, Prolegomena to a History of Islamicate Manichaeism, Sheffield, 2011, p. 96. 15  M. Tardieu, ‘Principes de l’exégèse manichéenne du Nouveau Testament’, in Les règles de l’interprétation, Paris, 1987, p. 123-124. 16  W. B.  Henning ‘Ein manichäisches Henochbuch’, Sitzungsbe-richte der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 5 (1934), p. 27-35; W. B.  Henning, ‘The Book of the Giants’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 11.1 (1943) p. 52-74. 17  J. C.  Reeves, Jewish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony: Studies in the Book of Giants Traditions, Cincinnati, 1992.

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tact with Second Temple Jewish sectarianism. 18 Mani appears to have been well versed not only in the so-called Enoch literature, but stories about other biblical forefathers as well, such as Adam, Seth, Cain, and Abel. He even endeavoured to provide a clever etymology for the name of Mount Sinai in his Living Gospel. 19 At the same time, later Jewish authors reacted negatively to Manichaean teachings and were offended by their dualism, as in the case of the Karaite theologian Yusuf al-Basir (11th cent), who lumped them in with Zorastrians and Christians, or the Spanish philosopher Abraham bar Hiyya, who believed that Mani was a heretic predicted by the prophet Daniel (11:20). 20 Christians, who engaged with Manichaeans most directly, share with them a rather complex history. In addition to Mani’s proclamation to be an ‘Apostle of Jesus Christ’, 21 Manichaean mythology is deeply rooted in an alternate trinitarian FatherMother-Child schema which we also find in texts such as the Secret Book of John. Additional connections between other Nag Hammadi texts such as the Gospel of Philip, Eugnostos, and On the Origin of the World and Manichaean literature can also be found, although the lines of influence between the corpora are far from clear, 22 as is the case with similar motifs in other noncanonical writings such as the Acts 23 and Gospel of Thomas. 24 18  A. Henrichs, ‘Mani and the Babylonian Baptists: A Historical Confrontation’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 77 (1973), p. 23-59; A. F. J.  Klijn, G. J. Reinink, ‘Elchasai and Mani’, Vigiliae Christianae, 28.4 (1974), p. 277-289. 19  W.-P. Funk, ‘Mani’s Account of Other Religions According to the Coptic Synaxeis Codex’, in New Light on Manichaeism: Papers from the sixth International Congress on Manichaeism; organized by the International Association of Manichaean Studies – ed J. Beduhn, Leiden, 2009, p. 123. 20  Reeves, Prolegomena, p. 136-137. 21 This identification has been further reinforced by Zsuzsanna Gulácsi’s recent identification of Mani’s personal seal, see N. A. Pedersen, J. M. Larsen, Manichaean Texts in Syriac: First Editions, New Editions and Studies, with contributions by Zsuzsanna Gulácsi and Myriam Krutzsch, Turnhout, 2013. 22  See T. Pettipiece, ‘Towards a Manichaean Reading of the Nag Hammadi Codices’, Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies, 3-4 (2012): p. 43-54. 23  P.-H. Poirier, L’Hymne de la perle des actes de Thomas. Introduction, TexteTraduction, Commentaire, Louvain-la-Neuve, 1981. 24  W.-P. Funk, ‘ “Einer aus tausend, zwei aus zehntausend”: Zitate aus dem Thomasevangelium in den koptischen Manichaica’, in For the Children, Perfect Instruction: Studies in Honor of Hans-Martin Schenke on the Occasion of the Ber-

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Such similarities, of course, did nothing to garner any sympathy among western ‘proto-orthodox’ observers, so Christian authors in Roman lands tended to denigrate Mani as a Persian charlatan, or worse, as an illegitimate slave. 25 For instance, in his classic description, Hegemonius says in the Acts of Archelaus: When he saw Manes, Marcellus was first astonished at the garments he was wearing. For he wore a kind of shoe which is generally known commonly as the ‘trisolium’, and a multicoloured cloak, of a somewhat ethereal appearance, while in his hand he held a very strong staff made of ebony-wood. He carried a Babylonian book under his left arm, and he had covered his legs with trousers of different colours, one of them scarlet, the other coloured leek-green. His appearance was like that of an old Persian magician or warlord (trans. Vermes). 26

Even the Aramaic speaking Mandaeans interacted with Manichaeans in important ways, although this remains a subject that is far from being satisfactorily explored. For example, we find parallel descriptions of the ‘King of Darkness’ in Kephalaia Chapter 21 and the Mandaean Right Ginza, where the dark ruler is described as resembling a lion, eagle, serpent, and demon. 27 Yet, at the same time, the Mandaeans are harshly critical of their Manichaean cousins, since elsewhere in the Right Ginza, we read: There is another gate to perdition, which resulted from the mission of the Christ. They are the ones called zandiqia and mardmania  ... they invoke wind, fire, and water and sing hymns of praise to the sun and moon ... they are termed elect ones whom Mar Mani has chosen. 28 liner Arbeitskreis für koptisch-gnostische Schriften’s Thirtieth Year – ed. H.-G. Bethge et al., Leiden, 2002, p. 67-94; J. K.  Coyle, ‘The Gospel of Thomas in Manichaeism?’ in J. K. Coyle, Manichaeism and Its Legacy, Leiden, 2009, p. 123141. 25  Numerous polemical sources, including the Acts of Archelaus, tell an alternate story of Mani’s origins as a slave-boy named Corbicius. 26   M. Vermes, S. N. C. Lieu, K. Kaatz, Acta Archelai (The Acts of Archelaus), Turnhout, 2001, p. 58. 27 See T. Pettipiece, Pentadic Redaction in the Manichaean Kephalaia, Leiden, 2009, p. 55-56; M. Lidzbarski, Ginza: Der Schatz oder Das große Buch der Mandäer, Göttingen, 1978 [1925]. 28  Reeves, Prolegomena, p. 143-144.

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Aside from Christians, Islamic writers have the most to say about Manichaeans and are among our most valuable witnesses, due in part perhaps to a possible Manichaean resurgence under the early Islamic regime. 29 Yet, as in the case of the Mandaeans, the full trajectory of influence between Manichaean and early Muslim communities has remained very much underexplored. For example, what do we make of the fact that, as al-Biruni suggests, Mani called himself ‘Seal of the Prophets’ long before Muhammad? 30 Indeed, we should not be surprised to find Manichaeans in pre-Islamic Arabia. They are attested by Titus of Bostra’s lengthy fourth-century refutation and, in fact, according to the Persian geographer Ibn Rusta, Manichaeans reportedly came from al-Hira to Mecca, 31 possibly via Palmyra, where they had been received by Queen Zenobia. 32 Yet, even if we can demonstrate some historical proximity, can we also detect some deeper degree of interconnection? Tor Andrae suggested that the only definite trace of Manichaean teaching could be found in Muhammad’s docetic Christology, 33 but surely we can see some broad similarities in the way in which both Mani and Muhammad characterized their respective missions to restore the primeval revelation given to humanity and as the last in a series of prophetic forerunners. As Mani proclaimed in his Shaburagan, a text he wrote specifically to announce his mission to the Persian court: Apostles of God have constantly brought wisdom and deeds in successive times. In one era they were brought by

29  S. N. C.  Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China: A Historical Survey, Manchester, 1985, p. 82-83. 30   E. Sachau, The Chronology of Ancient Nations: An English Version of the Arabic Text of the Athâr-Ul-Bâkiya of Albıˉrûnıˉ, Or, Vestiges of the Past, Collected and Reduced to Writing by the Author in A.h. 390-1, A.d. 1000. Lahore, 1983, p. 207; See Reeves, Prolegomena, p. 97; G. Stroumsa, ‘Seal of the Prophets: the Nature of a Manichaean Metaphor’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 7 (1986), p. 61-74. 31   T. Andrae, Mohammed: The Man and His Faith, New York, 1960, p. 105. 32  M. Tardieu, ‘L’arrivee des manicheens à al-Hira’, in La Syrie de Bysance à l’Islam, viie-viiie siècles: actes du Colloque international “De Bysance à l’Islam”, Lyon, Maison de l’Orient méditerranéen, Paris, Institut du monde arabe, 11-15 septembre 1990 – ed. P. Canivet, J.-P. Rey-Coquais, Damas, 1992. 33  Andrae, Mohammad, p. 112.

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the apostle al-Bud to the land of India, in another (era) by Zardasht to Persia, and in another (era) by Jesus to the West. Now this revelation has descended and this prophecy is promulgated during this final era by me, Mani, the apostle of the God of truth to Babylonia. 34

In fact, both prophets claimed (or were said to claim) to represent the Paraclete promised by Jesus. Indeed, as the tenth-century Islamic scholar al-Nadim stated, ‘Mani claimed that he was the Paraclete’, 35 whereas this is an identification also famously applied to Muhammad in Qur’an 61.6. More specifically, the Sira of Ibn Ishaq cites a (non-Peshitta) Syriac version of Ioh. 15:23 and states that munahhemana refers to Muhammad. 36

3. Abstaining Aramaeans: The Lost Socio-Linguistic Matrix of Manichaeans and their Rivals While we can see that Manichaeans interacted with other late antique religions in a variety of concrete and specific contexts, there are some broader trajectories that unite them in fundamental ways, both ideologically and linguistically. One of the characteristic features of late antique religiosity is the rise of the ascetic movement. In stark contrast to earlier Graeco-Roman values, which we tend to imagine as idealizing and valuing the body and its pleasures, the flesh increasingly became the battleground in a cosmic war waged for the soul. This ascetic tendency, which spreads through the eastern Mediterranean in the fourth century – shortly after the emergence of Manichaean communities 37 – is certainly present at the core of Manichaean ideology, particularly in terms of what was expected of the community’s elite, the Elect. Yet, according to

  Cited by al-Biruni, see Reeves, Prolegomena, p. 103.   Fihrist in Reeves, Prolegomena, p. 169. 36  A. Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, London, 1955, p. 104. 37  G. Stroumsa, ‘Monachisme et Marranisme chez les Manicheens d’Egypte’, Numen, 29.2 (1982), p. 184-201; L. Koenen, ‘Manichäische Mission und Klöster in Ägypte’, Das römisch-byzantinische Ägypten. Aegyptiaca Treverensia, 2 (1983), p. 93-108. 34 35

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accounts of Mani’s origins, his father Patek, while spending time in one of Ctesiphon’s shrines, heard a voice call to him and say: ‘Do not eat meat, do not drink wine and abstain from intercourse with anyone’. 38 A similar statement can be found in the second (unpublished) volume of Manichaean Kephalaia in connection with the Greek sage Anacharsis: ‘Anacharsis the Blessed [...] thus spoke to him [...] Anacharsis the Blessed and [...] hear [...] Do not leave [...]*/ beasts! Drink no wine! Eat(?) no flesh (?) [...] wife! Beget no [...]’. 39 This same admonition is attested in an earlier third-century source, the Syriac teacher Bardaisan’s Book of the Laws of Countries, which states that ‘there is a law among the Indians for the Brahmans, which many thousands and tens of thousands of them are, not to kill, to worship idols, to commit no fornication, to eat no meat and to drink no wine’. 40 Moreover, it is also attested later in the seventh century, when Sebeos in his Armenian History attributes to Muhammad the teaching ‘not to eat carrion, not to drink wine, not to speak falsely, and not to engage in fornication’. 41 It would seem then that this command functioned as a sort of ascetic slogan throughout Late Antiquity and may ultimately derive from Tatian and his Syrian encratite milieu. 42 In fact, it is important to note is that this ascetic mantra frequently occurs in texts and traditions firmly rooted in Aramaic/ Syriac religious culture. Mani, of course, communicated in an Aramaic dialect, as his father would have as well, and Coptic Manichaean writings were most definitely based on a Syriac foundation. Bardaisan represents one of our earliest sources of Syriac literature from Edessa, whereas the earliest Islamic traditions, if we accept the implications of Christoph Luxenburg’s 38  Al-Nadim, Fihrist in I. Gardner, S. N. C. Lieu, Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire, Cambridge, 2004, p. 46-47. 39  Chapter 312: [On the Seven Buddhas ... Anacharsis ... Chasro ...] (2Ke 310.9-310.14 unpublished). S. Giversen, The Manichaean Coptic Papyri in the Chester Beatty Library, Genève, 1986. 40   H. Drijvers, The Book of the Laws of Countries: Dialogue on Fate of Bardaisan ˙ of Edessa, Assen, 1965, p. 43. 41  R. W.  Thompson, The Armenian History Attributed To Sebeos – Part I: Translation and Notes, Liverpool, 1999, p. 95-96. 42 See Eus., Hist. Eccl. 7. 29 and Clem. Alex., Strom. 1.15.

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ground-breaking study, 43 also contain a significant Aramaic/ Syriac substrate. Add to this the fact that the Jewish, Christian, and Mandaean sources mentioned above also emerged from an Aramaic-speaking milieu and we can see a profound linguistic and cultural nexus interconnecting these varied strands of late antique religiosity – one strongly marked by an ascetic impulse. It is rather remarkable how little attention is paid to the common Aramaic roots of Christian, Jewish, Manichaean, Mandaean, and also Muslim traditions. This is partly understandable, since so much of this early Aramaic substratum has been lost or erased. Yet, in spite of this lacuna, we can see something of the palimpsest just below the surface of our normative textual traditions. After all, it is well-known that Aramaic served as a lingua franca throughout the ancient Near East since Achaemenid times, but somehow this obvious fact fails to translate into a recognition of what it actually implies. It implies that the opportunities for interchange between these traditions would have been far greater and lasted for far longer than their surviving literatures would have us believe. In this sense, Mani really does stand at a crossroads of sorts, since he represents so many of the elements that characterize the religious culture of his time. Inspired by a deep sense of mission and election, an ascetically inclined, Aramaic-speaking prophet (some might say religious organizer) took elements of both Jewish and Christian predecessors and formed them into what he saw as a restoration of their originally revealed form. As a result, he created a movement that seems to have greatly stimulated the ascetic leanings of Late Antiquity and set the stage not only for the monastic movement, but also for a later prophet with a similar sense of mission and election to restore the revelation yet again.

43  Ch. Luxenberg, The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran, Berlin, 2007.

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Bibliography 1. Primary Sources Clement of Alexandria, Clemens Alexandrinus: Bd. 2., Leipzig, 1906. H. Drijvers, The Book of the Laws of Countries: Dialogue on Fate of Bardaisan of Edessa, Assen, 1965. ˙ Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History, London, 1926. I. Gardner and S. N. C. Lieu, Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire, Cambridge, 2004. I. Gardner, Kellis Literary Texts, 2 vols., Oxford, 2007, II. Ph. Gignoux, Les quatre inscriptions du Mage Kirdıˉr: Textes et concordances, Studia Iranica 9, 1991. Giversen, The Manichaean Coptic Papyri in the Chester Beatty Library, Genève, 1986. A. Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, London, 1955. W. B. Henning ‘Ein manichäisches Henochbuch’, Sitzungsbe-richte der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 5 (1934), p. 27-35 W. B.  Henning, ‘The Book of the Giants’, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 11.1 (1943), p. 52-74. A. Henrichs, L. Koenen, ed, Der Kölner Mani-Kodex: Über das Werden seines Leibes: Kritische Edition, Opladen, 1988. M. Lidzbarski, Ginza: Der Schatz oder Das große Buch der Mandäer, Göttingen, 1978 [1925]. N. A. Pedersen, J. M. Larsen, Manichaean Texts in Syriac: First Editions, New Editions and Studies, with contributions by Zsuzsanna Gulácsi and Myriam Krutzsch, Turnhout, 2013. E. Sachau, The Chronology of Ancient Nations: An English Version of the Arabic Text of the Athâr-Ul-Bâkiya of Albıˉrûnıˉ, Or, Vestiges of the Past, Collected and Reduced to Writing by the Author in A.h. 390-1, A.d. 100., Lahore, 1983. M. Vermes, S. N. C. Lieu, K. Kaatz, Acta Archelai (The Acts of Archelaus), Turnhout, 2001. R. W.  Thompson, The Armenian History Attributed to Sebeos Part – I: Translation and Notes, Liverpool, 1999.

2. Secondary literature T. Andrae, Mohammed: The Man and His Faith, New York, 1960. J. BeDuhn, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, Volume 1. Conversion and Apostasy, 373-388 ce, Philadelphia, 2009.

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J. BeDuhn, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, Volume 2. Making a “Catholic” Self, 388-401 ce, 2013, Philadelphia, 2013. J.  BeDuhn, ‘Placing the Acts of Archelaus’, in Frontiers of Faith: The Christian Encounter with Manichaeism in the Acts of Archelaus – ed. J. BeDuhn, P. Mirecki, Leiden, 2007. M. Boyce, A Catalogue of the Iranian Manuscripts in Manichean Script in the German Turfan Collection, Berlin, 1960. F. C.  Burkitt, The Religion of the Manichees, Cambridge, 1925. J. K. Coyle, ‘The Gospel of Thomas in Manichaeism?’, in Manichaeism and Its Legacy, Leiden, 2009. M. Deeg, I. Gardner, ‘Indian Influence on Mani Reconsidered: The Case of Jainism’, International Journal of Jaina Studies, 4-6 (20082010), p. 158-186. H. Drijvers, ‘Addai und Mani. Christentum und Manichäismus im dritten Jahrhundert in Syrien’, in iiie Symposium Syriacum 1980, Rome, 1983, p. 75-185. W.-P. Funk ‘‘Einer aus tausend, zwei aus zehntausend’: Zitate aus dem Thomasevangelium in den koptischen Manichaica’, in For the Children, Perfect Instruction: Studies in Honor of Hans-Martin Schenke on the Occasion of the Berliner Arbeitskreis für koptisch-gnostische Schriften’s Thirtieth Year – ed. H.-G. Bethge et al., Leiden, 2002, p. 67–94. W.-P. Funk, ‘Mani’s Account of Other Religions According to the Coptic Synaxeis Codex’, in New Light on Manichaeism: Papers from the sixth International Congress on Manichaeism; organized by the International Association of Manichaean Studies – ed J. Beduhn, Leiden, 2009. I. Gardner, S. N. C.  Lieu, ‘From Narmouthis (Medinet Madi) to Kellis (Ismant El-Kharab): Manichaean Documents from Roman Egypt’, The Journal of Roman Studies, 86 (1996), p. 146169. I.  Gardner, ‘The Reconstruction of Mani’s Epistles from Three Coptic Codices (Ismant el-Kharab and Medinet Madi)’, in The Light and the Darkness: Studies in Manichaeism and its World – ed. P. Mirecki, J. Beduhn, Leiden, 2001, p. 93-104. I. Gardner, ‘Some Comments on Mani and Indian Religions from the Coptic Sources’, in New Perspectives in Manichaean Research – ed. A. Van Tongerloo, L. Cirillo, Leiden, 2005. Gh. Gnoli ‘ “Aurentes”: The Buddhist “arhants” in the Coptic “Kephalaia” through a Bactrian Transmission’, East and West, 41.1 (1991), p. 359-361.

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A. Henrichs, ‘Mani and the Babylonian Baptists: A Historical Confrontation’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 77 (1973), p. 23-59. A. F. J. Klijn, G. J. Reinink, ‘Elchasai and Mani’, Vigiliae Christianae, 28.4 (1974), p. 277-289. H.-J. Klimkeit, Gnosis on the Silk Road: Gnostic Texts from Central Asia, New York, 1993. L. Koenen, ‘Manichäische Mission und Klöster in Ägypten’, Das römisch-byzantinische Ägypten. Aegyptiaca Treverensia, 2 (1983), p. 93-108. S. N. C.  Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China: A Historical Survey, Manchester, 1985. Ch. Luxenberg, The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran, Berlin, 2007. T. Pettipiece, ‘The Buddha in Early Christian Literature’, in Millennium 6/2009: Jahrbuch zu Kultur und Geschichte des ersten Jahrtausends n. Chr., Berlin, 2009. T. Pettipiece, Pentadic Redaction in the Manichaean Kephalaia, Leiden, 2009. T. Pettipiece, ‘Towards a Manichaean Reading of the Nag Hammadi Codices’, Journal of the Canadian Society for Coptic Studies, 3-4 (2012): p. 43-54. P.-H. Poirier, L’Hymne de la perle des actes de Thomas. Introduction, Texte-Traduction, Commentaire, Louvain-la-Neuve, 1981. J. C.  Reeves, Jewish Lore in Manichaean Cosmogony: Studies in the Book of Giants Traditions, Cincinnati, 1992. J. Reeves, Prolegomena to a History of Islamicate Manichaeism, Sheffield, 2011. J. Robinson, The Manichaean Codices of Medinet Madi, Eugene, 2013. C. Schmidt and H.-J. Polotsky, ‘Ein Mani-Fund in Ägypten,’ Sitzungsberichte der preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1933, p. 4-90. A. Stein, ‘Sir Aurel Stein’s Expedition in Central Asia’, The Geographical Journal, 46.4 (1915), p. 269-276. G. Stroumsa, ‘Monachisme et Marranisme chez les Manicheens d’Egypte’, Numen, 29.2 (1982), p. 184-201. M. Tardieu, ‘L’arrivee des manicheens à al-Hira’, in La Syrie de Bysance à l’Islam, viie-viiie siècles: actes du Colloque international “De Bysance à l’Islam”, Lyon, Maison de l’Orient méditerranéen, Paris,

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Institut du monde arabe, 11-15 septembre 1990 – ed. P. Canivet, J.-P. Rey-Coquais, Damas, 1992. M. Tardieu, ‘Principes de l’exégèse manichéenne du Nouveau Testament’, in Les règles de l’interprétation, Paris, 1987, p. 123-124. J. Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia: From 550 bc to 650 ad, London, 1996.

Abstract After highlighting the rediscovery of primary Manichaean sources over the last century, this article examines the multiple points of interconnectedness that exist between Manichaeans and the religions of the late antique Near East and suggests a new approach to understanding the nature of their common social and linguistic milieu.

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COLUMBA STEWART OSB Saint John’s Abbey and University Collegeville, Minnesota

PATRISTICS BEYOND ‘EAST’ AND ‘WEST’

Introduction This essay explores the intricate pathways of transmission of ideas and texts in early Christianity. My hope is to suggest some perspectives for a more nuanced and accurate portrayal of the literature of the Christian world in its first millennium. Most of my examples will be drawn from the literature I know best, ascetic and monastic writings, and from what we know of the people who created and read them. First, I will offer some preliminary remarks about the key terms in the title of this lecture, ‘Patristics’, ‘East’, and ‘West’, then I will continue with observations about ‘Patristics between Greek East and Latin West’, then ‘Patristics beyond the Greek East’, and finally ‘Patristics beyond “East” and “West” ’.

1. ‘Patristics’ Traditionally the study of Patristics has focused on texts, and these texts were regarded as if they were fixed monuments with a quasi-inspired status (unless, of course, they were considered ‘heretical’). Occasionally the sands of time would shift and a new text would be uncovered and added to the register of monuments. We now accept that texts are not as stable as once was thought, especially when they have crossed linguistic frontiers, nor is their attribution always as certain as widely assumed. We now call the Areopagite ‘Pseudo-Dionysius’ and place him 10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107524

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in Syria rather than Athens. In the twentieth century numerous texts traditionally ascribed to Nilus of Ancyra were found to be disguised writings of Evagrius Ponticus, who had been largely written out of the traditional ascetic canon even as many of his works survived, several of them only in Syriac translation. More recently, Gregory the Great’s Commentary on First Kings, a text of some importance to Benedictines because it was the only one of Gregory’s works actually to quote the Regula Benedicti, was determined by its learned monastic editor to be a twelfth-century pastiche. 1 We have also become more keenly aware of what is missing, and of the fact that we have mere remnants of what was, even into the medieval period, a much larger corpus of early Christian writings eroded by changes in theological fashion, devastation of communities in the Middle East, or simple accident. It is helpful to recall some examples. Irenaeus’s Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching (CPG 1307) was rediscovered only in the early twentieth century, and then only in Armenian; the Adversus haereses (CPG 1306), of course, is complete only in Latin translation. Clement’s Hypotyposes (CPG 1380) with the teachings of his master, Pantaenus, the former Stoic and adventurous missionary to ‘India’ (known from Eusebius) are lost apart from some fragments. For all of his now-restored significance, we lack some of Origen’s most important works: the Greek of most of De principiis (CPG 1482), though at least there is the Latin; the Hexapla (CPG 1500), though there is the Syro-Hexapla; any of the Stromata (CPG  1483) beyond fragments; large portions of his exegetical works. Fortunately, there are still discoveries to be made, as in 2012 of the Greek original of twenty-nine “lost” homilies on the Psalms (CPG 1428) in the Staatsbibliothek in Munich. 2 The writings of Theodore 1  A. de Vogüé, ‘L’Auteur du Commentaire des Rois attribué à S. Gregoire: un moine de Cava?’ Revue Bénédictine, 106 (1996), p. 319-331. Vogüé was partway through an edition of the commentary for SC when he made this determination; the first two volumes (SC, 351, 391) bear the name of Gregory, the four subsequent ones (SC, 432, 449, 469, 482) add ‘Pierre de Cava’ as the probable author. 2 See M. Molin Pradel, ’Novità origeniane dalla Staatsbibliothek di Monaco di Baviera: il Cod. graec. 314’, Adamantius, 18 (2012), p. 16-40; L. Per-

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of Mopsuestia are lost in Greek apart from fragments. Many of his works survive complete in Syriac, others in snippets. One of the most important, the single known copy of the Syriac translation of the De incarnatione (CPG 3856), was lost as recently as a century ago. The existence of this manuscript was known in the west for only a decade. Sadly it was not edited before it disappeared in the massacres of Christians in eastern Turkey in 1915, which brought the murder of its owner, the learned Chaldean Archbishop Addai Scher, and the destruction of his library. 3 And then there are the texts that survive in a single manuscript, of which I will cite some important for my own work. The Greek Vita of Alexander Akoimetes (BHG 47) exists in one manuscript now in Paris (Parisinus  1452, tenth-eleventh century). The original form of the Kephalaia gnostica of Evagrius Ponticus (CPG 2432) survives only in Syriac, and only in one manuscript now in the British Library (BL Add. 17167, sixth-seventh century). The fascinating life of the early fifthcentury bishop of Edessa, Rabbula, exists in a single sixth-century manuscript now in the British Library (BL Add. 14652), brought like the manuscript of the Kephalaia gnostica from Wadi Natrun. The Latin Regula magistri (CPL 1858), now accepted to be the principal source of the Regula Benedicti, survived complete only in Parisinus 12205 (ca 600) and excerpted in another manuscript (Parisinus 12634, late sixth century), both found at Corbie by the Maurist Benedictines in the seventeenth century and taken to their headquarters at Saint Germain des Prés. The manuscripts remained there until the monastery was suppressed in 1796, fortunately by a regime that chose to save manuscripts rather than to burn them. What survives of the patristic legacy, then, is not a static array of monuments but the epiphenomena of deep currents rone, ‘Riscoprire Origene oggi: prime impressioni sulla raccolta di omelie sui Salmi nel Codex Monacensis Graecus 314’, Adamantius, 18 (2012), p. 41-58. 3 The manuscript was Seert 88, as in A. Scher, Catalogue des manuscrits syriaques et arabes conservés dans la bibliothèque épiscopale de Séert (Kurdistan), Mosul, 1905, p. 65; Cfr. the notice by Scher in ‘Joseph Hazzaya, écrivain ˙ des inscriptions syriaque du viiie siècle’, Comptes rendus des séances de L’Académie et Belles-Lettres, Paris, 1909, p. 306-307.

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of thought and culture, currents that kept moving even as some texts fell out of fashion and were no longer copied, or were deliberately suppressed because of theological or other controversy. Those deeper currents are what concern us here, flowing back and forth across the Mediterranean and Adriatic, the Black Sea and the Red, the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea, following trade routes and imperial ventures. We are beginning to understand the impressive mobility of Late Antique people, whose evangelism and pilgrimage were carried on the infrastructure of trade and post, and whose lives and locations were altered by wars both military and theological.

2. ‘East’ and ‘West’ Linguistic and cultural frontiers in the ancient world should not be understood exclusively in geographical terms, as if ‘east’ and ‘west’ were strictly bounded. Linguistic and cultural frontiers ran through individuals and sub-cultures, and through the various sectors of their lives, with language use changing according to context or activity. Let me illustrate this with a modern example. I recently spent time with friends from Istanbul. The father of the family was Armenian, the mother Greek. Both of their families had been in the ‘Polis’ for centuries. Their daily business at work and when shopping was largely conducted in Turkish, a language both of them spoke well. As neither of them knew the other’s mother tongue, they conducted their marriage in French. The choice of French was both utilitarian and an expression of identity: though both knew Turkish, they preferred a language that linked them to a broader, Christian, world that in turn somehow evoked the lost past of Christian Constantinople. Were they of the ‘east’ or of the ‘west’? In the Late Antique world of the Church Fathers – especially in its eastern regions – multilingualism was typical, not only in speaking but also (to varying degrees) in reading and writing: as one scholar of the phenomenon has remarked, ‘It is not monolingualism but multilingualism that represents the norm: monolingualism is a culture-bound exception from 320

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multilingualism, and bilingualism a variety of the latter’. 4 This is a reversal of the modern western, or at least typically Anglophone, presumption that the whole of life is conducted in a single language, one’s own. We must also remember that when discussing Patristic texts, we confine ourselves to ‘High’ literary forms of language, floating above and often quite beyond ‘Low’ spoken languages. The literary Greek of our texts was distinct from its own spoken forms and bore no relation whatsoever to indigenous languages spoken throughout most of the ‘Hellenistic’ world. These of course included various forms of Aramaic in Palestine and Syria, or the now-lost languages of Asia Minor, e.g., Cappadocian, of which we know virtually nothing other than Strabo’s assertion that it was related to ‘Cataonian’, about which we know even less. 5 In Asia Minor, Greek and such indigenous non-literary languages co-existed for centuries, perhaps until the sixth century, and in the case of Phrygian, even later, until the rise of Arabic and then Turkish. And even as Syriac emerged as the preferred Christian literary form of Aramaic over other spoken and written forms of the language (e.g., Christian Palestinian Aramaic), and spread westward from Osrhoene, what became the ‘classical’ written language did not suppress variant spoken forms, as is still the case today in the Tur ‘Abdin, Iraq, parts of Syria and Iran. The ‘book’ language of Kthobonoyo, spoken Classical Syriac, may be used in certain settings (such as monasteries), 6 while Turoyo, Sureth, and other Syriac or Neo-Aramaic dialects are˙ used in daily life. 7 In this way Syriac foreshadows what will be the story of Arabic, with a classical written language and a wide range of spoken dialects.

4   G. Lüdi, as quoted in M. Janse, ‘Aspects of Bilingualism in the History of the Greek Language’, in Bilingualism in Ancient Society. Language Contact and the Written Word – ed. J. N. Adams, M. Janse, S. Swain, Oxford, 2002, p. 333. 5  Geogr. 12, 1, 2, as in M. Janse, ‘Bilingualism in the History of Greek’, p. 355. 6 See G. Kiraz, ‘Kthobonoyo Syriac: Some Observations and Remarks’, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies, 10 (2007), p. 129-142. 7  See the summary of Neo-Aramaic dialects in L. Van Rompay, ‘Aramaic’, in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of Syriac Heritage – ed. S. Brock, A. M. Butts, G. A. Kiraz, L. Van Rompay, Piscataway, 2011, p. 29-30.

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3. Patristics between Greek East and Latin West Before the mid-twentieth century, western patrologists typically had what one might call a binary Patrologia Latina / Patrologia Graeca view of the Church Fathers. This division was obviously made along linguistic lines, but was also influenced by the schism between Rome and Constantinople. This becomes evident when one considers the overall scope of Migne’s audacious project. The Patrologia Latina includes 217 volumes (plus indices) covering a period lasting until 1221. This was certainly an expansive view of ‘the Fathers’. The Patrologia Graeca consists of 161 volumes extending to the year 1439, which is a revealing terminus ad quem: the Greek authors were of interest until all hope of their reconciliation with Rome was lost. The volumes of the PG that parallel the period covered by the PL, i.e., up to the early thirteenth century, number 140, only two-thirds of the PL’s 221 volumes. But even that number is misleadingly high, given the PG’s parallel Latin translation of its Greek texts. The result is a much diminished corpus of texts, which is obviously not a reflection of the true magnitude of the Greek literature. In fairness, Migne was inhibited by his reliance on the printed editions of Greek texts as available by the 1850s (many of them, incidentally, produced by my Maurist Benedictine forebears). It was at best a partial view. When the series Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller (GCS) was founded in 1891 by Harnack and Mommsen to improve upon the editions of the PG, the fact that it was limited to only the first three centuries of Christianity may indicate another set of assumptions about which texts were important. Only after the Second World War was the series expanded to the eighth century. There are many famously untranslated or only partially or latterly translated Greek texts that could have made a difference in understanding between Greek east and Latin west, among them the Orationes of Gregory Nazianzen (CPG, 3010), especially the so-called Orationes theologicae (Orat. 27-31). Rufinus translated only the first of these among the nine he selected from the full collection of forty-five. 8 Of Basil’s De spiritu sancto (CPG, 2839),  Ed. A. Engelbrecht (CSEL, 46), Wien, 1910.

8

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there exists in Latin only a very brief excerpt made in the sixth century by Dionysius Exiguus. 9 Gregory of Nyssa’s De  vita Moysis (CPG, 3159) with its profound mystical instruction was not known in the west until George of Trebizond’s translation almost a thousand years later. There is no indication that Evagrius’s Kephalaia gnostica (CPG, 2432) or his treatise De oratione (CPG, 2452) were among the works translated by either Rufinus or Gennadius; nor are they found among the anonymous translations that survive. 10 The works of Ps.-Dionysius were translated twice in the ninth century (see CPG, 6614), but their real impact on western spirituality would come only in the twelfth century. And from the other direction, when speaking of Greek translations of Augustine, Dekkers remarks laconically in his Clavis, ‘omnes posterioris aetatis’ (CPL, p. 99). As noted, however, a narrow focus on texts takes us only so far. The Latin Christian world was steeped in Hellenism, received its scriptures in Greek and translated them from Greek (until Jerome’s muddled turn to the Hebraica veritas for much of the Old Testament), and even Augustine depended on NeoPlatonism mediated through the translations of Marius Victorinus for critical components of his theological system. In fact, there were waves of linguistic influence, which flowed back and forth between Greek and Latin. The laments of Libanius over the growing fashionableness of Latin in Antioch in the late fourth century are well known, even if not to be taken literally. 11 This was a time when the city was a frontline imperial and military base for the war against Persia, and experiencing a new (and surely not unrelated) vogue for the study of Latin law rather than Greek rhetoric. In the fifth century the Empire was inevitably undergoing Hellenization after the definitive shift of the capital to Constantinople, but even so, Latin was still prominent in Constantinople in the sixth century. The Justi9  Ed. E. Schwartz, Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, IV, 2, Berlin, 1914, p. 95, l. 10-15. 10  C. Stewart, ‘Evagrius Beyond Byzantium: the Latin and Syriac Receptions’, in Evagrius and His Legacy – ed. R. D. Young, J. Kalvesmaki, South Bend (forthcoming) 11 See R. Cribiore, The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch, Princeton, 2007, p. 207-212.

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nianic legal reforms depended on the copying of Latin texts, and high-ranking Italian families displaced by the Gothic Wars were arriving to take up what sometimes proved to be long-term residence. 12 Among them was Cassiodorus, who wrote his Expositio Psalmorum (CPL, 900) in Constantinople before heading back to Italy to found his exceptionally bi-cultural monastic colony at Vivarium. Gregory, Roman papal diplomat and later bishop of Rome himself, delivered the talks that became his Moralia in Iob while living at a Latin monastery in Constantinople. Greek moved west with the reassertion of Byzantine control over Italy in the sixth century, leaving a lasting mark on the church of southern Italy. 13 With the exception of Cassiodorus’ Vivarium, there is not in these examples any deliberate effort at theological exchange between ‘east’ and ‘west’, but rather illustrations of the world in which these people lived, where all kinds of forces could shift people and ideas from one place – or cultural context – to another. Those shifts could have significant, if usually unintended, consequences. Let me offer two examples. The first is John Cassian, whom the west thinks of as the founder of monasteries at Massilia (Marseilles) in southern Gaul and whom the Greeks called ‘Kassianos the Roman’. The fact that the Greeks called him anything at all is significant, as will be so for Gregory the Great later. Cassian, like other monks, embodied more of the ‘on-the ground’ reality of cultural exchange than other ecclesiastical types. The monks were more mobile, often spurred by their quest for monastic authenticity. Latin monks explored the east; eastern monks went to Egypt. Monastic mobility also helped them escape political and personal troubles when these arose. When one considers the Latin monastic authors of the fourth 12  F. Millar, ‘Linguistic Co-Existence in Constantinople: Greek and Latin (and Syriac) in the Acts of the Synod of 536 ce’, Journal of Roman Studies, 99 (2009), p. 92-103; A. Cameron, ‘Old and New Rome: Roman Studies in Sixth-Century Constantinople’, in Transformations of Late Antiquity. Essays for Peter Brown – ed. P. Rousseau, M. Papoutsakis, Farnham, 2009, p. 15-36. 13 See A. Ekonomou, Byzantine Rome and the Greek Popes: Eastern Influences on Rome and the Papacy from Gregory the Great to Zacharias, ad 590-752, New York, 2007, and less ecclesiastically, E. Zanini, Le Italie bizantine. Territorio, insediamenti ed economia nella provincia bizantina d’Italia (VI-VIII secolo), Bari, 1998.

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and fifth centuries know to have been capable of translating or adapting Greek texts into Latin – Rufinus, Jerome, Cassian – these were hardly exemplars of the later Benedictine virtue of stabilitas. Cassian was likely born in the bilingual environment of Scythia Minor. As a teenager he went to the Holy Land and joined a Greek cenobium, a prelude to a longer residency in Egypt at the monastic settlement of Scetis. There he was exposed to the ascetic theories of Evagrius Ponticus and others, and there too he was caught in the reaction against the philosophical orientation of Evagrius and others of his kind. Cassian’s subsequent years of wandering to Constantinople, Rome, and perhaps elsewhere, and his eventual arrival in southern Gaul, are cloaked in mystery. His substantial literary output, composed in a flowing if sometimes turgid Latin, cleverly passed Evagrian monastic ideas to the west without the taint of the master’s name and shorn of the esoteric ideas Evagrius had elaborated from Origen’s more sober speculations. Like Benedict’s later pruning of the Regula magistri, Cassian’s selective use of Evagrian thought was to be of enormous significance for western monasticism. Cassian’s distinction was to be a genuine conduit between east and west, a goal he explicitly declared in his preface to the Conlationes: May your prayers obtain ... a complete recollection by us of their traditions, and the words to speak of them readily, so that we may explain it just as holy and complete as we received it from them, and may show them to you in a way embodied in their teaching [instituta], and even better, speaking in Latin. 14

But not always: Cassian retained Greek terminology for crucial elements of the system he learned from Evagrius, thereby contributing to the monastic vocabulary of the west, even while cleverly moving away from problematic Greek terms that had 14  Obtineant itaque orationes uestrae ... ut nobis earumdem traditionum memoriam plenam et sermonem ad dicendum facilem conferre dignetur, quo tam sancte eas tamque integre quam ab ipsis accepimus explicantes ipsos quodammodo suis institutis incorporatos et quod maius est Latino disputantes eloquio uobis exhibere possimus (Conl. Praef. 6 – ed. M. Petschenig [CSEL, 13], Wien, 1886, p. 4).

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attracted the wrath of Jerome. Thus Evagrius’s ἀπάθεια became puritas cordis. More fundamentally, Cassian ensured a place in the west for the ascetic anthropology of the Christian east, which despite later clashes with the more pessimistic views of Augustine’s heirs such as Prosper of Aquitaine would nonetheless survive in the western monastic tradition. 15 Furthermore, Cassian’s mystical theology has notable affinities with that of the earlier Greek writer now usually called ‘Pseudo-Macarius’ (CPG, 2410-2412) and surprising parallels with that of the slightly later Greek monk-bishop Diadochus of Photike (CPG, 6106). 16 Cassian’s writings were translated into Greek (portions survive), 17 sayings attributed to him were included in the collections of the Apophthegmata patrum (the only Latin figure so honored), and he has a commemoration in the Byzantine liturgical calendar. In the first and last of those distinctions, Cassian is joined by Gregory the Great, my second example. I have already noted Gregory’s presence in Constantinople in the late sixth century; despite his occasional protestations that he did not know Greek, his familiarity with it has probably been underestimated. 18 During his lifetime the Regula pastoralis (CPL, 1712) was translated into Greek by the bishop Anastasius II of Antioch at the Emperor’s request (600 ca), though the translation is now lost. 19 His Dialogues (CPL 1713) were translated in the mid-eighth century by the Greek Bishop of Rome Zacharias (741-52),

15 Prosper’s De gratia Dei et libero arbitrio contra Collatorem (CPL, 523) is an attack on Cassian’s Conl. 13, ‘De protectione Dei’, on the exercise of the will. 16   C. Stewart, Cassian the Monk, Oxford, 1998, p. 121-129. 17  Now edited by P. Tzamalikos, A Newly Discovered Greek Father: Cassian the Sabaite Eclipsed by John Cassian of Marseilles (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 111), Leiden, 2012. In an accompanying volume he argues that the Greek is the original text and the Latin a massively interpolated and expanded translation: The Real Cassian Revisited: Monastic Life, Greek Paideia, and Origenism in the Sixth Century (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 112), Leiden, 2012. I disagree. 18  Greg. M., Epist. 7, 29 – ed. D. Norberg (CC SL, 140), Turnhout, 1982, p. 487-489 and 11, 55 (CC SL, 140A), Turnhout, 1982, p. 960, l. 24-25. 19  Greg. M., Epist. 12, 6 (CC SL, 140A), p. 976, l. 53-58. See R. Lizzi, ‘La traduzione graeca delle opere di Gregorio Magno’, in Gregorio Magno et il suo tempo. XIX Incontro di studiosi dell’antichità christiana in collaborazione con l’École Française de Rome. Rome, 9-12 maggio (Studia ephemeridis Augustinianum, 33-34), Rome, 1991, vol. 2, p. 41-57.

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and survives complete in that translation, 20 as well as excerpted in the eleventh-century Byzantine anthologies of Paul Evergetinos and Nikon of the Black Mountain. Here it is worth remembering that the bishops of Rome for almost a century (from 678-752, excluding 715-31) were Greeks, whether of Syrian or Sicilian origin. Some of them were in Rome because of the displacements caused by the Persian and Arab invasions, reflected also in the growth in number of Greek monasteries in Rome between the seventh and ninth centuries. 21 The Dialogues were composed by Gregory as propaganda on behalf of Italian saints, inspired by and responding to the stories of holy men circulating in the east and increasingly available in Latin translation. The translation of Gregory’s own work into Greek completed a circle of inspiration and response. One of the more unusual stories in the Dialogues was picked up by John Moschus, who was in Rome from 615 until his death in 619 as a refugee from the Persian assault on Egypt. His companion, Sophronius, would later negotiate the surrender of Jerusalem to its Arab conquerors in 637. The story is about a monk in Gregory’s own monastery who had violated his promise of poverty and been cast out of the community. 22 He soon died, and Gregory, fearful for the dead monk’s spiritual state, commanded that the Eucharist be offered for thirty consecutive days as the best hope of obtaining forgiveness for the sins of the deceased. After the thirtieth such Eucharist, the dead monk appeared in a vision to one of the other monks, assuring him that he had now found peace.

20   PL, 77, col. 149-430. See I. Havener, ‘The Greek Prologue to the “Dialogues” of Gregory the Great’, Revue Bénédictine, 99 (1989), p. 103-117. 21  P. Hatlie, The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople ca. 350-850, Cambridge, 2008. 22  Greg. M., Dial. 4, 57 (PL, 77, col. 420A-421C); Ioh. Mosch., Prat. 192 (PG, 87, col. 3072). A briefer version of the Latin story, with reference to its inclusion in Moschus’s collection, is found in the ninth-century Ioh. Diac. Vita Greg. M. [BHL 3641] 2, 45 (PL, 75, col. 106). Because the preceding story in Moschus is narrated by ‘Anastasius of Antioch’, both that one and this also circulated in at least one manuscript of the works of Anastasius of Sinai (BL Add. 28270, fol. 88v-90r, dated 1111), as in F. Nau, ‘Le texte grec des récits utiles à l’âme d’Anastase (le Sinaïte)’, Oriens Christianus, 3 (1903), p. 84-85.

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It has been argued that Gregory was addressing this and other such stories in the fourth book of the Dialogues (‘de aeternitate animarum’) to controversies in Constantinople about the state of the soul after death. 23 The fact that Moschus not only seems to have heard it while in Rome but chose to include it in the Pratum spirituale suggests that it had a particular resonance to an eastern ear. The same story would have a significant impact on the Latin Church, more specifically on its sacerdotal economy, through the popularization of the so-called ‘Gregorian Trental’, a series of thirty Masses offered on consecutive days for a soul in Purgatory. The story’s characterization of a state between death and the final status of the soul played a role in the later western development of a full doctrine of Purgatory and corresponding pious practices. Given later polemics between Latins and Greeks over that doctrine, the circulation of the story in the Greek tradition is ironic indeed. Before leaving Gregory, there must be one last note, about his mystical teaching. For him, ‘compunction’, a sorrow-tinged but expansive kind of intense spiritual experience, played a major role in contemplative development. Gregory’s emphasis on compunction can be traced back to Cassian, though for the so-called ‘Doctor of Desire’ it plays a more dynamic role than it did for the monk of Marseilles. 24 For Cassian, conpunctio was a term inclusive of various forms of intense spiritual experience, whether sorrow for sins or gratitude for God’s mercy, and it was closely associated with the phenomenon of physical tears. For Gregory, compunction yoked to desire was the motor of contemplative progress. In the Moralia – composed in Constantinople – he writes: Hearts are wounded so that they might be healed... The soul struck by the darts of his love ... burns with desire for contemplation... She has been brought back to health by a blow, called back to the safety of deep restfulness by the  See M. Del Santo, Debating the Saints’ Cults, Oxford, 2008.   The phrase is from J. Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. A Study of Monastic Culture – tr. C. Misrahi, New York, 19823, p. 29-32; cfr. C. Straw, Gregory the Great. Perfection in Imperfection, Berkeley, 1988, p. 213-235. 23 24

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disturbance of his love. When the wounded mind begins to pant for God, despising all of the offerings of this world, it stretches itself by desire toward the homeland above. 25

Citing the famous verse vulnerata caritate ego sum (‘I am wounded by love’, Cant. 2, 5) following the Greek tradition rather than the Vulgate’s less vivid amore langueo, rendering the Hebrew, Gregory echoes for a Latin audience Origen’s mystical interpretations of the Canticum Canticorum as well as the kind of spiritual longing described in Gregory of Nyssa’s Vita Moysis.

4. Patristics beyond the Greek East Having considered the scope of the Patrologia Latina and Patrologia Graeca, it is now time to move beyond the Greek linguistic frontier into the other languages of the Christian Orient and the scholarly series that have been devoted to them. The first was the Patrologia Syriaca begun in 1894 by René Graffin (1858-1941). At the same time he launched the Revue de l’Orient Chrétien (1896), which featured both texts and studies. The Patrologia Syriaca was soon complemented by the Patrologia Orientalis (1904), originally conceived as a series for non-Syriac oriental texts though eventually it absorbed the Syriac ones as well. 26 This evolution is perhaps indicative of the growing realization that there was not a hierarchy among oriental Christian languages. Each of them has both a substantial native literature as well as translations of Greek (and other) texts of importance. In 1903 the Corpus scriptorum christianorum orientalium (CSCO) was launched

25  Sed [corda] vulnerantur ut sanentur ... percussa autem caritatis eius spiculis ... ardet desiderio contemplationis ... Percussione ergo ad salutem reducitur quae ad securitatem quietis intimae amoris sui perturbatione revocatur. Sed cum sauciata mens anhelare in Deum coeperit, cum cuncta mundi huius blandimenta despiciens ad supernam se patriam per desiderium tendit (Mor. 6.42 – ed. M. Adriaen [CC SL, 143, p. 315); cfr. In Ez. II 2.8 and 10.21 – ed. M. Adriaen [CC SL, 142, p. 230 and p. 395-396]). 26 The PS finally included three substantial volumes (1894, 1907, 1926) of Syriac texts with Latin translation. The PO continues and has now reached 235 fascicles, each with edited text and facing translation, which from the outset were in modern languages rather than the Latin versions of the PS and the early volumes of CSCO.

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as a joint project of the Catholic Universities of Louvain and America, including texts, translations, and a subsidia series of important monographs covering a range of languages as expansive as the Patrologia Orientalis. In some areas of the east not only was the culture multilingual but there were also multiple literary languages in regular use. In Syria and Mesopotamia, both Greek and Syriac were in regular use for centuries, 27 and in eastern Asia Minor, Greek co-existed with an array of languages including Armenian, Syriac, Kurdish, Georgian, and Arabic. 28 Greek was often given a certain pride of place, as in the marvelous inscription above the doors of the baptistery in Nisibis, at the far eastern end of the Roman Empire, dated 359 ce. 29 Even many centuries later, Greek appears in the captions of illuminations in Syriac manuscripts, though with obvious signs that it was increasingly unfamiliar. 30 Over time, the church in the east experienced significant linguistic transitions that further eroded any normativity of Greek. Though Greek was the original biblical and liturgical language from Egypt to Armenia, inevitably it yielded to Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and other languages as biblical translations were made and vernacular liturgies created, a transition later encouraged by the doctrinal controversies that weakened ties to the Byzantine / Melkite center. Later, the advent of Islam and its literary language of Arabic would introduce yet another factor. 27  S. Brock, ‘Greek and Syriac in Late Antique Syria’, in Literacy and Power in the Ancient World – ed. A. Bowman, G. Woolf, Cambridge, 1994, p. 149-160; D. G. K.  Taylor, ‘Bilingualism and diglossia in Late Antique Syria and Mesopotamia’, in Bilingualism in Ancient Society – ed. J. N. Adams, M. Janse, S. Swain, p. 298-331. For a maximalist view of the role of Greek in regions where Greek and Syriac coexisted, see F. Millar, ‘Greek and Syriac in Edessa and Osrhoene, ce 213-363’, Scripta classica Israelica, 30 (2011), p. 93-111. I thank Scott Johnson for stimulating conversations about this surprisingly controversial issue. 28  Janse, ‘Bilingualism in the History of Greek’, 357. 29  Published by F. Sarre, E. Herzfeld, Archäologische Reise im Euphrat und Tigris Gebiet, 4 vols., 2, Berlin, 1920, p. 337-338. It remains quite visible after the recent excavations at the site. 30  See, e.g., Mardin Orth. (CFMM) 37, f. 5r, a thirteenth-century Gospel book in which Greek captions are written horizontally in white, and Syriac ones vertically in yellow. Though the Greek has the place of honor, it features telling faults of orthography: e.g., Η ΑΝΑΛΗΜΨΙΟΣ for Η ΑΝΑΛΗΜΨΙΣ, ΑΠΟΣΤΟΛΟΝ for ΑΠΟΣΤΟΛΟΙ.

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Even if authors from these regions wrote in only one language, they inhabited more than one linguistic space. Theodoret of Cyrrhus is the famous example: as a native of Antioch, his literary output was extensive and entirely in Greek, though he was clearly able to speak some version of Syriac, which Sebastian Brock has suggested should be considered his mother tongue. 31 Theodoret provides some of our best information about language use in northern Syria in the early fifth century. At the monasteries of Teleda, ‘some were chanting the poet in Greek, some in the local language’. 32 The monastery of Pouplios near Zeugma was divided into Greek and Syriac communities with different leaders. 33 In commenting on Iud. 12, 6 (‘shibboleth’ vs. ‘sibboleth’), Theodoret compared the spoken varieties of Aramaic/Syriac, noting: ‘In the same way, those from Osrhoene and Syria and Euphratensis and Palestine and Phoenicia use the phoˉneˉ of the Syrians; but all the same their dialexis exhibits many differences’. 34 So was Theodoret Greek, Syriac, or both? Paul Peeters described Theodoret as an example of: [T]hose Orientals in whom Hellenic culture, brought to a rare degree of excellence, has masked without effacing [their] ethnic character. One of his admirers, who studied him extensively, regarded his being ‘a pure Greek’ as an essential aspect of his glory. But this is an illusion among many others attributable to the Hellenic mirage. We must restore Theodoret to Syria. 35 31  Brock, ‘Greek and Syriac in Late Antique Syria’, p. 154. See also T. Urbainczyk, ‘ “The Devil Spoke Syriac to Me”: Theodoret in Syria’, in  Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity – ed. S. Mitchell, G. Greatrex, London, 2000, p. 253-265. 32   H. rel. 4, 13 (SC, 234, p. 324). 33   H. rel. 5, 5 and 6 (SC, 234, p. 334-338): ‘Theogenos inherited the leadership of [those of] the Greek tongue, and Aphthonios of the Syrian’. 34  Qu. 1-28 in Iud. 19 (PG, 80, col. 507-509). 35 ‘[Théodoret est un] de ces Orientaux chez qui la culture hellénique, portée à un rare degré d’excellence, a recouvert sans l’effacer le caractère ethnique. Un de ses admirateurs, qui l’a pourtant bien étudié, regarde comme essentiel à sa gloire qu’il soit un pur grec. C’est une illusion entre beaucoup d’autres dues au mirage hellénique. Il faudra bien qu’on rende Théodoret à la Syrie.’ P. Peeters, Orient et Byzance. Le tréfonds oriental de l’hagiographie byzantine (Subsidia hagiographica, 26), Bruxelles, 1950, p. 89.

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Because of the complexities presented by his cultural and theological positions, Theodoret raises a host of questions about the interplay between language, identity, and the rhetorical manipulation of both. When we expand our view of the ‘East’ beyond Greek patristic literature, we enter the complex territory of translation and adaptation. Translation almost always moved in one general direction, from Greek to other languages, sometimes with a third language serving as an intermediary, e.g., Greek to Syriac to Armenian; Greek to Syriac to Arabic; Greek to Coptic to Arabic to Ge‘ez. The exceptions to that flow from Greek to other languages are instructive. There is the vast corpus of Greek hymns attributed to Ephrem of Nisibis, though few are likely to have been written by him. Why Ephrem? He was a poet and writer of hymns, and from the sixth century onward the Byzantine Church fell in love with liturgical poetry, largely through the influence of a Greek writer with deep Syriac roots, Romanos the Melodist, born in Emesa (Homs) in the late fifth century. Romanos was influenced by Ephrem’s hymns and by other Syriac writings, notably the Diatessaron. 36 The Greek ascetic writings now usually referred to as the ‘Pseudo-Macarian’ corpus have clear affinities with themes typical of Syriac literature but that are unusual, and proved to be controversial, in Greek. 37 The Pseudo-Macarian writings inspired Gregory of Nyssa, Diadochus of Photike, Maximus the Confessor, and Symeon the New Theologian, becoming staples of Byzantine spiritual reading. 38 As noted earlier, the forced or voluntary displacement of individuals and communities because of war or theological controversy was a significant element in the flow of thought and texts between east and west. This was also the case within 36  See W. Petersen, ‘The Dependence of Romanos the Melodist upon the Syriac Ephrem: Its Importance for the Origin of the Kontakion’, Vigiliae Christianae, 39 (1985), p. 171-187, and E. Papoutsakis, ‘The Making of a Syriac Fable: from Ephrem to Romanos’, Le Muséon, 120 (2007), p. 29-75. 37 See C. Stewart, Working the Earth of the Heart: The Messalian Controversy in History, Texts, and Language to ad 431 (Oxford Theological Monographs), Oxford, 1991. 38 See M. Plested, The Macarian Legacy: The Place of Macarius-Symeon in the Eastern Christian Tradition (Oxford Theological Monographs), Oxford, 2004.

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the broader eastern world, especially after the fifth century. A consequence was the creation of multilingual microclimates that proved enormously important for literary history. In the fourth century there were Manicheans at Kellis, in the Dakhleh Oasis of Egypt, writing in Syriac, Greek, and Coptic. 39 As we shall see, from the fifth to the seventh centuries the Monastery of the Enaton near Alexandria became a refuge for Miaphysites escaping Melkite persecution in Syria and elsewhere, becoming a remarkable center for translation and literary production. 40 From the fifth century to the Ottoman period, the monastery of Saint Catherine at Sinai was polyglot, with early evidence of monks adept at Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and Ethiopic, and soon Armenian, Georgian, Arabic, and Slavonic as well. Sinai became a center of Chalcedonian manuscript production in both Greek and Syriac. 41 In the sixth to ninth centuries, the monastery of Qenneshre (‘eagles’ nest’) on the Euphrates was a center of Greek learning for Miaphysite Syriac monks and a place of translation of Greek texts into Syriac. 42 In the eighth and ninth centuries, the monastery of Mar Saba in Palestine was first a center of translation from Syriac to Greek (e.g., for the writings of Isaac of Nineveh), and then from Greek to Arabic, in addition to being a center for Arabic Chalcedonian theological literature. 43 In Egypt, a Syriac-language com39  S. Emmel, ‘Coptic Literature in the Byzantine and Early Islamic World’, in Egypt in the Byzantine World, 300-700 – ed. R. Bagnall, Cambridge, 2007, p. 83-102. 40   A. Juckel, ‘The Enaton’, in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of Syriac Heritage – ed. S. Brock, A. M. Butts, G. A. Kiraz, L. Van Rompay, Piscataway, 2011, p. 144-145. 41   S. Brock, ‘Syriac on Sinai: the main connections’, in Eukosmia: Studi miscellanei per il 75o di Vincenzo Poggi S. J. – ed. V. Ruggieri, L. Pieralli, Soveria Mannelli, 2003, p. 103-17. 42 See J. Tannous, ‘Qenneshre, Monastery of ’, in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of Syriac Heritage – ed. S. Brock, A. M. Butts, G. A. Kiraz, L. Van Rompay, Piscataway, 2011, p. 345-346. 43  S. Brock, ‘Syriac into Greek at Mar Saba: the Translation of St Isaac the Syrian’, in The Sabaite Heritage in the Orthodox Church from the Fifth Century to the Present (Orientalia Lovaniensia analecta, 98) – ed. J. Patrich, Leuven, 2001, p. 201-208; the two collections of articles in S. H. Griffith, Arabic Christianity in the Monasteries of Ninth-Century Palestine, Aldershot, 1992, and The Beginnings of Christian Theology in Arabic: Muslim-Christian Encounters in the Early Islamic Period, Aldershot, 2002.

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munity was in residence at Dayr al-Suryan in Wadi Natrun from ca. 800 to the seventeenth century, with an extraordinary collection of manuscripts now largely at the British Library. 44 From the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, the Black Mountain near Antioch had Greek, Armenian, Georgian, and Syriac (both Miaphysite and Melkite) monks, and even Latins as well, in a Benedictine monastery that passed under the Cistercian observance. 45 Each of these multicultural and multilingual environments encouraged an exchange of ideas and the translation of texts, and interesting things happened in such places. As with Greek into Latin, so with Greek into Syriac we have the problem of why some texts were translated but not others. For example, although Aristotle was extensively translated into Syriac, Plato was not. Clement, Origen, and Didymus were not translated into Syriac apart from the briefest of snippets on the Psalms. One of the manuscripts containing such snippets is itself an example of the unexpected flow of texts. The manuscript, BL Additional 14434, is from the collection formerly at Dayr al-Suryan in Egypt, and is probably to be dated to the eighth century. 46 It contains the Psalms in the Syriac translation made by Paul of Tella from the Hexaplic Septuagint. That translation was a product of what proved to be a fruitful exile for Paul at the Enaton near Alexandria in the early seventh century, and was part of a wave of increasingly literal sixth- and seventh-century

44  See L. Van Rompay, ‘al-Suryaˉn, Dayr’, in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of Syriac Heritage – ed. S. Brock, A. M. Butts, G. A. Kiraz, L. Van Rompay, Piscataway, 2011, p. 386-387. 45  S. Brock, ‘Syriac Manuscripts Copied on the Black Mountain, near Antioch’, in Lingua restituta orientalis. Festgabe für Julius Assfalg (Ägypten und Altes Testament, 20) – ed. R. Schulz, M. Görg, Wiesbaden, 1990, p. 59-67; W. Z. Djobadze, Materials for the Study of Georgian Monasteries in the Western Environs of Antioch on the Orontes (CSCO, 372), Louvain, 1976, p. 86-108; J. J. S. Weitenberg, ‘The Armenian Monasteries on the Black Mountain’, in East and West in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean. I: Antioch from the Byzantine reconquest until the end of the Crusader principality, acta of the congress held at Hernen Castle in May 2003 (Orientalia Lovaniensia analecta, 147) – ed. K. Ciggaar, M. Metcalf, Leuven, 2006, p. 79-94. 46  W. Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum Acquired Since 1838, London, 1870-1872, vol. 1, p. 35-36 (= no. LIV, the first part of MS Add. 14434). Cfr. Milan, Ambrosianus C313 Inf.

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Syriac biblical translations. Paul’s was one of the ‘mirror translations’ of the period, marked by such precise attention to the Greek original that one could retrovert the results back into Greek with some ease. 47 In this manuscript of the Psalms in Paul of Tella’s Syriac version, there are prefixed to the Psalter some translated extracts from various Greek commentators on the Psalms, including Hippolytus, Basil, Eusebius of Caesarea, Athanasius, and Origen. The selection of that particular array of authorities to a collection of commentaries on the Psalms translated from Greek into Syriac in the early sixth century on the ‘Black Mountain’, presumably the famous center near Antioch. 48 The manuscript is additionally notable for the inclusion of a rare marginal note in Latin, providing a few lines from Psalm 50, added by someone residing at the monastery, probably before the twelfth century. Was it a visiting monk? In any case, here we have a sixth-century translation from Greek done at the Black Mountain in Syria, accompanying a seventh-century Syriac translation of the Psalms done at the Enaton in Egypt, found in an eighth-century manuscript from Wadi Natrun bearing a Latin note from the Crusader era.

5. Patristics beyond ‘East’ and ‘West’: a broader view What does any of this mean for our view of Patristics in the twenty-first century? One of the remarkable features of the last

  L. Van Rompay, ‘Pawlos of Tella’, in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of Syriac Heritage – ed. S. Brock, A. M. Butts, G. A. Kiraz, L. Van Rompay, Piscataway, 2011, p. 325-326; Brock, ‘Towards a History of Syriac Translation Technique’, p. 11-14. 48 See A. Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur, mit Ausschluss der christlich-palästinensischen Texte, Berlin, 1922, p. 164, with reference to Vatican syr.  135, which contains Simeon’s description of the project (but not the work itself). Both Simeon and his monastery seem to be otherwise unknown. A complete copy of the compilation also exists in a twelfth-century manuscript formerly in the Chaldean library of Diyarbakir (Diyarbakir 36). The manuscript was taken with several others from Diyarbakir to Mosul and then to Baghdad, where the collection of the Chaldean Patriarchate suffered terrible damage at the time of the 2003 Iraq War. The surviving manuscripts are now being inventoried and digitized, and it is not yet known if this one is among them or what its condition may be. 47

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hundred years has been the break-out from that dichotomous PG/PL view of the world and a fuller inclusion of the nonGreek eastern Christian cultures into our understanding of Late Antiquity. This broader view has sometimes taken us beyond the theological literature that was the traditional basis of Patristics, but it remains grounded in texts. When I was a doctoral student in the late 1980s it was somewhat unusual to be working with Syriac as well as Greek patristic writings. Now it is normal, just as it is increasingly common for those studying the Latin Middle Ages to learn Arabic. Though we can never fully enter into the thought and experience of these ancient people, we can at least recognize that they had an instinctively comprehensive view of the geography and cultures of what was then the Christian world and of the other cultures within and adjacent to it. As we have seen, ‘reception’ and influence are not simply a matter of textual mechanics, translation and redaction. They also follow from live (or epistolary) human interaction, especially in places where cultures overlap, or where individuals representing various cultures are gathered. Our modern version is a conference such as this, where scholars representing different traditions, perspectives, and methodologies gather in a city that has historically been a center of cultural encounter and mutual influence. Let us be humble enough to recognize that we are simply recapitulating what has long been the case.

Bibliography 1. Primary sources Greg. M., Dial. = Gregorius Magnus, Liber dialogorum, Latin text and Greek version by Pope Zacharias (PL, 77, col. 149-430). Greg. M., Epist.  = Gregorius Magnus, Registrum epistularum – ed. D. Norberg (CC SL, 140, 140A), Turnhout, 1982. Greg. M., In Ez. II 2.8 and 10.21 = Gregorius Magnus, In Ezechielem homiliae – ed. M. Adriaen (CC SL, 142), Turnhout, 1971. Greg. M., Moral. = Gregorius Magnus, Moralia, sc. Expositio beati Iob – ed. M. Adriaen (CC SL, 143, 143A, 143B), Turnhout, 1979.

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Greg. Naz., Orat. = Gregorius Nazianzenus, Orationes; Latin tr. and ed. A. Engelbrecht (CSEL, 46), Wien, 1910. Ioh. Cass., Conl. Praef. =  Iohannes Cassianus, Conlationes – ed. M. Petschenig (CSEL, 13), Wien, 1886. Ioh. Diac., Vita Greg. M. = Iohannes Diaconus, Vita Gregorii Magni (PL, 75, col. 59-241). Ioh. Mosch., Prat. 192 = Iohannes Moschus, Pratum spirituale (PG, 87, col. 2851-3112). E. Schwartz, Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, IV, 2, Berlin, 1914. Thdt. H. re. = Theodoretus Cyrrhensis, Historia religiosa (SC, 234, 257), Paris, 1977-1979. Thdt.  Qu. 1-28 in Iud. =  Theodoretus Cyrrhensis, Quaestiones in Iud. (PG, 80, col. 485-517).

2. Secondary sources A. Baumstark, Geschichte der syrischen Literatur, mit Ausschluss der christlich-palästinensischen Texte, Berlin, 1922. S. Brock, ‘Syriac on Sinai: the main connections’, in Eukosmia: Studi miscellanei per il 75o di Vincenzo Poggi S.J. – ed. V. Ruggieri, L. Pieralli, Soveria Mannelli, 2003. S. Brock, ‘Syriac into Greek at Mar Saba: the Translation of St Isaac the Syrian’, in The Sabaite Heritage in the Orthodox Church from the Fifth Century to the Present (Orientalia Lovaniensia analecta, 98) – ed. J. Patrich, Leuven, 2001, p. 201-208. S. Brock, ‘Greek and Syriac in Late Antique Syria’, in Literacy and Power in the Ancient World – ed. A. Bowman, G. Woolf, Cambridge, 1994, p. 149-160. S. Brock, ‘Syriac Manuscripts Copied on the Black Mountain, near Antioch’, in Lingua restituta orientalis. Festgabe für Julius Assfalg (Ägypten und Altes Testament, 20) – ed. R. Schulz, M. Görg, Wiesbaden, 1990, p. 59-67. S. Brock, ‘Towards a History of Syriac Translation Technique’, in III Symposium Syriacum, 1980: les contacts du monde syriaque avec les autres cultures: Goslar 7-11 Septembre 1980 (Orientalia christiana analecta, 221) – ed. R. Lavenant, Roma, 1983, p. 1-14. A. Cameron, ‘Old and New Rome: Roman Studies in Sixth-Century Constantinople’, in Transformations of Late Antiquity. Essays for Peter Brown – ed. P. Rousseau, M. Papoutsakis, Farnham, 2009, p. 15-36.

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R. Cribiore, The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch, Princeton, 2007. W. Z.  Djobadze, Materials for the Study of Georgian Monasteries in the Western Environs of Antioch on the Orontes (CSCO, 372), Louvain, 1976. A. Ekonomou, Byzantine Rome and the Greek Popes: Eastern Influences on Rome and the Papacy from Gregory the Great to Zacharias, ad 590752, New York, 2007. S. Emmel, ‘Coptic Literature in the Byzantine and Early Islamic World’, in Egypt in the Byzantine World, 300-700 – ed. R. Bagnall, Cambridge, 2007, p. 83-102. S. H.  Griffith, The Beginnings of Christian Theology in Arabic: MuslimChristian Encounters in the Early Islamic Period, Aldershot, 2002. S. H.  Griffith, Arabic Christianity in the Monasteries of Ninth-Century Palestine, Aldershot, 1992. P. Hatlie, The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople ca. 350-850, Cambridge, 2008. I. Havener, ‘The Greek Prologue to the “Dialogues” of Gregory the Great’, Revue Bénédictine, 99 (1989), p. 103-117. M. Janse, ‘Aspects of Bilingualism in the History of the Greek Language’, in Bilingualism in Ancient Society. Language Contact and the Written Word – ed. J. N. Adams, M. Janse, S. Swain, Oxford, 2002, p. 332-390. A. Juckel, ‘The Enaton’, in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of Syriac Heritage – ed. S. Brock, A. M. Butts, G. A. Kiraz, L. Van Rompay, Piscataway, 2011, p. 144-145. G. Kiraz, ‘Kthobonoyo Syriac: Some Observations and Remarks’, Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies, 10 (2007), p. 129-142. J. Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God. A Study of Monastic Culture – tr. C. Misrahi, New York, 19823. R. Lizzi, ‘La traduzione graeca delle opere di Gregorio Magno’, in Gregorio Magno et il suo tempo. XIX Incontro di studiosi dell’antichità christiana in collaborazione con l’Ecole Française de Rome. Rome, 9-12 maggio (Studia ephemeridis Augustinianum, 33-34), Rome, 1991, 2 vols., 2, p. 41-57. F. Millar, ‘Greek and Syriac in Edessa and Osrhoene, ce 213-363’, Scripta classica Israelica, 30 (2011), p. 93-111. F. Millar, ‘Linguistic Co-Existence in Constantinople: Greek and Latin (and Syriac) in the Acts of the Synod of 536 ce’, Journal of Roman Studies, 99 (2009), p. 92-103.

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F. Nau, ‘Le texte grec des récits utiles à l’âme d’Anastase (le Sinaïte)’, Oriens Christianus, 3 (1903), p. 56-90. E. Papoutsakis, ‘The Making of a Syriac Fable: from Ephrem to Romanos’, Le Muséon, 120 (2007), p. 29-75. P. Peeters, Orient et Byzance. Le tréfonds oriental de l’hagiographie byzantine (Subsidia hagiographica, 26), Bruxelles, 1950. L. Perrone, ‘Riscoprire Origene oggi: prime impressioni sulla raccolta di omelie sui Salmi nel Codex Monacensis Graecus 314’, Adamantius, 18 (2012), p. 41-58. W. Petersen, ‘The Dependence of Romanos the Melodist upon the Syriac Ephrem: Its Importance for the Origin of the Kontakion’, Vigiliae Christianae, 39 (1985), p. 171-187. M. Plested, The Macarian Legacy: the Place of Macarius-Symeon in the Eastern Christian Tradition (Oxford Theological Monographs), Oxford, 2004. M. Molin Pradel, ‘Novità origeniane dalla Staatsbibliothek di Monaco di Baviera: il Cod. Graec. 314’, Adamantius, 18 (2012), p. 16-40. L. Van Rompay, ‘Aramaic’, in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of Syriac Heritage – ed. S. Brock, A. M. Butts, G. A. Kiraz, L. Van Rompay, Piscataway, 2011, p. 29-30. L. Van Rompay, ‘Pawlos of Tella’, Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of Syriac Heritage – ed. S. Brock, A. M. Butts, G. A. Kiraz, L. Van Rompay, Piscataway, 2011, p. 325-326. L. Van Rompay, ‘al-Suryaˉn, Dayr’, in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of Syriac Heritage – ed. S. Brock, A. M. Butts, G. A. Kiraz, L. Van Rompay, Piscataway, 2011, p. 386-387. F. Sarre, E. Herzfeld, Archäologische Reise im Euphrat und Tigris Gebiet, vols., 2, Berlin, 1920. A. Scher, ‘Joseph Hazzaya, écrivain syriaque du viiie siècle’, Comptes ˙ de L’Académie des inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, rendus des séances Paris, 1909, p. 300-307. A. Scher, Catalogue des manuscrits syriaques et arabes conservés dans la bibliothèque épiscopale de Séert (Kurdistan), Mosul, 1905. C. Stewart, ‘Evagrius Beyond Byzantium: the Latin and Syriac Receptions’, in Evagrius and His Legacy – ed. R. D. Young, J. Kalvesmaki, South Bend [forthcoming]. C. Stewart, Cassian the Monk, Oxford, 1998. C. Stewart, Working the Earth of the Heart: the Messalian Controversy in History, Texts, and Language to ad 431 (Oxford Theological Monographs), Oxford, 1991.

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C. Straw, Gregory the Great. Perfection in Imperfection, Berkeley, 1988. J. Tannous, ‘Qenneshre, Monastery of’, in., Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of Syriac Heritage – ed. S. Brock, A. M. Butts, G. A. Kiraz, L. Van Rompay, Piscataway, 2011, p. 345-346. D. G. K. Taylor, ‘Bilingualism and diglossia in Late Antique Syria and Mesopotamia’, in Bilingualism in Ancient Society. Language Contact and the Written Word – ed. J. N. Adams, M. Janse, S. Swain, Oxford, 2002, p. 298-331. P. Tzamalikos, A Newly Discovered Greek Father: Cassian the Sabaite Eclipsed by John Cassian of Marseilles (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 111), Leiden, 2012. P. Tzamalikos, The Real Cassian Revisited: Monastic Life, Greek Paideia, and Origenism in the Sixth Century (Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae, 112), Leiden, 2012. T. Urbainczyk, ‘ “The Devil Spoke Syriac to Me”: Theodoret in Syria’, in Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity – ed. S. Mitchell, G. Greatrex, London, 2000, p. 253-265. A. de Vogüé, ‘L’Auteur du Commentaire des Rois attribué à S. Gregoire: Un moine de Cava?’ Revue Bénédictine, 106 (1996), p. 319-31. J. J. S. Weitenberg, ‘The Armenian Monasteries on the Black Mountain’, in East and West in the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean. I: Antioch from the Byzantine reconquest until the end of the Crusader principality: acta of the congress held at Hernen Castle in May 2003 (Orientalia Lovaniensia analecta, 147) – ed. K. Ciggaar, M. Metcalf, Leuven, 2006, p. 79-94. W. Wright, Catalogue of Syriac Manuscripts in the British Museum Acquired Since 1838, 3 vols, London, 1870-1872. E. Zanini, Le Italie bizantine. Territorio, insediamenti ed economia nella provincia bizantina d’Italias (VI-VIII secolo), Bari, 1998.

Abstract The traditional view of Patristics as the study of a canon of texts is challenged by awareness that many texts have been lost, others survive only in translations, some in a single manuscript. The static view is yielding to a more supple understanding of cultures, languages, and the interactions among them. The flow of ideas and texts across linguistic frontiers suggests the naturally multilingual context of Late Antique Christianity. 340

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There is significance in both the translation of texts and the fact of no translation. In this exchange, monks played a particular role as facilitators of cultural influence, and several monasteries became multilingual environments for literary composition and translation. All of this takes the modern scholar beyond the traditional Patrologia Latina / Patrologia Graeca view of Patristics to a perspective that includes the numerous oriental Christian traditions and their interactions with the Hellenistic world.

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A MEETING-POINT BETWEEN EAST AND WEST: HESYCHIUS OF JERUSALEM AND THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PSALTER IN BYZANTIUM

Hesychius, a still relatively little-known 1 church father who lived in fifth-century Jerusalem (d. 453?), taught and preached at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, probably after having lived as a monk in some monastery on the border with Egypt. He became a renowned didaskalos in his own time. 2 His works, mainly exegetical and homiletic in character, have come down to us in the original Greek, but also in translations, such as Armenian, 3 Georgian 4 and Latin. In particular, his Commentary

1  Much basic editorial work remains to be done on texts attributed to him; see Clavis patrum graecorum, III: A Cyrillo Alexandrino ad Iohannem Damascenum – ed. M. Geerard, Turnhout, 20032, no. 6552-6555 (hereafter abbreviated as CPG), in particular the Scholia and Commentaries on the Psalms. I am currently working on an edition of a work published as De titulis psalmorum under the name of Athanasius in PG, 27, col. 649-1344 (CPG, no. 6552). The book by R. Devreesse, Les anciens commentateurs grecs des Psaumes (Studi e testi, 264), Vatican City, 1970, p. 243-301, remains fundamental. Cfr. also M.-J. Rondeau, Les Commentaires patristiques du Psautier (iiie-ve siècles) (Orientalia christiana analecta, 219), Rome, 1982, p. 137-143. 2  On Hesychius’s life and works, see Hesych. H., Les Homélies festales = M. Aubineau, Les Homélies festales d’Hésychius de Jérusalem, I: Homélies I-XV (Subsidia hagiographica, 9), Brussels, 1978, p. xiii-xx. For a recent thesis with an editorial scope, see M. Eriksson, ‘The Scholia by Hesychius of Jerusalem on the Minor Prophets’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Uppsala University, 2012). The first chapter is structured around the sources for the life of Hesychius. 3   Hesych. H., Comm. in Iob = Homélies sur Job: version arménienne – ed. Ch. Renoux, tr. Ch. Mercier, Ch. Renoux (PO, 42.1-2), Turnhout, 1983. 4   Hesych. H., Homilia in Hypapantem = G. Garitte, ‘ L’homélie géorgienne d’Hésychius de Jérusalem sur l’Hypapante’, Le Muséon, 4 (1971), p. 353372; Hesych. H., Homilia de resurrectione mortuorum = M. van Esbroeck, ‘ L’homélie géorgienne d’Hésychius de Jérusalem sur la résurrection des morts’,

10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107525

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on  Leviticus is preserved almost exclusively in a medieval Latin translation, 5 and only the relatively recent discovery of a Greek fragment dispelled doubts about the attribution of this work to him. 6 In this paper, I will argue that this linguistic multiformity favoured the successful role of Hesychius as a bridge between traditions. Looking at the specific use of his glosses on the Psalms in a Byzantine manuscript, I will further suggest that he was used and recognized as such in Byzantium at a moment of crisis, namely, in the aftermath of the 1054 schism. 7 Two issues seem fundamental when thinking about dialogue in general, and East-West dialogue in particular. One is the search for texts that can speak to both traditions because each is familiar in some way with the author in question, his writings being known through translations, partial quotations, or abbreviations, and thus coming to constitute a shared patrimony of language and thought. We can refer to this aspect as the concept of ‘familiarity’. The second key point is what we can refer to as the concept of ‘variety’, a notion that is not usually associated with matters theological and dogmatic, which tend to be apprehended as rigid in their conclusions and generating stark oppositions that reflected in the bitter and prolonged debates often punctuated by ‘schisms’. Nevertheless, theological reflection was not impervious to maintaining, or even at times actively seeking, an openness to different interpretations of the same concept. More specifically, in exegetical questions, different interpretations of the same scriptural passage were possible, and indeed welcome. This fanning out of possible interpretations attested to the Le Muséon, 7 (1974), p. 1-21. As far as I am aware, Hesychius has not been transmitted in Syriac. 5  Hesych. H., Comm. in Lev. (PG, 93, col. 787-1180). In his thesis at the University of Bologna Stefano Tampellini proposed a new critical edition of this text; see S. Tampellini, ‘L’esegesi del Levitico di Esichio di Gerusalemme: osservazioni introduttive e sondaggi preliminari’, Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi, 3.1 (1996), p. 201-209. 6  A. Wenger, ‘Hésychius de Jérusalem. Notes sur les discours inédits et sur le texte grec du commentaire in Leviticum’, Revue des Études Augustiniennes, 2 (1956), p. 457-470. 7  The most recent monograph on the topic is that by A. Bayer, Spaltung der Christenheit. Das sogennante Morgenländische Schisma von 1054 (Beihefte zum Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 53), Böhlau, 2002.

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common interest of struggling with understanding the word of God, of striving to apply its message to one’s specific situation, of practising that constant reflection, meditating upon it ‘day and night’, as the Psalm says (Ps. 1, 2). In perceiving Hesychius as a lynch-pin in East-West dialogue, both these aspects appear operative. The presbyter Hesychius was almost exactly a contemporary of Augustine. While the problem of Augustine’s reception in the East may not be as stark as is normally perceived, as his works (quoted by the church councils) were probably a little better known by Greek Christians than is usually assumed even before the fourteenth-century Kydonian revival, 8 the figure of Augustine, invested with episcopal authority and overflowing in his copious writings, is often perceived more as an obstacle than as a path for East-West understanding in the historical and contemporary dialogue between the churches. 9 Hesychius, on the contrary, quiet and unassuming, little known and without special honours, yet prolific in his teachings and writings (he is said to have produced commentaries on the whole of Scripture), inserts his voice in the crevices and communicates in typical monastic fashion across centuries and cultures.

1. Hesychius in the context of his time Although still seriously understudied, Hesychius is gradually but steadily emerging as an influential voice carrying the impact of Palestinian Christianity in the directions of both Rome and Constantinople at one and the same time. Both as a point of departure and as a continuing symbol of utmost importance for Christianity, Jerusalem could and did act as a pivot in the ecclesiastical and political consciousness of the oikoumene. It can therefore be perceived and used as a uniting force, a common

8  B. Crostini, ‘Augustine in the Byzantine World to 1453’, in The Oxford Guide to the Reception of Augustine – ed. K. Pollman, 3 vols., Oxford, 2013, II, p. 726-734. 9  A. Nichols, Rome and the Eastern Churches. A Study in Schism, Edinburgh, 1992.

