Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
I uploaded a list of the works of Severian of Gabala here. I’ve worked on it a bit more since, and revised versions are now available:
I don’t seem to have done anything on these for a week, so best to park them here!
UPDATE: Newer version here.
Severian of Gabala (fl. 398 AD) was the enemy of John Chrysostom, patriarch of Constantinople, and assisted in driving the latter into exile and to his death. The disagreement between them was not ideological, but arose from perceived snubs by John’s officials. It seems that the patriarchal officialdom created enemies for Chrysostom faster than he could deal with them, since Severian was by no means the only one offended in this way.
St. John Chrysostom is perhaps the most important of the Greek fathers. So it is not surprising that the Greek church does not remember Severian. Our accounts of the affair are all written from a pro-Chrysostom perspective. In that age, as today, personal smears are the main weapon used against an enemy, so it is important to note that nothing really damaging could be found to say about him.
All the same, his works have been neglected. This is not surprising. For everyone has their own special interests, which will dispose them to listen, or not, to a writer. Severian manages to be outside the area of sympathy for almost everyone involved in patristics, in the past and now.
Firstly, scholars interested in Orthodoxy will see him the enemy of the greatest of their saints.
Roman Catholics will feel the same, to a lesser degree. So he won’t really get a hearing for himself.
Secularists will – and do! – don’t believe in the bible, and so sneer at him for his literal-minded Antiochene exegesis.
So who, precisely, will read him with an open mind?
Fortunately there is today a constituency which might. Modern bible-believing Christians with an interest in patristics are not invested in any of these biases. Which means that, other things being equal, we may hope for a fairly unbiased evaluation of this ancient writer, untroubled by theological odium.
I have mentioned before that IVP Academic, from this background, has arranged to publish his six sermons on Genesis. It is my intention to review this translation, and to review what Severian has to say. On the face of it his interpretation is bonkers; but at least I won’t have any a priori reason not to listen.
This is why it is really useful to have a variety of religious and political outlooks in academia. It means that obscure writers who appeal to no-one may find a partisan, and be edited, translated and commentated; in short, become accessible to us all.
I’m even grateful for all the ex-hippies working on the Nag Hammadi texts. They may be a bit daft, and their “conclusions” best explicable as the product of chemical-induced brain damage; but the fact is that nothing on earth would have induced any sensible person – alright, very few – to spend the huge amounts of time on these daft gnostic texts that they have felt inclined to do. In consequence, we are all the gainer.
Which is rather nice, really.
Severian, if you’re up there, you owe me a beer when we meet.
While working on the bibliography of Severian of Gabala, I came across a 1952 paper by A. Wenger in which he publishes, with French translation, a portion of Severian’s homily on Epiphany.[1] I thought that it might be good to give this here in English.
So great is the light, so great is the beauty that makes the Church shine! And so shines also, in the same way, the perfect crown of empire, worthy of the crown of the empire, which God has given to the world, the good offspring, the flower on a good tree.
In speaking thus, I mean both the brothers and the harmony of the empire, which verifies the words, ” The brother who helps his brother is like a strong city, and as a fortified palace” and “These are the two anointed sons of that blessing which brought near the Lord all the earth,” flowers of piety, supporting the Truth, the ramparts of the Church, since Christ took over the empire.
I see the offspring with the root, I see the blessed emperor bright among his children. Because his glory is not dead. It is among the righteous. For the just, says the Scripture, leave a memory (eternal).
I see him shine through (his) living image . I consider what came before and I tremble: how everywhere the spectre of war is dissipated by the faith of the great emperor .
This faith of the father is the rampart of the children of the empire. God who has watched over the emperor, watch over the fruit of this noble root!
Pray, brethren, that the flames of faith are preserved, the bulwark of the Church!
Let no-one think that this is a speech of flattery. This is the truth. Yes, God uses men as a bulwark of the Church. Absolutely. Do not you know that after having given great things to men, God asks little things of us?
He gave the manna in the desert, and he asks the priests for bread, saying: “You shall set out a table in my presence.” He gave a pillar of fire and he said: “Place a lamp before me.”
You make so great a source of light, and you ask for a lamp, so that, by the blessings that I receive, I pay tribute to your generosity, and so you, by the gifts that you offer, fill up your desire for recognition. May we, brethren, fully enlightened, give glory to God most holy . To him be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
— St. Severian , on Epiphany.
This seems clearly to address Arcadius, soon after the death of Theodosius I.
The reference at the end to divine blessings has rather the sound of a man hoping for a handout from the emperor, doesn’t it?!
