Tag: Information access

Possible short works to translate from the Greek Fathers

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve now finished reading all the way through the 3rd volume of Quasten’s Patrology, looking for shortish works that would be interesting to turn into English and post online.  Here’s a digest.  I haven’t yet looked at any of the refs given.

  • Acacius of Beroea.  The literary remains of this contemporary of Cyril of Alexandria comprise 6 letters in all; PG 77, 99-102; PG 84, 647-8 + 658-660; and PG 41, 156 f.  No translations of any sort were listed, but apparently one of the letters is addressed to Cyril, recommending peace.  There are also 5 Syriac hymns which praise Acacius.  A German translation of these was published in the BKV 2nd ed. vol. 6 (1912), p. 71-89.
  • Hesychius mostly wrote long commentaries, but a fragment of his church history exists, in a Latin version, which was printed by Mansi, vol. 9, p. 248f.  This I would definitely like to do.  Mansi seems to be online at the Documenta Catholica Omnia site.
  • A bunch of letters by Nestorius exist, listed on Quasten p.518, including one written towards the end of his life to the people of Constantinople which is described as “interesting”.
  • The fragments of the Church History of Philip of Side, a contemporary of Chrysostom, are very short and definitely deserve attention.
  • Another bit of Mansi, vol. 7, p.187, describes the trials of Theodoret at the time of Chalcedon.  This needs to be looked at.

When I get a chance, I’ll look into all these further.

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More digging in Quasten

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’m still reading through Quasten’s Patrology volume 3, looking for interesting texts which might be translated.  A few more have caught my eye.

It seems that Epiphanius of Salamis, author of the Panarion, also wrote three works attacking the veneration of images.  He became concerned that people were putting up such images in the churches, pagan-style.  These are extant (more or less). K. Holl, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte, vol. 2 (1928), pp.356-363.  I wasn’t able to find this online, unfortunately.

Theodore of Mopsuestia on Genesis I have mentioned before.  I admit that I am still drawn to this.  Likewise I need to remember to do something about the remains of Philip of Side.

Another snippet from Quasten relates to Diodore of Tarsus.  During the reign of Julian the Apostate he resisted the attempts at re-paganisation.  In a rage Julian wrote an angry letter to one Photinus describing Diodore as “a priest sorceror of the Galileans” and “a keen defender of a religion for farmers” who was defending the Christians with “the wisdom of Athens itself”.  Erudite Christians always tend to infuriate Christian-haters.  The letter is preserved by Facundus of Hermiane (who?), Pro defens. trium capit. 4, 2.  I am unfamiliar with this work, but the letter sounds like something that should be online, and does not seem to be. 

I wonder if the letter is present in the Loeb Julian?  I always hesitated to scan material from these, not least because I am very much in favour of the Loeb Library, and the volumes are still in print.  But now that PDF’s are online there seems little reason to hold back.

The letter is indeed in the Loeb edition of Julian the Apostate, volume 3, on p.186, which also tells us that Diodore was in Antioch in 362.

This letter may have been written at any time between Julian’s arrival at Antioch in July 362 and his departure thence, in March 363. The Greek original is represented by curious and sometimes untranslatable Latin. Photinus, bishop of Sirmium, where Constantius resided in 351, was tried, deposed and banished by a synod convened there by Constantius. According to Sozomen 4. 6, he wrote many Greek and Latin works in support of his heretical views on the divinity of Christ, which were opposed by both Arians and Nicaeans. He is mentioned by Julian, Against the Galilieans 262c.

Moreover the Emperor Julian, faithless to Christ, in his attack on Diodorus writes as follows to Photinus the heresiarch:

O Photinus, you at any rate seem to maintain what is probably true, and come nearest to being saved, and do well to believe that he whom one holds to be a god can by no means be brought into the womb. But Diodorus, a charlatan priest of the Nazarene, when he tries to give point to that nonsensical theory about the womb by artifices and juggler’s tricks, is clearly a sharp-witted sophist of that creed of the country-folk.

A little further on he says:

But if only the gods and goddesses and all the Muses and Fortune will lend me their aid, I hope to show that he is feeble and a corrupter of laws and customs, of pagan * Mysteries and Mysteries of the gods of the underworld, and that that new-fangled Galilaean god of his, whom he by a false myth styles eternal, has been stripped by his humiliating death and burial of the divinity falsely ascribed to him by Diodorus.