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focus; indeed, its political role came to the fore precisely around the turn of the millennium. Beside his Palestinian and Jewish origins, Hesychius strides across the environments of both cathedral and monastery. His preaching and teaching appear to have taken place in a church setting before an audience as varied as that expected of a place of pilgrimage like Jerusalem, and his capable rhetoric was influenced by the bishops who were his teachers, notably John II and Juvenal. This point has been admirably proved by the editor of Hesychius’s Festal Homilies, Michel Aubineau, through a detailed study of their rhetoric and vocabulary. 10 But the roots of Hesychius’s formation and perhaps his deepest allegiance belonged to the monastic world, a world spreading out from Jerusalem across the desert to Egypt, comprising a variegated reality of communities and anchorites that the studies by Brouria Ashkelony, Aryeh Kofsky, 11 and Lorenzo Perrone 12 are gradually bringing to scholarly attention. These communities evolved from simple retirement into the desert into complex networks regulated by strict rhythms and nourished by a special literature that dissected the movements of the soul and prescribed progressive askesis. Not alien to this monastic setting, however, was also the classical training in rhetoric and grammar, which these ascetics had been and perhaps were still being exposed to in the context of their monastic schooling, in their roles as learners and then as teachers. This particular interaction, often underestimated, has been the special focus of the project ‘Paideia and Ancient Monasticism’ at the University of Lund. 13 The notes taken

  Hesych. H., Les Homélies festales, passim.   B. Bitton-Ahskelony, ‘Penitence in Late Antique Monastic Literature’, in Transformations of the Inner Self in Ancient Religions – ed. J. Assmann, G. G. Stroumsa (Numen Book Series, 83), Leiden, 1999, p. 179-420, and more comprehensively, B. Bitton-Ahskelony, A. Kofsky, The Monastic School of Gaza (Vigiliae Christianae, Supplements, 78), Leiden, 2006. 12  L. Perrone, La Chiesa di Palestina e le controversie cristologiche. Dal concilio di Efeso (431) al secondo concilio di Costantinopoli (553) (Testi e ricerche di scienze religiose), Brescia, 1980, esp. p. 64-79. 13  See ‹http://mopai.lu.se/education.html› [accessed 30 November 2013]. Papers from collaborators in this project, directed by Samuel Rubenson, are gathered in Papers Presented at the Sixteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies 10 11

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by the disciples of Didymus the Blind are a case in point. 14 His world combining ascetic discipline and exegetical teaching is not far from Hesychius’s own, and the Alexandrian tradition of spiritualized interpretation permeates both. 15 Traces of Didymus’s commentary on the Psalms are fragmentary, but passages make their way into catenae despite his Origenist leanings, and often closely echo Hesychius’s glosses. Hesychius, for his part, was surely as versed in understanding his own self as he was in meditating upon and explaining to others the Scriptures. In a recent article, Cornelia Horn suggests that the voice inspiring some of these ascetic Palestinian communities may well be that of Hesychius, 16 bestowing his ascetic counsels in the form of glosses on the Scriptures, in which he dwells particularly on the concept of repentance, but with a positive emphasis on the associated promise of forgiveness. Hesychius may replace the expected but ultimately unattested influence of the Cappadocian Basil; 17 it is in this author that one needs to look to understand the intellectual framework of these coenobia, perched uneasily between doctrinal controversies, in particular the Christological debates leading from the condemnation of Nestorianism at the Council of Ephesus in 431 to the definition of Christ’s two natures at Chalcedon in 451. Horn is Held in Oxford 2011, III: Early Monasticism and Classical Paideia – ed. M. Vinzent, S. Rubenson (Studia Patristica, 55) Leuven, 2013. A recent conference (October 2012) at Lund University explored this theme further. 14   Didym., Fr. Ps. (PG, 39, col. 1155-1616). On Didymus, see R. Devreesse, Les anciens commentateurs, p. 147-210; M.-J. Rondeau, Les Commentaires patristiques, p. 116-120. The teaching milieu in which Didymus operated has been explored more recently in the work of B. Stefaniw, developing from her study, B. Stefaniw, ‘Exegetical Curricula in Origen, Didymus, and Evagrius: Pedagogical Agenda and the Case for Neoplatonist Influence’, Studia Patristica, 44 (2010), p. 281-294. 15   R. A. Layton, Didymus the Blind and His Circle in Late Antique Alexandria. Virtue and Narrative in Biblical Scholarship, Urbana, Ill., 2004, esp. p. 135-158. 16  C. Horn, ‘Preaching and Practising Repentance: Hesychius of Jerusalem’s Influence on Ascetic Movements in Byzantine Palestine’, in Bibel, Byzanz und Christlicher Orient. Festschrift für Stephen Gerö zum 65. Geburtstag – ed. D. Bumazhnov, E. Grypeou, T. B. Sailors, A. Toepel (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 87), Leuven, 2011, p. 535-552. 17  Horn’s suggestion was preceded by the problematization of this issue in B. Bitton-Ahskelony, ‘Penitence’, questioning Basil’s influence specifically on the subject of monastic penance.

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not alone in considering Hesychius as probably sharing the antiChalcedonian perspective of the monastic milieu of the Judaean desert, even though his death soon after prevented his full and explicit participation in that schismatic party. Besides Horn’s study pointing to the emphasis on penance in Hesychius, Mats Eriksson’s recent doctoral thesis at Uppsala University suggests that the conventional view of Hesychius portrayed as entirely ‘orthodox’ (i.e. Chacedonian) in the ponderous volumes written by Jüssen 18 may need revisiting. Eriksson maintains that more personal and ascetic material is to be found in the Hesychian corpus than the limited studies have so far managed to highlight. For example, Hesychius’s glosses on Ps. 131 LXX (132 Heb.) make explicit references to the monastic choice as fulfillment of the words of the psalm: the tabernacles (σκηνώματα) of the Lord explicitly become the μοναστήρια that we are invited to enter into. 19 This monastic facet of Hesychius’s writings makes it likely that his theological position was closer to that of the anti-Chalcedonians, who were mostly supported within Palestinian monasticism. Nonetheless, far from alienating him, the monastic involvement may be among the factors that accompanied the survival and guaranteed the transmission of Hesychius’s exegesis. Whether his glosses and commentaries were written directly by him or were taken down by disciples from his oral presentations, these works were often selected for inclusion in the catenae, that is, the commentaries copied in the margins of parchment manuscripts of the Scriptures and made up of excerpts from the fathers. This process began probably in Palestine around the sixth century, Procopius of Gaza (circa 465-528 ad) being cited as the initiator or one of the earliest examples of this type of commentary, although the manuscript evidence begins later on. 20

18  K. Jüssen, Die dogmatische Anschauungen des Hesychius von Jerusalem (Beiträge zur Theologie, 17, 20), 2 vols., Münster i. W., 1931,1934. 19  Hesych. H., Ps. tit. (PG, 27, col. 1249A12 and C12 [interpretatio]): see M. Eriksson, ‘The Scholia’, p. 15. 20  The hiatus between actual composition and extant evidence has given rise to much speculation as to the early form and function of catenae. On Procopius, see the work by F. Petit, ‘Introduction’, in Autour de Théodoret de Cyr. La ‘Collectio Coisliniana’ sur les derniers livres de l’Octateuque et sur les Règnes. Le ‘Commen-

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The freedom in the use of sources that the excerptors experienced in their work is attested by the survival of a number of condemned or dubious authors in the form of passages that either became attached to a different author or blended in with the rest by remaining unattributed. 21 The variety of catenae that have been preserved in manuscripts, particularly those on the Psalter, also witnesses to the creative use of juxtaposition in the sequence of patristic sources selected for the commentaries, and although scholars have attempted, and to a small degree succeeded, in systematizing the extant evidence, questions about their evolution remain open. The fundamental survey by Gilles Dorival, now published in four volumes, distinguishes primary from secondary compilations, calling them ‘mother-catenae’ and ‘daughter-catenae’. 22 However, it is not uncommon to find compilations produced ad hoc for a specific edition, and the case of Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 752, an illuminated Greek Psalter from the eleventh century, appears to contain precisely such an apposite and original catena, that must be categorized as its own ‘type’.

2. Hesychius in Vat. gr. 752 The catena of Vat. gr. 752 is principally composed of passages from Hesychius’s commentaries on the Psalter, flanked by interpretations by other authors such as Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who is in particular paired with Hesychius in nearly all the glosses on the titles (also called inscriptions) of the Psalms. In inventorying this manuscript in his survey of catenae to the Greek Psalter, Dorival noted from the start the presence of uniden-

taire sur les Règnes’ de Procope de Gaza (Traditio exegetica graeca, 13) – ed. F. Petit, Leuven, 2003, p. xxxii-xxxiii. 21  F. Petit, ‘Introduction’, in La Chaine sur la Genèse: édition intégrale – ed. F. Petit (Traditio exegetica graeca, 1-4), 4 vols., Leuven, 1991-1996, I, p. xv. 22  G. Dorival, Les Châines exégétiques grecques sur les Psaumes. Contribution à l’étude d’une forme littéraire (Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 43-46), 4 vols., Leuven, 1986-1991. The fifth volume that was planned to contain indices has not yet appeared.

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tified extracts. 23 These passages may belong to as yet unpublished sources, which include parts of Hesychius’s own exegetical homilies on the Psalter (the Commentarius magnus or Long Commentary, CPG 6554), or may be versions of published works, albeit reworked and altered beyond recognition. In this manuscript, Hesychius’s importance above the other authors juxtaposed to him by the compiler is clearly marked in several ways. To begin with, his commentary on the titles of the Psalter was copied in the biblical column as part of the titles written in red or gold ink. Moreover, the illustrations often use a quotation from his commentary as part of the caption, in this way establishing a direct relationship between Hesychius’s interpretation of a verse of the Psalm and the subject chosen for the illustration. The fact that the miniatures in the manuscript are placed in the commentary column definitively establishes this particular relation. The central role that Hesychius performs in Vat. gr. 752 goes beyond his popularity as a source in biblical catenae, and, considered within the overall intent of the production of this manuscript, can be taken as a conscious choice that responds to the overall planning criteria for this edition of the Psalter. The setting of this book at the time of the East-West schism of 1054 (it is dated to 1058/59 by the paschal tables contained in it) allows us to probe whether Hesychius’s exegetical approach could work effectively at a time of crisis. I would like to suggest that possible reasons for this choice include the suitability of Hesychius for the œcumenical and pacifying role that his exegesis could offer in the context of the events surrounding the creation of the manuscript. These turbulent times in the eleventh century were not unlike the original context of theological controversy in which Hesychius lived in the fifth, but from which he appears to have remained relatively unscathed, steering a safe course between monophysitism and the new Chalcedonian allegiance that Palestine reluctantly embraced. Lorenzo Perrone suggested that Hesychius turned to the Scriptures and thereby maintained an anchor-hold in times of Christological con23  G. Dorival, Chaînes exegétiques, IV, p. 54-113, includes Psalms 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, 50, 51, 61, 75-78, 91, 100, 101, 118, 131, 141, and 150.

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troversy leading to a phase of schism in the Palestinian church in the aftermath of Chalcedon (431). 24 Across the centuries, Scriptures and their interpretation were a key factor in the self-definition of, and confrontation between, churches. The production of special manuscripts of the Bible, whether we think of the Carolingian renaissance or of the production of illuminated bibles in the eleventh century on the wave of ecclesiastical reform, played an important role between the imperial patrons sponsoring these manuscripts and the church authorities for whom (or in view of whom) they were made. In a similar manner, the Byzantine affirmation of belonging to the ‘true faith’ included a statement about their attitude to Scripture via the copying, commenting, and illustration of biblical manuscripts. This production displayed their serious study of biblical writings, and also their capacity for using imagery to express its hidden or spiritual meanings (of the Old Testament in particular). The considerable number of hexaplaric readings that accompany Hesychius’s exegesis attests the extent to which he capitalized on Origen’s philological work on Scripture – his sixcolumn comparative Bible, the Hexapla – to further problematize and explore the text from its original language, Hebrew, to the Septuagint Greek translation. 25 He also made extensive use of the first-century revisions by Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion (known as ‘the Three’ translators included in the Hexapla), in this not unlike Eusebius. The role of these later, more literal translations of the Bible in the liturgical life of the Jewish 26 and Christian communities testifies to a sharp awareness of the variable renderings of the Word of God expressed through human language. While the intent of these more literal translations may have been that of diminishing the Messianic content

  L. Perrone, La Chiesa di Palestina, p. 66.   On hexaplaric readings of the biblical text of Vat. gr. 752, see A. Schenker, Hexaplarische Psalmenbruchstücke. Die hexaplarischen Psalmenfragmente der Handschriften Vaticanus graecus 752 und Canonicianus graecus 62 (Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, 8), Freiburg and Göttingen, 1975. 26  N. de Lange, ‘Jewish Greek Bible Versions’, in The New Cambridge History of the Bible, II: From 600 to 1450 – ed. R. Marsden, A. Matter, Cambridge, 2012, p. 56-68, at p. 59, 61. 24 25

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in the Old Testament, their value for the exegete was nonetheless intact. A very unusual image of Aquila and Symmachus in the illuminations of Vat. gr. 752 well visualizes the respect that these ‘biblical scholars’ were accorded, and raises issues about the perception of Jews both in a historical and a contemporary perspective (see Figure 1 = fol. 187r). While the main gist of Hesychius’s exegesis tallies more closely with the Alexandrian interpretative approach (allegorical/ spiritualizing), 27 he also resorts to etymological discourse and Christ-centred typology to expose the gamut of meanings that the Scriptures open up, rather than define. This range of meanings is explored through connection with other parts of Scripture, through an analysis of language and words, including proper names, and with an eye to ethical engagement with the Word of God as found especially in the Psalms. This attitude at once puts Hesychius’s writings at one remove from the heart of contemporary controversy in its more technical sense, and offers a positive, slowly paced approach to religious contemplation as constituted by meditative and critical reading, resulting in a diffraction of possible meanings and approaches.

3. A Case Study: Hesychius on the Sons of Kore The scholarship applied to the people and words of the Psalter takes us into the depths of a multiform approach that makes Hesychius’s exegesis at once alien and fascinating for a modern reader. I would like to turn to one example, namely the explanatory possibilities Hesychius contemplates concerning the ‘sons of Kore’. In an attempt to counter their role as authors of the Psalms, Hesychius emphasizes their function as psalm-singers, while at the same time offering alternative, allegorical explanations for the insertion of names in the Psalm titles. This exegesis is found in Hesychius’s Prologue to the Psalms edited by Giovanni Mercati in 1901 from two tenth-century manuscripts, but the shorter glosses of Hesychius’s commentary

27  M. Simonetti, Lettera e/o allegoria: un contributo alla storia dell’esegesi patristica (Studia Ephemeridis ‘Augustinianum’, 23), Rome, 1985, p. 226-230, at p. 227.

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also rely on similar interpretations. 28 Thirteen psalms mention by name the sons of Kore in their titles, and on this basis are attributed to them: Psalms 42-49, 84-85, and 87-89 (Heb.). However, Hesychius proposes the following alternatives for their interpretation: Ὅπου δὲ τῶν Κορὲ ἐστὶν ἡ ἐπιγραφή, καὶ αὕτη ἡ ἐπιγραφὴ διαφόρως δηλοῖ. ἦσαν μὲν γὰρ ἐκ τῶν υἱῶν Κορὲ ψαλτῳδοί, ὡς εὑρίσκομεν ἐν Παραλειπομέναις. γέγραπται γάρ Καὶ ἀνέστησαν οἱ Λευῗται ἀπὸ τῶν υἱῶν Καὰθ καὶ ἐκ τῶν υἱῶν Κορὲ τοῦ αἰνεῖν Κυρίῳ τῷ θεῷ Ἰσραὴλ ἐν φωνῇ μεγάλῃ εἰς ὕψος. ἦσαν οὖν οἱ ψαλτῳδοὶ αἰνοῦντες τὸν Κύριον ἐν λόγοις Δαυείδ, κατὰ τὸ εἰρημένον ἐν Παραλειπομέναις ὅτι Οἱ Λευῗται ἐν ὀργάνοις ᾠδῶν Κυρίου, ἃς ἐποιήσατο Δαυεὶδ ὁ βασιλεὺς τοῦ ἐξομολογεῖσθαι ἐναντίον Κυρίου, ὅτι εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα τὸ ἔλεος αὐτοῦ, ἐν ὕμνοις Δαυεὶδ διὰ χειρὸς αὐτῶν. ἦσαν οὖν οἱ Κορηνοὶ οἱ ψαλτῳδοὶ σὺν τοῖς Λευῗταις. Ἔνθα οὖν ἔχει τὴν ἐπιγραφὴν τῶν υἱῶν Κορέ, δηλοῖ ὁ ψαλμὸς ἢ περὶ τῶν καθαρῶν τὴν καρδίαν εἰρῆσθαι τὸν ψαλμόν, ἢ περὶ τῶν ἀβοηθήτων, ἢ περὶ τῶν ἀντιλογικῶν. τὸ μὲν γὰρ ὄνομα τοῦ Κορὲ ἑρμηνεύεται φαλακρός, ὁ δὲ φαλακρὸς κατὰ τὸν νόμον καθαρός ἐστιν. κατὰ γέγραπται ἐν τῷ Λευϊτικῷ Ὡς ἂν δέ τινι μαδήσῃ ἡ κεφαλὴ αὐτοῦ, φαλακρός ἐστιν, καθαρός ἐστιν. πάλιν ἐν Προφήταις εὑρίσκομεν τὸν θεὸν ἔν τισι τόποις ὀργιζόμενον πρὸς τὸν Ἰσραὴλ καὶ λέγοντα Καὶ ἔσται ἐπὶ πᾶσαν κεφαλὴν φαλάκρωμα. ὡσανεὶ παντὶ ἄρχοντι τοῦ λαοῦ αἰσχύνη καὶ ὄνειδος, ὅταν ἀφέλωμαι ἀπ᾽αὐτῶν τὴν βοήθειαν. σαφὲς δὲ καὶ αὐτὸς Κορὲ ἀντιλογίας γέγονεν. ἔνθα οὐχὶ περὶ τῶν υἱῶν Κορὲ τῶν ψαλμῶν, ὡς ἔφην, ἢ περὶ τῶν καθαρῶν τὴν καρδίαν λέγει ὁ ψαλμός, † ἢ περὶ τῶν ἐκτὸς ὄντων τῆς σκέπης τοῦ θεοῦ ἢ περὶ τῶν ἀντιλεγόντων τῷ τοῦ θεοῦ εὐαγγελίῳ, περὶ ὧν ὁ ἀπόστολος λέγει Οὐαὶ αὐτοῖς, ὅτι τῇ ἀντιλογίᾳ τοῦ Κορὲ ἀπώλοντο, καὶ ἐν ἑτέρῳ Ἀντέλεγον τοῖς ὑπὸ τοῦ Παύλου λεγόμενοις, καὶ ὁ παροιμιαστὴς ἔφη Ἀντιλογίας ἐγείρει πᾶς κακός. καὶ περὶ μὲν τοῦ ἐπιγράμματος τῶν υἱῶν Κορὲ οὕτως δηλόν σοι παρεστήσαμεν. 28  G. Mercati, ‘Il commentario d’Esichio Gerosolimitano sui Salmi’, in Id., Note di letteratura biblica e cristiana antica (Studi e testi, 5), Rome, 1901, p. 145-179 (edited text at p. 155-169). As Mercati says at p. 154, ‘il proemio ci dà la chiave del commentario’. I have reproduced here Mercati’s text (p. 160, l. 9-161, l. 17). I am currently preparing a new edition based on more manuscript witnesses and with an English translation, to appear in A Book of Psalms from Eleventh-Century Byzantium: the Complex of Texts and Images in Psalter Vat. gr. 752. Proceedings of an Ars edendi Workshop, Rome, 11-13 June 2012 – ed. B. Crostini, G. Peers (Studi e testi), Vatican City, forthcoming 2015. 

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And whenever the superscription is ‘those of Kore’, this superscription also can designate different things. For there were psalm-singers among the sons of Kore, as we find in Chronicles. For it is written there: ‘And the Levites rose up from the children of Kaath and from the sons of Kore to praise the Lord God of Israel with a loud voice on high.’ (II Chron. 20, 19) Thus they were the psalm-singers praising ‘the Lord in the words of David ’, according to what it says in Chronicles, that: The Levites on the organs [were performing] the odes to the Lord, that King David had composed in order to bear witness before the Lord, because his mercy [is] forever, in the hymns of David through their hands (cfr. II Chron. 29, 26-30). Thus the sons of Kore (Korenoi) were psalm-singers together with the Levites. When the psalm has the inscription, ‘of the sons of Kore’, it designates: either [1] that the psalm is said concerning the pure in heart; 29 or [2] concerning the helpless; 30 or [3] concerning people who like to quarrel. 31 For the name ‘Kore’ means ‘bald head’, but one who is bald according to the law, is pure, as it is written in Leviticus: ‘And if any one’s head should lose the hair, and he become bald: he is pure’ (Leu. 13, 40). 32 And again in the Prophets we find in some passages that God is angry with Israel and he says: ‘And there shall be baldness upon every head, just as there shall be shame and reproach upon every leader of the people, whenever I will remove from them my help’ (cfr. Am. 8, 10; Is. 15, 2; Ez. 7, 18). And it is clear that Kore himself was involved in disputations. Thus, where the psalm does not speak about the sons of Kore, who were psalm-singers, as I said, it is speaking about the pure in heart or about those who are outside the protection of God, or about those who oppose the Gospel of God, about whom the apostle says, ‘Woe to them, who perished by the rebellion of Kore’ (cfr. Iudae 1, 11), and in another passage, ‘They disputed against the words of Paul ’ (cfr. Act. 13, 45), and the author of Proverbs said: ‘Disputation

  Mercati’s note c) points to Hesychius’s exegesis in Ps. 83 and 86.    Mercati’s note c) points to Hesychius’s exegesis in Ps. 43. 31  Mercati’s note b) points to Hesychius’s exegesis in Ps. 84 and 87. 32 Chapter 13 of Leviticus is of key importance for the issue of purity, dealing with the topic of leprosy and the definition of priesthood. Hesychius’s commentary on this passage, extant in Latin, does not mention the sons of Kore; see Hesych. H., Comm. in Lev. 13, 40-43 (PG, 93, col. 945-946). 29 30

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engenders every evil ’ (Prou. 17, 11). And I have explained to you thus what the superscription ‘of the sons of Kore’ means. 33

Even from this limited and, to us, unusual example, the richness of Hesychius’s outlook, and his mental habit of stretching far and wide to gather material for his interpretations, is evident. Rooted in the interrelationship of scriptural texts, its resonances branch out towards the contemporary situation. The sons of Kore as privileged performers of the Psalms impresses on these texts the mark of authority, dealing with issues of purity as reflected in the Levitical law but also representing the strife that disputations impart onto the mechanisms of the ecclesia as seen in the biblical narrative and reflected in Hesychius’s own times. In his edition Mercati provides one example for each of Hesychius’s possible meanings of ‘sons of Kore’, based on the gloss to the title applied in each case by Hesychius himself. So, the ‘purity’ concept appears in the title to Ps. 83, while the ‘abandonment’ is found for Ps. 43 and the ‘disputational’ issues in Ps. 84 and 87. These different leads suggested by the interpretation of ‘the sons of Kore’ go at least some way towards explaining the different and at times ostensibly diverging functions that the representations of the sons of Kore take in the illustrations to Vat. gr. 752. These characters, unusually taking centre stage in this manuscript’s programme of illuminations, have puzzled commentators, who naturally sought one meaning for their rather extensive presence. Here Hesychius shows us that a range of meanings can be applied to them, going from the quasi-saintly to the more expected disputational aspect related to the objectionable behaviour of Kore. I would like to dwell on the concept of purity and its application to Ps. 83 in the Vatican illuminated manuscript, in view of the importance of the concept of clerical purity in the eleventh-century liturgical reform of the Church. I am inclined to attribute the use of Hesychius to the demonstration of the ancient roots of this shared concern that came to the fore again

33 I would like to thank Joseph Munitiz SJ for help in revising the translation.

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forcefully in the Middle Ages. Through the Latin translation of Hesychius’s commentary on Leviticus and its manuscript diffusion in Carolingian and Ottonian monasteries, 34 one could argue that a shared vocabulary of biblical references was being employed to attest that the Byzantine church also subscribed to the same requirements of purity. Through this appeal to a familiar author and to the familiar concepts in his writings, a dialogue across cultures was sought that had a common basis and, because of this, a better chance of success. It is particularly interesting that in Vat. gr. 752 we find Ps. 83 assigned for use ‘in case of schism between the churches’. This designation is due to a particular adaptation of the Letter of Athanasius to Marcellinus in the shortened and modified version copied in the codex Vaticanus. 35 When we turn to the iconography employed by the manuscript at this juncture, we find that the words of Hesychius about the Levitical purity of the sons of Kore is matched by an image of the purity of the ecclesiastical rites of consecration. De Wald describes the image in the following words (see Figure 2 = fol. 265r): David stands at left in an attitude of adoration before a deacon or priest who holds a censer and the pyxis with the Holy Wafer. At the right is an altar set within a balustrade beneath a domed ciborium at which a bishop is celebrating the mass. A book and a chalice are placed on the altar. 36

If the fourth and fifth centuries were characterized by problems in Christological definitions, the tenth and eleventh saw unrest in a number of other areas, principally concerning the sacrament of the Eucharist, with some repercussions on the proper 34   The pattern of diffusion can be traced through the extant Latin manuscripts. See also the article by R. Savigni, ‘Purità rituale e ridefinizione del sacro nella cultura carolingia: l’interpretazione del Levitico e dell’Epistola agli Ebrei’, Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi, 13.1 (1996), p. 229-255. 35  Ath., Ep. Marcell. (CPG, no. 2097; PG, 27, col. 12-45); Vat. gr. 752, fol. 12r-17r. Further remarks on the manuscript tradition were made by M.-J. Rondeau, ‘ L’Épître à Marcellinus sur les Psaumes’, Vigiliae Christianae, 22 (1968), p. 176-197, and further bibliography can be found in Athanasius Handbuch – ed. P. Gemeinhardt, Tübingen, 2011, p. 271-274. 36  E. de Wald, The Illustrations in the MSS. of the Septuagint, II: Vaticanus graecus 752, Princeton, 1942, p. 29.

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practice of repentance and absolution, as well as a continued interest in the definition of the Trinity. East and West came to clash on both points ostensibly in matters of practice, as the socalled schism of 1054 is usually characterized, consisting of the choice between the use of leavened and unleavened bread in the liturgy, 37 and which words to utter for recitation in the Creed concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit. 38 It is not here the place to evaluate the political or theological basis of the events at Constantinople, nor their representative weight in the painful and eventually quite radical process of separation of the Greek and Latin churches. But it is important to remember that these topics belonged to a wider and ongoing history of dogmatic definitions and discussions, which swept through the entire Christian medieval world much as the Christological debates once did in the Late Antique world, and thus cannot be reduced purely to matters of discipline or ‘consuetudo’ between traditions, but affected more deeply the self-definition of the entire Church. It is significant therefore that Hesychius’s concept of ritual purity is applied to the celebration of the eucharist in this Byzantine manuscript, bringing his understanding of its Old Testament roots to bear on current ecclesiastical debates.

4. Conclusion It is likely that the illuminated Psalter now known as Vat. gr. 752 had the contemporary ecclesial climate in mind when it was planned and copied around the 1050s. In its combination of imagery and text it engages with the question of the Eucharist by depicting the liturgical action of the sacrament and the typological Old Testament meals. It also appears to pursue some political agenda in emphasizing the repentance of David (usually a symbol for the Byzantine emperor) and in choosing to represent several times the rather unusual figure of Saint Sylvester, 37  Still useful is the little volume by M. H. Smith III, And Taking Bread... Cerularius and the Azyme Controversy of 1054 (Théologie historique, 47), Paris, 1978. 38  P. Gemeinhardt, ‘Der Filioque-Streit zwischen Ost und West’, in Vom Schisma zu den Kreuzzügen, 1054-1204 – ed. P. Bruns, G. Gresser, Munich, 2005, p. 105-132, esp. p. 122-28.

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the legendary Constantinian pope. Further, it places special emphasis on eschatology, as seen in the representation of the Archangel Michael, the throne of the hetoimasia, and several scenes of judgment, perhaps in this respect reflecting contemporary concerns against a version of the Bogomil heresy then attested at Constantinople, that denied the resurrection of the dead. 39 What could Hesychius contribute in the ostensibly orthodox and pacifying purpose that this psalter – at least according to our interpretation – tried to put forth in the midst of controversy? The centrality of the Bible and its interpretations emerge as the focus of the eleventh-century reform movement, whether seen as instigated by papal policy from on high or moving more subtly around the monastic communities of central Italy, such as Vallombrosa in the North or Monte Cassino in the South. The still partly unknown process of copying the so-called Atlantic bibles, majestically surviving the centuries in their giant formats and striking decoration, was often accompanied by marginal commentaries. 40 The ‘glossa ordinaria’ that in the next century developed as a more standard medieval form of catena commentary has roots in that period, and we may by now not find it too surprising that it should include excerpts from Hesychius of Jerusalem, as signaled in the article of Dictionnaire de Spiritualité that is still awaiting more detailed investigation on this point. 41 The unusual gathering together of much Hesychian material on the Psalms in Vat. gr. 752 could indeed be based on a notion that this author’s voice could be heard across traditions, thanks to its scriptural, but also down-to-earth, ascetic bent.

39   Witness to the heretical movements coming into contact with Byzantine monastics of the captial is the text edited by F. Osti, ‘ L’Epistola invettiva di Eutimio della Peribleptos (1050 ca.) nei codici Vaticani greci 840 e 604. Una “versione breve” e un rimaneggiamento’, in Vie per Bisanzio – ed. A. Rigo, A. Babuin, M. Trizio, 2 vols., Venice, 2013, I, p. 251-274, at p. 263. 40  See especially G. Lobrichon, ‘Riforma ecclesiastica e testo della Bibbia’, in Le Bibbie Atlantiche. Il Libro delle Scritture tra monumentalità e rappresentazione – ed. M. Maniaci, G. Orofino, Montecassino, 2000, p. 15-23. 41  J. Kirchmeyer, ‘Hésychius de Jerusalem’, in Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, 7, Paris, 1968, col. 399-408, at col. 407. On the complex questions concerning the Glossa ordinaria and its transmission, see L. J. Smith, The Glossa Ordinaria. The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary, Leiden, 2009.

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Covering the topics of repentance, reparation in case of strife, and purity, Hesychius offered a good commentary for the transposed eleventh-century setting, where his straightforward yet multiple exegesis could act as a neutral voice in describing the predicament of the Church. While the Palestinian influence over liturgical ritual and ascetic practices in Byzantine monasteries has been well described, the texts from Palestine that were used in the Stoudite tradition have received less attention. These included, for example, the writings of Dorotheus of Gaza and the exegesis of Hesychius of Jerusalem. The latter seemed particularly suited to keeping open a dialogue between traditions in times of strife: as in his own time, Hesychius eluded at once an ecclesiastical career and a condemnation for heresy. Steering a middle course and keeping close to the word of Scripture earned him a lasting usefulness for later generations. When strife came again to the fore – as it usually does – keeping in mind his manifold interpretation of Scripture meant taking the Word of God seriously and openly at the same time. Choosing Hesychius in East-West dialogue meant finding an author who was familiar to both contexts and kept a variety of options open. And this continuous dialogue in the manifold and ever deeper ways of understanding is what looking at the patristic tradition should do for us also.

Bibliography 1. Primary sources Ath., Ep. Marcell. = Athanasius Alexandrinus, Epistula ad Marcellinum (PG, 27), Paris, 1857, col. 12-45. Didym., Fr. Ps. = Didymus Alexandrinus, Fragmenta in psalmos – ed. A. Mai (PG, 39), Paris, 1863, col. 1155-1616. Hesych. H., Comm. in Iob = Homélies sur Job: version arménienne – ed. Ch, Renoux, tr. Ch. Mercier, Ch. Renoux (PO, 42.1-2), Turnhout, 1983. Hesych. H., Comm. in Lev. = Hesychius Hierosolymitanus, Commentarius in Leviticum (PG, 93), Paris, 1865, col. 787-1180. Hesych. H., Homilia in Hypapantem = G. Garitte, ‘L’homélie géorgienne d’Hésychius de Jérusalem sur l’Hypapante’, Le Muséon, 4 (1971), p. 353-372.

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Hesych. H., Homilia de resurrectione mortuorum = M. van Esbroeck, ‘ L’homélie géorgienne d’Hésychius de Jérusalem sur la résurrection des morts’, Le Muséon, 7 (1974), p. 1-21. Hesych. H., Les Homélies festales = Les Homélies festales d’Hésychius de Jérusalem, I: Homélies I-XV – ed. M. Aubineau (Subsidia hagiographica, 9), Brussels, 1978. Hesych. H., Ps. tit. = Hesychius Hierosolymitanus, De titulis psalmorum (PG, 27), Paris, 1857, col. 649-1344. La Chaîne sur la Genèse: édition intégrale – ed. F. Petit (Traditio exegetica graeca, 1-4), 4 vols., Leuven, 1991-1996.

2. Secondary literature Athanasius Handbuch – ed. P. Gemeinhardt, Tübingen, 2011. A. Bayer, Spaltung der Christenheit. Das sogennante Morgenländische Schisma von 1054 (Beihefte zum Archiv für Kulturgeschichte, 53), Böhlau, 2002. B. Bitton-Ahskelony, ‘Penitence in Late Antique Monastic Literature’, in Transformations of the Inner Self in Ancient Religions – ed. J. Assmann, G. G. Stroumsa (Numen Book Series, 83), Leiden, 1999, p. 179-420. B. Bitton-Ahskelony, A. Kofsky, The Monastic School of Gaza (Vigiliae Christianae, Supplements, 78), Leiden, 2006. Clavis patrum graecorum, III: A Cyrillo Alexandrino ad Iohannem Damascenum – ed. M. Geerard, Turnhout, 20032. B. Crostini, ‘Augustine in the Byzantine World to 1453’, in The Oxford Guide to the Reception of Augustine – ed. K. Pollman, 3 vols., Oxford, 2013, II, p. 726-734. N. de Lange, ‘Jewish Greek Bible Versions’, in The New Cambridge History of the Bible, II: From 600 to 1450 – ed. R. Marsden, A. Matter, Cambridge, 2012, p. 56-68. R. Devreesse, Les anciens commentateurs grecs des Psaumes (Studi e testi, 264), Vatican City, 1970. E. de Wald, The Illustrations in the MSS. of the Septuagint, II: Vaticanus graecus 752, Princeton, 1942. G. Dorival, Les Chaînes exégétiques grecques sur les Psaumes. Contribution à l’étude d’une forme littéraire (Spicilegium Sacrum Lovaniense, 43-46), 4 vols., Leuven, 1986-1991. M. Eriksson, ‘The Scholia by Hesychius of Jerusalem on the Minor Prophets’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Uppsala University, 2012.

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P. Gemeinhardt, ‘Der Filioque-Streit zwischen Ost und West’, in Vom Schisma zu den Kreuzzügen, 1054-1204 – ed. P. Bruns, G. Gresser, München, 2005, p. 105-132. C. Horn, ‘Preaching and Practising Repentance: Hesychius of Jerusalem’s Influence on Ascetic Movements in Byzantine Palestine’, in Bibel, Byzanz und Christlicher Orient. Festschrift für Stephen Gero zum 65. Geburtstag – ed. D. Bumazhnov, E. Grypeou, T. B. Sailors, A. Toepel (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 87), Leuven, 2011, p. 535-552. K. Jüssen, Die dogmatische Anschauungen des Hesychius von Jerusalem (Beiträge zur Theologie, 17, 20), 2 vols., Münster i. W., 1931, 1934. J. Kirchmeyer, ‘Hésychius de Jerusalem’, in Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, 7, Paris, 1968, col. 399-408 R. A. Layton, Didymus the Blind and His Circle in Late Antique Alexandria. Virtue and Narrative in Biblical Scholarship, Urbana, IL, 2004. G. Lobrichon, ‘Riforma ecclesiastica e testo della Bibbia’, in Le Bibbie Atlantiche. Il Libro delle Scritture tra monumentalità e rappresentazione – ed. M. Maniaci, G. Orofino, Montecassino, 2000, p. 15-23. G. Mercati, ‘Il commentario d’Esichio Gerosolimitano sui Salmi’, in Id., Note di letteratura biblica e cristiana antica (Studi e testi, 5), Rome, 1901, p. 145-179. A. Nichols, Rome and the Eastern Churches. A Study in Schism, Edinburgh, 1992. F. Osti, ‘ L’Epistola invettiva di Eutimio della Peribleptos (1050 ca.) nei codici Vaticani greci 840 e 604. Una “versione breve” e un rimaneggiamento’, in Vie per Bisanzio – ed. A. Rigo, A. Babuin, M. Trizio, 2 vols., Venice, 2013, I, p. 251-274. Papers Presented at the Sixteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford 2011, III: Early Monasticism and Classical Paideia – ed. M. Vinzent, S. Rubenson (Studia Patristica, 55), Leuven, 2013. L. Perrone, La Chiesa di Palestina e le controversie cristologiche. Dal concilio di Efeso (431) al secondo concilio di Costantinopoli (553) (Testi e ricerche di scienze religiose), Brescia, 1980. F. Petit, Autour de Théodoret de Cyr.  La ‘Collectio Coisliniana’ sur les derniers livres de l’Octateuque et sur les Règnes. Le ‘Commentaire sur les Règnes’ de Procope de Gaza (Traditio exegetica graeca, 13) – ed. F. Petit, Leuven, 2003. M.-J. Rondeau, Les Commentaires patristiques du Psautier (iiie-ve siècles) (Orientalia christiana analecta, 219), Rome, 1982.

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M.-J. Rondeau, ‘L’Épître à Marcellinus sur les Psaumes’, Vigiliae Christianae, 22 (1968), p. 176-197. R. Savigni, ‘Purità rituale e ridefinizione del sacro nella cultura carolingia: l’interpretazione del Levitico e dell’Epistola agli Ebrei’, Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi, 13.1 (1996), p. 229-255. A. Schenker, Hexaplarische Psalmenbruchstücke. Die hexaplarischen Psalmenfragmente der Handschriften Vaticanus graecus 752 und Canonicianus graecus 62 (Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, 8), Freiburg, 1975. M. Simonetti, Lettera e/o allegoria: un contributo alla storia dell’esegesi patristica (Studia Ephemeridis ‘Augustinianum’, 23), Rome, 1985. L. J. Smith, The Glossa Ordinaria. The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary, Leiden, 2009. M. H. Smith III, And Taking Bread... Cerularius and the Azyme Controversy of 1054 (Théologie historique, 47), Paris, 1978. B. Stefaniw, ‘Exegetical Curricula in Origen, Didymus, and Evagrius: Pedagogical Agenda and the Case for Neoplatonist Influence’, Studia Patristica, 44 (2010), p. 281-294. S. Tampellini, ‘L’esegesi del Levitico di Esichio di Gerusalemme: osservazioni introduttive e sondaggi preliminari’, Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi, 3.1 (1996), p. 201-209. A. Wenger, ‘Hésychius de Jérusalem. Notes sur les discours inédits et sur le texte grec du commentaire in Leviticum’, Revue des Études Augustiniennes, 2 (1956), p. 457-470.

3. Web sites ‹http://mopai.lu.se/education.html›

Abstract The Psalter is in itself a special ‘place’ – a meeting-point of histories and cultures, and a timeless voice expressing both the universal and the particular truths that pertain to each and every human being who experiences life in its different facets. The intimate, prayerful voice of this Jewish-Christian text makes it suitable for different adaptations, but also lays it open to different interpretations. Hesychius of Jerusalem, writing in fifth-century Palestine, adopts on the one hand a scholarly and philological approach didactically expounding the different meanings of words and names, and on the other hand emphasizes aspects of forgiveness and repentance in reflecting as a pastor on the impact of the Psalms on the soul’s journey. In Byzantine catenae,

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he was a popular author, but the use of his glosses in the West and the Latin translation of his Commentary on Leviticus argue for his suitability in East-West dialogue. I illustrate such possible function during the eleventh-century crisis between the Latin and Greek churches from a specific illuminated Byzantine Psalter, Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 752, whose tailoring of texts and images may be thought to reflect aspects of that controversy.

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This image is not available in the online version of this publication. The manuscript may be viewed online via the link below. Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 752, fol. 187r: http://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.gr.752.pt.1

Fig. 1. Vat. gr. 752, fol. 187r

This image is not available in the online version of this publication. The manuscript may be viewed online via the link below. Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. gr. 752, fol. 265r: http://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.gr.752.pt.2

Fig. 2. Vat. gr. 752, fol. 265r

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CHRISTOPH MARKSCHIES Berlin

PATRISTICS AND THEOLOGY: FROM CONCORDANCE AND CONFLICT TO COMPETITION AND COLLABORATION?

There are occasions when, after having accepted a friendly invitation to contribute to a certain subject, you do not realize when formulating the title, precisely what a challenge you have taken on, which only becomes clear when actually writing the piece. The challenge this time already begins with the title, as the title of my paper contains two terms that nowadays are not self-explanatory, either standing on their own, or when examined in their specific collocation. I will begin with a relatively detailed explanation of the title, and this explanation will also contain the guiding thesis of my paper; I shall develop this argument in two parts that will deal with the following principal questions, namely: ‘What can Theology contribute to Patristics today?’ and ‘What can Patristics contribute to Theology today?’ The fact that I have to limit myself in a very strict sense and that what I have to say is influenced by a very specific confessional and national background, which I can escape only to a certain extent, requires no further explanation. Luckily, very different confessional and national views are offered in the present volume as well. I begin the first part of my paper by explaining the main title: ‘Patristics and Theology’, before examining the main questions in the following two parts. The English word ‘Patristics’ or ‘Patristik’ in German – as documented in nearly all relevant lexica or textbooks – derives from the Latin adjective patristicus. The use of this adjective enabled the differentiation of the 10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107526

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theologia patristica from the theologia biblica in early modern times. 1 And, as often happened in modern times, the adjective took on an independent existence as a noun and in the process of gaining independence lost, in purely linguistic terms, its original accompanying noun theologia. This autonomous noun ‘Patristics’ first of all continued to stand pars pro toto for that to which theologia patristica had once referred, namely, the study of early Christian writings under the guiding paradigm of the two (or three) confessional theologies in continental Europe or under the guiding paradigm of the Anglican theology in modern times. As such, to name only one single Protestant example from Germany, the theologian, physicist and mathematician Albrecht Veiel (1672-1704) from Ulm published – under the title the Theses ex universa theologia patristica selectae – forty-four quite extensively documented miscellanea in 1695 which dealt with early Christian literature under the deanship of Lutheran baroque-era theologian Johannes Fecht (1636-1716). The standard by which early Christian literature (for example, the First Epistle of Clement in the seventeenth thesis) is judged in these Theses reflects Lutheran Reformation theology, narrowed down to the doctrine of justification by grace alone. And Johann Franz Buddeus (1667-1729), Lutheran professor in Jena from 1705 on, in his historical and systematic introduction to theology published posthumously in 1730, pointedly defined ‘Patristics’ as a secondary subject within systematic theology: ‘Per theologiam patristicam intelligimus complexum dogmatum sacrorum ex mente sententiaque patrum, inde ut cognoscatur, quo pacto veritas religionis christianae conservata semper sit in ecclesia, ac propagata’; (it is through Patristic theology that we understand the connection between the teachings from the spirit and the opinions of the Fathers so that we can recognise why the truth of the Christian religion must always be safeguarded and disseminated in the Church). 2 To put it in other words: until the end of the eighteenth century the horizons within which 1  H. R. Drobner, Lehrbuch der Patrologie, Frankfurt am Main, 20113, p. 61f.; J. Quasten, Patrology, 4 vols., Utrecht, Brüssel, 1950, I, p. 1-20. 2  J. F. Budde, Gesammelte Werke, VIII.1: Isagoge Historica-Theologica ad Theologiam Universam Singulasque eius Partes. Novis Supplementis Auctior (Historia Scientiarum), Hildesheim, 1999 (= Lipsia, 1730), p. 478.

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early Christian texts were perceived under the term theologia patristica were – at least in Germany– the debates of the confessional age, that is, on the one hand the conflicts between Roman Catholic and Lutheran and Reformed theologians and, on the other hand, of course, also the conflicts within a single confessional paradigm, in our example within the Lutheran theology of the Baroque period. The same may be observed in the Anglican engagement with the Church Fathers and their writings since the early modern period, but I will not elaborate on this here. Likewise, I will leave out the discussion of the origins of the use of this terminology in the ancient Christian discourse by the Church Fathers and the theological argumentation with the Fathers in antiquity, mainly since the fourth century; this topic has been examined in detail in other places, also by myself. 3 The title ‘Patristics and Theology’ of the present paper, however, only makes sense if we keep in mind that this close unity between the study of early Christian literature and a certain confessional horizon fell apart in most parts of Protestant continental Europe in the late eighteenth, and above all in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even if Johann Matthias Schröckh (1733-1808), professor at Wittenberg and author of a forty-three volume ‘Christian Church History’, presented early Christianity with the aim of gaining orientation for the present time, and considered both the perfection and the simplicity of the early Christians as representative of early Christianity, 4 nevertheless, neither the ancient nor the early modern distinctions between true and false theology, between orthodoxy and heresy, played 3  T. Graumann, Die Kirche der Väter. Vätertheologie und Väterbeweis in den Kirchen des Ostens bis zum Konzil von Ephesus (431) (Beiträge zur Historischen Theologie, 118), Tübingen, 2002; Ch. Markschies, ‘Normierungen durch “Väter” bei Neuplatonikern und Christen. Ein Vergleich’, in Zwischen Altertumswissenschaft und Theologie. Zur Relevanz der Patristik in Geschichte und Gegenwart – ed. Ch. Markschies, J. van Oort (Studien der Patristischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft, 7), Löwen, 2002, p. 1-30. 4  J. M.  Schröckh, Christliche Kirchengeschichte, 43 vols., Leipzig, 1772, I, p. 63f.; cfr. S. P. Bergjan, ‘Die Beschäftigung mit der Alten Kirche an deutschen Universitäten in den Umbrüchen der Aufklärung’, in Zwischen Altertumswissenschaft und Theologie, p. 31-61, in partic. p. 49.

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an influential role in the study of early Christianity, as my colleague from Zurich, Silke-Petra Bergjan, has already shown with regard to Schröckh and other theologians some time ago. 5 ‘Patristics’ and ‘Theology’ developed into two separate disciplines in Protestant continental European Universities in the eighteenth century already because of the differentiation that was taking place in the academic disciplines in the universities at that time. Thus, out of theologia patristica emerged ‘Patristics’ and ‘systematic theology’. However, this development also set free the study of early Christianity to seek out new institutional affiliations and therefore methodical contexts and fundamental frameworks other than the systematic theology of Europe’s confessional churches. Representative of this increase in autonomy, which is – for example, in the German speaking regions – often conventionally and confusingly referred to under the central category ‘Patristics’ is the article in the classic Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche from the year 1904, edited by Gustav Krüger (1862-1940), a student of Adolf Harnack. 6 Krüger basically understood Patristics as a literary history of early Christian writings and strived verbatim ‘to eradicate the leftovers of dogmatic prejudices’ 7. Of course, on the other hand there have also been since then repeated attempts to revive the classical theologia patristica or to transform it, in order to meet the needs of the respective contemporary climate. I am thinking here, for example, of the so-called Neo-Lutheranism (“Neuluthertum”) on German Protestant territory. In 1867, Adolf von Harnack’s sometimes friend and later opponent Theodor von Zahn (18381933) portrayed Marcellus of Ancyra as a model for a Bibleoriented Lutheran theologian from Antiquity 8. The representa  Bergjan, Die Beschäftigung mit der Alten Kirche an deutschen Universitäten in den Umbrüchen der Aufklärung, p. 42-49. 6  G. Krüger, ‘Patristik’, Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, 24 vols., Hamburg, 1904, XV, p. 1-13. 7  G. Krüger, ‘Patristik’, p. 12; H. Ch.  Brennecke, ‘ “Patristik” oder “altchristliche Literaturwissenschaft”? Eine historische Leitwissenschaft der protestantischen Theologie in Deutschland am Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts’, ZAC, 15 (2011), p. 8f. 8  H. Ch. Brennecke, ‘Patristik in der konfessionellen Theologie des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Zwischen Altertumswissenschaft und Theologie, p. 62-90, in partic. p. 83. 5

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tives of the French Catholic ‘Nouvelle Théologie’ oriented themselves after 1945 less towards the Dicta probantia of the preceding neo-scholastic textbooks, but more towards the theological methods of the Church Fathers. 9 Accordingly, not only the orthodox Church Fathers of the Great Church appeared in the ‘Sources Chrétiennes’ edition series, but also Anhomoean Easter homilies. 10 However, in addition to such attempts to continue or revive the classic theologia patristica, as we saw, attempts were also made to study early Christianity without any reference whatsoever to confessional contexts. And ‘Patristics’ is nowadays the only umbrella term used to cover different approaches to the rich field of the study of ancient Christianity, which is widely accepted, although nearly everyone has serious problems with that term – a quite paradoxical situation! Out of the self-evident unity of a theologia patristica, the dyad Patristics and/or Theology began to develop in the eighteenth century – and to put it pointedly – at least at some institutions, and above all universities in Protestant lands, but also French and Italian state universities, under respectively different conditions that were brought about by the separation of state and church. One only needs to go through the lists of participants and the published lectures from any of the Oxford Conferences on Patristic Studies since these took place first in 1951 to see that some of them understood the term ‘Patristics’ fully in the classic meaning of a theologia patristica. Others tended to see it as a dyad – a view which may sometimes implicate antagonism – and as we know, many of the circumstances in which a discipline gains autonomy from its original discipline are often rife with conflict during the initial stages of this process; I am thinking here of the certainly tense relationship between Religious Studies and Theology. Accordingly, in the first Oxford conference in 1951, the Swiss reformed theologian Lukas Vischer (1926-2008), a student of Oscar Cullmann, held a joint lecture 9  R. Winling, ‘Nouvelle Théologie’, Theologische Realenzyklopädie, 36 vols., Berlin, New York, 1994, XXIV, p. 668-675. 10  Deux homélies anoméennes pour l’octave de Pâques, – ed. and tr. J. Liébaert (SC, 146), Paris, 1969; cfr. É. Fouilloux, La collection ‘Sources Chrétiennes’, éditer les Pères de l’Église au xxe siècle, Paris, 1995.

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with David Lerch about ‘the history of interpretation as a necessary task of theological study’ and examined, if only briefly, the benefits of the history of interpretation for systematic theology. 11 Early Christian texts are not dealt with at all in that essay. The relationship between ‘Patristics’ and ‘Theology’ was presented completely differently, for example, in a lecture also held in 1951 by the editor of the conference volume, Lietzmann’s student, Kurt Aland (1915-1994), who worked in Halle and Berlin at the time. Aland dealt in his lecture with ‘the religious attitude of Emperor Constantine’. At the end of his lecture, he asks – and that only in mild terms – whether the religious changes that took place during the times of Emperor Constantine, Chlodwig and the Elector of Saxony, Frederick the Wise during the Reformation were a sign of a ‘reasonable occurrence, which was driven by the inner strengths of the faith, the continuation of which we are referring to here.’ 12 Seen from this viewpoint, ‘Patristics’ is one of the many terms in modern European times which was deprived of its original theological context and became secularised (this holds true, no matter what one thinks about the thesis put forward by the not unproblematic jurist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), who stated that all terms used in modern theories of the state are secularised religious terms). 13 At the same time, however, the category ‘Patristics’ also makes clear what contemporary research on secularisation repeatedly makes clear as well, namely, that there has not been an uninterrupted dechristianisation of Europe, but rather always a renewed religiosity and therefore always a renewed theologia patristica. Munich’s Protestant theologian Trutz Rendtorff has described these circumstances as ‘multivalent’ (‘vielspältig’), 14 meaning that in our times what we have is not simply the random parallel existence of ideological pluralism, but a situation, in which 11   L. Vischer, D. Lerch, ‘Die Auslegungsgeschichte als notwendige theologische Aufgabe’, Studia Patristica = TU 63, Berlin, 1957, p. 417. 12  K. Aland, ‘Die religiöse Haltung Kaiser Konstantins’, Studia Patristica = TU 63, Berlin, 1957, p. 599. 13  C. Schmitt, Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität, Berlin, 20048, p. 43. 14  T. Rendtorff, Vielspältiges. Protestantische Beiträge zur ethischen Kultur, Stuttgart, 1991.

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a variety of conflicts exist. Ultimately, a secular definition of ‘Patristics’ stands for very different forms of the study of early Christianity alongside a very traditional definition of ‘Patristics’ in the sense of a renewed theologia patristica. My colleague from Göttingen, Ekkehard Mühlenberg, describes this situation – in what at first glance appears to be a confusing use of language – in one of the aforementioned Lexicon entries as follows: As used in the language of today, Patristics refers to all academic study of church history of the first six centuries. Theologians dedicated to the research of early Christianity are called Patristics scholars. In Roman Catholic faculties, Patrology is listed as a discipline on its own right that deals with the lives, writings and teachings of the Church Fathers. [...] “Church Fathers” is a conventional term for early Christian writers who are seen as witnesses of the truth of faith and their teachings enjoy a position of authority within the Church. 15

The thesis that I would like to substantiate in its two parts in the following begins with a simple observation based on hermeneutics and the philosophy of science: even if the increasing movement within Patristics towards an autonomy from theology has repeatedly been justified by the sublime pathos of objectivity in European science 16 – a classic example of which is Gustav Krüger’s claim to purify Patristics by ‘eradicating remaining dogmatic prejudices’ 17 and thus render it suitable for scientific study – it nevertheless remains questionable whether an objectivity of this type, understood quasi as the clinical purity of a science free from prejudices, is even possible. The philosopher HansGeorg Gadamer (1900-2002), who last taught in Heidelberg, described a model of aseptic objectivity of this kind as an illusion. In his work, first published in 1960 and entitled Truth and Method,

15   E. Mühlenberg, ‘Patristik’, Theologische Realenzyklopädie, 36 vols., Berlin, New York, 1996, XXVI, p. 97-106, in partic. p. 97. 16 L. Daston, P. Galison, Objectivity, New York, 2007. 17  Krüger, ‘Patristik’, p. 12; H. Ch.  Brennecke, ‘  “Patristik” oder “altchristliche Literaturwissenschaft”?’, p. 8f.

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he instead defined ‘prejudices as a condition of understanding.’ 18 Prejudices are then conditional for real understanding if they are ‘judgements before scrutiny’ that are in principle revisable, that is, they can be revised in the process of the appropriation of texts or positions. Thus, Gadamer rehabilitates the concept of ‘prejudice’, which had had negative connotations since the eighteenth century, as something that is always influenced by a previous understanding, which guides and defines our understanding, but which can always be adapted and formed anew through our understanding. If one describes the theological background of those who study early Christianity as prejudices in this sense, then these do not categorically differ from other kinds of preconception that are constituted by national origin, social influence or any other factors. One can, with Gadamer, count all of these elements under ‘historical tradition’ that shapes us when we encounter something that is alien to us and we attempt to understand it. 19 When Gadamer tries to rehabilitate ‘authority and tradition’ as characteristics of prejudice, theology can even be seen as a particularly classic case of prejudice in the way that Gadamer means this – like the definition of classic as well, of course. 20 It is, of course, clear to me that this is not all that there is to say about theology in the context of other academic disciplines, but for the purposes of the present article, a description of theology within the horizons of the dyad ‘Patristics and Theology’ may suffice. For ‘Patristics’, ‘Theology’ provides an ensemble of possible ‘prejudices’ in Gadamer’s definition and, vice versa, ‘Patristics’ also offers ‘Theology’ an ensemble of possible prejudices in this sense. Theology is a prejudice quite close to the content of texts and positions that we analyse in Patristic studies. Understanding is the endless process of merging these distinct horizons so that both Theology and Patristics can be respectively transformed through their separation 21. A process of this kind is an opportunity and not a disadvantage to academic pursuit.   H. G. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, Tübingen, 19754, p. 261. 19  Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. p. 255. 20  Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. p. 263. 21  Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. p. 289. 18

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After this relatively detailed explanation of my title, we can now come to the two other parts of my paper, the title and contents of which are reflected in the main questions of our section: ‘What can Theology contribute to Patristics today?’ and ‘What can Patristics contribute to Theology today?’ I will begin with the question about the influences of theology on Patristics – and in doing so I would like to mention in passing that it is presumably not that easy to define cause and effect in precise terms here. Whether, for example, the greater attention to the history of interpretation of Scripture that Lukas Vischer and David Lerch demanded in 1951 can be explained either on the grounds of their respective doctoral studies in Patristics under Oscar Cullmann 22 or because of a systematic interest in building a bridge between ‘historical-critical exegesis and denominational interpretation’ (as formulated in the aforementioned Oxford lecture from 1951) would require a thorough investigation, unless what we have here is an inextricable hermeneutical circle. Taking all of this into consideration, I would like to attempt to provide several answers to the first question:

What can Theology contribute to Patristics today? First of all, I could come up with a simple answer to this question: Theology offers Patristics in many places an institutional umbrella in the form of theological educational facilities, faculties and research institutes. I am thinking here not only of the faculties of Theology that still exist – if in very different forms – in various European countries at state universities, but also of research institutes, such as the Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum or the bilingual Fontes Christiani series. The latter receives notable funds from the German Catholic Bishops’ Conference and leans towards the ‘Sources Chrétiennes’, not only in terms of language. It is hardly surprising that Catholic institutions 22  L. Vischer, Die Auslegungsgeschichte von I. Kor. 6,1-11 (Beiträge zur Geschichte der neutestamentlichen Exegese, 1), Tübingen, 1955; D. Lerch, Isaaks Opferung, christlich gedeutet. Eine auslegungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung. Die vorreformatorische Auslegung von Isaaks Opferung, Tübingen, 1950.

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are more predominant here of course; it is only the Catholic Church that offers an ‘Instruction on the Study of the Fathers of the Church in the Formation of Priests’, (this booklet from the year 1989 does not contain any references to critical text editions at all, but only to the cloaca maxima of the Patrologiae by Jean-Paul Migne), but the Protestant churches do not have anything comparable. However, such a listing would, of course, only be a very superficial description. One could assume (and mainly from a French or Italian perspective) that what we have here are the last institutional remains from the era of the theologia patristica. More recent developments towards the deconfessionalisation of theological faculties in Great Britain and Sweden could indeed be interpreted in this direction. It seems to me that we have been given the first hints towards a somewhat more thorough answer: on the one hand, the obvious awakening of research in the area of the history of interpretation of Scripture, at least in German-language Patristics between the fifties and seventies, is without doubt down to a fundamental reorientation of Protestant theology during those years. In the context of the so-called dialectical theology, one would once again reflect upon the category of the ‘Word of God’ (Karl Barth and his friends speak of the ‘theology of the Word of God’). Accordingly, the biblical text received a new appreciation also within the systematic theology. However, this also meant that the interpretation of this biblical text precisely and the history of its interpretation at the same time became more interesting. Nevertheless, if one considers the relevant book series, namely the ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der biblischen Exegese’ (Contributions to the History of Biblical Exegesis), of which twenty-eight volumes appeared in the years between 1955 and 1986 and which the Mohr-Siebeck publishing house in Tübingen has since ceased publishing, one needs to acknowledge that a complete realignment of the discipline, in order to become the ‘history of the interpretation of the Holy Scripture’, as was the intention of the Protestant theologian, Gerhard Ebeling (1912-2001), 23 did not succeed. Presumably, one must 23 G. Ebeling, Kirchengeschichte als Geschichte der Auslegung der Heiligen Schrift (Sammlung gemeinverständlicher Vorträge, 189), Tübingen, 1947 = Wort Gottes.

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concede that, although Ebeling did not intend to narrow down this program in terms of a pure history of biblical exegesis, it was fortunate for both Patristics and Theology that the program did not succeed. In the meantime, this program of interpretation history has also been taken up in some sense by the Italian journal ‘Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi’. Moreover, one can also trace back, to a certain extent, the more fundamental hermeneutical works of Basil Studer (1925-2008) and Charles Kannengiesser to distant influences of this Protestant awakening. 24 Still, both names also bear evidence to the strong impact of the awakening of the ‘Nouvelle Théologie’ on Patristics, because both the Benedictine, Studer, and the once Jesuit, Kannengießer, had been influenced by their formative years in Paris, and by De Lubac and Daniélou in particular. 25 Furthermore, one should mention this awakening and the corresponding debates at the Second Vatican Council. 26 It should have become clear by now that my review of the process of awakening in interpretation history during the last decades of the previous century, has not of course answered the question concerning its contributions today yet. It also seems to me that a Protestant theologian of German origin is not necessarily the best person to fulfil this task. German Protestant theology is at the present time in many places greatly influenced by a very significant renaissance of the theologians Friedrich Schleiermacher and Ernst Troeltsch. As is well known, neither of these theologians offered any particularly original academic contributions to Patristics, but rather – as Simon Gerber demonstrated in his edition of relevant lectures by Schleiermacher (as well as

Studien zu einer Hermeneutik der Konfessionen (Kirche und Konfessionen, 7), Göttingen, 19662, p. 9-27. 24  Ch. Kannengiesser, Handbook of Patristic Exegesis, Leiden, 2000; B. Studer, Dominus Salvator. Studien zur Christologie und Exegese der Kirchenväter (Studia Anselmiana, 107), Roma, 1991. 25  G. Rexin, ‘Studer, Basil’, in Biographisch-bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, 33 vols., Nordhausen, 2011, XXXII, p. 1379-1390. 26 Cfr. D. E. Gianotti, I Padri della Chiesa al Concilio Vaticano II. La teologia patristica nella “Lumen gentium”, Bologna, 2010; A. M. Triacca, ‘L’uso dei “loci” patristici nei documenti del Concilio Vaticano II: un caso emblematico e problematico’, in Lo studio dei Padri della Chiesa oggi – ed. E. dal Covolo (Biblioteca di Scienze Religiose, 96), Roma, 1991, p. 149-184.

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in his Habilitation thesis in Berlin) 27 – they mainly relied on secondary sources. Schleiermacher has at least contributed an intelligent treatise on the history of Trinitarian theology which, however, written in favour of the theology of Marcellus of Ancyra, establishes a clear distance to the Neo-Nicene theology laid down by the authoritative ‘Church Fathers’ of the fourth century. 28 Since there are hardly any direct influences on Patristics by contemporary Protestant theology, one needs to refer to awakenings in the Anglican, Catholic and Orthodox churches – I am thinking, for example, of the neo-Patristic concepts of a ‘teologia patristica’ in Romania or the concepts of a revived mysticism among Catholics 29 or of Sarah Coakley’s attempts to rethink contemporary Anglican theology with the use of the Cappadocian Fathers 30. At this point because of a lack of expertise on my own part, I may refer to contributions in this volume that further illuminate corresponding theological concepts. Thus, we can now proceed with the examination of our second question regarding the influences of Patristics on Theology.

What can Patristics contribute to Theology today? As a scholar of Patristics who has been teaching and still teaches at Protestant theological faculties in Germany, I must unfortunately begin this last part of my paper by announcing a deficit: in contemporary Protestant theology, the interest in the outcome of the scholarship of early Christianity tends to be low. This is 27   F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Vorlesungen über die Kirchengeschichte – ed. S. Gerber (Kritische Gesamtausgabe, II/6), Berlin, New York, 1991. 28  F. D. E. Schleiermacher, ‘Über den Gegensatz zwischen der Sabellianischen und der Athanasianischen Vorstellung von der Trinität’, in Theologischdogmatische Abhandlungen und Gelegenheitsschriften – ed. H.-F. Traulsen, M. Ohst (Kritische Gesamtausgabe, I/10), Berlin, New York, 1990, p. 223-306. 29  G. Collins, Meeting Christ in His Mysteries: A Benedictine Vision of the Spiritual Life, Dublin, 2011. 30  Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa, – ed. S. Coakley, Oxford, 2003 [originally a special issue of Modern Theology 18 (2002)], passim; Re-thinking Dionysius the Areopagite, – ed. S. Coakley, C. M. Stang, Oxford, 2009 [originally a special issue of Modern Theology 24 (2008)].

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mostly due to the prejudice that the history of the Reformation churches began only in the sixteenth century. The view that the Protestant Church is that part of the una sancta catholica which went through the Reformation is not unanimously held in the run-up to the Reformation jubilee year in 2017. 31 A telling example of this confusion is the comparatively unhelpful definition of the function of Patristics for theology that can be found in Ekkehard Mühlenberg’s aforementioned article under the same title: The word Patristics expresses a connection to theology. As a result, the theological element in the academic study of the early Christian period must be named as clearly as possible. There is, namely, in Theology, a specific interest in its own history and in particular in the knowledge of the ancient Christian era. Roman Catholic theology defines the theological element as a principle of tradition; for the Orthodox churches, the principle of tradition is rather confined to the time period of the seven ecumenical councils, while the Anglican Church has a leaning towards Patristics. The relationship of the Protestant churches of the Reformation to the Fathers can by comparison be described as a broken one. However, what should be true for Christian theology in general is, that it cannot ignore the question of the Church’s historical unity, nor can it detach its truth from the Christian faith of the past. 32

The images of a specific understanding of the respective Christian confessions are static (a theological awakening like the aforementioned one of the Nouvelle Théologie is left by the wayside) and the importance of Patristics for Protestant theology is here reduced to a plain interest in gaining orientation via the past in order to establish a relationship to past concepts of church and faith. Why it might be necessary or even vital, and 31 Cfr., however, Ch. Markschies, ‘Wie katholisch ist die Evangelische Kirche? Wie katholisch sollte sie sein?’, Evangelischer Pressedienst Dokumentation, 16 (17.4.2012), p. 4-14 [repr. in Ökumenische Information. Nachrichten und Hintergründe aus der Christlichen Ökumene und dem Dialog der Religionen, 17 (24.4. April 2012), p. i-xii]; cfr. Italian version: ‘L’importanza di stabilire cosa significhi cattolicità per la Chiesa evangelica. Certe parole hanno un peso’, L’Osservatore romano, 227 (3.10.2012), p. 4. 32  Mühlenberg, ‘Patristik’, p. 97.

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what gains one might have from an orientation of this kind, remains hidden within an unspecific and imprecise discourse. In his 1999 farewell lecture, Mühlenberg’s Protestant colleague from Heidelberg, Adolf Martin Ritter, defined the significance of early Christian (and medieval) traditions for Protestantism very differently, in the following three respects: Protestantism needs to be rooted in the pre-Reformation, ancient Christian and Medieval tradition and therefore in Antiquity itself, because its ability to take part in an ecumenical dialogue is highly dependent on this. The ability to take part in a dialogue with the “Catholic churches” (that is, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican) in particular [...] is affected at its very core by whether or not Protestants possess not only rudimentary knowledge of early and Medieval (Church) history, but also whether they understand the pre-Reformation period as a part of their own history instead of purely in terms of historical development. [...] Protestantism needs this rootedness in pre-Reformation tradition, because this is an essential factor influencing its ability to take part in the dialogue between religions. The Antiquity and the early Middle Ages are not only the “formative periods of Christianity and Islam”, but also of the so-called “classical Judaism”. [...] Protestantism needs to be rooted in the ancient Christian and Medieval tradition in the interest of a cultural competence that is becoming increasingly vital today. [...] However: the fact that knowledge of the Jewish-Christian tradition may contribute essential insights to our cultural self-reassurance is something that can hardly be disputed. 33

If one derived tasks for Patristics from this definition of three layers of meaning, then one would end up with a very broad approach to the subject, both in terms of method and content. A classic history of dogma and a theology focusing on the great ecumenical themes would be welcome (which could certainly be broadened in the sense of a new history of ideas in line with

33  A. M. Ritter, ‘Protestantisches Geschichtsbewusstsein und vorreformatorische Tradition’, in A. M. Ritter, Vom Glauben der Christen und seiner Bewährung im Denken und Handeln. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte (Texts and Studies in the History of Theology, 8), Mandelbachtal, Cambridge, 2003, p. 22f.

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the suggestions put forward by Quentin Skinner’s Cambridge School to include historical, political and social contexts) 34 as well as a study of Patristics that expands to include religious history and to examine ancient Judaism and Christianity as praeparatio islamica (from the research perspective brought forward by Guy Stroumsa, at the Oxford Patristics Conference in 2011, which understands Islam as a part of that Late Antiquity which is characterized by lively contacts between Judaism and Christianity and not only by a parting of the ways). 35 Ultimately, it remains necessary, in order to fulfil the tasks outlined by Ritter, to develop an interest in the transformation of the early Christian (as well as the ancient Jewish and Islamic) heritage in the postAntique period. In the meantime, the classic models of a history of reception and influence have been added to by highly ambitious theories of transformation (for example, in one research project in Berlin entitled ‘Tranformations in the Antiquity’) 36 which describe the alongside-one-another in in-one-another of change and continuity much more precisely than the older models. One can take Ritter’s description further by referring to contributions from French scholars of Antiquity, who drew attention to the fact that the secularisation of our image of Antiquity which took place in the nineteenth century dramatically affected more than just our image of Antiquity in relation to historical reality. In Germany, at least, following the Humboldt educational reform, the texts of Augustine disappeared from the school curricula and Antiquity became just as dechristianised as the surrounding society. When some time ago, following Henri-Irénée Marrou, Jacques Fontaine (incidentally, before the circle of sponsors and friends of the Franz-Josef-Dölger Institute in Bonn, which publishes the Encyclopaedia of Antiquity and Christianity – Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum) in turn 34   Die Cambridge School der politischen Ideengeschichte – ed. M. Mulsow, A. Mahler, Frankfurt am Main, 2010. 35 G. Stroumsa, ‘Athens, Jerusalem and Mekka: The Patristic Crucible of the Abrahamic Religions’, in Studia Patristica 62 (2013), p. 153-168. 36 H.  Böhme, ‘Einladung zur Transformation’, in Transformation. Ein Konzept zur Erforschung kulturellen Wandels’ – ed. H. Böhme et al., München, 2011, p. 7-38.

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stated, in programmatic terms, ‘Christianity is also Antiquity’, 37 he of course intended to express the converse of his sentence, namely: ‘Antiquity is also Christianity’. The classical philologian, Reinhart Herzog (1941-1994), who was in close exchange with Fontaine and his French colleagues, bundled and narrowed down the results of French research on the history of the term, ‘Late Antiquity’, in his programmatic essay, ‘ “We live in Late Antiquity”: The experience of an era and its impulses for scholarship.’ 38 If one attempts to draw one simple pragmatic conclusion from his highly reflective considerations, then perhaps that conclusion should be not to overdo it when trying to update the results of Patristics research work for contemporary theological tasks: a mere repristination of ancient theologoumena, ethical norms, or even world views would serve nobody. Herzog pleads in favour of dealing with the tradition of the Enlightenment in a reflective manner. If one compares Adolf Martin Ritter’s description to what Italian colleague Lorenzo Perrone, who teaches at an institute for the study of Antiquity in Bologna, said in 2004 at a conference of the ‘New Europe College’ in Bucharest under the title ‘Les Pères de l’église dans le monde d’aujourd’hui’, one will find significant congruities between a Protestant church historian and an Italian scholar of Antiquity. Even if Perrone, of course, also refers to the Second Vatican Council, to the new world situation after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, and to the conflicts with a radicalized Islam, his lecture is also characterised by the conviction that early Christian texts contain challenging ideas for the present time. 39 Certainly, he pleads in favour of 37   J. Fontaine, ‘Christentum ist auch Antike. Einige Überlegungen zu Bildung und Literatur in der lateinischen Spätantike’, JbAC, 25 (1982), p. 5-21.  38  R. Herzog, ‘  “Wir leben in der Spätantike”: Eine Zeiterfahrung und ihre Impulse für die Forschung’, in R. Herzog, Spätantike. Studien zur römischen und lateinisch-christlichen Literatur – ed. P. Habermehl, (Hypomnemata. Suppl., 3), Göttingen, 2002, p. 321-348. 39  L. Perrone, ‘L’étude des Pères dans l’Université: pour une approche européenne’, in Les Pères de l’église dans le monde d’aujourd’hui. Actes du colloque international organisé par le New Europe College en collaboration avec la Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft (Bucarest, 7-8 octobre 2004) – ed. C. Badilita, Ch. Kannengiesser, Paris, 2006, p. 19-35.

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taking a European approach to the task at hand and thus leaving decidedly behind us the era of competition between individual nation states (take, for example, the edition of the Greek Church Fathers of the Prussian Academy in Berlin that was in competition with the edition of the Latin Church fathers in Vienna 40). This adds a fourth layer to the series of tasks for the research of Patristics which we have already derived from the three layers of meaning provided by Ritter: if one follows Perrone’s plea in favour of a European dimension to the significance of Patristics (which, of course, does not apply to theology alone), then the trans-European dimension of the history of early Christianity must once again be addressed more rigorously. Here, we not only have a (sometimes strongly deviating) Christianity beyond the imperial borders of Persia and Arabia, which is of great importance for the emergence of Manichaeism and Islam, but also an interaction on the basis of the Mediterranean between various actors in the so-called Arian or Pelagianist disputes, which it would be well worth investigating again. Concluding: in his aforementioned Bucharest lecture, Lorenzo Perrone said that ‘ l’univers des Pères’, the universe of the Church Fathers, cannot be studied by only one discipline and also not from only one disciplinary background, because of the fact that it is already so rich. Significantly, it is not exhausted in Greek and Latin texts, 41 since it has been transmitted in the various languages and cultures of the Christian Orient. If, in the course of my line of argument here, it has become clear that the increasing autonomy of Patristics from its mother, the theologia patristica, does not have to result in a permanent, eternal separation between Patristics and Theology – a perpetual breaking asunder of the two – but that Theology can now happily join the ranks of the disciplines that may deliver interesting aspects to 40  Ch. Markschies, ‘Origenes in Berlin und Heidelberg’, Adamantius, 8 (2002), p. 135-145 [= ‘Origenes in Berlin. Schicksalswege eines Editionsunternehmens’, in Markschies, Origenes und sein Erbe.  Gesammelte Studien (Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, 160), Berlin, New York, 2007, p. 239-259]. 41  L. Perrone, ‘  L’étude des Pères dans l’Université: pour une approche européenne’, p. 27f.

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the study of early Christianity, then I have achieved what I set out to do in this paper. Certainly, one should not have illusions about the possible achievements of a reflectively established connection between Patristics and Theology: Andrei Ples¸u, former Romanian foreign minister and rector of the New Europe College in Bucharest, when he spoke at the aforementioned conference about ‘Les Pères de l’église dans le monde d’aujourd’hui’ in 2004, did not speak of the relevance of the Church Fathers in contemporary times, but about their lack of contemporary relevance. 42 And I clearly remember how surprised I was as a young assistant to find only isolated Dicta probantia in mostly outdated editions, 43 both in official Roman Catholic and Ecumenical church documents. That is why a sense of sobriety is recommended in the – for theologians perhaps – natural expectation to bring Patristics and Theology closer together, if the subject is to be dealt with to some extent exhaustively.

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D. Lerch, Isaaks Opferung, christlich gedeutet. Eine auslegungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung. Die vorreformatorische Auslegung von Isaaks Opferung, Tübingen, 1950. Deux homélies anoméennes pour l’octave de Pâques – ed. and tr. J. Liébaert (SC, 146), Paris, 1969. Ch. Markschies, ‘Origenes in Berlin und Heidelberg’, Adamantius, 8 (2002), p. 135-145 (= ‘Origenes in Berlin. Schicksalswege eines Editionsunternehmens’, in Ch. Markschies, Origenes und sein Erbe. Gesammelte Studien (Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur, 160), Berlin, New York, 2007, p. 239-259). Ch. Markschies, ‘Die altkirchlichen Väter – eine ökumenische Herausforderung?’, in ‘... zur Zeit oder Unzeit’. Studien zur spätantiken Theologie-, Geistes- und Kunstgeschichte. Hans Georg Thümmel zu Ehren, – ed. A. M. Ritter, W. Wischmeyer, W. Kinzig (Texts and Studies in the History of Theology, 9), Mandelbachtal, Cambridge, 2004, p. 307-342. Ch. Markschies, ‘Normierungen durch “Väter” bei Neuplatonikern und Christen. Ein Vergleich’, in Zwischen Altertumswissenschaft und Theologie. Zur Relevanz der Patristik in Geschichte und Gegenwart – ed. Ch. Markschies, J. van Oort (Studien der Patristischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft, 7), Löwen, 2002, p. 1-30. Ch. Markschies, ‘Wie katholisch ist die Evangelische Kirche? Wie katholisch sollte sie sein?’, Evangelischer Pressedienst Dokumentation 16 (17.4.2012), p. 4-14; (repr. in Ökumenische Information. Nachrichten und Hintergründe aus der Christlichen Ökumene und dem Dialog der Religionen 17 (24.4.2012), p. i-xii; cfr. Italian version: ‘L’importanza di stabilire cosa significhi cattolicità per la Chiesa evangelica. Certe parole hanno un peso’, L’Osservatore romano, 227, (3.10.2012), p. 4. E. Mühlenberg, ‘Patristik’, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, 36 vols., Berlin, New York, 1996, XXVI, p. 97-106. M. Mulsow, Die Cambridge School der politischen Ideengeschichte, Frankfurt am Main, 2010. L. Perrone, ‘L’étude des Pères dans l’Université: pour une approche européenne’, in Les Pères de l’église dans le monde d’aujourd’hui. Actes du colloque international organisé par le New Europe College en collaboration avec la Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft (Bucarest, 7-8 octobre 2004) – ed. C. Badilita, Ch. Kannengiesser, Paris, 2006, p. 19-35. A. Ples¸u, ‘Réflections sur l’actualité et l’inactualité des Pères’, in Les Pères de l’église dans le monde d’aujourd’hui.  Actes du colloque international organisé par le New Europe College en collaboration avec

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la Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft (Bucarest, 7-8 octobre 2004) – ed. C. Badilita, Ch. Kannengiesser, Paris, 2006, p. 13-18. J. Quasten, Patrology, 4 vols., Utrecht, Brüssel, I, 1950. T. Rendtorff, Vielspältiges. Protestantische Beiträge zur ethischen Kultur, Stuttgart, 1991. G. Rexin, ‘Studer, Basil’, in Biographisch-bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, 33 vols., Nordhausen, 2011, XXXII, p. 1379-1390. A. M.  Ritter, ‘Protestantisches Geschichtsbewusstsein und vorreformatorische Tradition’, in A. M. Ritter, Vom Glauben der Christen und seiner Bewährung im Denken und Handeln. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte (Texts and Studies in the History of Theology, 8), Mandelbachtal, Cambridge, 2003, p. 17-24. F. D. E.  Schleiermacher, Vorlesungen über die Kirchengeschichte – ed. S. Gerber (Kritische Gesamtausgabe, II/6), Berlin, New York, 1991. F. D. E. Schleiermacher, ‘Über den Gegensatz zwischen der Sabellianischen und der Athanasianischen Vorstellung von der Trinität’, in Theologisch-dogmatische Abhandlungen und Gelegenheitsschriften – ed. H.-F. Traulsen, M. Ohst (Kritische Gesamtausgabe, I/10), Berlin, New York, 1990, p. 223-306. C. Schmitt, Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur Lehre von der Souveränität, Berlin, 20048. J. M. Schröckh, Christliche Kirchengeschichte, 43 vols., Leipzig, 1772, I. G. Stroumsa, ‘Athens, Jerusalem and Mekka: The Patristic Crucible of the Abrahamic Religions’, in Studia Patristica, 62 (2013), p. 153-168. B. Studer, Dominus Salvator. Studien zur Christologie und Exegese der Kirchenväter (Studia Anselmiana, 107), Roma 1991. A. M. Triacca, ‘L’uso dei “loci” patristici nei documenti del Concilio Vaticano II: un caso emblematico e problematico’, in Lo studio dei Padri della Chiesa oggi – ed. E. dal Covolo (Biblioteca di Scienze Religiose, 96), Roma, 1991, p. 149-184. L. Vischer, Die Auslegungsgeschichte von I. Kor. 6,1-11 (Beiträge zur Geschichte der neutestamentlichen Exegese, 1), Tübingen, 1955. L. Vischer, D. Lerch, ‘Die Auslegungsgeschichte als notwendige theologische Aufgabe’, Studia Patristica = TU 63, Berlin, 1957, p. 414-419. R. Winling, ‘Nouvelle Théologie’, Theologische Realenzyklopädie, 36 vols., Berlin, New York, 1994, XXIV, p. 668-675.

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Abstract The paper addresses the issue of the complex and intricate relationship between Patristics and theology today and offers a history of the discipline of Patristics as well as a historical overview of the relationship between Patristics and its mother discipline: Theology, in its various stages and mainly in continental Europe. The paper refers to the impact of particular confessional understandings with regard to the historical development and interpretation of a theologia patristica. Moreover, the paper examines the role, and transformation of the study of early Christianity in German language Protestant theology with a focus on the secularisation process in modern times. It suggests a new approach based on hermeneutics and the philosophy of science that highlights the importance of theology as an ensemble of possible preconceptions for Patristics. Finally, the paper stresses the importance of the study of Patristics that expands to include a classic history of dogma and theology as well as religious history and a trans-European dimension of the history of early Christianity and argues for the significance of the contribution of theology to this rich field of study.

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LENKA KARFÍKOVÁ Prague and Olomouc

THE FIFTH THEOLOGICAL ORATION OF GREGORY NAZIANZEN AND THE HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY OF REVELATION *

Christianity understands itself from the story – the revelation – of Jesus of Nazareth, whom it considers to be the person in whom God himself comes to the world. This faith displays, in the religious milieu of Judaism from which Christianity grew, as well as in the world of Greek thought in which it gradually developed and formulated its teaching, a hint of the scandalous and the foolish. The Christian message about Jesus – who ‘lost’ in human history, but in whom, nevertheless, salvation comes to the world – is, in the words of Paul of Tarsus, ‘a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles’ (I Cor. 1, 23). We could, without too much exaggeration, suggest that the whole of Christian theology came into being as an attempt to explain how a contingent event, in this case the story of one man, is able to possess universal revelatory and soteriological value. Understood like this, ‘sacred contingency’, which nonetheless claims universal relevance, will be a paradigm of Christian selfunderstanding and also the key to the Christian concept of godhood: the Christian God reveals himself not only in the universal sacred world order, but first and foremost in the unpredictable, entirely particular and far from glorious story of a certain individual. By ‘contingent’ I do not, however, mean completely accidental, rather that the story could have happened otherwise, as a certain and by no means insignificant role was played by *  The contribution has been prepared as a part of the project “History and Interpretation of the Bible”, Grant Agency of the Czech Republic (P401/12/G168). 10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107527

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human freedom, and by the historical situation created by the many factors that could also have been otherwise. The testimony of the body of texts that forms the Christian New Testament focuses on the life and ministry of Jesus, and on what that life and ministry means. It is in this context that the questions concerning Jesus’s heavenly Father and the continuing significance of Jesus’s life and ministry, as guaranteed by the Holy Spirit, have been asked. After the intricate path taken by the dogmatic controversies of the fourth Christian century, these questions eventually lead to the formulation of Trinitarian doctrine, just as the question concerning the person of Jesus would, a century later, lead to the formulation of Christological doctrine. This highly adventurous journey, which I believe fully shares the fate of the historical contingency of the story of Jesus (that is, it could also have happened otherwise, without being completely accidental) cannot be reconstructed here. Rather, I would like to concentrate on the contingency itself, on the fact that the Christian God gave himself into human hands not only in the story of Christ, but also in the historicity of revelation, that is, in the astonishing fact that truth, understood as revealed and binding, at the same time possesses an historical and therefore also a contingent nature. This historicity, or at least the progression of God’s revelation in history, was reflected upon in Patristic times, as is shown very clearly in Gregory Nazianzen’s famous pneumatological oration, which I will review in the first part of this paper. In the second part I will return to the question of what this ‘historicity’ of revelation, or historicity of truth, actually means.

