Tag: Methodius

Today I am quite pleased to be able – at long last! – to upload the first English translation of De Vita, On Life and Rational Action, by Methodius of Olympus.

The translation was made by Ralph Cleminson, from the unpublished Old Slavonic text, which alone has survived.  This was accessed using the online images of manuscript 40 of the Holy Trinity-St Sergius Lavra in Russia.

Here it is:

• Methodius-De_Vita_2015 (PDF)
• Methodius-De_Vita_2015 (Word .doc)

I have also made the files available at Archive.org here.

As usual, I make these files and their contents public domain.  Do whatever you like with them, personal, educational or commercial.

We all owe Dr Cleminson a debt of thanks.  I have also asked him to translate some more Methodius, and he has agreed in principle.  The next one is likely to be De cibis.

Some of the works of Methodius of Olympus (d. 311 AD) no longer exist in Greek.  But an unpublished Old Slavonic version of a few does exist.  Recently a couple of manuscripts of this appeared online on a Russian site; and a little while ago I commissioned a translation of “On life and rational activity”.

Last night I received the translation and it seems fine.  I have sent off a cheque for it today – unusually, in these days of instant funds transfer – but of course I shan’t put it online until the money has reached the translator, and it becomes mine and, therefore, public domain as usual.

The sermon – for such it is – is well adapted to these present days of uncertainty.  The actual Slavonic is rather corrupt, and somewhat awkward at points, but the work is still comprehensible.  The translator has stated as his opinion that the corruption is probably older than all the exemplars.

This evening I shall look at the other sermons by Methodius, and do some calculations of word counts, and see if perhaps we can get some more of these translated too.

I wonder if there is an index or clavis of Old Slavonic literature, like that for Greek in the Clavis Patrum Graecorum?  I always like to reference such indices if they exist.

This evening I emailed a correspondent, asking if he knew someone who might translate some works by Methodius out of Russian.  Knowledge of Old Slavonic would be good; and the translator must be a native English speaker, and familiar with Christian jargon.  I’ve had rough experiences when these last two were not present!

The enquiry may or may not produce results, but if not, I have another possible translator in mind.

I left work at 3:30pm this afternoon, to travel to Cambridge University Library.  Not, I might add, in order to use the books, but rather to perform a CETEDOC search of Latin literature for uses of the phrase “Sanguis eius super nos et super filios nostros” – “His blood be upon us, and upon our children.”  Yes, it’s Matthew 27:25 again.

It took me almost 45 minutes to drive the 3 miles in question, thanks to the selfish attitude of those who control the roads policy of Cambridge council – which, I imagine, is the immensely rich, powerful and successful university that fills its town centre.  It took a similar time to get back.  The ill-maintained roads have received negligible care in 20 years, to my certain knowledge, and are full-to-bursting.  The university profits enormously from the economic activity that Cambridge enjoys; but invests none of it in the amenities of the town.

These same selfish people insist that an external reader like myself make that journey in order to use the electronic databases.  They can be used from anywhere, if you have a login; but they force ordinary people like me to physically travel there.  I grudge the hours of my life that these people stole from me.  May Minos sentence them to the fate of Sisyphus.

Anyway I performed the search, and saved the results in PDF for later investigation, and checked – of course – that it had saved.  I then did the search again, this time with a date range on it (to the end of the 5th century), and curiously the results were different.  Tertullian only turned up in the second search.  Anyway I saved the results of that search too, but didn’t check it.

Imagine, therefore, my rage on discovering just now that the PDF from the second search did not save the results; and merely saved the query parameters!  I lost two hours of my life for that; and, to get it again, I will have to endure the misery of that journey once more: all because of the selfishness of people who could perfectly well allow me access, but choose not to.

I’m not going to rage about how these databases are all paid for by me, through my taxes.  Instead let me observe something else which amused me rather.

A few weeks ago I advised the library to obtain the English translation of Eusebius of Caesarea’s Commentary on Isaiah.  Earlier this week I received notice that they had purchased the eBook.  So I went to look for it while I was there.

I was a little surprised to find that I couldn’t simply download a PDF.  Rather I was subjected to a horrible proprietary interface, which officiously told me that I could read n pages, or print m pages (the two numbers not being identical, of course).  I struggled with the thing a while, and then simply gave up.  A paper book could be used, but this was impossible.

I then looked at another “eBook”, three treatises of Cyril of Alexandria, in the Fathers of the Church series, and found the same idea.  Again I just gave up.  Give me a paper book rather than this.

Fortunately DeGruyter, in their GCS series, don’t do this, and I was able to get hold of the Greek text at least of this work, so that I can work out where the supposed reference to Acts 4:10 might be.

But the other two made me laugh.  I mean… these guys have already been paid, right?  The library has sloshed money at them, for access to the book.  But these creeps are so concerned about not getting paid even more, by people who might, like, save a copy, that they make all kinds of difficulties.  I found, in fact, that the expensive access that CUL give their readers gave me very little.

I also noted a sign of the times.  The CETEDOC database was in the Brepols online site.  But not even the world’s number two university could afford to purchase all of the options!  The Patrologia Orientalis collection was not available.

All this nonsense is only temporary, of course.  The racket whereby material produced by state-funded academics is then sold back to the state-funded universities at an extortionate price must collapse soon.

But I still feel sore about those hours on the road.  If the library was open later, I might drive over in the evening.  But it is only open from 9.00-19:15.

What I did find was some 68 references to that verse in Latin writers before 500 AD.  Some I already have.  But there were a number in voluminous commentaries in Latin.  These were mostly by Jerome, and it is interesting to see that most of these are untranslated.  How is it that, in 2015, the commentaries of Jerome remain untranslated?

All in all, therefore, it was a productive evening.

I have written before on Methodius of Olympus (d. 311 AD), and how some of his works survive only in an Old Slavonic translation.  This week I scanned the preface of the Russian translation by E. Lovyagin (1905).  It proved to be in a pre-revolutionary spelling, but a kind correspondent modernised this for me, so that I could use Google Translate and see what the author had to say.  Here is the Russian text of the preface:

• Methodius_Works_Loviagin_1905_edited (.rtf)

There is no evidence of the use of Old Slavonic sources, and the title page makes plain that this is from the Greek.  Lovyagin seems to have taken the edition of Jahn – which assembled rather more Greek fragments than were accessible to the Ante-Nicene Fathers translators – and translated it into Russian.  In fact a commenter on this post, discussing the table of contents, makes the same point.

Mikhail Chub in 1961 and 1964 did use manuscripts in his articles for Богословский труды (Bogoslovski Trudy – archive of these now online here).  Two of these mss are now online here.

I had forgotten that, back in 2011, I obtained PDFs of these, which I can no longer locate; and translated Michael Chub’s preface and placed it here; and that I tried to get a translation made from a GCS edition of Methodius on Leprosy, using a commercial German translator, but unsuccessfully.  But I still want to attack this material.

Perhaps the way forward is to get translations made of Michael Chub’s Russian translations.  They are relatively short, and deserve attention.  It is helpful that the articles can now be downloaded in PDF form.