Yesterday I received an email asking if I could locate the Greek text for a passage in a translation from a work by Gregory of Nyssa, and complaining that it wasn’t obvious what the Patrologia Graeca reference would be. Oh lucky me.
What a marvel: the virgin becomes a mother and remains a virgin! Do you see the innovation of the nature? For other women, so long as she is a virgin, she is not a mother. And when she becomes a mother, she no longer has her virginity. But here the two descriptions go together simultaneously, [247] for the same woman is both mother and virgin. The virginity did not prevent the birth and the birth did not destroy the virginity. After all, it was fitting that the one who came into human life to take away the corruption of the whole should take his start from his own servant in a birth of incorruption. For human convention is acquainted with calling a woman with no sexual experience “incorrupt.” To me, that great man Moses seems to have already observed this in the theophany that came to him through the light, when fire was kindled in the bush and the bush was not consumed. For it says, “After passing through, I will see this great sight.”33 I think by the “passing through” it indicates not locomotion but passing through as in traversing a period of time. For after an intervening period passed, that which had been prefigured in the flame and the bush was disclosed in the mystery of the virgin. For just as in the former case the shrub both kindles the fire and is not consumed, so too in the latter case the virgin both bears the light and is not corrupted.
The translation is a portion of Gregory of Nyssa, Oration on the Saviour’s Nativity, translated by Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, taken from Mark DelCogliano (ed.), The Cambridge Edition of Early Christian Writings vol. 3: Christ: Through the Nestorian Controversy, Cambridge (2022), pp. 403-419; p.409. I’d not seen this series, which is very nicely produced. I also discover that a draft of the same translation is online at hcommons.org here – well done!
The bold [247] turns out to be the page number in the Greek text, printed in the Gregorii Nysseni Opera series published in a lotta lotta volumes with confusing numeration by Brill. From the intro:
The text translated here is from the critical edition of Friedhelm Mann in Ernestus Rhein, Friedhelm Mann, Dörte Teske, and Hilda Polack, Gregorii Nysseni Sermones, Pars III, GNO 10.2 (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 235–269. Numbers in square brackets correspond to page numbers in this edition.
Erm, yes. The volume numbering probably makes sense if you have the set before you; otherwise not. I know that producing daft volume numbering is a cherished tradition of German editors, but… guys, it’s got to stop. Memo to Brill: horse-whip any academics who try this trick in future.
So our passage is on page 247 of the GNO edition. And if you can find the right one, then you can move forward.
First however, a quick whinge.
What the translator does NOT do is two essential essential things. And if you are editing or translating a text, please do these in your introduction. Please. Why force every user to do this?
Firstly, give the Clavis Patrum Graecorum (CPG) reference number. It’s what it’s for.
In this case the work turns out to be CPG 3194, “Oratio in diem natalem Christi”. This is also listed in the BHG index as 1915. The PG text is 1128-1149, reprinting the Morel edition of 1638.
There. That’s solid, useful bibliographical information, available for the price of a number. Why the heck not refer to it?
Secondly, give the Latin title(s) of the work. Come ON boys! Why make the reader reverse translate your shoddy little vernacular paraphrase? We want to access the literature.
In this case the CPG and GNO differ: the latter calls it “In Diem Natalem Salvatoris”, for some unknown reason.
Where the GNO edition DOES score is that it printed the PG column number in bold, with “M” for Migne, the PG editor. So we can indeed link back to the PG text.
So here we can see that our passage is that found in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca vol. 46 col. 1136.
A quick sanity check shows that page 247 does indeed refer to “mater” and “parthenos”, so we have the right passage.
There’s no chapter or verse divisions, so anybody using the GNO edition has to refer to GNO page number – yes, the bibliographical reference with the confusing volume numbers (second memo to Brill: stop these bums doing this, yes?).
I wondered if there was actually any divisions in the PG edition. Taking a look, we find that Migne gives the title as “In diem natalem Christi” or, at fuller length, “Oratio in diem natalem Christi et in infantes qui in Bethleem occisi sunt a Herode” – Oration on the nativity of Christ and on the infants who were killed at Bethlehem by Herod.”
But the PG has no chapter divisions either. Rats!
That seems more work than it should be, to be honest.
Christmas homilies tend to attract translators. A translation also exists in Beth Dunlop’s unpublished 2004 thesis “Earliest Greek Patristic Orations on the Nativity” (Boston College, 2004), p.154 f., and another translation appears without attribution at Orthodox Christianity Then And Now. There are probably others.
We are of a like mind. There is hardly anything worse (when reading citations) than seeing an English translation of a work which has some bizarre, one-off title rather than the traditional Latin rendering. New City Press’s Augustine series sometimes leans in this direction, and there are some really egregious examples out there.
It can be baffling trying to work out which work is meant.
Hi Mr. Pearse, another great post, I apologize to go off topic but I was wondering if you had any thoughts regarding the legitimacy of Origen using the word ‘homoousios’ later in his life for the Father and Son?
More specifically, your thoughts in the context of this excerpt of his from his Commentary on John where he seems to use the term in a orthodox understanding but is actually refuting a belief of creation being homoousios with God:
“Let us discern if it is not extremely impious to say that they who worship God in spirit are of one being [homoousious] with the unbegotten and entirely blessed nature. These are the ones who, by Heracleon’s account, are shortly to fall. He says that “the Samaritan woman, even though she is of spiritual nature, had been made a fornicator.” But those who say these things do not see that everything which is of the same being is also susceptible to the same things. If the spiritual nature had been allowed to commit fornication, even though of the same being with God, what unholy, godless, and irreverent consequences follow from such a doctrine about God it is not without danger even to imagine!” (From, I believe, 13.149)
Origen seems to use the term in a manner which allows for distinction, unlike others, while still possessing the same quality of nature. His argument if I understand correctly is that if those who are homoousios with God are able to fall then God, being of the same substance, is also capable of such (contradicting his immutability and such).
Would this perhaps lend credibility to the concept of Origen later using the term for the Father and Son? After all, he does frequently address the unity of the Father and Son as one mind and will. In the same work he also calls it an ‘impious belief’ if you say that the Son is of another substance than the Father (2.16) and that the Son is by nature a son of the Father (2.76).
I’m certainly not trying to appeal to today’s understanding but it seems that Origen could have eventually used the term since he already expressed the Father and Son as being one in numerous ways.
For more of an example, in his homilies on the Psalms (15.3), he says that the Logos cannot sin by nature—back in Commentary on John he says that the Son cannot die by nature (32.322?). It seems that Origen does believe that since the Son is made one with the Father (many examples in which he says this) that it may be possible that he later understood the term ‘homoousios’ to be applicable to this unity. I’m very interested to hear anything you may have to say, sorry for the long comment!
P.S. Love your work!
It’s certainly possible, but I am wary. “homoousios” is such a fingerprint for the Nicene definition that it may well be introduced later by copyists, especially in catena material.
That’s a brief reply to a long and interesting post, but I’m a bit tied up – sorry!