The Fifth Theological Oration of Gregory Nazianzen Gregory, who was designated non-Arian Bishop of Constantinople, delivered his five ‘theological orations’ (Or.  27-31) – devoted to the questions of Christology and pneumatology – into the tense atmosphere preceding the second ecumenical council, convened in Constantinople in ce 381. 1 Gregory 1  On Gregory’s time in Constantinople (379-381) and his difficult role at this council, see E. Fleury, Hellénisme et christianisme: Saint Grégoire de Nazianze et son temps, Paris, 1930, p. 269-330; C. A.  Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the

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devotes the fifth of these theological orations to the divinity of the Holy Spirit, 2 apparently an even more controversial subject than the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son, as he has to counter not only the neo-Arian position but also the reproaches of the non-Arian Pneumatomachians, who recognized the divinity of the Son but did not find sufficient support in Scripture for the divinity of the Spirit. 3 As with the Christological controversies, so here the chief argument is of a soteriological nature: only God can unite man with God, which is why neither the Son (the mediator) nor the Spirit (the medium of such a union) can possibly be inferior mediatory beings, as it is in them that man becomes united with God; they are not only the means but also the goal of human deification. 4 At the same time, Gregory seeks to explain why Scripture is somewhat tacit on this matter. It is precisely this discourse on the progressive revelation of God’s Persons that is now of interest to us. The argument Gregory presents in defence of this belief is not taken from ‘the letter’ of Scripture, but more from insight into its logic, from contemplation upon God’s pedagogy through history, and on the ‘economy’ of salvation: There have been two manifest transformations of the human way of life (μεταθέσεις βίων) in the course of the world’s history (ἐκ  τοῦ παντὸς αἰῶνος). These are called two ‘covenants’, and, so famous was the business involved, two ‘shakings of the earth’ (σεισμοὶ γῆς) (cfr. Ex. 20, 3-5; Hebr. 12, 27; Matth. 27, 51). The first was the transition from idols to the Law; the second, from the Law to the Gospel. The Gospel also tells of the third ‘shaking’ (σεισμόν), the change from this present state of things to what lies unmoved Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light, Oxford, 2008, p. 34-54. 2 On Gregory’s pneumatology, see also D. F.  Winslow, The Dynamics of Salvation: A Study in Gregory of Nazianzus, Cambridge, MA, 1979, p. 121-145, and C. A.  Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus, p. 153-186 (analysis of Or. 31, ibid., p. 164-185). 3 On the addressees of Gregory’s polemic, see F. W.  Norris, ‘Gregory’s Opponents in Oration 31’, in Arianism: Historical and Theological Reassessments. Papers from the Ninth International Conference on Patristic Studies, 5-10 September 1983, Oxford – ed. R. C. Gregg, (Patristic Monograph Series, 11), Cambridge, MA, 1985, p. 321-326; F. W.  Norris, Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning: The Five Theological Orations of Gregory Nazianzen, Leiden, 1991, p. 53-71. 4  Or. 31, 4 (SC, 250, p. 282); 31, 28 (SC, 250, p. 332).

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and unshaken (cfr. Hebr. 12, 28) beyond (τὴν ἐντεῦθεν ἐπὶ τὰ ἐκεῖσε μετάστασιν) [...] The first change cut away idols but allowed sacrifices to remain; the second stripped away sacrifices but did not forbid circumcision. Then, when men had been reconciled to the withdrawal (τὴν ὑφαίρεσιν), they agreed to let go what had been left them as a concession. Under the first covenant that concession was sacrifice, and they became Jews instead of Gentiles; under the second, circumcision – and they became Christians instead of Jews, brought round gradually, bit by bit, to the Gospel. 5

To this process of ‘withdrawal’ (τῶν ὑφαιρέσεων) in the history of salvation there is a corresponding opposite process of ‘addition’ or ‘accretion’ (τῶν προσθηκῶν) in theology (θεολογία): 6 The old covenant made manifest (φανερῶς) proclamation of the Father, a less definite (ἀμυδρότερον) one of the Son. The new [covenant] made the Son manifest (ἐφανέρωσεν) and gave us a glimpse (ὑπέδειξε) of the Spirit’s Godhead. At the present time the Spirit resides amongst us, giving us a clearer manifestation of himself than before (σαφεστέραν ἡμῖν παρέχον τὴν ἑαυτοῦ δήλωσιν). It was dangerous to preach openly the Son (ἐκδήλως κηρύττεσθαι) when the Godhead of the Father was still unacknowledged (μήπω τῆς τοῦ Πατρὸς θεότητος ὁμολογηθείσης). It was dangerous, too, to make the Holy Spirit (and here I use a rather rash expression) an extra burden (τὸ Πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον ἐπιφορτίζεσθαι), when the Godhead of the Son had not been received (μηδὲ τῆς τοῦ Υἱοῦ παραδεχθείσης). It could mean men jeopardizing what did lie within their powers, as happens to those encumbered with a diet too strong for them or who gaze at sunlight with eyes as yet too feeble for it. No, God meant it to be by piecemeal additions, ‘ascents’ (ἀναβάσεσι) as David called them (Ps. 83:6 LXX), by progress and advance from ‘glory to glory’ (II Cor. 3, 18), that the light of the Trinity should shine upon more illustrious souls (ἐκλάμψει τοῖς λαμπροτέροις). 7

5   Or.  31, 25 (SC, 250, p. 322, 1-7; p. 324, 22-28) [Eng. trans. after L. Wickham and F. Williams, Faith, p. 292-293]. 6  Or. 31, 26 (SC, 250, p. 326). 7  Or.  31, 26 (SC, 250, p. 326, 4-17) [Eng. trans. after L. Wickham and F. Williams, Faith, p. 293].

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This double process of withdrawal in matters of rite and of addition in theological knowledge appears for Gregory to represent a single process of salvation actualized in human history. The gradual ‘enlightenment’ that we are given (φωτισμοὺς ἡμῖν κατὰ μέρος ἐλλάμποντας) – that is, the gradual revelation of the deity of the individual Persons, first the Father, then the Son, and finally the Spirit – is not just a question of epistemology (τάξις θεολογίας), 8 but is itself the very process of revelation, a process by which salvation takes place. Gregory describes these two ‘transformations of the human way of life’ as ‘shakings of the earth’, but at the same time emphasizes their gradual 9 and non-forceful nature. God did not want to enforce them but was waiting for human acceptance. 10 He did not want to act like a tyrannical authority (τυραννικῆς ἐξουσίας) but on the basis of what is right in each situation (ἐπιεικείας), like a teacher and a physician (παιδαγωγικῶς τε καὶ ἰατρικῶς). 11 Knowledge of the Spirit also grows gradually, 12 as was already apparent in the New Testament: from the beginning of the Gospels the Spirit partially (κατὰ μέρος) dwells in the hearts of the disciples, ‘according to their capacity’, but after the Passion and Ascension of Jesus this capacity is ‘made perfect’, the Spirit is breathed upon them (Ioh. 20, 22), and appears to them in tongues of fire (Act. 2, 3). Jesus himself, in his farewell speech in John’s Gospel, also reveals the Spirit gradually. First, he reveals his relationship to the Father: ‘And I will ask the Father, and he shall give you another Counsellor [...] the Spirit of truth’   Or. 31, 27 (SC, 250, p. 328).  Linked with this idea, J. Plagnieux talks about ‘slowness’ (lenteur) as a ‘basic law’. See J. Plagnieux, Saint Grégoire de Nazianze théologien, Paris, 1952, p. 52. 10  Or.  31, 25 (SC, 250, p. 324): Οὔκουν ᾤετο δεῖν ἄκοντας εὖ ποιεῖν, ἀλλ’ ἑκόντας εὐεργετεῖν. 11  Or. 31, 25 (SC, 250, p. 324). 12  Similarly, in his oration on Pentecost, Gregory talks about the gradual revelation of the Spirit before the Passion, after the Resurrection, and after the Ascension of Jesus: in the first case the revelation was obscure, in the second more apparent, and in the last even more perfect, as at Pentecost the Spirit is present not only in his ‘activity’ (ἐνεργείᾳ), but ‘substantially’ (οὐσιωδῶς). See Or. 41, 11 (SC, 358, p. 340): ᾿Αλλὰ τὸ μὲν πρῶτον ἀμυδρῶς· τὸ δὲ δεύτερον ἐκτυπώτερον· τὸ δὲ νῦν τελεώτερον, οὐκέτι ἐνεργείᾳ παρὸν ὡς πρότερον, οὐσιωδῶς δὲ, ὡς ἂν εἴποι τις, συγγινόμενόν τε καὶ συμπολιτευόμενον. 8 9

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(Ioh. 14, 16, 17). The very next moment, however, Jesus says that although the Spirit will be sent by the Father, it will be sent in his (Jesus’s) name (which he adds instead of mentioning again his request to the Father; see Ioh. 14, 26). A little further on, he says: ‘I will send you [...]’ (Ioh. 16, 7) and finally he speaks only of the Spirit himself: ‘He comes’ (Ioh. 16, 8). This progression corresponds exactly to Gregory’s ‘economy of theology’: first to be revealed is the operation of the Father, then that of the Son, and finally that of the Spirit. 13 Gregory also sees a kind of economy of theological knowledge implied in Jesus’s words – again in John’s Gospel – about the Spirit who will guide the disciples ‘into all truth’ and who will tell them at a later date what Jesus cannot tell them now because they would not be able to ‘bear’ it (Ioh. 16, 12). 14 Among these teachings that were until then ‘hidden’ (παρεκαλύπτετο), Gregory includes the deity of the Spirit, which could only be revealed ‘after the return of Jesus to glory (ἀποκατάστασις)’, as it was only by this miracle that his authority was definitively confirmed as divine. 15 Gregory thus develops his ‘theological economy’ as part of an economy of salvation: not only could the Spirit be given only after the glorification of Jesus, but also he could be known as God only after a clear statement of the Son’s deity. These two events belong inseparably together like two sides of God’s self-revelation to man. So what we have before us in Gregory’s pneumatological exposition is not only an outline of the history of salvation but also a theological basis for the historicity of revelation, 16 and with it, in nuce, a concept of the historicity

  Or. 31, 26 (SC, 250, p. 328).   Gregory is particularly proud of this biblical argument although he doesn’t rule out the possibility that someone before him might have thought of it. See Or. 31, 27 (SC, 250, p. 328). 15  Or. 31, 27 (SC, 250, p. 330). 16 See J. Plagnieux, Saint Grégoire de Nazianze, p. 50-59; Or. 31, 25 (SC, 250), p. 322-323, note 4; Or. 31, 26 (SC, 250), p. 326-329, note 2; D. F. Winslow, The Dynamics, p. 124-125; F. W. Norris, Faith, p. 53 and 206207. (In relation to Gregory’s text, this author explores more the possibility of extra-biblical revelation rather than the historicity of dogma.) H. E. W. Turner shows the background to the idea of ‘progressive Revelation’ in other Church fathers, mainly in Origen’s biblical hermeneutics (see H. E. W. Turner, The Pattern 13 14

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of truth in general (although Gregory himself makes no connection between historicity and the concept of truth). 17 It is to this idea that I would like to devote the second part of these reflections.

The historicity of revelation The idea of the historicity of truth, and historicity in general, finds little place today among the principle avenues of philosophical enquiry, as if the subject had been exhausted by Herder’s optimistic visions, and by Hegel’s speculative ontologization and Marx’s subversive application of them. Heidegger’s historicity of ‘existence’ (Dasein) and temporality of Being, or Benjamin’s Jetztzeit of revolutionary discontinuity as a model of messianic time, 18 are – in all their difference – a kind of late blossoming of this tradition. In order to be able to develop a philosophy of history, we need to be convinced that there is something at stake in history, some kind of meaning, whether it is guaranteed by something extra-human, or as fragile as finite human existence itself. 19 This belief did not exist in antiquity, and neither does it appear as a given in European philosophy today. 20 of Christian Truth: A Study in Relations between Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Early Church, London, 1954, p. 264-273). Similarly C. A.  Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus, p. 169-170. On the idea of the history of salvation as ‘progress’ in the authors of second and third centuries, see also W. Kinzig, Novitas Christiana. Die Idee des Fortschritts in der Alten Kirche bis Eusebius, Göttingen, 1994, p. 210361. On Irenaeus, see also E. P. Meijering, God Being History: Studies in Patristic Philosophy, Amsterdam, Oxford, 1975, p. 52-80. 17   On differing meanings of the term ἀλήθεια in Gregory’s work (from personal honesty to orthodox teaching, even God the Son himself), see F. Trisoglio, San Gregorio di Nazianzo: Un contemporaneo vissuto sedici secoli fa – ed.  R. L. Guidi, D. Petti, Cantalupa, 2008, p. 211-254. 18 See W. Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte, in Gesammelte Schriften, I/2 – ed. R. Tiedemann, H. Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt a. M., 1991, Theses 17-18, p. 703 [693-704]. For Benjamin, who in the messianic ‘stopping’ of history sees an opportunity to bring salvation to an ‘oppressed past’ (ibid., Thesis 17, p. 703; see also Thesis 2, p. 694), it is clear, however, that the puppet of ‘historical materialism’ is controlled by the invisible and ugly ‘hunchbacked dwarf’ of theology (ibid., Thesis 1, p. 693). 19  So Czech philosopher J. Patoc ˇka, Ketzerische Essays zur Philosophie der Geschichte, Frankfurt a. M., 2007. 20  Even Paul Ricœur, though he is convinced of the meaning of history in its totality, considers this meaning to be hidden or eschatological. See P. Ricœur,

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As Karl Löwith shows, the very asking after ‘the meaning of history’ is itself historically conditioned. This ‘colossal question’ was instigated by Jewish and Christian thinking, with their idea of a God who stands outside history, but who nonetheless has a plan for it. 21 A secularized form of the search for the meaning of history in history itself (rather than anticipating its eschatological completion) can only, according to Löwith, ultimately become meaningless: ‘philosophy of history originates with the Hebrew and Christian faith in a fulfilment and [...] it ends with the secularization of its eschatological pattern’. 22 But what about theology? Can theology that is based on the biblical message of a God who enters history fail to consider the relevance of history? But on the other hand, can it not see the danger such reflections might present to the idea of God – should he be excessively given over to historical contingency – as well as to the idea of history – should it be, with all its horrors, considered as the locus of his revelation? Prima facie, we can think of the historicity of revelation (and of revealing) in two very different ways. Either we think in terms of an atemporal truth gradually, in various complementary forms, and even perhaps with increasing intensity, revealing itself in history. Or we can abandon the concept of an atemporal basis of truth altogether and consider its historical revelation, ‘Le Christianisme et le sens de l’histoire’, in Id., Histoire et vérité, Paris, 1955, p. 98-102. He would prefer to renounce ‘philosophy of history’ in favour of ‘history of philosophy’ (P. Ricœur, ‘L’Histoire de la philosophie et l’unité du vrai’, in Id., Histoire et vérité, p. 56, 72), in which the unity of truth is present only in an imaginary dialogue of particular truths (ibid., p. 69-70). Similarly, Ricouer understands the unity of history in its continuity as something inaccessible to historical man; rather it is anticipated in the discontinuity of events or in the discontinuity of individual focal points of meaning (P. Ricœur, ‘Objectivité et subjectivité en histoire’, in Id., Histoire et vérité, p. 48-50; see also Id., Le Christianisme et le sens de l’histoire, p. 92). 21  K. Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History, Chicago, 1949, p. 4. The only truly ‘historical’ religion is, according to this protestant thinker, Judaism. Christianity, so he believes, does not assume the continuance of history, but the ‘end of history’ in the coming of Christ and consequent expectation of his second coming (ibid., p. 194-198). 22  K. Löwith, Meaning in History, p. 2. A secularized form of ‘philosophy of history’ eventually leads, according to Löwith, to fruitless historicism and an emptying of philosophy. See also K. Löwith, ‘Wahrheit und Geschichtlichkeit’ in Sämtliche Schriften, 9 vols., Stuttgart, 1983, II, p. 460-472.

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the ‘process of revealing’, or even, ultimately, history itself, to be the truth. Atemporal truth, as understood by the former of these concepts of historicity, relates, paradigmatically, to mathematical relations which have been considered as ahistorical since Plato’s times. Knowledge which appeals to these relations is also subordinated to time only in the sense that each individual soul has itself to recollect it, usually with the help of another individual soul. Mathematics may well also display a history of revealing (as Husserl reflected in his Origin of Geometry), 23 but this is more as a kind of irreversible tradition of thought, an historical constitution of geometry as a field of study. In this case, truth is historical in the sense that the one who is gaining knowledge of it is necessarily embedded in an historical tradition which nonetheless helps him relate to the atemporal contents. 24 It may also be possible to understand theological knowledge this way, although the subject would not then be the history of salvation but rather God in his atemporality. The question remains, however, whether one is actually able to get to know God in such a way, that is, whether such revelation is possible. To abandon the concept of an atemporal basis of historical revelation (as assumed in the second of our two concepts of the historicity of truth) would mean to understand not only the self-revelation of God, but also God himself – or at least perhaps his Trinitarian nature – as historical: God would be God only within world history, or would only through the incarnation and the sending of the Spirit become Trinitarian. In European

23  E. Husserl, ‘Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als intentionalhistorisches Problem’, from 1936, reprinted as appendix 3, in Id., Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie; also in Id., Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (Husserliana, VI), Den Haag, 1954, p. 365-386. 24  Taking into account the ‘historical apriori’ of all mathematical formulations, Husserl assumes the ‘ideal objectivity’ (‘ideale’ Objektivität) of Pythagorus’s theorem (and of all geometry), which exists ‘only once’ and is ‘identically the same’ no matter how many times or in what language it is expressed (E. Husserl, ‘Die Frage’, p. 368). This veritas aeterna, that is, the apodictically general invariant content of geometric science (and every other ‘intellectual construction’), allows for its universal validity and so opens the possibility of repeating the insight which was at its origin (E. Husserl, ‘Die Frage’, p. 385).

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history (from Hegel to Hans Jonas 25) there has been no shortage of attempts to make God, in his completion, dependent on history. But the question is, in this case, how great a ‘historical necessity’ there is for such a ‘historical’ God to be eventually identified with history or to dissolve into it. 26 In this case the truth will be in some way radically historical because its revelation will have no atemporal basis. Rather it will be the process itself through which human beings relate to the historical world and so create this world at the very same time. But can we then still speak of the revelation of the Godhead? Perhaps there is yet a third way to understand the historicity of revelation and truth, and that is, on the one hand not to deny to them some kind of atemporal basis, but on the other to understand them as more radically historical than simply in the sense of the historicity of tradition, which allows knowledge of atemporal contents. As we have seen in Gregory’s exposition, the process of revelation also includes human knowledge: the Spirit is gradually revealed as God – that is, he gradually becomes known as such. God, in his pedagogy, takes into account the human condition, as if waiting, with his revelation, for man in all his slowness. Gregory clearly does not mean that the Spirit would not, without such a revelation and without human acceptance, be God; rather he talks of the triune Godhead ‘outside time’ (ἀχρόνως). 27 Even though he speaks elsewhere about the ‘motion’ by which God’s Persons are established, there is no time aspect in this differentiation. Gregory illustrates it as a ‘motion’ between numbers: ‘Therefore number one, having from the beginning

25  See H. Jonas, Zwischen Nichts und Ewigkeit. Drei Aufsätze zur Lehre vom Menschen, Göttingen, 1963, p. 55-62; Id., Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz. Eine jüdische Stimme, Frankfurt a. M., 1987. 26  The movement in European thinking from Hegel’s Absolute Spirit which comes to know Himself through history even though He remains at the same time transcendent to it, to the total secularization of the idea of progress and the disintegration of historicity in the doctrine of eternal recurrence, is shown by K. Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche (Sämtliche Schriften, IV), Stuttgart, 1988, p. 1-490. 27  Or. 31, 14 (SC, 250, p. 304). See also Or. 31, 4 (SC, 250, p. 280-282); Or. 29, 3 (SC, 250, p. 180-182).

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arrived by motion at number two, found its rest in number three. This is what we mean by Father and Son and Holy Spirit.’ 28 Gregory thus assumes on the one hand an atemporal godhead which is triune in its relationality (because the names of God’s Persons are, for him, the names of relations, σχέσεις), 29 and on the other God’s historical revelation, to which also belongs historical knowledge (that is, the ‘economy’ of salvation). I do not take this to mean, however, that the economy of salvation and the ‘theological order’, as we hear about them in Gregory’s pneumatological oration, are about the progressive revelation of an atemporal truth (as in the historical constitution of geometry). Gregory’s idea is both more sceptical and more radically historical, as we will now see. In the second of his theological orations Gregory gives an exposition on the ‘ungraspability of God’, who is knowable only to himself as Trinity. 30 Only on what he calls a ‘second course’ can we attempt to know God from his works, 31 and we will only truly be able to find him when we are made like him at the end of time. 32 According to Gregory, Plato is not precise when

28  Or.  29, 2 (SC, 250, p. 178-180): Διὰ τοῦτο μονὰς ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς εἰς δυάδα κινηθεῖσα, μέχρι τριάδος ἔστη.  Καὶ τοῦτό ἐστιν ἡμῖν ὁ  Πατήρ, καὶ ὁ Υἱός, καὶ τὸ ἅγιον Πνεῦμα. Gregory suggests that the Persons are distinct in number (ἀριθμῷ), not in essence (οὐσίᾳ). This is perhaps why he uses the arithmetical comparison for the constitution of the Persons.  29   Or.  29, 16 (SC, 250, p. 210): σχέσεως δὲ καὶ τοῦ πῶς ἔχει πρὸς τὸν Υἱὸν ὁ Πατήρ, ἢ ὁ Υἱὸς πρὸς τὸν Πατέρα. I have dealt with the category πρὸς τί πως ἔχειν elsewhere (L. Karfíková, ‘Ad Ablabium, Quod non sint tres dei’, in Gregory of Nyssa: The Minor Treatises on Trinitarian Theology and Apollinarism. Proceedings of the 11th International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa, Tübingen, 17-20 September 2008 – ed. V. H. Drecoll, M. Berghaus, Leiden, 2011, p. 161-162). 30  Or. 28, 3 (SC, 250, p. 104): τὴν πρώτην τε καὶ ἀκήρατον φύσιν, καὶ ἑαυτῇ, λέγω δὴ τῇ Τριάδι, γινωσκομένην. See the whole passage Or.  28, 3-4 (SC, 250, p. 104-108). 31  Or. 28, 13 (SC, 250, p. 128). Gregory gives two versions of a ‘second course’ (δεύτερος πλοῦς), improper and proper: that is, either the deification of created things, or understanding their beauty and order as a path to knowing God. On the ‘second course’ (the metaphor of an alternative, more demanding course, with the use of oars, if there is no fair wind) see Plato, Phd. 99c. 32  Or. 28, 13 (SC, 250, p. 134): Εὑρήσει δέ ... ἐπειδὰν τὸ θεοειδὲς τοῦτο καὶ θεῖον, λέγω δὲ τὸν ἡμέτερον νοῦν τε καὶ λόγον, τῷ οἰκείῳ προσμίξῃ, καὶ ἡ εἰκὼν ἀνέλθῃ πρὸς τὸ ἀρχέτυπον, οὗ νῦν ἔχει τὴν ἔφεσιν.

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he states that it is difficult to know and impossible to express the Maker of the world (see Tim. 28c): ‘But I say that it is impossible to express God, and yet more impossible to know Him.’ 33 The revelation we receive is not therefore knowledge of God in his essence. In his sermon on the Epiphany, Gregory says that our spirit creates a kind of image of Him, but not an image of what He is like, rather of what surrounds him (οὐκ ἐκ τῶν κατ’ αὐτὸν, ἀλλ’ ἐκ τῶν περὶ αὐτόν); the only truly comprehensible thing is God’s incomprehensibility, his boundlessness (ἡ ἀπειρία). 34 On the question of the ‘knowability’ of God’s inner relations, Gregory is equally sceptical, at least as far as we understand from his reply to his imaginary neo-Arian adversary: ‘What then is proceeding? You explain the ingeneracy of the Father and I will give you a physiological account of the Son’s begetting and the Spirit’s proceeding – and let us go mad the pair of us for prying into God’s secrets.’ 35 The proceeding of the Spirit, as revealed in the economy of salvation and the ‘theological order’, is not therefore the mysterious intradivine procession itself but the form of it that is accessible to a human being. In its true meaning, therefore, theology does not relate to atemporal truths themselves but to their historical revelation. Furthermore, when Gregory speaks about the ‘shakings of the earth’ in the history of salvation through the making of the Old and New Covenants (and another ‘shaking of the earth’ meaning the end of history), here neither is it about the historical revelation of atemporally valid contents but rather about a fundamental change in the human situation with its historicity. Thus it is not the truth about God which is being revealed – the way he Himself is, outside of time – but the truth about his relationship 33   Or.  28, 4 (SC, 250, p. 108): φράσαι μὲν ἀδύνατον, ὡς ὁ ἐμὸς λόγος, νοῆσαι δὲ ἀδυνατώτερον. On the ‘ungraspability’ of the godhead by human thought, see also Or. 28, 11 (SC, 250, p. 122). 34  Or. 38, 7 (SC, 358, p. 116): τοῦτο πάντη καταληπτὸν αὐτοῦ μόνον, ἡ ἀπειρία. 35  Or. 31, 8 (SC, 250, p. 290). Τίς οὖν ἡ ἐκπόρευσις; Εἰπὲ σὺ τὴν ἀγεννησίαν τοῦ Πατρός, κἀγὼ τὴν γέννησιν τοῦ Υἱοῦ φυσιολογήσω, καὶ τὴν ἐκπόρευσιν τοῦ Πνεύματος, καὶ παραπληκτίσομεν ἄμφω εἰς Θεοῦ μυστήρια παρακύπτοντες [Eng. trans. by L. Wickham and F. Williams, Faith, p. 283].

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to mankind, which changes, not only reveals, the human situation (just as Kierkegaard’s ‘God in time’ creates a new situation of truth, which ‘Socrates’, in his time, could not have known in any way at all). 36 According to this third possibility for understanding historicity – which I believe to be the best match for Gregory’s ideas – revelation is historical in the sense that it relates to the historical situation of mankind and is conditioned also by its knowledge. So it is not just atemporal truth – or atemporal truth revealing itself gradually to people over time – but a process in which we co-act, rather than one we create ourselves. In the story of Christ, the Christian God gives himself into human hands (or into history) in the sense that also man creates this story, but without being able, by himself, to guarantee (or completely destroy) its meaning. The historicity of revelation is not then about an atemporal truth revealing itself in time, but a relation of God, who is ‘above’ time, to mankind in its history. This is why this truth has an atemporal basis, without being atemporal, and why it is also historical, but without being identical to history.

Bibliography 1. Ancient authors Gregorius Nazianzenus, Orationes, 27-31 – ed. P. Gallay (SC, 250), Paris, 1978. Gregorius Nazianzenus, Orationes, 38-41 – ed. C. Moreschini (SC, 358), Paris, 1990. Plato, Phaedo – ed. J. Burnet (Platonis opera, II), Oxford, 1900 (reprint 1967). Plato, Timaeus – ed. J. Burnet (Platonis opera, IV), Oxford,  1902 (reprint 1968). 36  ‘God in time’ is, according to Kierkegaard, a teacher who only ‘in time’ creates the conditions for knowledge of the truth (S. Kierkegaard, Philosophische Brocken (Werke, V), Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1964, p. 101). It is therefore neither ‘historical fact’ nor ‘eternal fact’, but ‘absolute fact’ (ibid., p. 90-91), that is, a paradox in which the eternal becomes historical and the historical becomes eternal (ibid., p. 57): God becomes historical (ibid., p. 80) due to his concern for the historical (ibid., p. 99).

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2. Literature C. A.  Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God: In Your Light We Shall See Light, Oxford, 2008. W. Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte, in Gesammelte Schriften, I/2 – ed. R. Tiedemann, H. Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt a. M., 1991. E. Fleury, Hellénisme et christianisme: Saint Grégoire de Nazianze et son temps, Paris, 1930. E. Husserl, ‘Die Frage nach dem Ursprung der Geometrie als intentionalhistorisches Problem’, in Id., Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (Husserliana, VI), Haag, 1954, p. 365-386. H. Jonas, Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz. Eine jüdische Stimme, Frankfurt a. M., 1987. H. Jonas, Zwischen Nichts und Ewigkeit. Drei Aufsätze zur Lehre vom Menschen, Göttingen, 1963. L. Karfíková, ‘Ad Ablabium, Quod non sint tres dei’, in Gregory of Nyssa: The Minor Treatises on Trinitarian Theology and Apollinarism. Proceedings of the 11th International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa, Tübingen, 17-20 September 2008 – ed. V. H. Drecoll, M. Berghaus, Leiden, 2011, p. 131-168. S. Kierkegaard, Philosophische Brocken (Werke, V), Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1964. W. Kinzig, Novitas Christiana. Die Idee des Fortschritts in der Alten Kirche bis Eusebius, Göttingen, 1994. K. Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History, Chicago, 1949. K. Löwith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche (Sämtliche Schriften, IV), Stuttgart, 1988, p. 1-490. K. Löwith, ‘Wahrheit und Geschichtlichkeit’, in Sämtliche Schriften, 9 vols., Stuttgart, 1983, II, p. 460-472. E. P.  Meijering, God Being History: Studies in Patristic Philosophy, Amsterdam, Oxford, 1975. F. W.  Norris, Faith Gives Fullness to Reasoning: The Five Theological Orations of Gregory Nazianzen, Leiden, 1991. F. W.  Norris, ‘Gregory’s Opponents in Oration 31’, in Arianism: Historical and Theological Reassessments. Papers from the Ninth International Conference on Patristic Studies, 5-10 September 1983, Oxford – ed. R. C. Gregg, (Patristic Monograph Series, 11), Cambridge, MA, 1985, p. 321-326.

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J. Patocˇka, Ketzerische Essays zur Philosophie der Geschichte, Frankfurt a. M., 2007. J. Plagnieux Saint Grégoire de Nazianze théologien, Paris, 1952. P. Ricœur, Histoire et vérité, Paris, 1955. P. Ricœur, ‘Le Christianisme et le sens de l’histoire’, in Id., Histoire et vérité, p. 80-102. P. Ricœur, ‘ L’Histoire de la philosophie et l’unité du vrai’, in Id., Histoire et vérité, p. 53-73. R. Ricœur, ‘Objectivité et subjectivité en histoire’, in Id., Histoire et vérité, p. 25-52. F. Trisoglio, San Gregorio di Nazianzo: Un contemporaneo vissuto sedici secoli fa – ed. R. L. Guidi, D. Petti, Cantalupa, 2008. H. E. W. Turner, The Pattern of Christian Truth: A Study in Relations between Orthodoxy and Heresy in the Early Church, London, 1954. D. F. Winslow,  The Dynamics of Salvation: A Study in Gregory of Nazianzus, Cambridge, MA, 1979.

Abstract The revelation of God in the story of Christ establishes a pattern of revelation that is both historical and contingent (that is, it could have happened otherwise). The historical and contingent but nonetheless binding character of this revelation is echoed in the development of Christian doctrine. In his famous pneumatological oration (Or. 31, 25-27), Gregory Nazianzen describes how God’s pedagogy involves progressive revelation, which includes the historical nature of the theological knowledge attained through the gradual recognition of the deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. This type of historicity does not mean the increasing manifestation of an atemporal truth or of a God who is himself becoming history. Rather, the progressive revelation applies both to God’s atemporal Trinity and to human historical cognition and reception. It thus implies truth which is at one and the same time atemporal and historical, since it changes the historical situation of human beings.

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FORMATION FROM THE FATHERS: THE PLACE OF PATRISTICS IN THE THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION OF CLERGY

1. The nature and purpose of theological education of the clergy Until relatively recently the study of theology in many universities was the preserve of those preparing for ministry within the churches. Today it is more common to see vocational and academic training courses running in parallel, with separate core curricula and modes of assessment. Third-level institutions now tend to recognize the need for different patterns of theological education for those studying theology, primarily within the academy, and those studying within the seminary with the intention of serving as ministers within their various churches. Those whose vocation is towards academic theology typically undertake extensive training in the forensic investigation of the culture, history, texts, and beliefs of the tradition they study, while those with a ministerial vocation study these aspects to a less rigorous level, concentrating instead on the integration of the theological disciplines with pastoral and formational studies. Since their purpose will be to utilize theological insights within pastoral situations, it seems appropriate that their primary attention is directed to the professional competencies, which their ministry will demand of them. It is likewise appropriate that the training of academic theologians adequately equip them for the expectations of the academy. This division, which has lately emerged within theological education, is not novel and, perhaps, reflects trends in the Early Church. When one considers the portrayal of teaching offices in the writings of the first and second centuries it is possible to discern two separate roles; there were 10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107528

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the didaskoli, such as the authors of the Epistle of Barnabas and the Letter to Diognetus, who operated in a similar capacity to modern professional theologians of the academy. 1 These teachers were entrusted with the instruction of catechumens and of teaching the faith to those outside of it. A separate role was fulfilled by the bishops who offered instruction to the community gathered in worship for those within the faith. The two teaching offices represented two sides of the same coin, each addressing a different audience. In recognising that practitioners of theological research and practitioners of Christian ministry each require formation in the theological disciplines, albeit with different educational needs, theological educators have, in a sense, reappropriated a basic model of the teaching offices of the Early Church. The question that this paper shall explore, then, is to what extent should patristic studies feature on the curricula of those preparing for Christian ministry? Before delving into this question it is pertinent to begin by exploring the relative status of patristic studies in formational curricula. When one investigates this question it becomes apparent quickly that in many denominations, there is a discrepancy between their theoretical emphasising of the importance of patristics in their ecclesial pronouncements on theological education, and the practical outworking in their limited place in the curriculum. The first section of this paper, therefore, will explore the theoretical place that patristic occupies in clerical formation, while the second section will offer a statistical treatment that contextualizes the theory against practice. In its various decrees on the training of its clergy, the Roman Catholic Church has consistently emphasized the importance of a thorough grounding in patristic studies for the formation of its clergy. Canon 252 of the Code of Canon Law establishes that ‘sacred tradition’ is the lens through which ‘dogmatic theology’ ought to be studied. 2 The historical development of theology is thus endowed with a numinous quality

1 J. Meyendorff, ‘Theological Education in the Patristic and Byzantine Eras’, St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 31 (1987), p. 200-201. 2 Code of Canon Law, 252 § 3, The Code of Canon Law: Latin-English Edition, Washington, D.C., 1983, p. 87.

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as the vehicle through which revelation is comprehended. In an effort to further accentuate the place of patristics within priestly formation, the Congregation for Catholic Education, which oversees theological formation for the Roman Catholic Church, issued a decree in 1989 entitled: Instruction on the Study of the Fathers of the Church in the Formation of Priests. The document is both an impassioned plea for further study of the Fathers and also a pragmatic suggestion for how this can be realized. It expresses its distress at the emergence of theological concepts that ‘pay little attention to the Fathers’ witness and ecclesiastical tradition’. 3 It laments that in many seminaries, ‘the study of the Fathers is reduced to a minimum,’ and diagnoses the cause of this pathology as a trend that seeks ‘an overall rejection of the past.’ The result is a body of theologians who operate outside of the continuity of tradition and who ‘[...] think they are doing theology but are really only doing history, sociology, etc.’ The instruction asserts that since the Fathers are the superlative example of the continuity of church teaching, which Catholic ministers will contribute to expressing, it is consequently foundational to formation: ‘a closer approach to the Fathers can therefore be considered the most effective means of discovering the vital strength of theological formation’. 4 In an effort to incorporate the instruction into their guidelines for formation, the USA Conference of Catholic Bishops has underlined the importance of patristics in the curriculum. For the bishops, the Fathers’ natural and instinctual integration of spirituality with theology establishes them as a logical foundation for a curriculum that aims to be both historical-critical in approach, yet spiritually edifying its outcome. Accordingly, they stated: Patristic studies constitute an essential part of theological studies. Theology should draw from the works of the Fathers of the Church that have lasting value within the

3 Congregation for Catholic Education, ‘Instruction on the Study of the Fathers of the Church in the Formation of Priests’, Origins, 19:34 (1990), p. 552. 4  ‘Instruction on the Study of the Fathers of the Church in the Formation of Priests’, p. 551.

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living tradition of the Church. The core should include patrology (an overview of the life and writings of the Fathers of the Church) and patristics (an overview of the theological thought of the Fathers of the Church). 5

Such privileging of the Fathers is not unique to Roman Catholicism. In 2003 the Anglican Communion established an office for Theological Education in the Anglican Communion (T.E.A.C.). The office has concentrated on developing resources to assist in theological education and formation across the Communion. One of the resources developed by the office has emphasized the need to train ministers of every order in the ‘Anglican Way’, which is rooted in the integration of scripture, reason and tradition as the primary sources for theological reflection. The engagement with history is foundational to the Anglican method of theology; it mediates ‘the voice of the living God in the Holy Scriptures’ and so Scripture must be read with ‘a grateful and critical sense of the past’. 6 What emerges from the Anglican and Roman Catholic conversations on theological education is the necessity of integrating the study of Christian history and doctrine with human experience, which in a sense, endows tradition with a trans-temporal mystical quality. The emphasis on the integration of academic with professional competencies is paramount in the accreditation standards of Association of Theological Schools in the United States and Canada (A.T.S.). This network of 270 seminaries from across the spectrum of the Christian traditions has outlined four key competencies that underpin the Master of Divinity (M.Div.) professional degree, which represents the typical training route for ministerial theology in North America. The first competency is religious heritage, encompassing study in Scripture, the doctrine and history of the particular faith community and general studies in Christian history and heritage. The second competency is cultural studies and covers topics in contemporary sociocultural issues as well as global and cross-cultural issues relevant to understanding communities of faith. The third competency 5 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Program of Priestly Formation – 5th edition, Washington, D.C., 2006, § 200-201, p. 70. 6  The Anglican Way: Signposts on a Common Journey, Singapore, 2007, § 1.

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is personal and spiritual formation, including the cultivation of skills necessary for operating in a ministry capacity. The fourth concerns ministry and leadership. 7 Although the curricular priorities concern the practical and pastoral competencies, two of the ten named core subject areas articulated by the A.T.S. are concerned with history and Christian tradition. The overarching objective of the M.Div., however, is to enable the graduate to naturally integrate each of these competencies in their ministerial practice. 8 It follows then, that across the Christian denominations there is an emphasis on the need for the minister to integrate theory and practice in order to balance the content of the faith tradition with the context of belief. In each of the traditions explored here, there is, an appreciation of the importance of history, and in some cases especially patristics, as an essential component of the formational curriculum. Yet it must be questioned whether the methods of teaching patristics in seminaries are genuinely contributing to an appreciation of the relevance of the Fathers for Christian ministry. Reflecting on many years of study and teaching in several seminaries and universities, George Bebis has commented that patristic courses are typically ‘the most difficult, unpopular, uncreative [... and] not very inspiring.’ 9 The method of teaching tends to focus on sterile details, memorizing names and dates, rather than considering the practical application of the Fathers’ mindsets to issues of Christian discipleship. What, then, is the state of patristics within the seminary?

2. The Professionalization of the Clergy and the Relegation of Patristics Clergy are coming under increasing pressure to conform to the standards expected of other professionals working in cognate occupations. In many countries and denominations the clergy are expected to adhere to codes of conduct relating to data   Association of Theological Schools Handbook of Accreditation, Section 8, p. 6.   Association of Theological Schools Handbook of Accreditation, Section 8, p. 8. 9  G. Bebis, ‘Teaching Patristics on the Parish Level’, Greek Orthodox Theological Review, 48 (2003), p. 233-234. 7 8

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protection, confidentiality, and employment legislation, while models of best practice derived from management science have contributed to the emergence of a professionalized clergy. According to Michael Kane, codes of conduct introduced in the United States have been based on similar codes in operation for mental health professionals, therefore the clergy are operating to approximate standards as mental health professionals. 10 This professionalizing trend is reflected in the evolution of the curricula of ministerial formation programmes, and has had a detrimental effect on the place of patristics in the syllabi. The evolution of the formational curriculum at Trinity College Dublin is a case study that illustrates this trend. At its foundation in 1592, one of Trinity College’s principal functions was the training of clergy within the Anglican tradition in an effort to spread the English Reformation to Ireland. The training of clergy was regularized in 1833 when the ‘Divinity Testimonium’ qualification was re-constituted as the standard of ministerial formation. 11 At that time ministerial formation was regarded as one of the university’s ‘professional schools’ alongside medicine, engineering or law. 12 Students enrolled in a general course of instruction in the liberal arts lasting two years, and thereafter commenced two years of additional specialised training in theology for which they would earn the professional qualification. In the first year of the Testimonium the emphasis was on providing a thorough grounding in the theological disciplines. Lecture courses were offered on the development of heresies and orthodoxy, while more in-depth courses focused on Augustine and other key patristic theologians. 13 Additional instruction was offered in biblical studies and doctrine, but over the two years students devoted broadly one third of their studies each

  M. N.  Kane, ‘Codes of Conduct for Catholic Clergy in the United States: the Professionalization of the Priesthood’, Mental Health, Religion and Culture, 9 (2006), p. 371. 11  J. V.  Luce, ‘The Church of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin, 15921992’, Search: a Church of Ireland Journal, 15 (1992), p. 12. J. Bartlett, ‘From divinity to theology in four centuries’, in Trinity College Dublin & the Idea of a University – ed. C. H. Holland, Dublin, 1991, p. 226. 12  Trinity College Dublin Calendar 1880, Dublin, 1880, p. 31. 13  Trinity College Dublin Calendar 1880, p. 133. 10

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to biblical studies, theological studies and history, reflecting the Anglican triad of Scripture, reason, and tradition. It is notable that although the Testimonium was a professional qualification, no tuition was offered in professional studies. Instead the integration of academic with the experiential was expected to be learned on-the-job during a curacy. As regards the historical studies syllabus, the extant book lists and lecture tables indicate the emphasis was bifocal, concentrating on patristic and reformation history. 14 This pattern continued without significant change, other than to the prescribed textbooks, until the 1930s. Around this time it is possible to discern an increased interest in church history as the means for teaching doctrine. 15 A substantial change to the curriculum is obvious from the 1950s when a preliminary year was introduced to give a foundation, not in history, but in biblical studies, biblical languages, philosophy, and psychology prior to entering into the Testimonium. 16 The introduction of psychology to the curriculum constitutes the first hint of the emergence of professional studies during the training for ministry. One third of the curriculum was devoted to these professional studies, which had the effect of reducing the space available to teach the biblical, theological, and historical strands. By the 1970s the teaching of theology at Trinity had been radically transformed. 17 By 1986 in response to the emerging gulf between academic and pastoral theology, a separate undergraduate honours Bachelor of Arts degree facilitated the former, while the new ordinary Bachelor of Theology degree addressed the needs of the latter. 18 Although historical studies remained a crucial aspect of the speculative degree, biblical studies became the overarching concern of the formational degree. Biblical studies occupied 55% of the curriculum, the remainder being split equally between professional, historical and theological studies. The same general divisions continued until the most recent modification of the cur14  R. B.  McDowell, D. A. Webb, Trinity College Dublin, 1592-1952: An Academic History, Cambridge, 1982, p. 163-164. 15   Trinity College Dublin Calendar 1931, Dublin, 1931, p. 222. 16  Trinity College Dublin Calendar 1950, Dublin, 1950, p. 280. 17 Luce, ‘The Church of Ireland and Trinity College’, p. 14. See also Trinity College Dublin Calendar 1970, Dublin, 1970, p. 192. 18 Bartlett, ‘From divinity to theology’, p. 233.

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riculum in 2009. 19 The recently revised curriculum emphasizes the professional aspect of training. It is offered at Masters’ level akin to the North American M.Div. degree. Within this revised curriculum there is no compulsory instruction in Christian history, instead some two thirds are devoted to professional studies, while the remaining one third is equally distributed between theological studies and biblical studies. When one considers how the curriculum has evolved over time it is apparent that the balanced attention to theology, biblical studies, and history that existed from the 1830s until the 1930s, has been offset in the recent developments that have allowed professional studies to supplant historical studies to the detriment of instruction in patristics. Although the Trinity College example is a single snapshot, a comparative study of twenty-four theological colleges and seminaries from across the British Isles and the USA reveals some common trends in the level of attention devoted to Christian history in general, and patristic studies in particular. The curricula that have been analysed for this micro-study are taken from Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Orthodox seminaries. The table below illustrates the relative weight of professional, biblical, theological, and historical studies in the core curricula: 43.7% 21.3% 21.7% 13.3%

Professional Studies Biblical Studies Theological Studies Historical Studies Fig. 1. Distribution of Core Curriculum

Although biblical and theological studies receive equal attention, historical studies are relegated to substantially lower position. This differs, of course, between institutions and between denominations. The table below illustrates the relative emphases in each denomination:

  Trinity College Dublin Calendar 1990, Dublin, 1990, p. K 14.

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Professional Studies

Biblical Studies

Theological Studies

Historical Studies

38.5% 52.6% 35.4% 41.7% 39.5% 51.1%

18.7% 21.8% 27.0% 24.6% 20.4% 17.1%

32.2% 16.0% 25.2% 16.9% 30.8% 13.4%

10.6%  9.6% 12.4% 16.8%  9.3% 18.3%

Roman Catholic Anglican Methodist Presbyterian Baptist Orthodox

Fig. 2. Distribution of Core Curriculum by Denomination

It is clear that in all cases professional studies are given the highest priority and never dropping below 35% of the curriculum. Biblical, historical, and theological studies vary substantially between the various denominations which tend to emphasize according to their respective ecclesial traditions. The Orthodox seminaries are the only seminaries that devote greater attention to historical studies (18.3%) than to biblical (17.2%) or theological studies (13.4%); in all other denominations historical studies are equal to or less than the attention offered to other strands. Although historical studies generally occupy less of the curriculum, it is encouraging to see that patristic studies tend to be wellrepresented in this element of the curriculum: Roman Catholic Anglican Methodist Presbyterian Baptist Orthodox

30.0% 20.0% 64.3% 29.2% 32.1% 52.2%

Fig. 3. Patristic Studies as a percentage of the Historical Studies Curriculum

It remains the case, however, that patristics is generally a minor aspect of most curricula, in spite of the high praise given to the discipline in many official church documents about theological education. This reflects a broader disinterest in historical studies as it relates to ministerial formation. The information presented here lends further weight to Bebis’s concern that the value of patristics in theological education has been missed and that it exists more as box to be ticked than as being of genuine 413

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relevance for the professional clergyperson. It can be reasonably suggested, therefore, that as the curricula for ministerial formation have become more professionalized, the level of attention afforded to historical studies in general, and consequently patristic studies has declined.

3. Patristics and the Integrative Curriculum At the start of this paper it was argued that the content of both academic and ministerial theological courses is rightly determined by the end-objective of the training. The question that remains, therefore, is whether, in light of the professionalization of clerical formation, it is reasonable to expect patristic studies to have more than a minor place in the seminary? The remainder of this paper will be devoted to advancing an argument for seminaries to give greater attention to the Fathers. It has been noted that the common objective in the theological education of clergy is the formation of reflective practitioners through developing the capacity to integrate the various competencies of ministry, namely professional, theological and personal. Judith Thompson describes this objective of engaging theology with ‘thinking, praying, living, recording, and sharing.’ 20 It asks ministerial students to perform ‘the feats of intellectual and practical integration,’ which is no easy task. 21 In an effort to assess whether the curricula were achieving their purpose, Jane Leach carried out a study of the ministerial formation programmes of the University of Cambridge’s Theological Federation, which includes eleven seminaries from five denominations. Leach’s study evaluated the models of assessment of learning. Assessment in the federation is primarily through the compilation of a pastoral portfolio and viva voce examination, through which the candidate is afforded the opportunity to demonstrate their integration of academic, pastoral and personal formation. 22 20  J. Thompson, S. Pattison, R. Thompson, SCM Study guide to Theological Reflection, London, 2008, p. 126. 21  E. L.  Graham, H. Walton, F. Ward, Theological Reflection: Sources, London, 2007, p. 5. 22   J. Leach, ‘The End of Theological Education: An Analysis of the Contribution of Portfolio Learning to Formation in Ministry within a University Context’, Journal of Adult Theological Education, 7.2 (2010), p. 199.

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In her study of these assessments Leach noted that theology is generally understood by students methodologically, that is, as a step to be worked through in the resolution of a particular pastoral question. The conception of theology as method, rather than content, is manifested in students’ general failure to engage with the literature of theology, and to locate their reflections within that framework. Leach concedes that this is more than likely caused by the teachers’ preference for teaching theological reflection as a process rather than as content. It follows, therefore, that students were not exhibiting the desired integration of disciplines and competencies which the curriculum had anticipated. Reflecting on these types of deficiencies John Paver has noted that curricula tend to emphasize systematic theology as the vehicle for integration, which is corroborated by the study undertaken for this paper where systematics received the highest attention amongst the theological disciplines. Paver stresses that there is a need to engender a ‘healthy respect for each of the theological disciplines.’ 23 Three initial conclusions can be advanced at this point: first, theological education seeks to integrate the biblical, theological, and historical resources of Christian theology. Second, many curricula are failing to achieve the intended degree of integration. Third, patristic studies occupies on average 5.09% of the overall curriculum. The remaining question, therefore, is could a stronger footing in patristics help to advance desired goal of integration? While it is impossible to synthesize the entire theology of the Fathers, at least two central doctrines that continue to inform pastoral practice are discernable in the corpus of their writings. The theocentric nature of man described by Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Palamas, and Athanasius of Alexandria contributed to the emergence of a creation theology that recognizes the place of humanity in the economy of salvation. 24 This acts a corrective to individualism and contributes to building awareness of Christian community. Alongside this fundamental doctrine is the emergence of Trinitarianism, a doctrine which essen  J. E.  Paver, Theological Reflection and Education for Ministry: the Search for Integration in Theology, Hampshire, 2006, p. 145. 24  Meyendorff, ‘Theological Education in the Patristic and Byzantine Eras’, p. 205. 23

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tially relational. 25 Together they contribute to a theology and anthropology which is rooted in relationally: life in God is an interpersonal relationship. 26 Theology in the Fathers is lived: it is thought, prayed, recorded, and shared. Theology is essentially a communion of the individual, the institutional, and the ineffable. Although the fathers have a speculative or philosophical element, they are rooted in spirituality, that is, in constant dialogue with the speculative. With the emergence of medieval scholasticism and its crowning in Enlightenment rationalism, practical theology has lost an element of its mystical combination of head and heart together, and become an act of either head before heart, or head after heart. While certain patristic schools perhaps contributed to this model, others challenged it. Certainly, the scholastic monopolisation of theology runs contrary to the patristic synthesis of head and heart. The model of communion-ism that shows how knowledge of God does not consist in knowing about God conceptually, but in a real communion with God, constitutes a challenge to scholastic rigidity. The method of theological reflection inherent in the Fathers thus embodies precisely the kind of reflective practitioners that theological educators are seeking to form. A second patristic contribution to ministerial formation is in the lessons they offer for the complexities of the contemporary pastoral situation. A striking element of patristic theology is the constant recourse to Scripture. Many of the first works of Christian theology were born out of the exegetical endeavours of the Fathers, who sought to interpret Scripture’s message for a post-biblical age. In the pursuit of this, the Fathers recognized the need to engage with non-theological schools. Much of patristic thought wrestles with balancing the distinctiveness of Christianity with the trends of contemporary culture. Surely this challenge is one of the greatest facing the churches of the twenty-first century. In responding to these challenges, the Father’s

25  P. S. Fiddes, Participating in God: a Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity, London, 2000. 26 Meyendorff, ‘Theological Education in the Patristic and Byzantine Eras’, p. 210.

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blended spirituality and rationality, which gave rise to an apologetic flavour in their writings. Together their defences and apologies tell the story of conflict in ecclesiological, Christological, and Trinitarian matters. But behind the conflict lies a pastoral context that sought to respond to inquiries, offer teaching, and give spiritual guidance in the midst of uncertainty. These tools of Scripture, culture, and apologetics are essential for the modern minister’s toolbox. A third contribution is how the awareness of the diversity of tradition can advance the ecumenical project. As witnesses to the development of tradition, the Fathers illustrate the gradual and sequential evolution of Christian theology as it engaged with surrounding cultures and contexts. For example, they wrote in Greek, Latin, and Syriac, responding to the cultures in which they operated. The study of the Fathers illustrates the simultaneous operation of diverse spiritual, disciplinary, exegetical, and theological systems. 27 The plurality of the Early Church in terms of liturgy, language, and law illustrates that tradition is not monolithic, and that amidst the diversity lies the unity of a common basic faith. Perhaps the study of the Fathers can contribute to the ecumenical movement’s conversation on what is essential and what counts as adiaphora? The Fathers’ witness to an evolving tradition helps to locate ministers as links in that chain of teaching, perhaps, empowering them to be open to innovation as they seek to adapt the essential message for future contexts. This paper began with an assessment of the place patristic and historical studies holds in a number of different Christian denominations. Through a study of seminary curricula it was observed that the privileged position theoretically afforded historical and patristic studies is not reflected in the formational syllabi. The final section constituted an argument for the relevance of patristic studies in the formation of the clergy. It was suggested that patristics are particularly useful in understanding the development of tradition and in framing the challenges of pastoral ministry. It was argued that the Fathers’ composite approach to theology is essentially pastoral, and consequently there is 27  ‘Instruction on the Study of the Fathers of the Church in the Formation of Priests’, p. 544.

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a natural equivalence of context between the Fathers and the ministers-in-formation. Finally, it has been argued that theological education seeks to integrate personal, theological, and professional competencies, and that in many cases it is failing to achieve the intended outcome. Since the Fathers naturally demonstrate the integration envisaged by theological education it seems reasonable to suggest that they should occupy more a central place in the formation of clergy.

Bibliography Secondary literature The Anglican Way: Signposts on a Common Journey, Singapore, 2007. Association of Theological Schools Handbook of Accreditation, Pennsylvania, 2013. J. Bartlett, ‘From Divinity to Theology in four centuries’, in Trinity College Dublin & the Idea of a University – ed. C. H. Holland, Dublin, 1991. G. Bebis, ‘Teaching Patristics on the Parish Level’, Greek Orthodox Theological Review, 48 (2003), p. 233-240. Code of Canon Law, 252 § 3, The Code of Canon Law: Latin-English Edition, Washington, D.C., 1983. Congregation for Catholic Education, ‘Instruction on the Study of the Fathers of the Church in the Formation of Priests’, Origins, 19:34 (1990), p. 549-561. P. S.  Fiddes, Participating in God: a Pastoral Doctrine of the Trinity, London, 2000. E. L. Graham, H. Walton, F. Ward – ed. Theological Reflection: sources, London, 2007. M. N.  Kane, ‘Codes of Conduct for Catholic Clergy in the United States: The Professionalization of the Priesthood’, Mental Health, Religion and Culture, 9 (2006), p. 355-377. J. Leach, ‘The End of Theological Education: An Analysis of the Contribution of Portfolio Learning to Formation in Ministry within a University Context’, Journal of Adult Theological Education, 7.2 (2010), p. 117-204. J. V.  Luce, ‘The Church of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin, 1592-1992’, Search: a Church of Ireland Journal, 15 (1992), p. 9-17.

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R. B.  McDowell, D. A.  Webb, Trinity College Dublin 1592-1952: An Academic History, Cambridge, 1982. J. Meyendorff, ‘Theological Education in the Patristic and Byzantine Eras’, St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 31 (1987), p. 197-213. J. E.  Paver, Theological Reflection and Education for Ministry: The Search for Integration in Theology, Hampshire, 2006. J. Thompson, S. Pattison, R. Thompson, SCM [= Student Christian Movement] Study Guide to Theological Reflection, London, 2008. Trinity College Dublin Calendar 1880, Dublin, 1880. Trinity College Dublin Calendar 1931, Dublin, 1931. Trinity College Dublin Calendar 1950, Dublin, 1950. Trinity College Dublin Calendar 1970, Dublin, 1970. Trinity College Dublin Calendar 1990, Dublin, 1990. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Program of Priestly Formation – 5th edition, Washington, D.C., 2006.

Abstract This paper begins with an exploration of the place of patristic studies in the theological education of clergy in several Christian denominations. It then offers a summary of a study of seminary curricula that attempted to ascertain the relative status of patristic and historical studies vis-à-vis other theological disciplines. Noting that patristic studies occupy a relatively small amount of the core curriculum an argument is advanced for the relevance of patristics for pastoral theology. The paper argues that the study of the Fathers is particularly relevant to the objectives of theological education, namely the formation of reflective practitioners that capably integrate personal, theological and professional competencies.

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REUVEN KIPERWASSER AND SERGE RUZER The Open University of Israel – The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

SYRIAC CHRISTIANS AND BABYLONIAN JEWRY: NARRATIVES AND IDENTITY SHAPING IN A MULTI-RELIGIOUS SETTING *

The research of last few decades has elaborated on the possibility of actual or indirect links between Babylonian Jewry of the Talmudic period and contemporaneous Syriac Christianity, with the geographical and cultural affinity, that is, the shared Aramaic (Syriac) language, strongly suggesting the probability of such links. 1 For example, the possibility of the influence of Jewish exegetical trends on Syriac Old Testament exegesis has been repeatedly discussed. 2 In the Sasanian Empire, Jews and (Syriac - speaking) Christians also shared the status of a religious minority, which makes the comparative analysis of their iden-

* This research was supported by The Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 1344/12). 1   For discussion of the existing appraisals of these links, from actual influence all the way to the Zeitgeist, see A. Becker, ‘The Comparative Study of “Scholasticism” in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Rabbis and East Syrians’, AJS Review, 34.1 (2010), p. 91-113. 2   See, for example, T. Kronholm, Motifs from Genesis 1-11 in the Genuine Hymns of Ephrem the Syrian with Particular Reference to the Influence of Jewish Exegetical Tradition, Lund, 1978; S. Brock, ‘Jewish Traditions in Syriac Sources’, Journal of Jewish Studies, 30 (1979), p. 212-232; G. Stemberger, ‘Contacts between Christian and Jewish Exegesis in the Roman Empire’, in Hebrew Bible / Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, vol. I/1 – ed. M. Sæbø, Göttingen, 1996, p. 583-585; N. Koltun-Fromm, ‘Aphrahat and the Rabbis on Noah’s Righteousness in Light of Jewish-Christian Polemic’, in The Book of Genesis in Jewish and Oriental Christian Interpretations – ed. J. Frishman, L. Van Rompay, Louvain, 1997, p. 57-72; S. Ruzer, A. Kofsky, Syriac Idiosyncrasies: Theology and Hermeneutics in Early Syriac Literature, Leiden, 2010, p. 30-31, 43-48, 50, 56-59, 97-107; E. Narinskaya, Ephrem, a ‘Jewish Sage’: A Comparison of the Exegetical Writings of St. Ephrem the Syrian and Jewish Traditions, Turnhout, 2010. 10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107529

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tity-shaping strategies particularly promising. 3 We will discuss here some test cases important for a better appraisal of the strategies and literary patterns characteristic of patristic and rabbinic discourse – a discussion that will highlight the reciprocal relationship between Syriac patristic and Jewish studies. We will also try to chart some new avenues of investigation, namely, arguing that such a comparative analysis can lead to the unearthing of literary topoi of broader circulation – originally neither Jewish nor Christian – perused by both Christian and Jewish traditions deriving from the region in question. 4 Our study relates to two examples of the comparative reading of rabbinic and Christian narratives, which on the Christian side both come from the Life of Iˉˇsoˉ‛sabran, penned in Syriac by the Catholicos Iˉˇsoˉ‛yahb III in the early seventh century (620 C.E.). This is a composition of which the Syriac text has somehow not received the scholarly attention we believe it deserves. 5 Though ostensibly referring to events that took place a few decades earlier, the treatise may also have been reacting to the new realities of the Muslim conquest and the demise of Zoroastrian rule. 6 Its major point of reference, however, remains proto-Muslim, as Iˉˇsoˉ‛sabran’s Vita focuses on its protagonist’s conversion to Christianity from Zoroastrianism, with him becoming an outstanding ascetic who would later master Christian Scripture, thus acquiring ‘an invincible armor of the Holy Scriptures’ spiritual iron’ that would enable him to prevail in the agon of martyrdom. 7

3  See R. Kiperwasser, S. Ruzer, ‘Zoroastrian Proselytes in Rabbinic and Syriac Christian Narratives: Orality-Related Markers of Cultural Identity’, History of Religions, 51.3 (2012), p. 497-218. 4   The research presented here is part of an ongoing project: ‘Boundaries and Paradigms of Interaction: Constructing Christian and Jewish GroupIdentity in Late Antique Syria-Mesopotamia’, conducted under the auspices of the Israeli Science Foundation, of which Aryeh Kofsky is also a principal investigator. 5   M. J.-B.  Chabot, ‘Histoire de Jésus-Sabran, écrite par Jésus-Yab d’Adiabène’, Archives des missions scientifiques et littèraires, 7 (1897), p. 503-584; preface and French abstract, p. 485-502. 6  As suggested by G. Herman (personal communication). 7  Fol. 195b, Chabot, p. 524.

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1. Travel hazards The first narrative unit to be discussed occurs in the Vita following Iˉˇsoˉ‛sabran’s departure from his native city on the way to his solitary retreat in the wilderness: One day, when I was staying under that rock, I overheard something that sounded like a conversation among many men who were saying to one another: Let’s make this rock fall on him and destroy him. And they cried all together with a strong voice like manual workers do: Now, all of you together! 8 And lo, a crack of the rock breaking down was heard and it was slightly displaced and was already falling upon me. But in the end all their scheme [thanks to God’s grace] came to nothing. 9

The episode is flanked by descriptions of a series of demonic appearances harassing Iˉˇsoˉ‛sabran during his sojourn in the wilderness. The context, thus, indicates that what our protagonist overhears in his half-sleep while resting in the shade of the menacing rock is a conversation of evil demons. One of them casually suggests pushing the rock onto the head of Iˉˇsoˉ‛sabran; the rock starts moving, but in the final account the plot to hurt the holy man, who is destined for a great future, comes to nothing. 10 In the tractate Ta’anit 21a of Babylonian Talmud, the narrator puts two pious rabbinic travelers from the third century in a similar situation of a close escape from imminent danger: 11 Ilfa and R. Yohanan were in extreme need. They said: ‘Let us rise, go and busy ourselves with commerce (‫עסקא‬ ‫ )נעביד‬and let us fulfill in ourselves (the verse): “There shall   One notes the use of what seems to be an idiomatic expression borrowed from an oral Aramaic-speaking culture (ha shwat ha), to which our pedestrian translation hardly does justice.  9  Fol. 197a-b, Chabot, p. 528-529. 10 No concrete explanation is provided, however, except for the general reference to God’s grace. 11  The story was analysed by scholars in the following works: Y. Fraenkel, Studies in the Spiritual World of the Aggadic Narrative, Tel Aviv, 1981, p. 89-91 (in Hebrew); D. Levine, ‘Holy Men and Rabbis in Talmudic Antiquity’, in Saints and Role Models in Judaism and Christianity (  Jewish and Christian Perspectives, 7) – ed. M. Poorthius, J. Schwartz, Leiden, 2004, p. 45-57; C. Licht, Ten Legends of the Sages: The Image of the Sage in Rabbinic Literature, Hoboken N.J., 1991, p. 181-206. 8

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be no needy among you” (Deut. 15, 4)’. Then they went and sat down under the ruins of a certain unsound wall (‫)רעיעא גודא‬. While they were eating bread R. Yohanan overhead one angel saying to another: ‘Come, let us cast it down upon them and kill them, for they are abandoning eternal life and busying themselves with the temporal life’. The other said to him: ‘Leave them be! One of them has a great future before him’.

The story goes on with what may, in fact, be an independent narrative unit: R. Yohanan said to Ilfa, ‘Did the master hear anything’? He said to him: ‘No’. He said [to himself]: ‘This means that I am the one with a great future, I will return and fulfil of myself the verse, “For there will never cease to be needy ones in your land” (Deut. 15, 11)’. By the time Ilfa came back, R. Yohanan was leading the Academy. When Ilfa came, they said to him, ‘Had you sat and studied, would you not be leading’? Ilfa went and suspended himself on the sail of a ship. He said, ‘If anyone asks me a question regarding the baraita of the school of R. Hiyya and the school of R. Oshaya and I do not explain it to him on the basis of our Mishna, I will throw myself from the sail of the ship and drown in the river...’ 12

The famous R. Yohanan b. Napaha and his friend Ilfa – both, like Iˉˇsoˉ‛sabran, at the very beginning of their religious vocation but on the verge of preferring a business career – are described as having an afternoon nap in the shade of ruins. One of them overhears a conversation of two mysterious creatures, 13 one of whom suggests killing both would-be rabbis by pushing onto them the shaky wall of the ruins. His interlocutor, however, cautions against the plot, supporting his reservations by the knowledge that one of the two Torah students is destined for great fame. In addition to the obvious overlap, our stories also contain meaningful differences. Thus unlike Iˉˇsoˉ‛sabran, who is conspired against by evil demons on his way to the glorious agon of religious 12 The English translation is based upon J. L. Rubenstein, Stories of the Babylonian Talmud, Baltimore, 2010, p. 41-42, with the textual version based on MS Oxford 366. 13 Some existing versions specify that these are angels-in-God’s-service (‫)מלאכי השרת‬.

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perfection, the rabbinic protagonists are trying to escape their scholarly destiny and are correspondingly met with the intervention of angels. Instead of the rock of Iˉˇsoˉ‛sabran’s story, the rabbinic narrative features an unsound wall – a typical element of Babylonian storytelling and an outstanding marker of a halakhic issue pertaining to city dwellers. 14 Literary dependence between the rabbinic and Syriac traditions under discussion seems unlikely; one should reasonably see them as developing the source-narrative independently, expressing their different cultural identities. Thus, whereas journey is an important factor in shaping the identity of a Christian ascetic, in rabbinic narrative it is perceived as a distraction from the ideal of incessant Torah study in the frame of a beth-hamidrash. As no explicit polemical markers can be discerned here, we are inclined to believe that the evidence points rather to the two versions’ dependence on an underlying common topos. If we look for an earlier version of the story in the Palestinian Talmud, we will find a prototype to its second part only in the form of a doublet attested in two Talmudic tractates: y. Ketubbot 6:7 [31 a]

y. Qiddushin 1:1 [58 d]

R. Yose said: That section resolved Hilfa’s question. He said: ‘Place me on the bank of river. If I cannot derive the baraitot of R. Hiyya the Great from our Mishnah. throw me into the river’! What did he say? ‘Let the trustee do that with which he was charged’ (m. Ket. 6:7).

Hilfai said: ‘Place me on the bank of a river. If I cannot derive the baraita of R. Hiyya the Great from our Mishna, throw me into the river’. They said to him: ‘Behold, Rabbi Hiyya taught: A sela is four dinars’. He said to them: ‘So too we have learnt in the Mishna [...]’ (m. Baba Metzia 4:5). They said to him: ‘Behold, R. Hiyya taught [...]’ He said to them: ‘So too we have learnt in the Mishna’.

14 See Rubenstein, Stories of the Babylonian Talmud, p. 44 and 54. The wall hazard and the miraculous intervention of the angel appear also in a parallel from a Christian travel story attributed to John Moschus (late sixth – early seventh century). See E. Mioni, ‘Il Pratum Spirituale di Giovanni Mosco: gli episodi inediti del Cod. Marciano greco 11.21’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica, 17 (1951), p. 61-94, tr. - J. Wortley, The Spiritual Meadow by John Moschos: Introduction, Translation and Notes, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1992, p. 220. We are grateful to Hillel Newman for referring us to the parallel in The Spiritual Meadow.

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This Palestinian prototype of the story from the Babylonian Talmud is very short and puzzling, but it was probably important enough for the editors of Palestinian Talmud to record it twice as an exemplary case of a challenge to a scholar. Hilfai offers to demonstrate his proficiency in Oral Torah by equating laws found in the baraitot – tannaitic traditions recorded outside of the Mishnah – of R. Hiyya’s collection with the equivalent teachings in the Mishna itself. So confident is he of his knowledge that he agrees to be thrown into the river if he fails the challenge. He successfully answers five queries pertaining to money issues, achieving exactly what he has promised – a correspondence between a Mishna and a corresponding baraita. This story was transmitted to Babylonia, where the editors of the tractate Ta’anith borrowed its second part, 15 appending it to a newly composed narrative about travel hazards. Remaining faithful to the nature of the scholarly challenge to Hilfai (here named Ilfa), the Babylonian editors reworked the story to accord with their life context. In the original version the hero offers to be thrown into the river – not to jump from a ship’s mast. Taking into account the nature of rivers in Palestine, it is doubtful whether the Palestinian narrator meant to put his protagonist in mortal danger; the narrator probably only wanted to express the humiliation the hero would undergo if tossed into the water as a consequence of his failure to stand up to the challenge. In the Babylonian Talmud’s context, the river is viewed as deep and wide, with ships sailing on it, and correspondingly the protagonist offers in case of failure to jump into it and get drowned. This change could be explained by the general tendency of the Babylonian narrator to embellish the narrative with additional drama, and by his understanding of the phonetically changed name of the protagonist as a pun – “Ilfa” meaning boat in Babylonian Aramaic. What appears in the passage from b. Ta’anith 21a, discussed above is, in fact, a later and significantly transformed version of the story, where Ilfa’s halakhic challenge is secondary to an earlier miraculous travel hazard event. It seems that the Babylonian Jewish storytellers 15 See Rubenstein, Stories of the Babylonian Talmud, p. 48-53. Cfr. inter alia b. Ket. 69b, where it appeared in an almost intact form. 

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constructed their version of the narrative by creating and adding to the halakhic challenge episode – which had reached them from their Palestinian predecessors via b. Ketubbot – the account of R. Yohanan and Ilfa leaving the Academy. By so doing, they filled in the narrative gap, explaining why Ilfa took the challenge upon himself. 16 What provoked Ilfa’s bizarre act? That he simply wished to show off his intellectual prowess is apparently not a satisfactory explanation, especially after transformation of the consequences of failure, from being thrown into the river to jumping from a mast and drowning. The storytellers provide a narrative motivation for Ilfa’s action, constructing a plot from elements that seem to have been of major importance in their Babylonian Jewish culture. The following such typical elements of Babylonian Talmudic storytelling have recently been singled out from our narrative by Jeffry Rubenstein: The sort of action taken when being in extreme need; a typical divine punishment by means of an unsound wall; a propitious foretell that changes the course of the hero’s life; a collision between the eternal life of Torah study and the temporal life of business, etc. 17 We suggest that the existence of an independent Syriac Christian parallel enables one to complement Rubenstein’s analysis, associating the above list of individual motifs with a developed narrative topos of broader circulation – namely, belonging rather originally to a broader cultural tradition than specifically to either a Jewish or a Christian minority milieu. In the hypothetical legendary narrative containing that topos, the protagonist might have been presented at the very beginning of his testing life-journey as being exposed for a fleeting moment to the intervention of angelic/demonic powers and a hint of his future triumph – with a menacing wall as a characteristic marker. In our view, then, this case both demonstrates how the shared motifs are modified in different ways in our two religiously motivated narratives and exemplifies the relevance of a comparative analysis of Syriac patristic and Babylonian rabbinic sources for

 See, Rubenstein, Stories of the Babylonian Talmud, p. 48-53.   Ibid., p. 53.

16 17

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unearthing elements of their broader common late antique cultural backdrop.

2. Converting a Zoroastrian The second narrative unit selected for our discussion relates to an earlier phase in the protagonist’s spiritual journey. Still, Iˉˇsoˉ‛sabran is portrayed here as and already accomplished ascetic, whose command of the Christian tradition is nevertheless drastically limited to merely a knowledge by heart of the Lord’s Prayer, which he recites incessantly. 18 It is at this stage that ‘Iˉˇsoˉ‛sabran decides to hurry down ‘from the solitude of the mountains to the theater of the world ( ‫ ’) ܠܬܐܛܪܘܢ ܕܥܠܡܐ‬in order to study the Holy Scripture, which should serve him as ‘an invincible armor [...] spiritual iron, the one that would not only be catching the arrows (coming) from those who adhere to false worship but would also cause delight to the eyes of contemplation with divine knowledge’. 19 According to our protagonist’s understanding, the knowledge of Scripture will both increase the sublime delight he has already experienced in his mystical exercises and, most important, will enable him to turn with a Christian mission to his former Zoroastrian co-religionists. Iˉˇsoˉ‛sabran approaches a priest who had earlier brought him to embrace Christianity and who, out of love for the ascetic, now gives him as a teacher his own young son. The very start of the study process, however, generates a conflict between the youth, well versed in Scripture, and his grown-up pupil. Iˉˇsoˉ‛sabran asks: ‘What would be right for a person to study first from the Covenant ( ‫ ’?) ܡܢ ܩܝܡܐ‬And the youth replied ̈ ), then that one should first of all learn the letters (‫ܐܬܘܬܐ‬ their (proper) vocalization (‫) ܗܓܝܢܗܝܢ‬. After that one should learn psalms (‫ ) ܡܙܡܘ̈ܪܐ‬and little by little he would read ̈ ‫) ܒܟܠܗܘܢ‬, and after he has been inall the scriptures (‫ܟܬܒܐ‬ structed in the Scriptures, he should approach their interpretation (‫) ܠܘܬ ܦܘܫܩܐ ܡܟܝܠ ܕܝܠܗܘܢ ܡܬܩܪܒ‬. But the blessed man 18  We discussed this story in great detail in our earlier study: Kiperwasser, Ruzer, ‘Zoroastrian Proselytes in Rabbinic and Syriac Christian Narratives’. 19  Fol. 195b, Chabot, p. 524.

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said to the youth: ‘In the meantime, until I finish trying to learn the letters teach me (orally) ten psalms’. He said that because he had been used to grasp orally (‫) ܠܡܠܒܟ ܡܢ ܦܘܡܐ‬ retna da-mgushutha (‫ ܪܛܢܐ ܕܡܓܘܫܘܬܐ‬, the mumbling of the magi), as the teaching of Zoroaster is not written down ̈ in intelligible characters (‫ܒܐܬܘܬܐ ܕܡܠܝܠܘܬܐ‬ ). And he tried to convince the youth that he would rather grasp things from hearing them ( ‫) ܡܢ ܦܘܡܐ‬. And trying to take hold of a saying he was laboring vigorously – moving his neck (‫ ) ܡܙܥܙܥ ܩܕܠܗ‬back and forward in the manner of the magi ̈ ‫) ܒܐܣܟܡܐ‬. The youth, however, did not let him (‫ܕܡܓܘܫܐ‬ do that, saying: ‘You should not act as the magi do, but rather stay quiet and let only your mouth speak. This way, you are going to grasp many things in a short time’. The two of them came and told the priest about (all) that. And the priest convinced him to learn the letters first, as it is from them that the reading of all the Scriptures will become possible. He became convinced, accepted that and in a few days learned the letters and went over about ten psalms and three or four of the minor prayerful responses. He also learned how to arrange all the evening and morning services and frequently fulfilled his prayers with great fervor. 20

Whereas the instructor intends to begin with the learning of the letters of the (presumably Syriac) alphabet, the newcomer – representative of a Persian cultural background – is keen on gaining knowledge of the scriptures by means of oral instruction and memorization. Iˉˇsoˉ‛sabran therefore asked his instructor to recite ten psalms to him and then immediately repeated them out loud while shaking his head back and forth – the custom he had inherited from his Zoroastrian milieu. He was duly reprimanded not to behave in this way, what the narrator defines as retna da-mgushuta (the bubbling of the magi), but to learn Scripture as a Christian should, by relying on written texts and forgoing wild bodily movements. In The Story of Iˉˇsoˉ‛sabran, this peculiar boundary-marking motif is adduced to other expressions of general aversion toward the Persian oral method of learning. It deserves notice that the same derogatory term (‘bubbling of the magi’), referring to an emphasis on oral instruction and memori  Fol. 196a, Chabot, p. 525.

20

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zation of the text without an effort to comprehend its content, is applied in rabbinic literature in the context of internal polemic, though with a clear awareness of its initial Zoroastrian setting, as the mark of a lack of proper education. 21 This tale invites us to turn to narratives about Zoroastrians joining another involved minority, the Jews. The story in question is found in Kohelet Rabbah, 22 a midrash of Palestinian provenance that, however, adopted an otherwise non-attested Babylonian tradition concerning two Jewish Babylonian sages, Rav 23 and Samuel, 24 and one Iranian would-be convert. Kohelet Rabbah 7, 8: 25 Better a patient spirit than a haughty spirit. A Persian (‫ )חד פרסי‬came to Rav. And told him: ‘Teach me the Torah’. He told him: ‘Say (on this) aleph’. He told him: ‘Who says that this is aleph? Others would say it is not’! ‘Say (on that) beth’. He told him: ‘Who says that this is beth’? Rav rebuked him and drove him out in anger. He went to Samuel And told him: ‘Teach me the Torah’. He told him: ‘Say (on this) aleph’. 21 See b. Sotah 22a; J. Greenfield, ‘Ratin Magosha’, in Joshua Finkel Festschrift – ed. S. B. Hoenig, L. D. Stitskin, New York, 1974, p. 69; E.-S. Rosenthal, ‘For the Talmudic Dictionary – Talmudica Iranica’, in Irano-Judaica: Studies Relating to Jewish Contacts with Persian Culture Throughout the Ages, vol. 1 – ed. S. Shaked, A. Netzer, Jerusalem, 1982, p. 71-72.  22  On this midrash, see, for example, M. Hirshman, Midrash Qohelet Rabbah: Chapters 1-4, Ph.D. dissertation, Jewish Theological Seminary, 1983 (in Hebrew); R. Kiperwasser, ‘Midrashim on Kohelet: Studies in their Redaction and Formation’, Ph.D. dissertation, Bar Ilan University, 2005, p. 43-72, 243-274 (in Hebrew); R. Kiperwasser, ‘Towards the Redaction History of Kohelet Rabbah’, Journal of Jewish Studies 61 (2010), p. 257-277. 23 See for Abba Aricha, commonly known as Rav of the first amoraic generation, H. Albeck, Introduction to the Talmud Bavli and Yerushalmi, Tel Aviv, 19892, p. 170 (in Hebrew).  24 See ibid., p. 172. 25  For the list of the Kohelet Rabbah manuscripts that have been taken into account, see Kiperwasser, Midrashim on Kohelet, Appendix: The Synopsis of Kohelet Rabbah, p. 63. 

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He told him: ‘Who says that this is aleph’? He told him: ‘Say (on that) beth’. He told him: ‘Who says this is beth’? He took hold of his ear and the man exclaimed: ‘Oh my ear! Oh my ear’! Samuel asked him: ‘Who said this is your ear’? He answered: ‘Everyone knows this is my ear’. He told him: ‘In the same way, everyone knows that this is aleph and that is beth’. The Persian was immediately silenced and accepted that. Hence, ‘better a patient spirit than a haughty spirit’ (Eccle. 7, 8). Better is the forbearance that Samuel displayed with the Persian than the impatience that Rav showed towards him, for otherwise the Persian might have returned to his heathenism (‫[ )לסיאורו הפרסי חזר‬...]

By calling the protagonist Persian the narrator seems to mark him as a potential convert from Zoroastrianism, since both Iranians and Jews seem to have perceived adherence to their religion as tantamount to fidelity to their ethnicity. 26 But why is the Persian having doubts about the letters, and why do the sages react in so violent a fashion? Moreover, what causes the Persian in the end to accept the second sage’s teaching? The Persian asks to be taught Torah, which, even if the halakhic implications are not spelled out, seems to be synonymous with a request for conversion. 27 In accordance with the prototypical pattern, attested elsewhere in rabbinic sources (b. Shab. 31a; Avot de R. Nathan A 15, B 29), the prospective convert first approaches the pedantic teacher and only afterwards, having been rebuked, comes to the empathic one. From the sage’s point of view it is crystal clear that the process of Torah study must begin with a study of the letters, which points to a reading-skills based education.

26  See P. Gignoux’s remarks comparing Jewish and Zoroastrian notions of identity in his Man and Cosmos in Ancient Iran (Series Orientale Roma, 91), Rome, 2001, p. 95; Y. Elman, ‘The Other in the Mirror: Iranians and Jews View One Another: Questions of Identity, Conversion and Exogamy in the Fifth-Century Iranian Empire: Part 2’, The Bulletin of the Asia Institute, 20 (2010), p. 30. 27  See M. Finkelstein, Conversion: Halakhah and Practice - tr. from Hebrew E. Levin, Ramat Gan, 2006, p. 195-198.

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An early witness to this educational method is found in The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (ca 125 C.E.), where an attempt by Joseph at young Jesus’ systematic education begins with teaching him letters, which tellingly puts Jesus and his instructor on a collision course. 28 This motif is attested in Syriac sources also, for example, in the Syriac recension of the same Infancy Gospel, 29 as well as in the surviving Syriac version of the Wisdom of Ahiqar. 30 It stands to reason that Syriac elementary education did, in fact, start with teaching the letters. 31 In Kohelet Rabbah, the attempt to teach the Persian the Hebrew letter aleph encounters opposition from the potential convert. He asks a question that might actually have had something to do with his cultural background: His doubts concerning the lack of certitude with regard to the meaning and/or pronunciation of the letters might have reflected a situation characteristic of his native culture. 32 Or alternatively, as one coming from a culture with a strong emphasis on orality, he might have been 28   The Infancy Gospel of Thomas (IGT) 6, 14. For discussion of the surviving manuscripts, see W. Schneelmelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 1, London, 1991, p. 439-443. Deserving of notice is the proximity between the later rabbinic ‘Who says that this is aleph? (‫ ’)מן יימר דהוא אלף‬and ‘What is aleph ( ‫ ’) ܡܢܐ ܗܝ ܐܠܦ‬appearing in the Syriac version of IGT 14. Cfr. the Syriac version of The Legend (Wisdom) of Ahiqar – ed. F. C. Conybeare, R. Harris, A. S.  Lewis, The Story of Ahikar: From the Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Old Turkish, Greek and Slavonic Versions, Cambridge, 1913. p. 36.  29  See The History of the Blessed Virgin Mary and The History of the Likeness of Christ Which the Jews of Tiberias Made to Mock At, 2 vols. – ed. E. A. W. Budge, London, 1899, II, p. 72-73.  30  A new consensus arising in recent decades sees Aramaic as the original language of the Ahiqar story. See J. M. Lindenberger, ‘Ahiqar (Seventh to Sixth Century B.C.): A New Translation and Introduction’, in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2 – ed. J. H. Charlesworth, New York, 1985, p. 481. The wolf episode, relevant here, is however absent from the surviving fragments of the Aramaic text from Elephantine. 31  See N. V.  Pigulevskaya, The Culture of the Syrians in the Middle Ages, Moscow, 1979, p. 38-41 (in Russian). 32 As is known, the Middle Persian language used the Aramaic characters, some of which for certain historical reasons acquired a number of various readings. However, the exact historical background of this phonetic uncertainty remains disputed. See, for example, P. Huyse, ‘Late Sasanian Society between Orality and Literacy’, in The Sasanian Era – ed. V. S. Curtis, S. Stewart (The Idea of Iran Series, 3) London, 2008, p. 144-149. Therefore suggestions regarding the possible phonetic background of the Persian’s doubts remain only hypothetical. 