Then, just as people who are convicted of error always begin to invent, being the slaves of artifice rather than of truth, he goes on to say:

For the fellow sailed to Athens to the injury of the general welfare, then rashly took to philosophy and engaged in the study of literature, and by the devices of rhetoric armed his hateful tongue against the heavenly gods, and being utterly ignorant of the Mysteries of the pagans he so to speak imbibed most deplorably the whole mistaken folly of the base and ignorant creed-making fishermen. For this conduct he has long ago been punished by the gods themselves. For, for many years past, he has been in danger, having contracted a wasting disease of the chest, and lie now suffers extreme torture. His whole body has wasted away. For his cheeks have fallen in and his body is deeply lined with wrinkles. But this is no sign of philosophic habits, as he wishes it to seem to those who are deceived by him, but most certainly a sign of justice done and of punishment from the gods which has stricken him down in suitable proportion to his crime, since he must live out to the very end his painful and bitter life, his appearance that of a man pale and wasted.

* Twice in this letter Facundus translates Julian’s “Hellenic” as “pagan.”

Interesting that this Photinus was currying favour with Julian.  We tend to think of the corrupt bishop as a modern figure, but of course it is not so.

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Smiling men with bad reputations

Posted on by Roger Pearse

… Or so the Arians must have thought!  Yes, it’s the Cappadocian Fathers.  These are the group of clergymen who turned the tide against Arianism in the mid-4th century; Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzen.

Less well known are some of their associates, such as Amphilochius.  I’ve been looking at his works with an eye to seeing whether any of them are (a) short and (b) untranslated.

One interesting text is the Iambics for Seleucus (PG 37, 1577-1600).  This is a set of moral advice to a friend, composed in verse form, and ending with a recommendation to study the scriptures and a list of canonical books.  There is a poor translation of the latter here – the portion of Hebrews misrepresents what Amphilochius writes.

I understand that a critical text of all the works of Amphilochius was made by C. Datema, Amphilochii Iconiensis Opera, CCSG 3 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1978).  I don’t know whether any translation of the Iambics exists, tho; I could find none.

Another interesting text was published in Leipzig in 1906 by Gerhard Ficker in his Amphilochiana, I., p.23-77, Against the Apotactites and Gemellites.  Quasten says this is a Coptic version, but it seems to be a mistake; there is a Greek text, and then another work on Isaac, presented in German translation only of a Coptic text.  Who the people attacked in the former are I do not know, but they seem to be ascetic or perhaps encratite heretics.  Thankfully Ficker’s book is online here.

Asterius of Amasea was another of the Cappadocian Fathers.  Fourteen homilies survive, and the same Datema made an edition with English notes (but no translation!) here.  The edition appeared from Brill in 1970, who have put online a limited preview.  It is a pity that they didn’t make the whole book available.  Five of his fourteen homilies are online in English at my site.

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A work of Athanasius extant in English, possibly out of copyright

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I was reading Quasten’s Patrology vol. 3, looking for interesting untranslated texts, when I came across (p.57-8) mention of a work of Athanasius on the Holy Spirit, consisting of four letters to bishop Serapion of Thmuis.  Quasten lists an English translation: C. R. B. Shapland, trans., The Letters of Saint Athanasius Concerning the Holy Spirit, Ad Serapion (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1951).

The subject is probably dull, but a US publication of that date may be out of copyright, unless the copyright was renewed after 28 years.  So I thought it was worth checking.  And … I can find no evidence of a copyright renewal.  “Shapland” is quite an unusual name, after all.  “Athanasius” is going to get a limited number of hits in any database.

By contrast the Tertullian / Minucius Felix in the “Fathers of the Church” series (1950) turns up as renewed in 1978 in this database.

A look in COPAC reveals that “Shapland” was Cuthbert Richard Bowden Shapland, but no dates for his life.  (The copyright system outside the US demands that we know the biography of the author, absurdly enough). The book is 204 pages, and Shapland’s last date of publication was a volume of sermons in 1957 – but this was edited by someone else, and was probably posthumous.

A search for the name on Ancestry.com reveals a man of that name born 1907, died 1952.  There is a picture of a young clergyman there.  This is likely to be the same man, and the dates are right.  If so, his books goes out of copyright outside the US in 2022 (1952+70).

What a performance, just to find out the status of a long defunct book!

So … are any copies available for sale?  Not that I can find.  Hum!

Well, I’ve placed an ILL for it instead.

Update: (3rd September 2021): Eleven years later, a kind correspondent writes that C. R. B. Shapland, trans., The Letters of Saint Athanasius Concerning the Holy Spirit, Ad Serapion (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1951), is online here:

https://archive.org/details/TheLettersOfSaintAthanasiusConcerningTheHolySpirit

Excellent news!

I wonder whatever happened to that ILL?