Severian of Gabala (fl. ca. 398 AD) was the enemy of John Chrysostom. A popular preacher at the court of Constantinople, where he preached in a pleasant Syrian accent, and favoured by the empress, he was among the various people slighted or snubbed by John Chrysostom’s officials. In consequence he became an enemy, and was one of those responsible for driving Chrysostom into exile, and ultimately to his death.
His works, ironically, have been preserved under Chrysostom’s name. They consist of exegetical sermons. Most famous among them are the six – possibly seven – homilies on Genesis 1-3, in which he takes an odd position, later advanced by Cosmas Indicopleustes. I translated homily 1 and placed it on my site; but never got any further. His position is sometimes described as “extreme literalism”; whether this is really so seems doubtful to me.
I discovered today that an upcoming English translation by Robert C. Hill was in fact published back in 2010, and is available here, at a price that seems entirely reasonable by comparison with some volumes that I have seen lately. I hope to review this volume at some point.
It has been my ambition for some time to get some of his other homilies translated. In particular I have made a number of attempts to commission a translation of De pace, “On peace”, delivered after the end of Chrysostom’s first exile and at a time of reconciliation. I have this week made another attempt at this.
But it isn’t trivial simply to know what works Severian wrote. For my own reference, therefore, I have started a Word document with a list, basing it on the Clavis Patrum Graecorum. The file is here:
UPDATE: Please use the versions here.
I will work on this some more and revise it and add more material.
But there are quite a few homilies there which are only 3-4 columns of Migne. Is there anyone interested in and capable of translating them for me, from Greek into English, for money? If so, please drop me a line, using this form here.
Severian of Gabala, the enemy of John Chrysostom, has left around 60 homilies to us, some in Greek, preserved under his enemy’s name, and others in Armenian or other languages. Much of this material is unpublished, and nearly all of it is untranslated. Being rather obscure, it can be hard to get a handle on the material.
Today I found two articles by Robert E. Carter in JSTOR, which help quite a lot. The first discusses the chronology of the homilies, and identifies 20 which can be dated to 400 or 401 A.D.[1] This gives an overview of Severian’s life, and also a useful bibliography. The reader is referred by Dr. Carter to an article by Sever Voicu for details of Severian’s life and works, and I wish it were accessible to me.[2]
But it also refers back to an earlier article, which sets out an index of scriptural references in Severian’s sermons.[3] This also gives a list of Severian’s homilies on p.324-6, which is more up-to-date than the CPG list. Some of the unpublished items listed in the CPG now seem to have appeared.
I’m not sure who without JSTOR access would find this list of raw texts useful, but perhaps a list of Severian’s works, modified for a more general readership, ought to appear online.
I’m having some fun using Google translate to allow me to browse the online Slavonic manuscripts of the Russian State Library. Occasionally the results are comic: “Number 140. The Psalter of St. sensible” made me smile, although it is combined with a text by Athanasius.
The manuscripts are those of the Moscow Theological Seminary, the Trinity-Sergius Lavra. I think we should thank the RSL for putting all these images online!
The start of the collection is here, starting with 3 mss called “Gospel” and then 4 more labelled “Apostle”. The next 3 are Psalms. A bit further on are three copies in Slavic of the works of Dionysius the Areopagite, closely followed by some copies of Basil the Great on Fasting.
Number 32 looks interesting — is that actually Severian of Gaballa on the six days of creation? “Six days Severian bishop Gavalskogo”? That must be his sermons on Genesis. Who knew that these existed in Slavic?
Then the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, a John Damascene, Ephraim Syrus, and the Ladder of John Climacus.
No. 63 is also Severian. No 75 is Cosmas Indicopleustes. No. 100 is the Annals of George Hamartolus. No 102 is Cosmas Indicopleustes again. Isaac the Syrian appears as 151. 167 is The Imitation of Christ by a certain Thomas Kempiyskago.
Later on the items of interest — interesting to us here, anyway, for I suspect much of this is of the highest interest to students of Russian history — grow fewer. I notice the occasional 18th century text, and the odd one in Greek or Latin. No. 338 is “collected works of the Fathers and Lucian” (?) which sounds interesting. There are Greek and Latin dictionaries. No. 351 (Gr. 188) is by Theodoret of Cyrhus, “On the fishery of God”.
It is, truly, a marvellous collection. I am deeply grateful that they have set up the website in such a web that those of us who know no Russian can still use it, and learn more than one could possibly imagine.
The entry point, in case you want to browse, is:
http://www.stsl.ru/manuscripts/index.php?col=5&gotomanuscript=01
And there is a marvellous aerial picture of the St. Sergius Lavra here at the English language site:
An email reached me today offering the chance to commission a translation of something from ancient or patristic Greek. My mind was rather a blank — or I might have suggested letters of Isidore of Pelusium, or perhaps of John Chrysostom — and all I could think of was the sermon preached by Severian of Gabala after his reconciliation with John Chrysostom.