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inclined to focus on the study of word units rather than letters: While the words are crucial for the transmission of a culture’s religious content, the letters are mainly of interest to scribes, who need to properly write contracts. That until the Islamic period Iranians retained strong reservations about putting things into writing is duly attested in their literary sources. 33 Whatever the case, the intention of the Persian in the story seems clear: If everything you know about your religion is gleaned from a written text, how can you be sure that your understanding is right and not conditioned by wrong ways of reciting the Scripture. His inquiry thus aims to clarify a crucial issue: Is the sacral tradition of the Jews based on a trustworthy oral tradition, or do they have to rely only on an unreliable written text? The rabbi’s response is tailored to alleviate the Persian’s doubts: Jewish oral tradition – ‘everyone knows that this is aleph and that is beth’ – is as trustworthy as his own basic immediate certitude that the ear in acute pain is his ear. In principle, the possibility cannot be completely excluded of some literary interdependence of the rabbinic and Syriac traditions depicting conversion of Persians into the true faith – Judaism and Christianity, respectively. However, the evidence at hand seems to point rather to parallel and independent boundary-drawing strategies employed by the two minority groups to define their identity, by contrast, vis-à-vis a dominant culture commonly perceived as founded on orality. 34 In this context, the study of Scripture stands out as a shared marker of their self-definition. However, along with the similarities in portraying the Persian ‘Other’, corroborated by other available sources, meaningful nuances in appraising the emphasis on oral tradition may be discerned. Whereas both 33  Thus one learns from Denkard V 24.13 (9th century): ‘The legitimacy of [the] oral tradition is thus in many respects greater than that of writing. And it is logical, for many other reasons as well, to consider the living and oral Word as more essential than the written one’. The citation is according to Huyse, ‘Late Sasanian Society’, p. 143. See C. Cereti, La Letteratura Pahlavi: Introduzione ai testi con riferimenti alla storia degli studi e alla tradizione manoscritta, Milan, 2001, p. 41-78. 34  For a possibility of additional internal direction of the polemic, see Kiperwasser, Ruzer, ‘Zoroastrian Proselytes in Rabbinic and Syriac Christian Narratives’, p. 217, n. 82.

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Jews and Christians are inclined to present the exclusively oral Zoroastrian culture as a ‘lower’ one, the Jews are less extreme about this, allowing, even in an explicitly polemical context, for a greater measure of interconnection between the written and oral paths of learning, in accordance with their notion of the two Torahs complementing each other. This internal tension present in the Jewish version of the education-based initiation narrative may be provisionally contextualized within broader cultural trends, namely, a long period of oral composition and transmission of the Babylonian Talmud taking place against the background of a pervasive orality characteristic of Babylonia, as contrasted with the greater prevalence of written transmission in the Greco-Roman cultural realm. 35 It is of interest that in both cases the study of Scripture functions as a marker of the irreversibility of the religious transformation. The Syriac story also emphasizes the polemical function of a Scripture-centered education, which is supposed to provide ammunition in disputations with Zoroastrians. This motif is conspicuously absent from the rabbinic narrative, a fact that may indicate the difference in modes of missionary outreach among Jews, as opposed to Christians. A number of recent studies have highlighted the emphasis on oral tradition as an important identity marker in the late antique Jewish polemic against Christianity. 36 Our investigation shows that in a dissimilar context, with Zoroastrians and not Christians as the ‘Other’, the strategy of identity marking employed by the Jewish side was different. Although not completely abandoning

35 As suggested in Y. Elman, ‘Orality and the Redaction of Babylonian Talmud’, Oral Tradition, 14.1 (1999), p. 52-99. See also Idem, ‘Middle Persian Culture and Babylonian Sages: Accommodation and Resistance in the Shaping of Rabbinic Legal Tradition’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature – ed. C. E. Fonrobert, M. S. Jaffee, Cambridge, 2007, p. 176180; R. Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture, New Haven, 1998, p. 156-161; J. L. Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud, Baltimore - London, 2003, p. 62-63.  36  See, for example, G. G. Stroumsa, ‘The Scriptural Movement of Late Antiquity and Christian Monasticism’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 16.1 (2008), p. 61-64; I. Yuval, ‘The Orality of Jewish Oral Law: From Pedagogy to Ideology’, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Course of History: Exchange and Conflicts – ed. L. Gall, D. Willoweit, München, 2011, p. 237-260. 

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orality, elsewhere posited as the true mystery of God, 37 it stressed instead the prime importance of the ability to read the written tradition, an ability based on letter-centered literacy, as the distinguishing feature vis-à-vis what was being perceived as characteristic of the Persian culture. 38 When interacting with Persian culture, Jewish self-perception focuses on the written nature of its religious heritage, as opposed to when it faces Christianity and embraces the self-image of an orality-oriented tradition. The rabbinic narrative under discussion thus, highlights the relative nature of the stances taken in polemical contexts, even when they pertain to such a core issue as the centrality of the Oral Torah. The Syriac initiation narrative, presenting an unabashedly anti-oral stance, provides here an instructive backdrop to the mixed strategy employed in the rabbinic variant. As for a possible literary link between the two traditions, it may go back to an underlying common topos representing the broader, and religiously neutral, cultural background shared by Jews and Christians. This topos might have had its origin in the story of a wonder-child refusing to follow the ordinary course of elementary study; 39 but in our narratives it already functions in the context of religious rites de passage. The Persian newcomer is portrayed in both Jewish and Christian narratives as one who initially rejects the suggested course of education based on the knowledge of written letters. In both cases, the initiation of the outsider is achieved via a private ‘study session’ rather than through a school-based course of education.

  Tanchuma-Buber Vayera 6 and Tanchuma Vayera 5.   See M. Hirshman’s remark that “this insistence on reading is all the more remarkable if we are to recall that Talmudic culture is self consciously oral” (The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture, 100 C.E. - 350 C.E. Texts on Education and Their Late Antique Context, Oxford – New York, 2009, p. 103). 39  See the appearance of the motif in the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Wisdom of Ahiqar, related to above. For a more detailed discussion of the existing textual evidence, see R. Kiperwasser, S. Ruzer, ‘To Convert a Persian and Teach Him the Holy Scriptures: a Zoroastrian Proselyte in Rabbinic and Syriac Christian Narratives’ in Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians: Religious Dynamics in a Sasanian Context – ed. G. Herman, Piscataway, NJ, 2014, p. 120-127. 37 38

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3. Conclusion We have presented two cases, exemplifying the reciprocal potential of a comparative study of Syriac Christian and Babylonian rabbinic sources, and we have consciously chosen traditions that do not show signs of direct dependence or contact. In the first case, the comparative analysis of the sources representing our two minority groups both highlighted their different religious agendas and allowed for restoring otherwise unattested patterns of their broader ‘pagan’ Mesopotamian cultural backdrop with which they converse. This ‘restoration track’ may be seen as analogous to the attempts, mutatis mutandis, to restore elements of first-century ‘common Judaism’ on the basis of patterns shared by two minority ‘sectarian’ groups represented by the Dead Sea Scrolls and earliest Christian writings. The second case may also possibly indicate a shared religiously neutral topos of a wonder-child primary education; its main input, however, is that it exemplifies parallel and seemingly independent attempts at defining self-identity by our two minority groups in response to the same Zoroastrian cultural challenge. The comparison definitely helps to better appreciate the peculiarities of each of the responses; moreover, this case somehow offers an even more significant insight into the Jewish aspect of the conundrum for which the Christian narrative provides an illuminating backdrop. This may be seen as a complementing, and for now less trodden reversal, of the more usual paths of study of rabbinic sources as a backdrop for patristic ones.

Bibliography Primary Sources The History of the Blessed Virgin Mary and The History of the Likeness of Christ Which the Jews of Tiberias Made to Mock At, 2 vols. –  ed.  E. A. W.  Budge, London, 1899. Jesus-Yab of Adiabene, Story of Jesus-Sabran – ed.  M. J.-B.  Chabot, ‘Histoire de Jésus-Sabran, écrite par Jésus-Yab d’Adiabène’, Archives des missions scientifiques et littéraires, 7 (1897), p. 502-584. John Moschus, The Spiritual Meadow – ed. E. Mioni, ‘Il Pratum Spirituale di Giovanni Mosco: g1i episodi inediti del Cod. Mar-

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ciano greco 11.21’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica, 17 (1951), p. 61-94; – tr. J. Wortley, The Spiritual Meadow by John Moschos: Introduction, Translation and Notes, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1992. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Greek version – ed. C. von Tischendorf, Evangelia apocrypha, Leipzig, 1876. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Syriac version – ed. W. Baars, J. Heldermann, ‘Neue Materielen zum Text und zur Interpretation des Kindheitsevangeliums des Pseudo-Thomas’, Oriens Christianus, 77 (1993), p. 191-226; 78 (1994), p. 1-32. The Legend of Ahiqar – ed. F. C. Conybeare, R. Harris, A. S. Lewis, The Story of Ahikar: From the Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Old Turkish, Greek and Slavonic Versions, Cambridge, 1913. Palestinian Talmud – Talmud Yerushalmi. According to ms. Or. 4720 of the Leiden University Library with Restorations and corrections, The Academy of the Hebrew Language, Jerusalem, 2001. Treatise Ta’anit, Babylonian Talmud – ed.  H. malter, The Treatise Ta’anit of the Babylonian Talmud, New York, 1930, repr. Jerusalem, 1973. Tanchuma-Buber – ed. S. Buber, Midrasch Tanhuma, 2 vols. Wilna, 1885; repr. Jerusalem, 1964.

Secondary literature H. Albeck, Introduction to the Talmud Bavli and Yerushalmi, Tel Aviv, 19892 (in Hebrew). A.  Becker, ‘The Comparative Study of “Scholasticism” in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Rabbis and East Syrians’, AJS Review, 34.1 (2010), p. 91-113. S.  Brock, ’Jewish Traditions in Syriac Sources’, Journal of Jewish Studies, 30 (1979), p. 212-232. R.  Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture, New Haven, 1998. C. Cereti, La Letteratura Pahlavi: Introduzione ai testi con riferimenti alla storia degli studi e alla tradizione manoscritta, Milan, 2001. Y. Elman, ‘The Other in the Mirror: Iranians and Jews View One Another: Questions of Identity, Conversion and Exogamy in the Fifth-Century Iranian Empire: Part 2’, The Bulletin of the Asia Institute, 20 (2010), p. 25-46. Y. Elman, ‘Middle Persian Culture and Babylonian Sages: Accommodation and Resistance in the Shaping of Rabbinic Legal Tra-

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dition’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature – ed. C. E. Fonrobert, M. S. Jaffee, Cambridge, 2007, p. 165-197. Y.  Elman, ‘Orality and the Redaction of Babylonian Talmud’, Oral Tradition, 14.1 (1999), p. 52-99. M. Finkelstein, Conversion: Halakhah and Practice, tr. from Hebrew by E. Levin, Ramat Gan, 2006. Y.  Fraenkel, Studies in the Spiritual World of the Aggadic Narrative, Tel Aviv, 1981 (in Hebrew). P.  Gignoux,  Man and Cosmos in Ancient Iran (Series Orientale Roma, 91), Rome, 2001. J.  Greenfield, ’Ratin Magosha’, in Joshua Finkel Festschrift – ed. S. B. Hoenig, L. D. Stitskin, New York, 1974, p. 63-69. M.  Hirshman, The Stabilization of Rabbinic Culture, 100 C.E. – 350 C.E. Texts on Education and Their Late Antique Context, Oxford – New York, 2009. M. Hirshman, Midrash Qohelet Rabbah: Chapters 1-4, Ph.D. dissertation, Jewish Theological Seminary, 1983 (in Hebrew). P.  Huyse, ’Late Sasanian Society between Orality and Literacy’, in The Sasanian Era (The Idea of Iran, 3) – ed. V. S. Curtis, S. Stewart, London, 2008, p. 140-155. R. Kiperwasser, ‘Towards the Redaction History of Kohelet Rabbah’, Journal of Jewish Studies, 61 (2010), p. 257-277. R. Kiperwasser, Midrashim on Kohelet: Studies in their Redaction and Formation, Ph. D.  dissertation, Bar Ilan University, 2005 (in Hebrew). R.  Kiperwasser, S. Ruzer, ‘To Convert a Persian and Teach Him the Holy Scriptures: a Zoroastrian Proselyte in Rabbinic and Syriac Christian Narratives’, in Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians: Religious Dynamics in a Sasanian Context – ed. G. Herman, Piscataway, NJ, 2014, p. 91-127. R.  Kiperwasser, S. Ruzer, ‘Zoroastrian Proselytes in Rabbinic and Syriac Christian Narratives: Orality-Related Markers of Cultural Identity’, History of Religions, 51.3 (2012), p. 197-218. N.  Koltun-Fromm, ‘Aphrahat and the Rabbis on Noah’s Righteousness in Light of Jewish-Christian Polemic’, in The Book of Genesis in Jewish and Oriental Christian Interpretations – ed. J. Frishman, L. Van Rompay, Louvain, 1997, p. 57-72. T.  Kronholm, Motifs from Genesis 1-11 in the Genuine Hymns of Ephrem the Syrian with Particular Reference to the Influence of Jewish Exegetical Tradition, Lund, 1978.

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D. Levine, ‘Holy Men and Rabbis in Talmudic Antiquity’, in Saints and Role Models in Judaism and Christianity (Jewish and Christian Perspectives) – ed. M. Poorthius, J. Schwartz, Leiden, 2004, p. 4557. C. Licht, Ten Legends of the Sages: The Image of the Sage in Rabbinic Literature, Hoboken N.J., 1991. J. M.  Lindenberger, ‘Ahiqar (Seventh to Sixth Century B.C.): A New Translation and Introduction’, in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2 – ed. J. H. Charlesworth, New York, 1985, p. 479-507. E. Narinskaya, Ephrem, a ‘Jewish Sage’: A Comparison of the Exegetical Writings of St. Ephrem the Syrian and Jewish Traditions, Turnhout, 2010. N. V.  Pigulevskaya,  The Culture of the Syrians in the Middle Ages, Moscow, 1979 (in Russian). E. S. Rosenthal, ‘For the Talmudic Dictionary – Talmudica Iranica’, in Irano-Judaica: Studies Relating to Jewish Contacts with Persian Culture Throughout the Ages, vol. 1 – ed. S. Shaked, A. Netzer, Jerusalem, 1982, p. 38-134 (in Hebrew). J. L.  Rubenstein, Stories of the Babylonian Talmud, Baltimore, 2010. J. L.  Rubenstein, The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud, Baltimore – London, 2003. S. Ruzer, A. Kofsky, Syriac Idiosyncrasies: Theology and Hermeneutics in Early Syriac Literature, Leiden, 2010. G. Stemberger, ‘Exegetical Contacts between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire’, in Hebrew Bible / Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, vol. I/1: Antiquity – ed. M. Sæbø, Göttingen, 1996, p. 569-586. G. G.  Stroumsa, ‘The Scriptural Movement of Late Antiquity and Christian Monasticism’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 16.1 (2008), p. 61-76. I.  Yuval, ‘The Orality of Jewish Oral Law: From Pedagogy to Ideology’, in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Course of History: Exchange and Conflicts – ed. L. Gall, D. Willoweit, München, 2011, p. 237-260.

Abstract Recent research has drawn attention to the possibility of actual or indirect links between Babylonian Jewry of the Talmudic period and contemporaneous Syriac Christianity, with the geographical and cultural affinity – e.g., the shared Aramaic (Syriac) language – strongly

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suggesting the probability of such links. Moreover, in the Sasanian Empire, the two entities also shared the status of a religious minority, which makes analysis of their identity-shaping strategies particularly promising. This paper highlights reciprocal relationship between Syriac patristic and Jewish studies, suggesting some previously understudied avenues of investigation. First, it focuses not on Syriac biblical exegesis or religious lore, where rabbinic influence is usually suspected, but rather on selected narrative patterns. Second, the customary scholarly interest in rabbinic sources as possibly relevant for clarifying elements of Syriac tradition is complemented here by an alternative direction: using Syriac narrative parallels for clarifying the historical and cultural setting of their rabbinical counterparts. And, finally, the comparative analysis of the sources representing our two minority groups not only underscores their different religious agendas but also allows for restoring otherwise unattested patterns of their broader cultural – namely the ‘pagan’, Mesopotamian/ Babylonian – backdrop with which they converse.

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MARK VESSEY Vancouver

‘LA PATRISTIQUE, C’EST AUTRE CHOSE ’: ANDRÉ MANDOUZE, PETER BROWN AND THE AVOCATIONS OF PATRISTICS AS A PHILOLOGICAL SCIENCE

‘Ask your fathers and they will show you, your elders and they will tell you’ (Deut. 32, 7). With this line from a song of Moses, a certain Vincentius, pen-name ‘Peregrinus’, writing from an island on the Gallo-Roman riviera, launched the first methodological essay in ‘patristics’ avant la lettre, a work later known as the Commonitorium and nowadays remembered chiefly for its author’s beguilingly uncontroversial definition of orthodoxy as ‘that which has been believed everywhere, at all times, by all persons’. 1 Composing his treatise under the double impact of the complete works of Augustine (d. 430) and the acts of the first Council of Ephesus (431), in a milieu in which the routines of monastic conference or collatio were being skilfully blended with those of written discourse, Vincent was among the earliest thinkers to project a plenary text of the Christian ‘Fathers’, understanding the latter to be approved teachers providentially spread throughout the Church in time and space (‘in ecclesia dei divinitus per tempora et loca dispensatos’), whose teachings had been, or would be, transmitted in writing to persons living in other places and times. 2 1   Vinc.  Lirin., Comm. 1, 1 – ed. R. Demeulenaire, CCSL  64, p. 147: ‘Dicente scriptura et monente: Interroga patres tuos et dicent tibi, seniores et adnuntianbunt tibi ’ [...]; 2, 5, p. 149: ‘In ipsa item catholica ecclesia magnopere curandum est, ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est’. 2  Vinc. Lirin., Comm. 38, 10 (CCSL 64, p. 188); H. J. Sieben, Die Konzilsidee der Alten Kirche, Paderborn, 1970, p. 149-170 (‘Der Konzilsbegriff des Vincenz von Lerin’).

10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107530

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Vincent drafted his Commonitorium on the island of Lerinum (Lérins) in 434. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Mediterranean, in Hippo Regius, the man who had lately come to play Tiro to Augustine’s Cicero, Possidius of Calama, was wrapping up his biography of the most prolific of Latin-writing ‘Fathers’ with a few well-chosen tropes of orality, insisting for example that Augustine had always been more than just an antitype of the evangelist’s ‘scribe instructed unto the kingdom of heaven, which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old’ (Matt. 13, 52, KJV). 3 It did no harm that the same biblical verse had already been used by Augustine himself – to capture the figural, polysemic quality of divine ‘scripture’ – at the beginning of one of his most writerly, least oratorical works, the De Genesi ad litteram or ‘Literal Commentary on Genesis’. 4 Passages and paradoxes like these may now be seen as marking a critical threshold for Western or Latin-Roman consciousness of the textuality of the far-flung Christian community as a cognitive, social and political phenomenon. Critical threshold marking is an activity to which historians even of the latest fashion are still prone, and anniversaries confirm our weakness for it. Here the half-centenary of an international scholarly organization provides an opportunity to mark such a threshold in the recent history of scholarship on the Fathers as scriptores ecclesiastici, ‘writers of the church’, as Jerome called them in the title of his influential catalogue of their company, otherwise known as the De viris illustribus. 5 Though styled ‘plenary’ in the conference program, this paper will encompass no great tracts of time, space, thought or bibliography. Its coordinates will be fleeting and provincial. It means to open, without circumscribing, the space for a discussion that will then find its own way between other papers to follow, under the rubric of ‘Patristics, Literature, and Histories of the Book’, according to the interests – in the first instance – of those whom the providence 3   Possidius, Vita Augustini, 31, 10, in Vita di Cipriano, Vita di Ambrogio, Vita di Agostino – ed. A. A. R. Bastiaensen, Roma, Milano, 1975, p. 240. 4  Aug., Gen. ad litt., I, 1 – ed. J. Zycha, (CSEL 28/1, p. 3).  5  Hier., Epist. 112, 3 (to Augustine) – ed. I. Hilberg, (CSEL 55, p. 370); M.  Vessey, ‘Augustine among the Writers of the Church’, in A Companion to Augustine – ed. M. Vessey, Malden, MA, 2012, p. 240-254.

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of our hosts has gathered from around the world for a collatio or ‘conference’ on the Fathers in (of all places) Jerusalem.

Patristics at the limits A collective instinct for the plenary seems to have been a feature – if not a ‘note’ – of ‘patristic studies’ since the time of Vincent of Lérins, or whenever we date the beginning of such activities. We might begin by asking our own fathers. My ‘father’ in patristics, whether he knew it or not, was that great and genial scholar of Augustine, André Mandouze, in whose seminar at the Sorbonne as an auditeur libre, more than thirty years ago, I was introduced to a discipline until then unknown and unnamed to me. André Mandouze was a peerless impresario of the Fathers. Some of you will have relished, if only on video, his presentation of Augustine’s Confessions in Strasbourg Cathedral during ‘ l’année de l’Algérie en France’ of 2003, co-starring Gérard Dépardieu. 6 Rarely has an actor of Dépardieu’s gifts been so completely upstaged by an elderly scholar. Mandouze was a brilliant publicist for the causes that he espoused, as well as an impressively conscientious academic. 7 Four and a half decades earlier, in 1959, he had delivered a plenary report to the Third International Conference on Patristic Studies in Oxford. Its title was ‘Mesure et démesure de la Patristique’ (‘The Proportions and Disproportion of Patristics’ or ‘The Extent and Excesses of Patristics’). 8 In those days, as AdolfMartin Ritter has reminded us, French was still the international language of patristic studies. 9 ‘Written to be read’, the text of Mandouze’s report was published unaltered. Even in print it is an unmistakably Mandouzian oration: sinuous, allusive,  G. Dépardieu, A. Mandouze, Approches et lectures de saint Augustin [videocassette], Paris, 2004; G. Dépardieu, A. Mandouze, Lire Saint Augustin, Paris, 2004. The ‘live’ performance was also given in Paris and Bordeaux.  7  For a scholar’s autobiography like no other, see A. Mandouze, Mémoires d’outre-siècle, I: D’une Résistance à l’autre, s. l., 1998; II: (1962-1981) À gauche toute, bon Dieu!, Paris, 2003.  8 A. Mandouze, ‘Mesure et démesure de la Patristique’, in Studia Patristica, 3 = TU, 78 – ed. F. L. Cross, Berlin, 1961, p. 3-19. 9  See his contribution to this volume, p. 195-207. 6

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provocative, baroquisant. It occupies a place of honour at the front of the published proceedings, under the Latin heading ‘Introductio’, a section-title used there for the only time (so far) in the exponentially expanding series of Studia Patristica. Yet already, as we shall see, that touch of editorial decorum risked upsetting the brinkmanship – the calculated mesure en démesure – of Mandouze’s plenary discourse. His lecture began comfortably enough: Since our collective enterprise belongs to a tradition that ultimately goes back to the Fathers themselves, it seems to me fitting, in order to situate more precisely the succession in which we stand (le relais que nous prenons), to begin with the conclusion reached by Father de Ghellinck at the close of his survey of the ‘Progress and main directions in patristic studies over the past fifteen centuries’. 10

That survey of de Ghellink’s being then of recent date, this sentence by itself already effortlessly reunited the present company in Oxford with fifth-century collatores of the Fathers like Vincent of Lérins. The quotation that followed now fills a page, ending with de Ghellinck’s last words in 1947: What is beyond doubt [he had written] is that the continuation of this research, and a fortiori of the progress of these studies, is only possible at the price of indefatigable labour and of a technical mastery, the necessity of which makes itself ever more keenly felt with the expansion of the field to be cultivated and the multiplicity of new disciplines of knowledge called upon to exploit it with sober competence. 11

Steady, well-coordinated professional expertise was the prerequisite for any patristic science that would not sooner or later overflow its own measure, as – already in 1947 – this science promised and threatened to do. It was almost as if, speaking of the immediate post-War crise de croissance in patristic studies,

  Mandouze, ‘Mesure’, p. 3.  J. De Ghellinck, Patristique et Moyen Age: Études d’histoire littéraire et doctrinale, II: Introduction et compléments à l’étude de la patristique, Brussels, Paris, 1947 [repr. 1961], p. 180. 10 11

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de Ghellinck had foreseen the need for the Oxford patristic conferences – ‘our Oxford “conferences” ’, as Mandouze collegially called them on that early autumn day in 1959. 12 Indefatigable labour, technical mastery, sober competence, following in a tradition as old as the Fathers themselves... Another plenary speaker in Jerusalem, reading a paper to be revised for this volume, might with perfect justice begin by placing this week’s collective enterprise and its sponsoring Association squarely and ecumenically in the tradition evoked by Mandouze in 1959 after de Ghellinck in 1947. That was not my purpose in beginning where I have. Nor can I add anything to the accounts that other speakers have given of the genesis and early history of the Association, by reading (as one might) between the lines of Mandouze’s Oxford plenary for early hints of an initiative that would come to fruition in Paris six years later. Instead, I want to press this text of Mandouze’s a little harder in a direction that it already takes from the start, with its founding reference to a work of le Père de Ghellinck, in order to suggest that that reference should now be interpreted as a sign of – if not in fact the signal for – a historic break in the relais or succession of texts descending from the Fathers towards ourselves.

Patrology, history of ancient Christian literature The work of de Ghellinck’s in question had been subscribed by its author from Louvain on the feast of St. John Damascene in 1946 and published the next year as the second volume in the series of his collected studies, entitled Patristique et Moyen Age: 12  Mandouze, ‘Mesure’, p. 4: ‘nos “conférences” d’Oxford’. Cfr. Mandouze, Mémoires, I, p. 36: ‘Je ne me doutais pas, à ce moment-là [in 1934], que mes délices, ce serait, à partir de 1959, de me rendre, sauf exception, tous les quatre ans en Angleterre, non plus à Wimbledon, mais à Oxford pour participer à ce que j’appelle irrévérencieusement “la foire aux Pères” (de l’Église). J’aurai sans aucun doute à en reparler.’ A later reference (p. 238) to participation in ‘le “marché aux Pères” (de l’Église, bien sûr)’ shows that Mandouze in fact already attended the second Oxford conference in 1955, and that he did so in the company of H.-I. Marrou, whose paper that year, ‘Civitas Dei, civitas terrena. Num tertium quid?’ (Studia Patristica, 2, p. 342-350) announced a new understanding of Augustine’s sense of the saeculum as ‘le temps de l’histoire’. See also below, n. 36.

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Études d’histoire littéraire et doctrinale. 13 At least four volumes were planned, but the difficulties of the time, and the author’s death in 1950, restricted the actual series to three. The first contained researches on the origins of the Apostles’ Creed. The second, to which Mandouze would refer in Oxford, was separately titled Introduction et compléments à l’étude de la patristique and presented part of a larger body of material that de Ghellinck had been assembling and revising in view of a unified ‘Introduction’ that could serve as a supplement to standard handbooks of patristics or patrology. In the meantime, as he explained in a preface, the chapters in the present volume dealt mainly with histoire littéraire, offering a ‘summary tableau of the general transmission of patristic works, their immediate mode of diffusion, [and] the use made of them either soon after their appearance or in later ages’. He expressed a hope that veterans as well as novices in the study of theology would benefit from seeing the gradual, centurieslong process of ‘Christian education’ documented in this way through ‘the history of the books’ that had nourished the thought of generations before their own. 14 This, then, was to be ‘literary history’ as ‘history of the books of the Fathers’ as ancillary discipline to theology. De Ghellinck’s outline of that history is a tour de force comparable to Wilamowitz’s Geschichte der Philologie, and better documented. 15 It has not been superseded as a general treatment of the subject. This second, ‘literary-historical’ volume of de Ghellinck’s Patristique et Moyen Age took the form of a diptych. Its latter section gathered the evidence for the ‘diffusion and transmission’ of patristic writings in the early centuries and drew up a balance sheet of what had been lost and preserved, ending encouragingly with the discovery of the Toura papyri (in 1941). But it was the first section of the book, containing a survey of the ‘Progress and main directions (tendances) in patristic studies over   See n. 11 above.   De Ghellinck, Patristique et Moyen Age, II, p. viii. 15  Cfr. U. Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, History of Classical Scholarship – tr. A. Harris – ed. with an intro. and notes by H. Lloyd-Jones, London, 1982; first published in 1921 as Geschichte der Philologie. On Wilamowitz’s sense of the scope and obligations of ‘philology’, see the editor’s introductory remarks, esp. p. vii-xvii. 13 14

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[the previous] fifteen centuries’, that – in its closing sentence, already quoted – would provide Mandouze with his stately yet destabilizing opening gambit in Oxford. That section, too, is almost exclusively ‘literary’ or ‘book-historical’ in content. The story that it told was one of the progressive recovery and critical editing of texts, of the refinement of philological methods from the Renaissance onwards, and of the gradual absorption of the textual objects of ‘patristic’ study into the non-theological, philological sciences of antiquity as those had developed since the early nineteenth century. (Wilamowitz is a constant referencepoint.) The final chapter addressed ‘the latest consequence’ of these ‘new directions’ in scholarship, under a heading that, while equivocal, stopped a question-mark short of being explicitly interrogative: ‘Patrology or history of ancient Christian literature’. Patrologie ou histoire de la littérature chrétienne antique (?). After reviewing the debates in recent decades between Protestant, Catholic, and confessionally unaligned proponents of new-style ‘literary histories’ that would include patristic texts within their purview and so potentially displace ‘patrology’ as a philological discipline, de Ghellinck came to a conclusion in which nothing was concluded: Despite all the – often meritorious – attempts reviewed in the foregoing pages, we are not yet close to possessing a definitive [literary] history, so diverse are the materials to be considered, so elusive or complex the ‘literary’ character of many of the writers, and so poorly understood [...] the relations between them and the ambient literature [of the time], or their mutual influences on each other. 16

The ideal of a (new) ‘literary history’ that would take due account of the Fathers of the Church, if ever it was to be realized, still waited on further research. That is where de Ghellinck ended in 1947, with the rallying cry that Mandouze would repeat – with a difference – in 1959.

  De Ghellinck, Patristique et Moyen Age, II, p. 180. 

16

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... or something else? All this happened a long time ago. The fact that I wish to register today, in the interests of finally slipping these ancient disciplinary moorings, is that Mandouze’s introductory summons to his fellow scholars in Oxford in 1959 took for its point of departure the point of non-arrival of an already decades-long experiment in recasting patristics as a species or sub-class of ‘literary history’. It was an experiment that, as would by then have been clearly apparent, had more or less exhausted itself by the end of the Second World War. 17 There would not be any ‘literary-historical’ alternative to patristics. There has not been been. Instead, there has been (ever more) patristics ... and the recurrent prospect or promise of ... something else. There is something else about Mandouze’s Oxford plenary that is still worth underlining at this late stage, obvious though it may be. His call to order that day was self-consciously that of a classically trained Latin philologist with a post in a French secular university (Strasbourg at the time, Algiers before that, Paris later in his career), for whom the actual or potential aporiai of professedly ‘literary’ approaches to the Church Fathers held a charm that they could not have had for Fr. de Ghellinck, despite the latter’s formidable qualifications as a Latinist and medieval literary historian. In the end, as from the beginning, de Ghellinck’s Introduction et compléments à l’étude de la patristique were strictly that: elements of a propaideutic that, even when complete, must still have yielded before the plenitude of the theological science to which it was meant to lead the way. The balanced terms of his higher-order title, Études d’histoire littéraire et doctrinale, named not only a complementarity but also a supersession: 17 B.  Altaner, ‘Der Stand der patrologischen Wissenschaft und das Problem einer neuen altchristlichen Literaturgeschichte’, in Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati, I = Studi e Testi, 121, Città del Vaticano, 1946, p. 483-520, marks the nec plus ultra. See further H. C. Brennecke, ‘ “Patristik” oder “altchristliche Literaturwissenschaft”? Eine historische Leitwissenschaft der protestantischen Theologie in Deutschlands am Beginn der 20. Jahrhunderts’, ZAC/JAC, 15 (2011), p. 7-46; M. Vessey, ‘Literature, Patristics, Early Christian Writing’, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies – ed. S. A. Harvey, D. G. Hunter, Oxford, 2008, p. 42-65, in partic. p. 49-55.

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‘literary history’, whether as a projected history of authors, styles and genres or an actual ‘history of books’, was still a prelude – for the time being, and in de Ghellinck’s book – to the history of doctrine. The third volume of Patristique et Moyen Age, as originally advertised on the flyleaf of the second, was to have opened with a ‘program of dogmatic readings in the fathers’ and been followed by another of ‘spiritual readings’. 18 Granted, André Mandouze in Oxford in 1959 did not appear to diverge by so much as a hair’s breadth from the theological tradition of patristics. On the contrary, he made delighted play with all its tropes. Having begun his lecture in the footsteps of de Ghellinck, he concluded it in the same style, repeating a quotation already made by the latter from Bossuet’s Défense de la tradition et des saints Pères, in order once more to link the present company of patristicians across the centuries to the Fathers themselves – those who, in the words of the bishop of Meaux, had received the ‘original spirit’ of the Christian religion from its ‘very source’. 19 Yet, for all that, and even though his text would serve in due course as a preface to the by-then canonical divisions of Studia Patristica (sc. Editiones, Critica, Philologica, etc.), Mandouze’s lecture is ex professo not an ‘introduction’ to any discipline of patristic studies then or ever existing. While one cannot easily put a finger on it, there is an element of démesure in his own observance of the rules of plenary patristic discourse, a witting excess of fidelity to the tradition, that we may have to call ‘rhetorical’ if we do not call 18  In the event, the third volume (Brussels and Paris, 1948) was subtitled Une édition patristique célèbre and had for its subject the Maurist edition of the works of Augustine. 19  Mandouze, ‘Mesure’, p. 19: ‘  C’est ici qu’il faut en fin de compte aller jusqu’au bout de l’histoire, de l’histoire que nous ne pouvons quitter un instant, qui nous relie aux Pères et qui relie les Pères entre eux, nous faisant remonter à ce que Bossuet appelait “cette pure substance de la religion ... de cet esprit primitif que les Pères ont reçu de plus près et avec plus d’abondance de la source même” ’ (my italics). For the citation of Bossuet, Mandouze acknowledges De Ghellinck, Patristique et Moyen Age, III: Une édition patristique célèbre, p. 105 (see previous note). The close interrelation of Mandouze’s general reflections on mesure et démesure in patristics and his special concern with scholarship on Augustine is already apparent from this train of citation. For the circumstances in which he prepared his text for Oxford in 1959, see his Mémoires, I, p. 309-311.

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it ‘literary’. As Professor of Latin at the Sorbonne in later years, Mandouze was a legend among students for his ability to turn texts of classical French authors into any one of several classical Latin idioms. He could have rewritten Bossuet in the style of Cicero or Augustine, standing on one leg. Bossuet, in any case, was not his only confrère in Oxford that day. As Jean Cocteau, on being elected to the Académie Française in 1955, had answered the question ‘What is poetry?’ with ‘La poésie, c’est autre chose’ (‘Poetry is something else’), Mandouze offered up his own anti-disciplinary definition of patristics: ‘La patristique, c’est autre chose’ (‘Patristics is – something else’). 20 Even then, none of the Oxford delegates that year could have been absolutely sure that he or she had heard this speaker assert in so many words that patristics was not the discipline that they were all already practising, in supramillennial continuity with the Fathers. Mandouze’s definition by deferral was perfectly traditional in its deference to the ‘original spirit’ of the Christian religion. Its patrologocentrism – to borrow a term soon to be made current by Jacques Derrida – was still of an audibly classical tenor. In any case, whatever it was that Mandouze was heard to have said that day, it did nothing to trouble the apostolico-patristic succession from that Oxford conference to the next, in 1963, when plenary speakers, catching the mood of the Second Vatican Council, would open and close proceedings with serene reflections on ‘Tradition and Authority in the Early Church’ (J. N. Bakhuizen van den Brink) and ‘Les Pères de l’Eglise et l’Unité des Chrétiens’ (Jean Daniélou).

Augustines for our time We have arrived at the backward horizon of this year’s (ante-dated) patristic half-centenary. 1963: a date too early for 20  Mandouze, ‘Mesure’, p. 19. Variants of Cocteau’s mot were also applied by Mandouze to other things he held dear: e.g., Mémoires, I, p. 43 (L’École Normale Supérieure, rue d’Ulm), p. 60 (marriage); cfr. A. Mandouze, ‘Augustin préfacier d’Augustin’, in Saint Augustin. Confessions – tr. L. de Mondadon, Paris, 1982, p. 11-25, in partic. p. 17, 22 (the Confessions). Cocteau’s speech can be read at ‹http://www.academie-francaise.fr/discours-de-reception-dejean-cocteau›.

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the living memories of many here but one that already saw our scholarly ‘fathers’ and ‘mothers’ hard at work. Some of them were among the ‘zealous young’ whom Peter Brown speaks of as being ‘everywhere’ at that year’s Oxford patristic conference. 21 Brown was there himself, though you would not know it from perusing the ‘Augustiniana’ of the published proceedings. His paper on Augustine’s attitude to religious coercion appeared the next year in the Journal of Roman Studies, alongside an article by Alan Cameron on ‘The Roman Friends of Ammianus’ and another by Ramsay MacMullen on ‘Social Mobility and the Theodosian Code’. 22 That should strike us in retrospect as a disciplinary alibi of the same order as Mandouze’s rhetorical ‘othering’ of patristics a lustrum earlier. Mandouze, we have noted, was a classical (Latin) philologist, one whose personal avocation for late Roman social and religious history was consecrated – as he himself poignantly relates in the first volume of his Mémoires – by the experience of living in the land of Augustine. Brown, his younger by a generation and a historian by training, was already in 1963 a highly innovative historian of the religions and societies of the later Roman Empire, unawed by classical (or any other) philology but appreciative of the intermittently useful labours of philologists. In 1967, Faber and Faber published his Augustine of Hippo, a ‘life’ as lively as any ever written so long after its subject’s death and a work raised on so airy a scaffolding of footnotes as almost to bely the solidity of its author’s erudition. 23 Mandouze’s Saint Augustin. L’aventure de la raison et de la grâce appeared the next year from Etudes Augustiniennes: 800 densely printed, large-format pages, many of them trailing only the slenderest thread of narrative across a carpet mosaic of secondary reference. 24 The contrast,

 P. Brown, ‘Introducing Robert Markus’, Augustinian Studies, 32 (2001), p. 181-187, in partic. p. 182. 22 P. Brown, ‘St. Augustine’s Attitude to Religious Coercion’, Journal of Roman Studies, 54 (1964), p. 107-116; repr. in his Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine, London, 1972, p. 260-278. 23 P. Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, London, 1967; new edition with an epilogue, Berkeley, Los Angeles, 2000. 24 A. Mandouze, Saint Augustin. L’aventure de la raison et de la grâce, Paris, 1968. 21

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which few scholars of Augustine can have missed but fewer seem to have marked, conceals a powerful complicity of purpose even as it reveals a deep-seated difference in approach. With good reason, Brown’s scholarly oeuvre as a whole has lately been an object of intense methodological reflection on the part of his fellow historians, who have been encouraged in this by his own occasional retractationes of parts of it. Mandouze, whose complementary thesis, defended alongside his Saint Augustin in 1968, was a Rectratatio retractationum sancti Augustini, and whose mentor and friend Henri-Irénée Marrou inaugurated the genre of the modern scholarly (Augustinian) ‘Retractatio’ with his 1949 postscript to the reimpression of his Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (1938), was an instructively reflexive scholar from early in his publishing career. He also wrote two extraordinary volumes of memoirs before his death in 2006. 25 Reading or rereading Brown and Mandouze on Augustine and ‘late antiquity’, 26 in the light of each other, almost fifty years after their Augustine-books appeared, may help us define the present scholarly epoch with respect to long traditions of the Fathers as scriptores. 27 What, in particular, can Mandouze’s ‘Augustine’ tell us about our times in the ‘history of the books of the Fathers’?

25   See n. 7 above. Mandouze first met Marrou on the day of the latter’s oral defence of his thesis on Augustine: Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 38; Mémoires, I, p. 43. His own Retractatio retractationum S. Augustini remains unpublished; Mémoires, II, p. 81-82. 26 Mandouze’s adoption of ‘ l’antiquité tardive’ as a period-concept postdates his 1968 thesis on Augustine, where the latter still appears as ‘un enfant de cette fin de siècle qui, en un certain sens, est aussi la fin d’un monde et l’annonce de cet âge nouveau qu’on appelle le Moyen Age’ (p. 50). A threshold for the new usage among French scholars is marked by H.-I. Marrou, ‘La civilisation de l’antiquité tardive’, in Tardo Antico e Alto Medioevo. La forma critica nel passagio dell’antichità al medioevo (Roma, 4-7 aprile 1967), Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Quaderno, no. 105, Rome, 1968, p. 384-394; repr. in H.-I. Marrou, Christiana Tempora. Mélanges d’histoire, d’archéologie, d’épigraphie et de patristique, Rome, 1978, p. 67-77. 27 For fuller discussion of Brown’s early work, in this connection, see M.  Vessey, ‘The Demise of the Christian Writer and the Remaking of “Late Antiquity”. From H.-I. Marrou’s Saint Augustine (1938) to Peter Brown’s Holy Man (1983)’, JECS, 6 (1998), p. 377-411. 

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Other times: Augustine’s Confessions as a ‘literary’ text André Mandouze once told a classmate of mine, ‘Augustin, c’est comme le mariage: c’est pour la vie.’ 28 The life of Augustine that he meant to render would be at once a life’s work (his own, among other works of an eventful life) and the life of a literary and historical figure wrested back by huge effort from the forces of ‘tradition(s)’ that threatened otherwise to overwhelm it. Mandouze prepared his readers to expect that he would ‘take hold’ of the accumulated bibliography on Augustine and ‘wring its neck’. 29 In less menacing terms, his aim was to make a critical traversal of Augustinian scholarship and mythography, on the way back to Augustine’s own text(s) and context(s). It was an operation that he had demonstrated in miniature but already on a grand scale in a paper given at the international congress held in Paris in 1954 to commemorate the sixteenth centenary of Augustine’s birth. The paper was devoted to ‘The Possibilities and Limits of the Method of Textual Parallels’, as that method had been applied to the scene of the ‘ecstasy of Ostia’ described in Book 9 of the Confessions, by Pierre Courcelle, Paul Henry, and others interested in tracing Augustine’s sources. By pushing the latest, most technically ambitious philologico-philosophical exegesis of Augustine to its limits, then a little further, Mandouze meant to restore (as he put it) ‘the literary originality’ of Augustine’s text. For only by respecting the ‘letter’ of that text in its linear, temporal sequence could a reader begin to measure – with Augustine the mystic, according to Mandouze – the gap between human philology and the ‘ineffable philology’ of the biblical God... 30 Augustin, c’est autre chose. If anyone was qualified to speak of ‘Mesure et démesure de la Patristique’ by the end of the 1950s, 28  A short memoir of his was more tentatively entitled: A. Mandouze, ‘Cohabiter avec Augustin?’, in Saint Augustin – ed. P. Ranson, [Lausanne, Paris], 1988, p. 11-21. 29  Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 30. See also p. 28, n. 1. 30 A. Mandouze, ‘ “L’extase d’Ostie”. Possibilités et limites de la méthode des parallèles textuels’, in Augustinus Magister. Congrès international augustinien (Paris, 21-24 septembre 1954), 3 vols., Paris, 1954-1955, I, p. 67-84, in partic. p. 83-84. The essence of the analysis would be subsumed in Ch. 12 of the author’s Saint Augustin (‘Rencontres avec Dieu’).

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it was the philological scholar of Augustine that Mandouze had set himself to be. Before it could be anything else, patristics or patrology was bound to be a kind of philology: Editiones, Critica, Philologica (to cite the rubrics of Studia Patristica). The hazard of any philology, for the philologist Mandouze considering the case of Augustine, was that it had the power to multiply collateral texts in ways that were likely to distract the eye from the literary economy of the ultimately singular text of primary reference, and hence risked nullifying the morethan-literary effects that such a text – precisely in virtue of its imputed ‘literariness’ – might be supposed to work in the reader. Mandouze’s practical solution to the problem was to appeal from those many texts through those many texts to that singular text and its (not always textually substantiated) context. 31 Is that not what philology, at least in one of its modern kinds, has always done? Perhaps. But Mandouze’s sense of the specifically ‘literary’ claims of a text such as Augustine’s Confessions was rare for the time within the company of Augustinian and patristic scholars. A glance back at early volumes of Studia Patristica confirms as much. His treatment of the Ostia scene for the 1954 congress was certainly sui generis in the miscellany of papers collected in the first section of Augustinus Magister under the rubric of ‘Histoire littéraire’ (to be followed by ‘Philologie et critique’, ‘Sources’, and then by the far more numerous philosophical and theological contributions). Introducing the whole, the editor had noted how even the ‘critical’ and ‘historical’ pieces engaged directly with questions of ‘theory’ (i.e. theology) and of ‘doctrine’. 32

31  Cfr. H.-I. Marrou (with the collaboration of A.-M. La Bonnardière), St Augustin et l’augustinisme, Paris, 1955, p. 180: ‘la tâche que nous est fixée devient dès lors facile à définir (Étienne Gilson en 1930, Maurice Nédoncelle ou André Mandouze en 1954 l’ont bien vu): en appeler sans cesse de l’augustinisme, de tous les augustinismes, à saint Augustin.’ Marrou cites an interview with Mandouze in L’Actualité religieuse dans le monde, November 1, 1954, on the appearance of the first two volumes of Augustinus Magister. Echoing the title of Joseph Malègue’s 1933 novel about a modern French Catholic’s crisis of faith, the piece was headed: ‘Le véritable Augustin ou le maître est là.’ For the moment in Mandouze’s life – which was also that of the outbreak of hostilities in Algeria – see his Mémoires, I, p. 226-227.  32 F. Cayré, ‘Préface’, in Augustinus Magister, I, p. vii.

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Like all such tropes of editorial plenitude, this one opened itself to its own questions. Mandouze’s sense of the ‘literary’ quality of Augustine’s Confessions may indeed have been theoretically inseparable for him from Augustine’s sense of God – and, more particularly, from Augustine’s sense of God speaking in him. That did not, however, make his essay a contribution to the history of doctrine. How could it have been? Abstracting Augustine from the latter-day history – or histories – of doctrine, releasing him from the competing Augustinianisms of aftertimes, replacing him and his texts in their own place and time, so that they could be known and read again in the present, with as much as possible of their original démesure still intact... that was the scholarly wager of Mandouze’s personal aventure de la raison et de la grâce and the rationale for the formidable mise en page of the work published under that sub-title by Etudes Augustiniennes. 33 The speaker who summoned Cocteau to his aid in Oxford did indeed bring a distinctly mid-twentieth-century literary sensibility to bear on the writings of Augustine. While no text of Roland Barthes or Gérard Genette could have found its way into the bibliography of the theses that he defended in the summer of 1968 in a Sorbonne under siege from anti-government protesters, Mandouze’s remarks on the Confessions at the beginning of his Saint Augustin would already have primed his reader for a work of structuralist literary theory such as Philippe Lejeune’s Le Pacte autobiographique. 34 ‘Bibliographical presuppositions and methodological postulates’ was the impeccably precautionary sub-title for the introduction to this aventure augustinienne, and in no time its author was shoulder-to-shoulder again with de Ghellinck, not only for that scholar’s view of the ‘laicisation’ of patristic studies but also for his account of the Maurist edition of the works of Augustine, in the eventual third 33  The first side heading in Saint Augustin (p. 12) is ‘Mesure et démesure des études augustiniennes’. Three pages later the author observes that ‘pure patristics’ – in the sense of a science that would be entirely disinterested – must be as elusive as ‘pure poetry’. 34 P. Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, Paris, 1975. Lejeune finds no autobiography before Rousseau, though his bibliography includes E. Vance, ‘Le moi comme language. Saint Augustin et l’autobiographie’, Poétique, 14 (1973), p. 163-177. Mandouze proposes his own ‘pacte autobiographique’ in Mémoires, I, p. 7-14 (‘Entrée de jeu’).

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volume of Patristique et Moyen Age. 35 For all that, there is no mistaking the distance already travelled by Mandouze apart from de Ghellinck. Both men were indefatigable students of ‘the history of the books of the Fathers’. Only one of them set the end of that study – for the time being – as a shared literary experience. To re-apply the terms in which the orator introduced Bossuet at the end of his 1959 plenary: this was the way that Mandouze had found, as a scholar of Latin ‘literary’ texts by vocation, to go jusqu’au bout de l’histoire, ‘to the very limit of history, a history that we cannot leave behind for a moment’. 36 Rhetorically satisfying as it might be to end again at that point, it would be unfair to the memory of André Mandouze – and not only because his own, extraordinary literary historical jusqu’auboutisme seems always to have brought him back to a traditional assurance of continuity with the Fathers. There is also the risk of staking too much on latter-day imputations of literariness. 37 Mandouze’s ‘literary’ sensibility, moreover, had at times a distinctly documentary cast. 38

Other places: the Donatist files Rejecting out of hand, for the work of a single author at so late a date, the task of providing an adequate summa of what could be known about Augustine, Mandouze proposed instead the model of a map:

  Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 15, n. 2-3.   Above, n. 19. Mandouze was responsive from an early stage to Marrou’s reflections on Augustine and the Christian sense of time and history, which find their fullest expression in H.-I. Marrou, Théologie de l’histoire, Paris, 1968. 37  See further M. Vessey, ‘Literature, Literary Histories, Latin Late Antiquity’, in Spätantike Konzeptionen von Literatur. Notions of the Literary in Late Antiquity – ed. J. R. Stenger, Heidelberg, forthcoming, p. 19-31. 38  A notable feature of his Mémoires is the steady reference to ‘documents’ of his own past, chiefly of his own composition. Each volume is equipped at the end with a chronological list of ‘textual milestones’ (jalons textuels) for the period in question. As he explains it (I, p. 10), his sense of the limitations of his Mémoires was confirmed by the two outstanding experiences of his scholarly career, namely ‘the elusive trace of a life’ in his study of Augustine and ‘the intransigent exactitude of facts’ in the compilation of the Prosopogographie de l’Afrique chrétienne (303-533). 35 36

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I believe [...] the moment has come to try to put together several kinds of itineraries to facilitate access to Augustine. This means providing equipment for orientation: instruments, maps and ultimately a real atlas for use by the enthusiast (l’amateur eventuel) in preparing for the long, difficult and wonderful journey ahead. This book does not pretend to be such an Augustinian Atlas, but it would like to contribute to it. 39

His book would be a guide, picking its way through carefully selected and presented textual topoi on the way to what was to be ‘seen’ in the end – which, in the event, was Augustine’s mystical vision of God, the goal set by Mandouze for his doctoral research more than a quarter of a century earlier. Extending the topographical figure of thought, he went on to give an account of the book’s method, consistent with his 1954 paper on ‘The Possibilities and Limits of the Method of Textual Parallels’: We refer here to ‘places’ (lieux) because the documents used are texts, but what these texts in fact express are moments in a person’s life and developing thought. The limitations of our linear existence oblige us to use literary expedients if we want to convey a character’s spiritual complexity (la densité spirituelle d’un personnage). The author of the Confessions knew this well enough and did not wait for the cinema or the modern novel before employing ‘flashbacks’ in order to reveal, by disconcerting his readers in this way, the uncertainties and riches of lived experience (la  durée vécue). 40

Readers of Peter Brown’s Augustine of Hippo were by this time relishing their history in the future tense, as Augustine’s cinematic flashbacks became Brown’s flashforwards. Mandouze’s readers would take a different and in some ways more arduous route. Extrapolating from Augustine’s hints, Mandouze constructed the narrative of his Saint Augustin as a succession of three superimposed or interlocking stages of ‘confession’. Each of the three main parts of his book contains four chapters.   Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 31.   Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 32.

39 40

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Only the two middle chapters of the middle part (‘Confessio fidei’) of this text-bound topography have toponyms in their titles: ‘Metamorphosis of Rome’ (Chapter 6), ‘Africa of the Lost Sheep’ (Chapter 7). For all its disclaimers, Mandouze’s guide was also already an atlas, with the meridian of its meticulously projected planar ‘Augustine’ running between ‘Rome’ and ‘Africa’. 41 Meanwhile, independently but under the impress of some of the same prior scholarship – notably in the matter of Donatism – Brown was completing the series of studies that appeared in 1972 as Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine. The second and third sections of his book are likewise headed ‘Rome’ and ‘Africa’. 42 In Brown’s view as in Mandouze’s, the articulation of those two more-than-toponyms in respect of Augustine and the wider world of the late Roman Empire raised critical questions of historical perspective. They were literally questions about what could be seen, then and now. More precisely, they were questions about the kinds of historical seeing that written materials, duly transmitted, made possible and impossible. What came first to the view of the parties arguing one side or another of the ‘case of Donatus’, in Augustine’s time as in the late twentieth century, was a collection or dossier of more or less authentic, more or less datable documents. For Mandouze, who, in 1961, as a prominent actor in recent events, had published his own collection of documents entitled La Révolution algérienne par les textes, the option of assimilating the Donatist cause to anti-colonialist movements in the contemporary Maghreb was at once obvious and obviously mistaken, another instance (however potentially anti-Augustinian) of the unhistorical Augustinianizing against which he had set his face. The word ‘colonialism’ appears on only one page of his book, 41  The design is made explicit at the beginning of Ch. 7: ‘Eussions-nous réussi sur ce point [viz. in satisfying critics of Augustine’s attitude to ‘Rome’] que nous ne serions pas plus avançé: au centre de l’univers augustinien et l’assiégant pourtant de toute part, l’Afrique pose derechef un problème, non point simplement analogue, mais bien autrement difficile’ (p. 332, my italics).  42 P. Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine, London, 1972. The articles and reviews in Part 2 (‘Rome’) and Part 3 (‘Africa’) originally appeared between 1961 and 1970. References to them below are to the 1972 volume.

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entre guillemets at the end of a paragraph. The next paragraph begins: ‘As for the dossier itself, all the documents (pièces) have been scrupulously inventoried by Paul Monceaux in his Histoire littéraire de l’Afrique chrétienne.’ 43 In a parallel passage, noting how the Roman Empire had been put ‘on trial’ by recent books on Donatism, Brown would contrast the picture of an ‘Africa of the inland plateau’, made newly visible by modern archaeology, with the more familiar one of an ‘Africa of [Christian Latin] literature, dominated by Carthage and by the Roman cities of the Mediterranean seaboard’, ‘home of Augustine’. 44 Mandouze’s focus in Saint Augustin remained firmly on the latter scene. As he saw it, recent epigraphic finds had supplemented without substantially altering the picture presented half a century earlier by Monceaux’s dossier: This tableau allows us to glimpse, first of all, an Augustine who is not closed off by his own genius or shut up in his august personage but intimately part of a history and a milieu. Here he is ‘in real life’ (‘en situation’), inseparable from a local setting of long date. 45

It is here, exactly at the mid-point of Mandouze’s book that readers of his Saint Augustin were (and are) most likely to find common ground with adepts of Brown’s Augustine of Hippo. The critical questions of historical perspective or optique with which Mandouze was grappling in those pages, having lived for years in ‘Augustine’s ’ Africa and spent hundreds of hours visiting and guiding students round its Roman and early Christian sites, were the ones that also engaged Brown in the studies that went to make up the ‘Africa’ section of Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine and helped pave the way 43   Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 338, citing (n. 3) L. Duchesne, ‘Le dossier du Donatisme’, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome, 10 (1890), p. 589-650, as the inspiration for the inventory in (vols. 4-7 of ) P. Monceaux, Histoire littéraire de l’Afrique chrétienne, 7 vols., Paris, 1901-1923. 44  Brown, Religion and Society, p. 239 (my italics). In another of the early articles in the ‘Africa’ section of the collection he observes that ‘the ecclesiastical life of this province is exceptionally well-documented and has been the subject of excellent monographs’, citing Monceaux’s Histoire littéraire as ‘basic’ (p. 303, n. 2).  45  Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 338.

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for Anglophone students to a fresh and vivid consciousness of the worlds of late antiquity. How did Augustine fit into the wider cultural landscape of late Roman Africa, as it was then newly coming to be seen? What might be the consequences of that resighting for longer histories of Christianity and of Western civilization? 46 ‘It is true that we experience some difficulty in fixing an image of Africa in the time of Augustine’, Mandouze conceded: ‘Africa does not let itself be easily “photographed” ’. 47 The difficulty of reconciling different modern accounts of ‘Christianity and local culture in late Roman Africa’ (the title-phrase of one of Brown’s articles) arose in large part from the nature of the documentation. The dossier transmitted to aftertimes was itself a document of contested transmission: The figures in this African tableau were first and foremost actors in a drama [...]. Each of the two groups – the Catholic like the Donatist – considered that the others were the ‘traitors’, traditores. To have handed over or given up sacred books or liturgical objects to the police officers of pagan Rome [...], was that not tantamount to consenting once more to hand over, give up, betray Christ? [...] The subtle ambiguity of a Latin word served, moreover, to symbolize the tragic ambiguity of this situation. As traditio was already the ecclesiological concept par excellence, privileged guarantee of the universal Church, traditio was at 46 Note esp. Religion and Society, p. 246: ‘It may perhaps be shown that Donatism – for all its local power – was part of a wider revolution, provoked by the rise of Christianity, in the Latin world; and that the history of this African schism is relevant not only to the rise of Islam in the south, but to the development of medieval Latin Catholicism in the north.’ 47  Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 339. See too the remarkable passage in A. Mandouze, ‘Encore le Donatisme,’ L’Antiquité Classique, 29 (1960), p. 61-107, concluding a trenchant review of J. P. Brisson, Autonomisme et Christianisme dans l’Afrique romaine de Septime-Sévère à l’invasion vandale, Paris, 1958: ‘Je crois devoir ajouter en terminant que je mesure le privilège singulier de ceux à qui il est donné de voir l’Afrique. Chronologie, théologie, économie, realia de toute sorte eussent en effet trouvé comme par enchantement leur vraie place, si la grâce de cette terre africaine, la vertu de ses sites et la grandeur de ses ruines, romaines et chrétiennes, avaient pu, par le miracle d’une rencontre bouleversante, d’une contemplation inlassable et d’une fidelité devenue instinctive, conférer à l’auteur de cette belle thèse [sc. Brisson, who was blind] toutes les vertus mystérieuses de l’antique vocable mérité par quelques-uns des plus grands Romains: celui d’Africanus’ (p. 107).

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the same time, in fourth-century Africa, the word denoting the scandal of a schism that rendered the guilty party unfit to lay claim to gospel faith and apostolic continuity. 48

How could Mandouze’s meditations on Augustine’s dealings with the Donatists not have formed an essential background to his reprise at Oxford in 1959 of de Ghellinck’s plenary discourse of the history of Christian books? At the bottom of the Donatist crisis, on his reading of the sources, lay the failure of both sides to recognize the reality of their ‘situation’. In their polemics over tradition, they had lost sight of the history – and of a geography too – qu’ils ne pouvaient quitter un instant. Needless to say, it was Augustine’s failure, betraying itself in a polemical démesure proportional (!) to his apostolic zeal, that was heaviest with consequence. 49 ‘An error of perspective’ runs the headline for the page on which Mandouze sought to put his finger on the flaw. Committed as Augustine was to a certain exegesis of the history and eschatology of the Scriptures – an exegesis specified by Brown in 1963/64 as embodying ‘the Prophetic viewpoint’ 50 – he had been constrained to overlook ‘the strictly political, economic and social problem’ represented by the separatist communion of the Donatists. 51 Preoccupied as he was by the vision of an eternal city, he had neglected the temporal dimensions of the problem in hand. ‘If ever there was a serious error committed by Augustine, that was where it lay and it was first of all an error of perspective.’ 52 André Mandouze never professed to be an historian except by avocation. There is no useful comparison to be made between his account of Augustine’s ‘error of perspective’ in dealing with the Donatists and the wide-angled views of the Christian diffusion of Latin Roman culture in North Africa and of the synergy of ecclesial and imperial structures of authority within

  Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 339, 340-341.   Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 334. 50  Brown, Religion and Society, p. 266-267 (in the article subsuming his Oxford paper of 1963). 51  Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 374, n. 5, citing an earlier study of his own. 52  Mandouze, Saint Augustin, p. 374. 48 49

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which Brown would locate the same issues. 53 And yet for all that, there is a striking affinity – indeed, a symmetry – in the two men’s respective senses of the perceptual limits imposed by a pre-constituted dossier of the ‘histoire littéraire de l’Afrique chrétienne’. ‘One need expect very little from [...] the ecclesiastical sources of the Latin Empire [...] in terms of intellectual content’, Brown cheerfully affirmed in the article encompassing his 1963 Oxford paper, as a preliminary to re-reading some of those sources in search of Augustine’s ‘attitude to religious coercion’. Attitude to, not ‘doctrine of...’. For, he suggested, we may make some progress in understanding Augustine’s ideas if we treat them as an ‘attitude’ – that is, as placed a little lower than the angels of pure Augustinian theology, and a little higher than the beasts of the social and political necessities of the North African provinces. 54

There in a nutshell was the almost infinite space that the same author would open for fellow students of late Roman history in Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. It was also the space-time of  Saint Augustin. L’aventure de la raison et de la grâce, even if the author of that work took a somewhat steeper flight-path through it.

Patristics, literary history Num tertium quid? It is now possible to coordinate the contrasting but complementary mesures en démesure of two of the founders of what passes as current for (or instead of) patristics in the early twenty-first century: on the one hand, an Oxford-trained historian who always begins again with the documents, however ‘poetic’ his own readings of them may appear to some; 55 on the other, a classically-trained Latinist and littéraire who also proved to be,

  In the essays in Part 3 (‘Africa’) of Religion and Society, in the first instance.   Brown, Religion and Society, p. 261. 55  E.g. A. Murray, ‘Peter Brown and the Shadow of Constantine’, Journal of Roman Studies, 73 (1983), p. 191-203, in partic. p. 202. 53 54

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time and again, an exemplary ‘documentaliste’. 56 The matter of Donatism, in which issues of tradition and authority – above all, of the authority of texts and/or documents of (the) tradition – come to the fore as nowhere else in early Western ecclesiastical history, was all but preordained for their rendez-vous. As a ‘conference’ (collatio) at Carthage in 411 announced the final defeat of the Donatists, adjudged by the imperial commissioner Marcellinus not to have carried their case on the basis of documents produced and recited before him in the Baths of Gargilius, so conferences at Oxford in 1959 and 1963 can now be seen as marking a critical step towards the dismantling of a plenary and traditional ‘literary history’ of Christianity. That threshold may appear more sharply in retrospect if we take one more sighting, this time on a work of scholarship still in progress a century ago. It has already loomed large in this account. For Vincent of Lérins, writing barely a generation after the event and nearly hypnotized by the written legacy of Augustine, the suppression of Donatism was the anchor (quod ubique!) for a text-, document- or (let us say) scriptum-assured master narrative of the providential unfolding of orthodoxy per tempora et loca. 57 For Peter Brown, reckoning up new resources for the study of Augustine four decades after he began reading his way through ‘the Complete Works [...] in the wide pages of the monks of Saint-Maur’, the most precious single addition to that stock was the Prosopographie de l’Afrique chrétienne, completed in 1982 under the editorship of André Mandouze, a referencework minutely observant of the times and places of individual Christians living in those Roman or once-Roman provinces, but without entries for Augustine and several other major figures from the Histoire littéraire de l’Afrique chrétienne. 58 For Mandouze

56   Mandouze’s own term in Mémoires, I, p. 341, used with reference to his La Révolution Algérienne par les textes.  57 Vinc. Lirin., Comm. 4, 2 (CC SL 64, p. 150). 58  Brown, Augustine of Hippo, rev. edn., p. 483: ‘Here we have nothing less than the “collective biography” of African Christianity in the age of Augustine. I had barely dared to dream of such a work in 1961.’ Prosopographie chrétienne du Bas-Empire, I: Prosopographie de l’Afrique chrétienne (303-533) – ed. A. Mandouze, Paris, 1982; for the relation of the prosopography to Monceaux’s Histoire littéraire, see the editor’s remarks on p. 15.

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himself, a conference-session on the ‘Africanity of Augustine’ held in Algiers in 2001 would present an opportunity to correct ‘an error of perspective’ compounded by Monceaux’s readiness to create a literary oeuvre for the schismatic Donatus, even in the absence of any extant text attributable to him. 59 Is there a perspective available to us now, in which these data would come into a single focus? De Ghellinck listed Monceaux’s Histoire littéraire de l’Afrique chrétienne among the major landmarks of the previous halfcentury’s progress in patristic studies. 60 It was the sole example – as it will always be the modern prototype – of a regional, not to say proto-national, history of ancient Christian literature, albeit incomplete. No fewer than four of its seven volumes were sourced from or otherwise devoted to (historical) documents and (literary) texts relating to the Donatist controversy. The last was dedicated to ‘Saint Augustine and Donatism’. 61 The sixth had laid out the ‘Donatist Literature in the Time of Augustine’. The fifth covered earlier Donatist writers, hitting its stride with Donatus himself: ‘With Donatus the Great, the literature properly so-called of Donatism begins.’ 62 The fourth constituted the core of the dossier (‘Documents on the History of the Schism’) and had opened with a manifesto: Christian Africa of the fourth and early fifth centuries produced a curious polemical literature that is all its own: the Donatist and anti-Donatist literature. This vast domain, in which the genius of the Africans gave itself free rein, has been almost completely ignored by modern criticism. Historians of Latin letters have doubtless seen it only as material for theology or documents for history [...] Nonetheless

59  A. Mandouze, ‘Augustin et Donat’, in Saint Augustin. Africanité et universalité, Actes du colloque international Alger-Annaba, 1-7 avril 2001 (Paradosis: Études de littérature et de théologie anciennes, 45.1-2) – ed. P.-Y. Fux, J.-M. Roessli, O. Wermelinger, 2 vols., Fribourg, 2003, I, p. 125-139, addressing ‘une erreur de perspective concernant la transformation d’une impossibilité purement contingent de coexistence en un antagonisme fondamentalement irrémissible’ (p. 125). 60  De Ghellinck, Patristique et Moyen Age, II, p. 45. 61  Monceaux, Histoire littéraire, VII, p. 3. 62  Monceaux, Histoire littéraire, V, p. 99 (my italics).

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[...], it has seemed right to us to accord a place here, indeed a large place, to this polemical literature, which will be seen to lack neither originality nor interest. 63

These lines of Monceaux’s should now be read in conjunction with his preface to the work as a whole, in which he situated the task of his ‘literary history’ with respect to other scholarly vocations. ‘In sum’, he recorded, while profiting from previous studies and rendering full justice to each, we came to a realization that, from our point of view, the subject-matter was new in almost all its aspects. Having consulted historians, theologians and philologists, we find ourselves confronting original texts and documents (en face des textes et documents originaux). Our aim has been simply to understand, to explicate, and to appreciate these documents and these texts. Hence our inquiry has automatically assumed a double form: it begins with philological critique, to end in literary critique. 64

More than a century on, it would be easy to miss the element of funambulism in this preface. A classical philologist who had come of an age in a new era of literary criticism and ethnocentric literary history, with a study of the classical ‘pagan’ literature of Africa (entitled Les Africains) already to his credit, Monceaux was staking out the ground for, as he put it, une véritable histoire de la littérature chrétienne d’Afrique, one that would take full account of the works of writers such as Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine, without being a contribution to theology or any other ecclesiastical science. As it turned out, the main methodological challenge of this new-style literary history did not lie at any intersection of ‘literature’ with ‘theology’ but instead along the line dividing (and not dividing) ‘texts’ from ‘documents’ in the case of a body of writings characterized by Monceaux – to distinguish it from the ‘past-oriented’ literature of pagan African authors – as ‘all of action, always preoccupied with the present or the future, and

  Monceaux, Histoire littéraire, IV, p. 3.   Monceaux, Histoire littéraire, I, p. vi.

63 64

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for which fine language (le bien dire) was now nothing other than a form of action’. 65 As he further explained in his preface: Historical documents occupy a fairly large place in our work. Our thought in expanding its framework in this way was not only to render service to archaeologists and other scholars who often have to cite these items without always being able to ascertain their value beforehand. Indeed, we initially meant to confine ourselves to literary works in the strict sense. However, we quickly realized that one cannot, without misrepresenting it, arbitrarily isolate a literature of action, since in this case the insertion of contemporary documents is necessary for an understanding of literary works, and the most literary of those works are at the same time documents of history. Anonymous treatises, letters, transcripts of proceedings, conciliar acts, inscriptions, martyr acts – we have omitted nothing, since all of this serves to illuminate the literature (puisque de tout cela s’éclaire la littérature). 66

There is more than a little irony in Monceaux’s special pleading for a present-minded, forward-looking ‘literature of action’, when so much of that reputed literature, at least from the midfourth century onwards, takes the form of a dogged contestation of disputed pasts. If the ‘strictly literary’ texts of this African Christian corpus were indissociable from their contemporary (datable, placeable) documents, was that not because it was – like other ancient Christian ‘literatures’, even if pre-eminently so among them – also a ‘literature of tradition’? There is no need for us to resolve that dilemma at this date. There may be some value, however, in recognizing how skilfully it was managed by Monceaux at the time. As de Ghellinck would show in 1947, the romantic-historicist classical philology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (as represented supremely by Wilamowitz) created formidable problems for students of ancient Christian writings, not least because of the freight of ‘documents’ – that is, of texts not manifestly ‘literary’ according to aesthetic criteria – that were transmitted as part of  patristic tradition. The non-appearance of the third volume   Monceaux, Histoire littéraire, I, p. i-ii.   Monceaux, Histoire littéraire, I, p. iii (my italics).

65 66

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of Adolf von Harnack’s history of pre-Nicene Christian literature, which was to have traced the internal development of the ‘literature’ whose extant ‘documents’ were inventoried and dated in the first two, was only the most graphic symptom of a general difficulty. 67 Since Monceaux’s Histoire littéraire de l’Afrique chrétienne also remained incomplete, arrested at the point at which it would have had to absorb the oeuvre of Augustine from beyond his direct dealings with the Donatists, it is impossible to say what model it might ultimately have provided for an extended literary history of Christian writings that could no longer be mistaken for a propaideutic to theology. By stopping where he did, in the immediate aftermath of the heavily documented events at Carthage in June 411, Monceaux left later historians and literary scholars with an invitingly open ‘literary’ dossier. A little over fifty years ago, by separate routes, André Mandouze and Peter Brown came back to that juncture at the end of Monceaux’s unfinished narrative of the ‘literature’ of early Christian Africa, near the beginning of Vincent’s projected plenary discourse of the Fathers – a place and time close to the practical limits of both patristics and literary history as they have been known. Guided by the lights of these two modern scholars among others, we have our own chance to intervene in the same zone. The outstanding challenge can perhaps be put as follows: Is there a language, existing this side of pure poetry and the ineffable philology of God, in which ‘patristic’ philologists could now at last speak without equivocation about texts/documents that, from the moment of their genesis in late antiquity, have also been documents/texts? Could we invent it, that might still be something else again.

Bibliography 1. Primary Sources Augustinus, De Genesi ad litteram – ed. J. Zycha, CSEL 28. Hieronymus, Epistulae – ed. I. Hilberg, CSEL 54-56.  See De Ghellinck, Patristique et Moyen Age, II, p. 149-172. 

67

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Vincentius Lirinensis, Commonitorium – ed. R. Demeulenaere, CCSL 64, p. 145-195. Vita di Cipriano, Vita di Ambrogio, Vita di Agostino – ed. A. A. R. Bastiaensen, Roma, Milano, 1975.

2. Secondary Sources B. Altaner, ‘Der Stand der patrologischen Wissenschaft und das Problem einer neuen altchristlichen Literaturgeschichte’, in Miscellanea Giovanni Mercati, I = Studi e Testi, 121, Città del Vaticano, 1946, p. 483-520. Augustinus Magister. Congrès international augustinien (Paris, 21-24 septembre 1954), 3 vols., Paris, 1954-1955. H. C. Brennecke, ‘ “Patristik” oder “altchristliche Literaturwissenschaft”? Eine historische Leitwissenschaft der protestantischen Theologie in Deutschlands am Beginn der 20. Jahrhunderts’, ZAC/JAC, 15 (2011), p. 7-46. P. Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, London, 1967; new edition with an epilogue, Berkeley, Los Angeles, 2000. P. Brown, ‘Introducing Robert Markus’, Augustinian Studies, 32 (2001), p. 181-187. P. Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine, London, 1972. P. Brown, ‘St. Augustine’s Attitude to Religious Coercion’, Journal of Roman Studies, 54 (1964), p. 107-116; repr. in his Religion and Society in the Age of Saint Augustine, p. 260-278. J. De Ghellinck, Patristique et Moyen Age: Études d’histoire littéraire et doctrinale, II: Introduction et compléments à l’étude de la patristique; III: Une édition patristique célèbre, Brussels, Paris, 1947-1948 [repr. 1961]. G. Dépardieu, A. Mandouze, Approches et lectures de saint Augustin [videocassette], Paris, 2004. G. Dépardieu, A. Mandouze, Lire Saint Augustin, Paris, 2004. P. Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, Paris, 1975. A. Mandouze, ‘Augustin et Donat’, in Saint Augustin. Africanité et universalité, Actes du colloque international Alger-Annaba, 1-7 avril 2001 (Paradosis: Études de littérature et de théologie anciennes, 45.1-2) – ed. P.-Y. Fux, J.-M. Roessli, O. Wermelinger, 2 vols., Fribourg, 2003, I, p. 125-139. A. Mandouze, ‘Cohabiter avec Augustin?’, in Saint Augustin – ed. P. Ranson, [Lausanne, Paris], 1988, p. 11-21.

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A. Mandouze, ‘Augustin préfacier d’Augustin’, in Saint Augustin. Confessions – tr. L. de Mondadon, Paris, 1982, p. 11-25. A. Mandouze, ‘Encore le Donatisme,’ L’Antiquité Classique, 29 (1960), p. 61-107. A. Mandouze, ‘ “L’extase d’Ostie”. Possibilités et limites de la méthode des parallèles textuels’, in Augustinus Magister, 3 vols., Paris, 1954, I, p. 67-84. A. Mandouze, Mémoires d’outre-siècle, I: D’une Résistance à l’autre, s. l., 1998; II: (1962-1981) À gauche toute, bon Dieu!, Paris, 2003. A. Mandouze, ‘Mesure et démesure de la Patristique’, in Studia Patristica, 3 = TU, 78 – ed. F. L. Cross, Berlin, 1961, p. 3-19. A. Mandouze, Saint Augustin. L’aventure de la raison et de la grâce, Paris, 1968. H.-I. Marrou, ‘La civilisation de l’antiquité tardive’, in Tardo Antico e Alto Medioevo. La forma critica nel passagio dell’antichità al medioevo (Roma, 4-7 aprile 1967), Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Quaderno no. 105, Rome, 1968, p. 384-394; repr. in H.-I. Marrou, Christiana Tempora. Mélanges d’histoire, d’archéologie, d’épigraphie et de patristique, Rome, 1978, p. 67-77. H.-I. Marrou, (with the collaboration of A.-M. La Bonnardière), St Augustin et l’augustinisme, Paris, 1955. H.-I. Marrou, Théologie de l’histoire, Paris, 1968. P. Monceaux, Histoire littéraire de l’Afrique chrétienne, 7 vols., Paris, 1901-1923. A. Murray, ‘Peter Brown and the Shadow of Constantine’, Journal of Roman Studies, 73 (1983), p. 191-203. Prosopographie chrétienne du Bas-Empire, I: Prosopographie de l’Afrique chrétienne (303-533) – ed. A. Mandouze, Paris, 1982. H. J. Sieben, Die Konzilsidee der Alten Kirche, Paderborn, 1970. E. Vance, ‘Le moi comme language. Saint Augustin et l’autobiographie’, Poétique, 14 (1973), p. 163-177. M. Vessey, ‘Augustine among the Writers of the Church’, in A Companion to Augustine – ed. M. Vessey, Malden, MA, Oxford, 2012, p. 240-254. M. Vessey, ‘The Demise of the Christian Writer and the Remaking of “Late Antiquity”. From H.-I. Marrou’s Saint Augustine (1938) to Peter Brown’s Holy Man (1983)’, JECS, 6 (1998), p. 377-411. M. Vessey, ‘Literature, Literary Histories, Latin Late Antiquity’, in Spätantike Konzeptionen von Literatur. Notions of the Literary in Late Antiquity – ed. J. R. Stenger, Heidelberg, forthcoming, p. 19-31.

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M. Vessey, ‘Literature, Patristics, Early Christian Writing’, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies – ed. S. A. Harvey, D. G. Hunter, Oxford, 2008, p. 42-65. U. Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, History of Classical Scholarship – tr. A. Harris and ed. with an intro. and notes by H. Lloyd-Jones, London, 1982.

Abstract Patristics, being defined by writings attributable to Church Fathers, has in recent times been pursued as a philological science. Philology, however, is a divided house and its divisions are writ large in patristic and para-patristic scholarship. Whereas philology always deals with written ‘texts’ in the broad sense of that word, some of those texts prove in practice more ‘literary’ (hence, even, more ‘textual’), others more ‘documentary’. Seventy years ago, the most lucid methodological reflection on patristics as a discipline left its fate suspended between literary and theological vocations. While that dilemma is long past, the ambivalence of patristics between literary/textual and historical/documentary regimes of philology continues to be felt. The works of two exemplary scholars who intervened in the Oxford patristic conferences of 1959 and 1963 offer insights into the methodological problem and, between them, a vantage-point from which we might yet respond to it.

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DOMINIQUE CÔTÉ Université d’Ottawa

LES PSEUDO-CLÉMENTINES ET LE CHOIX DU ROMAN GREC

Introduction Oscar Cullmann considérait les Pseudo-Clémentines comme étant « le premier roman dû à la plume d’un auteur chrétien » 1. Voilà un énoncé qui pose au moins trois problèmes: celui des PseudoClémentines, dont l’origine et la formation restent encore, après plus de 150 ans de recherche, difficiles à expliquer, celui du genre romanesque dans l’Antiquité, qui fait toujours l’objet de débats et celui du caractère chrétien des Pseudo-Clémentines, qui est loin de faire l’unanimité 2. Le problème de la formation des Pseudo-Clémentines 3 et celui de leur caractère chrétien ou judéo-chrétien ne seront pas directement abordés dans cet exposé 4. Nous nous en tiendrons ici au problème du genre romanesque ou plus précisément au problème que pose le choix du genre romanesque par les auteurs des Pseudo-Clémentines. Depuis E. Rohde 5, en effet, la question 1 O. Cullmann, Le problème littéraire et historique du roman pseudo-clémentin, Paris, 1930, p. vii. 2 Cfr. T. Whitmarsh, Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance, Oxford, 2011. 3  Voir à ce sujet le livre récent de B. Pouderon, La genèse du roman pseudoclémentin. Études littéraires et historiques, Paris, Louvain, 2012. 4   Sur la question du judéo-christianisme des Pseudo-Clémentines, on consultera A. Yoshiko Reed, ‘‘Jewish Christianity” after the “Parting of the Ways”. Approaches to Historiography and Self-Definition in the Pseudo-Clementines’, in The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages – ed. A. H. Becker, A. Yoshiko Reed, Tübingen, 2003, p. 189-231. 5 E. Rohde, Der griechische Roman und seine Vorlaüfer, Leipzig, 1914 (3e éd.), p. 476.