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Parker library on the web… or rather, not

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A BBC News item caught my eye.

One of the most important collections of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts – for centuries kept at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge – has been entirely digitised, and is now available on the internet.

The college’s Parker Library holds more than 550 documents – including the 6th Century St Augustine Gospels, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the earliest history written in English.

Sounds exciting, hey?

Well, it isn’t.  True, the manuscripts have been photographed.  True the images are web-connected.  But no, you can’t see them.  All you can see is low-resoltution images where the text is too fuzzy to read.  All the indexes, list of contents, are all locked.

Why not?  Well, just guess.  That’s right — money money money.  They want to be paid.

Corpus Christi College consumes substantial quantities of public money each year.  It is, in theory, a private institution.  In practice it is almost entirely reliant on the tax payer.  There is something a little distasteful about a body so hugely privileged for centuries, indeed from the time of Henry VIII on, engaged in trying to charge the man in the street for access. 

Whether what they are doing is immoral I do not know.  But it does compare very unfavourably with Google books, Google streetview, Google mail, with the GPS satellite navigation… the list of US-based generosity could go on indefinitely.  If those items had been UK-based, they would all be charging for access.

I don’t want to pillory those involved.  But I feel sadness all the same.  It feels so small-minded, so ignoble, to prevent the ordinary man from reading the pages.  It’s not as if anyone but institutions will ever subscribe anyway.

The gentlemen of Corpus of a previous generation would have considered such money-grabbing ungentlemanly.  It is a pity that Corpus today, for whatever reason, does not feel the same.

The website is here, for all the use it is.

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Wace, Dictionary of Christian Biography, in Wikisource

Posted on by Roger Pearse

While creating a basic Wikipedia article on the Arian bishop Patrophilus of Scythopolis I stumbled across the fact that someone has placed a scanned version of Wace’s Dictionary of Christian Biography to the end of the Sixth Century in Wikisource.  This is invaluable for obscure patristic writers, as every statement tends to be referenced to the primary sources.  The article on Eusebius of Emesa was useful; all the ‘E’ writers are here.

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Yet more treasures at Archive.org

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The pace of additions at Google books shows no sign of slowing, and the indexing at Archive.org is becoming an increasingly valuable way to find out what exists. 

This is particularly so for non-US searchers.  The Google book search does not work very well if you are outside the US; it does not return the same list of results, even.  Even if it does work, the results do not distinguish between “no PDF available” and “no PDF available to you, foreigner”.  The Archive.org search works for everyone, even if in some cases the PDF is at Google.

This evening I was looking for editions of Stobaeus, the 5th century Eastern Roman compiler of extracts from ancient authors.  Quite a few of his extracts are witty, and turn up in collections of Greek wit.  I found a four-volume edition by Thomas Gaisford in 1822-4, and parts of one by Meineke in 1855.  I was rather impressed by the list of results.  This set me to doing some searches, just to see what was there.

First I searched for “Moralia in Job”.  This is a massive work by Pope Gregory I, which was translated into English once — only — by the Oxford Movement translators.  It filled six of their capacious Library of the Fathers volumes.  Such vastness was quite beyond my powers.  I was delighted to find that four of the volumes came up.

Then I searched for “Cyril of Alexandria”.  This gave many more results than it ever did before.  In particular the multi-volume edition of his works by Philip Pusey, made in Oxford in the 1870’s, appeared.  So did the English translation of both  volumes of the Commentary on John, also in the Library of the Fathers series. 

The second volume of the latter is a phenomenally rare work, issued in 1884, 30 years after most of the volumes had appeared, a decade after the first volume had been met with catcalls, and four years after E.B.Pusey, the last of the original editors and founder of the series, had died.  Hardly any of the subscribing libraries ever knew about it or bought it.  I myself obtained a photocopy from the generous people at Glasgow University Library many years ago, scanned it and placed it online.  I never thought to see another copy.  Now anyone can see it.

There is much to grumble about in our days — much, indeed, to give any liberal-minded man great alarm.  But it’s worth reminding ourselves of how blessed we are, of how much Google has done for us all.  All this vast wealth, freely given — it’s hard to imagine such a thing.  I had to pay for the copies from GUL — and pay handsomely.  Material that is offline is still regarded as a source of profit by libraries.  But we … we can just download a PDF of so much! 

Let us give thanks to God that educated book-loving people like ourselves live in such fortunate times for people like us!