I posted about this here, and indeed once commissioned someone to have a go at it, but they vanished after a page or two.
The translator apparently did a translation of a work of Basil of Caesarea for an MPhil, so ought to be capable of doing it. Let’s see! I’ll release the output into the public domain and post it online, of course, if it all works out.
It seems that I am not the only person interested in Severian of Gabala. I have come across a series of publications by Remco F. Regtuit, who is assistant professor of Greek at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
So far I have seen none of his works, but articles on “The Charm of Severian of Gabala” — something I have noted myself — suggest good things! Unfortunately none of this material seems to be accessible online.
One interesting publication I learned of is Henning J. Lehmann, Per piscatores: studies in the Armenian version of a collection of homilies by Eusebius of Emesa and Severian of Gabala, 1975. This is research on a collection, published between 1956-9 in Handes Amsorya by Nerses Akinian, based on Ms. New Julfa 110. It sounds very like the collection published a century earlier by Aucher, which perhaps exists in several manuscripts.
Another is an edition and translation of an unpublished homily, ed. by Aubineau, Un traité inédit de christologie de Sévérien de Gabala : In centurionem et contra Manichaeos et Apollinaristas. Cahiers d’Orientalisme V. Geneve, 1983.
But once again, how do we access any of this?
While surfing this evening I came across a reference to a Discourse on the Seals by our old friend Severian of Gabala, the bishop who preached with a pleasant Syrian burr and was a rival of John Chrysostom’s. It was in an 1815 book by Nathaniel Lardner, on p.620 of vol. 2 of his works, On the credibility of the Gospel history, chapter 119 of which is devoted to Severian.
In an oration concerning Seals, Severian expresses himself in this manner:
Let heretics often observe that saying, “In the beginning was the word.” Indeed, the three evangelists, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, when they began their preaching, did not immediately say what became Christ’s dignity, but what was suitable to their hearers’ capacity. Matthew, at the beginning of the gospels, says, “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Why does he not say, “the son of God?” Why does he, with such low expressions conceal his dignity?’
Having answered those queries, he also observes the beginnings of the gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke, and adds:
‘All three, therefore, attended to his dispensation in the flesh; and, by his miracles, gradually instilled his dignity.’
He afterwards compares John to thunder, and says, he is terrible to heretics; whilst the other three evangelists only lightned. He likewise says, until John wrote, the best defence of the right faith, and the best weapons against heretics were wanting.
And, in his discourse on Seals, the beginning of the first epistle of John is expressly cited as John’s: and it may be reasonably supposed, that he likewise received the epistle of James.
From the CPG (vol. 2) I learn that CPG 4209 is De sigillis sermo (BHG 2351; PG 63, 531-544; Savile 5, 689-698). I always wondered what that was. It doesn’t sound too long, and might be quite interesting to have translated. Something like 7 columns of Migne, at $20 each – $140? Hmmm. I think I will just go and peek at Migne now.
It seems to be in six chapters. The Latin translation was made for the Migne edition, the old one being too much of a paraphrase. Severian attacks the extreme Arians in it.
An email reached me today from a chap volunteering to take on a commission for some Greek and Syriac (and Armenian for that matter, although I have none in mind at the moment). I’ve written back and asked for some details. It might be nice to get him to do a few of the letters of Isidore of Pelusium, at least as a starter.
This reminded me that someone translated 14 of Isidore’s letters during the summer, and that — as I dimly remembered — I commissioned some more, as I remarked here. I wonder if I ever published those 14 letters online? I certainly meant to! I paid for them, after all, and the last revision was rather good and rather readable. I must hunt them out. Meanwhile I have written to the translator asking what happened with regard to the next chunk.
There’s no lack of material to commission. There’s sermons by Chrysostom, such as the two on Christmas. I think I listed a bunch of Chrysostom material some time back.
There’s also material by Severian of Gabala. That reminds me that I ought to write to two other people, each of whom was going to do a sermon and neither of whom I have heard from since. There is such a thing as being too busy, and I suspect I probably qualify! But it illustrates why reliability is such a virtue in a translator.
Then there are works by Cyril of Alexandria, such as his Apologeticus ad imperatorem, explaining himself after the Council of Ephesus. There’s John the Lydian, On the Roman Months (De Mensibus), book 4 of which is intensely interesting. Andrew Eastbourne translated the section on December for us a while back. Indeed John’s work might form a nice volume three in the series of translations I am publishing, although I suspect a UV photographic copy of the manuscript might be a necessary precursor.
Who knows? The email is welcome, and let’s see if we can get something done.