10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107531

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de l’appartenance des Homélies et des Reconnaissances pseudoclémentines au genre du roman grec a été soulevée à plusieurs reprises, notamment, ces dernières années, par M. Vielberg 6 et I. Czachesz 7, alors que la question du choix d’un tel genre, celui du roman, n’a pas été aussi souvent étudiée. C’est pour combler en partie cette lacune que nous proposons, dans le cadre de cette communication, d’expliquer la stratégie littéraire des PseudoClémentines. La possibilité même de l’exercice peut justement sembler faire problème en raison de la nature pseudépigraphique de l’œuvre. Il est vrai que nous ne connaissons pas les auteurs des Homélies et des Reconnaissances. Ce que nous connaissons, en revanche, c’est leur décision d’utiliser la forme du roman pour donner vie à des traditions apostoliques et à des récits apocryphes qui étaient en circulation aux iiie et ive siècles. Pour notre part, nous avons choisi d’expliquer cette décision en utilisant une approche nouvelle dans le domaine des études pseudo-clémentines, mettant à contribution la sociologie et plus particulièrement la notion de champ littéraire, telle que définie par Pierre Bourdieu 8. Nous avons pris pour modèle, mutatis mutandis, l’étude menée récemment par Isabella Sandwell sur Jean Chrysostome et Libanios, étude dans laquelle la notion d’habitus, également empruntée à Pierre Bourdieu, fournissait à l’auteur son cadre d’analyse 9. Il s’agira donc de montrer, dans un premier temps, comment deux textes rédigés dans la Syrie du ive siècle, les Constitutions apostoliques et les Pseudo-Clémentines, ont accordé au même noyau narratif un traitement différent, dans un deuxième temps, comment s’est traduit le choix pseudo-clémentin de la forme romanesque et, dans un troisième temps, comment peut s’expliquer le choix pseudo-clémentin à la lumière de la notion de champ littéraire.  M. Vielberg, Klemens in den pseudoklementinischen Rekognitionen. Studien zur literarischen Form des spätantiken Romans, Berlin, 2000. 7 I. Czachesz, ‘The Clement Romance: Is It a Novel?’, in The PseudoClementines – ed. J. Bremmer (Studies on Early Christian Apocrypha, 10), Louvain, 2010, p. 24-35.  8 P. Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire, Paris, 1992. 9 I. Sandwell, Religious Identity in Late Antiquity. Greeks, Jews and Christians in Antioch, Oxford, 2007. 6

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1. Traditions apostoliques et récits apocryphes aux iiie et ive siècles : les Constitutions apostoliques et les Pseudo-Clémentines Les Constitutions apostoliques et les Pseudo-Clémentines ont un certain nombre d’éléments en commun. Les deux textes se caractérisent, en effet, par une rédaction finale qui peut être datée du milieu du ive siècle et par l’intégration de couches rédactionnelles plus anciennes remontant au iiie siècle. Les Constitutions apostoliques ont ainsi absorbé la Didascalie des Apôtres, 10 d’une part, et les Homélies et les Reconnaissances, d’autre part, ont intégré ce que l’on appelle généralement l’Écrit fondamental 11. Les deux textes proviennent également de milieux chrétiens ou judéo-chrétiens établis en Syrie 12. Ils ont également fait usage d’un même thème narratif élaboré à partir de traditions entourant les figures apostoliques de Jacques, le frère du Seigneur, de Pierre et de Clément, considéré dans certains milieux comme le successeur de Pierre à Rome 13. Bien entendu, les deux textes se rattachent à des ensembles littéraires bien distincts. Les Constitutions apostoliques   Voir les explications de M. Metzger, ‘Introduction’, in Les constitutions apostoliques. Tome I, Livres I et II – ed. M. Metzger (SC, 320), Paris, 1985, p. 14-24. Sur la Didascalie des Apôtres et les autres documents qui composent les Constitutions apostoliques, cfr. J. G. Mueller, ‘The Ancient Church Order Literature: Genre or Tradition?’, Journal of Early Christian Literature, 15 (2007), p. 338-340. À propos des rapports entre la Didascalie des Apôtres et le judaïsme, voir C. Fonrobert, ‘The Didascalia Apostolorum: A Mishnah for the Disciples of Jesus’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 9 (2001), p. 483-509. 11  Voir L. Cirillo, ‘Introduction’, in Les Reconnaissances du pseudo-Clément. Roman chrétien des premiers siècles – tr. A. Schneider (Apocryphes, 10), Turnhout, 1999, p. 14-23.  12 Sur les milieux judéo-chrétiens en Syrie, voir P. W. van der Horst, ‘Jews and Christians in Antioch at the end of the fourth Century’, in Christian-Jewish Relations through the Centuries – ed. S. E. Porter, B. W. R. Pearson, Sheffield, 2000, p. 228-238, et M. Murray, ‘Christian Identity in the Apostolic Constitutions: Some Observations’, in Identity and Interaction in the Ancient Mediterranean. Jews, Christians and Others. Essays in Honour of Stephen G. Wilson – ed. Z. A. Crook, P. A. Harland, Sheffield, 2007, p. 179-194. 13 Sur Pierre, voir F. Lapham, Peter: the Myth, the Man and the Writings: A Study of Early Petrine Text and Tradition, London, New York, 2003. Sur Jacques, voir R. Bauckham, ‘James and the Jerusalem Community’, in Jewish Believers in Jesus – ed. O. Skarsaune, R. Hvalvik, Peabody, MA, p. 55-95; L.  Cirillo, ‘Jacques de Jérusalem d’après le roman du Pseudo-Clément’, in La figure du prêtre dans les grandes traditions religieuses. Actes du colloque en hommage à M. l’abbé Julien Ries – ed. A. Motte, P. Marchetti, Namur, 2005, p. 177-188; J.  Painter, Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition, Columbus (South Carolina), 1997. 10

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et la Didascalie des apôtres appartiennent à la littérature canonico-liturgique ou institutionnelle 14. Les Pseudo-Clémentines, qui désignent ici le corpus formé des Homélies, des Reconnaissances et des documents liminaires comme la Lettre de Clément à Jacques, font partie d’un corpus plus vaste de textes apocryphes consacrés à la figure de Clément de Rome que l’on appelle littérature clémentine ou pseudo-clémentine 15. Rappelons tout d’abord que les deux versions des PseudoClémentines, les Homélies et les Reconnaissances, mettent en scène les mêmes personnages principaux : l’Apôtre Pierre, envoyé en mission par Jacques, le frère du Seigneur, contre Simon le Mage, et Clément, jeune noble romain, membre de la famille impériale et formé à la grecque, qui part à la recherche de la vérité et de sa famille, qu’il croit perdue à la suite d’une série de malheurs, et qui trouvera, grâce à sa rencontre avec Pierre, à la fois la vérité, en se convertissant à la doctrine du Vrai Prophète, et sa famille, dont les membres se retrouvent tous, à la fin, dans l’entourage de l’Apôtre. Une série de personnages secondaires comme Barnabé, qui introduit Clément à l’Apôtre Pierre, Aquila et Nicétas, frères de Clément, Mattidie et Faustinianus (Faustus dans les Homélies), parents de Clément, et Zachée inter alios, complète le tableau 16. Or, la plupart de ces personnages, principaux et secondaires, se retrouvent dans un court passage des Constitutions apostoliques : Simon, me rencontra, moi, Pierre, d’abord à Césarée de Sratôn, où Corneille, le croyant, en vint par mon intermédiaire du paganisme à la foi au Seigneur Jésus. Simon tenta de perturber l’annonce de la Parole de Dieu. J’étais alors accompagné des saints fils Zachée, jadis publicain, et Barnabé, Nicétas et Aquila, les frères de Clément, l’évêque et le compatriote des Romains, qui fut lui-même disciple 14   Au sujet du genre littéraire auquel appartiennent les Constitutions apostoliques, voir A. Faivre, ‘La documentation canonico-liturgique’, in La documentation patristique. Bilan et prospective – ed. J.-C. Fredouille, R.-M. Roberge, Québec, Paris, 1995, p. 3-41. Cfr. Mueller, ‘The Ancient Church Order Literature’, p. 344-349, pour une critique de Faivre et Metzger à ce sujet. 15 Cfr. Cirillo, ‘Introduction’, p. 14-17. 16  Jacques ne joue qu’un rôle très effacé dans le récit des Homélies (XI, 35), alors que dans les Reconnaissances, au Livre I principalement, et dans les documents liminaires, Lettre de Clément à Jacques et Lettre de Pierre à Jacques, il occupe une place importante. Cfr. Painter, Just James, p. 187-188.

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de Paul, notre collègue apôtre et notre collaborateur dans l’évangélisation. Devant eux pour la troisième fois je discutais avec Simon des questions concernant le Prophète et la monarchie divine. Par la puissance du Seigneur je le confondis, le contraignis au silence et le forçai ainsi à fuir en Italie. 17

Si l’on accepte, comme M. Metzger, que l’année 380 correspond à la date de rédaction des Constitutions apostoliques 18 et si l’on considère, comme L. Cirillo, que les deux versions des PseudoClémentines seraient antérieures à cette date 19, il est alors fort plausible de supposer que ce passage révèle une certaine connaissance des écrits pseudo-clémentins. En tout cas, la présence dans ce passage de l’appellation « Césarée de Stratôn », du groupe formé de Zachée, Barnabé, Nicétas et Aquila, de la simple mention des « frères » de Clément (Nicétas et Aquila) et de la discussion de Pierre avec Simon sur les questions du Prophète et de la monarchie divine, semble étayer cette hypothèse. Les auteurs (compilateurs / rédacteurs) des Constitutions apostoliques auraient eu ainsi accès à l’une des formes du « roman » pseudo-clémentin, peut-être l’Écrit fondamental, s’il faut en croire Georg Strecker 20. Quel que soit le stade rédactionnel avec lequel ils ont été en contact, ils ont clairement eu recours, tout comme les auteurs

  Const. apost., VI, 9, 1. Traduction de M. Metzger (voir supra, note 10). Ὁ μέντοι Σίμων ἐμοὶ Πέτρῳ πρῶτον μὲν ἐν Καισαρείᾳ τῇ Στράτωνος, ἔνθα Κορνήλιος ὁ πιστὸς ἐπίστευσεν ὢν ἐθνικὸς ἐπὶ τὸν Κύριον Ἰησοῦν δι’ ἐμοῦ, συντυχών μοι ἐπειρᾶτο διαστρέφειν τὸν λόγον τοῦ Θεοῦ, συμπαρόντων μοι τῶν ἱερῶν τέκνων, Ζακχαίου τοῦ ποτε τελώνου καὶ  Βαρνάβα, καὶ Νικήτου καὶ Ἀκύλα ἀδελφῶν Κλήμεντος τοῦ Ῥωμαίων ἐπισκόπου τε καὶ πολίτου, μαθητευθέντος δὲ καὶ Παύλῳ τῷ συναποστόλῳ ἡμῶν καὶ συνεργῷ ἐν τῷ Εὐαγγελίῳ· καὶ τρίτον ἐπ’ αὐτῶν διαλεχθεὶς αὐτῷ εἰς τὸν περὶ προφήτου λόγον καὶ περὶ Θεοῦ μοναρχίας, ἡττήσας αὐτὸν δυνάμει τοῦ Κυρίου καὶ εἰς ἀφωνίαν καταβαλὼν φυγάδα κατέστησα εἰς τὴν Ἰταλίαν. 18  Metzger, ‘Introduction’ (SC, 320), p. 59. 19  Cirillo, ‘Introduction’, p. 22. 20 G. Strecker, Das Judenchristentum in den Pseudoklementinen (TU, 70), Berlin, 1981, p. 266: « Auch dem Verfasser der Apostolischen Konstitutionen hat die Grundschrift vorgelegen ». On peut aussi envisager, entre les Constitutions apostoliques et les Pseudo-Clémentines, un rapport de type intertextuel. C’est ce que nous avons fait dans un ouvrage paru en 2001 pour étudier l’évolution littéraire du motif de l’opposition entre Pierre et Simon. Voir D. Côté, Le thème de l’opposition entre Pierre et Simon dans les Pseudo-Clémentines (Collection des Études Augustiniennes – Série Antiquité, 167), Paris, 2001, p. 273. 17

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des Pseudo-Clémentines, à la fiction ou, pour reprendre les termes de M. Metzger, à la « pseudépigraphie apostolique » 21. Suivant cette fiction, les Constitutions apostoliques auraient été promulguées par le collège apostolique réuni, à l’occasion de l’assemblée de Jérusalem (Act. 15) avec Paul, Jacques de Jérusalem et Clément, considéré ici comme le « secrétaire » des apôtres et chargé de diffuser des traditions apostoliques complémentaires des Épîtres 22. Metzger tient à préciser que le style pseudépigraphique des Constitutions apostoliques se distingue de celui des évangiles et actes apocryphes et des Pseudo-Clémentines en ce qu’il n’a pas pour but de « satisfaire la curiosité hagiographique (évangiles et actes apocryphes) ou de se substituer à la littérature païenne, pour le délassement des chrétiens cultivés (Pseudo-Clémentines), mais plutôt à affermir l’autorité des règlements transmis » 23.

2. Le choix pseudo-clémentin de la forme romanesque Les auteurs des Constitutions apostoliques et les auteurs des PseudoClémentines ont donc utilisé un matériau narratif commun qui comprend deux éléments majeurs: la lutte de Pierre contre Simon et la conversion de Clément et de sa famille à la doctrine du Prophète. Alors que les auteurs des Constitutions apostoliques ont intégré le matériau en question à un ensemble bien défini par les règles du genre canonico-liturgique, les auteurs des Pseudo-Clémentines l’ont combiné à une forme littéraire que l’on appelle le roman grec. Bien qu’elle soit couramment employée pour désigner les Homélies et les Reconnaissances, l’expression « roman pseudoclémentin » demeure problématique. Elle apparaît notamment dans le titre d’un ouvrage récent de B. Pouderon, La genèse du roman pseudo-clémentin, et nous avons vu que depuis E. Rohde les Pseudo-Clémentines ont été régulièrement classées parmi les

21  M.  Metzger, ‘Introduction’, in Les Constitutions apostoliques – tr. M. Metzger, Paris, 1992, p. 12. 22  Ibid.  Évidemment, comme le note Metzger, les apôtres sont censés s’exprimer eux-mêmes, collectivement ou individuellement. 23  Ibid., p. 13.

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romans grecs 24. En fait, si l’expression fait problème, c’est que, premièrement, le genre du roman, stricto sensu, n’est pas bien défini dans l’Antiquité et que, deuxièmement, les Homélies et les Reconnaissances ont emprunté au « roman » certains de ses éléments sans pour autant en assumer toutes les caractéristiques. Il reste néanmoins que la plupart des spécialistes s’entendent pour reconnaître que les Homélies et les Reconnaissances ont fait usage de motifs qui relèvent du roman grec 25. Meinolf Vielberg, par exemple, a identifié, dans les Reconnaissances, outre le thème de la reconnaissance lui-même qui donne son titre à l’ouvrage 26, un certain nombre de motifs romanesques, comme celui de l’amour (le désir du frère de Faustinianus pour Mattidie qui est la cause du départ de Mattidie et de son naufrage) 27 ou celui du naufrage et des pirates (Mattidie fait naufrage et ses fils sont enlevés et vendus par des pirates) 28 ou encore le motif de l’île (c’est sur l’île d’Arados, comme dans le roman de Chariton,  Voir supra note 5.  S. Montiglio, Love and Providence: Recognition in the Ancient Novel, Oxford, 2012, p. 210-211; S. Tilg, Chariton of Aphrodisias and the Invention of the Greek Love Novel, Oxford, 2010, p. 64; Czachesz, ‘The Clement Romance’, p. 26; Vielberg, Klemens in den pseudoklementinischen Rekognitionen, p. 112; W. Robins, ‘Romance and Renunciation at the Turn of the Fifth Century’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 8 (2000), p. 539; M. J. Edwards, ‘The Clementina: A Christian Response to the Pagan Novel’, Classical Quarterly, 42 (1992), p. 459; T. Hägg, The Novel in Antiquity, Berkeley, 1983, p.162-164. 26  Sur le thème de la « reconnaissance » dans les Reconnaissances pseudoclémentines, voir P. Boulhol, ‘La conversion de l’anagnorismos profane dans le roman pseudo-clémentin’, in Nouvelles intrigues pseudo-clémentines: Actes du deuxième colloque international sur la littérature apocryphe chrétienne, Lausanne – Genève, 30 août – 2 septembre 2006 – ed. F. Amsler, A. Frey, C. Touati (Publications de l’Institut romand des sciences bibliques, 6), Lausanne, 2008, p. 151-175; K. Cooper, ‘Matthidia’s Wish: Division, Reunion, and the Early Christian Family in the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions’, in Narrativity in Biblical and Related Texts – ed. G. J. Brooke, J.-D. Kaestli (Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, 149), Leuven, 2000, p. 243-264. Cfr. Montiglio, Love and Providence, p. 211: « Among the features this narrative shares with the novels are recognition scenes. In fact, the author has selected the anagnoˉrismos motif and given it more prominence than it has in the pagan novels: it figures in the title and unfolds as a succession of episodes reuniting the family members step by step, whereas other novelistic stock scenes do not appear. In addition to the sheer motif, the Recognitions shares with the Greek novels a major ideological assumption underlying it: that recognition is a reward for goodness ». 27  Vielberg, Klemens in den pseudoklementinischen Rekognitionen, p. 112. 28  Ibid. 24 25

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qu’ont lieu la rencontre de Pierre et de Mattidie et la reconnaissance de Mattidie et Clément) 29. Pierre Geoltrain, pour sa part, observe qu’en général, aussi bien dans les Homélies que dans les Reconnaissances, on retrouve les « ressorts du roman grec suivants » : « séparation initiale, voyages aventureux, naufrages, magie, merveilleux, métamorphoses, quiproquos, interventions divines, retrouvailles » 30. Il existe toutefois une différence notable entre la forme romanesque des Pseudo-Clémentines et le roman grec et c’est le rôle qu’y joue Éros. Comme l’a noté Sophie Lalanne, les 5 romans grecs conservés « dans leur intégralité », Callirhoé de Chariton, les Éphésiaques de Xénophon d’Éphèse, Daphnis et Chloé de Longus, Leucippé et Clitophon d’Achille Tatius et les Éthiopiques d’Héliodore, suivent un « schéma narratif unique » 31: des jeunes gens tombent amoureux, se voient séparés, éprouvés (naufrage, pirates etc.) et se trouvent finalement réunis à nouveau 32. L’amour constitue clairement le moteur de l’intrigue. Dans les Pseudo-Clémentines, c’est une toute autre histoire. Il y a bien, dans les Homélies, un éloge d’Éros, qui s’inscrit dans un éloge de l’adultère 33, mais le thème de l’amour ne possède pas, dans les 29  Ibid., p. 112-113. Sur l’île d’Arados, voir M.-A. Calvet-Sebasti, ‘Une île romanesque : Arados’, in Lieux, décors et paysages de l’ancien roman, des origines à Byzance. Actes du Colloque de Tours, 24-26 octobre 2002 – ed. B. Pouderon, Lyon, 2005, p. 87-99. 30 P. Geoltrain, ‘Introduction (Roman pseudo-clémentin)’, in Écrits apocryphes chrétiens II (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade) – ed. P. Geoltrain, J.-D. Kaestli, Paris, 2005, p. 1176. 31  S. Lalanne, Une éducation grecque. Rites de passage et construction des genres dans le roman grec ancien (Textes à l’appui – Série histoire classique), Paris, 2006, p. 12. Cfr. R. F. Hock, ‘The Rhetoric of Romance’, in Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic period 330 bc – ad 400 – ed. S. E. Porter, Boston, Leiden, 2001, p. 445-446. 32  Sur l’importance de la dimension érotique dans le roman, voir Lalanne, Une éducation grecque, p. 47 et R. Brethes, De l’idéalisme au réalisme. Une étude du comique dans le roman grec (CARDO, 6 – Études et Textes pour l’Identité Culturelle de l’Antiquité Tardive), Salerno, 2007, p. 69. 33  En effet, le thème de l’amour se retrouve aussi dans les Homélies (Livre 5) sous la forme d’un éloge du dieu Éros qui fait partie d’un éloge de l’adultère, attribué au grammairien Apion. Voir, à ce sujet, W. Adler, ‘Apion’s “Encomium of Adultery”: A Jewish Satire of Greek Paideia in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies’, Hebrew Union College Annual, 64 (1993), p. 15-49 et D. Côté, ‘La figure d’Éros dans les Homélies pseudo-clémentines’, in Coptica – Gnostica – Manichaica, Mélanges en l’honneur de Wolf-Peter Funk – ed. P.-H. Poirier, L. Painchaud

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deux versions des Pseudo-Clémentines d’ailleurs, la même capacité de structurer le récit. En fait, dans les Pseudo-Clémentines, la dimension érotique du roman grec se voit essentiellement remplacée par la dimension familiale : c’est une famille et non un couple d’amoureux qui subit la séparation, l’épreuve et la réunion. Le procédé romanesque des reconnaissances ne concerne d’ailleurs, du moins directement, que les personnages qui composent la famille de Clément. Selon William Robins, ce changement de paradigme, qui aurait donné naissance à ce qu’il appelle « the family romance », s’expliquerait par la montée de l’ascétisme chrétien et son impact sur l’aristocratie romaine du ive siècle 34. Il émet l’hypothèse que l’Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri aurait servi de modèle aussi bien aux hagiographes latins, au tournant des ive et ve siècles, qu’aux auteurs des Reconnaissances 35. L’hypothèse de Robins, si elle s’avérait, permettrait de mieux comprendre les raisons pour lesquelles les auteurs pseudo-clémentins ont modifié les thèmes empruntés au roman. Elle laisserait toutefois dans l’ombre les raisons pour lesquelles ils ont adopté ces thèmes au départ. De toute manière, étant donnée la double nature des Pseudo-Clémentines, il faut d’abord tenter de déterminer de quels auteurs pseudo-clémentins il s’agit et tenter, par le fait même, de déterminer à quelle étape de leur formation l’intégration des éléments romanesques aurait eu lieu. Il serait sans doute utile de rappeler ici, à la suite de B. Pouderon, la théorie classique sur la formation du texte pseudoclémentin 36. Ce que nous appelons les Pseudo-Clémentines se présente sous la forme de « deux ouvrages très proches l’un de l’autre »  : les Homélies, rédigées en grec et les Reconnaissances qui nous sont parvenues dans une traduction latine de Rufin

(Collection Bibliothèque copte de Nag Hammadi – Section Études, 7), Québec, Louvain, 2005, p.135-165. 34  Robins, ‘Romance and Renunciation’, p. 532. 35  Ibid., p. 554. 36 Voir Pouderon, La genèse du roman pseudo-clémentin, p. xvii-xviii. Cfr. F. S. Jones, ‘Clement of Rome and the Pseudo-Clementines: History and/or Fiction’, in Studi su Clemente Romano: atti degli Incontri di Roma, 29 marzo e 22 novembre 2001 – ed. P. Luisier (Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 268), Rome, 2003, p. 141.

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d’Aquilée 37. Leur « proximité est telle » (structure et thématique), note B. Pouderon, que l’on a « supposé une base commune », désignée en allemand par le terme Grundschrift (Écrit fondamental, Basic Writing) 38. La datation des trois documents fait l’objet de « vifs débats », mais on s’entend généralement sur les dates suivantes : la traduction des Reconnaissances par Rufin circa 400; la rédaction des Reconnaissances avant 379; la rédaction des Homélies avant 325; la rédaction du Grundschrift, entre 222 et 325 39. Il s’agit maintenant de situer, dans ce schéma à trois composantes : Grundschrift, Homélies et Reconnaissances, le point d’insertion du cadre romanesque. Compte tenu que l’élément de proximité le plus visible entre les Homélies et les Reconnaissances est une trame narrative commune, on peut supposer que le cadre romanesque, i.e. le motif des reconnaissances (séparation, naufrage et retrouvailles) remonterait au Grundschrift. C’est en tout cas la position de Strecker 40. À partir d’un premier ensemble  Concernant cette traduction, voir Y.-M. Duval, ‘Le texte latin des Reconnaissances clémentines. Rufin, les interpolations et les raisons de sa traduction’, in Nouvelles intrigues pseudo-clémentines – ed. F. Amsler, A. Frey, C. Touati, p. 79-92. 38 Voir Jones, ‘Clement of Rome’, p. 142-145, pour une description du contenu de l’Écrit fondamental. 39   En tout cas, la traduction latine des Reconnaissances par Rufin date d’avant 406, année de la mort de l’évêque Gaudentius de Brescia, dédicataire de la préface de Rufin à la traduction des Reconnaissances, et un manuscrit syriaque de 411 atteste l’existence des Homélies et des Reconnaissances au début du ve siècle à Édesse. Suivant la présentation de Cirillo, ‘Introduction’, p. 22-23, les Reconnaissances auraient été rédigées avant 379 (témoignage de Basile de Césarée, PG, 31 col. 213A-217B et mort de Basile en 379), les Homélies, avant 325 (témoignage d’Eusèbe de Césarée, qui mentionne des « dialogues de Pierre et d’Apion » in h.e., III, 38, 5, et rédaction de h.e.  avant 325) et le Grundschrift, entre 222 (mort de Bardesane dont le Dialogue sur le destin est cité en Reconnaissances, IX 19-29) et 232 (si les citations d’Origène dans la Philocalie sont de lui) ou 325 (Eus., h.e., III, 38, 5) si les citations sont des interpolations. Cfr. Pouderon, La genèse du roman pseudo-clémentin, p. 339-340 (Schéma no 1 : La genèse de l’intrigue), qui défend l’authenticité des citations d’Origène et n’hésite pas à dater le Grundschrift de la fin du iie, début du iiie siècle. Il reprend d’ailleurs le titre Pérégrinations de Pierre (Periodoi Petrou) utilisé par Origène et propose un schéma de la genèse du roman hautement hypothétique quoique très cohérent. 40  Strecker, Das Judenchristentum, p. 75-78. Cfr. la remarque de Geoltrain, ‘Introduction’, p. 1182 : « le cadre romanesque, de la dispersion initiale aux retrouvailles finales, en est l’élément le plus visible (de la trame narrative com37

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littéraire, les Homélies et les Reconnaissances auraient ensuite organisé la matière de façon différente 41. On peut donc penser que les auteurs du Grundschrift ont fait le choix des procédés romanesques et que les auteurs des Homélies et des Reconnaissances ont assumé ce choix en y apportant des modifications de part et d’autre. Comment alors s’explique le choix de la forme romanesque par les auteurs des Pseudo-Clémentines? Pourquoi cette forme littéraire et non pas une autre? Pourquoi le roman au lieu de l’histoire, du discours ou encore du traité? S’il fallait user de fiction pour « compléter » les Évangiles et les Actes canoniques 42, pourquoi ne pas avoir emprunté la voie de la littérature institutionnelle, comme les auteurs des Constitutions apostoliques 43? Pourquoi, d’ailleurs, avoir fait le choix du « roman », un genre sans genre? S’ils avaient fait le choix du discours ou de la poésie, comme Grégoire de Nazianze 44, ils auraient eu à leur disposition mune), mais la question de son appartenance à l’Écrit de base est loin d’être admise ». 41  Par exemple, l’épisode des discussions entre Apion et Clément à Tyr sur les dieux de la mythologie et l’interprétation allégorique des mythes (Homélies IV-VI) n’a aucun parallèle direct dans les Reconnaissances, mais les thèmes qui y sont abordés (mythologie et allégorie) se retrouvent partiellement en Reconnaissances X, 15-41, dans un contexte différent (Laodicée) avec des personnages différents : Clément et ses frères d’un côté, Faustinianus, leur père (et non Apion), de l’autre. Cfr. Geoltrain, ‘Introduction’, p. 1183. 42   Comme le font les auteurs des évangiles et des actes dits apocryphes. Pour une définition des textes apocryphes chrétiens et à propos de leur relation avec le Nouveau Testament, cfr. É Junod, ‘ “Apocryphes du Nouveau Testament” : une appellation erronée et une collection artificielle. Discussion de la nouvelle définition proposée par W. Schneemelcher’, Apocrypha, 3 (1992), p. 26-27 : « Textes anonymes ou pseudépigraphes d’origine chrétienne qui entretiennent un rapport avec les livres du Nouveau Testament et aussi de l’Ancien Testament, parce qu’ils sont consacrés à des événements racontés ou évoqués dans ces livres ou parce qu’ils sont consacrés à des événements qui se situent dans le prolongement d’événements racontés ou évoqués dans ces livres, parce qu’ils sont centrés sur des personnages apparaissant dans ces livres, parce que leur genre littéraire s’apparente à ceux d’écrits bibliques ». Sur la frontière entre canonique et apocryphe, cfr. J.-C. Picard, Le continent apocryphe : Essai sur les littératures apocryphes juive et chrétienne (Instrumenta Patristica, 36), Turnhout, 1999, p. 9. 43  Sur la « pseudépigraphie apostolique » pratiquée par les auteurs des Constitutions apostoliques, voir Metzger, in Les constitutions apostoliques (SC, 320), p. 34-46. 44 Au sujet de Grégoire de Nazianze et de ses rapports avec la culture grecque, voir l’ouvrage de S. Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church. Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome, Berkeley, Los Angeles, 2012. La thèse principale de l’auteur consiste à dire que l’œuvre entière de Grégoire

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des règles précises définissant le genre, règles qu’ils auraient pu s’employer à respecter pour démontrer leur capacité à rivaliser avec les Grecs. Or, ils ont plutôt fait le choix d’adapter le « genre mal-aimé » du roman 45, pour lequel, note Romain Brethes, « on ne trouve nulle référence ... dans quelque traité ou manuel que ce soit » 46. Évidemment, les auteurs anonymes du Grundschrift, des Homélies et des Reconnaissances ne se sont pas expliqués sur le sujet. À défaut, cependant, de pouvoir déterminer l’intentio auctoris ou auctorum des Pseudo-Clémentines, il nous reste tout de même l’œuvre en soi, le texte, qui peut révéler, par « sa cohérence contextuelle et par la situation des systèmes de signification auxquels il se réfère », une intentio 47. En d’autres termes, le fait que les Pseudo-Clémentines utilisent de manière cohérente des éléments d’un genre littéraire, qui se situe dans le contexte des Pseudo-Clémentines et que nous appelons le roman, en se référant à des notions qui appartiennent à des systèmes de signification, que nous appelons judaïsme, christianisme,

de Nazianze devrait être interprétée comme une réaction à l’interdiction faite aux chrétiens par l’empereur Julien d’enseigner la rhétorique (voir notamment à la page 151). 45  Sur l’intention des auteurs pseudo-clémentins et plus particulièrement des auteurs des Homélies à rivaliser avec les Grecs et leur culture en utilisant la forme romanesque, cfr. A. Yoshiko Reed, ‘Heresiology and the (Jewish) Christian Novel: Narrativized Polemics in the Pseudo-Clementien Homilies’, in Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity – ed. E. Iricinschi, H. Zelletin, Tübingen, 2008, p. 298: « Interestingly, it is particularly in the Homilies that we find fully exploited the polemical power latent in the adoption of a “pagan” literary form: for, as we have seen, the appropriation of the genre of the novel here serves an extended polemic against Hellenism as “heresy”... ». 46  Brethes, De l’idéalisme au réalisme, p. 68 : « On peut avoir le sentiment dans l’Antiquité tardive que le roman est un genre mal aimé. Quoiqu’il soit apparu probablement entre le ier siècle av. et le ier siècle ap. J.-C., on ne trouve nulle référence à son existence dans quelque traité ou manuel que ce soit ». Il poursuit (p. 68-69) : « cependant, si la tragédie, la comédie ou l’épopée répondent à des critères réellement déterminés, force est de constater qu’il n’existe aucune trace d’une théorie du roman antique. » Cfr. Lalanne, Une éducation grecque, p. 46; Pouderon, La genèse du roman pseudo-clémentin, p. xxii-xxiii. Selon M. Bakhtine, le roman ne serait pas un genre, tout au plus un anti-genre ou un genre en devenir qui n’aurait pas de canon. Voir M. Bakhtine, Esthétique et théorie du roman (tr. du russe par Daria Olivier), Paris, 1978, p. 439-473. 47 U. Eco, Les limites de l’interprétation (tr. de l’italien par M. Bouzaher), Paris, 1992, p. 29. Sur la distinction entre intentio auctoris, intentio operis et intentio lectoris, voir Ibid., p. 29-32.

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hellénisme, ce fait en lui-même devrait nous permettre de comprendre le choix de la forme romanesque. C’est ici qu’intervient Bourdieu et son champ littéraire.

3. La notion de champ littéraire et la prise de position des Pseudo-Clémentines Lorsque les auteurs du Grundschrift, des Homélies et des Reconnaissances décident d’écrire l’histoire de Pierre, Simon et Clément, en les insérant dans une structure narrative de type romanesque, ils entrent sans le savoir dans ce que le sociologue Pierre Bourdieu a appelé le champ littéraire. Pour bien saisir en quoi la notion de champ littéraire peut nous aider à comprendre les PseudoClémentines, il faut tout d’abord et très brièvement en donner une définition et la situer dans la théorie bourdieusienne de l’espace social. Selon la théorie de Pierre Bourdieu, la notion de champ littéraire doit se comprendre à la lumière du concept plus général de champ 48. Le champ est ainsi défini comme un milieu, un espace social régi par des lois et des codes, ou encore, d’après Bernard Lahire, comme un « microcosme relativement autonome au sein du macrocosme que représente l’espace social global » 49. Chaque champ possède des « règles du jeu et des enjeux spécifiques » et constitue un « espace différencié et hiérarchisé de positions », un espace de domination et de conflits entre « les différents agents et/ou institutions qui cherchent à s’approprier le capital spécifique du champ » 50. Dans les termes de Bourdieu lui-même, le champ est un: réseau de relations objectives (de domination ou de subordination, de complémentarité ou d’antagonisme, etc. entre des positions... Chaque position est objectivement définie 48   Sur la notion de champ chez Pierre Bourdieu, cfr. C. Lemieux, ‘Le crépuscule des champs. Limites d’un concept ou disparition d’une réalité historique?’, dans Bourdieu, théoricien de la pratique – ed. M. de Fornel, A. Ogien (Raisons pratiques. Épistémologie, sociologie, théorie sociale, 21), Paris, 2011, p. 75-100. 49 B. Lahire, ‘Le champ et le jeu : la spécificité de l’univers littéraire en question’, in Bourdieu et la littérature – ed. J.-P. Martin, Nantes, 2010, p. 145. 50  Ibid.

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par sa relation objective aux autres positions, ou, en d’autres termes, par le système des propriétés pertinentes, c’est-à-dire efficientes, qui permettent de la situer par rapport à toutes les autres dans la structure de la distribution globale des propriétés. 51

Appliquée à la culture (art, littérature, science etc.) ou, pour parler comme Bourdieu, à la production culturelle, la notion de champ désigne alors le champ artistique, le champ littéraire etc. 52 Le champ littéraire peut donc se définir « comme un réseau de relations objectives entre des positions, par exemple, celle qui correspond à un genre comme le roman ou à une sous-catégorie telle que le romain mondain, ou, d’un autre point de vue, celle qui repère une revue, un salon ou un cénacle comme lieux de ralliement d’un groupe de producteurs » 53. Bourdieu ajoute qu’à l’intérieur d’un champ, aux positions correspondent des prises de positions : « Aux différentes positions (qui, dans un univers aussi peu institutionnalisé que le champ littéraire ou artistique, ne se laissent appréhender qu’à travers les propriétés de leurs occupants) correspondent des prises de position homologues, œuvres littéraires ou artistiques évidemment, mais aussi actes et discours politiques, manifestes ou polémiques, etc. 54 ». Il faut noter également que le champ littéraire s’inscrit toujours, comme les autres champs, dans le champ du pouvoir, celui qui se présente « comme le champ des champs, à l’origine de la hiérarchie entre les autres champs » 55, celui que Bourdieu définit comme « l’espace des rapports de force entre des agents ou des institutions ayant en commun de posséder le capital nécessaire pour occuper des

  Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art, p. 378.   Ibid., p. 351-352. 53  Ibid., p. 378. 54  Ibid., p. 379. Plus loin (p. 383), Bourdieu précise : « la science de l’œuvre d’art a donc pour objet propre la relation entre deux structures, la structure des relations objectives entre les positions dans le champ de production (et entre les producteurs qui les occupent) et la structure des relations objectives entre les prises de position dans l’espace des œuvres ». 55 A. Jourdain, S. Naulin, La théorie de Pierre Bourdieu et ses usages sociologiques (Collection 128, Série Sociologies contemporaines), Paris, 2011, p. 109. 51 52

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positions dominantes dans les différents champs (économique ou culturel notamment) » 56. Revenons maintenant au cas des Pseudo-Clémentines et au choix de la forme romanesque. Pour qu’à la fin du ive siècle deux versions des « reconnaissances » de Clément se rendent jusqu’à Rufin d’Aquilée, il aura fallu qu’un certain nombre de personnes occupent des positions dans le champ littéraire des iiie-ive siècles en Syrie et ailleurs dans l’Empire : des auteurs, des éditeurs, des rédacteurs, des secrétaires, des copistes, des traducteurs et des distributeurs. Étant données les conditions de la production littéraire dans la société gréco-romaine de l’Antiquité tardive (il n’y a pas de réelle autonomie du champ littéraire comme ce sera le cas dans la société française à partir du xixe siècle) 57, on doit ici comprendre le champ littéraire comme faisant partie du champ plus général de la culture. Ces auteurs, éditeurs etc. entrent en relation (domination, subordination, antagonisme) avec des personnes qui occupent des positions mieux définies sur le plan institutionnel dans le champ de la production culturelle, comme les sophistes, les rhéteurs, les philosophes etc. C’est ainsi que les auteurs, rédacteurs, éditeurs des Pseudo-Clémentines, en produisant un texte, en étant producteurs culturels, se situent de facto dans le champ littéraire et y occupent une position. Or, lorsqu’ils choisissent la forme du roman, ils se trouvent non seulement à occuper une position, mais aussi à prendre position. Ils choisissent un genre nouveau et qui ne porte pas de nom, un genre qui n’existe pas dans les traités de poétique et qui 56  Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art, p. 353. À l’intérieur du champ du pouvoir, le champ littéraire occupe lui-même une position dominée : « Du fait de la hiérarchie qui s’établit dans les rapports entre les différentes espèces de capital et entre leurs détenteurs, les champs de production culturelle occupent une position dominée, temporellement, au sein du champ du pouvoir. Pour si affranchis qu’ils puissent être des contraintes et des demandes externes, ils sont traversés par la nécessité des champs englobants, celle du profit, économique ou politique ». Le champ littéraire, dans ses rapports avec le champ du pouvoir, se trouve donc, à chaque moment, en lutte entre deux principes de hiérarchisation, l’hétéronome, favorable à ceux qui dominent le champ économiquement et politiquement (par exemple l’art bourgeois), et le principe autonome (par exemple l’Art pour l’art)... ». 57 Sur la notion d’autonomie littéraire, voir G. Sapiro, ‘L’autonomie de la littérature en question’, in Bourdieu et la littérature – ed. J.-P. Martin, Nantes, 2010, p. 45-61.

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est exclu, par exemple, des lectures considérées comme moralement acceptables par Julien, philosophe, empereur et adversaire du christianisme : « Il nous convient de ne lire que des histoires tirées de faits réels. Écartons les fictions rapportées sous forme d’histoire chez les anciens, affaires d’amour (ἐρωτικὰς ὑποθέσεις) et absolument tout ce qui y ressemble » 58. En choisissant la forme du roman, mais en l’expurgeant de sa dimension érotique pour la remplacer par une dimension familiale, les auteurs, éditeurs des Pseudo-Clémentines prennent là encore position. Ils innovent par rapport à un genre qui peut lui-même passer pour novateur. Ils innovent en restant dans ce que Bourdieu appelle « l’espace des possibles » 59. En choisissant la forme du roman, ils prennent position également vis-à-vis de ceux qui choisissent la rhétorique, l’histoire, le traité, le dialogue ou même la poésie, bien que l’on trouve dans les Pseudo-Clémentines des discours, des dialogues et des lettres, le genre romanesque n’ayant pas de canon. En choisissant la forme du roman, ils prennent de même position vis-à-vis des autorités juives et chrétiennes parce que le genre romanesque, né dans la foulée de la Seconde Sophistique est le véhicule d’une certaine affirmation hellénique 60, le véhicule de la paideia que plusieurs auteurs chrétiens, dont les auteurs mêmes des Pseudo-Clémentines, cherchent à neutraliser. Prendre position dans le champ littéraire, c’est encore, et finalement, prendre position dans le champ du pouvoir. Sur le fond, les Pseudo-Clémentines affirment clairement, au milieu du ive siècle, que Rome est subordonnée à Jérusalem (Pierre, Clément, Jacques), que Paul est l’ennemi de la vérité, que Moïse et Jésus dispensent également le salut 61, que les Écritures contiennent des passages erronés etc.

58   Jul., ep. 89 (301 b) – ed. J. Bidez (Collection des Universités de France), Paris,  1924 : Πρέποι δ’ ἂν ἡμῖν ἱστορίαις ἐντυγχάνειν, ὁπόσαι συνεγράφησαν ἐπὶ πεποιημένοις τοῖς ἔργοις· ὅσα δέ ἐστιν ἐν ἱστορίας εἴδει παρὰ τοῖς ἔμπροσθεν ἀπηγγελμένα πλάσματα παραιτητέον, ἐρωτικὰς ὑποθέσεις καὶ πάντα ἁπλῶς τὰ τοιαῦτα. Cfr. Brethes, De l’idéalisme au réalisme, p. 69. 59  Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art, p. 384-387. 60 S. Swain, Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50-250, Oxford, 1996, p. 101-131. 61 Cfr. Yoshiko Reed, ‘  “Jewish Christianity” after the “Parting of the Ways” ’, p. 213-224.

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Conclusion Les Pseudo-Clémentines revendiquent une marginalité de forme et de fond. Autrement dit, le choix de la forme romanesque est cohérent avec le choix des idées souvent jugées hétérodoxes mises de l’avant dans les Homélies et les Reconnaissances, surtout dans les Homélies. Ce n’est pas seulement une affaire d’esthétisme littéraire. C’est d’abord et avant tout une prise de position. La réception des Pseudo-Clémentines, sous une forme ou une autre, est à ce sujet éloquente. Au livre III de l’Histoire ecclésiastique, Eusèbe de Césarée parle d’ « écrits longs et verbeux ... qui ne conservent pas le caractère pur de l’orthodoxie apostolique » 62 et Épiphane, dans son Panarion, associe les Periodoi Petrou (le Grundschrift ?) aux enseignements des Ébionites, accusant ces hérétiques de les avoir corrompus, de s’en être approprier et d’avoir menti au sujet de Pierre et de ses bains quotidiens 63. Le cas de Rufin et de sa réception des Pseudo-Clémentines est intéressant. Lui-même Origéniste et brouillé avec Jérôme sur ce point, donc dans une relation difficile avec une certaine orthodoxie (comme les Pseudo-Clémentines) 64, il traduit et transmet les reconnaissances de Clément dans le but d’édifier

62   Eus., h.e., III, 38, 5 – ed. G. Bardy (SC, 31), Paris, 1952: « D’autres écrits, verbeux et longs, ont été tout récemment présentés comme étant de lui [Clément]: ils renferment des dialogues de Pierre et d’Apion, dont il n’existe absolument aucun souvenir chez les anciens et qui d’ailleurs ne conservent pas le caractère pur de l’orthodoxie apostolique » = ἤδη δὲ καὶ ἕτερα πολυεπῆ καὶ μακρὰ συγγράμματα ὡς τοῦ αὐτοῦ χθὲς καὶ πρῴην τινὲς προήγαγον, Πέτρου δὴ καὶ Ἀπίωνος διαλόγους περιέχοντα·ὧν οὐδ’ ὅλως μνήμη τις παρὰ τοῖς παλαιοῖς φέρεται, οὐδὲ γὰρ καθαρὸν τῆς ἀποστολικῆς ὀρθοδοξίας ἀποσῴζει τὸν χαρακτῆρα. Pour une comparaison entre l’Histoire ecclésiastique d’Eusèbe et les Homélies, voir A. Reed, ‘ “Jewish Christianity” as Counter-history? The Apostolic Past in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History and the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies’, in Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World – ed. G. Gardner, K. L. Osterloh (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism, 123), Tübingen, 2008, p. 173-216. 63  Epiph., haer., XXX, 15 – ed. K. Holl (GCS, 25), Leipzig, 1915. Sur le lien entre les « Ébionites » d’Épiphane et les Pseudo-Clémentines, voir Pouderon, La genèse du roman pseudo-clémentin, p. 161-185 et S. C. Mimouni, Le judéo-christianisme ancien. Essais historiques, Paris, 1998, p. 277-286. 64  Cfr. C. M. Chin, ‘Rufinus of Aquileia and Alexandrian Afterlives: Translation as Origenism’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 18 (2010), p. 617-647.

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l’évêque Gaudentius et ses concitoyens, comme il s’en explique dans la Préface à la traduction latine des Reconnaissances : bien qu’avec beaucoup de retard, nous nous acquittons de la tâche que jadis la vierge Silvia de vénérable mémoire nous avait imposée, à savoir de restituer Clément à notre langue, tâche que toi par la suite, usant de ton droit d’héritier, tu exigeais de nous, et le butin, non négligeable je crois, que nous avons soustrait aux bibliothèques des Grecs, nous l’apportons aux nôtres, pour leur utilité et leur profit, si bien que, incapables de les nourrir de nos propres aliments, nous leur en offrons d’étrangers. 65

Toutefois, il se montre bien conscient du caractère peu orthodoxe ou problématique de certains passages sur « le Dieu non engendré et le Dieu engendré, ainsi que sur quelques autres sujets », passages, avoue-t-il, « qui ont dépassé son entendement », et qu’il préfère « réserver à d’autres » 66. Autrement dit, Rufin se montre ouvert à un écrit « problématique », mais ressent le besoin de le rendre acceptable pour l’establishment en ne traduisant pas les passages difficiles. Par ces corrections, Rufin modifie la prise de position initiale des Pseudo-Clémentines au sein du champ du pouvoir. En occupant la position de traducteur, Rufin fait passer du grec au latin « les trésors cachés de la sagesse » (occultos sapientiae thesauros). Il restitue au monde romain et à la langue latine le Clément dont les Grecs s’étaient emparés. Usant des termes « butin » (praeda) et « dépouilles de la Grèce » (Graeciae spolia) 67, il pré65   Ps. Clem., rec., prol., 2 – ed. G. Strecker (GCS, 51) 1965 : nos ... opus quod olim venerandae memoriae virgo Silvia iniunxerat, ut Clementem nostrae linguae redderemus, et tu deinceps iure hereditario deposcebas, liceaas post moras, tamen aliquando restituimus, praedamque, ut opinor, non parvam, Graecorum bibliothecis direptam, nostrorum usibus et utilitatibus convectamus, ut quos propriis non possumus, peregrinis nutriamus alimoniis. Traduction d’A. Schneider (voir supra note 11). 66  Ibid., 10-11 : sunt autem et quaedam in utroque corpore de ingenito deo genitoque disserta et de aliis nonnullis, quae, ut nihil amplus dicam, excesserunt intellegentiam nostram. haec ergo ego, tamquam quae supra vires meas essent, aliis reservare malui quam minus plena proferre. 67  Ibid., 5 : et nescio quam gratus me civium vultus accipiat, magna sibi Graeciae spolia deferentem et occultos sapientiae thesauros nostrae linguae clave reserantem = « Et je ne sais pas avec quelle expression de reconnaissance me reçoivent mes concitoyens, moi qui leur apporte de riches dépouilles de la Grèce et qui leur ouvre les trésors cachés de la sagesse grâce à la clé de notre langue ». Traduction d’A. Schneider.

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sente sa traduction des Reconnaissances comme une opération de reconquête : « Accueille donc, mon très cher, notre Clément qui revient à toi, accueille-le désormais en tant que Romain (...). Ce sont donc des produits étrangers que nous transportons, à grand peine, dans notre patrie » 68. En soulignant l’origine grecque et le caractère exotique des Reconnaissances, Rufin modifie à nouveau la prise de position initiale des Pseudo-Clémentines. De produit marginal dans le champ culturel et littéraire d’origine, les Pseudo-Clémentines deviennent dans le champ littéraire où évolue Rufin un produit normal et acceptable, parce que devenu Romain, et un produit appréciable et estimable, parce qu’étranger. Or, « les produits étrangers, rappelle Rufin, non seulement, paraissent d’ordinaire plus doux, mais parfois aussi plus profitables » 69. En terminant cette brève étude, il faut bien reconnaître que le problème des PseudoClémentines et du choix de la forme romanesque n’est pas complètement résolu. Dans le cadre d’une étude à venir, il faudra sans doute se demander si ce problème ne serait pas lié, au fond, à celui que pose Rufin d’Aquilée et son choix de traduire le roman de Clément.

Bibliographie 1. Littérature première Const. apost. = Les Constitutions apostoliques – ed. M. Metzger (SC, 320), Paris, 1985. Eus., h.e. = Eusèbe de Césarée, Histoire ecclésiastique.  Livres I-IV – ed. G. Bardy (SC, 31), Paris, 1952. 68  Ibid., 4-5 : Suscipe igitur, mi anime, redeuntem ad te Clementem nostrum, suscipe iam Romanum ... peregrinas ergo merces multo in patriam sudore transvehimus. 69  Ibid., 3 : Nam et solent suaviora videri peregrina, interdum vero et utiliora. Denique peregrimun est paene omne quod medelam corporibus confert, quod morbis occurrit, quod venena depellit = « Car, les produits étrangers, non seulement, paraissent d’ordinaire plus doux, mais parfois aussi plus profitables. En un mot, est étranger presque tout ce qui apporte la guérison aux corps, tout ce qui s’oppose aux maladies, tout ce qui expulse les poisons ». Rufin donne ensuite l’exemple de la « larme de balsame », en provenance de Judée, de la « chevelure de dictamne », de la Crète, des « fleurs d’aromates », de l’Arabie et du « nard d’épices », de l’Inde.

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Epiph., haer. = Epiphanius, Ancoratus. Panarion (haer. 1-33) – ed. K. Holl (GCS, 25), Leipzig, 1915. Jul., ep. 89 = L’empereur Julien, Œuvres complètes. Tome I. 2e partie. Lettres et fragments – ed. J. Bidez (Collection des Universités de France), Paris, 1924. Ps. Clem. Rom., rec. = Die pseudoklementinen.  II.  Rekognitionen in Rufins Übersetzung – ed. B. Rehm (GCS, 51), Berlin, 1965.

2. Littérature secondaire W.  Adler, ‘Apion’s “Encomium of Adultery”: A Jewish Satire of Greek Paideia in the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies’, Hebrew Union College Annual, 64 (1993), p. 15-49. M.  Bakhtine, Esthétique et théorie du roman (tr. du russe par Daria Olivier), Paris, 1978. R.  Bauckham, ‘James and the Jerusalem Community’, in Jewish Believers in Jesus, – ed. O. Skarsaune, R. Hvalvik, Peabody, MA, p. 55-95. P. Boulhol, ‘La conversion de l’anagnorismos profane dans le roman pseudo-clémentin’, in Nouvelles intrigues pseudo-clémentines. Actes du deuxième colloque international sur la littérature apocryphe chrétienne, Lausanne – Genève, 30 août – 2 septembre 2006 – ed. F. Amsler, A. Frey, C. Touati (Publications de l’Institut romand des sciences bibliques, 6), Lausanne, 2008, p. 151-175. P. Bourdieu, Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire, Paris, 1992. R.  Brethes, De l’idéalisme au réalisme. Une étude du comique dans le roman grec (CARDO, 6 – Études et Textes pour l’Identité Culturelle de l’Antiquité Tardive), Salerno, 2007. M.-A.  Calvet-Sebasti, ‘Une île romanesque : Arados’, in Lieux, décors et paysages de l’ancien roman, des origines à Byzance. Actes du Colloque de Tours, 24-26 octobre 2002 – ed. B. Pouderon, Lyon, 2005, p. 87-99. M.  Chin, ‘Rufinus of Aquileia and Alexandrian Afterlives: Translation as Origenism’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 18 (2010), p. 617-647. L. Cirillo, ‘Introduction’, in Les Reconnaissances du pseudo-Clément. Roman chrétien des premiers siècles – tr. A. Schneider (Apocryphes, 10), Turnhout, 1999, p. 13-65. L.  Cirillo, ‘Jacques de Jérusalem d’après le roman du PseudoClément’, in La figure du prêtre dans les grandes traditions religieuses.

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Actes du colloque en hommage à M. l’abbé Julien Ries – ed. A. Motte, P. Marchetti, Namur, 2005, p. 177-188. K.  Cooper, ‘Matthidia’s Wish: Division, Reunion, and the Early Christian Family in the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions’, in Narrativity in Biblical and Related Texts – ed. G. J. Brooke, J.-D. Kaestli (Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, 149), Leuven, 2000, p. 243-264. D.  Côté, ‘La figure d’Éros dans les Homélies pseudo-clémentines’, in Coptica – Gnostica – Manichaica, Mélanges en l’honneur de Wolf-Peter Funk – ed. P.-H. Poirier, L. Painchaud (Collection Bibliothèque copte de Nag Hammadi – Section Études, 7), Québec, Louvain, 2005, p.135-165. D. Côté, Le thème de l’opposition entre Pierre et Simon dans les PseudoClémentines (Collection des Études Augustiniennes – Série Antiquité, 167), Paris, 2001. O. Cullmann, Le problème littéraire et historique du roman pseudo-clémentin, Paris, 1930. I. Czachesz, ‘The Clement Romance: Is it a Novel?’, in The PseudoClementines – ed. J. Bremmer (Studies on Early Christian Apocrypha, 10), Louvain, 2010, p. 24-35. Y.-M. Duval, ‘Le texte latin des Reconnaissances clémentines. Rufin, les interpolations et les raisons de sa traduction’, in Nouvelles intrigues pseudo-clémentines. Actes du deuxième colloque international sur la littérature apocryphe chrétienne, Lausanne – Genève, 30 août – 2 septembre 2006 – ed. F. Amsler, A. Frey, C. Touati (Publications de l’Institut romand des sciences bibliques, 6), Lausanne, 2008, p. 79-92. U. Eco, Les limites de l’interprétation (tr. de l’italien par M. Bouzaher), Paris, 1992. M. J. Edwards, ‘The Clementina: A Christian Response to the Pagan Novel’, Classical Quarterly, 42 (1992), p. 459-474. S. Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church. Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome, Berkeley, Los Angeles, 2012. A. Faivre, ‘La documentation canonico-liturgique’, in La documentation patristique. Bilan et prospective – ed. J.-C. Fredouille, R.-M. Roberge, Québec, Paris, 1995, p. 3-41. C.  Fonrobert, ‘The Didascalia Apostolorum: A Mishnah for the Disciples of Jesus’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 9 (2001), p. 483-509. P.  Geoltrain, ‘Introduction (Roman pseudo-clémentin)’, in Écrits apocryphes chrétiens II (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade) – ed. P. Geoltrain, J.-D. Kaestli, Paris, 2005, p. 1175-1187.

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T. Hägg, The Novel in Antiquity, Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1983. R. F.  Hock, ‘The Rhetoric of Romance’, in Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic period 330 B.C. – A.D. 400 – ed. S. E. Porter, Boston, Leiden, 2001, p. 445-465. F. S.  Jones, ‘Clement of Rome and the Pseudo-Clementines : History and/or Fiction’, in Studi su Clemente Romano: atti degli Incontri di Roma, 29 marzo e 22 novembre 2001 – ed. P. Luisier (Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 268), Rome, 2003, p. 139-161. A. Jourdain, S. Naulin, La théorie de Pierre Bourdieu et ses usages sociologiques (Collection 128, Série Sociologies contemporaines), Paris, 2011. É Junod, ‘ “Apocryphes du Nouveau Testament”: une appellation erronée et une collection artificielle. Discussion de la nouvelle définition proposée par W. Schneemelcher’, Apocrypha, 3 (1992), p. 17-46. B. Lahire, ‘Le champ et le jeu: la spécificité de l’univers littéraire en question’, in Bourdieu et la littérature – ed. J.-P. Martin, Nantes, 2010, p. 143-154. S.  Lalanne, Une éducation grecque. Rites de passage et construction des genres dans le roman grec ancien (Textes à l’appui – Série histoire classique), Paris, 2006. F. Lapham, Peter: the Myth, the Man and the Writings: A Study of Early Petrine Text and Tradition, London, New York, 2003. C.  Lemieux, ‘Le crépuscule des champs. Limites d’un concept ou disparition d’une réalité historique?’, in Bourdieu, théoricien de la pratique – ed. M. de Fornel, A. Ogien (Raisons pratiques. Épistémologie, sociologie, théorie sociale, 21), Paris, 2011, p. 75-100. M. Metzger, ‘Introduction’, in Les constitutions apostoliques. Tome I, Livres I et II – ed. M. Metzger (SC, 320), Paris, 1985, p. 13-94. M.  Metzger, ‘Introduction’, in Les Constitutions apostoliques – tr. M. Metzger, Paris, 1992, p. 7-27. S. C. Mimouni, Le judéo-christianisme ancien. Essais historiques, Paris, 1998. S.  Montiglio, Love and Providence: Recognition in the Ancient Novel, Oxford, 2012. J. G. Mueller, ‘The Ancient Church Order Literature: Genre or Tradition?’, Journal of Early Christian Literature, 15 (2007), p. 337-380. M. Murray, ‘Christian Identity in the Apostolic Constitutions: Some Observations’, in Identity and Interaction in the Ancient Mediterranean. Jews, Christians and Others. Essays in Honour of Stephen G. Wilson – ed. Z. A. Crook, P. A. Harland, Sheffield, 2007, p. 179-194. J.  Painter, Just James: The Brother of Jesus in History and Tradition, Columbus (South Carolina), 1997.

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J.-C. Picard, Le continent apocryphe: Essai sur les littératures apocryphes juive et chrétienne (Instrumenta Patristica, 36), Turnhout, 1999. B. Pouderon, La genèse du roman pseudo-clémentin. Études littéraires et historiques, Paris, Louvain, 2012. W. Robins, ‘Romance and Renunciation at the Turn of the Fifth Century’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 8 (2000), p. 531-557. E.  Rohde, Der griechische Roman und seine Vorlaüfer, Leipzig, 1914 (3e édition). I.  Sandwell, Religious Identity in Late Antiquity. Greeks, Jews and Christians in Antioch, Oxford, 2007. G. Sapiro, ‘L’autonomie de la littérature en question’, in Bourdieu et la littérature – ed. J.-P. Martin, Nantes, 2010, p. 45-61. G. Strecker, Das Judenchristentum in den Pseudoklementinen (TU, 70), Berlin, 1981. S. Swain, Hellenism and Empire. Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World, ad 50-250, Oxford, 1996. S. Tilg, Chariton of Aphrodisias and the Invention of the Greek Love Novel, Oxford, 2010. P. W.  van der Horst, ‘Jews and Christians in Antioch at the end of the fourth Century’, in Christian-Jewish Relations through the Centuries – ed. S. E. Porter, B. W. R. Pearson, Sheffield, 2000, p. 228-238. M. Vielberg, Klemens in den pseudoklementinischen Rekognitionen. Studien zur literarischen Form des spätantiken Romans, Berlin, 2000. T.  Whitmarsh, Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance, Oxford, 2011. A.  Yoshiko Reed, ‘Heresiology and the (Jewish) Christian Novel. Narrativized Polemics in the Pseudo-Clementien Homilies’, in Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity – ed. E. Iricinschi, H. Zelletin, Tübingen, 2008, p. 273-298. A.  Yoshiko Reed, ‘‘Jewish Christianity” after the “Parting of the Ways”. Approaches to Historiography and Self-Definition in the Pseudo-Clementines’, in The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages – ed. A. H. Becker, A. Yoshiko Reed, Tübingen, 2003, p. 189-231. A. Yoshiko Reed, ‘ “Jewish Christianity” as Counter-history? The Apostolic Past in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History and the PseudoClementine Homilies’, in Antiquity in Antiquity. Jewish and Christian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World – ed. G. Gardner, K. L. Osterloh (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism, 123), Tübingen, 2008, p. 173-216.

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Abstracts Cette étude a pour objet la question des rapports entre les PseudoClémentines et le roman grec considérée sous l’angle de la stratégie littéraire. Au lieu de chercher à savoir en quoi les Pseudo-Clémentines ont été influencées par la forme du roman grec, il s’agit plutôt de déterminer pourquoi les Pseudo-Clémentines ont choisi d’utiliser la forme du roman grec. L’analyse comparée du traitement accordé au même noyau narratif par les Constitutions apostoliques et les PseudoClémentines permet tout d’abord de constater l’originalité de la stratégie pseudo-clémentine dans le contexte culturel des IIIe et ive siècles. L’analyse comparée de l’utilisation des motifs de la « reconnaissance » et de l’« amour » par le roman pseudo-clémentin et par le roman grec met également en relief l’originalité des auteurs pseudo-clémentins dans leur emploi de la forme romanesque. Le recours à la notion de « champ littéraire », telle que définie par Pierre Bourdieu, dans son ouvrage Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire, donne lieu finalement à une explication de la stratégie littéraire des PseudoClémentines en termes sociologiques. This paper considers the relationship between the Pseudo-Clementines and the Greek novel from the point of view of literary strategy. Instead of responding to the question of how the Pseudo-Clementines were influenced by the Greek novel, it is rather why the Pseudo-Clementines have decided to use the Greek novel that is here investigated. Comparative analysis of the Apostolic Constitutions and the PseudoClementines in their treatment of the same narrative allows to assess at the start how original is the pseudo-clementine strategy in the cultural context of the IIIrd and IVth centuries. Comparative analysis of the pseudo-clementine romance and the Greek novel in their use of the ‘love’ and ‘recognition’ motives also highlights the originality of the pseudo-clementine writers in the way they used the novel form. Finally, resorting to the concept of champ littéraire, as defined by Pierre Bourdieu in his work Les règles de l’art. Genèse et structure du champ littéraire, leads to an explanation of the Pseudo-Clementines’ literary strategy in terms of sociology.

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TINA DOLIDZE Iv. Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University

PATRISTICS – AS REFLECTED IN GEORGIAN SPIRITUAL AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY 1

The prominent Byzantinologist Sergei Averintsev spoke about the ‘force field’ of the enormous inter-ethnic synthesis of Eastern and Western elements in the vast cultural landscape of the eastern Christian world. 2 Its territorial dimensions, seen in a cross-like shape, embraced lands from the Bosphorus down to Mesopotamia and from the South Caucasus down to the Nile. Georgians, living at the South Caucasian edge of that spiritually and intellectually integrated world, were extremely zealous in finding paths to become part of it. Beginning in the fifth century, Georgian monks established their monasteries and carried out intense literary activity first in Palestine (including Jerusalem), 3 Egypt, and Syria, and later, from the ninth century, in the Byzantine West (Asia Minor, Constantinople, Athos, Cyprus, 1  It is a pleasure to acknowledge my gratitude to the Center for Mediterranean Studies at the Central European University in Budapest, where during my stay in the framework of the International Higher Education Support Program project on the Caucasus I developed a version of this overview. I also wish to express sincere gratitude to my Georgian colleagues T. Aptsiauri, A. Kharanauli and E. Kochlamazashvili for their kind help during its preparation. 2  От берегов Босфора до берегов Евфрата [From the Shores of Bosphorus to the Shores of Euphrates] – tr. S. S. Averintsev, Moscow, 1987, p. 8. 3  In the fifth century Peter the Iberian (411-491), prince of Iberia (Kartli) by origin and later the bishop of Maium (near Gaza), built churches and founded Georgian monasteries in Palestine (the Judean desert near Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Gaza). If Evagrius of Pontus was really of Georgian origin as asserted by Greek and Coptic sources, one can assume that in the Egyptian context individual initiatives must have existed earlier (K. Kekelidze, ‘A Fourth-Century Georgian from Abroad. A Thinker and a Public Figure’ [in Georgian], in Id., Studies in the History of Georgian Literature, VI, Tbilisi, 1960, p. 5-17).

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and Bulgaria), along with monastic centres founded in their native land from the middle of the sixth century onward. Georgian ecclesiastical literature developed and was shaped within this vast cultural network. 4 When speaking about the intensity of its development, one has to focus on Old Georgian literature, that is, the long epoch from the fifth though the eighteenth century. In this chronological framework Georgian ecclesiastical literature is organized into the four following periods. Period one, from the fifth century until the 980s, is the time of the building of an integrated Georgian state and cultural identity, which was significantly shaped by the multilingual monastic environment of the Near East. Period two – also called the classical age – developed from the 980s until the first half of the thirteenth century. This is the epoch when the Georgian state and its culture flourished, and the national spirit manifested itself in its attachment to Greek culture. 5 In period three, from the second half of the thirteenth century until the end of the sixteenth century, Georgian spiritual literature experienced a decline, obviously due to strong political oscillations. Period four, from the start of the seventeenth century through the eighteenth century, was marked by a cultural revival that included a revival of ecclesiastical literature. In order to review the content of the literature created by Georgian churchmen in monastic centres inside and outside of their land within the above geographical and chronological context, I shall have to restrict myself to several significant instances and figures of that literature, which I discuss according to the genres of ecclesiastical literature.

4  L. Menabde, Seats of Ancient Georgian Literature Abroad, 2 vols., Tbilisi, 1962, 1980 (in Georgian); Ancient Christianity in the Caucasus – ed. T. Mgaloblishvili (Iberica Caucasica, 1), Richmond, 1998; T. Meskhi, Sinai and Georgia. New Pages of the Centuries-Old History, Tbilisi, 2013 (in Georgian); for the history of Georgian monastic life in European research: Georgian Literature in European Scholarship – ed. E. Khintibidze, Amsterdam, 2001. 5  The decisive turn to Greek literary sources begins with the establishment of the Georgian Iveron monastery on Mt. Athos (established in 980-983), and primarily with the founder of its literary circle, Euthymius the Athonite, whose major project was aimed at amplifying Georgian ecclesiastic literature with translations done exclusively from Greek.

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1. The Bible and apocrypha The most ancient Georgian witnesses to the Old Testament are preserved in fifth- to seventh-century palimpsest fragments and in ninth- to tenth-century lectionaries and biblical codices. 6 The surviving translations reveal that some books of the Old Testament were rendered several times and from different text traditions: from Hexaplaric and Lucianic recensions, as well as from traditions fragmentarily attested in several Greek sources and in the Vetus Latina. In a number of instances Georgian translations are the oldest written witnesses for certain textual traditions. It is not yet clear whether the Georgian Bible underwent a revision according to the Greek text before the tenth century. In the eleventh century only the Psalter among the books of the Old Testament was revised at the Iveron monastery on Athos. The next stage of revision is connected with the Catena collections (11th-12th c.) which aim to harmonize the text of the Bible with its commentaries. As for the New Testament, the earliest translations preserved in the fifth- to seventh-century palimpsests and the ninth-century manuscripts represent texts of Palestinian and Antiochene traditions. Of the several phases of text revision the last phase done by George the Athonite (d. 1065) shows a tendency towards formal approximation to Greek. It is regarded as the Vulgata and has been widely used until now in the Georgian Orthodox Church. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries two new editions of the complete Bible were compiled: the Mtskheta Bible (17th-18th c.), which has been revised according to the Latin and Armenian editions, and the Bakari (Moscow) Bible (1743), which supposedly has been revised according to the Slavonic text.

6 This section on the Bible draws on the contribution of A. Kharanauli in T. Dolidze, A. Kharanauli, ‘The Bible in Georgian Christianity’, in The Encyclopaedia of the Bible and Its Reception, X, Berlin, (in press); see further E. Gabidzashvili, Translated Works of Ancient Georgian Literature. Bibliography, IV: Bibliology, Exegetical, Apocryphal, Tbilisi, 2009, p. 160-217 (in Georgian); N. Melikishvili, ‘Bibliology’, in N. Melikishvili,  M. Maisuradze, Essays from the History of Old Georgian Spiritual Literature, I, Tbilisi, 2012, p. 4-261 (in Georgian).

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Apocryphal books are included already in the fifth- to seventhcentury palimpsest fragments (e.g. Protoevangelium Jacobi, Acta Andreae et Matthiae, an unidentified text with a conventional title Acts of the Apostles). The earliest available Georgian versions of the Old Testament apocrypha are: Assumptio Mosis, Vita Adam, Historia Melchizedek, Caverna thesauri (an exegetic compendium of the Old and New Testament). Georgian literature is especially rich in New Testament apocrypha about the birth, life, and dormition of the Mother of God; Christ’s childhood and various episodes of his life; holy reliquiaries of the crucifixion (cross, nails, robe of Jesus); apocryphal gospels (Evangelium Nicodemi, Protoevangelium Jacobi); apocryphal acts of apostles, apocalypses, and epistles; apocryphal lives of saints; etc. The main part of this literature has been rendered in the fifth to ninth centuries from Greek, Armenian, or Syriac. Some of the Georgian versions merit research because they preserve an early redaction of a text or are the only remaining witness to a text. 7

2. Liturgy and hymnography The earliest surviving Typicon in Georgian is the eighth-century translation of the seventh-century Jerusalem Canon, which attests that Georgians used the Typicon of Christ’s tomb in their liturgical practice. Since this translation includes biblical readings for the whole year, it is also called the Jerusalem Lectionary. Hymnographic (so-called Iadgari) collections and the Euchologion have also survived from the Jerusalem tradition. Until the tenth century the Georgian church used the liturgy of the apostle James, and presumably also that of the apostle Peter. It was no earlier than the tenth century that the Constantinopolitan calendar and Typikon replaced the Jerusalem calendar and Typikon at the initiative of the Iveron Monastery on Athos. Two Athonite fathers, Euthymius (d. 1028), initiator of the literary and translation activity at the monastery, and his successor George, strongly facilitated the development of the Constantinopolitan tradition.

7  E. Gabidzashvili, Translated Works, IV: Bibliology, Exegetical, Apocryphal, p. 365-480.

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Euthymius translated a short redaction of the Constantinopolitan Synaxarion and introduced some parts of the Euchologion and several hymnographical texts. More significant in this respect are George’s achievements in working vigorously to translate the vast Greek liturgical collections of his time, thus completely renewing the Old Georgian liturgical books. He translated the Great Synaxarion (a complete Typikon of Hagia Sophia, containing liturgical instructions for the whole year), Horologion, Hieratikon, Liturgiarion (liturgies by Basil and John Chrysostom), Great Euchologion and all the hymnographic collections such as Parakliton, Triodion, Pentekostarion and twelve volumes of Menaion. In order to compile the most complete Menaion, George collected hymnographic material from numerous Greek Menaion manuscripts kept in monastic centres of the Black Mountain, Athos, and Constantinople. In the subsequent centuries his liturgical collections have undergone certain changes, but they remained in use along with new collections until the nineteenth century. In the first half of the twelfth century Arsen of Iqalto (d. 1125) introduced St. Sabas’s Typikon. Thereafter the Great Synaxarion and St. Sabas’s Typikon were used in parallel. 8 The first (4th-6th c.) hymnographic collections were Tropologia, which are no longer available, though their existence is confirmed in later Iadgari. The oldest Iadgari presents the complete repertoire of liturgical poetry. Later on, in the ninth to tenth centuries, a new type of Iadgari, the so-called Great Iadgari, was compiled. The renaissance of Georgian vernacular hymnography of the first period dates to the turn of the tenth century. John Minchkhi, John Mtbevari, and Michael Modrekili stand out as the most productive hymnographers. The Great Iadgari by Michael Modrekili was enriched on the one hand with new translations from Greek and, on the other, with new hymns composed by Georgian hymnographers. His collection with attached neumes (quite different from Greek ones) contains Akolouthias 8  A portion of liturgical texts lost in Greek is preserved in Georgian translations. For Georgian liturgical texts and their research history: E. Gabidzashvili, Translated Works of Ancient Georgian Literature. Bibliography, V: Liturgy, Hymnography, Tbilisi, 2011, p. 12-239 (in Georgian).

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of the annual feasts, the Parakliton, Triodion, Pentekostarion, and Hirmologion. Along with liturgical poetry, non-liturgical Byzantine poetry was translated as well (Gregory of Nazianzus, Christopher of Mytilene, etc.). Impressive samples of vernacular liturgical and non-liturgical hymnography survive from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries and the eighteenth century.

3. Hagiography The Old Georgian ecclesiastic literature was very prolific in hagiographic writings. The early translations, until the end of the tenth century, were rendered from initial versions (so-called keimena, i.e., the first plain narratives). Georgians started to render the collection of Symeon Metaphrastes within his lifetime. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries metaphrastic literature was almost completely translated into Georgian, covering the whole twelve-month cycle. Valuable information about the life of Symeon Metaphrastes, the character of his literary activity, and the content of his collection is given in the writings of the Georgian ecclesiastics Ephrem Mtsire (d. 1103) 9 and Theophilus Hieromonachos (11th-12th c.), the representative of the Athonite school, who rendered many metaphrastic hagiographic works from Greek. According to Georgian manuscript tradition, Symeon’s work was continued by the Byzantine philosopher and writer John Xiphilinos, whose Menologion, evidently not preserved in Greek, is almost fully extant in Georgian. 10 Along with 9  Ephrem Mtsire was the leading person of the Black Mountain Georgian literary and educational centre (near Antioch) in the second half of the eleventh century. He was an excellent theologian, philologist, and scholar, the initiator of the so-called hellenophile trend, which in addition to sharing the ideas of scholarly orientated contemporary Byzantine erudition, endeavored to introduce capabilities of expression found in Greek into Georgian language. Ephrem Mtsire and Antiochene Georgian translators created the system of establishing critical texts and elaborated methodological principles for humanistic erudition. 10  K. Kekelidze, ‘Симеон Метафраст по грузинским источникам’ [‘Symeon Metaphrastes According to Georgian Sources’], in Id., Studies in the History of Georgian Literature, V, Tbilisi, 1957, p. 212-226; K. Kekelidze, ‘Иоанн Ксифилин, продолжатель Симеона Метафраста’ [‘John Xiphilinos, Successor of Symeon Metaphrastes’], ibid., p. 227-247.

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metaphrastical collections, other kinds of hagiographic or semihagiographic collections were also compiled, such as martyrologia, paterika, materika, enkomia, and synaxaria. Most Georgian translations were made from Greek, but some early ones were rendered from Syriac, Armenian, and Arabic. 11 Several keimenic and metaphrastic hagiographic works preserved in Old Georgian translations have not survived in Greek or even in other languages; a number of them are extant in other languages, but not in the same redaction as in Georgian. Apart from translations of hagiographic writings, Georgians produced their indigenous hagiographic literature. It covers a period from the fifth to the eighteenth century. 12 In addition, it should be noted that Euthymius the Athonite, who was a very prolific translator of Greek hagiographical works into Georgian, in his turn contributed to the history of Greek language hagiography. According to Greek, Latin, and Georgian sources, he rendered from Georgian into Greek the well-known medieval novel ascribed to John of Damascus, Vita Barlaam et Joasaph (in Georgian, The Wisdom of Balahvar) which soon after Euthymius’s time appeared in Latin (in 1048) and thereafter in many other European languages. Moreover, his biographer, George the Athonite, refers to another narrative, called Abukura, which Euthymius also must have rendered from Georgian into Greek. Both spiritual stories were apparently translated from Arabic into Georgian at the turn of the tenth century. 13 11   E. Gabidzashvili, Hagiographic Works Translated into Georgian, Tbilisi, 2004 (in Georgian); T. Pataridze, ‘Christian Literature Translated from Arabic into Georgian: A Review’, Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU, 19 (2013), p. 47-65; T. Pataridze, ‘Существуют ли переводы с сирийского языка на грузинский?’ [‘Are there Translations from Syriac into Georgian?’], in Miscellanea Orientalia. Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Seminar für Orientalistik und Islamwissenschaft – ed. N. Seleznev, U. Aržanov, Moscow, 2014, p. 185-206. 12  For Georgian manuscripts and respective bibliography: E. Gabidzashvili, Hagiographic Works. For the corpus of Georgian hagiographic writings: Monuments of Old Georgian Hagiographic Literature – ed. I. Abuladze, M. Shanidze, et al., 6 vols., Tbilisi, 1964-1980 (in Georgian). 13 See the discussion on the identification of this text in Georgian Literature in European Scholarship, p. 16-19; M. Nanobashvili, ‘The Development of Literary Contacts between the Georgians and the Arabic Speaking Christians in Palestine from the 8th to the 10th Century’, Aram, 15 (2003), p. 269-274; T. Pataridze, ‘Christian Literature’, p. 60-62.

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4. Ascetic literature The earliest samples of ascetic literature reveal how closely the Georgian ascetic ideal was linked with Near Eastern monastic life. In the first period of their literature Georgians were acquainted with the works of Anthony the Great (seven epistles, sayings, teachings), Evagrius of Pontus (seven orations and one epistle), Ephrem the Syrian (more than forty of his works were rendered before the tenth century), John Moschus (Pratum Spirituale, translated in the ninth century from Arabic or Greek), John Sinaites (Scala Paradisi, later translated several times), Pseudo-Macarius (two epistles), Abba Amona (sixteen orations), Mark the Hermit (ascetic writings), Dorotheus the Egyptian (some Teachings for monks; Euthymius later translated more Teachings), Nilus of Sinai (also retranslated later by Euthymius, as well as in the twelfth century), and others. Georgian translations include authors and works that have not been yet identified, such as Monk Abraham’s Teachings and one oration to monks, Pimen’s Teachings, Monk Martyr’s On Remorse and Humility, Sahak the Monk’s Teachings on Virtue (Euthymius’s translation), and Simon of Mesopotamia’s Teaching on Death (Euthymius’s translation). Especially prolific in rendering ascetic literature were the prominent ecclesiastic figures of the classical period. Apart from translations noted above, Euthymius translated and retranslated John Sinaites’ Scala Paradisi, Ephrem the Syrian’s writings, Pseudo-Macarius’s Spiritual Teachings, forty-two Teachings by Isaac the Syrian, Teachings ascribed to St. Zosimus of Palestine, and more. It is symptomatic that along with Egyptian, Palestinian, and Syrian fathers, Euthymius rendered such authors as Basil the Great (Ethics), Gregory of Nazianzus (Spiritual Teachings, a compilation of his homilies) Gregory of Nyssa (De virginitate, De vita Macrinae, De vita Mosis), Asterius of Amasea (In principium jejuniorum, which Euthymius took to be Nyssa’s work), Maximus the Confessor (three collections of Teachings and ascetic excerpts from different works), Gregory the Great (Dialogues), and John Cassian (De octo principalibus vitiis from the Institutiones) from Greek. He compiled an ascetic collection according to the Book of Holy Men, and himself was the author of one original work written in Greek, How to Live in the Kelliotic or Anchoretic Way. George the 504

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Athonite, the next superior of the Iveron, translated Theodore of Stoudios’s ascetic-mystic collection to be read in Lent, and Gregory of Nyssa’s De professione Christiana and De perfectione. His student Theophilus Hieromonachos translated selections from the Book of Holy Men and John Chrysostom’s Asceticon. In the field of mystics and ascetics a productive translator was the eleventh-century ecclesiastic and scholar Ephrem Mtsire, who rendered Basil’s Asceticon (except the Ethics, already translated by Euthymius), Ephrem the Syrian’s teachings in two volumes (Ephrem the First and Ephrem the Second, containing fifty works), the Lausaicon by Palladius, the Historia Philothea of Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Diadochus of Photice’s Hundred Chapters, two writings by Cassian, and more. Immensely popular in Georgia was John Climacus. The popularity of his work is evident from the large number of manuscripts and the three surviving translations. Along with the earliest anonymous translation and that by Euthymius mentioned above, there is a thirteenth-century translation by Peter of Gelati. In addition, two iambic poems were composed after Euthymius’s translation. The earlier, ascribed to John Petritsi (circa 10501125), 14 is composed according to the first part of Euthymius’s translation, while the other one, written by Catholicos Anton I (18th c.) is based on the second part of Euthymius’s rendition. Finally, it should be noted that the Georgian manuscript tradition has also preserved more than ten types of ascetic and apophthegmic collections. 15

5. Homiletics The number of homiletic writings translated into Georgian greatly exceeds the heritage of other literary genres. The first samples 14  John Petritsi is the founder of the intellectual stream of the Gelati Academy (established in the first half of the twelfth century). It was a special branch of hellenophile scholarship, distinguished by its authentic rigorous linguistic insights, which went even further in the adoption of Greek linguistic norms and the formation of a special philosophical and metaphysical language targeted at the highly intellectual reader. 15  E. Gabidzashvili,Translated Works of Ancient Georgian Literature. Bibliography, II: Ascetics and Mystics, Tbilisi, 2006 (in Georgian).

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are to be found in palimpsests of the fifth to seventh centuries. Several hundreds of homiletic treatises, rendered predominantly from Greek, have been incorporated into vernacular homiletic collections of various types. The earliest among them is the Polycephalon (8th-10th c.). The up to ten surviving polycephala have different contents. They represent homilies arranged on a calendrical principle to celebrate various ecclesiastical feasts with several homilies dedicated to each feast. Compilation of a new type of homiletic collection – in Georgian manuscript tradition called metaphrases – begins in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In these homiletic collections each feast or commemorative day of a saint is presented only by one homily; metaphrases frequently differ from polycephala also by their repertoire. The most popular patristic homiletic authors in Old Georgian literature are John Chrysostom, Ephrem the Syrian, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and John of Damascus. Apart from these church fathers, translations were made of sermons by Gregory Thaumaturgus, Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria, Cyril of Jerusalem, Meletius of Antioch, Epiphanius of Cyprus, Methodius of Olympos, Amphilochius of Ikonion, Severianus of Gabala, Hesychius of Jerusalem, Antipater of Bostra, Andrew of Crete, Sophronius of Jerusalem, Maximus the Confessor, Anastasius of Sinai, Germanus of Constantinople, Theodore of Studios, and others. In addition, it should be mentioned that translations done in this literary genre preserved the names of authors and writings which have yet to be identified. Original sermons are rather scarce in medieval Georgian literature. 16 The most eidetic figure of that time is John, Bishop of Bolnisi, who according to scholars should be identified with a Georgian cleric active in the seventh or tenth century. Original sermons in Georgia started to flourish rather late, from the seventeenth century. 17 16  This was presumably caused by Georgian clerics’ adherence to the nineteenth canon of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, which obliged them to lead their congregation not through their own teaching, but through the teachings of holy fathers. 17  M. Maisuradze, ‘Homiletics’, in N. Melikishvili, M. Maisuradze, Essays, I, p. 262-598; E. Gabidzashvili, Hagiographic Works; E. Gabidzashvili,

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6. Exegetical works Translation of exegetical works started in the early Middle Ages. 18 From the very beginning issues of creation must have been of special interest. The earliest translated exegetical texts are Severian of Gabala’s In Genesim and the Physiologos (both mid-5th c.); thereafter, no earlier than the eighth century, Basil’s In  Hexaemeron and Gregory of Nyssa’s De hominis opificio were rendered, apparently from Arabic. The earliest preserved translations of commentaries on the Psalms are those of Theodoret of Cyrrhus (rendered from Armenian) and Athanasius of Alexandria (Epistula ad Marcellinum). The commentary on the Canticum canticorum by Hippolytus of Rome must have been the first interpretation of that book rendered into Georgian before the tenth century. This text is also interesting for being a fully preserved version of Hippolytus’s work. To the early translations belong as well Hippolytus’s De benedictione Mosis, The Benediction of Jacob, On David and Goliath (fully available only in Georgian), and De antichristo, as well as Epiphanius of Cyprus’s De XII gemmis (translated from Armenian) and De mensuribus et ponderibus (excerpts; translated from Syriac or Greek). In due time the earliest translations done from Greek, Armenian, Syriac, and Arabic were included in the collections compiled at the turn of the ninth to tenth century. Particularly noteworthy is the early-tenth-century Shatberdi Collection, compiled in the southwest Georgian monastery of the same name, which illustrates the character of monastic erudition at that time. However, the greatest part of patristic exegesis was rendered from Greek between the second half of the tenth century and the thirteenth century. In this regard, the contribution of the Iveron monastery is especially significant: Andrew of Caesarea’s In Apocalypsim belongs to Euthymius’s earliest translations. Later he initiated the systematic rendering of Byzantine interpretations of the Gospels with his translations of John Chrysostom’s Homiliae Translated Works of Ancient Georgian Literature. Bibliography, III: Homiletics, Tbilisi, 2009. 18  T. Dolidze, A. Kharanauli, ‘The Bible in Georgian Christianity’. For further information on manuscript tradition and research: Gabidzashvili, Translated Works, IV: Bibliology, Exegetical, Apocryphal, p. 219-362.