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Copyfraud once more

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Today I received an email from a Romanian gentleman, asking about the translation of the lost passage by John Chrysostom from Oratio 2 adversus Judaeos, which I commissioned and then gave away recently.  He wanted to make a translation into Romanian.  So he asked what I paid the journal, in which Wendy Pradels published the Greek text with notes and German translation, for permission to have that English translation made.  I replied that I paid them nothing; there was no money in all this, and any claim to own a text by a man dead 16 centuries might be valid in some benighted lands but hardly in the USA. 

But it led me to muse on the likelihood that any academic publisher would try to sue out a claim to copyright in such a case.  It would hardly be sensible, in my opinion; why sue over what has no commercial value?  

While in bath, tho, my sense of humour took hold, and I took to wondering what questions one could ask in court.  Copyright only vests in “original, creative works.”  So…

“M’Lud, can the plaintiff tell us which specifically which words in the first line are NOT by John Chrysostom?”

“Would you give us a list of the differences between the text printed and the text composed in 400 AD by John Chrysostom?  If you cannot list the portions which are an original creative work by yourselves, on what possible grounds can you claim that any of it is by you?”

“Would you tell us what the commercial value of this item was, when you purchased — as you believed — the copyright from the scholarly author?  Did you pay any money at all for it?”

And so on.

I suspect, sadly, that courts are unimpressed by rhetoric  unless it involves clever points of law.   The layman who ventures into these waters does so at his peril, and indeed few of us ever do so unless cornered.  As Auberon Waugh remarked, from bitter experience, “He who goes to court places himself in the hands of a ring of grinning rascals who will all run up costs as fast as they can until somebody has to pay.” 

It’s probably easier and safer just to meet the plaintiff, shake hands with him, and then pitch him head first out of his office window, “accidental-like”.  Would the fines for so doing be at all likely to reach the charges that any law firm would demand?

The serious point behind all this is that the relentless march of commercial interests taking a yard where the law granted an inch has reached the point of absurdity.  Only the common sense exercised by publishers in the anglophone world is restraining them from foolishness of the sort feared by our Romanian friend; and outside that sunlit circle of generosity and mutual respect, there have been many examples of insane greed.  We need to push back. 

Genuine creative work should be protected by copyright, for the benefit of us all.  Attempts to own the work of the ancients, by one subterfuge or another, should not exist in a civilised land.

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Bootlegging the Theodosian code

Posted on by Roger Pearse

One of the texts that is not online and really should be is the legal compedium assembled in the reign of Theodosius II in 450 AD and known as the Theodosian code or Codex Theodosianus. 

The work was compiled from earlier collections of imperial edicts, or rescripts as they were known.  These took the form of a letter from the emperor to some official, usually a proconsul or prefect.  The compilation provided a systematic list of things proscribed or permitted.

The work was translated by a certain Clyde Pharr back in 1954 for Princeton University Press.  That means that it could be out of copyright in the US; unfortunately it is not.

The most interesting portion of the code is the last book.   This consists of the rescripts on religious matters issued by Constantine and his successors, which progressively made Christianity a privileged religion, then the state religion, and then prohibited other religions aside from Judaism.  The tone of these rescripts is often violent, as is often the case with the edicts of later emperors.  Pharr’s introduction points out rescripts which indicate the powerlessness of these emperors, and their repeated and futile attempts by ever heavier penalties to get their will enacted by the imperial bureaucracy.

Such interesting material is always likely to find its way online in unauthorised form.  Today I found a site with a substantial chunk of that book 15 here.  I’m not sure whether it is complete, tho.

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Chrysostom against the Jews — online copies

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Once we have a final version of the missing portion of Chrysostom against the Jews, I need to make sure that it is added to the copies of the defective text that are around online.  Of course that means I need to know where they are.  A google search provided quite a few links:

The first is undoubtedly the most important; many of the others derive from it.   But I have yet to visit most of these.

Some of the more unusual sites in this list — and there are a few — can be difficult to communicate with, as their authors are either very eccentric or have developed a well-grounded fear of entrapment by their political enemies.   I cannot say that I am looking forward to the task of writing to all these sites and asking them to add the missing passage to sermon 2.  Doubtless some will ignore my email.

But unless we do this, unless we reunite the lost portion of the text with all the copies we can find, we may be wasting our time.  We cannot be certain which copy of the text will be the ancestor of all the copies to reach the year 3,000 AD.  In so many cases, we know that a single copy ca. 800 AD is the ancestor of all our current copies of a text.  To fail to reunite the severed texts may be tantamount to wasting the rediscovery.

Our duty to the future dictates that the effort must be made.  Once I have the final version, I will make that effort.  Not because I agree or disagree with the sites above; but because we cannot tell which of them may provide the future with the text of Chrysostom.

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