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in Matthaeum and Homiliae in Joannem. As well, he rendered Gregory of Nyssa’s De oratione dominica and De vita Mosis, and Maximus the Confessors’ well-known biblical commentaries, the Questiones ad Thalassium and the Ambigua ad Joannem (a part of the Ambiguorum Liber). George the Athonite rendered anew Basil’s In Hexaemeron and Gregory of Nyssa’s De hominis opificio from Greek. George obviously had a special affection for Gregory of Nyssa as a thinker. He also translated Nyssa’s Apologia in Hexaemeron, In Canticum canticorum, 19 and Orationes de beatitudinibus. Theophilus Hieromonachos rendered John Chrysostom’s Homiliae in Genesim. Shortly afterwards Ephrem Mtsire and the theologians of the hellenophile Gelati Academy made a considerable contribution to the appropriation of the achievements of Greek exegetics: Gregory Thaumaturgus’s Metaphrasis in Ecclesiasten Salomonis and Gregory of Nazianzus’s Significatio in Ezechielem (spurious) were rendered into Georgian by Ephrem. To the juncture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries goes the Gelati translation of In Canticum canticorum by an anonymous translator; the Greek source of this text has not yet been identified. In the same time the representative(s) of the Gelati school rendered Maximus the Confessor’s Expositio orationis Dominicae and (for the second time, after Euthymius) his Questiones ad Thalassium and Ambiguorum Liber. The translation of a commentary on Ecclesiastes by Olympiodorus of Alexandria and Mitrophanes of Smyrna is attributed to a notable Gelati Academy theologian and philosopher John Chimchimeli (12th-13th  c.). In addition, he translated the extensive commentaries In Marcum and In Lucam by Theophylactus of Bulgaria; the rendition of Theophylactus’s In Joannem was made by another (anonymous) member of the Gelati school. The eleventh and twelfth centuries are marked by the introduction of collections of selected commentaries on biblical books. This type of systematic work was initiated by Euthymius the Athonite. He compiled (or rendered from an unknown source) a florilegium of Maximus the Confessor’s exegetical works The Words of Gospels Selected from St. Maximus’ Writings, and trans  Recently published: Gr. Nyss., In Cant.

19

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lated select commentaries on Paul’s epistles (Ad Romanos and I ad Corinthios) from a catena collection based on John Chrysostom’s and other fathers’ interpretations. Later on, Ephrem Mtsire accomplished the complete translation of this collection. Moreover, Ephrem translated a Psalter catena, relying mainly on the commentaries of Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria, but also of Basil the Great, Hesychius of Jerusalem, Asterius of Amasea, John Chrysostom, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and others. Ephrem’s Psalter catena, in turn, provided the basis for a twelfth-century anonymous author, the follower of his approach, to compile a  Select Commentaries on Psalms. The vast text of the twelfthcentury Gelati Catena Bible comprises numerous marginal commentaries. This collection was apparently compiled to cover the exegesis of all biblical books. Nowadays, however, only complete commentaries remain from Leuiticus to Ruth. In the eighteenth century, Catholicos Antony I (d. 1788) compiled an original extensive commentary to the Fiftieth Pslam, containing various patristic and later sources. In the eyes of Antony’s opponents, that work revealed his strong adherence to the Latin church.

7. Dogmatic and polemical works The earliest collections certainly include dogmatic and polemic works. 20 One quite frequently comes across works de fide or homilies containing dogmatic and polemic discourses against Arianism, Nestorianism, and Monophysitism. Translation of polemic works against Monophysites and Nestorians were evidently linked with the early period of hot debate with Armenians (6th-9th c.), serving as supporting materials in that controversy. An indigenous historical and polemic work On the Split of Georgia and Armenia introduces the bitter strife between the Georgian and Armenian churches at the turn of the seventh century. 21 Nevertheless, at the outset of the classical period (the turn 20  Bibliography for the whole section: E. Gabidzashvili, Translated Works of Ancient Georgian Literature. Bibliography, VI: Canonical, Dogmatic, and Polemical, Tbilisi, 2012, p. 151-330. 21  Arsen Saphareli, On the Split of Georgia and Armenia – ed. Z. Alexidze, Tbilisi, 1980 (in Georgian).

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of the 11th c.) there was an obvious lack of dogmatic literature in the Georgian church. Euthymius the Athonite began to fill this gap, focussing mainly on four Greek theologians: Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, and John of Damascus. Along with Gregory of Nazianzus’s liturgical homilies, he rendered a number of his aporetical (non-liturgical) orations (Or. 2, Or. 3, Or. 20, Or. 29, Or. 30, Or. 31, Or. 37), excluding the theological orations Adversus Eunomianos (Or. 27), previously translated from Armenian, and De Theologia (Or. 28), which was already translated from the Greek by his contemporary David Tbeli. From Gregory of Nyssa’s work he selected three dogmatic writings: Oratio catechetica magna, De anima et resurrectione, and the homily De deitate Filii et Spiritus Sancti. From Maximus the Confessor’s dogmatic legacy Euthymius chose his most significant anti-monothelite treatise Disputatio cum Pyrrho (retranslated by a Gelati school theologian in the twelfth century). As far as John of Damascus’s dogmatic work is concerned, Euthymius accomplished the compilation of two florilegia. Some of the treatises he amalgamated in the compendium Leader, entitled after Anastasius of Sinai’s Viae dux. It includes excerpts mainly from the Expositio fidei, but also from Sacra parallela, De haeresibus, Epistula de hymno trisagio, De sancta trinitate (dubious), De natura composite sive contra acephalos, and some other sources. The other florilegium was compiled from John of Damascus’s antimonophysite and anti-monothelite treatises, incorporated under a common title On Two Natures and One Hypostasis. To Euthymius’s dogmatic translations belongs Michael Synkellos’s creed as well, in two versions, for the creed of Pseudo-Maximus, which Euthymius inserted in his rendition of Maximus’s Vita by Theodosius of Gangra, is a slightly revised version of Synkellos’s creed. The translation method of Euthymius was itself compilative. While translating, he employed various intra- and intertextualizing strategies, changing the diction of the Greek original, simplifying its discourse, or adding explanatory passages even from other sources. This selective method of translation was based on Euthymius’s hermeneutic approach to the text as a living and life-giving word, its primary mission being the rearing of the spiritually immature reader. Particularly when rendering philo510

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sophically-minded patristic authors, Euthymius virtually echoed contemporary Macedonian intellectualism and gave Georgian readers an opportunity, at least to a certain extent, to become acquainted with the spirituality and literary taste of his contemporary Greek intellectual environment. With the name of George the Athonite are associated some creedal symbols. He translated the version of Niceaconstantinopolitanum to which Photius’s definition 22 and the historical overview On the Holy Councils are attached, and the Symbolum Quicunque, particularly the version that introduces the pneumatological formula with filioque. The fact that George translated this version of the treatise is evidence that in the time of severe tension between the Byzantine and Roman churches under Michael Cerularius, he belonged to the opposite party of Metropolitan clergymen. 23 The Symbol of Gregory Thaumaturgus, a part of George’s translation of Vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi by Gregory of Nyssa, circulated as an independent text through many manuscripts. Further, George considered it appropriate to acquaint Georgian readers with the De virginitate ascribed to Athanasius, the De theologia of John of Damascus (dubious), and Ignatius’s twelve epistles (seven authentic and five dubious). It was Theophilus Hieromonachos who first rendered the short version of Epiphanius of Cyprus’s Panarion and the Confession of the True and Immaculate Christian Faith, being another revised version of Synkellos’s creed (in Georgian manuscripts ascribed to Theodoret of Cyrrhus). From the eleventh to twelfth and later centuries survived anonymous translations of the Nicene and Niceno-Constantinopolitan creeds, The Definition of Chalcedon, Definitions of the Holy Councils, and a number of other similar texts in various versions. 24

22  According to K. Kekelidze, it resembles the fifth chapter of Photius’s epistle to Pope Nicholas I; cfr. K. Kekelidze, History of Georgian Literature, I: Old Literature, Tbilisi, 1960, p. 225 (in Georgian). 23  It is also revealed by his answer to Constantine (X) Doukas’ question about the difference between communion in Orthodox and Catholic churches; see the ‘Life of St. George the Athonite’ in Monuments of Old Georgian Hagiographic Literature, II, Tbilisi, 1967, p. 179-180. 24  For editions of creeds, see E. Kochlamazashvili, ‘The Symbol of the Faith in Old Georgian Translation’, Studies in Christian Archaeology, 3 (2010), p. 11-45 (in Georgian; abstract in English, p. 798).

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Within the domains of philosophical theology and dogmatics, Ephrem Mtsire gave special attention to such monumental works as the Corpus Dionysiacum and John of Damascus’s Pege gnoseos, except De haeresibus. He also translated up to forty writings by Gregory of Nazianzus, among them the aporetical orations. Of perhaps greatest importance in the history of Georgian dogmatics is the translation activity of Arsen of Iqalto, who was a professor of the Gelati Academy and influenced by Petritsi. He compiled the largest Georgian dogmatic anthology, the Dogmaticon, which comprises more than seventy translated works. 25 In due time it was expanded with new texts mostly of polemic character. To this day there is no evidence of a similar Greek collection. Arsen’s Dogmaticon consists of works by well known and anonymous writers, including Anastasius of Sinai’s Viae dux; John of Damascus’s Pege gnoseos (except De haeresibus, as with Ephrem’s translation), his De duabus in Christo voluntatibus, two treatises against Nestorius and one against Jacobites. The great polemist Theodore Abu-Qurrah is represented with about thirty-five dogmatic-polemical treatises against Jacobites, Severians, Armenians, Jews, Muslims, and Saracens. A part of these texts has not been specified so far. One can find here Nicetas Stethatos’s De anima (fifteen orations), De paradiso (Or. 3), Dedicatoriae epistulae (eight known epistles in Greek and the ninth unknown), and five orations against the Armenians. 26 The collection includes some of Cyril of Alexandria’s works against Nestorius and fragments from his work De incarnatione Unigeniti. Of course, the Tomus of Leo the Great was translated in the first period of the Georgian-Armenian controversy, but what we have today is Arsen’s translation. This collection also includes a well known Greek dogmatic florilegium, Doctrina patrum, Michael Psellos’s De Primogenito, the Epistula canonica by

25  Arsen received higher education in Constantinople and later on became a polymath with wide-ranging interests in theology, philosophy, philology, quadrivium disciplines, as well as canon law. Another voluminous collection he translated was the Great Nomocanon, preceded by the Small Nomocanon by Euthymius and other translated and vernacular canon law documents. See E. Gabidzashvili, Translated Works, VI: Canonical, Dogmatic, and Polemical, p. 12-148. 26  Recently edited: Nik. Steth., Opera.

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Petrus of Antioch, a polemic treatise against Origen (To Them Who Say That Human Souls Are Prior to the Body), Eustratius of Nicaea’s On the Split of Churches, one of the first treatises that entered Arsen’s Dogmaticon in the late Middle Ages, and many other dogmatic and polemic works. In the person of John Petritsi, a central figure in medieval Georgian philosophy, and his successors at the Gelati Academy, one can see the final turn to the ‘outer philosophy’, which became extensively treated first in Macedonian and thereafter in Doukanian and Komnenian Byzantium. It was the Gelati Academy, with its ambition of being ‘another Athens and a second Jerusalem’ that amalgamated Christian wisdom with Greek philosophy as indispensible part of its curriculum. The number of surviving texts shows that the education provided there was closely linked to contemporary paradigms of Byzantine high school erudition: Proclus’s Elementatio theologica with a comprehensive commentary by John Petritsi, 27 as well as Ammonius’s In Aristotelis Categorias and In Porphyrii Isagogen, rendered by his successor. This part of the late Hellenic philosophical school heritage must have been taught in parallel to a number of courses aimed to build a profound Christian erudition. The textual basis for it could have been selected from the following Gelati translations: Nemesius of Emesa’s De natura hominis, rendered by Petritsi; commentaries on so-called Christian physics as seen in Ecclesiastes and Christian epoptics as seen in Canticum canticorum; the comprehensive Gelati catena collection; Maximus the Confessor’s exegetical, dogmatic, and polemical writings; some of the treatises from Arsen’s Dogmaticon: hagiographical (e.g. John Xiphilinos’s metaphrastic collection), historiographical (George Hamartolos’s Chronicon; Flavius Josephus’s Antiquitates Iudaici), canonical (Nomocanon and respective texts), as well as astronomical works. The final stage of the cultural ascent at the turn of the twelfth century was marked by the composition of Shota Rustaveli’s secular poem The Knight in the Panther’s Skin. This long poem, regarded as the pinnacle of the entire Georgian literary output, 27  According to literary sources, Petritsi translated the Categoriae and De Interpretatione (no longer extant).

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is based on a profound knowledge of patristic theology and philosophy. However, it is primarily the development of the central idea of love that aligns the author with the foremost Christian thinkers of the pre-Renaissance period. Georgian ecclesiastical literature at the turn of the New Epoch (17th-18th c.) followed the paradigm of the humanistic and scholarly orientation associated with Gelati. This time it was new cultural entities – mainly Russian theology, but also elements of European theology and philosophy – that were combined with the Byzantine-Armenian-Georgian synthesis. The first scholar to give close attention to European spirituality was the Georgian encyclopaedist of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani. Pursuing mainly political interests at the end of the seventeenth century, he converted to Catholicism. His first step toward Western tradition was a revised edition of the Georgian Bible according to the Latin and Armenian Bibles. Later on, Orbeliani defended the filioque and the primacy of Pope in the second edition of his comprehensive catechesis, Entrance into Paradise. A counter trend to this pro-Latin orientation strived to preserve the traditional position of Georgian orthodoxy. It too was productive in creating theological and dogmatic literature. In 1729 Catholicos Besarion composed an immense anti-Latin work, Anvil. Timote Gabashvili (first half of the 18th c.) composed another dogmatic and historical investigation of the seven Ecumenical Councils, entitled Iron Claws. Both Besarion and Timote show extensive knowledge of the history of dogmatics as they discuss in detail issues of Orthodox and Catholic confessions. Timote Gabashvili is also the author of a voluminous dogmatic and polemic collection, which included an anti-Muslim treatise written by Gabashvili himself. The ecclesiatic writing of the second half of the eighteenth century is called the age of Catholicos Anthony I. Along with traditional Greek and Armenian literary documents, he worked with Russian and Latin sources. This approach underlies his work Collection of the Precious Thoughts, which demonstrates his profound erudition in Greek philosophy and patristic theology. Here, along with the Greek authors, he cites representatives of Latin patristics. 514

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A few more words about polemics. Old Georgian literature includes treatises against pagans, Jews, Catholics, Muslims, and various Christian heresies, such as Arianism, Origenism, 28 Nestorianism, various monophysite trends (against Armenians, Jacobites and Severians), 29 monothelitism, iconoclasm (represented by John of Damascus’s orations), Paulicianism (represented by just one treatise of Euthymius Zigabenos), and one treatise against Augustine’s theory of predestination. 30 Especially rich in this genre are the polemics against Muslims, Armenians, and, in the eighteenth century, Catholics. 31

8. Conclusion In the quest for insights into Byzantine-Georgian patristic culture, one has to operate within the paradigmatic contexts of interculturality and identity, tradition and innovation, as well as the cultural dynamics of transmission, appropriation, and transformation. Language, as the most significant cultural phenomenon, played a key role in these processes. The eighth-to-ninth-century reformation of literary language under the auspices of Georgian community at St. Sabas’s Laura, a result of multilingual literary interactions, marks a new stage in the development of Georgian cultural identity. Several statements by those who implemented major national projects in the eleventh and twelfth centuries illustrate the goals they pursued. There was a move from ‘the ability of adding to and taking out’ from the original (according to Ephrem Mtsire’s assessment of Euthymius’s selective method 28  Apart from the anonymous polemical treatise To Them Who Say That Human Souls are Prior to Body, which entered the Dogmaticon, two polemical collections contain The Story of a Miserable Philosopher Origen (in fact an excerpt from George Hamartolos’ Chronicon) and The Answer of the Blessed Theodore AbuQurrah to Origen (both evidently translated at the juncture of the 11th and 12th c.). 29  The earliest sample is a relatively large fragment of the anti-monophysite collection, apparently rendered in the fifth to sixth century; it contains excerpts from pre-chalcedonic Greek and Latin (Pope Celestine I, Ambrose, Augustine) fathers. 30  On the Creation and That There is No Determination by God of Good and Bad in Man. This extensive pseudoepigraphic work (attributed to John Chrysostom) is included in the early tenth-century Sinai collection.  31  E. Gabidzashvili, Translated Works, VI: Canonical, Dogmatic, and Polemical, p. 151-330.

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of translation), through George the Athonite’s belief that the appropriation of literary spirituality should cover the full range of the Greek original, towards the working principle of Ephrem Msire (‘not according to the beauty of Georgian, but in comparison with the Greek’), to the final phase of this vector, Petritsi’s aim ‘I wanted to shape the (Georgian) language according to the (Greek) language’. The latter remained the cultural dream of Catholicos Antony I, who in the difficult times of the eighteenth century strived to revive Georgian theological and philosophical language to the heights of Petritsi’s intellectual enterprise. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Georgian ecclesiastical literature experienced the impact of Russian orthodoxy, but that cannot be characterized as a fruitful period of its history. In closing this paper, I should note that the scholarly study of old Georgian versions of Greek patristic literature started at the turn of the nineteenth century and continued on a large scale in philological and historical research in the communist era, both inside and outside of Georgia. 32 The fall of the atheistic state at the end of the twentieth century offered new perspectives, specifically for the conceptual study of Greek and Georgian patristics. 33 However, in spite of the extensive research already carried out, innumerable philological and historical issues, as well as theological and philosophical issues, still require detailed examination. The focus must shift from the study of isolated moments in the literary history of Georgian patristics to the systematic study of intercultural aspects, in order to situate Georgia’s literary production in the overall context of Eastern Christianity. 32 For the history of research: Georgian Literature in European Scholarship, with a bibliography of research in European languages; T. Dolidze, ‘A Reflection of Alexandrian Tradition in the Old Georgian Literature and the Modern Georgian Research’, Adamantius. Notiziario del Gruppo Italiano di Ricerca su ‘Origene e la tradizione alessandrina’, 7 (2001), p. 154-172; T. Dolidze, ‘Foundation of Kartvelian – Byzantine Studies in Georgia’, Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU, 18 (2012), p. 126-136; T. Dolidze, ‘Overview of the Georgian Research into Byzantine and Medieval Georgian Patristic Theology’, Phasis. Greek and Roman Studies, 15-16 (2012-2013), p. 397-426. 33 E.g., the studies by Lela Alexidze, Tamar Aptsiauri, Edisher Chelidze, Tina Dolidze, Levan Gigineishvili, Tengiz Iremadze, Eka Kiria, Ekvtime Kochlamazashvili, Magda Mchedlidze, Damana Melikishili, Nino Sakvarelidze, Guram Tevzadze, and others.

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Bibliography 1. Primary sources Arsen Saphareli, On the Split of Georgia and Armenia – ed. Z. Alexidze, Tbilisi, 1980 (in Georgian). Gr. Nyss., In Cant. = St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Commentary on the Song of Songs (Canticum canticorum) – ed. G. Kiknadze, N. Melikishvili, Tbilisi, 2013 (in Georgian). Monuments of Old Georgian Hagiographic Literature – ed. I. Abuladze, M. Shanidze, et al., 6 vols., Tbilisi, 1964-1980 (in Georgian). Nik. Steth., Opera = Dogmaticon II: Niketas Stethatos, Five Polemic Speeches, Epistles, On the Soul, On Paradise – ed. M. Raphava, M. Kasradze, Tbilisi, 2013 (in Georgian). От берегов Босфора до берегов Евфрата [From the Shores of Bosphorus to the Shores of Euphrates] – tr. S. S. Averintsev, Moscow, 1987. E. Kochlamazashvili, ‘The Symbol of the Faith in Old Georgian Translation’, Studies in Christian Archaeology, 3 (2010), p. 11-45 (in Georgian; abstract in English, p. 798).

2. Secondary literature Ancient Christianity in the Caucasus (Iberica-Caucasica, 1) – ed. T. Mgaloblishvili, Richmond, 1998. T. Dolidze, ‘Overview of the Georgian Research into Byzantine and Medieval Georgian Patristic Theology’, Phasis. Greek and Roman Studies, 15-16 (2012-2013), p. 397-426. T. Dolidze, ‘Foundation of Kartvelian – Byzantine Studies in Georgia’, Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU, 18 (2012), p. 126-136. T. Dolidze, ‘A Reflection of Alexandrian Tradition in the Old Georgian Literature and the Modern Georgian Research’, Adamantius. Notiziario del Gruppo Italiano di Ricerca su ‘Origene e la tradizione alessandrina’, 7 (2001), p. 154-172. T. Dolidze, A. Kharanauli ‘The Bible in Georgian Christianity’, The Encyclopaedia of the Bible and Its Reception, X, Berlin, 2015, col. 83-89. E. Gabidzashvili, Translated Works of Ancient Georgian Literature. Bibliography, II: Ascetics and Mystics; III: Homiletics; IV: Bibliology, Exegetical, Apocryphal; V: Liturgy, Hymnography; VI: Canonical, Dogmatic, and Polemical, Tbilisi, 2006-2012 (in Georgian). E. Gabidzashvili, Hagiographic Works Translated into Georgian, Tbilisi, 2004 (in Georgian).

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Georgian Literature in European Scholarship – ed. E. Khintibidze, Amsterdam, 2001. K. Kekelidze, ‘A Fourth-Century Georgian from Abroad. A Thinker and a Public Figure’ (in Georgian), in Id., Studies in the History of Georgian Literature, VI, Tbilisi, 1960. K. Kekelidze, History of Georgian Literature, I: Old Literature, Tbilisi, 1960 (in Georgian). K. Kekelidze, ‘Иоанн Ксифилин, продолжатель Симеона Метафраста’ [‘John Xiphilinos, Successor of Symeon Metaphrastes’], in Id., Studies in the History of Georgian Literature, V, Tbilisi, 1957, p. 227247. K.  Kekelidze, ‘Симеон Метафраст по грузинским источникам’ [‘Symeon Metaphrastes According to Georgian Sources’], in Id., Studies in the History of Georgian Literature, V, Tbilisi, 1957, p. 212226. N. Melikishvili,  M. Maisuradze, Essays from the History of Old Georgian Spiritual Literature, I, Tbilisi, 2012, (in Georgian). L. Menabde, Seats of Ancient Georgian Literature Abroad, 2 vols., Tbilisi, 1962, 1980 (in Georgian). T. Meskhi, Sinai and Georgia. New Pages of the Centuries-Old History, Tbilisi, 2013 (in Georgian). M. Nanobashvili, ‘The Development of Literary Contacts between the Georgians and the Arabic Speaking Christians in Palestine from the 8th to the 10th Century’, Aram, 15 (2003), p. 269-274. T. Pataridze, ‘Существуют ли переводы с сирийского языка на грузинский?’ [‘Are there Translations from Syriac into Georgian?’], in Miscellanea Orientalia. Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Seminar für Orientalistik und Islamwissenschaft – ed. N. Seleznev, U. Aržanov, Moscow, 2014, p. 185-206. T. Pataridze, ‘Christian Literature Translated from Arabic into Georgian: A Review’, Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU, 19 (2013), p. 47-65.

Abstract One can loosely say that Georgian ecclesiastical literature is a scion of eastern patristics. The history of its reception goes back to the early Byzantine period. Since that time the grand ‘eastern Christian miracle’ became an inherent part of Georgian cultural identity and, particularly, its literature. Two literary ways of adoption – translation and incorporation of Byzantine Christian thought in indigenous literature – were applied together. As far as the attitude towards Latin

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Christianity is concerned, it was ‘ambivalent’, varying according to cultural challenges. The present paper does not claim to provide a complete exposition of the subject. It only aims to show, by calling attention to the most illustrative evidence, how the Old Georgian literary processes resonated with Byzantine ecclesiastical literature. It concludes by offering a short account on the scholarly study of the Greek patristic legacy in Georgia.

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YONATAN MOSS Hebrew University, Jerusalem

THE RISE AND FUNCTION OF THE HOLY TEXT IN LATE ANTIQUITY: SEVERUS OF ANTIOCH, THE BABYLONIAN TALMUD, AND BEYOND When the Chalcedonian-minded commander Justin ascended the imperial throne in July of 518, it did take not long before his radical break with the essentially anti-Chalcedonian policies of his predecessor, Anastasius, began to be felt.1 By late September of that year Justin had ordered that the tongue of Severus, patriarch of Antioch, the outspoken articulator of the anti-Chalcedonian cause, be – well – severed.2 The patriarch got word, and, as is well known, saved his tongue by fleeing to Egypt.3 Although he spent the remaining twenty years of his life in hiding, Severus was able, through an elaborate correspondence network and a series of expositions of patristic theology, to maintain his position as the leading voice of the anti-Chalcedonian camp.4 The subsequent traditions of the main anti-Chalcedonian  See A. A.  Vasiliev, Justin the First: An Introduction to the Epoch of Justinian the Great, Cambridge, MA, 1950, p. 136-148; V. Menze, Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church, Oxford, 2008, p. 18-30 for nuanced histories of this process. 2 There is some discrepancy on this matter between the reports of the late ancient sources. It is Evagrius, Historia Ecclesiastica 4. 4., who says that Severus’ tongue was to be cut off; Liberatus, Breviarium causae Nestorianum et Eutychianorum 19 (ACO, 2.5, p. 134) reports that Severus was merely summoned to Constantinople. Nevertheless, as Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 3 vols., New York, 1930, II, p. 853, n. 128 (Chapter 46.2), wittily remarks, after citing these competing accounts: “The prudent patriarch did not stay to examine the difference.” 3 See Liberatus, ibid., for the basic outline of events. Appendix 1 of my PhD dissertation (see n. 6 below) deals with the exact dates of Severus’ departure from Antioch and arrival in Egypt.  4 For a helpful introduction to Severus and his works, see P. Allen, C. T. R.  Hayward, Severus of Antioch, London, New York, 2004. For an in1

10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107533

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churches, namely the Syrian and the Coptic Orthodox communities, revere Severus in two main capacities: as a ‘founding father’ and as ‘a saint.’ This second aspect, Severus’ traditional image as saint, will be this paper’s actual point of departure, but I want to preface with a few words about the first aspect. Modern scholarship has, by and large, eagerly accepted Severus’ capacity as the ‘chief-church-father,’ the institutional pioneer, of the anti-Chalcedonian churches.5 I recently compared this image of Severus to the ideological profile that emerges from his own writings.6 I discovered that contrary to his subsequent reputation, Severus was in fact very much opposed to the creation of an institutional rival to the imperial church. Throughout his many years of exile he advocated remaining within the given depth study of Severus’ years as patriarch, see F. Alpi, La route royale: Sévère d’Antioche, 2 vols. (Bibliothèque archéologique et historique, 188), Beirut, 2009. Alpi, Route royale, vol. 2 is also helpful for its comprehensive overview of the sources by and about Severus, in the various linguistic traditions of the ancient church. 5  The expression ‘chief-church father’ (‘Hauptkirchenvater’) is used by W. De Vries, Sakramententheologie bei den syrischen Monophysiten, (OCA, 125), Rome, 1940, p. 19. For an introduction to the reception of Severus in the Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Arabic and Ethiopic traditions, see L. Van Rompay, ‘Severus, Patriarch of Antioch (512-538), in the Greek, Syriac, and Coptic Traditions’, Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies, 8 (2008), p. 3-22. See also Alpi, Route royale (vol. 2, p. 19-39) for detailed information on the Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, Ethiopic and Coptic, sources pertaining to Severus. Regarding Severus’ image as institutional pioneer of the anti-Chalcedonian churches, see R. Darling, The Patriarchate of Severus of Antioch, 512-518, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Chicago, 1982, p. 109. See the full development of Darling’s argument in ibid., p. 126-155; W. H. C.  Frend, ‘Severus of Antioch and the Origins of the Monophysite Hierarchy’, in The Heritage of the Early Church: Essays in Honor of Georges Vasilievich Florovsky on the Occasion of his Eightieth Birthday – ed. D. Neiman, M. Schatkin (OCA, 195), Rome, 1973, p. 261-275. Other, more recent expressions of this view, can be found in R. Roux, ‘Notes sur la fonction épiscopale selon Sévère d’Antioche’, in Eukosmia: Studi miscellanei per il 75° di Vincenzo Poggi S.J. – ed. V. Ruggieri, L. Pieralli, Soveria Mannelli, 2003, p. 427-441, in partic. p. 440-441; Menze, Justinian, p. 12-14; 177-178; 191-192. For earlier scholarship along these lines, see J. Lebon, Le monophysisme sévérien: étude historique, littéraire et théologique sur la résistance monophysite au Concile de Chalcédoine jusqu’à la constitution de l’Eglise Jacobite, Louvain, 1909, p. 501; 526; W. A. Wigram, The Separation of the Monophysites, London, 1920, p. 63-64; A. Van Roey, ‘Les débuts de l’Eglise jacobite’, in Das Konzil von Chalkedon: Geschichte und Gegenwart – ed. A. Grillmeier, H. Bacht, 3 vols., Würzburg, 1951-1953, II, p. 339-360, in partic. p. 339. 6 Yonatan Moss, In Corruption: Severus of Antioch on the Body of Christ, unpublished doctoral dissertation, New Haven, 2013. 

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ecclesial structures. Rather than breaking away from the Chalcedonian controlled imperial church, Severus hoped to bring the Roman administration and population over to anti-Chalcedonian theology.7 The purpose of the present paper is to apply the methodology I used with regard to Severus’ image as ‘founding father’ to his image as ‘saint.’ I wish to compare posterity’s version of Severus saintliness with the picture that emerges from his writings taken on their own terms. Naturally, my business is not to challenge the patriarch’s holiness per se. What I wish to do is to examine to what degree the later tradition’s conception of Severus as saint correlates with Severus’ own attitude to the ‘holy man’ type and to the charismatic authority that type embodies. In order to do this I will begin by analyzing one Severus miracle story recounted in the medieval tradition. I will then proceed to analyze Severus’ own attitude to charisma. I will propose that contrary to rival trends in his day, Severus sought to distance religious authority from the charismatic powers of the individual. I will argue that in lieu of charisma, which Severus was ideologically opposed to, and in lieu of ecclesiastical power, which Severus had lost access to in his exile, the former patriarch stressed a new locus of authority: the intellectual authority of the mediators of the patristic textual tradition.8 This preference for holy texts over and against ‘holy men’ is paralleled in two other cultures of Severus’ time: in the east Syrian and in the rabbinic academies of learning that flourished in fifth and sixth century Mesopotamia. I will conclude the paper with some preliminary thoughts about the

7  Severus’ rhetoric in addressing both the anti-Chalcedonian leaning Anastasius and the pro-Chalcedonian Justinian was markedly pro-imperial; his decisions on various issues of ecclesial regulation, like the relaxation of canons regarding the ordination of priests, the consecration of bishops, and the reception of heretics, also reflect a strongly ecumenicist, pro-imperial stance. For the full argument, see Moss, In Corruption, p. 107-172. 8  I will be employing “charisma” in the sense of authority anchored in direct, unmediated access to the miraculous and the divine. Severus’ model of episcopal authority, inasmuch as it was rooted in the expertise, and therefore control, of a body of knowledge, could also be called “charismatic” in a different sense of the word. For one application of this latter sense of charisma to Severus, see K. M.  Hay, ‘Severus of Antioch: An Inheritor of Palestinian Monasticism’, ARAM, 15 (2003), p. 159-171, in partic. p. 167.

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meaning of these parallels for what Peter Brown has called, on various occasions, ‘the religious revolution of late antiquity.’9 As indicated at the outset, I will begin this story at the end, namely with the source that is chronologically latest: a specimen of the later, medieval conception of Severus. Medieval Arabic sources in the Coptic Orthodox tradition, relate the following account about Severus. I quote according to the liturgical manual of the Coptic Orthodox Church, known in scholarship as the ‘Copto-Arabic Synaxarion.’ The entry for the second day of the Coptic month of Babeh (29 September) reads as follows:10 One day, once he (i.e. Severus) had come to the desert of Scete, he entered the church under the guise ( ‫) في زي‬ of a foreign ( ‫ )غريب‬monk. Once the priest had raised the host (‫ )القربان‬and had gone around incensing (‫) دار بالبخور‬ the congregation, and after the reading of the chapters ( ‫ ) الفصول‬and the Gospels, the priest lifted up the cover and looked for the host on the plate ( ‫)الصينية‬, but it was hidden from him. The priest wept and turned to the congregation, saying: ‘My brethren, I do not know whether this has happened on account of my sin or on account of yours, for I cannot find the host in its place, as it is hidden from me.’ The congregation wept and at that moment an angel of the Lord appeared, saying to him: ‘This is neither on account of your sin, nor on account of the congregation’s sin. Rather it is because you have ventured to raise the host in the   P. Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1982, p. 5. The seeds of this idea are contained already in P. Brown, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies, 61 (1971), p. 80-101, in partic. p. 99-101.  10  J. Forget – ed. Synaxarium Alexandrinum (CSCO, 67), Beirut, Paris, 1905, vol. 1, p. 48-49. Cfr. Forget’s Latin translation, Synaxarium Alexandrinum (CSCO, 78), Rome, 1921, p. 53-54. Cfr. R. Basset’s edition and French translation of the same text (which he calls the ‘synaxaire arabe Jacobite’) in PO 1, Paris, 1907, p. 313-314. Basset and Forget based their editions on different manuscripts but our text shows no significant differences. For an introduction to the complex textual history of the Copto-Arabic Synaxarion, see M. N. Swanson, ‘The Copto-Arabic Synaxarion’, in Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History 5 (1350-1500), Leiden, 2013, p. 92-100. A more significantly different version of this story can be found in PO 2, Paris, 1907, p. 399-400, taken from Sachau 43, a Garshuni manuscript copied in 1823, at 54b-55b. For a description of this manuscript see E. Sachau, Verzeichniss der syrischen Handschriften der königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin, 2 vols., Berlin, 1899, I, p. 745-753 (item 245 in the catalogue). Our anecdote is discussed at ibid, p. 748. 9

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presence of the patriarch.’ The priest replied: ‘Where is he, then, my Lord?’ The angel pointed with his finger to Severus in a corner of the church; and the saint was recognized by this favor. The priest approached Severus and once they had brought him to the altar with great honor, Severus bade the priest to complete the Mass. Having mounted the altar, the priest found the host in its place.

Readers of Peter Brown’s famed essay on the holy man in late antiquity will recognize in this story many of the elements that Brown has identified as characteristic of the holy man in the eastern Roman society of the fifth and sixth centuries.11 It should be added that it does not matter for this purpose whether these elements should be read as characteristic of the holy man in real social contexts, as Brown had initially believed, or more as aspects of the contemporary literary construction of the holy man, as Brown partially conceded in light of subsequent critiques.12 Severus appears in this text as a ‘total stranger’ (to use Brown’s phrase) who alone can mediate between God and man.13 Neither the established ritual of the eucharistic liturgy, nor the recognized hierarchical position of the officiating priest can bring the divine to earth. It is only the exiled saint, appearing from nowhere under the guise of a simple ‘foreign monk’ (to use the text’s phrase), who can do this. Aided by manifest angelic intervention Severus in this story possesses what Brown called the ‘utterly objective, inalienable power’ that was lacking in other traditional, more institutionalized loci of spiritual power.14   Brown, ‘Rise and Function’ [reprinted with some additions in Idem, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1982, p. 103-152]. 12  P. Brown, ‘The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity’, Representations, 1 (1983), p. 1-25; Idem, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity, 1971-1997’, JECS, 6 (1998), p. 353-376; Idem, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman World, Cambridge, 1999, p. 55-78. See further on this issue J. Howard-Johnston, ‘Introduction’, in The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown – ed. J. Howard-Johnston, P. A. Howard, Oxford, 1999, p. 1-27, in partic. p. 6-8; 15-20; A. Cameron, ‘On Defining the Holy Man’, in Cult of Saints – ed. HowardJohnston, Howard, p. 27-43; P. Rousseau, ‘Ascetics as Mediators and as Teachers’, in Cult of Saints – ed. Howard-Johnston, Howard, p. 45-59; J. Howe, ‘Revisiting the Holy Man’, Catholic Historical Review, 86 (2000), p. 640-644. 13  Brown, ‘Rise and Function’, p. 91-92. 14   Brown, ‘Rise and Function’, p. 96-97. 11

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According to Peter Brown, this conception of the ‘holy man’ played a key role in what he dubs the ‘religious revolution of late antiquity.’15 The Copto-Arabic Synaxarion’s characterization of Severus and indeed other depictions of him stretching from the sixth century down through the Middle Ages, comply with this conception.16 In the present paper I want to signal what I believe to be a different aspect of ‘the religious revolution of late antiquity’ – one which stands in a certain tension with the holy man. It is Severus himself who provides the key to my claim. Despite the image of Severus as ‘holy man’ that emerges from the Copto-Arabic Synaxarion and other hagiographical presentations of the patriarch, Severus’ own texts tell a very different story. In what follows I will call on three passages from Severus’ corpus that demonstrate his endorsement of an alternative to the ‘holy man’ model. I will then situate Severus’ position within a broader historical context that reveals a different side of ‘the religious revolution of late antiquity.’ The central point of the medieval miracle story that we just read was that the eucharistic liturgy could not proceed without Severus. The host literally disappears until Severus allows it to reappear. As legendary as this tale is, it actually corresponds – but in an oppositional way – to a kernel of historical truth. 15  Brown, ‘Rise and Function’, p. 99-101; Idem, Society and the Holy, p. 5. On Brown and other historians’ designation of late antiquity as a period of ‘religious revolution’ see G. G. Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice: Religious Transformations in Late Antiquity – tr. S. Emanuel, Chicago, 2009, p. 4-5.  16 See also the discussion of this anecdote and its relation to the image of Severus in the Coptic Orthodox liturgical tradition in Y. N. Youssef, ‘A Contribution to the Coptic Biography of Severus of Antioch’, in Coptic Studies on the Threshold of a New Millennium: Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Coptic Studies, Leiden, 27 August - 2 September 2000 – ed. M. Immerzeel, J. Van der Vliet, 2 vols (OLA, 133), Leuven, Paris, Dudley, MA, 2004, I, p. 407-422, in partic. p. 417-419. After presenting the evidence, Y. N. Youssef notes in conclusion (ibid., p. 419): “The aim of the story is to present Severus of Antioch to the people as a wonder-performer.” For a evidence of a similar perception current already in the mid-sixth century, see, for example, the description of the miraculous qualities of Severus’ corpse related in the Life of Severus attributed to John of Beth Aphthonia (PO 2), Paris, 1907, p. 260, recently translated into English in S. Brock and B. Fitzgerald, Two Early Lives of Severos, Patriarch of Antioch (Translated Texts for Historians, 59), Liverpool, 2013, p. 138. See my treatment of this episode in Moss, ‘In Corruption, p. 328-329.

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During Severus’ lifetime there were people who were unwilling to receive communion from anyone but him. Four of his letters, written both during and after his patriarchate, were addressed to individuals who wished to establish with Severus a system that can be called ‘mail-order communion’. For these people communion at the hands of anyone but the patriarch was unthinkable. They wanted him to consecrate the elements and send them to them by mail. Severus, however, was strongly opposed to this idea. He believed that as long as the officiating priest was of orthodox faith, his identity, behavior and reputation made no difference in the quality of the Eucharist. Severus explains:17 It is a great and unpardonable sin that, when the faith of the orthodox priests is one, a person should take the holy and venerable communion (‫ ) ܫܘܬܦܘܬܐ‬from this one, and not take it from that. For it is Christ himself and his mysterious words which are pronounced over the bread and the cup of blessing that complete (‫ ) ܓܡܪܝܢ‬the rational and bloodless sacrifice, not the priest (‫ ) ܟܗܢܐ‬who stands before the altar.18

Thus, while the medieval legend portrays Severus as embodying the late antique image of the holy man as one who competes with the established clerical hierarchy, Severus himself judged attempts to elevate his, on anyone else’s, liturgical prowess above other priests a grave sin. In denouncing this practice Severus was in fact opposing a commonly accepted role of the late ancient holy man. Sources contemporary with and slightly later than Severus document the custom of influential lay people receiving communion only from the hands of known holy men.19 17  Severus of Antioch, Select Letters 3.4 – ed. E. W. Brooks, The Sixth Book of the Select Letters of Severus of Antioch in the Syriac Version of Athanasius of Nisibis, London, Oxford, 1902-1903, p. 278 (text), 245 (tr.)]. Severus’ position on this issue is similar to Augustine of Hippo’s. See J. Patout Burns, ‘The Eucharist as the Foundation of Church Unity in North African Theology’, Augustinian Studies, 32 (2000), p. 1-23. 18  Cfr. I Cor. 3, 6: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” 19 See Brown’s description of this practice in Brown, Authority and the Sacred, 72-73, citing from the early sixth century Plerophoriae by John Rufus and the late sixth century Pratum Spirituale by John Moschus.

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We have, thus, witnessed one realm in which there is a marked discrepancy between the medieval, ‘classic’ holy man image of Severus and his own positions. But Severus’ discomfort with the classic late antique ‘holy man’ cut deeper. His concerns were not limited to threats to the vested ecclesial hierarchy. Severus’ skepticism towards charismatic power was aimed at himself just as much as at anyone else. In the following letter, written from his exile, Severus describes the actions of a certain Anatolius, a rival of his within the anti-Chalcedonian community who advocated a separation between the Syrian exiles and the local Egyptian Church. Anatolius had invoked charismatic authority to bolster his position. He made menacing predictions against his opponents in the form of prophecies. In one situation his prophecy actually appeared to come true. Severus relates: A certain gentle man who had received such a threat from him [i.e. from Anatolius], after communicating the knowledge to the holy church and accepting its help in considering what was best to do, by God’s permission was smitten with bright tumors on the side... He coming up to me (for he was one of those who know our affairs), persuaded (‫) ܡܦܝܣ‬ me 20 to touch the afflicted part: and I, beginning to weep, applied to it the chrism of the holy cross, and its venerated sign; and I sent this man away expecting that he would die [‫ܕܢܡܘܬ‬ ܼ ‫] ܘܫܕܪܬܗ ܠܗܢܐ ܟܕ ܿܡܣܟܐ‬. And on the next day the Lord of hosts made the swelling caused by the tumors to disappear, and he did not keep his bed for one single hour... But if I have become a fool by relating this, Anatolius the false prophet compelled me.21

This is a striking passage. Severus, whom posterity regarded as a miracle worker, offers a candid account of a cure performed by his own hand. What I find so striking about his account is its skeptical tone. The man needs to persuade Severus to apply the cure of the chrism, and even after having done so Severus admits that he expected him to die. In contrast to his later image,

20  Admittedly, this can also be translated as ‘begged me’ (as indeed Brooks, Select Letters, renders it).  21  Severus of Antioch, Select Letters 5.11 – ed. Brooks, p. 374 (text), p. 331-332 (tr.).

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Severus appears to have had little confidence in the efficacy of the chrism as a physical cure. Embarrassed and surprised by the apparent ‘success’ of his healing, Severus blames Anatolius for forcing him to tell the tale.22 Severus is skeptical of charisma as a means for the determination of theological truth. What then, in Severus’ mind, was the proper alternative to this model? In his theological debate with Julian of Halicarnassus, another fellow anti-Chalcedonian bishop, Severus articulates his view that truth is not to be determined by dreams, miracles and other charismatic testimonies, but by the correct interpretation of the Scriptures and the writings of the church fathers. In the course of their debate, which occupied Severus on and off throughout most of his twenty years in exile, Severus repeatedly berates his opponent for his faulty interpretation of the patristic canon.23 In one work written at the peak of the controversy, he accuses Julian of turning to dreams for support after despairing of attempts to prove his point from scriptural and patristic texts. In one passage within this work, which will be discussed presently, Severus sets up a clear contrast between these two modes of authority. What is interesting about his depiction of the charismatic mode is that he does not deny its reality. He does not deny that the dreams have a divine origin. He merely claims that they are not the decisive factor in the determination of theological truth. In order to understand this passage a word must be said about the debate between Severus and Julian. Finding themselves in exile these two erstwhile anti-Chalcedonian allies had developed an acrimonious controversy about the nature of the body of Christ. Julian argued that the holy body must have been essentially immune from suffering and corruption. Faced with the fact 22   Nevertheless, it must also be borne in mind that, Severus, as he goes on to explicitly state, models his rhetoric here on I Cor. 12, 11, where Paul (according to Severus’ understanding) is compelled by false apostles to relate his visions. 23  For theological aspects of this debate, see R. Draguet, Julien d’Halicarnasse et sa controverse avec Sévère d’Antioche sur l’incorruptibilité du corps du Christ, Louvain, 1924; A. Grillmeier, T. Hainthaler, Christ in Christian Tradition – tr. P. Allen, J. Cawte, London, Louisville, 1995, vol. 2, p. 79-111; Moss, In Corruption, p. 52106. For textual-cultural aspects of the debate, especially Severus and Julian’s respective uses of the patristic past, see Moss, In Corruption, p. 237-311.

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that the Gospels are full of descriptions of Jesus’ passions and pains, Julian explained that it was only by a special, voluntary act that Jesus accepted sufferings upon his body. Severus, on the other hand, countered that the body of Christ had to have been corruptible by essence. Otherwise, his sufferings would be no more than an illusion. For this reason, Severus accused Julian of endorsing the view, deemed heretical by theologians of earlier generations, that Jesus’ body, in its full earthly experience, was a phantasm. With this theological context in mind we may turn to the passage in question. Severus writes to Julian: News has reached me – although I am located far away – that having despaired of your feeble attempts to prove [your position] from the divinely inspired Scriptures and the select men who are initiators into its mysteries, you sought refuge in deluding, dreamy visions (‫ܡܛܥܝܢܐ ܕܚܠܡܐ‬ ̈ ‫ܚܙܘܢܐ‬ ̈ ). You hired an Ephesian, a simpleton ( ‫ ) ܗܕܝܘܛܐ‬by the name of Menander, to go around and take pains to confirm your evil opinion, and to lead the simple folks astray with the narration of his dream ( ‫) ܚܠܡܘܗܝ‬. How, then, would I not thank, with ten-thousand tongues, God who alone is wise, who allowed for this error (‫ ) ܛܥܝܘܬܐ‬to be appropriately ( ‫ ) ܠܚܡܐܝܬ‬refuted by the very same elements that wrought the error to begin with. For it was truly fitting that dreams ̈ ‫ܚܙܘܐ‬ ̈ ) should provide support for your and visions (‫ܘܚܠܡܐ‬ dreamy, phantastical heresy (‫) ܗܪܣܝܣ ܚܠܡܢܝܬܐ ܕܗܓܓܘܬܐ‬. The result is that those who hold these, unfortunate phantastical, opinions have as their support nothing more than a phantasm (‫ !) ܦܢܛܣܝܐ‬24

Severus does not deny the divine origin of the dreams that supported Julian’s position. On the contrary, he affirms it. But what Severus does do in this passage is challenge the relevance of such revelations to the determination of theological truth. For Severus, it is demonstrations based on scriptural and patristic texts that must be used to prove theological statements; not dreams, however divine.25� This is the stuff that Severus’ own 24   Severus of Antioch, Contra Additiones Iuliani, Chapter 37 – ed. R. Hespel, Sévère d’Antioche: La polémique antijulianiste, 3 vols., in 4 (CSCO, 244-245; 295296; 301-302; 318-319), Louvain, 1964-1971, II.1, p. 139 (text), 116-117 (tr.). 25 See Brown, Authority and the Sacred, p. 73, for an intuition of this point with regard to Severus. 

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treatises are made of: elaborate, dialectical expositions of the patristic canon.26 Severus’ position finds an interesting parallel in the Babylonian Talmud (‘the Bavli’), the foundational text of rabbinic Judaism, which many present-day scholars think was redacted around the time of Severus.27 The date of the Bavli’s redaction is crucial here because contemporary historians are increasingly realizing that much of the material contained within the Bavli is the product of the text’s redactors rather than the people described and quoted within it. In other words, the Bavli’s debates and stories concerning the famous first-to-third century Palestinian rabbis or even the third-to-fifth century Babylonian rabbis, are more connected to the ideologies and concerns of its unnamed sixth century Babylonian redactors than to the rabbis of the firstto-the-fifth century.28 Historians have dedicated much work to the reconstruction of the worldview of these anonymous Talmudic redactors, especially in the realm of narrative accounts.29 One passage that scholars repeatedly return to, so much so that it is has been called “the most discussed [narrative] in Talmudic and general Jewish scholarship,” 30 offers an interesting parallel to Severus’ view of the relationship between charisma and textual argumentation, or, as 26  Before leaving Severus, it should be noted that my basic argument was preceded by J.-E. Steppa, John Rufus and the World Vision of Anti-Chalcedonian Culture, (2nd edition), Piscataway, New Jersey, 2005, p. 118; 128. At ibid., p. 118, Steppa writes: “In fact, we know that Severus of Antioch regarded visions and prophecies as arguments in theological and canonical arguments with great suspicion.” But, as far as I can tell, Steppa cites no evidence for this statement. Perhaps he had in mind the texts discussed in this article.  27  R. Kalmin, ‘The Formation and Character of the Babylonian Talmud’, in The Cambridge History of Judaism: Vol. 4: The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period – ed. S. T. Katz, Cambridge, 2008, p. 840-876, in partic. p. 840-843. 28 Scholarship participating in this trend builds on the pioneering work of David Weiss Halivni and Shamma Friedman done in the 1970’s and 1980’s. It is by now extensive. A landmark contribution in the realm of narrative (aggada) is J. L. Rubenstein – ed. Creation and Composition: The Contribution of the Bavli Redactors (Stammaim) to the Aggada, Tübingen, 2005. 29  See J. L.  Rubenstein, Stories of the Babylonian Talmud, Baltimore, 2010; M. Vidas, Tradition and the Formation of the Talmud, Princeton, 2014. 30  C. Fonrobert, ‘When the Rabbi Weeps: On Reading Gender in Talmudic Aggada’, Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues, 4 (2001), p. 56-83, in partic. p. 56.

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Daniel Boyarin has put it in another context, between ‘divination’ and ‘dialectic’.31 In the story in question, the Bavli recounts a heated disagreement concerning the laws of purity that two late first-century rabbis, Rabbi Eli’ezer and Rabbi Joshua, had within the academy:32 On that day, Rabbi Eli’ezer used every imaginable argument ( ‫) הושיב כל תשובות שבעולם‬,33 but they [i.e. the members of the academy] did not accept them from him. He said to them: “If the law is as I say, let the carob tree prove it.” The carob tree uprooted itself from its place one hundred cubits – and some say four cubits.34 They said to him: “One does not bring proof from the carob tree.” The carob tree returned to its place. He said to them: “If the law is as I say, let the aqueduct prove it.” The water began to flow backwards. They said to him: “One does not bring proof from water.” The water returned to its place. He said to them: “If it is as I say, let the walls of the academy ( ‫ ) בית המדרש‬prove it.” The walls of the academy inclined to fall. R. Joshua rebuked them [i.e. the walls of the academy]. He said to them: “When sages defeat each other in law, what is to you?” It was taught: They [i.e. the walls of the academy] did not fall because of the honor of R. Joshua, and they did not stand because of the honor of R. Eli’ezer, and they are still inclining and standing. He [i.e. R. Eli’ezer] said to them: “If it is as I say, let it be proved from heaven ( ‫)מן השמים יוכיחו‬.” A voice came 31  D. Boyarin, ‘Dialectic and Divination in the Talmud’, in The End of Dialogue in Antiquity – ed. S. Goldhill, Cambridge, 2008, p. 217-241. Boyarin makes the interesting observation that the Bavli’s endless dialectic was tantamount to another form of divination. I am not sure I agree with Boyarin’s analysis but I have borrowed his terminology. 32  Babylonian Talmud, Bava Metzi’a 59a. English translation adapted from J. L.  Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories: Narrative Art, Composition, and Culture, Baltimore, London, 1999, p. 37. The text is based on the version found in MS Munich Hebr. 95. As noted, above, much has been written about this passage and this is not the place to enter into a detailed discussion of all its elements. For a survey of some of the relevant literature, see T. Novick, ‘A Lot of Learning is a Dangerous Thing: On the Structure of Rabbinic Expertise in the Bavli’, HUCA, 78 (2007), p. 91-107, in partic. p. 91, n. 1. 33  For a discussion of various possible meanings of this phrase, see D. Steinmetz, ‘Agada Unbound: Inter-Agadic Characterization of Sages in the Bavli and Implications for Reading Agada’, in Creation and Composition – ed. J. L. Rubenstein, p. 293-338, in partic. p. 316. 34   Other manuscripts read ‘four hundred cubits’, a stock expression of Talmudic hyperbole. 

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from heaven and announced: “What is it for you with R. Eli’ezer, since the law is in accordance with him in every place?” Rabbi Joshua stood up on his feet and said: “It is not in heaven (Deut. 30, 12) ( ‫) לא בשמים היא‬.” What is, “It is not in heaven”? R. Jeremiah said: “We do not listen to a heavenly voice ( ‫) אין משגיחין בבת קול‬, since you already gave it to us on Mount Sinai and it is written there ‘Incline after the majority’ (Ex. 23, 2).” R. Nathan came upon Elijah. He said to him: “What was the Holy One, blessed be He, doing at that time?” He said to him: “He laughed and smiled and said, ‘My children have defeated me, my children have defeated me.” ’35

This story gives powerful expression to the prioritization of textual argumentation above direct, charismatic communications. All of R. Eli’ezer’s wondrous signs are of no avail to him. The more he tries to prove his case by direct appeals to the divine, the more the text conspires to rebuff him. First his colleagues flatly deny the relevance of proof in the natural world; then, when R. Eli’ezer elicits a direct communication from heaven, his chief opponent, R. Joshua, tautologically cites textual evidence to prove that the only evidence that counts is textual evidence. Once the divine message had been delivered at Sinai, the authority of its interpretation belongs exclusively in human hands. Finally, God himself personally deals the coup de grace to the validity of charisma in interpretation, by explicitly endorsing the position of R. Eli’ezer’s opponents. All this has been abundantly illustrated in earlier discussions of this famous tale. As mentioned before, the tendency in recent scholarship has been to view the story as a characteristic expression of the scholastic, dialectic-centered culture of the Bavli’s redactors. Building on this approach I would like to make two further observations, relevant to our issue of the source and nature of theological authority and evidence.36 35   I have only cited the middle part of this story. The lead-up and continuation are no less important to the story in its original context, which is primarily about interpersonal relations. For this point, see Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories, p. 40-63. Nevertheless, for the question of miracles as a source of proof and authority, only the section cited here is relevant. 36  Given the volume of scholarly treatments of this passage, it is likely that these points have been made already and I have simply not encountered them.

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The first observation is that R. Eli’ezer is not the only person who performs miracles in this text. His opponents, both the anonymous members of the academy and R. Joshua himself, also perform counter-miracles. Following the academy’s declaration that no proof can be brought from the self-locomotive carob tree, the tree returns to its original position. The tree’s movement in this second instance is no less a miraculous interruption of the regular patters of nature than its first translocation.37 Similarly, the fact that the walls of the academy cease from falling once rebuked by R. Joshua is no less wondrous than their initial decline at the behest of R. Eli’ezer. Like Severus of Antioch, R. Eli’ezer’s opponents do not deny the reality of miracles. Like the patriarch, they are indeed able to perform miracles themselves. But, also like Severus, although they are able to engage in these ‘charismatic’ activities, they consider them irrelevant to the determination of God’s law. Clarification of this point allows us to better appreciate the differences displayed in the parallel version of this story in the Palestinian Talmud (the Yerushalmi). This brings me to my second observation. If, as current scholarship has claimed, the Bavli’s version of the story reflects the particular concerns of its sixth-century redactors, then we would expect the story told by the Yerushalmi, edited in late-fourth century Palestine, to reflect very different concerns.38 Indeed, a comparative analysis of the two versions of this story fulfils this expectation. I cite the passage, beginning with R. Eli’ezer’s address to the carob tree: “O carob, o carob, if the law is according to their words, uproot yourself,” but it did not uproot itself. “If the law is according to my words, uproot yourself,” and it uprooted itself. “If the law is according to them, return,” and it did not return. “If the law is according to my words, return,” and it returned. All this praise [asks the Yerushalmi] and the 37 The second miracle, with the aqueduct is more complicated. Unlike the tree and the walls, which are naturally stationary, water’s natural state is in motion. Thus, the fact that after the academy’s comment, the aqueduct goes back to flowing in its original direction does not involve an additional miracle, beyond the initial one performed by R. Joshua. 38  I thank Reuven Kiperwasser for pushing me on this point.

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law is not according to R. Eli’ezer? R. Hanania said, “When it was given it was given only such that ‘incline after the majority (Ex. 23, 2).” ’ But did not R. Eli’ezer know ‘incline after the majority (Ex. 23, 2)’ [asks the Yerushalmi]? He became angry only because they burned his purities [i.e. the objects he ruled to be pure] in front of him... R. Jeremiah said: “A great burning occurred on that day. Every place that R. Eli’ezer cast his eye was burned.” Not only that, but even one grain of wheat, half of it [that he looked upon] was burned and half of it [that he did not look upon] was not burned. And the columns of the assembly house ( ‫) בית הוועד‬ were trembling ( ‫) מרופפים‬. R. Joshua said to them: “If the sages are fighting, what care is it of yours?” A heavenly voice went forth and said: “The law accords with my son Eli’ezer.” R. Joshua said: “It is not in heaven.” (Deut. 30, 12).39

In the Yerushalmi’s story, the only miracles that occur are in favor of R. Eli’ezer. He initiates both the uprooting and the return of the carob tree; the columns of the assembly house voluntarily tremble in his honor; and the heavenly voice comes down to support him, even without his having to call upon it, as he does in the Bavli. Thus, in the Yerushalmi, unlike the Bavli, ‘divinatory’ or ‘charismatic’ ability is exclusively linked to R. Eli’ezer. As we saw, the Bavli indicates that R. Joshua and his colleagues shared this ability with R. Eli’ezer. Their difference was solely a question of principle: may this ability be used to determine the law? The Yerushalmi, on the other hand, can be taken to imply that R. Eli’ezer’s opponents lacked the ability to perform the wonders that he did; had they possessed this ability, perhaps they would have used it. This reading is confirmed by the overall thrusts of the respective accounts. Whereas the Bavli story clearly comes down on the side of R. Joshua, culminating in the divine admission of defeat, the Yerushalmi merely presents the two different positions, without offering a clear-cut narrative resolution in favor of one side or the other. Whereas the Bavli presents R. Joshua’s claim ‘it is not in heaven’ as a response to R. Eli’ezer’s call on   Palestinian Talmud, Mo’ed Katan, 3.1, cited according to Leiden Ms. Or. 4720, Jerusalem, 2001, p. 810. The translation follows Rubenstein, Talmudic Stories, p. 49. 39

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heavenly support, the Yerushalmi presents it as a response to an unsolicited heavenly declaration. This is a meaningful difference. In the Yerushalmi R. Joshua is in direct conflict with the heavenly voice and there is no ‘meta-narrative’ indication, as there is in the Bavli, that ‘heaven’ accepts self-recusal. I stress this point because some scholars have actually read the Yerushalmi as coming out against R. Eli’ezer and his ‘charismatic’ position.40 I believe this reading might be influenced by the more famous Babylonian version. Taken on its own terms, however, the Yerushalmi cannot be said to endorse R. Joshua’s position. If anything, the balance in the Yerushalmi actually seems to lean in favor of R. Eli’ezer.41 Thus, to recapitulate: 40  The most recent treatment of this story reads the relationship between the Bavli and Yerushalmi accounts in diametrical opposition to my reading. See I. Brand, ‘Can Wondrous Signs Determine Law? A Comparison of Two Talmudic Traditions’, REJ, 172 (2013), p. 1-22. Brand (p. 12) argues that the Yerushalmi ‘tradition’ “is not accepting of miracles.” Brand applies to the story of R. Joshua and R. Eli’ezer a particular historiographical mold which views the Palestinian tradition as much less interested in ‘charisma’ and ‘magic’ than the Babylonian tradition. According to this reading, the Yerushalmi opposed the ‘holy man’ model precisely because it was so warmly embraced by contemporary Christians (see Brand, ibid, p. 20-22). Yet, this approach has been challenged, both as an overall historiographical model and as a key to reading this particular story. On the overall challenge, see G. Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History, Cambridge, 2008, p. 354 (citing earlier literature): “The age-old claim that the Babylonian rabbis were more prone to magical beliefs and activities than their Palestinian contemporaries seems to be quite unwarranted ... both the Palestinian rabbinic compilations and the Babylonian Talmud preserve much evidence for the great interest in magic, and the practice thereof, among the sages of late-antique Palestine.” For a similar conclusion, also diametrically opposed to Brand’s view, see J. Levinson, ‘Enchanting Rabbis: Contest Narratives between Rabbis and Magicians in Late Antiquity’, JQR, 100 (2010), p. 54-94, in partic. p. 64 (discussing a Palestinian source): “It is likely that the proximity between the Holy Man within and the magician from without led the rabbinic narrators to adopt a double tactic; on the one hand they appropriated for themselves the power of the magician, and on the other they proceeded to prove their superior prowess by the same means as the sectarian sorcerers displayed their own.” For a reading of the Palestinian version of this story, along the lines I propose, see D. Weiss Halivni, Peshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis, Oxford, 1991, p. 207, n. 15 (referenced by Brand, ‘Can Wondrous Signs’, p. 12, n. 36): “[A]ccording to the Palestinian Talmud, God was more on the side of R. Eliezer. The Palestinian Talmud does not report that God said, ‘My children have defeated me.’ ” 41  Whereas the Bavli cites R. Jeremiah in support of R. Joshua’s position (“We do not listen to a heavenly voice...”), the Yerushalmi cites him in favor of R. Eli’ezer (“A great burning occurred on that day; every place that R. Eli’ezer cast his eye was burned.”).

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the two Talmudic versions of our story reflect very different attitudes to the role of charisma in the determination of law. The Yerushalmi, redacted in late fourth century Palestine, at a time and place where the Christian ‘holy man’ was on the rise, allows for the possibility that truth may be determined by charismatic means. The Bavli, redacted some two centuries later, when, as I am arguing, an alternative mode of authority was on the rise, shuts the door on the charismatic option. Once the divine text has been revealed to humanity, the authority of its interpretation lies solely in human hands. Theological truth, for the Bavli, as for Severus, is to be decided solely by the means of textual argumentation. Following the work of Adam Becker, rabbinics scholars have noted interesting parallels between the scholastic settings and ideological worldviews of this Babylonian Talmudic culture, on the one hand, and of their East-Syrian Christian contemporaries, on the other hand.42 But no attention, as far as I know, has been given to the parallels between these two cultures and the contemporary culture represented by Severus of Antioch, later to be claimed by the West-Syrian Church. It is true that Severus, especially once in exile, was more of a lone-wolf; he did not operate in the same type of communal academic environment as his rabbinic and East-Syrian contemporaries. Nevertheless, his writings embody the same combination of textual traditionalism and dialectic rationalism that students of ‘scholasticism’ as a cross-cultural category have identified as typical of the ‘scholastic’ mindset.43 It is precisely 42  A. H.  Becker, ‘Beyond the Spatial and Temporal Limes: Questioning the ‘Parting of the Ways’ Outside the Roman Empire’, in The Ways that Never Parted – ed. A. H. Becker, A. Yoshiko Reed (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism, 95), Tübingen, 2003, p. 373-392; A. H.  Becker, ‘The Comparative Study of ‘Scholasticism’ in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Rabbis and East Syrians’, AJS Review, 34 (2010), p. 91-113; D. Boyarin, ‘Hellenism in Jewish Babylonia’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature – ed. C. E. Fonrobert, M. S. Jaffee, Cambridge, 2007, p. 336-363; Levinson, ‘Enchanting Rabbis’, p. 90-91.  43 See J. I.  Cabezón – ed. Scholasticism: Cross-Cultural and Comparative Perspectives, Albany, New York, 1998, p. 4-6 (cited in Becker, ‘The Comparative Study’, p. 104). See also Y. Moss, ‘Packed with Patristic Testimonies: Severus of Antioch and the Reinvention of the Church Fathers’, in Between Personal and Institutional Religion: Self, Doctrine, and Practice in Late Antique Eastern Chris-

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this combination that we find in the cultures of both the Bavli and the East-Syrian schools. I believe more work would reveal that also within the Byzantine sphere Severus’ approach was less idiosyncratic and more representative than it might first appear.44 In any case, I hope to have demonstrated by focusing on the case of Severus, that in the early sixth century, at the same time that Peter Brown’s ‘holy man’ was on the rise, there was also a competing current, which adopted a more skeptical view of this religious ideal. In place of the holy man, this approach valorized the holy text as it is maintained holy by its privileged exegetes. It may be speculated that Severus, the Babylonian rabbis, and the East-Syrian scholars all turned to this textually-based mode of authority because of their lack of access to political forms of power. Their approach to the text embodied a form of what Andrew Jacobs has, in another context, called ‘academic imperialism.’45 It was only the privileged exegete who had the ability to maintain the perfection of the holy text by dialectically resolving its contradictions. Be this as it may, these three contemporary cultures played out an aspect of religious life in late antiquity which stands in some competition with the holy man. Brown concluded his essay on the Christian holy man by pointing to Islam as the culmination of the late antique religious revolution. Quoting a papyrus that preserves, in Greek, the basmala, the Muslim confession of faith, Brown famously wrote: [T]he victory of Christianity in Late Roman society was not the victory of the One God over the many: it was the victory tianity – ed. B. Bitton-Ashkelony, L. Perrone, Turnhout, 2013, p. 227-250, for a similar argument concerning similarities between Severus and the Bavli. 44 Thus, for example, Leontius of Jerusalem, Severus’ younger contemporary and Chalcedonian adversary, offers a series of arguments against the relevance of miracles to the determination of theological truth. Like Severus and the Bavli, he does not deny the reality of these miracles; instead, he argues, also like them, that decisions in matters of dogma must be made on the basis of texts and logical argumentation. See P. Gray – ed. Leontius of Jerusalem: Against the Monophysites: Testimonies of the Saints and Aporiae, Oxford, 2006, p. 156-159 (= PG, 86, col. 1896B-1900A). Cfr. also Gray’s discussion of this issue in his introduction, ibid, p. 16; 22-23. 45  A. Jacobs, Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity, Stanford, 2004, p. 59-60, 71-72. My usage of Jacobs’ term here follows the pattern established by Levinson, ‘Enchanting Rabbis’, p. 70-71.

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of men over the institutions of their past ... The last papyrus in the religious section of Mitteis and Wilcken’s Grundzüge und Chrestomathie der Papyruskunde sums up both the late antique revolution and its untold consequences: ‘ἐν ὀνόμαι τοῦ θεοῦ ἐλεήμονος καὶ φιλανθρώπου,’ it runs, ‘οὐκ ἔστιν θεὸς εἰ μὴ ὁ θεὸς μόνος.’ It is as we have been told: ‘progrès et victoire du monothéisme, ainsi pourrait on la caractériser d’un mot.’ 46 But not quite. Not just the one God. One God and His man, for the papyrus continues: ‘Μαάμετ ἀπόστολος θεοῦ.’ It is this which the historian of Late Antiquity must attempt to understand.47

To this we may add – in light of the argument put forth in this paper – that yes, Muhammad was considered the apostle of God, but there was hardly anything new in this. There were apostles before him. What was new with this late antique apostle was the fact that unlike his predecessors, he did not perform miracles to confirm that his message was from God. In several places the Qur’aˉn reveals that contemporaries of Muhammad critiqued him for not performing any signs – ayaˉt. They did this because they failed to grasp that Muhammad’s signs were the units of revelation themselves – also called ayaˉt.48 Although previous prophets had demonstrated the veracity of their messages through the performance of supernatural acts, the prophet of Islam’s proof was the message itself.49 The text itself had now become the miracle.50 Nevertheless, within several 46 Here Brown cites M. Simon, A. Benoit, Le judaisme et le christianisme antique, Paris, 1968, p. 2. 47  Brown, ‘Rise and Function’, p. 100-101. 48   See Qur’aˉn 6, 37: “And they say: ‘Why has a sign not been sent down to him from his Lord.”; similarly, 13.7; 21.5: “But they say, ‘[The revelation is but] a mixture of false dreams; rather, he has invented it; rather, he is a poet. So let him bring us a sign ( ‫ ) فليأتنا بآية‬just as the previous [messengers] were sent [with miracles]’.” On this point, see further A. J.  Wensinck, ‘Mu’djiza’, EI, vol. 7, p. 295; D. Gril, ‘Miracles’, EQ, vol. 3, p. 392-398, in partic. 392. I have referred to ayaˉt as ‘units of revelation’, rather than ‘verses,’ since the latter meaning was only a secondary semantic development. See A. T.  Welch, ‘Kur’an,’ EI vol. 5, p. 400-429, in partic. p. 401. 49  See O. Pautz, Muhammeds Lehre von der Offenbarung, Leipzig, 1898, p. 264-268; H. Stieglecker, Die Glaubenslehren des Islam, Paderborn, 1962, p. 371-372. 50 For this purpose it does not make a difference whether the ‘text’ in question was oral or written. See on this point, M. Wallraff, Kodex und Kanon: Das Buch in frühen Christentum, Berlin, 2013, p. 54-62.

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generations Muslims came to venerate their own miracle-working holy men, following the late antique and medieval Christian model.51 The Qur’aˉnic image of Muhammad as a transmitter of text with no further mandate to perform supernatural miracles came to be updated in post-Qur’aˉnic literature. On the basis of certain hints in the Qur’aˉn itself, subsequent tradition attributed a whole host of miracles to the ‘seal of the prophets.’52 Needless to say, the late antique model of the charismatic holy man did not go away with the advent of Islam or the dawn of the Middle Ages. Indeed, the very story with which we began, clearly demonstrates that it did not. The Severus of Antioch of medieval tradition had become a full-fledged wonder-worker. The point of this study has been to show that alongside the enduring model of the holy man, the final centuries of late antiquity brought with them an alternative model. The works of Severus, the Bavli, and the Qur’aˉn offer us glimpses into this alternative. These three sixth and seventh-century corpora demonstrate, each in its own way, a subtle transformation of the imprimatur of theological truth – from human acts, divinely endowed, to divine texts, humanly interpreted.

Abbreviations and Bibliography 1. Abbreviations ACO Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, ed. E. Schwartz, Berlin and Leipzig, 1914-1940. CSCO Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, Louvain, 1903- EI Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed., Leiden, 1960-2006. EQ Encyclopedia of the Qur’aˉn, Leiden, 2001-2006. 51 See C. Robinson, ‘Prophecy and Holy Men in Early Islam’, in Cult of Saints – ed. Howard-Johnston, Howard, p. 241-262, in partic. p. 258-259. 52  Pautz, Muhammeds Lehre, p. 268-269; G. Von Bülow, Hadıˉthe über Wunder des Propheten Muhammad, insbesondere in der Traditionssammlung des Buhaˉrıˉ, unpublished doctoral thesis, Bonn, 1964. See J. Van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra: Eine Geschichte des religiösen Denkens im frühen Islam, 6 vols., Berlin, 1991-1997, IV, p. 630-632, for a survey of the attempts of medieval theologians to square the Qur’aˉnic non-miraculous picture of Muhammad with external traditions of him as a wonderworker.

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HUCA  Hebrew Union College Annual, Cincinnati, 1924JECS Journal of Early Christian Studies, Baltimore, 1993JQR Jewish Quarterly Review, Philadelphia, 1909OCA Orientalia Christiana Analecta, Rome, 1935OLA Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, Louvain, 1975PG Patrologia Graeca, ed. J. P. Migne, Paris, 1857-1886. PO Patrologia Orientalis, Paris, 1903REJ Revue des études juives, Paris, 1880-

2. Primary Sources Evagrius Scholasticus, Historia Ecclesiastica – ed. J. Bidez and L. Parmentier, The Ecclesiastical History of Evagrius with the Scholia, London, 1898. John of Beth Aphthonia, Life of Severus, Patriarch of Antioch – ed. M.-A. Kugener (PO, 2), Paris, 1907, p. 203-264. Leontius of Jerusalem, Testimonia Sanctorum – ed. P. Gray, Leontius of Jerusalem: Against the Monophysites: Testimonies of the Saints and Aporiae, Oxford, 2006, p. 46-161. Liberatus, Breviarium Causae Nestorianum et Eutychianorum – ed. E. Schwartz (ACO, 2.5), Berlin, Leipzig, 1932, p. 98-141. Severus of Antioch, Select Letters in the Syriac Version of Athanasius of Nisibis – ed. E. W. Brooks, London, Oxford, 1902-1903. Severus Of Antioch, Contra Additiones Iuliani – ed. R. Hespel, Sévère d’Antioche: La polémique antijulianiste (CSCO, 295-296), Louvain, 1968. Synaxarium Alexandrinum – ed. J. Forget (CSCO, 67), Beirut, Paris, 1905. Talmud, Babylonian, Munich hebr. 95, Jerusalem, 1971. Talmud, Palestinian, Leiden Or. 4720, Jerusalem, 2001.

3. Secondary Literature P. Allen, C. T. R. Hayward, Severus of Antioch, London, New York, 2004. F. Alpi, La route royale: Sévère d’Antioche, 2 vols. (Bibliothèque archéologique et historique, 188), Beirut, 2009. A. H. Becker, ‘Beyond the Spatial and Temporal Limes: Questioning the ‘Parting of the Ways’ Outside the Roman Empire’, in

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The Ways that Never Parted – ed. A. H. Becker, A. Yoshiko Reed (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism, 95), Tübingen, 2003, p. 373392. A. H. Becker, ‘The Comparative Study of ‘Scholasticism’ in Late Antique Mesopotamia: Rabbis and East Syrians’, AJS Review, 34 (2010), p. 91-113. G. Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History, Cambridge, 2008. D. Boyarin, ‘Hellenism in Jewish Babylonia’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature – ed. C. E. Fonrobert, M. S. Jaffee, Cambridge, 2007, p. 336-363. D. Boyarin, ‘Dialectic and Divination in the Talmud’, in The End of Dialogue in Antiquity – ed. S. Goldhill, Cambridge, 2008, p. 217-241. I.  Brand, ‘Can Wondrous Signs Determine Law? A Comparison of Two Talmudic Traditions’, REJ, 172 (2013), p. 1-22. S. Brock, B. Fitzgerald, Two Early Lives of Severos, Patriarch of Antioch (Translated Texts for Historians, 59), Liverpool, 2013. P. Brown, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies, 61 (1971), p. 80-101. P. Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, Berkeley, Los Angeles, 1982. P. Brown, ‘The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity’, Representations, 1 (1983), p. 1-25. P. Brown, ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity, 1971-1997’, JECS, 6 (1998), p. 353-376. P. Brown, Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman World, Cambridge, 1999. J. I. Cabezón, ed., Scholasticism: Cross-Cultural and Comparative Perspectives, Albany, 1998. A. Cameron, ‘On Defining the Holy Man’, in Cult of Saints – ed. J. Howard-Johnston, P. A. Howard, p. 27-43. R. Darling, The Patriarchate of Severus of Antioch, 512-518, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Chicago, 1982. W. Devries, Sakramententheologie bei den syrischen Monophysiten (OCA, 125), Rome, 1940. R. Draguet, Julien d’Halicarnasse et sa controverse avec Sévère d’Antioche sur l’incorruptibilité du corps du Christ, Louvain, 1924. C. Fonrobert, ‘When the Rabbi Weeps: On Reading Gender in Talmudic Aggada’, Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues, 4 (2001), p. 56-83.

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G. Von Bülow, Hadıˉthe über Wunder des Propheten Muhammad, insbesondere in der Traditionssammlung des Buhaˉrıˉ, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Bonn, 1964. M. Wallraff, Kodex und Kanon: Das Buch in frühen Christentum, Berlin, 2013. D. Weiss Halivni, Peshat and Derash: Plain and Applied Meaning in Rabbinic Exegesis, Oxford, 1991. A. T.  Welch, ‘Kur’an’, EI, vol. 5, p. 400-429. A. J.  Wensinck, ‘Mu’djiza’, EI, Vol. 7, P. 295. W. A.  Wigram, The Separation of the Monophysites, London, 1920. Y. N.  Youssef, ‘A Contribution to the Coptic Biography of Severus of Antioch’, Coptic Studies on the Threshold of a New Millennium: Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Coptic Studies, Leiden, 27 August – 2 September 2000 – ed. M. Immerzeel, J. Van der Vliet, 2 vols., (OLA, 133), Leuven, Paris, Dudley, MA, 2004, I, p. 407-422.

Abstract Ever since Peter Brown’s famous essay on his rise and function, the holy man of the fifth and sixth centuries has received volumes of scholarly attention. Less noticed, however, has been the parallel, contemporary challenge to this concept, manifestations of which we witness in later antique culture. Evidence to this effect is examined from the works of Severus of Antioch. Severus contests the authority of dreams, prophecies and miracles. The challenge to charismatic authority goes hand in hand with a parallel phenomenon characteristic of Severus’ works: his valorization of intellectual authority. This intellectual authority lies, as it does in the Babylonian Talmud (possibly redacted during Severus’ lifetime), in an expert knowledge of one’s revered textual tradition and in one’s exegetical ability to harmonize contradictions within this tradition. The comparative example of the Babylonian Talmud, as well as evidence from the Qur’aˉn, conspire with the material from Severus to demonstrate that alongside the late antique holy man, there was also a contemporary, cross-cultural current that prioritized holy messages and intellectual argumentation above holy people and miraculous deeds in the determination of theological truth.

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ROBIN M. JENSEN Vanderbilt University

INTEGRATING MATERIAL AND VISUAL EVIDENCE INTO EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES: APPROACHES, BENEFITS, AND POTENTIAL PROBLEMS

Introduction The study of physical remains has enriched and expanded our work as historians of ancient Christianity. Although to some this turn toward visual and material evidence may seem like a new development, many scholars have long recognized the limits of purely text-based studies while acknowledging the benefits of incorporating the study of material data into their research. The methods as well as discoveries of archaeologists, art historians, and epigraphers (among others) have recently prompted – or even required – us to reassess many of our conclusions about the character of early Christianity in certain regions or eras. Along with a more comprehensive and culturally nuanced perspective of the movement and its adherents, these discoveries also have provided a basis for theorizing about the daily lives and religious commitments of certain classes of individuals who produced no surviving written documents. The massive number of important artifacts housed in the world’s major museums alone has made it eminently clear that visual culture was an essential dimension of ancient religious practice, whether Christian or non-Christian. For example, liturgical historians have pursued a more grounded understanding of certain ritual practices through analyzing and comparing extant examples of typical facilities (e.g., basilicas, graves, baptisteries, and shrines) with relevant documentary evidence. Access to these remains has prompted them to reconstruct rites in space and to assess the possible connections (and disconnections) between often idealized verbal descriptions and actual lived experiences. 10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107534

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Social historians, for their part, have found that the study of material remains can undermine long-standing assumptions and generalizations. The visual evidence has shown that the distinction between Christians and their non-Christian neighbors was less unambiguous than was once believed; that Christians were fully embedded in their culture and reproduced its signs and symbols just as they spoke the local language. At the same time, analysis of artifacts also has revealed a diverse set of related subgroups or sects among Christian communities, and allowed historians to attend more fully to regional characteristics, interlocking identities, or shifting dynamics through time. As important as material evidence is to our work, its incorporation is not without pitfalls. The study of material evidence is no more or less scientific or straightforward than the study of texts. Just as scholars have always produced various interpretations of identical literary documents, they have constructed divergent analyses of the same material artifacts. Although these divergent analyses sometimes arise from different levels of experience in working with non-textual materials, they also result when researchers embark with particular goals or perspectives that guide their conflicting construals of the evidence. Generally, historians of early Christianity ask different types of questions than art historians or archaeologists, and those questions guide their selection, sorting, and analysis of the available data. Most of the time this selection, sorting, and analysis is a productive and illuminating endeavor, but occasionally things go awry, especially when historians who focus mainly on ideas are insufficiently aware of the potentially contentious import of religious or theological questions into fields that may regard them with some suspicion. Although these kinds of problems can arise with almost any kind of historical research, art historians or archaeologists are particularly sensitive to what they sometimes see as misuse or even abuse of what they view as theirs. They seek what one of this conference’s speakers (Prof. Ritter) described as ‘the emancipation of artifacts from theology’. 1

  See essay in this volume, p. 195-207.

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Jeffrey Hamburger sums up his sense of this problem and expresses certain regret at its fallout. With regard to medieval art history, Hamburger explains, The interpretation of [medieval] art in terms of theology has fallen out of favor. The aversion to theology has many causes: not the least are disbelief and disinterest, allied with a general discrediting (and occasional abuse) of the iconographic method, which in turn entails a healthy disinclination to explain images through texts. Instead, popular piety, oral traditions, and the beliefs of marginal groups command scholarly attention. 2

Hamburger’s cautionary assessment also points out the problem of scholarly interpreters finding a balance that respects the integrity of both types of evidence, subjecting neither to the other, but bringing them into dialogue with one another. When the scale tips one way or the other, some important insights are inevitably lost. So long as an artifact emerges from a culture that includes religion (and, thus, theology), it would seem to bear some level of congruence or relationship to the cultic, religious, or belief systems of those who made it. The difficulty may lie in the process of interpretation: how much can we assume that an art object reflects on or illuminates some knowable historical reality or actual religious activity versus a somewhat idealized projection that might have very little correlation to either lived practice or religious belief? As one prominent scholar has asserted, ‘Only very rarely does art function as a documentary description of an actual event’. 3 The converse can be said of texts, of course. Only rarely does a text explain or even fully correspond to a work of art. The textual evidence that scholars may call upon to reconstruct religious belief or practice is often based on an idealized version of how things should be, and may reflect the specific circumstances or perspective of only a small minority. Documents from theological treatises to church orders are therefore of qualified use for reconstructing what people actually did or believed. 2  J. Hamburger, St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology, Berkeley, 2002, p. 1. 3  J. Elsner, Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph, Oxford, 1993, p. 27.

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Thus, experienced historians know that texts are of limited (while real) value for interpreting artworks and that artworks themselves have to be considered in context and submitted to historical scrutiny insofar as possible. We can only surmise how ancient viewers saw an object or what they concluded about its meaning or purpose. Thus, like modern text scholars, art historians employ a variety of methods or analytical approaches to produce their interpretations. They should be open to any relevant evidence – including literary – to help them to see the possibilities of function or message. But, like all scholars, they will also inevitably be influenced by their particular cultural context, training, and sympathies. The following discussion will illustrate some of the ways that scholars have incorporated the study of visual art into their writing of the history of early Christianity while also instantiating some of these approaches, methods, and problems. It will demonstrate how different intellectual starting points, investigative methods, or personal interests generate diverse evaluations of the same early Christian iconographic motif. In some instances authors primarily turned to texts (especially scripture) to identify and then explain the image. At other times, they perceived the image as depicting some ancient Christian ritual practice that was either confirmed by literary data or appeared to supplement or even contradict existing documentary sources. The different conclusions are not, therefore, just the results of different individuals’ assessments of the evidence but reflect their different scholarly approaches or particular research agendas. What I hope these different examples show is how complicated it is to incorporate visual evidence into historical research, how important it is to be conscious of one’s methodology, and how easy it is to try to make the data serve some secondary purpose rather than presenting new evidence in its own right. Of course, this should not be news to most of us, since these are precisely the same issues that arise in text analysis.

1. The Case Study: Banquet Scenes in Early Christian Art Early Christian scenes of persons seated around a sigma-shaped table, sharing a meal of bread, wine, and fish appeared in the 552

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third and fourth centuries, both in Roman catacomb painting and in sculpted reliefs on Christian sarcophagi (Fig. 1). These somewhat enigmatic images have been variously identified and are still the subject of some controversy. Such images are common in Roman catacomb paintings and sarcophagus reliefs and belong to both pagan and Christian funerary art. They typically show seven people reclining around a semi-circular dining couch (stibadium), sharing a meal of bread, wine, and fish that was usually set out on small tripod tables in the foreground. Modern historians tend to assume that the image depicts some kind of ritual meal but disagree on just what kind of meal or ritual is being practiced. Most of these historians have paid attention primarily to the Christian examples and so have attempted to understand it within an early Christian context. Earlier generations of art historians tended to see most early Christian iconography as depicting some biblical scene and sometimes identified the meal scene as a depiction of the Last Supper. 4 This identification was difficult to sustain, particularly in light of the fact that seven, not thirteen, persons were placed around the table. The common inclusion of fish with the bread and wine added to the problem and prompted other scholars to view it still as a biblical scene but as one depicting the picnic beside the Sea of Tiberius or another of the feeding miracles. 5 However, since the number of diners still did not match, another group identified it as depicting the celestial banquet promised by Jesus at the Last Supper, when his followers would come from all directions to recline at the Lord’s table (Marc. 14, 25; Luc. 12, 29). 6 Abandoning the search for an adequately matching biblical narrative, other historians perceived the scene as showing an early Christian ritual. One can find many standard handbooks of early Christian art that simply identify this image as a eucharistic ban4  This may be based on the way that the Last Supper was depicted in Byzantine and Medieval art, with the apostles and Jesus on one side of the table. See A. Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins, Princeton, 1968, p. 8-9, fig. 7. 5  For example, G. Snyder, Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence for Church Life before Constantine, Macon, GA, 1985, p. 65-5; or R. Milburn, Early Christian Art and Architecture, Berkeley, 1988, p. 34. 6 For example, W. Lowrie, Art in the Early Church, New York, 1969, p. 51-53.

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quet or some kind of communal repast, like the agape meal. 7 Often their reasons are unstated, but one may surmise that these identifications emerged out of an assumption that early Christian meals that were celebrated in house churches must have looked something like this: people seated around a regular dining table in a domestic triclinium. For example, Walter Lowrie, author of Art in the Early Church (1965), thought that most of these meals alluded to the celestial banquet but then went on to discuss a particularly famous example of the motif, found in the so-called Capella Graeca in the Catacomb of Priscilla (Fig. 2), making a case that it – unlike the other examples – accurately represented an early Christian Eucharist: The only picture which is in a certain degree realistic [as a depiction of the Eucharist] is a fresco in the Capella Graeca where we see a little group gathered in this very crypt to celebrate the sacrament in memory of their dead, using the tombstone as an altar. The number of persons present is seven, as at the celestial banquet; but the veiled woman in the midst suggests a different interpretation, and this is borne out by the striking gesture of the man who is breaking the loaf for the ‘breaking of the bread’, fractio panis, was so characteristic of the Eucharist that it was often denoted by this name and so far as we know never used in any other connection. The meaning is made perfectly clear (in spite of some archaeologists who are inclined to be contentious by the seven baskets which are ranged on either side. 8

Lowrie never clarified why he judged that this particular image was a singularly realistic eucharistic depiction. Presumably, he surmised that similar banquet scenes depicted something else. Nevertheless, his interpretation was enormously influential. Other scholars even modified his description and began to describe this Catacomb of Priscilla scene as showing seven women (rather than six women and one man) celebrating a Eucharist. 9 7  See J. Stevenson, The Catacombs: Rediscovered Monuments of Early Christianity, London, 1978, p. 94-95; and P. Du Bourguet, Early Christian Art, New York, 1971, p. 50-51.  8   Lowrie, Art in the Early Church, p. 53. 9  Stevenson, Catacombs, p. 94.

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Once this particular painting was assumed to depict a eucharistic banquet and, further that the figure on the left is both the presider and female, it became regularly cited as convincing archaeological evidence for women priests (or even bishops) in the second and third centuries. Furthermore, according to some historians, it demonstrated that women shared some kind of ritual meal separately from men (a practice not described in any surviving documents). 10 For example, in her book Private Women, Public Meals: Social Conflict in the Synoptic Tradition (1993) Kathleen Corley asserts: In this fresco, seven women are sharing a eucharistic celebration. Six women are reclining at the table, with arms outstretched over the eucharistic elements. The seventh woman is sitting up, undoubtedly because she is meant to be pictured as breaking the eucharistic bread being distributed to the others. There are no men in this scene, only women; the group is not a mixed one. 11

An alternative interpretation sees the image not as a eucharistic banquet but as a Christian agape meal. A different sort of communal meal, the agape meal was – at least theoretically – less hierarchal or unsupervised by ecclesial authorities. This interpretation is particularly espoused by Graydon Snyder in his influential monograph, Ante Pacem. In the second edition of this work, Snyder explains the scene as both a depiction of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes and as an agape meal, albeit one that could also have been shared as part of a funeral celebration in the tomb. 12 However, in an earlier essay on the  D. Irvin, ‘The Ministry of Women in the Early Church’, Duke Divinity School Review, 45, 2 (1980), p. 81-84; and K. J. Torjesen, When Women Were Priests: Women’s Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity, San Francisco, 1995, see esp. p. 55, where the caption under the image of the Priscilla meal scene reads ‘A woman breaks bread at an early Christian Eucharist’. More recently, N. Denzey, The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women, Boston, 2008, p. 91-108. See the recent controversy about this image in recent news reports on the internet: ‹http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2510473/Vaticanunveils-frescoes-Catacombs-Priscilla-paintings-FEMALE-PRIESTS.html›, accessed 12/10/2013. 11  K. Corley, Private Women Public Meals: Social Conflict in the Synoptic Tradition, Peabody, MA, 1993, p. 76. 12  Snyder, Ante Pacem, p. 124-126. 10

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character and meaning of Christian art in the pre-Constantinian era, Snyder specifically argues that the scene reflected a ritual practice from an early house church and thus could have featured a woman as presider over the rite: The menu and format of the feeding of the 5,000 occur in early representations of the agape/Eucharist. The bread and fish are always present. The cup has been added on a consistent basis. Occasionally, the bread and cup are being distributed. The persons who blessed and distributed the bread and cup were not necessarily priests, but morally the owner of the house or apartment where the community met. If that owner happened to be a woman, according to artistic representations, she supervised the distribution. 13

Snyder’s assertion that the meals were, in some respect, familial and non-clerical reflects his strong contention that early Christian artworks generally (and these meal images particularly) reflect the religion of the laity, common folk, or women over against the public ceremonies held by bishops and priests and attended by the elite and the educated members of the society. For Snyder and others, archaeological and art historical data give access to the religion of the common folk that they see as overlooked by text-oriented historians of Christianity, particularly as it is reflected in the standard canon of patristic literature. As a corrective, such scholars seek to offer more inclusive, sociologically informed, and archaeologically grounded analyses of both public and private religious beliefs and practices, especially attending to issues of class, ethnicity, and gender. 14 One should note that these scholars infer a specifically Christian meaning for these banquet scenes, with some arguing that it reflected specifically on the practices of the Church’s non-elites. Some, like Snyder, also connect them to pre-Christian practices of funerary banquets, while yet believing that they should 13 G. Snyder, ‘Agape, Eucharist, and Sacrifice in Early Christian Art’, in Interpreting Christian Art – ed. H. Hornik, M. Parsons, p. 60. 14 See Snyder, Ante Pacem, rev. edition, Macon, GA, 2003, p. 9-21 for a summary. For a parallel proposed distinction between the elite and popular Christianity and the value of archaeological data for understanding the latter see R. MacMullen, The Second Church: Popular Christianity ad 200-400, Atlanta, 2009, p. xi-xii.

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be understood as showing something that was characteristically Christian. Few, however, see these scenes as exactly parallel to similar scenes (seven or nine people around a semi-circular table sharing bread and wine) that appear in non-Christian contexts as well as in tombs of elite – or at least reasonably wealthy – Roman polytheists. Occasionally, these scenes show only women, as on a mosaic of women at a funeral banquet from Antioch (Fig. 3). Other well-known examples of these scenes can be found in the hypogeum of the Aurelii in Rome and on the walls of the mausoleum of Clodius Hermes within the complex of the Catacomb of San Sebastiano (Fig. 4). One of these meal scenes comes from the hypogeum of a Roman matron named Vibia (Fig. 5). Vibia was buried, along with her husband Vicentius, in a family tomb decorated with traditional iconography. In addition to depictions of Hercules rescuing Alcestis, Pluto carrying off Vibia (in the guise of Proserpina), and Vicentius dining with the underworld judges, the rear lunette displays a fascinating image of the good angel (angelus bonus) guiding Vibia through a gate and into a meadow where a celestial banquet is underway. Six men recline at a stibadium in a kind of paradisiacal or garden setting; they are wearing wreaths and raise their glasses in a toast to Vibia. Apparently she has passed their examination, for the legend above the men’s heads indicates that she has been judged to be among the good ones (bonorum iudicio iudicati). Fish and other foods (bread or a cake?) appear on the table and a servant brings in a platter with poultry. Two figures in the foreground appear to be playing a game of dice. Such parallels in non-Christian art reveal that there was nothing uniquely Christian (nor specifically non-clerical or lower class) about these banquet scenes. They most likely referred to some generalized hopes for a happy afterlife or perhaps alluded to the traditional funerary meal shared by family members (with the deceased) at tombs throughout the ancient world. Presumably the owners of these tombs or sarcophagi were wealthy enough to afford such monuments or artists to decorate them. Given their appearance in both Christian and pagan contexts, the image must have been open to a variety of meanings, depending on the viewer’s own religious persuasion or social location. The art 557

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historian (and archaeologist) Katherine Dunbabin, believes that no single identification suffices; that the banquet scene may have been intentionally ambiguous – either a feast in heaven or in the tomb, in the present or in the future, celestial or terrestrial, funerary or otherwise. 15 Given the pagan parallels to these Christian banquet scenes, it seems reasonable to resist interpreting them as depicting some uniquely Christian teaching, text, or ritual. At the same time, we may acknowledge that such images could disclose precious evidence about Christian funerary practice among folks of different social strata. We may conclude that early Christians maintained certain traditional Roman funerary customs, even though they promulgated different teachings about death and the afterlife and viewed these scenes through those teachings. We might even consider the possibility that they linked these customs with certain scriptural texts like the feeding miracles or even the eschatological banquet in paradise. These divergent interpretations illustrate key but often contradictory approaches to material evidence. Each is grounded in certain, perhaps optimistic, expectations regarding the possibilities of material evidence for elucidating details about early Christian beliefs and practices. For the sake of simplicity, I have grouped them into three slightly overlapping categories based on their characteristic objectives. Certain problems tend to arise in each of these categories, but – on the positive side – each also has the potential to offer valuable contributions to early Christian studies. 1.1. Physical/Material Evidence as Confirmatory This approach tends to seek material evidence that confirms certain ideas, teachings, or practices as they are presented in documentary sources. Historians who regard texts to be generally reliable witnesses are the most likely proponents of this method. Likewise, when presented with an artifact, such scholars typically search for relevant documents to explain its function or appear15 K.  Dunbabin, The Roman Banquet. Images of Conviviality, Cambridge, 2003, p. 190. See also J. Dresken-Weiland, Bild, Grab, und Wort, Regensburg, 2010, p. 183-187.

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ance. This approach has long been associated with the venerable Roman school of Christian archaeology, characterized by the writings of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century luminaries, Giuseppe Marchi, Josef Wilpert, and Pasquale Testini, and continued in the writings of Aldo Nestori. While this approach illuminates the connection between iconography and scripture or dogmatic writings, the search for texts too often bypasses analysis of an object on its own terms and in its own context. The approach often tends to categorize images or objects too fixedly, seeing them as one kind of thing or as reflecting the beliefs of a single religious community. Often such scholars seek material evidence as secondary or supporting data, or simply as illustration. Other data deemed irrelevant or unhelpful may be ignored or sidelined. Moreover, when texts and artifacts diverge, the written document is preferred and the artifact assumed to be atypical. The assumption that texts are less ambiguous than visual images or physical objects dominates this approach. Images are perceived as silent and thus malleable. In his responses to essays evaluating his major work on Christian baptism, Everett Ferguson recently articulated this privileging of texts over material evidence in straightforward prose: ‘I judge archaeological evidence to be confirmatory of literary sources, and where it appears contradictory or ambiguous, I give priority to the written texts, which are both earlier and clearer’. 16 Of course, whether texts are in fact earlier is debatable. A good many early Christian artifacts may pre-date existing texts. They may even have influenced them. Nevertheless, this approach certainly grants texts a level of clarity and trustworthiness not accorded to material remains. 1.2. Physical/Material Evidence as Contradictory This approach may be the flipside of the former in that it allows material evidence to challenge or disprove long-standing suppositions rather than validating them. In an instance when texts and objects contradict or diverge from one another, this approach normally grants independent – or at least parallel – authority to 16 E.  Ferguson, ‘Response to Contributors’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 20.3 (2012), p. 472 (in response to Robin M. Jensen).

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the physical remains. Thus, it often breaks new ground, but it also requires that its adherents convincingly elaborate a theory about the essential character and historical value of artifacts versus documents. Among the most dramatic instances of this was the discovery in the 1920s and 1930s of the figural mosaic pavement in the synagogue at Beth Alpha or the wall paintings in the Dura Europos Synagogue, which challenged the standard belief that Jews did not allow visual images in their places of worship. Once the astonishment dissipated, historians began to modify their assumptions about a pure, aniconic Judaism in the early rabbinical period. They also had to revise their picture of ancient synagogues as places devoid of pictorial art. More recently, scholars have challenged the presumed separation, distinct cultural expressions, ritual practices, and – in general – the social exclusivity of Christians in antiquity. 17 The study of material evidence has been extremely useful to this end, as it has given concrete witness that Christians never ceased to be part of their broader socio-cultural environment, even if they officially rejected aspects of it. Like their language, their visual art and architecture remained essentially Greco-Roman. They may even have patronized the same workshops, while they adapted iconographic symbols or motifs (e.g. the Good Shepherd) to fit their own system of beliefs. 1.3. Physical/Material Evidence as Complementary This approach sees the physical evidence as a crucial supplement to text-oriented knowledge – while allowing it to be an independent witness with validity distinct from existing documentary data. It also recognizes and stresses the value of including non-literary material in the study of early Christianity in order to achieve a broader, richer, more accurate, and more inclusive understanding of its social, cultural, and religious context. As noted above, some historians have even posited a fundamental difference between the users (viewers) and produc17 J. Elsner takes this position. For a good articulation of his argument see J. Elsner, ‘Archaeologies and Agendas: Reflections on Late Ancient Jewish Art and Early Christian Art’, The Journal of Roman Studies, 93 (2003), p. 114-128.

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ers of visual or material objects and the producers of texts – or between ordinary believers and religious officials. Finding and researching non-textual artifacts is, in their view, a potential means of gaining insight into the daily lives and religious commitments of these folks – perhaps the basis for reconstructing an alternative, non-clerical church community. 18 For example, in her book Image as Insight, Margaret Miles argued, ‘The recommendation that visual historical evidence be taken into account in our attempt to understand the ideas and image of people who were not linguistically trained – that is, specially privileged – has the ring of an obvious truth or methodological necessity about which no more need be said’. 19 Of course elite and literate individuals also produced and used that visual historical evidence; they probably were more likely to commission decorated tombs, books, and luxury personal objects (gems, gold glasses, etc.). Thus, this theory presumes something about the evidence that might not match its own reality. Underlying this third approach is the belief that art does something different from texts – that art simply reflects a different kind of reality or different set of persons. Therefore, art and text, while both valuable types of evidence, are perceived as not comparable or even easily coordinated. It is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the data to equate images to words, as if they were simply non-verbal forms of speech. Graydon Snyder summed up his reticence to interpret iconography by reference to texts in this sense: I seldom [cite] parallel writings because I assume, perhaps overly much, that the sentiments of the religious actor usually differ from those of the religious writer. Furthermore, I assume that we will normally find the sentiments of the religious actor in the visual field. 20

Snyder’s assertion raises another important issue for our consideration: who determined the content, context, or character of a work of art or the design and decoration of a church or   As one may see in MacMullen, The Second Church.  M. Miles, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture, Boston, 1985, p. 15. 20  Snyder, ‘Agape, Eucharist, and Sacrifice’, p. 53. 18 19

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a tomb? Is it possible to assume that the writers of theological treatises or church authorities were utterly uninterested in the visual representation of their sacred texts or teachings? In other words, how much were religious writers unaware of or unconcerned about the impact of images in liturgical or funerary settings – the field of the religious actors? Are such categories helpful or is the determination of these supposedly separate groups merely a misleading or false distinction? A slightly different concern critiques a too-focused attention to religious motivations – particularly as delineated in theological treatises – instead of considering formal dimensions of visual or material remains that have only marginal relevance to theological or religious beliefs, letting objects or even buildings stand on their own. This concern was raised by Mark Humphries who, critiquing the tendency to overemphasize the theological symbolism of religious architecture, argued that ‘examination of the development of church buildings can demonstrate the extent to which the construction of such edifices was driven by concerns of social status as much as piety’. 21 Despite Humphries’s anxiety that historians of Christianity can be overly eager to find religious significance in our material evidence – to infer special cultic meaning in some object when there might be none – it is still indisputable that the use of material or visual evidence gives us information that we would never get from documentary evidence alone. Moreover, it is a huge advantage to be theologically and liturgically knowledgeable when assessing the potential ritual function or religious implication of a particular object, image, or structure. Without a certain level of familiarity with texts or religious practices, basic recognition of iconographic motifs or the purpose of many objects or edifices would be nearly impossible. For example, many Byzantine-era pilgrimage churches were constructed with enormous baptisteries (e.g., the baptisteries at Qal’at Siman or Bir Ftouha outside Tunis). Nothing in the documentary evidence easily explains the apparent practice of baptism

21 M. Humphries, ‘Material Evidence (1): Archeology’, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies – ed. S. Ashbrook Harvey, David Hunter, Oxford, 2008, p. 97.

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in non-cathedral contexts, presumably of adults arriving from some distance to such a shrine. One guess is that they facilitated some ablution ritual that may have had a purificatory value, but there is no literary source to back that idea up, nor is there likely to be any. 22 Guessing makes many of us anxious – it is risky to simply imagine what a particular material object was, much less its function. We really like to have those reliable documents to back up our interpretations. Lacking such proof texts, artifacts are viewed as possibly anomalous, unreliable, and even inscrutable. In the end we should still subject our studies of physical remains to the corrective and balancing potential of textual evidence. This may be obvious if we consider how future archaeologists may assess common artifacts from our present world. Consider the possible discovery, two thousand years from now, of a large metal box with three colored lenses (red, yellow, green). Will there be any surviving text to explain this marvel? Will our drivers’ education manuals –written on pulpy paper – or even worse, now in ephemeral electronic form – still survive to help future historians figure out the ceremonial function of a traffic light? Thus, it is problematic, lacking any corroborating evidence, to assign some kind of religious significance to an artifact. Lacking labels, captions, or easily correlated documentary evidence, objects must be explained entirely on their own terms and so may be completely misunderstood. Maybe the artifact is simply a traffic-controlling device and not an oracle. Nevertheless, correlating artifacts and texts is tricky for all the reasons I discussed above. Moreover, artifacts have at least one notable advantage over texts. Whereas a written document has been copied and transmitted through time and space in different versions, translations, or editions, artifacts are one-of-akind and – even if damaged and no longer in situ – are original. We can date them fairly precisely by studying their provenance, fabric, style, and similarities to other objects like them.

22  See R. Jensen, ‘Baptismal Practices at North African Martyrs’ Shrines’, in Ablution, Initiation, and Baptism in Early Judaism, Graeco-Roman Religion, and Early Christianity – ed. David Hellholm et al., Berlin, 2011, p. 1673-1695.

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Conclusion It probably is impossible to overestimate the value of archaeological discoveries for our understanding of early Christianity in its many contexts and complexities – not to mention the simple pleasure that fascinating and often beautiful objects add to our work. However, no less than texts, the very nature of art enables various interpretations, which means that its incorporation into our research is just as vulnerable to missteps: the tendency to read into or manipulate the evidence to back up our hypotheses, or to propose conclusions before considering all the available data. The difficulty of knowing how ancient viewers would have regarded these objects and even realizing that only a tiny portion of the data has survived (without being sure that it is truly representative) adds to our caution. We also have to contend with the wariness that at least some of our colleagues in other fields will feel about our work as historians of religion. Yet taking some chances and then correcting mistakes is how we move forward. We will welcome the gains from using different approaches or methods, the challenges and corrections of our colleagues, and the opportunities to learn from scholars in other disciplines. In the long run, we will all be advantaged by bringing as many kinds of data as are available together and working collaboratively and constructively to advance our understanding of early Christian culture.

Bibliography K. Corley, Private Women Public Meals: Social Conflict in the Synoptic Tradition, Peabody, MA, 1993. N. Denzey, The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women, Boston, 2008. J. Dresken-Weiland, Bild, Grab, und Wort, Regensburg, 2010. P. Du Bourguet, Early Christian Art, New York, 1971. K. Dunbabin, The Roman Banquet. Images of Conviviality, Cambridge, 2003. J. Elsner, ‘Archaeologies and Agendas: Reflections on Late Ancient Jewish Art and Early Christian Art’, The Journal of Roman Studies, 93 (2003), p. 114-128. J. Elsner, Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph, Oxford, 1993.

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E.  Ferguson, ‘Response to Contributors’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 20.3 (2012), p. 467-484. A. Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of Its Origins, Princeton, 1968. J. Hamburger, St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology, Berkeley, 2002. M. Humphries, ‘Material Evidence (1): Archaeology’, in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies – ed. S. Ashbrook Harvey, David Hunter, Oxford, 2008, p. 87-103. D. Irvin, ‘The Ministry of Women in the Early Church’, Duke Divinity School Review, 45.2 (1980), p. 76-86. R.  Jensen, ‘Baptismal Practices at North African Martyrs’ Shrines’, in Ablution, Initiation, and Baptism in Early Judaism, Graeco-Roman Religion, and Early Christianity – ed. David Hellholm et al., Berlin, 2011, p. 1673-95. W. Lowrie, Art in the Early Church, New York, 1969. R. MacMullen, The Second Church: Popular Christianity ad 200-400, Atlanta, 2009. R. Milburn, Early Christian Art and Architecture, Berkeley, 1988. M. Miles, Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture, Boston, 1985. G. Snyder, ‘Agape, Eucharist, and Sacrifice in Early Christian Art’, in Interpreting Christian Art – ed. H. Hornik, M. Parsons, p. 53-64. G. Snyder, Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence for Church Life before Constantine, Macon, GA, 1985. J. Stevenson, The Catacombs: Rediscovered Monuments of Early Christianity, London, 1978. K. J.  Torjesen, When Women Were Priests: Women’s Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity, San Francisco, 1995. ‹http: //www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2510473/Vaticanunveils-frescoes-Catacombs-Priscilla-paintings-FEMALEPRIESTS.html›, accessed 12/10/13.

Abstract Historians of ancient Christianity are now, more than ever, incorporating the study of material evidence into their research. Artifacts that once were primarily the subjects for analysis by archaeologists and art historians have become central to the work of scholars

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who may have been trained primarily as text-scholars. Thus the need to expand beyond literary evidence offers challenge and promise as well as opportunities for new insights and perspectives. Nevertheless, certain problems also arise, many of them parallel to the issues that characterize the work of literary studies. This essay offers a brief overview of the situation and summarizes some of the common approaches and operating assumptions of primarily text historians when incorporating the study of objects into their work.

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Fig. 1. Banquet scene, Catacomb of Callixtus, Rome. © The International Catacomb Society: Photo by Estelle Brettman.

Fig. 2. Banquet scene, Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome. © The International Catacomb Society: Photo by Estelle Brettman.

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Fig. 3. Mosaic depicting a memorial meal, 2-4th century CE, from Antioch, now in the Worcester (MA) Art Museum. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Fig. 4. Banquet scenes from the Catacomb of San Sebastiano, on the exterior of the Mausoleum of Marcus Clodius Hermes. © The International Catacomb Society: Photo by Estelle Brettman.

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Fig. 5. Lunette painting from the Hypogeum of Vibia, Rome. © The International Catacomb Society: Photo by Estelle Brettman.

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PATRISTICISM AND BYZANTINE META-IMAGES MOLDING BELIEF IN THE DIVINE FROM WRITTEN TO PAINTED THEOLOGY

Based on how the Cappadocian fathers discuss Christology and Trinitarian theology, and John Damascene argues in favor of holy images, this article explores patristicism and the significance of Byzantine meta-images to verify didactically not only God’s humanity, but also God’s divinity. It will focus on how the specifics of Byzantine aesthetics face up to Orthodox axioms and how meta-images, paradoxical non-images, or non-categorizations of the divine, are prerequisite to epitomize Orthodox faith.

God and the Causality of Human and Divine The youngest of the three Cappadocian fathers, Gregory of Nyssa, emphasizes how the power (δύναμις) of the Theotokos’ virginity is like a bond (σύνδεσμος) that assures affinity (οἰκείωσις) between humankind and God. 1 Her virginity brings forever together God and humankind. Christ was indeed truly human, Gregory underlines, even if not so in every respect – but ‘as a man’ because of the mystery of the virginity. 2 He stresses that Jesus Christ was not subject to the laws of human nature in everything. The human side of Christ is named by the particular name Jesus 1   De virg. 2, 3, 1-10 (SC, 119, p. 268-271). Theotokos, ‘God-bearing’, ‘who is mother of God’, title of Virgin Mary. 2  Apoll. 21 (GNO, III-1, 160, 3). Cfr. A. Karahan, ‘The Impact of Cappadocian Theology on Byzantine Aesthetics. Gregory Nazianzen on the Unity and Singularity of Christ’, in The Ecumenical Legacy of the Cappadocians – ed. N. Dumitrascu, London, forthcoming.

10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107535

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received through the revelation (μυσταγωγία) made by Gabriel to the Virgin, while his divine nature is not expressed by a name, but the two became one through their co-mingling (ἀνάκρασις). 3 In Jesus Christ the two natures of divine and human exist in one reality. John Damascene, active during the first phase of the Byzantine Iconoclast controversy, 4 underlines, The Word became flesh immutably, remaining what it was, so also the flesh became the Word without losing what it was, being rather made equal to the Word hypostatically. Therefore I am emboldened to depict the invisible God, not as invisible, but as he became visible for our sake, by participation in flesh and blood. I do not depict the invisible divinity, but I depict God made visible in the flesh. 5

God is both within and beyond visibility and comprehensibility. Of crucial interest for Byzantine aesthetics and its dogmatic agenda, but also the theological impact of light, brilliance, tripartite windows, and the cross-halo, is a mode of thought found with the eldest of the Cappadocian fathers, Basil of Caesarea. When discussing Trinitarian theology, he uses the ὁμοούσιος concept, ‘of the same substance’. Basil introduces the distinction of one substance (οὐσία) in three Persona (ὑποστάσεις). He argues that μία οὐσία τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις is the only acceptable formula. 6 To him, οὐσία denotes the existence, or essence, or substantial entity of God, while ὑπόστασις signifies the existence in a par-

  Apoll. 21 (GNO, III-1, 161, 13).   See also, A. Karahan, ‘Byzantine Iconoclasm: Ideology and Quest for Power’, in Iconoclasm from Antiquity to Modernity – ed. K. Kolrud, M. Prusac, Surrey, England, 2014, p. 75-94. 5  Imag.  3, 6 – ed. B. Kotter, p. 77-78: ‘θεότης  ἡ φύσις  γέγονε  τῆς σαρκός, ἀλλ’ ὥσπερ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἀτρέπτως ἐγένετο μείνας, ὅπερ προῆν, οὕτω καὶ ἡ σὰρξ λόγος γέγονεν οὐκ ἀπολέσασα τουθ’, ὅπερ ἐστί, ταυτιζομένη δὲ μᾶλλον πρὸς τὸν λόγον καθ’ ὑπόστασιν.  Διὸ θαρρῶν εἰκονίζω θεὸν τὸν ἀόρατον οὐκ ὡς ἀόρατον, ἀλλ’ ὡς ὀρατὸν δι’ ἡμᾶς γενόμενον ἐν μεθέξει σαρκὸς καὶ αἵματος. Οὐ τὴν ἀόρατον εἰκονιζω θεότητα, αλλ’ εἰκονίζω θεοῦ τὴν ὁραθεῖσαν σάρκα·’ [Eng. translation A. Louth, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, Crestwood, New York, 2003, p. 86]. Cfr. also Imag. 1, 4. 6  The formula implies that God’s one substance is fully and equally possessed by each Persona, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, see Bas., Hom. 24, 4 (PG, 31, 605B). 3 4

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ticular mode, the manner of being of each Persona. 7 He explains the term ὁμοούσιον as relational – the divine οὐσία is the Father’s οὐσία, shared with the Son by begetting him and with the Spirit through procession. 8 Basil proclaims that faith confesses distinction in ὑπόστασις and community in οὐσία; ὑπόστασις relates to the individuality of each, whereas οὐσία relates to the principle of community. 9 Basil identifies co-inherence of the ὑπόστασις, one within the other and accentuates the properties of the three ὑποστάσεις, Fatherhood, Sonship, and Sanctification. 10 Philip Rousseau has sagaciously emphasized, It was the quality of “being related” that claimed priority, and problems connected with the mode of generation were of less significance – indeed, they were, in the end, beyond understanding and should not even be discussed. 11

My hypothesis is that the Orthodox Christian truisms of God being triune and one, as well as neither exclusively divinely incomprehensible, nor entirely humanly comprehensible, constitute the theoretical and methodological code of Byzantine aesthetics. 12 A Byzantine holy image verifies the image of God (εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ), but also God’s triune One-essence. Since, either in writing or in painting, to disregard either God’s humanity or divinity would deviate from established Orthodox faith. It would be anathema. The Logos, the inexplicable Word of God, and the Word incarnated in the second person of the Trinity, identifies one God. Jesus Christ is not just a blur of flesh who strips bare a temporal reality exposed to corruption. In support of my statement, I refer to John Damascene, who writes, ‘I venerate together with the King and God the purple robe of his body, not as a garment [...] but as called to be  J. Quasten, Patrology, 4 vols., Westminster, MD, 1994, III, p. 228.   Ep. 52 – ed. R. J. Deferrari, p. 328-337. 9   Ep. 38, 5 – ed. R. J. Deferrari, p. 200-203. 10   L. D.  Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325-787). Their History and Theology, Collegeville, MN, 1990, p. 114. 11  Eun. 2, 20-22 (SC, 305, p. 80-93). Discussed in P. Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, Berkeley, 1994, p. 107. 12 Cfr. A. Karahan, ‘The Image of God in Byzantine Cappadocia and the Issue of Supreme Transcendence’, Studia Patristica, 59 (2013), p. 97-111. 7 8

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and to have become unchangeably equal to God, and the source of anointing’. 13 Orthodoxy acknowledges the potential of every believer to experience theosis, that is to partake in the divine nature and unite with God, to share in the life and the nature of the divine already in this life. Belief in theosis concerns salvation 14 and bodily resurrection that ideologically depends on interaction of human and divine that is Cross Death and Grace. The specifics of Byzantine aesthetics, its meta-images, verify this axiom of God’s twofold identification. In this sense, a Byzantine holy image promotes verifications ‘of right belief’ (ὀρθόδοξος). What we behold is the prerequisite of lex orandi lex est credendi, worship must use the same terms as the profession of faith. Christopher Beeley has well remarked that the unity of Christ is the central tenet of Gregory Nazianzen’s Christology. 15 God and humanity, however, remain distinct kinds of reality (ἄλλο καὶ ἄλλο); the visible and the invisible are not the same thing. Yet, when the Son took on human existence they became ‘one thing’ (ἕν), and the incarnate Son continues to be a single subject of existence (ἄλλος), as he was before. 16 The Cappadocian father from Nazianzos concludes his Christological statement by saying, What he (Christ) was he set aside; what he was not he assumed. Not that he became two things, but he deigned to be made one thing out of two (οὐ δύο γενόμενος, ἀλλ᾿ ἓν ἐκ τῶν δύο γενέσθαι ἀνασχόμενος). For both are God, that which assumed and that which was assumed, the two natures meeting in one thing (δύο φύσεις εἰς ἓν συνδραμούσαι). But not two sons: let us not give a false account of the blending (ἡ σύγκρασις). 17   Imag. 1, 4 [Eng. trans. Louth, Treatises, p. 22].   II Petr. 1, 4. 15  C. A.  Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God, Oxford, 2008, p. 128. Cfr. Gr. Naz., Or. 29, 19 (SC, 250, p. 216-219); Or. 37, 4 (SC, 318, p. 276-281); Or. 38, 13 (SC, 358, p. 132-135); Ep. 101, 13, 15 (SC, 208, p. 40-43); Ep. 101, 16-32 (SC, 208, p. 42-51). On various readings of Gregory of Nyssa’s Christology, see M. Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)modern, Oxford, 2007, p. 98-107. 16  Gr. Naz., Ep.  101, 20-21 (SC, 208, p. 44-45) [Eng. trans. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus, p. 136, slightly changed]. 17  Or. 37, 2 (SC, 318, p. 274-275) [Eng. trans. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus, p. 128-129]. 13 14

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Beeley has shown that Gregory Nazianzen’s Christological method both assumes and advances a doctrine of the unity and unchanging identity of the Son of God in his eternal and his incarnate states. 18 All of Christ’s qualities, whether godly or human, belong to the same subject. Christ is, in his most fundamental identity, the eternal Son of God made flesh. In context of Byzantine aesthetics, I suggest, it is equally cardinal to authenticate God as twofold. I support my hypothesis on Gregory Nazianzen, who with reference to the duality of Christ’s divine and human titles acknowledges them as ‘yoked together on account of the mixture (ἡ σύγκρασις)’, and he underlines, The natures are distinguished and the names are separated in thoughts [...] Even though the combination of (God and human existence) is a single entity, he is such not in his (divine) nature, but in the union of the two. 19

Apophatic statements are also present in the Gospel of John, ‘No one has ever seen God’; 20 or in the First Letter of Paul to Timothy, ‘He (God) [...] dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see’. 21 In the patristic tradition as well, there is a plethora of apophatic proclamations. Gregory of Nyssa, well known for his apophatic theology, underlines that true knowledge and vision of God consist in seeing that God is invisible. In his treatise De vita Moisis, but also in his Sermons on the Beatitudes, Gregory emphasizes that what we seek lies   Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus, p. 128-136. Gr. Naz., in Or. 29, 19-20 (SC, 250, p. 218-223), writes on Christology, ‘He was begotten (ἐγεννήθη), but he was also born (γεγέννητο) of a woman [...] He was wrapped in swaddling bands, but he took off the swaddling bands of the grave by rising again [...] He is baptized as a human being, but he remitted sins as God [...] He asks where Lazarus was laid, for he was a human being; but he raises Lazarus, for he was God [...] As a sheep he is led to the slaughter, but he is the shepherd of Israel [...] He lays down his life, but he has the power to take it up again [...] He dies, but he gives life, and by death destroys death. He is buried, but he rises again’ [Eng. trans. Id., p. 136]. 19  Or.  30, 8.1-13 (SC, 250, p. 240-243), ‘ἡνίκα αἱ φύσεις διΐστανται ταῖς ἐπινοίαις, συνδιαιρεῖται καὶ τὰ ὀνομάτα [...] τὸ συναμφότερον ἕν, ἀλλ’ οὐ τῇ φύσει, τῇ δὲ συνόδῳ τούτων’ [Eng. trans. Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus, p. 140]. 20 Ioh. 1, 18. 21  I Tim. 6, 16. 18

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beyond all knowledge; the darkness of incomprehensibility separates us from it. Lars Thunberg has pointed to how Gregory in De vita Moisis contemplates about God in terms of an obscure light, or rather a luminous darkness. 22 Whereas Gösta Hallonsten has emphasized how Gregory through Moses’ encounters with God teaches how religious knowledge does not turn into light until experienced. 23 To encounter God is to experience the light, since there is no darkness (σκοτία) in God. 24 Yet, God is not light, since God transcends light. 25 Turning to the Sermons on the Beatitudes, Johannes Quasten concludes that to Gregory God is purity, freedom from passion, and separation from all evil. To make the divine beauty shine forth again, we must cleanse by a good life the filth that has been stuck on our hearts like plaster. A purified in contrast to a non-purified person can perceive what is invisible, as ‘the darkness caused by material entanglements’ has been removed from the eyes of the soul. The blessed vision, Gregory stresses, is now radiant in the pure heaven of the person’s heart. 26 The purified person experiences an inner radiant vision separated from material entanglements. Byzantine Orthodoxy venerates God as both human and divine, that is comprehensible as well as incomprehensible, circumscribed as well as uncircumscribed, visible as well as invisible; all of which identification are of equal importance. Yet, all church fathers emphasize with one voice the unfeasibility of manifesting the divine that is what God is. John Damascene recognizes the apophatic mystery, but also what can be said affirmatively of God, God, then, is infinite and incomprehensible, and all that is comprehensible about him is his infinity and incomprehensibility. All that we can say cataphatically concerning God does not show forth his nature but only the things that relate to his nature. 27 22     L. Thunberg, Man and the Cosmos. The Vision of St Maximus the Confessor, Crestwood, New York, 1985, p. 34. 23  G. Hallonsten, ‘Östkyrkan förr och nu. Studier i den ortodoxa traditionen’, Religio, 34 (1991), p. 83-108. 24  I Ioh. 1, 5. 25  Jo. D., F.o. 1, 4. 26   J. Quasten, Patrology, III, p. 294-295. 27  F.o.  1, 4, 32-34 – ed. B. Kotter, p. 13: ‘  ῎Απειρον οὖν τὸ θεῖον καὶ

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In contrast to apophatic theology, knowledge of God by way of negation (ἀποφατικός, ‘negative’), cataphatic theology concerns affirmations and positive statements about God and the incarnation. The Damascene stresses God’s incomprehensibility, but also, as Andrew Louth has called attention to, the paradox that we know God’s incomprehensibility, because God has made himself known through his own trinitarian being, through the Son and the Spirit. This knowledge has been passed down to us, first through the creation, the law, and the prophets, and then through the only-begotten Son. This ‘tradition’ (what has been ‘passed down’), rooted in the Godhead itself (it is the only-begotten Son, who has made it known), has been passed down to us by the Fathers, who have laid down ‘eternal boundaries’ that we should neither alter nor attempt to cross (cfr. Prou. 22, 28). 28 When exploring Byzantine aesthetics, it is prerequisite to heed the unconditional importance of tradition and synodical Orthodoxy in Byzantine religious life. Scientifically valid conclusions must consider and respect patristicism, since Byzantine faith and practice tally with the Fathers’ ‘eternal boundaries’ of right belief (ὀρθόδοξος). In his polemics in favor of holy images the Damascene states, It is impossible to make an image of God who is incorporeal, invisible, immaterial and with neither shape nor circumscription nor apprehension; how can what cannot be seen be depicted. 29

As quoted above from the Damascene, all that is comprehensible about God is God’s infinity and incomprehensibility. Yet, this does not insinuate that God’s impenetrability is a nonissue, since human salvation depends on faith in God’s mystery as well as revelations.

ἀκατάληπτον, καὶ τοῦτο μόνον αὐτοῦ καταληπτόν, ἡ ἀπειρία καὶ ἡ ἀκαταληψία. ῞Οσα δὲ λέγομεν ἐπὶ θεοῦ καταφατικῶς, οὐ τὴν φύσιν ἀλλὰ τὰ περὶ τὴν φύσιν δηλοῖ’. 28   A. Louth, St John Damascene. Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology, Oxford, 2002, p. 90-91. 29  Imag. 2, 7 – ed. B. Kotter, p. 74: ‘Θεοῦ μὲν γὰρ τοῦ άσωμάτου καὶ ἀοράτου καὶ ἀύλου καὶ μήτε σχῆμα μήτε περιγραφὴν μήτε κατάληψιν ἔχοντος ἀδύνατον ποιεῖν εἰκόνα: πῶς γὰρ τὸ μὴ ὁραθὲν εἰκονισθήσεται’ [Eng. trans. Louth, Treatises, p. 63-64].

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The Byzantine Meta-Image To create a living reenactment of the holy drama of the incarnation, Byzantine aesthetics exploits apophatic didactics. A transfigured reality underpinned by theological significance permeates the epic narrative to give insight into and a foretaste of God’s incomprehensibility and infinity. Artistic devices such as actual or symbolic brilliance of gold, silver, gems, and pearls, radiance of multicolor technique, light mandorlas, or sparkling light permeating tripartite windows are subtle ways of making God accessible to human contemplation (see Fig. 1). Other devices are: the inverted perspective that introduces a kind of transfigured non-temporal reality, and the corporeality extracted from temporal corruptibility, flattened, yet, perfectly poised. Imploded gravitation, dematerialized hovering bodies, but also compressed props of architecture and distorted nature, as well as circular forms, including halos, mold a divine ambience of a cosmos outside the temporal system. In addition, there is a plethora of borders, ornate with patterns of gems, geometry, foliage, or less complex with strokes of white, red, or blue colors. The Byzantine border does not frame but interacts with the epic narrative. In theory, it is beyond circumscription, since its patterns have no beginning or end (see Fig. 2). The notion I use for such artistic devices is meta-image. 30 The meta-image takes control over temporal characteristics, to mold a transfigured, divine reality that faces up to Orthodox faith. In a similar manner to patristicism, the holy drama imbibed with spiritual intensity guides the believer to eternal life. The meta-image is a kind of apophatic non-image, or nonmotif, or emblematic non-identification, or non-categorization of faith in God’s divinity. The meta-image relates to apophatic theology. It verifies the partaking of incomprehensible divinity in the epic narrative of the holy drama. Byzantine aesthetics assembles meta-images and narration into a mono-emergence, to recognize faith in God as both divine and human. In a didactic 30  See also, A. Karahan, Byzantine Holy Images – Transcendence and Immanence. The Theological Background of the Iconography and Aesthetics of the Chora Church, Leuven, 2010, p. 4, 24, 31-34, 36-37, 39-42, 45-48, and General Index ‘meta-image’.

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sense, the meta-image embraces faith in that God’s is is incomprehensible. It mediates apophatic knowledge about the impalpable divine. The meta-image is a kind of metaphorical aphorism, a kind of minimalistic pictorial or symbolic articulation to recognize that God’s divinity is as real and present as God’s humanity. Triune divine and the economy of salvation is a mono-reality. The meta-image celebrates Byzantine faith in a unique God of divine uncircumscribable incomprehensibility and human circumscribable comprehensibility. In many Byzantine churches, we can experience this reciprocal mono-reality, didactically, when figurative motifs are filled with the meta-image of unified dazzling brilliance from light entering through a tripartite window. 31 To contextualize my interpretation, I refer to the Scriptures, ‘we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals’. 32 In line with this, light phenomena or brilliance of precious metals, gems, and pearls are apophaticisms. The meta-image is not identical, but analogous in an apophatic sense. Negative theology is molded into abstract significations of divine presence. Neither light nor brilliance, or borders, or geometric abstractions, or tripartite windows categorize the divine. The meta-image is an apophatic attribute of the divine. It acts in communion with the narratives of the holy drama, props, and holy persons, that is, in communion with the affirmative (καταφατικός) theology, the positive statements about God, thus revealing in a paradoxical sense the core idea of Christian Orthodoxy. In this sense, the meta-image affects the ways we perceive of God and the holy drama. Compare how John Damascene emphasizes that ‘God does not show forth his nature but the things that relate to his nature (τὰ περὶ τὴν φύσιν)’. 33 Molded to painted theology, I suggest that in an orthodox sense, Byzantine meta-images embrace the potential to stimulate experience of theosis, that is, deification, a spiritual and mystical connection with virtue, particularly

  Cfr. ‘the light of the Trinity’, Gr. Naz., Or. 31, 26 (SC, 250, p. 326).   Act. 17, 29. 33  F.o. 1, 4, 33-36 – ed. B. Kotter, p. 13. On the creation of a statue versus God in creation, see Bas., Hex. 3, 10, 32D-E (SC, 26bis, p. 242-243). 31 32

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charity, if we listen to Gregory Nazianzen. 34 In Byzantine faith, theosis constitutes the goal of life. 35 It is the work of God’s grace (χάρις) and power (δύναμις). 36 To reach theosis demands faith in not only the image of God (εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ), but also God’s transcendent is. 37 In the parekklesion of the Chora Church, ornate borders of paradisiacal flora divide the dome into twelve triangular spaces, each devoted to an attendant angel (see Fig. 3). The dome’s apex is devoted to the Virgin, the saint most high and her Child encircled by a diamond-shape patterned multicolored medallion signifying the rainbow. A thin luminous white border signifying light encircles the medallion on each side. In the Byzantine Souda lexicon rainbow (ἶρις) relates to light, but also fire. The twelve paradisiacal borders unite in the medallion of light, in order to signify further divine light and eternal fire (of faith). In addition, blazes of light filter through the dome’s twelve windows, creating and amplifying a further vibrating effect of pulsating radiance. The religious message is clear. In a Byzantine sense, the dome symbolizes Heaven on Earth. Through the Theotokos and Jesus Christ, Earth meets Heaven, to offer grace and eternal life to those who believe in God’s incarnation. What better prospect could the patron (κτήτωρ) Theodoros Metochites hope for, when building his burial chapel at the Chora Church. Dogmatically, the economy of salvation implies divine and human interaction. In either written or painted theology, to disregard God’s duality would invalidate God’s grace in human salvation. Hence, when meta-images of divine presence interact with the holy drama, Byzantine aesthetics concurs with faith. The specifics of Byzantine aesthetics uncover holy persons as models for mimesis of the sacred state that leads to salvation, but also the holy drama as a didactic tool for faith in God’s interacting humanity and divinity.

 Cfr. Gr. Naz., Carm. 1, 2, 34, 161 (PG, 37, 957A).  Cfr. Max., Cap. 1, 42 (PG, 90, 1193D). 36 Cfr. Max., Qu. Thal. 22 (CCSG, 7, p. 141 lines 88-98); Max. Opusc. (PG, 91, 33C). 37 Cfr. Gr. Naz., Or. 21, 2C (SC, 270, p. 112-115). 34 35

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The Cross-halo All Byzantine motifs of Jesus Christ, as a child, the Pantokrator, or in his ministry role, represent him with a radiant halo around his head and a three-armed cross protruding out of or behind his head 38 (see Fig. 4). Generally, the cross is shimmering, delineated in gold, silver, gems, pearls, and/or shining bright colors. In an apophatic sense, the unifying iridescent effect of the cross-halo signifies God’s divine nature (φύσις) and substance (οὐσία). The three crossarms constitute an emblematic non-identification, a meta-image of faith in the three divine Persona (ὑποστάσεις) of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while the encircling halo signifies God as eternal and uncircumscribed. Triune and circular brilliance uncover a sparkling unified light phenomenon in space. In an apophatic sense, it authenticates faith in the Trinity, only known in creation through its divine operations, and God as the eternal light, but also God as a triune incomprehensible mono-reality, yet, comprehensible in the anthropomorphic image of God. The indwelling presence of God in the world is both human and divine. Protruding as a vertical fourth crossarm, the anthropomorphic image subtly validates the wooden cross. A causal correlation between Jesus Christ and the meta-image of the luminous crosshalo verifies the cross death at Golgotha and Jesus Christ as the savior. Triune and circular luminosity, cross-form, and the image of God construct a didactic fabric of faith in human salvation resting on incarnation and passion, but also divine knowledge and grace. The circle, Basil of Caesarea emphasizes, starts from itself and ends in itself. 39 In a sense, the circle is kindred with eternity and uncircumscription. Since, in theory, circles, but also luminosity and borders lack beginning or end, such meta-images match 38  On halo and cross-halo, see A. Karahan, Byzantine Holy Images, p. 123, 127-128, 179, 215, 232, 246, General Index, ‘halo’. On the Trinity in writing and image: see A. Karahan, ‘The Issue of περιχώρησις in Byzantine Holy Images’, Studia Patristica, 44-49 (2010), p. 29-30. 39  Hex.  2, 8, 49C (SC, 26bis, p. 180-183): ‘τοῦτο  δὲ  κυκλικόν  ἐστι  τὸ σχῆμα, ἀφ’ ἑαθτοῦ ἄρχεσθαι, καὶ εἰς ἑαυτὸ καταλήγειν. ῝Ο δὴ καὶ τοῦ αἰῶνος ἴδιον, εἰς ἑαυτὸν ἀναστρέφειν, καὶ μηδαμοῦ περατοῦσθαι’.

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introspective contemplation of faith in the continuum of divine nature. The three crossarms’ glowing luster is no proper image of God’s divinity, but an apophatic insight, a meta-image of faith in God’s incomposite (ἀσυνθέτως) divine nature, the trinitarian Christian God of one substance and three Persona (μία οὐσία τρεῖς ὑποστάσεις). In support of my conclusion, I refer to Gregory Nazianzen, who uses a poetic metaphor of the sun, its rays and light to highlight that the main issue is the junction of unity with the multiplicity of three. 40 Gregory infers also that ‘No human being has yet discovered or ever shall discover what God is in his nature and essence’, because in this world we can attain only relative understanding of the final knowledge of God. What humans can reach understanding of is only a brief emanation, or a small radiation of the great light that is God. 41 In a similar manner, contemplation of a meta-image of triune quivering brilliance can create a vibration, or palpitation in the believer, a bodily palpitation (παλμός) as means of divination. 42 The motif of Christ with a cross-halo draws attention to faith in co-inherence (περιχώρησις) in an Christological as well as a trinitarian sense. 43 To shed light on my hypothesis, I refer to John Damascene, The Son is the Father’s image, natural, undeviating, in every respect like the Father, save for being unbegotten and possessing fatherhood; for the Father is the unbegotten begetter, and the Son is begotten, not the Father. And the Holy Spirit is the image of the Son; “for no one can say that Jesus is Lord, save in the Holy Spirit.” It is therefore because of the Holy Spirit that we know Christ, the Son of God, and God, and in the Son we behold the Father; for by nature the word (logos) is a messenger of mind (or meaning), and   Or. 31, 32 (SC, 250, p. 338-341).   Or.  28, 17, 1-11 (SC, 250, p. 134-137): ‘Θεόν,  ὅ  τί  ποτε  μέν  ἐστι τὴν φύσιν καὶ τὴν οὐσίαν, οὔτε τις εὗρεν ἀνθρώπων πώποτε, οὔτε μὴ εὕρῃ· [...] Καὶ τοῦτο εἶναί μοι δοκεῖ τὸ πάνυ φιλοσοφούμενον, ἐπιγνώσεσθαί ποτε ἡμᾶς, ὅσον ἐγνώσμεθα. Τὸ δὲ νῦν εἶναι βραχεῖά τις ἀπορροὴ πᾶν τὸ εἰς ἡμᾶς φθάνον, καὶ οἷον μεγάλου φωτὸς μικρὸν ἀπαύγασμα’. 42 On παλμός, cfr. Eus., D.e. 5 proem. (PG, 22, 336D). 43 On Byzantine aesthetics and the notions ὁμοούσιος and περιχώρησις, see A. Karahan, ‘The Issue of περιχώρησις’, p. 27-34. 40 41

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the spirit discloses the word. The Spirit is therefore a like and undeviating image of the Son, being different only in proceeding; for the Son is begotten, but does not proceed. 44

In Byzantine churches, the meta-image brings divine context to the religious stage set intended for human salvation. Human and divine, death and eternal life, salvation and resurrection acquire reciprocal significance. Gregory of Nyssa points out that the triumph of the cross has two names, 45 whereas his elder brother Basil of Caesarea emphasizes, ‘Baptism is an image of the cross, of death, burial, and resurrection from the dead’. 46 Moreover the third Cappadocian father Gregory Nazianzen underlines, He (the Son, who is the Logos) lays down his life, but he has the power to take it up again [...] He dies, but he gives life, and by death destroys death. He is buried, but he rises again. 47

Two eleventh-century motifs of the Baptism, one in mural technique in a rock-cut chapel in Cappadocia, the other in mosaic in the Katholikon, Hosios Loukas, verify the complex import of the cross. On the left hand side of Christ, adorned with a radiant cross-halo, standing in the river Jordan, appears the life-giving cross on a diminutive column (see Fig. 5). The two crosses are active reminders of faith in baptism abrogating death, but also in grace and passion as prerequisite for salvation. The principle of life and death uncovers in the name of the cross, thus, foreboding the sacred state of every believer. Christ’s death on the cross constitutes the judgment of judgment; the fallen cosmos reconciles with God’s cosmos, κόσμος in Greek denoting both order and universe. Divine grace as well as

  Imag. 3, 18 – ed. B. Kotter, p. 126-127 [Eng. trans. Louth, Treatises, p. 96-97]. 45 Cfr. Gr. Nyss., Apoll. 21 (GNO, III-1, 161, 13). 46  Bapt. 1 – ed. R. J. Deferrari, p. 369 [Eng. trans. M. M. Wagner]. 47  Or.  29, 20, 32-37 (SC, 250, p. 222-223): ‘Παραδίδωσι τὴν ψυχήν, ἀλλ’ ἐξουσίαν ἔχει πάλιν λαβεῖν αὐτήν [...] ‘Αποθνῄσκει, « ζωοποιεῖ » δέ, καὶ καταλύει τῷ θανάτῳ τὸν θανάτον’. 44

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actions is triune divine, yet, without human incarnation and passion there would be no restoration. Discussing Trinitarian theology, Basil of Caesarea emphasizes one mutual triune hierarchy; yet, the union of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is without confusion. 48 In an apophatic sense, this is what the meta-image of the iridescent cross-halo signifies. An even more refined and, at the same time, profound meta-image of faith in the triune Christian God of one-substance is the motif of the crux gemmata. With four radiant crossarms, it verifies that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit is one God (see Fig. 6). The crux gemmata verifies, apophatically, faith in active reciprocity between the Word incarnated in the second person of the Trinity and the Trinity. It emphasizes enigmatically that Jesus Christ’s passion and cross death grant eternal life, since the Godhead and Jesus Christ is one undivided God of divine light ‘independent of time’ (ἀχρόνως). 49

The Red Line Encircling Halos In Byzantine holy images, the prime attribute of holiness is a halo, generally encircled by a thin red line. I suggest that this red colored circle constitutes a meta-image of faith in the Word incarnated in the second person of the Trinity. The red colored circle verifies redemption, eternal life, and renewed access to Heaven through faith in Jesus Christ’s body and blood, but also the Virgin’s body and blood, the Theotokos as mediatrix through her human participation in the economy of salvation. The red colored circle also verifies commitment to imitate Jesus Christ. Filled with divine knowledge, the Holy Spirit’s tongue of fire rests on every holy person. 50 A radiant white colored circle, generally appearing outside the red circle verifies this further. Compare the celebration of the Eucharist in the Divine Liturgy, where through the power of the Holy Spirit bread and wine becomes Christ’s body and blood.   Spir. 5, 7-10. Cfr. I Cor. 8, 6.  Cfr. Gr. Naz., Or. 31, 14 (SC, 250, p. 304), Gr. Nyss., tres dii (PG, 45, 129A), and Ioh. 8, 12. 50  Cfr. Act. 2, 3-4. 48 49

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In his second homily on the Dormition of the Theotokos, John Damascene refers to the Virgin as the true body and blood, the true clothing of Jesus Christ. 51 Theotokos substantiates complete purity (παναγνεία). 52 The Orthodox Akathistos Hymn hails her as ‘living temple’, ‘gate of salvation’, ‘key to the gates of Paradise’ – through her Paradise is opened. 53 Dressed in virginal human blood, God becomes fathomable in Jesus Christ. In a Byzantine religious sense, blood (αῖμα) generally relates to the biblical ‘life of the living body’. 54 Basil of Caesarea writes, ‘the life of every creature is its blood’. 55 While Gregory Nazianzen, to justify faith in sanctification, redemption, and renewed access to Heaven, underlines, ‘a few drops of blood make the universe whole again’. Thus, Vladimir Lossky exclaims, the cross death is swallowed up by life as in Christ death enters into divinity and thus exhausts itself. 56 To conclude the line of ideas, I refer to Athanasius of Alexandria, who asserts, ‘For He (God) was made man that we might be made God’. 57 In the context of saints, the glimmering halo with two circles colored in red and white authenticates faith in God’s incarnation, experience of theosis, and participation in the everlasting life (ζωή) of the Trinity. The red colored circle signifies primarily the shedding of blood that grants every believer eternal life, whereas the white colored circle is an apophatic attribute of divine uncircumscription and unfathomableness. Thus, the motif denotes the prerequisite of faith in both human and divine, but also saints, who have gained eternal life through imitation of Jesus Christ, formed from the spotless blood of the Virgin Theotokos.   On blood, see A. Karahan, Byzantine Holy Images, General Index, ‘blood’.   Thdr. Stud., Nativ. BMV (PG, 96, 693B). 53  Akathist Hymn 23, 2; 19, 7; 7, 9; 15, 15. Cfr. Id., 3, 11, ‘Hail, bridge leading those from earth to heaven’ [Eng.trans. L. M.  Peltomaa, The Image of the Virgin Mary in the Akathistos hymn, Leiden, 2001, p. 19, 17, 9, 13, 5]. 54  Leu. 17, 11. 55   Bas., Hex. 8, 2 (SC, 26bis, 168A): ‘παντὸς ζῴου ἡ ψυχὴ τὸ αἷμα αὐτοῦ ἐστιν’. 56  V. Lossky, Orthodox Theology. An Introduction, Crestwood, New York, 1989, p. 114, 116. 57  Inc.  54, 1, 13-17 (SC, 199, p. 458-459): ‘Αὐτος γὰρ ἐνηνθρώπησεν, ἵνα ἡμεῖς θεοποιηθῶμεν· καὶ αὐτὸς ἐφανέρωσεν ἑαυτὸν διὰ σώματος, ἵνα ἡμεῖς τοῦ ἀοράτου Πατρός ἔννοιαν λάβωμεν· καὶ αὐτὸς ὑπέμεινε τὴν παρ’ ἀνθρώπων ὕβριν, ἵνα ἡμεῖς ἀφθαρσίαν κληρονομήσωμεν’. 51 52

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Final remarks To face up to patristicism is to acknowledge that divine incomprehensibility is as real and present as human comprehensibility; Byzantine aesthetics refrains from conventional temporal representation. Apophatic meta-images form a divine stage set, a kind of reality outside time beyond decay. Rich in divine momentum, meta-images verify didactically that God is beyond categorization. The relish is not for realism or perfected corporeality, as corruption signifies the created exposed to intervals of time. 58 In Byzantium, perfected temporal beauty has no rationale, because to imitate corruption equals death, not life. 59 The motif of Jesus Christ with the radiant three-armed cross-halo constructs a sacred fabric that verifies the economy of salvation as well as Trinitarian theology. It supports the Nicene creed, ‘We believe in one God [...] Seen and unseen [...] God from God, light from light, true God from true God, one Being with the Father, incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary [...]’. The halo’s circular form and its encircling red line emphasize further Jesus Christ’s double capacity of perfect human being and perfect God. Compare Gregory Nazianzen, who underlines how God’s incarnation restores all destroyed by the fall, the drops of blood shed by the Lord remodels the whole world (κόσμον ὅλον ἀναπλάτουσαι) 60 – Christ is the new Adam. 61 The Son, Gregory affirms, mediates between humankind and God thanks to his double nature, and not, as Anne Richard has underlined, thanks to a tertium quid intermediary that is neither God nor human. 62 Compare also John Damascene, who drawing on Dionysios the Areopagite, points to the use in Scripture of,

58  On ‘intervals of time’ (χρονικοῖς διαστήμασι), see Bas., Spir. 59 (SC, 17, p. 223). On the Trinity ‘outside time’, see Gr. Naz., Or. 29, 2-3 (SC, 250, p. 178-181). 59  Cfr. A. Karahan, ‘Beauty in the Eyes of God. Byzantine Aesthetics and Basil of Caesarea’, Byzantion. Revue Internationale des Études Byzantines, 82 (2012), p. 165-212. 60  Gr. Naz., Or. 45, 29 (PG, 36, 664A). 61 Cfr. Gr. Naz., Or. 30, 1 (SC, 250, p. 226). 62  A. Richard, Cosmologie et théologie chez Grégoire de Nazianze, Paris, 2003, p. 466.

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Shapes and forms and figures to convey a faint conception of God and the angels by depicting in bodily form what is invisible and bodiless, because we cannot behold the bodiless without using shapes that bear some analogy to us. 63

The Word provides us with analogies, the Damascene stresses, to help us ascend to that which is formless and incomprehensible, yet, If the divine Scripture bestows on God figures that seem to be bodily, as shapes are seen, yet they are in a way incorporeal; for they were seen, not with bodily, but with intellectual eyes [...] It is from words that we understand shapes. 64

In a similar sense, meta-images such as circular or tripartite forms, but also light phenomena are in a way intangible, because their significance is unfathomable if detached from Byzantine faith. Meta-images mold written theology into painted theology. Neither meta-images nor words can exhaust what God is, since God’s divinity is beyond comprehension and uncircumscribed, whereas human comprehension is on par with circumscription. Yet, if contemplated with intellectual eyes, in order to exempt from complete ignorance, meta-images can guide to approximate and partial knowledge of God. In support of my interpretation, I conclude with a quote from John Damascene, The nature of neither God nor angel nor soul nor demon can be seen, but by a certain transformation these beings are beheld, since the divine providence bestows figures and shapes upon beings that are incorporeal and without figure or any bodily shape so that we might be guided to an approximate and partial knowledge of them, lest we remain in complete ignorance of God and the incorporeal creatures. 65 63   Imag.  3, 21 – ed. B. Kotter, p. 128: ‘σχήματα καὶ μορφὰς καὶ τύπους ἀναπλαττούσης τῶν ἀοράτων καὶ ἀσωμάτων σωματικῶς τυπουμένων πρός ἀμυδρὰν κατανόησιν θεοῦ τε καὶ ἀγγέλων διὰ τὸ μὴ δύνασθαι ἡμᾶς τὰ ἀσώματα ἄνευ σχημάτων ἀναλογούντων ἡμῖν θεωρεῖν’ [Eng. trans. Louth, Treatises, p. 98]. Cfr. Dion. Ar., C.h. 1, 1, 3 – ed. G. Heil, p. 8. 64  Imag. 3, 24, 15-24 [Eng. trans. Louth, Treatises, p. 100]. 65  Imag. 3, 25, 1-9 – ed. B. Kotter, p. 131: ‘ὅτι οὔτε θεοῦ οὔτε ἀγγέλου οὔτε ψυχῆς οὔτε δαίμονος δυνατὸν θεαθῆναι φύσιν, ἀλλ’ ἐν μετασχηματισμῷ τινι θεωροῦνται ταῦτα τῆς θείας προνοίας τύπους καὶ σχήματα περιτιθείσης τοῖς ἀσωμάτοις καὶ ἀτυπώτοις καὶ μὴ ἔχουσι σχηματισμὸν σωματικῶς πρὸς τὸ χειραγωγηθῆναι ἡμᾶς καὶ πρὸς παχυμερῆ καὶ μερικὴν αὐτῶν γνῶσιν, ἵνα μὴ ἐν παντελεῖ | ἀγνοίᾳ ὦμεν θεοῦ καὶ τῶν ἀσωμάτων κτισμάτων’ [Eng. trans. Louth, Treatises, p. 101].

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Bibliography 1. Primary Sources Athanasius Alexandrinus, De incarnatione – ed. C. Kannengiesser (SC, 199), Paris, 1973. Basilius Caesariensis Cappadociae, ‘De baptismo’ – Eng. trans. M. M. Wagner, in Saint Basil. Ascetical works (The Fathers of the Church, 9) – ed. R. J. Deferrari, Washington, DC., 1962, p. 339430. Basilius Caesariensis Cappadociae, Contra Eunomium – ed. B. Sesboüé, G. M. de Durand, L. Doutreleau (SC, 305), Paris, 1983. Basilius Caesariensis Cappadociae, Epistulae, 38 and 52 – ed. R. J. Deferrari (Epistulae, I), London, 1950, p. 196-226 and p. 326-336. Basilius Caesariensis Cappadociae, Homilia, 24 – ed. J. P. Migne (PG, 31), Paris, 1857. Basilius Caesariensis Cappadociae, Homiliae in hexaemeron – ed. S. Giet (SC, 26bis), Paris, 1968. Basilius Caesariensis Cappadociae, Liber de Spiritu sancto – ed. B. Pruche (SC, 17), Paris, 1947. Dionysius Areopagita, De caelesti hierarchia – ed. G. Heil (Corpus Dionysiacum, II), Berlin – New York, 1991. Eusebius Caesariensis, Demonstratio evangelica – ed. J. P. Migne (PG, 22), Paris, 1857. Gregorius Nazianzenus, Carminum libri duo – ed. J. P. Migne (PG, 37), Paris, 1862. Gregorius Nazianzenus, Epistula, 101 – ed. P. Gallay (SC, 208), Paris, 1998. Gregorius Nazianzenus, Oratio, 21 – ed. J. Mossay (SC, 270), Paris, 1980. Gregorius Nazianzenus, Orationes, 27-31 – ed. P. Gallay (SC, 250), Paris, 2006. Gregorius Nazianzenus, Oratio, 37 – ed. P. Gallay, C. Moreschini (SC, 318), Paris, 1985. Gregorius Nazianzenus, Oratio, 38 – ed. C. Moreschini, P. Gallay (SC, 358), Paris, 1990. Gregorius Nazianzenus, Oratio, 45 – ed. J. P. Migne (PG, 36), Paris, 1858. Gregorius Nyssenus, Adversus Apollinarem, 21 – ed. F. Müller (Gregorii Nysseni Opera, III-1), Leiden, 1958, p. 131-233.

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Gregorius Nyssenus, De virginitate – ed. M. Aubineau (SC, 119), Paris (cop.) 2011. Gregorius Nyssenus, De vita Moisis – ed. J. Daniélou (SC, 1bis), Paris, (cop.) 2007. Joannes Damascenus, Contra imaginum calumniators orations tres – ed. B. Kotter, Berlin, New York, 1975 [Eng. trans. A.  Louth, St John of Damascus. Three Treatises on the Divine Images, Crestwood, New York, 2003]. Joannes Damascenus, De fide orthodoxa libri quattuor – ed. B. Kotter, Berlin, New York, 1973. Maximus Confessor, Capitum quinque centuriae – ed. J. P. Migne (PG, 90), Paris, 1860. Maximus Confessor, Opuscula theologica et polemica – ed. J. P. Migne (PG, 91), Paris, 1865. Maximus Confessor, ‘Quaestiones ad Thalassium’, 22 in Questiones, I-LV (CCSG, 7) – ed. C. Laga, C. Steel, Turnhout, 1980, p. 139145. Theodorus Studita, Homilia in nativitatem BMV – ed. J. P. Migne (PG, 96), Paris, 1961.

2. Secondary Literature C. A.  Beeley, Gregory of Nazianzus on the Trinity and the Knowledge of God, Oxford, 2008. L. D.  Davis, The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325-787). Their History and Theology, Collegeville, Minnesota, 1990. G. Hallonsten, ‘Östkyrkan förr och nu. Studier i den ortodoxa traditionen’, Religio, 34 (1991), p. 83-108. A. Karahan, ‘The impact of Cappadocian Theology on Byzantine Aesthetics. Gregory Nazianzen on the Unity and Singularity of Christ’, in The Ecumenical Legacy of the Cappadocians – ed. N. Dumitrascu, London (forthcoming). A. Karahan, ‘Byzantine Iconoclasm: Ideology and Quest for Power’, in Iconoclasm from Antiquity to Modernity – ed. K. Kolrud, M. Prusac, Surrey, England, 2014, p. 75-94. A. Karahan, ‘The Image of God in Byzantine Cappadocia and the Issue of Supreme Transcendence’, Studia Patristica, 59 (2013), p. 97-111.

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A. Karahan, ‘Beauty in the Eyes of God. Byzantine Aesthetics and Basil of Caesarea’, Byzantion. Revue Internationale des Études Byzantines, 82 (2012), p. 165-212. A. Karahan, Byzantine Holy Images – Transcendence and Immanence. The Theological Background of the Iconography and Aesthetics of the Chora Church, Leuven, Paris, Walpole, MA, 2010. A. Karahan, ‘The Issue of περιχώρησις in Byzantine Holy Images’, Studia Patristica, 44-49 (2010), p. 27-34. V. Lossky, Orthodox Theology. An Introduction, Crestwood, New York, 1989. A. Louth, St John Damascene. Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology, Oxford, 2002. M. Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa, Ancient and (Post)modern, Oxford, 2007. L. M. Peltomaa, The Image of the Virgin Mary in the Akathistos Hymn, Leiden, 2001. J. Quasten, Patrology, 4 vols., Westminster, MD, 1994, III. A. Richard, Cosmologie et théologie chez Grégoire de Nazianze, Paris, 2003. P. Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, 1994. L. Thunberg, Man and the Cosmos. The Vision of St Maximus the Confessor, Crestwood, New York, 1985.

Abstract Based on how the Cappadocian fathers discuss Christology and Trinitarian theology, and John Damascene argues in favor of holy images, this article explores patristicism and the significance of Byzantine meta-images to verify didactically not only God’s humanity, but also God’s divinity. The author suggests that the theoretical and methodological code of Byzantine aesthetics is Orthodox Christian faith in God as triune and one, as well as neither exclusively divinely incomprehensible, nor entirely humanly comprehensible. A Byzantine holy image verifies the image of God (εἰκὼν τοῦ θεοῦ), but also God’s triune One-essence. Since, either in writing or in painting, to disregard either God’s humanity or divinity would deviate from established Orthodox faith. The specifics of Byzantine aesthetics, its meta-images, convey faith in God as both human and divine. In this way, a Byzantine holy image promotes verifications ‘of right belief’ (ὀρθόδοξος). What we behold is the prerequisite of lex orandi lex est credendi, worship must use the same terms as the profession of faith.

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Fig. 1. The Church of Theotokos Pammakaristos, early fourteenth century, Istanbul. Photo: A. Karahan

Fig. 2. The Crucifixion. Mural painting, eleventh century. Karanlık kilise, Göreme, Cappadocia. Photo: A. Karahan

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Fig. 3. Dome of the parekklesion, the Chora Church, Istanbul. Mural painting, 1315-1321. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, GNU Free Documention Licence

Fig. 4. Jesus Christ Pantokrator. Mural painting, eleventh century. Karanlık kilise, Göreme, Cappadocia. Photo: A. Karahan

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Fig. 5. The Baptism. Mural painting, eleventh century. Elmalı kilise, Göreme, Cappadocia. Photo: A. Karahan

Fig. 6. Crux Gemmata. Mural painting, mid tenth century, Tokalı kilise, Göreme, Cappadocia. Photo: A. Karahan

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BERNARD J. MULHOLLAND Queen’s University, Belfast

IDENTIFICATION OF EARLY BYZANTINE CONSTANTINOPOLITAN, SYRIAN AND ROMAN CHURCH PLANS IN THE LEVANT AND SOME POSSIBLE CONSEQUENCES 1. Introduction Twenty years ago Yoram Tsafrir observed that: The development of the Christian liturgy also significantly influenced the function and design of parts of the church, although we are as yet unable to distinguish between buildings belonging to different traditions and sects, for example between the Arian, Nestorian, or Monophysite churches on one hand, and those of the Orthodox on the other. 1

There are a number of factors that mark these observations out as pivotal to current archaeological research. Firstly, although written twenty years ago, they define limitations that still persist today. Secondly, they suggest that the liturgy of different traditions and sects might somehow influence or shape the structures that host them. 2 That there might even be a discernible relationship between ‘buildings’ and the ‘different traditions and sects’ to which they belong. Implicit in this narrative is the aspiration that archaeologists might one day be able to differentiate between churches belonging to Arian, Nestorian, Monophysite, Orthodox, and other traditions. 3 1   Y. Tsafrir, ‘The development of ecclesiastical architecture in Palestine’, in Ancient churches revealed – ed. Y. Tsafrir, Jerusalem, 1993, p. 6. 2  The term ‘liturgy’ tends to define an act of public worship. As an archaeologist, as well as a historian, the term ‘rite’ or ‘ritual’ is preferred instead because this can also include acts of worship that are not held in public. 3  Although Patrich observes that identifying defining criteria for each tradi-

10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107536

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Lastly, some initial steps have already been taken towards differentiating between different types of church plan by Joseph Patrich. 4 This analytical approach finds some resonance among leading scholars such as William Adams, Stephen Hill, Miljenko Jurkovic´, and particularly Robert Ousterhout. 5 In this vein Ousterhout argues that we should be able to ‘read a building, just as we read a text, as a historical document, for it can tell us much about the society that produced it’. 6

2. Thomas F. Mathews These observations also resonate strongly with research conducted by Thomas Mathews. In an early paper Mathews observed that a key characteristic of typical three-aisled church plans excavated in Rome is that the church sanctuary extended across both side aisles. 7 His illustration of this sanctuary layout exhibits a distinctive T-shaped sanctuary configuration in which the sanctuary also extends forward into the nave. 8 Mathews associated this distinctive church plan with the early Roman liturgy

tion or sect is a particularly challenging task. See J. Patrich, ‘Early Christian Churches in the Holy Land’, in Christians and Christianity in the Holy Land: From the Origins to the Latin Kingdoms – ed. G. G. Stroumsa, O. Limor (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 5), Turnhout, 2006, p. 355. 4  For a discussion of Type I and II church plans see J. Patrich, ‘The Transfer of Gifts in the Early Christian Churches of Palestine: archaeological and literary evidence for the evolution of the “Great Entrance” ’, in Mélanges offerts à Pierre Maraval – ed. B. Caseau, J.-C. Cheynet, V. Déroch (Centre de recherche d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, 23), Paris, 2006, p. 341-393. 5  W. Y.  Adams, Meinarti IV and V. The church and cemetery. The history of Meinarti: an interpretive overview (Sudan Archaeological Research Society, 11), Oxford, 2003, p. 1. Also S. Hill, The Early Byzantine churches of Cilicia and Isauria (Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Monographs, 1), Aldershot, 1996. See M. Jurkovic´, ‘Foreword’, in Retrieving the record: A century of archaeology at Porecˇ (1847-1947) – ed. M. Jurkovic´ (Studies in Early Christian and Medieval Art History and Archaeology, 1), Zagreb, 2001, p. 7-8. 6  R. Ousterhout, ‘Contextualizing the later churches of Constantinople: suggested methodologies and a few examples’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 54 (2000), p. 250.  7  T. F.  Mathews, ‘An early Roman chancel arrangement and its liturgical functions,’ Rivista di Archeologia Cristiana, 38 (1962), p. 73-95. 8   Mathews, ‘An early Roman chancel arrangement and its liturgical functions’, p. 94. 

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Ordo Romanus  I, which is thought to be associated with pope Sergius (ce 687-701). 9 If Mathews is correct in his analysis then it seems likely that churches which share these defining characteristics would also share the same rite. 10 In his later monograph on architecture and liturgy in Constantinople, Mathews described key defining features in early church plans in this city. 11 First, a key defining characteristic of early churches in this city is a major entrance located to either side of the apse, and this differentiates it from other centres of Christianity. 12 Secondly, these churches have multiple entrances. He also observed that a Π-shaped chancel barrier generally encloses the sanctuary, although the chancel runs straight across the aisles at Saray and Beyazit, and possibly also at Hag. Sergios and Bacchos as well. 13 Of particular importance here is that Mathews analysed this church plan in relation to the Byzantine rite, and drew an association between the two. In doing so Mathews finds some support for this analysis from Robert Taft in his major work on the Byzantine rite. 14 If analysis by Mathews

9  Romano thinks that Ordo Romanus I was produced under pope Sergius and later modified during the mid-eighth century. See J. F. Romano, Ritual and society in Early Medieval Rome, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Cambridge, MA, 2007, p. iii. 10  It is important to acknowledge that this analysis was confined to five early church excavations within the city of Rome at San Clemente, San Marco, and San Pietro in Vincoli, San Stefano in Via Latina, and also Sta. Maria Antiqua. See Mathews, ‘An early Roman chancel arrangement and its liturgical functions’, p. 73-95. 11  At twelve sites located at the old Hagia Sophia, Hag. Io ˉanneˉs Studios, Hag. Theotokos in Chalkoprateia, the Topkapıˉ Sarayıˉ Basilica, Hag. Sergios and Bacchos, Hag. Petros and Paulos, Hag. Polyeuktos, Hag. Ioˉanneˉs Prodromos in Hebdomon, Hag. Eupheˉmia, Beyazit Basilica A, Hag. Eireˉneˉ, and Hag. Sophia. See T. F.  Mathews, The early churches of Constantinople: architecture and liturgy, University Park, London, 1971. 12  Mathews, The early churches of Constantinople: architecture and liturgy, p. 105. 13  Mathews, The early churches of Constantinople: architecture and liturgy, p. 98, and 109-110.  14   Taft states that the ‘chancel or sanctuary area was generally Π-shaped, and had entrances at the front and on each side. On both sides of the single apse, where one would expect side-apses serving as pastophoria, are two entrances to the outside – and these are not just “back doors” or “service entrances”. They are among the principal entrances of the church’. See R. F. Taft, The Great Entrance: a history of the transfer of gifts and other pre-anaphoral rites of the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 200), Roma, 2004, p. 182. 

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and Taft is correct, then it would seem likely that churches which share these defining characteristics would also share the same rite. In the same monograph Mathews observed that in northern Syria there is a church plan with an inscribed apse that has a room located to either side of it. 15 In this church plan a Π-shaped chancel barrier also encloses the sanctuary or, in some cases, there are ‘transverse barriers across the nave’ where the altar is located in the apse. 16 This analysis found favour with both Richard Krautheimer and Taft. 17 Mathews also thought this church plan could be reconciled with the Syrian rite. 18 If analysis by Mathews, Krautheimer and Taft is correct then it seems likely that churches which share these defining characteristics would also share the same rite. From this brief introduction it is already apparent that there has been some previous research that analysed three different distinctive church plans found in Rome, Constantinople and north Syria in relation to Ordo Romanus I, the Byzantine and 15  Mathews, The early churches of Constantinople: architecture and liturgy, p. 120, 155-176, and also Figure 51. Note that Figure 51 is a reproduction of an earlier illustration by Lassus. See J. Lassus, Sanctuaires Chrétiens de Syrie. Essai sur la genèse, la forme et l’usage liturgique des édifices du culte chrétien, en Syrie, du iiie siècle à la conquête musulmane (Institut Français D’Archéologie De Beyrouth, Bibliothèque Archéologique Et Historique, 42), Paris, 1947, p. 63, and Figure 32. 16 In these churches the ‘triple sanctuary is the usual pattern, whether the side chambers and central apse are flush with a flat terminating east wall or the three chambers are articulated on the outside of the church’. See Mathews, The early churches of Constantinople: architecture and liturgy, p. 106, 157, and Figure 51. This distinct church plan was previously observed by the Marquis de Vogüé, Crosby Butler, Jean Lassus, and also by Georges Tchalenko. See C.-J.-Melchior de Vogüé, Syrie centrale. Architecture civile et religieuse du ier au viie siècle, Paris, 1865; H. C.  Butler, Architecture and other arts. Part II of the publications of an American archaeological expedition to Syria in 1899-1900 under the patronage of V. Everit Macy, Clarence M. Hyde, B. Talbot B. Hyde, and I.N. Phelps Stokes, New York, 1903; W. M. Ramsay, G. L. Bell, The thousand and one churches, London, 1909; J. Lassus, Inventaire archéologique de la région au nord-est de Hama (Institut Français de Damas), Damascus, 1935; J. Lassus Sanctuaires chrétiens de Syrie: essai sur le genèse, Paris, 1947; G. Tchalenko, Villages antiques de la Syrie du Nord, le massif du Bélus à l’époque romaine, Paris, 1953-1958. 17  R. Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine architecture – revised by R. Krautheimer, S. C´urcˇic´, New Haven, London, 1986, p. 307. Also Taft, The Great Entrance, p. 182. 18  See for example Mathews, The early churches of Constantinople: architecture and liturgy, p. 157, 163, 165-167, and 169-170.

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the Syrian rite respectively. Mathews’s research complements observations made by Tsafrir in regard to the possible relationship between buildings and the different traditions and sects to which they belong. 19 Furthermore, research towards a recently completed Ph.D. thesis has uncovered evidence that each of these three distinctive church plans is found in the area of the south Levant, and further afield as well. 20

3. Current research The focus of this research was repeated patterns of deposition of domestic artefacts in Early Byzantine churches that might reflect repeated patterns of behaviour associated with institutional activity which occurs at more than one church site. To this end a catalogue was originally compiled of forty-seven excavated churches mainly from the area of the south Levant. This research required like-for-like analysis between sites that shared the same basic plan so that patterns in the deposition of artefacts might be identified and cross-referenced, and so these sites were restricted to basilical plans. 21 There are a variety of basilical church plans in the south Levant. However J. W. Crowfoot had observed there to be ‘three commoner types – (a) the inscribed apse plan, (b) the external apse plan, (c) the triapsidal plan’. 22

19  Mathews notes: ‘Assuming that the chancel “fits” the liturgy, the rationale for this disposition of church space is to be sought in the external shape of the ritual of the Mass during this period. The task, then, is to reconstruct the external, visible, spatial requirements of the early liturgy, that is, the rubrics of the Mass. Curiously enough, while enormous amounts of research have been devoted to establishing the text of the early Mass, attempts to picture the external performance of the Mass have been only incidental and unsure’. See Mathews, ‘An early Roman chancel arrangement and its liturgical functions’, p. 74-75. 20  B. J. Mulholland, ‘Paraliturgical activities in the Early Byzantine basilical church’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Queen’s University, Belfast, 2011. 21 This method has some similarities with the interdisciplinary approach adopted by the founders of the Annales School, and reinforced through the development of Economic History. As Burguière notes: ‘To make sense, serial sources require massive data collection. But because they exist in several countries and in fairly standardized form, they more easily lend themselves to a comparative approach’. See A. Burguière, The Annales School: an intellectual history – tr. J. M. Todd, London, 2009, p. 91. 22  J. W.  Crowfoot, Early churches in Palestine, London, 1941, p. 58.

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These three distinctive church plans were still readily recognizable twenty years ago, and they are still common today. 23 For this reason they were selected to be used in this research, and further restricted to single- and three-aisled churches. 24 Initially church sites from the catalogue were each placed into one of these three groups to facilitate like-for-like analysis of artefactual evidence between church sites that shared the same ground plan, i.e. inscribed apse, external apse, or triapsidal plan. However, a problem was encountered. During the course of this research it was observed that there are two different sanctuary configurations (Fig. 1) that needed to be taken into consideration when placing church sites into groups, because these could affect the dispersal patterns of artefacts deposited inside churches. The evidence used by archaeologists to determine the location of the church sanctuary often consists of whole or fragmentary items of liturgical furniture and supporting evidence from the position of post holes in the pavement for altar table legs, and also post holes for chancel posts that supported the chancel screen and which demarcate the area of the sanctuary.

23 See Tsafrir, ‘The development of ecclesiastical architecture in Palestine’, p. 11-12. 24 The definition of a ‘basilica’ is problematic in that it is described by purists as a ‘building divided into a nave flanked by two aisles, the former being wider and taller than the latter, with an apse at the end of the nave’. J. S.  Curl, Classical architecture. An introduction to its vocabulary and essentials, with a select glossary of terms, London, 2001, p. 179. See also P. Baker, ‘Early Christian and Byzantine c. 313-1453’, in The grammar of architecture – ed. E. Cole, Boston, New York, London, 2002, p. 149. However the distinguished Late Roman archaeologist A. G. Poulter refers to the single-aisled church at Nicopolis ad Istrum as the ‘Small Basilica’. See A. G.  Poulter, Nicopolis ad Istrum: a Roman, Late Roman, and Early Byzantine city. Excavations 1985-1992 (Journal of Roman Studies Monograph, 8), London, 1995. Similarly, in the preface to his monograph the Byzantine archaeologist Stephen Hill states that in ‘reality this is a study of basilicas since the region is remarkable for the fact that its early churches are all basilicas’. His catalogue of sites includes illustrations of the single-aisled basilicas of Church K at Corycus, Church 10 C at Gazipas¸a, Karlik, the Cuppola Church at Meryemlik, and also Yemis¸küm; these single-aisled basilical churches comprise nearly 10 per cent of Hill’s illustrated plans. See Hill, The Early Byzantine churches of Cilicia and Isauria, p. xxi, and Figure 23, 31, 40, 45, and 61.

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3.1. Roman church plan The first configuration consists of a sanctuary in three-aisled churches that extended across both side aisles to prevent the laity accessing the apsidal end of the church, and that during the sixth century often had a nave extension to form a characteristic T-shaped sanctuary. The extended T-shaped sanctuary in this church plan matches that observed by Mathews in Rome and, as it is the convention in archaeology to name a new discovery after the location where it was first observed, so this church plan has been labelled here as a Roman church plan. 25 Characteristics of this church plan can also include: 1. The sanctuary extends across both side aisles, it is delineated by a chancel barrier, and during the sixth especially it also extends forward into the nave to form a distinctive T-shaped sanctuary. 2. Triapsidal church plan is common, although they can also be monoapsidal. 26 3. Side altars often present in both monoapsidal and triapsidal configurations. 4. Evidence for relics or reliquaries located under each altar table in many sites. 27 5. Ambo is generally located north of the nave entrance to sanctuary. 6. Where it exists, the baptistery is often located off the atrium or in the north chapel. 7. Christian decorative elements on chancel screens can include four- and six-armed ‘wreathed cross’ flanked by Latin crosses. 28   Note that this ‘Roman church plan’ applies only to those sites that share the specific characteristics described here, and not necessarily to other church sites with different features, even where they are found in the city of Rome itself. 26 Further research is required to determine what significance there is between the single- and triapsidal church plans, if any. 27  It is possible that this activity is driven by the 14th canon of the Council of Carthage (ce 401) in which the placing of relics in caskets beneath altars is made compulsory in the West for churches associated with the Roman See, which is a practice that is not made compulsory for churches in the East until the 7th Ecumenical Council held at Nicaea in ce 787. See V. Tzaferis, The excavations of Kursi – Gergesa (‘Atiqot, 16), Jerusalem, 1983, p. 9-10, and note 7. 28  Fitzgerald wrote: ‘Between these stones and the apse, we found a broken slab of marble 1.23 metres wide (and probably at least a metre high when complete) with a cross surrounded by a wreath carved on one side (Plate III, Figure 5). This suggested a clue to the meaning of the word στεφανοσταυρίον 25

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8. Chapel attached or adjacent to the church, and often located to the north.

Sixteen sites in the catalogue of forty-seven excavated churches shared this plan. 29 The second configuration is a Π-shaped sanctuary restricted by the chancel screen to an area in front of the apse. This Π-shaped sanctuary is overwhelmingly found in churches with two distinct plans in the catalogue. 3.2. Constantinopolitan church plan The first church plan with a Π-shaped sanctuary has a protruding apse with a main entrance located to either side of it, and the restricted area of the sanctuary allows ingress and egress through these entrances. This church plan shares key features observed by Mathews to be characteristic of churches in Constantinople and, again, as it is the custom in archaeology to name a new discovery after the location where it was first observed, so they have been labeled here as a Constantinopolitan church plan. 30 Characteristics of this church plan can also include: 1. Π-shaped sanctuary delineated by a chancel barrier. 2. Church plan with an external apse. 3. A key defining feature is a major entrance located either side of the apse. 4. Multiple entrances on all sides. (wreathed cross) which is found in both the inscriptions in the chapel floor’. The wreathed cross is on a marble chancel screen fragment. See G. M. Fitzgerald, A sixth century monastery at Beth-Shan (Scythopolis) (Publications of the Palestine section of the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 4), Philadelphia, 1939, p. 3-4, and 14-16, and also Figure 5. For the text see R. Ovadiah, A. Ovadiah, Hellenistic, Roman and Early Byzantine mosaic pavements in Israel (Bibliotheca Archaeologica, 6), Roma, 1987, p. 26-30. 29  As well as one Italian site included from the Middle Byzantine period. 30  Not all of the early churches in Constantinople share this plan. For example, Mathews observed that the church of St. Polyeuktos at Saraçhane ‘seems to constitute the only significant exception, in that its lofty platform probably made it less accessible from the sides and east’; i.e. it was raised on a platform and had only one staircase leading up to it from the west. See Mathews, The early churches of Constantinople, p. 105.

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5. Ambo generally located south of the nave entrance to the sanctuary. 6. Chapel attached or adjacent to the church, and often located to the north.

Four of the forty-seven excavated church sites share these characteristics. 3.3. Syrian church plan The second church plan with a Π-shaped sanctuary has an inscribed apse with a room located to either side of it and the restricted area of the sanctuary allowed the laity access to both of these rooms. 31 This church plan shares characteristic features observed by Mathews and others to be common in Early Byzantine churches found in Syria and, as previously noted, it is the custom in archaeology to name a new discovery after the location where it was first observed, so here they have been labelled as a Syrian church plan. 32 Characteristics of this church plan can also include: Π-shaped sanctuary delineated by a chancel barrier. Inscribed monoapsidal church plan. A room to either side of the apse. Entrance usually from the west. Ambo predominantly located south of the nave entrance to sanctuary. 6. Where present the baptistery is located in the room south of the apse or adjacent to the south aisle. 7. Chapel usually attached to and accessed from the south aisle.

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

31  Although with the notable exception of the Cathedral Church at Gerasa where the sanctuary is later extended across each side aisle. See C. H. Kraeling, Gerasa: city of the Decapolis. An account embodying the record of a joint excavation conducted by Yale University and the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (19281930), and Yale University and the American Schools of Oriental Research (19301931, 1933-1934), New Haven, 1938, Plate XXXI. 32  For clarification we can use a direct comparison with contemporary pottery. African Red Slip Ware (ARSW) refers only to a specific type of red slip ware. Not all red slip ware found in Africa is ARSW. Nor is ARSW only found in Africa, but it occurs all around the Mediterranean basin. Similarly the term ‘Syrian church plan’ refers only to those churches that share the same characteristics outlined here, and not to those churches in the modern state of Syria that have different church plans and layouts.

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Fifteen three-aisled church sites share these characteristics, and two single-aisled churches were later added to this group because they also shared some of these characteristics. It should be noted here that within the archaeological record there is also a sixth-century phenomenon wherein some sites with a Syrian church plan, and also some with an external apse, were converted to a Roman church plan during the early or mid-sixth century. 33 Research by Avraham Negev, Doron Chen and also Shlomo Margalit uncovered many examples, particularly in the area of the Negev. 34 However, there are other examples in the Byzantine territory of Palestine, Novae (Bulgaria), Porecˇ (Croatia) and possibly also in Constantinople (Turkey) and Rome (Italy) as well. 35 33  These church conversions appear to take place mostly during the early or mid-sixth century at a time when the pro-Chalcedonian emperor Justin I (ce 518-527) succeeded the pro-Monophysite emperor Anastasius I (ce 491518). Justin I and his successor Justinian I (ce 527-565) are thought to have persecuted the Monophysite Church and by ce 519 their bishops are deposed and banished. See C. Mango, Byzantium: the empire of the New Rome, London, 1980, p. 88-97. See also M. V.  Anastos, ‘The emperor Justin I’s role in the restoration of Chalcedonian doctrine, 518-519’, Vyzantina-Thessaloniki, 13.1 (1985), p. 126-139. Also V. L.  Menze, Justinian and the making of the Syrian Orthodox Church (Oxford Early Christian Studies), Oxford, 2008. 34  Margalit provides a summary of research by Negev and also Chen, and includes several other church sites. These include the Cathedral at Haluza, the North Church of Shivta, the South Church of Avdat, Khirbet Hesheq, the North Church at Rehovot-in-the-Negev, the West Church of Khirbet Eirav, the Citadel Basilica at Dibsi Faraj, the Civic Complex Church at Pella, and possibly the East Church at Alahan and the St. Thecla Church at Meriamlik. See S. Margalit, ‘On the transformation of the mono-apsidal churches with two pastophoria into tri-apsidal churches’, Liber Annuus – Studii Biblici Franciscanum, 39 (1989), p. 143-164. 35  At least two other sites in Palestine can be added to that list at the Petra Church and also Khirbat al-Karak. See The Petra Church – P. M. Bikai (American Center of Oriental Research Publications, 3), Amman, 2001. Also P. Delougaz, R. C. Haines, A Byzantine church at Khirbat al-Karak – ed. E. B. Hauser (The University of Chicago Oriental Institute Publications, 85), Chicago, 1960. Although regional evidence presented by Margalit suggests this is a localised phenomenon, there is further evidence that these church conversions also occurred at other locations around the Mediterranean. For Novae see S. Parnicki-Pudelko, ‘The Early Christian episcopal basilica in Novae’, Archaeologia Polona, 21-22 (1983), p. 241-270. For Porecˇ see A. Terry, F. G. Eaves, Retrieving the record: A century of archaeology at Porecˇ (1847-1947) – ed. M. Jurkovic´ (Studies in Early Christian and Medieval Art History and Archaeology, 1), Zagreb, 2001. For Constantinople see Mulholland, ‘Paraliturgical activities in the Early Byzantine basilical church’, p. 235-237. At San Clemente there is evidence for two apses, but

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Churches from the catalogue were re-arranged into groups (Fig. 1) that matched one of these three church plans, i.e. Roman, Constantinopolitan or Syrian church plans, and the remaining sites were placed into a fourth indeterminate group. Over the course of the last year the original catalogue of excavated church sites has been expanded to encompass more sites with a Roman, Constantinopolitan or Syrian church plan (Table 1-3) as a means of testing the original results. 36 These sites demonstrate a remarkable consistency for each of these three church plans and also their internal layout, which helps to mitigate any selection bias in the extended data set. 37 Of particular note here is a pronounced liturgical difference between sites with a Constantinopolitan or Syrian church plan, and those with a Roman church plan. There are five sites with a Constantinopolitan church plan and thirteen with a Syrian church plan that have evidence for a single altar table, which is usually located midway along the chord of the apse. 38 However, the archaeological evidence indicates that sites with a Roman church plan appear to differ considerably in their liturgical layout from the other two church plans. There are twelve sites with a Roman church plan that provide evidence for at least one altar table, but of interest is that at seven of these sites there is actually evidence for three altar tables, i.e. usually one located in each apse. 39 Furthermore, five of these sites also provide the addition of a later staircase obscures the area where a third apse may have been located. See H. Brandenburg, Ancient churches of Rome from the fourth to the seventh century: the dawn of Christian architecture in the West, Turnhout, 2005, p. 146. 36   Constantinopolitan (7), Syrian (31) and Roman (36) excavated church sites. 37   All of the Roman church plans appear to have a sanctuary that extends across each side aisle, except for the site at Khan el-Ahmar and possibly Emmaus and the Anchor Church. 38  At Ostrakine and an earlier phase of the Cathedral at Haluza there is also evidence for a small altar table located in the room south of the apse. 39  For the North Church see Y. Tsafrir, ‘The Northern Church’, in Excavations at Rehovot-in-the-Negev. Volume 1: The Northern Church – ed. R. Maltese (Qedem, 25), Jerusalem, 1988, p. 22-77, and also Figure 9. For Horvat Hesheq see M. Aviam, ‘Horvat Hesheq: A church in Upper Galilee’, in Ancient churches revealed – ed. Y. Tsafrir, Jerusalem, 1993, p. 54-65. Also, for Santa Cornelia see N. Christie, C. M. Daniels, ‘Santa Cornelia: the excavation of an early medieval papal estate and a medieval monastery’, in Three South Etrurian

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evidence for as many as two offertory tables attached or located to the rear of the chancel rail adjacent to the nave entrance to the sanctuary. 40 This archaeological evidence resonates strongly with analysis of  Ordo Romanus I by Mathews in which he argues that in churches with a Roman plan the faithful brought gifts up the end of each side aisle, and where John Romano argues they deposited these gifts on altaria located at the end of each aisle beside the sanctuary. 41 Furthermore, Patrich observes that in a section of the Chronicon paschale cited by Taft side tables are used to distribute the communion. 42 However, although Mathews observes that the T-shaped Roman chancel configuration survives from the mid-fourth century into the ninth century and later, it is evident that the Roman church plan discussed here pre-dates the late seventh century

churches – ed. Neil Christie (Archaeological Monograph of the British School at Rome, 4), London, 1991, p. 1-209, and also Figure 34. For the Petra Church see The Petra Church – ed. P. M. Bikai. For the cathedral at Haluza see A. Negev, ‘The cathedral at Haluza (Elusa)’, in Ancient churches revealed – ed. Y. Tsafrir, p. 286-293. For the Byzantine church at Nahariya see C. Dauphin, G. Edelstein, L’église Byzantine de Nahariya (Israël) étude archéologique – ed. C. Dauphin (Byzantina, 5), Thessalonica, 1984. For Khirbat al-Karak see Delougaz, Haines, A Byzantine church at Khirbat al-Karak. 40  There is a single offertory table attached to the rear of the chancel screen at the Petra Church. See C. Kanellopoulos, R. Schick, ‘Marble furnishings of the apses and the bema, Phase V’, in The Petra Church – ed. P. M. Bikai, p. 193-213, and Figure 20. For the two offertory tables in the Byzantine church at Nahariya see the ‘Plan: L’Eglise de Nahariya’ in Dauphin, Edelstein, L’église Byzantine de Nahariya, and also Figure 24. For the single offertory table adjacent to the south apse in the cathedral at Haluza see Negev, ‘The cathedral at Haluza (Elusa)’, p. 287 and the illustration on p. 290. For the two offertory tables in Horvat Hesheq see Aviam, ‘Horvat Hesheq: A church in Upper Galilee’, p. 55. At the East Church in Pella there is an ‘ambo’ to the rear of the chancel screen but which, due to its location, is more likely to be an offertory table. For the East Church at Pella see A. W. McNicoll et al., Pella in Jordan, 2. The  second interim report of the joint University of Sydney and College of Wooster excavations at Pella 1982-1985 (Mediterranean Archaeology Supplement, 2), Sydney, 1992. 41  Romano, Ritual and society in Early Medieval Rome, p. 286, and Figure 4.1. 42  Patrich, ‘The transfer of gifts in the Early Christian churches of Palestine: archaeological and literary evidence for the evolution of the “Great Entrance” ’, p. 347. Also R. F.  Taft, ‘Quaestiones disputatae: the skeuophylakion of Hagia Sophia and the entrances of the liturgy revisited – part II’, Oriens Christianus, 82 (1998), p. 84-85.

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Ordo Romanus I, and if there is there is a relationship between the two then these sites must reflect a proto-Ordo Romanus I. 43 There is evidence from datable inscriptions in church pavements that each of these three church plans were contemporary with each other throughout the Early Byzantine period during the fifth to the sixth or seventh century, which appears to counter any suggestion that each plan represents an evolutionary progression in the development of the liturgy of the Christian Church. Furthermore, there is historical evidence from Socrates’ history of the Christian Church that at least three different branches of Christianity used separate church buildings from each other during the fourth and fifth centuries, i.e. Novatians, Arians and Catholics (Nicene creed). For example, Socrates writes that the Arian emperor Constantius asked of the Catholic, Athanasius: But inasmuch as some of the [Arian] people of Alexandria refuse to hold communion with you, permit them to have one church in the city.” […] Athanasius immediately added, that he desired the same thing might be conceded to him […] that in every city one church should be assigned to those who might refuse to hold communion with the Arians. 44

Socrates also observes: But at that time both the Catholics and the Novatians were alike subjected to persecution [by the Arians]: for the former abominated offering their devotions in those churches in which Arians assembled, choosing rather to frequent the other three churches at Constantinople which belonged to the Novatians, and to engage in Divine service with them. 45

43   Mathews observes that the Roman T-shaped chancel configuration survives from the mid-fifth century into the ninth century at S. Marco, Sta. Maria Antiqua, and S. Stefano in Via Latina, and even later at S. Clemente. See Mathews, ‘An early Roman chancel arrangement and its liturgical functions’, p. 93-94. 44  Socrates, The ecclesiastical history of Socrates, surnamed Scholasticus, or the advocate. Comprising a history of the Church, in seven books, from the accession of Constantine, ad 305, to the 38th year of Theodosius II., including a period of 140 years – ed. H. de Valois – tr. Anon., London, 1853, p. 114. 45 Socrates also provides a list of the principal Arian and Homoousian bishops and their disposition under emperor Gratian. Socrates, The ecclesiastical history of Socrates, surnamed Scholasticus, or the advocate, p. 147 and 262-263.

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Moreover, from Socrates’ historical account it is likely that the liturgy or service differs in each of these three types of churches, which suggests that there are at least three different, distinct and readily identifiable church plans or configurations to accommodate these different services in Constantinople, and also in other major cities in the Byzantine Empire at this time. Unfortunately, insufficient architectural details are provided to enable the churches of Novatians, Arians or Catholics to be identified from each other using this evidence alone. However, Socrates does provide the names, provenance and titles of many of those associated with each of these three separate Churches which might enable them to be identified from church inscriptions. It must also be noted that each of these three church plans may be subject to revision, refinement or subdivision in light of further research and analysis. There are also other types of church plan evident in the archaeological record that will require more research.

Further analysis Where the excavation extends beyond the church walls (Fig. 2) it is apparent that in all but two sites each church is accompanied by a side chapel adjacent or attached to it. In general terms, sites with a Syrian church plan tend to favour a south chapel, while the other two church plans have a bias towards a north chapel. As noted previously, the location of the sanctuary in the church is often determined from whole or fragmentary items of liturgical furniture and supporting evidence from the position of post holes in the pavement for altar table legs and also post holes for chancel posts that supported the chancel screen. The same type of evidence for altars and chancel screens indicates that at some sites there is a second focus of liturgical activity located in these side chapels. If the rite of prothesis (rituals of preparation and oblation) requires an altar table set within a sacred space then, unless it takes place on the main altar in the church, it would seem likely that this rite took place on altars in these side chapels, especially in the absence of any other competing evidence from within the church building. 610

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Furthermore, there is evidence (Table 4) from six inscriptions that at least some of these side chapels function as a diakonikon. Four of these inscriptions are found in north chapels, and a partial inscription is taken by the archaeologist to indicate that the south chapel at Kursi also functioned as a diakonikon. 46 At Horvath Hanot the dimensions of the building suggest that it also is a side chapel rather than a church. 47 There are a further five known inscriptions that are not yet included in the catalogue of sites. Jean-Pierre Sodini has previously mentioned the inscriptions at Mount Nebo and Khirbat al-Karak, and he also refers to another at Zahrani. 48 Yet another is referred to at Ashkelon by Eliya Ribak. 49 Patrich refers to other inscriptions at Beth Yareh, and the Holy Zion Church. 50 Lastly, there is an inscription at Kourion that the excavation director takes to indicate that that the side chapel functioned as a diakonikon. 51 In this instance Ousterhout’s exhortation that we should read a building as we read a text is borne out here. 46  For the Propylaea Church inscription see J. W.  Crowfoot, ‘The Christian churches’, in Gerasa: city of the Decapolis. An account embodying the record of a joint excavation conducted by Yale University and the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (1928-1930), and Yale University and the American Schools of Oriental Research (1930-1931, 1933-1934) – ed. C. H. Kraeling, New Haven, 1938, p. 228. For ‘Evron see V. Tzaferis, ‘The Greek inscriptions from the Early Christian church at ‘Evron’, Eretz Israel, 19 (1987), p. 36-53. For Khirbat al-Karak see P. Delougaz, R. C. Haines, A Byzantine church at Khirbat al-Karak – ed. E. B. Hauser (The University of Chicago Oriental Institute Publications, 85), Chicago, 1960, plate 51A. For Mount Nebo see L. Di Segni, ‘The Greek inscriptions’, in Mount Nebo: new archaeological excavations 1967-1997 – ed. M. Piccirillo, E. Alliata (Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 27), Jerusalem, 1998, p. 429-430. For Kursi see V. Tzaferis, The excavations of Kursi – Gergesa (‘Atiqot, 16), Jerusalem, 1983, Plate XI.5, XII.3 and XII.1. 47   L. Di Segni, ‘A Greek inscription in the church at Horvat Hanot’, in One land – many cultures. Archaeological studies in honour of Stanislao Loffreda OFM – ed. G. C. Bottini, L. Di Segni, L. D. Chrupcała (Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 41), Jerusalem, 2003, p. 273-276.  48   J.-P. Sodini, K. Kolokotsas, Aliki, II: la basilique double (École Français D’Athènes, Études Thasiennes, 10), Paris, 1984, p. 148-149. 49  E. Ribak, Religious communities in Byzantine Palestina. The relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ad 400-700 (BAR, International Series, 1646), Oxford, 2007, p. 129. 50  Patrich, ‘The transfer of gifts in the Early Christian churches of Palestine: archaeological and literary evidence for the evolution of the “Great Entrance” ’, p. 352. 51  A. H. S.  Megaw, Kourion: excavations in the episcopal precinct (Dumbarton Oaks Studies, 38), Washington, D.C., 2007, p. 75, 142-146, and Figure 1.Z.

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Perhaps the most significant of these diakonika inscriptions is found at the Propylaea Church in Gerasa, which has a Constantinopolitan church plan. At this site the May ce 565 diaconia inscription is located in a circular structure that almost exactly matches the plan and dimensions of the contemporary skeuophylakion of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople that was renovated in ce 537. Furthermore, if we can take the Propylaea Church diaconia inscription as providing supporting evidence for Mathews’ identification of the circular structure at the Hagia Sophia as the skeuophylakion, then this would appear to provide some support for analysis by both Mathews and Taft in respect to performance of the Byzantine rite in churches with a Constantinopolitan plan. This evidence would also appear to support Crowfoot’s analysis at Gerasa where he argued that during the Early Byzantine period side chapels function as some form of diakonika, and that the rite of prothesis also took place here. 52 Interestingly, Patrich also argues that the presence of these annexed chapels coincides with a liturgical innovation referred to as the transfer of gifts, which he equates to the ceremonial procession of gifts known as the Great Entrance, and that they function as a prothesis chapel or diakonikon. 53 Indeed Patrich goes further, to suggest that ‘a prothesis chapel attached to a basilica at some distance from the altar may constitute an archaeologicalarchitectural indicator for the existence of this rite [Great Entrance] in the provinces under discussion’, which he thinks was introduced during the mid-fifth century. 54 52   J. W. Crowfoot, ‘The Christian churches’, in Gerasa: city of the Decapolis. An account embodying the record of a joint excavation conducted by Yale University and the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem (1928-1930), and Yale University and the American Schools of Oriental Research (1930-1931, 1933-1934) – ed. C. H. Kraeling, New Haven, 1938, p. 177-179, and notes 6 and 9. Also Patrich, ‘The transfer of gifts in the Early Christian churches of Palestine: archaeological and literary evidence for the evolution of the “Great Entrance” ’, p. 353-355. See also Mulholland, ‘Paraliturgical activities in the Early Byzantine basilical church’. 53  Mathews equates the Great Entrance with the Entrance of the Mysteries. See Mathews, The early churches of Constantinople: architecture and liturgy, p. 155162. See also Taft, The Great Entrance.  54 See Patrich, ‘The transfer of gifts in the Early Christian churches of Palestine: archaeological and literary evidence for the evolution of the “Great Entrance” ’, p. 350, and especially 357-358.

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It should be noted that some archaeologists thought the diakonikon and prothesis chapel were located in a room to either side of the apse. However, of the three common basilical church plans discussed here, only the Syrian church plan with an inscribed apse actually has a room located to either side of the apse, and so this hypothesis appears highly unlikely during the Early Byzantine period. 55 Similarly, Babic´ has argued that side chapels fulfilled a funerary function instead as commemorative chapels, but as most relics and burials are found inside churches and not from side chapels this argument is difficult to sustain in the absence of supporting archaeological evidence. 56

Conclusion At the beginning of this paper it was noted that Professor Tsafrir had made some observations relevant to current research. Of particular interest was the possibility that the function and design of buildings might be influenced by the liturgy of traditions and sects to which they belong. In effect, there might be a direct relationship between the layout of a church plan and the liturgy performed in it. This in turn raised the prospect that archaeologists might be able to differentiate between churches belonging to different traditions and sects wherein the liturgy differs significantly to that used by the others. Perhaps even between the Arian, Nestorian, or Monophysite churches on one hand, and those of the Orthodox on the other. There has been some archaeological research towards this goal. Careful analysis of the archaeological record in Israel and its immediate surroundings helped Patrich identify Type I and II church plans. This research is complemented by detailed analysis of church excavations in Rome by Mathews to identify key characteristics of churches thought to be associated with Ordo Romanus I. This was later followed by detailed analysis of church 55  For further discussion see Mulholland, ‘Paraliturgical activities in the Early Byzantine basilical church’, p. 97-100. 56  Mulholland, ‘Paraliturgical activities in the Early Byzantine basilical church’, p. 102-103. See also Patrich, ‘The transfer of gifts in the Early Christian churches of Palestine: archaeological and literary evidence for the evolution of the “Great Entrance” ’, p. 353-355.

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excavations in Constantinople by Mathews to describe key features unique to an identifiable Constantinopolitan church plan that he associated with the Byzantine rite, although he acknowledged that not all churches in the city shared this unique plan, e.g. St. Polyeuktos. And in doing so he also described key features of an identifiable Syrian church plan that he associated with the Syrian rite. Subsequent recent research by Mulholland has identified three common church plans in the south Levant. 57 One of these three church plans matches characteristics of a church plan in Constantinople identified by Mathews, another matches the characteristics of a church plan he identified in Rome, and the other matches a Syrian church plan he identified. As noted previously in this paper, the archaeological evidence does appear to indicate that the Roman, Constantinopolitan, and Syrian church plans each hosted a different rite, and the consistency of each church plan would suggest that there was a different centralised authority dictating the architectural and liturgical layout for each one. 58 It is not possible at this stage to unambiguously link any of these church plans to the Arian, Nestorian, Monophysite or Orthodox Churches. 59 And yet in many ways the more precise and detailed parallel links drawn by Mathews between the Roman church plan and Ordo Romanus I, the Constantinopolitan church plan and the Byzantine rite, and the northern Syrian church plan and the Syrian rite are far more preferable to the broad brush strokes implied by the labels Arian, Nestorian, Monophysite or Orthodox. 57   Mulholland, ‘Paraliturgical activities in the Early Byzantine basilical church’, p. 102-103. Also B. J.  Mulholland, The Early Byzantine Christian Church. An archaeological re-assessment of forty-seven Early Byzantine basilical church excavations primarily in Israel and Jordan, and their historical and liturgical context, Bern, 2014. 58 This ‘Syrian church plan’ refers only to those churches that match these specific characteristics, and is not intended to include all churches found in the modern state of Syria. Similarly, the ‘Roman church plan’ refers specifically to churches with the specific characteristics referred to here, and the ‘Constantinopolitan church plan’ refers only to those churches with these defined characteristics and not to all churches in Constantinople. Mathews’s research was limited to the cities of Rome and Constantinople. 59 Or indeed to the Melitians, Maronites, Novatians, Eunomians or any other named tradition or sects extant at this time.

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However, a note of caution is required as Mathews’s observations were predicated upon each one of these three church plans being unique to either the city of Rome, Constantinople or to northern Syria, and this in turn facilitated the analysis and linkage in respect to Ordo Romanus I, the Byzantine rite and the Syrian rite respectively. Furthermore, once it became evident that the geographic range of each of these three church plans extended elsewhere in the Byzantine Empire, then it also became apparent that these liturgical linkages also need to be re-evaluated in light of this new evidence. There is one area of research that might reconcile the available archaeological and historical data in such a way that the liturgy used in each of the three church plans identified in this paper can be identified with more certainty. An overlap exists between these two types of data in the form of inscriptions that provide the names, clerical titles and other useful historical information about the people and the liturgy associated with each of the three distinct church plans. Preliminary archaeological research to extract, tabulate and analyse names, saints or martyrs and clerical titles from inscriptions suggests that the community using a site with a Roman church plan chose to differentiate themselves through the use of names and clerical titles unique to their own community, and also in the choice of saints and martyrs that they revered. The same can be said of the community associated with the Syrian and also the Constantinopolitan church plan. Further archaeological and historical research might 1. confirm whether certain names, clerical titles, and saints or martyrs are more prevalent in one or more of the three common church plans identified in this paper; 2. determine whether certain names, clerical titles, and saints or martyrs are historically more favoured by specific Christian traditions or sects; 3. derive cultural information from the form these names take, e.g. in the modern era Pietr, Peadar, and Pedro are all forms of Peter and each form of the name not only carries direct information about the person referred to but also a subliminal ethnic or racial image derived from cultural experience; and 4. possibly identify any association or concentration of Christian traditions or sects within specific cities or regions.

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A. McNicoll, R. Smith, B. Hennessy, Pella in Jordan, 1. An interim report on the joint University of Sydney and The College of Wooster excavations at Pella 1979-1981, Canberra, 1982. A. W.  McNicoll et al., Pella in Jordan, 2. The second interim report of the joint University of Sydney and College of Wooster excavations at Pella 1982-1985 (Mediterranean Archaeology Supplement, 2), Sydney, 1992. E. Mikkola et al., ‘The church and chapel: data and phasing’, in Petra – the mountain of Aaron.  The Finnish archaeological project in Jordan. Volume 1. The church and chapel – ed. M. Stout Whiting, Helsinki, 2008, p. 98-176. S. Parnicki-Pudelko, ‘The Early Christian episcopal basilica in Novae’, Archaeologia Polona, 21-22 (1983), p. 241-270. The Petra Church – ed. P. M. Bikai (American Center of Oriental Research Publications, 3), Amman, 2001. M. Piccirillo, ‘The churches on Mount Nebo’, in Mount Nebo: new archaeological excavations 1967-1997 – ed. M. Piccirillo, E. Alliata (Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 27), Jerusalem, 1998), p. 221-264. K. Politis, ‘Excavations at Deir ‘Ain Abata 1990’, Annual of the Department of Antiquities of Jordan, 34 (1990), p. 377-388. T. W. Potter, A. C. King, Excavation at the Mola di Monte Gelato (Archaeological Monographs of the British School at Rome, 11), London, 1997. A. G.  Poulter, Nicopolis ad Istrum: a Roman, Late Roman, and Early Byzantine city. Excavations 1985-1992 (Journal of Roman Studies Monograph, 8), London, 1995. M. W.  Prausnitz, Excavations at Shavei Zion: the Early Christian church. Report of the excavations carried out by the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums (in cooperation with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) (Centro per le Antichità e la Storia dell’Arte del Vicino Oriente, Monografie di Archaeologia e d’Arte, 2), Rome, 1967. Procopius, The anecdota or secret history – tr. H. B. Dewing (Loeb Classical Library), Cambridge, MA, 1998. W. M. Ramsay, G. L. Bell, The thousand and one churches, London, 1909. A. M.  Schneider, The Church of the Multiplying of the Loaves and Fishes at Tabgha on the lake of Gennesaret and its mosaics – ed. A. A. Gordon and tr. E. Graf, Paderborn, Zurich, London, 1937. L. Di Segni, ‘The Greek inscriptions’, in Mount Nebo: new archaeological excavations 1967-1997 – ed. M. Piccirillo, E. Alliata (Studium

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IDENTIFICATION OF EARLY BYZANTINE CHURCH PLANS

Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 27), Jerusalem, 1998, p. 425467. L. Di Segni, ‘A Greek inscription in the church at Horvat Hanot’, in One land – many cultures. Archaeological studies in honour of Stanislao Loffreda OFM – ed. G. C. Bottini, L. Di Segni, L. D. Chrupcała (Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 41), Jerusalem, 2003, p. 273-276. R. H.  Smith, Pella of the Decapolis, 1: the 1967 season of The College of Wooster expedition to Pella, The College of Wooster, 1973. R. H. Smith, L. P. Day, Pella of the Decapolis, 2. Final report on the College of Wooster excavations in Area IX, the civic complex, 19791985, The College of Wooster, 1989. Socrates, The ecclesiastical history of Socrates, surnamed Scholasticus, or the advocate. Comprising a history of the Church, in seven books, from the accession of Constantine, ad 305, to the 38th year of Theodosius II., including a period of 140 years – ed. H. de Valois and tr. Anon., London, 1853. J.-P. Sodini, K. Kolokotsas, Aliki, II: la basilique double (École Français D’Athènes, Études Thasiennes, 10), Paris, 1984. C. L. Striker, Y. Dog˘an Kuban, Kalenderhane Camii in Istanbul. The buildings, their history, architecture, and decoration. Final reports on the archaeological exploration and restoration at Kalenderhane Camii 19661978, Mainz am Rhein, 1997. Y. Tsafrir, ‘The Northern Church’, in Excavations at Rehovot-in-theNegev. Volume  1: The Northern Church – ed. R. Maltese (Qedem, 25), Jerusalem, 1988, p. 22-77. Y. Tsafrir, Y. Hirschfeld, ‘The church and mosaics at Horvat Berachot, Israel; with an Appendix by Rina and Joseph Drory’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 33 (1979), p. 291-326. V. Tzaferis, The excavations of Kursi – Gergesa (‘Atiqot, 16), Jerusalem, 1983. V. Tzaferis, ‘The Greek inscriptions from the Early Christian church at ‘Evron’, in Eretz Israel, 19 (1987), 36-53. C.-J.-M. de Vogüé, Syrie centrale. Architecture civile et religieuse du ier au viie siècle, Paris, 1865.

2. Secondary sources M. V. Anastos, ‘The emperor Justin I’s role in the restoration of Chalcedonian doctrine, 518-519’, Vyzantina-Thessaloniki, 13.1 (1985), p. 126-139.

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M. Aviam, ‘Horvat Hesheq: A church in Upper Galilee’, in Ancient churches revealed – ed. Y. Tsafrir, Jerusalem, 1993, p. 54-65. M. Aviam, ‘Recent excavations and surveys of churches and monasteries in Western Galilee’, in One land – many cultures. Archaeological studies in honour of Stanislao Loffreda OFM – ed. G. C. Bottini, L. Di Segni, L. D. Chrupcała (Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 41), Jerusalem, 2003, p. 41-59. M. Avi-Yonah, ‘Emmaus’, in Encyclopedia of archaeological excavations in the Holy Land – ed. M. Avi-Yonah, 4 vols., London, Jerusalem, 1976, II, p. 362-364. P. Baker, ‘Early Christian and Byzantine c. 313-1453’, in The grammar of architecture – ed. E. Cole, Boston, New York, London, 2002, p. 148. A. B.  Biernacki, ‘The pulpit in the episcopal basilica at Novae (Svištov) (An attempt at a reconstruction)’, Balcanica Posnaniensa, 7 (1995), p. 315-332. H. Brandenburg, Ancient churches of Rome from the fourth to the seventh century: the dawn of Christian architecture in the West, Turnhout, 2005. A. Burguière, The Annales School: an intellectual history – tr. J. M. Todd, London, 2009. R. Cohen, ‘Monasteries’, in Encyclopedia of archaeological excavations in the Holy Land, III – ed. M. Avi-Yonah, E. Stern, Jerusalem, 1977, p. 876-885. J. W.  Crowfoot, Early churches in Palestine, London, 1941. J. S.  Curl, Classical architecture. An introduction to its vocabulary and essentials, with a select glossary of terms, London, 2001. Z. T. Fiema, ‘The Byzantine monastic/pilgrimage centre of St. Aaron near Petra, Jordan’, in One land – many cultures. Archaeological studies in honour of Stanislao Loffreda, OFM – ed. G. C. Bottini, L. Di Segni, L. D. Chrupcała (Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 41), Jerusalem, 2003, p. 343-357. D. Gazit, Y. Lender, ‘The Church of St. Stephen at Horvat Be’ershemca’, in Ancient churches revealed – ed. Y. Tsafrir, Jerusalem, 1993, p. 273-276. S. Hill, The Early Byzantine churches of Cilicia and Isauria (Birmingham Byzantine and Ottoman Monographs, 1), Aldershot, 1996. M. Jurkovic´, ‘Foreword’, in Retrieving the record: A century of archaeology at Porecˇ (1847-1947) – ed. M. Jurkovic´ (Studies in Early Christian and Medieval Art History and Archaeology, 1), Zagreb, 2001, p. 7-8. Z. Kalinowski, ‘Baptistery in the episcopal basilica at Novae’, in

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IDENTIFICATION OF EARLY BYZANTINE CHURCH PLANS

Novae: Studies and materials I – ed. A. B. Biernacki, Poznan´, 1995, p. 25-35. R. Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine architecture – revised by R. Krautheimer, S. C´urcˇic´, New Haven, London, 1986. J. Lassus, Inventaire archéologique de la région au nord-est de Hama (Institut Français de Damas), Damascus, 1935. J. Lassus, Sanctuaires Chrétiens de Syrie. Essai sur la genèse, la forme et l’usage liturgique des édifices du culte chrétien, en Syrie, du iiie siècle à la conquête musulmane (Institut Français D’Archéologie De Beyrouth, Bibliothèque Archéologique Et Historique, 42), Paris, 1947. Y. Magen, R. Talgam, ‘The monastery of Martyrius at Ma’ale Adummim (Khirbet el-Murassas) and its mosaics’, in Christian archaeology in the Holy Land: new discoveries. Essays in honour of Virgilio C. Corbo, OFM – ed. G. C. Bottini, L. Di Segni, E. Alliata (Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 36), Jerusalem, 1990, p. 91-152. C. Mango, Byzantium: the empire of the New Rome, London, 1980. S. Margalit, ‘On the transformation of the mono-apsidal churches with two pastophoria into tri-apsidal churches’, Liber Annuus – Studii Biblici Franciscanum, 39 (1989), p. 143-164. T. F. Mathews, ‘An early Roman chancel arrangement and its liturgical functions’, Rivista di Archeologia Cristiana, 38 (1962), p. 73-95. T. F. Mathews, The early churches of Constantinople: architecture and liturgy, University Park and London, 1971. V. L. Menze, Justinian and the making of the Syrian Orthodox Church (Oxford Early Christian Studies), Oxford, 2008. G. P. R. Métraux, ‘Mosaics, liturgy and architecture in the Basilica of Dermech I, Carthage’, in La Mosaique Greco-Romaine VIII, Actes Du viiieme Colloque International Pour L’etude De La Mosaique Antique Et Médiévale, 1 – ed. D. Paunier, C. Schmidt (Cahiers D’Archéologie Romande), Lausanne, 2001, p. 434-443. A. Michel, Les églises d’époque Byzantine et Umayyad de la Jordanie VeVIIIe. Typologie architecturale et aménagements liturgiques (Bibliothèque De L’Antiquité Tardive, Publiée Par L’Association Pour L’Antiquité Tardive, 2), Turnhout, 2001. B. J. Mulholland, The Early Byzantine Christian Church. An archaeological re-assessment of forty-seven Early Byzantine basilical church excavations primarily in Israel and Jordan, and their historical and liturgical context, Bern, 2014.

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B. J. Mulholland, ‘Paraliturgical activities in the Early Byzantine basilical church’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Queen’s University, Belfast, 2011. A. Negev, ‘The cathedral at Haluza (Elusa)’, in Ancient churches revealed – ed. Y. Tsafrir, Jerusalem, 1993, p. 286-293. E. Netzer, ‘The Byzantine churches of Herodium’, in Christian archaeology in the Holy Land: new discoveries. Essays in honour of Virgilio C. Corbo, OFM – ed. G. C. Bottini, L. Di Segni, E. Alliata (Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior, 36), Jerusalem, 1990, p. 165-176. E. D. Oren, ‘A Christian settlement at Ostrakine in North Sinai’, in Ancient churches revealed – ed. Y. Tsafrir, Jerusalem, 1993, p. 305-314. R. Ousterhout, ‘Contextualizing the later churches of Constantinople: suggested methodologies and a few examples’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 54 (2000), p. 241-250. R. Ovadiah, A. Ovadiah, Hellenistic, Roman and Early Byzantine mosaic pavements in Israel (Bibliotheca Archaeologica, 6), Rome, 1987. J. Patrich, ‘Early Christian Churches in the Holy Land’, in Christians and Christianity in the Holy Land: From the Origins to the Latin Kingdoms – ed. G. G. Stroumsa, O. Limor (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, 5), Turnhout, 2006, p. 351395. J. Patrich, ‘The Transfer of Gifts in the Early Christian Churches of Palestine: archaeological and literary evidence for the evolution of the “Great Entrance” ’, in Mélanges offerts à Pierre Maraval – ed. B. Caseau, J.-C. Cheynet, V. Déroch (Centre de recherche d’Histoire et Civilisation de Byzance, 23), Paris, 2006, p. 341-393. J. Patrich, Y. Tsafrir, ‘A Byzantine church complex at Horvat Beit Loya’, in Ancient churches revealed – ed. Y. Tsafrir, Jerusalem, 1993, p. 265-272. M. Piccirillo, ‘The architecture and liturgy of the Early Church’, in Cradle of Christianity – ed. Y. Israeli, D. Mevorah, Jerusalem, 2000, p. 51-113. E. Ribak, Religious communities in Byzantine Palestina. The relationship between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, ad 400-700 (BAR, International Series, 1646), Oxford, 2007. J. F. Romano, Ritual and society in Early Medieval Rome, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 2007.

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R. F. Taft, ‘Quaestiones disputatae: the skeuophylakion of Hagia Sophia and the entrances of the liturgy revisited – part II’, Oriens Christianus, 82 (1998), p. 53-87. R. F. Taft, The Great Entrance: a history of the transfer of gifts and other pre-anaphoral rites of the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 200), Rome, 2004. G. Tchalenko, Villages antiques de la Syrie du Nord, le massif du Bélus à l’époque romaine, Paris, 1953-1958. A. Terry, F. G. Eaves, Retrieving the record: A century of archaeology at Porecˇ (1847-1947) – ed. M. Jurkovic´ (Studies in Early Christian and Medieval Art History and Archaeology, 1), Zagreb, 2001. Y. Tsafrir, ‘The development of ecclesiastical architecture in Palestine’, in Ancient churches revealed – ed. Y. Tsafrir, Jerusalem, 1993, p. 1-16. Y. Tsafrir, Y. Hirschfeld, ‘The Byzantine church at Horvat Berachot’, in Ancient churches revealed – ed. Y. Tsafrir, Jerusalem, 1993, p. 207-218. B. de Vries, P. Bikai, ‘Archaeology in Jordan’, American Journal of Archaeology, 97 (1993), p. 507-508.

Abstract Twenty years ago Yoram Tsafrir observed that ‘we are as yet unable to distinguish between buildings belonging to different traditions and sects, for example between the Arian, Nestorian, or Monophysite churches on one hand, and those of the Orthodox on the other’. However Thomas Mathews has identified a T-shaped chancel arrangement in some early churches in Rome that he associates with Ordo Romanus I. He later observed that Early Byzantine churches in Constantinople uniquely had a major entrance to either side of the apse, which he and Robert Taft associate with the Byzantine rite, whereas churches in Syria usually had an inscribed apse with a room to either side of it. This paper examines a group of excavated Early Byzantine basilical churches to determine whether these three distinct church plans can be identified elsewhere, but primarily in the southern Levant. Also, whether churches with each of these ground plans share other characteristics, and how this enhanced knowledge can inform our understanding of the Early Christian Church.

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Fig. 1. Three church plans evident in the catalogue of sites (i) Constantinopolitan church plan with Π-shaped sanctuary surrounded by chancel barrier, and a major entrance either side of the apse. (ii) Syrian church plan with Π-shaped sanctuary surrounded by chancel barrier, and a room to either side of the apse. (iii) Roman church plan with a T-shaped sanctuary that extends across each of the side aisles and into the nave. 60

60  By the seventh century the nave extension is less common in the Roman church plan, and the sanctuary can be described as bar-shaped. In Italy the monoapsidal church plan is common (see Table 3.3. below). The Constantinopolitan, Syrian and Roman labels are appended to reflect observations made by Mathews. See Mathews, ‘An early Roman chancel arrangement and its liturgical functions’, p. 73-95. Also Mathews, The early churches of Constantinople. 

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IDENTIFICATION OF EARLY BYZANTINE CHURCH PLANS

Fig. 2. Second focus of liturgical activity located in side chapels 61

61 These typical church plans and layouts are based upon St. Theodore in Gerasa, (Constantinopolitan), see Kraeling, Gerasa, Plan XXXIII; Kursi (Syrian), see V. Tzaferis, The excavations of Kursi – Gergesa (‘Atiqot, 16), Jerusalem, 1983, Plan 4; and also Khirbat al-Karak and SS. Peter & Paul in Gerasa (Roman). See Delougaz, Haines, A Byzantine church at Khirbat al-Karak, Plate 51A; and Kraeling, Gerasa, Plan XXXIX.

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Yes

Yes

Yes

St. Theodore, Gerasa, Jordan

Yes

Yes

Yes

Synagogue Church, Gerasa, Jordan

Yes

Yes

Shavei Zion, Israel

Yes

Yes

Yes

Bema Church, Kalenderhane, Istanbul

Yes

Yes

Yes (North Church)

Basilica of Dermech I, Carthage

Yes

Yes (and with solea)

Yes

4th c. Amorium, Turkey

Yes

Yes

626

North chapel

Propylaea Church, Gerasa, Jordan

South chapel

T-shaped sanctuary

Π-shaped sanctuary

Triapsidal

Site

Monoapsidal

Inscribed apse

Table 1. Constantinopolitan church plan: apsidal plan and configuration of the sanctuary

Yes

IDENTIFICATION OF EARLY BYZANTINE CHURCH PLANS

South chapel

North chapel

T-shaped sanctuary

Π-shaped sanctuary

Triapsidal

Inscribed apse

Site

Monoapsidal

Table 2. Syrian church plan: apsidal plan and configuration of the sanctuary

Cathedral Church, Gerasa, Jordan

Yes

Yes

Yes

Large Basilica, Nicopolis ad Istrum, Bulgaria

Yes

Yes

Yes

Eastern Church, Herodium, Israel

Yes

Yes

Yes

Kursi, Gergesa, Israel

Yes

Yes

Yes

Old Church, Old Dongola, Sudan

Yes

Yes

Yes

St. Stephen’s, Horvat Be’er-shemca, Israel

Yes

Yes

Yes

St. John the Baptist, St. George, and SS. Cosmas & Damianus, Gerasa, Jordan

Yes

Yes

Ostrakine, Israel

Yes

Yes

Central Basilica, Ostrakine, Israel

Yes

Yes

Coastal basilica, Ostrakine, Israel

Yes

Yes

Central Church, Herodium, Israel

Yes

Yes

Horvat Berachot, Israel

Yes

Yes

Khirbet ed-Deir, Israel

Yes

Yes

627

Horvat Beit Loya, Israel

Yes

Yes

Yes

North Church, Nessana, Israel

Yes

Yes

Yes

South chapel

North chapel

T-shaped sanctuary

Π-shaped sanctuary

Triapsidal

Inscribed apse

Site

Monoapsidal

B. J.  MULHOLLAND

Small Basilica, Nicopolis ad Istrum, Bulgaria Monastery of Martyrius, Israel

Yes

Church of Amos and Kasiseus, Mount Nebo, Jordan (Khirbat al-Mukhayyat)

Yes

Church of SS. Lot and Procopius at Kh. alMukhayyat, Jordan

Yes

Yes

Church of Saint George, Kh. alMukhayyat, Jordan

Yes

Yes

St. Polyeuktos, Saraçhane, Istanbul

Yes

South Church at Hermopolis Magna (el-Ashmunein), Egypt

Yes

Church of the Multiplying of the Loaves and Fishes, Tabgha, Israel

Yes

Yes

Yes, possibly

Yes

Yes

628

? Possibly

South chapel

North chapel

T-shaped sanctuary

Π-shaped sanctuary

Triapsidal

Inscribed apse

Site

Monoapsidal

IDENTIFICATION OF EARLY BYZANTINE CHURCH PLANS

Treasure Church, Anemurium, Turkey

Yes

Yes

Necropolis Church, Anemurium, Turkey

Yes

Yes

St. Aaron pilgrimage centre, near Petra, Jordan

Yes

Yes

Yes

FJHP church, Mount Aaron, Petra, Jordan

Yes

Yes

Yes

Kourion, Cyprus

Yes

Yes

Yes

Western Church, Mampsis, Israel

Yes

Yes

? Possibly

Eastern Church, Mampsis, Israel

Yes

Yes

Yes

North Church, Eboda, Israel

Yes

Yes (?)

Yes

629

Yes

B. J.  MULHOLLAND

Table 3. Roman church plan: apsidal plan and configuration of the sanctuary. Thirteen of the sixteen sites are triapsidal churches.

‘Evron, Israel

Yes

North Church, Rehovot-in-theNegev, Israel*

Yes

Yes

Yes

Khirbat alKarak, Israel

Yes

Yes

Yes

Porecˇ, Croatia*

Yes

Yes

Yes

Procopius Church, Gerasa, Jordan

Yes

Yes (barshaped)

Yes

SS. Peter & Paul, Gerasa, Jordan

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Santa Cornelia, Italy

Yes

Mola di Monte Gelato, Italy

Yes

Yes

Yes

Haluza Cathedral, Israel*

Yes

Yes

Petra, Jordan*

Yes

Yes

Pella of the Decapolis, Jordan*

Yes

Yes

Horvat Hesheq, Israel*

Yes

Yes

Nahariya, Israel

Yes

Yes

Khirbet elWaziah, Israel

Yes

Santa Liberato, Italy*

Yes

Yes

630

Yes

South chapel

North chapel

T-shaped or bar-shaped sanctuary

Π-shaped sanctuary

Triapsidal

Inscribed apse

Site

Mono-apsidal

Key: * Denotes known Syrian-to-Roman church conversions and also Khirbat al-Karak, which is converted from a protruding monoapsidal church.

St. Mary’s or South Church, Nessana, Israel

Yes

Novae, Bulgaria*

Yes

Yes

Monastery of Euthymius, Israel

Yes

Yes

Karacaören, Turkey

Yes

East Church (Area V), Pella, Jordan

Yes

Yes

Northern Church, Shivta, Israela*

Yes

Yes

Deir ‘Ain ‘Abata, Jordan

Yes

(?)

Beth Shan, Israel

Yes

Yes

The Anchor Church, Mt. Berenice, Tiberias, Israel

Yes

(?)

Zourtsa, Peloponnese, Greece

Yes

Yes

West Church, Pella of the Decapolis, Jordan

Yes

East Church, Pella of the Decapolis, Jordan

Yes

Sector A triapsidal church, Abila (Quwaylbah) of the Decapolis, Jordan

Yes

631

Yes

South chapel

North chapel

T-shaped or bar-shaped sanctuary

Π-shaped sanctuary

Triapsidal

Inscribed apse

Site

Mono-apsidal

IDENTIFICATION OF EARLY BYZANTINE CHURCH PLANS

Yes

Yes

Yes

Sector DD triapsidal church, Abila (Quwaylbah) of the Decapolis, Jordan

Yes

Khirbat Al-Burz, Sama Al-Rusan, Jordan

Yes

South Church, Subeita, Israel

Yes

Yes

Yes

North Church, Subeita, Israel

Yes

Yes

Khan el-Ahmar, Israel

Yes

South Church, Eboda, Israel

Yes

Emmaus, Israel

Yes

632

Yes

Yes Yes

Yes

South chapel

North chapel

Yes

Π-shaped sanctuary

Sector D triapsidal church, Abila (Quwaylbah) of the Decapolis, Jordan

Site

Triapsidal

T-shaped or bar-shaped sanctuary

Inscribed apse

Mono-apsidal

B. J.  MULHOLLAND

Yes Yes

IDENTIFICATION OF EARLY BYZANTINE CHURCH PLANS

Table 4. Diakonikon inscriptions. Church

North chapel

South chapel

Other location

Church plan

Propylaea Church, Gerasa, Jordan

Inscription no. 331: ‘the diaconia’

Const.

‘Evron, Israel

Inscription no. 2: ‘two diaconica’

Roman

Khirbat alKarak, Israel

Inscription no. 1: ‘the diaconicon’

Roman

Mount Nebo, Jordan

Inscription 6: ‘the sacred diaconicon’

Not known

Kursi, Gergesa, Israel

Partial inscription

Horvat Hanot, Israel

Syrian ‘the diaconicon’ Not known

633

EIRINI PANOU Hebrew University of Jerusalem

THE CHURCH OF MARY IN THE PROBATIC POOL AND THE HAGHIASMATA OF CONSTANTINOPLE 1

Mark Eugenicus, the fifteenth-century metropolitan of Ephesus, addressed the Virgin Mary as the ‘new Probatic Pool’. 2 This is because of Mary’s association with the Probatic Pool (‘sheeppool’), or Probatike, and a church dedicated to her in this location in sixth-century Jerusalem. The church was initially dedicated not to Mary but to the healing of the Paralytic, the miracle that Jesus performed in the Probatic Pool and which we know from the ‘Gospel of John’ (Ioh. 5, 2). The significance of the Probatic Pool lies in the fact that it was used for Jewish purification purposes, to which the ‘Gospel of John’ added Christian baptismal connotations. The text reads: ‘In Jerusalem there is, in the Probatike, a pool, the so-called Bethesda in Hebrew, which has five porticoes.’ 3 In the description of this miracle, the paralytic tells Jesus that he has nobody to put him inside the pool (κολυμβήθρα) when the troubling of the waters takes place, which will heal him. The popularity of this miracle account is demonstrated in the construction of a three-aisled Byzantine basilica dedicated to the miracle of the Paralytic, which was attached to the pool. The dedication of a church 1 This article is taken from my forthcoming book The Cult of St Anne in Byzantium, Ashgate, 2015, where the relationship of Mary and her parents with Jerusalem and Constantinople is examined also in terms of liturgy and textual production. 2  S. Eustratiades, Heˉ Theotokos en teˉ Hymnographia, Paris, 1930, p. 37. 3 The Probatike is situated at the modern Islamic quarter of Jerusalem. The appellations ‘Bethesda’ and ‘Probatike’ refer to the pool and both terms will be used interchangeably in this article.

10.1484/J.BAIEP.5.107537

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first to the healing of the Paralytic (fifth century) and to Mary (sixth century) is the topographical expression of Mary’s healing role, which the topography of Constantinople developed through the connection of Mary to holy waters (haghiasmata).

Mary’s nativity at the Probatic Pool Mary’s Kathisma between Jerusalem and Bethlehem and her Tomb in Gethsemane consist evidence of the rising Marian piety in the Holy Land from the fifth century onwards. 4 This development could point to the fact that the church in the Probatike may have also been dedicated to Mary during the fifth century. However, pilgrim accounts allude that this development took place no earlier than the sixth century. The earliest testimony is Theodosius (530): ‘Next to the Sheep-pool is the church of my Lady Mary’. 5 The Piacenza pilgrim (circa 570), interested in healing sites, describes Bethesda as a ‘pool with five porticoes’ and writes that ‘to one of the porticoes a basilica was attached dedicated to St Mary in which many miracles take place’. 6 Also in the sixth century, Antonius (570) refers to the Probatic pool and the basilica of Mary and adds that Mary was born there. 7 Later accounts, such as Sophronius’s ‘Carmina Anacreontica’ (550/560-638/9) and John of Damaskos’s ‘Exposition of Faith’ (675-753/4) perpetuate the belief that the Virgin Mary was born at the church of the Probatike. 8 The tradition that affiliates Mary’s birth with this specific location appears as an established one as early as 530 in the writings of Theodosius and was con-

4  S. J. Shoemaker, Ancient traditions of the Virgin Mary’s dormition and assumption, Oxford, 2002, p. 79; O. Limor, ‘ The place of the End of the Days: Eschatological geography in Jerusalem’, in The real and ideal Jerusalem in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic art: studies in honor of Bezalel Narkiss on the occasion of his seventieth birthday – ed. B. Kuhnel, Jerusalem, 1998, p. 20. 5   J. Wilkinson, Jerusalem pilgrims before the crusades, Warminster, 2002, p. 109. 6  H. Donner, Pilgerfahrt ins Heilige Land: die ältesten Berichte christlicher Palästinapilger (4.-7. Jahrhundert), Stuttgart, 1979, p. 288. 7  Itinera et descriptiones Terræ Sanctæ – ed. T. Tobler, p. 106, 137.  8  Anthologia graeca carminum christianorum – ed. W. Christ, M. Paranikas, p. 46; Ioh. Damasc., De fide, 4. 14 – ed. B. Kotter, p. 200 : ‘Τίκτεται δὲ ἐν τῷ τῆς προβατικῆς τοῦ Ἰωακεὶμ οἴκῳ καὶ τῷ ἱερῷ προσάγεται’.

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tinued in later centuries. But since an earlier association of that kind between Mary and the Probatike had not been made until then, how did this tradition emerge?

The Probatic Pool as a representation of Baptism The pools constituted a massive purification site. The main characteristic of the pools is the ability of their waters to purify and heal, which formed the story of the miracle of the Paralytic in the ‘Gospel of John’ and gave Bethesda baptismal connotations. 9 Bethesda had all the necessary characteristics, the healing waters, a pool (a κολυμβήθρα in Greek, a term used in the Baptismal rite) and a miracle (practical manifestation of waters’ healing qualities). 10 This miracle gave rise to the sacramental symbolism of the site and it is presented as such in Christian texts in both West and East as early as the second century. In the West, Tertullian (160- died after 220) writes that it is through the troubling of the waters by the angel in Bethaisda (sic) that ‘man’s sin will be erased and the new man will be purified and be reborn since he will receive the Holy Spirit once again, which man had lost with the original sin’. 11 Ambrose (340-397) parallels the descending of the angel to the pool and the stirring of waters by him (a sign of God’s presence to the unfaithful) to the descending of the Holy Spirit during baptism (a sign of God’s presence to the faithful). 12 Chromatius, bishop of Aquileia (388-407/8), has made the most straightforward connection of the miracle at Bethesda to Baptism, which is clear from the title of his sermon ‘On the healing of the paralytic and Baptism’. Similarly to Ambrose, Chromatius connects 9  C. Kannengiesser, Handbook of Patristic Exegesis. The Bible in Ancient Christianity, Leiden, 2004, p. 633; S. P. Brock, ‘The Epiklesis in the Antiochene baptismal “Ordines” ’, Aldershot, 1974, p. 204, 210-211 [reprinted in Fire from heaven: studies in Syriac theology and liturgy (variorum), 2006]. 10  Offic. San. Bapt. 1: ‘Εἰσέρχεται ὁ ἱερεὺς [...], ἀπέρχεται ἐν τῇ κολυμβήθρα [...]’, see Euchologion sive rituale graecorum – ed. J. Goar, p. 287.  11  Tertul., Bapt., 5 (SC, 35, p. 74). 12  Ambros., De Sp. Scto, 1.77: ‘Sed cum angeli hominibus in adjumentum descendant, intelligendum est quod creatura quidem superior angelorum sit, quae plus recepit gratiae spiritalis’, (PL, 16, 724). 

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the angel’s descending to the pool with the descending of the Holy Spirit during Baptism. 13 In the East, John Chrysostom (fourth century) in one of his homilies on the Gospel of John, connects the miracle at Bethesda to Baptism: ‘What mystery doth it signify to us? [...] A Baptism was about to be given [...] A Baptism purifying all sins [...]’. 14 In a catena fragment probably of Theodore of Mopsuestia (fourth/fifth century), it is mentioned that ‘the leader of the angels comes down and disperses medical power, so that the Jews know that the leading angel cures all diseases of the soul’. 15 Also in this account, the healing powers of the site are placed in Christian context: ‘One is cured not only by the nature of waters but with the activity of the angel who under the grace of the Holy Spirit cures sins’. 16 Thus, texts show that as early as the second century and until the construction of the church of the Paralytic, the Probatike had been associated with one of the most important Christian sacraments, the Baptism, a connection facilitated by the fact that John’s Gospel played more important role than the other Gospels in the formation of the Orthodox liturgy. 17

Mary’s birth in the Probatic Pool The sacramental symbolism of Baptism infused the cult of Mary in sixth-century Jerusalem, as a result of female deities being born in water. This association was made through the regard of Baptism as a womb and birth, which led to the birth of deities and female ones in particular. More analytically, the attachment of the Probatike to Mary’s birth derives from the Christian understanding of Baptism as a new birth, 18 as the ‘Gospel of John’ (Ioh. 3,5) tell us: ‘No one who was not born   Chrom., Serm., 14.1 (SC, 154, p. 239).   Ioh. Chrys., Hom. Ioh., 36.1 (NPNF, 14, p. 125-126). 15   Catenæ græcorum patrum in Novum Testamentum – ed. J. A. Cramer, p. 228. 16   Ibid., p. 228. 17  S. Verhelst, ‘The liturgy of Jerusalem in the Byzantine period’, in Christians and Christianity in the Holy Land: From the Origins to the Latin Kingdoms. – ed. O. Limor, G. G. Stroumsa, Turnhout, 2006, p. 440. 18 J. Meyendorff, Byzantine theology: historical trends and doctrinal themes, New York, 1976, p. 193; a view that originates in Gen. 1,20, where the formation of life through water is described. 13 14

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of water and the Holy Ghost can enter the kingdom of God’. In patristic texts, Christ’s Nativity is presented as an antitype for liturgical baptism, 19 and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in his ‘Ecclesiastical Hierarchy’ (485-518/28), characterizes Baptism as a ‘ceremony of divine generation’ (θεογενεσία). 20 In the fourth century, female connotations of Baptism were made by St Augustine, who describes the newly baptized as infants who had been agitating in their mother’s womb. 21 In the Coptic Codex II of Nag Hammadi (fourth/fifth century), 22 it is said that the womb of the soul is reborn during Baptism, 23 and in Syria, the female association of the Holy Spirit derives from ‘the fusion of the spirit hovering over the primeval waters, pictured as a mother dove’. 24 In Ephrem the Syriac’s sermon ‘On the Nativity’, Mary says to her son: ‘Creator of your mother – in a second birth, through water,’ 25 which reflects the ‘Gospel of John’ (Ioh. 3, 4). Jacob of Serugh (fifth-sixth century) also makes the connection between Bethesda, Baptism and second birth in his homily ‘On the Paralytic’. 26 Finally, in the ‘Acathist hymn’ (fifth century), 27 ‘a conceptual connection between Mary’s womb and the baptismal font’ is attested, 28 which was also made in the fourth century by Didymus of Alexandria. 29 The correlation of female fertility to water had been established   R. Deshman, Servants of the mother of God in Byzantine and medieval art, London, 1989, p. 34. 20 PS. Dion., De Eccles. Hier. 2.8 (PG, 3, 397A). The word could also mean ‘reborn through God’, see PS. Dion., De Eccles. Hier. 2.1 (PG 3, 392A). 21  Serm., 228.1 (PL 38, 1101). 22  H. Lundhaug, Images of rebirth cognitive poetics and transformational soteriology in the Gospel of Philip and the Exegesis on the Soul, Leiden, 2010, p. 8. 23  Ibid., p. 94. 24  R. Murray, ‘The characteristics of the earliest Syriac Christianity’, in East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the formative period – ed. N. G. Garsoïan, T. F. Mathews, R. W. Thomson, Washington, D.C., 1982, p. 13. 25   Ephr. Syr., Nativ., 16.9 (CSCO, 187, p. 76). 26  S. P.  Brock, The Holy Spirit in the Syrian baptismal tradition, Bronx, NY, 1979, p. 87-88. 27  L.- M. Peltomaa, The image of the Virgin Mary in the Akathistos hymn, Leiden, 2001, p. 217-230. 28  Ibid., p. 199. 29   Didym. Alex., De Trin., 2.12: ‘Διτταὶ γὰρ γίνονται κυήσεις ἀνθρώποις, ἡ μὲν ἐκ σώματος ἡμετέρου, ἡ δὲ ἐκ τοῦ θείου Πνεύματος’ (Two births occur in human beings, one through the body, one through the Holy Spirit). (PG, 39, 669A). 19

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already in the fourth century in Palestine, when the pilgrim of Bordeaux (333) refers to a spring near Jericho, where women washed themselves or drank water to conceive a child. 30 According to texts, Bethesda is the first location associated with Mary’s birth. There, rebirth and regeneration occurs through the holy waters of Baptism and a female figure – Mary – was the recipient of the progressive affiliation of women with human or divine birth through water. Sacred space in sixth-century Jerusalem necessitated the identification of the Probatike as the place of Mary’s birth, because there was already the Kathisma to commemorate her moment of rest on her way to Bethlehem, her Tomb in Gethsemane to commemorate her death but none for her birth. The urge to complete the sacred map of Marian cult in sixth-century Jerusalem combined with the interpretation of Baptism as θεογενεσία explains the placement of Mary’s nativity at the Probatike. The dedication of the church to the miracle of the Paralytic and then to Mary expresses the ideological shift that – in terms of topography – was designed to complete the genealogy of Christ in the Holy Land.

Constantinople: Churches and water constructions in early Byzantium By the sixth century, Byzantine church architecture had integrated water constructions. 31 In the fifth century, water had become an integral part of church architecture due to the association of water to baptism and spiritual cleansing, which made its way to the sixth-century Byzantine architecture of Sepphoris, 32 Gerasa, 33 Macedonia and Athens. 34 The purifying element of   Itinera et descriptiones, – ed. Tobler, p. 19.  A. Pianalto, Martyrs, cults and water in the early Christian world (with a focus on Thessaloniki, Corinth and Philippi), unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1999, p. 65-66. 32  Z. Weiss, A. Netzer, ‘Sepphoris during the byzantine period’, in Sepphoris in Galilee: crosscurrents of culture – ed. R. Martin Nagy, Raleigh, 1996, p. 84. 33  B. Brenk, Die Christianisierung der spätrömischen Welt: Stadt, Land, Haus, Kirche und Kloster in frühchristlicher Zeit, Wiesbaden, 2003, p. 11-12. 34  K. M.  Hattersley-smith, Byzantine public architecture between the fourth and early eleventh centuries ad, with special reference to the towns of Byzantine Macedonia, Thessalonike, 1996, p. 35-36, 198, 204-205, 235. 30 31

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sacred waters as an imitation of Baptism gave rise to the construction of buildings (baptisteries, fountains, cisterns) within or next to churches throughout the Byzantine Empire owing to the sacramental qualities of water for Christianity. In Constantinople, water constructions and in particular springs constitute a distinctive element of the city’s topography. Mango considers springs as ‘insignificant’ because they played no role in the city’s water system. 35 Springs’ lack of practical use is important especially in the case of churches dedicated to Mary, such as the Blachernai and Pege, because it points to the fact that their construction was triggered by reasons other than water provision. The significance of water in Marian monuments lies in the fact that the appearance of haghiasmata is the architectural expression of the Virgin’s purificational/healing role. Nevertheless, it is unclear in bibliography why only a number of churches dedicated to Mary were associated to water. I will suggest that selectivity towards Marian monuments in their attachment to existing water constructions in Constantinopolitan architecture is partially explained in the light of Justinian I’s interest in healing and Mary’s role as healer saint.

Churches of Mary in Constantinople Between the fifth century and the sixth century, thirteen churches dedicated to Mary existed in the Byzantine capital and some of them were built by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I next to existing water constructions: the Theotokos of Kyros (fifth century); 36 the Chalkoprateia built by Verina; 37 the basilica

35   C. Mango, ‘The Water Supply of Constantinople’, in Constantinople and its Hinterland – ed. C. Mango, G. Dagron, Aldershot, 1995, p. 10. 36 C. Mango, ‘Η Κωνσταντινούπολη ως Θεοτοκούπολη’, in Μήτηρ Θεού: Απεικονίσεις της Παναγίας στη Βυζαντινή τέχνη’ – ed. M. Vassilaki, Athens, 2000, p. 17-25, in partic. p. 18 (map) and p. 19 for the date of construction. 37 Despite the fact that Theodore Lector (sixth century) attributes it to Pulcheria, the monument was built by Verina based on Justinian I’s Nov. 31 and because Theodore’s work survives only in twelfth- and thirteenth century manuscripts. See C. Mango, ‘The Origins of the Blachernai Shrine at Constantinople’, in Acta XIII Congressus Internationalis Archaeologiae Christianae, Split-Porecˇ (25 September – 1 October 1994), 3 vols., Vatican, 1998, II, p. 66.

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of the Blachernai (fifth century, 38 renovated by Justinian), 39 Theotokos of Pege (sixth century); 40 Theotokos ta Areovindou (sixth century); 41 Theotokos of Diakonisseˉs (sixth century); Theotokos of Besson (sixth century); 42 Theotokos close to the Jobs (sixth century); 43 Theotokos of Jerusalem (sixth century); 44 Theotokos close to St Luke (sixth century); 45 Theotokos next to the Great church (sixth century); 46 the Theotokos of Lithostroto (sixth century); 47 and the Theotokos of Boukoleon (sixth century). 48 The conclusion to draw out of this list, is that a great number of churches were built or rebuilt during Justinian’s reign, but of all the abovementioned buildings only the church of Mary in Pege was built near an existing fifth-century fountain by Justinian I, 49 and the basilica of Blachernai, which accommodated a fountain, 50 was also renovated by the same Emperor. It is a fact that despite the small number of churches dedicated to Mary connected with a source of holy water, modern scholars have stressed the association of Mary with healing waters in important monuments such as the Blachernai, 51 which together with the Chalkoprateia ‘were late antique foundations which functioned as two complementary foci of the Marian cult in the capital’. 52 Maguire has suggested that the Virgin Mary 38  R. Janin, La géographie ecclésiastique de l’Empire byzantin. Le siège de Constantinople et le patriarcat oecuménique. Tome 3, Les églises et les monastères, Paris, 1969, p. 161. 39  Proc., De Aed., 1.3 – ed. E. Weber, p. 183-184. 40  ACO III – ed. E. Schwartz, p. 71, no. 52; Janin, La géographie ecclésiastique, p. 223-228. 41  Janin, La géographie ecclésiastique, p. 157. 42  Ibid., p. 160; ACO III, – ed. E. Schwartz, p. 34, no. 29. 43 Janin, La géographie ecclésiastique, p. 186; ACO III – ed. E. Schwartz, p. 143, no. 30, p. 172, no. 33. 44  ACO III – ed. E. Schwartz, p. 143, no. 32. 45   ACO III – ed. E. Schwartz, p. 71, no. 49, p. 144, no. 42 and 51; Janin, La géographie ecclésiastique, p. 195. 46  ACO III – ed. E. Schwartz, p. 27. 47  Ibid. p. 47, no. 64, p. 70, no. 44, p. 144, no. 55. 48 Janin, La géographie ecclésiastique, p. 171. 49 Proc., De Aed., 1.2. 3 – ed. E. Weber, p. 184. 50  Proc., De Aed., 1.2. 3 – ed. E. Weber, p. 183. 51 Mango, ‘Η Κωνσταντινούπολη ως Θεοτοκούπολη’, p. 23. 52  D. Krausmüller, ‘Making the Most of Mary: The Cult of the Virgin in the Chalkoprateia from Late Antiquity to the Tenth Century’, in The Cult

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was often associated with healing waters and springs and Underwood refers to haghiasmata, ‘a series of buildings in Constantinople serving a cult of the Theotokos in which a sacred spring or fountain figures prominently’. 53 Since a number of Marian monuments existed in the sixth century, how can one explain the selectivity towards placing only but a few of them next to haghiasmata? It seems that it was not quantity that mattered, which urges us to reconsider the implications of bestowing healing qualities to a Marian monument in sixth-century Constantinople.

Mary as a healer and the role of Justinian I Justinian’s building activity on Mary throughout the empire is explained as a conscious effort to establish her veneration. 54 Before proceeding to the enumeration of the churches of Mary built by the Emperor in Constantinople, Procopius verifies Justinian’s profound respect of the saint: ‘We must begin with the churches of Mary the Mother of God. For we know that this is the wish of the Emperor himself, and true reason manifestly demands that from God one must proceed to the Mother of God’. 55 Justinian cultivated the veneration of Mary by constructing churches not only in her honour but also in her mother’s in the quarter of Deuteron in Constantinople. 56 His interest in Christ’s genealogy is what according to Procopius dictated the construction of the Deuteron church: ‘For God, being born a man as was His wish, is subjected to even a third generation, and His ancestry is traced back from His mother of the Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and Images – ed. L. Brubaker, M. B. Cunningham, Aldershot, 2011, p. 224. 53   H. Maguire, ‘The cult of the Mother of God in Private’, in Μήτηρ Θεού. Απεικονίσεις της Παναγίας στη βυζαντινή τέχνη – ed. M. Vassilaki, Athens, 2000, p. 284; P. A. underwood, ‘The Fountain of Life in Manuscripts of the Gospels’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 5 (1950), p. 112. 54  Proc., De Aed., 1.3, 2.10, 5.6, 5.7, 5.8, 6.2 – ed. E. Weber, p. 184-185, 321, 325, 327, 333. 55  Eng. trans. H. B. Dewing, G. Downey, On Buildings, 7 vols., London, Cambridge, MA, VII, p. 39; for the original text, see Proc., De Aed, 1.2.3 – ed. E. Weber, p. 183-184. 56 Proc., De Aed, 1.3 – ed. E. Weber, p. 185.

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even as is that of a man’. 57 On the consecration of the church, Romanos Melodos composed a kontakion on Mary’s nativity, based on the second-century apocryphal account of the ‘Protevangelium of James’, the only source for Mary’s early life as a child with her parents. 58 By the sixth century, the ‘Protevangelium’ had inspired the commemoration of the Kathisma of Mary in Jerusalem and the dedication of a church to Mary’s mother in Costantinople, which point to the rising influence of the text in both cities. According to the ‘Protevangelium’, Anne built a haghiasma (= sanctuary) in the room where Mary spent her first three years so that Mary would not step on unclean ground. 59 Mary’s purity in the ‘Protevangelium’ is interwoven with her uncorrupted virginity expressed in church architecture as a result of her spiritual purity and healing qualities. Mary’s healing qualities appear in the Probatike a century before the dedication of her church on site, as a fifth-century manuscript from Oxyrhynchus (P.Oxy.VIII 1151) shows. According to this text, a woman named Ioannina asks from ‘the God of the probatic pool’ to heal from her illness. Ioannina’s supplication is addressed to the archangels, saints and to the Virgin. 60 In fifth-century Constantinopolitan architecture, Mary’s role as healer is also underlined: the first church dedicated to Mary in the Byzantine capital was built after Mary had cured or benefited someone, as Sozomenus tells us. 61 Justinian I further encouraged Mary’s healing qualities in Jerusalem, where an infirmary in the Nea church offered services to poor people or those suffering from diseases. 62 His interest in healing is buttressed on the sixth-century ‘loumata’ or ‘lousmata’, the ‘ritual baths performed by the diakonia in Constantinople to wash and feed the poor’, 63 his recovery   Eng. trans. Dewing, Downey, On Buildings, VII, p. 43.   Rom. Mel., Cant. – ed. P. Maas, C. A. Trypanis, p. 276. 59  Jac., Protev., 6.1-2 (SH, 33, p. 90). 60 C. Wessely, ‘Les plus anciens monuments du Christianisme, Amulettes chrétiennes’ (PO, 18, 418-419). 61   Sozom., Hist. Eccl., 7.5 (SC, 516, p. 86). 62 Proc., De Aed, 5.6 – ed. E. Weber, p. 323-324. 63  P. Magdalino, Constantinople médiévale : études sur l’évolution des structures urbaines, Paris, 1996, p. 33-36. 57 58

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from a serious disease credited to the healer saints Kosmas and Damian, 64 and, as it will be shown below, on his regard of Mary’s parents – and Anne in particular – as healer saints. Mary’s association with ‘haghiasmata’ in Constantinople was based on the notion that she was considered healer saint both in Jerusalem and Constantinople, a role she had acquired already before Justinian, who further developed this notion. A twelfth-century text of the Iviron monastery on the construction of the fifth-century church of the Virgin ta Kyrou points to an additional factor that needs to be considered when discussing Mary and haghiasmata, which is the role of her mother as healer. The text reads: ‘Having been cured in the church of Kyros, Justinian did not construct a new building but dedicated next to it one church of St Anne, the grandmother of Christ’. 65 Mary and her mother appear as healers of the Emperor, who made a gesture of thankfulness by constructing a church of Anne next to an existing one of Mary. This reference introduces us to two elements, Anne’s healing role and the placement of her church next to one dedicated to her daughter. These two tendencies are already attested in the sixth century. In the basilica of the Sinai monastery, which, as Procopius tells us, was dedicated to Mary, 66 two chapels were constructed on its southern side, one for Sts Anne and Joachim and one for Sts Kosmas and Damian. 67 This dedication shows that Anne and Joachim are vested the role of Sts Anargyroi that according to Procopius had saved the Emperor from a serious illness. Sixth-century creation of sacred spaced tells us what texts of the time do not: Mary’s parents were regarded by Justinian as healer saints, which dictated the construction of the Deuteron church and the chapel in Sinai because he was personally inclined towards healer saints and Mary’s parents were considered as such.

 Poc., De Aed., 1.6, 2.10. 6 – ed. E. Weber, p. 193-194, 242.   M. Gedeon, Εκκλησίαι βυζαντιναί εξακριβούμεναι (κυρίως η Θεοτόκος των Κύρου), Συμπλήρωμα του Βυζαντινού Εορτολογίου, Constantinople, 1900, p. 134.  66 Proc., De Aed., 5.8 – ed. E. Weber, p. 327. 67  G. H.  Forsyth, ‘The Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai: The Church and Fortress of Justinian’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 22 (1968), fig. 2, no. O. 64 65

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Whether Justinian was successful or not in giving concrete substance to the association of Mary and Anne in particular to healing, post-sixth century topography suggests he was. We know that by the tenth century a chapel of Anne had been constructed at the church of Mary in Pege, 68 and at the same time one in the Chalkoprateia, where the feast of Anne’s Conception (of Mary) was celebrated, 69 and included a fifthcentury baptistery, 70 and that by the twelfth century, a church of St Anne had been built in the Hodegetria. 71 These churches, which are all haghiasmata and they were known for healing illnesses, repeated the formula of the Probatike, the placement of Anne’s next to Mary (through birth), healing and – in the case of the Chalkoprateia – they celebrate an event of Mary’s early life. The placing of a church of Mary and of Anne next to each other was practiced also in the Deuteron church sometime before the tenth century, as the ‘Synaxarium of Constantinople’ writes under September 6: ‘Consecration of (the church of) the Theotokos in the church of Anne in the Deuteron’. 72 The ‘Synaxarium’ either tells us what Procopius does not, or marks a post-Justinianic evolution, suggested in this paper, according to which a church of St Anne was incorporated or attached to the existing church of Mary. This explains why not all Marian ‘haghiasmata’ are characterized by this model, and only some of the most significant ones such as the churches of Pege, the Chalkoprateia and the Hodegetria are witnesses to this development. To sum up, the connection of Mary with healing waters in Jerusalem and Constantinople was an ideological entity expressed in religious architecture, which gave concrete form to the tradition of Mary’s birth as a result of Biblical exegesis and the spread of the ‘Protevangelium’. Both Jerusalem and Constantinople 68  AASS, Nov. 3, col. 879C, 883D – ed. Society of Bollandists, Brussels, 1910. 69   Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae.  Propylaeum ad Acta sanctorum Novembris – ed. H. Delehaye, Brussels, 1902, p. 291. 70 Janin, La géographie ecclésiastique, p. 166. 71  K. Horna, ‘Die Epigramme des Theodoros Balsamon’, Wiener Studien, 25 (1903), p. 190, no. xxviii. 72  Synaxarium ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae – ed. Delehaye, p. 20.

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promoted Christ’s forbearers and established the cult of Mary through aquatic connotations attached to her healing qualities in a time when the cult of Mary was rising in both cities. Justinian, recognizing the rising cult of the Virgin and influenced by his interest in healing saints and the creation of sacred space, introduced into Constantinopolitan topography a model, according to which a church of St Anne was attached to one of Mary in the proximity of healing water. The Probatike played significant role in the introduction and further development of the connection between the healing attributes of water, Mary and St Anne in the Byzantine capital from the sixth century onwards, because Justinian ‘rebuilt’ the model of the Probatike according to his personal inclination to healing, which in turn is placed in the the wider influence of healing on sacred space in Constantinople especially from the sixth century onwards. The church in the Probatike is crucial in this development since it is the first monument where this tradition becomes concrete.

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Abstract The Virgin Mary was from the sixth century associated with the Probatic Pool, a church dedicated to her in Jerusalem. The fact that the church was dedicated in the fifth century to the healing of the Paralytic (the miracle performed by Jesus and which we know from the Gospel of John) and then to Mary, set the ideological background for associating Mary and her mother Anne with healing qualities, which in the topography of Constantinople is expressed in the connection of Mary to holy waters (haghiasmata). The article addresses the elements that formed this development and discusses factors that influenced Constantinopolitan architecture from the sixth century onwards.

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