Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
On a visit to the Cranmer blog this evening, I was confronted with a confusing piece of advertising:[1]
Now what does “Passionate about Ajax?” convey to your mind?
Is it this?
Or even this?
I fear that the IT recruitment company responsible might get some strange replies ….
A few days ago I came across a bargain online. It was a copy of Michael Grant’s “Greek and Latin Authors: 800 B.C.-A.D.1000”, which, including postage, came to a princely $6. It arrived this morning, a big heavy book, ex-library.
I had rather hoped, from the title, that authors would be listed in chronological order, but not so. Instead they are appear in name order. This is unfortunate, for it means that the book cannot easily be read through. At least if authors are in chronological order, you can read the whole as a story.
But it does mean that the book is ideal to dip into. Indeed I propose to consume it in just such a manner. It might be a valuable resource to read on the loo, for instance.
I have forgotten the author who recommended the purchase of small page, cheap editions of the Latin poets, for use in such a circumstance. Each page would be a poem or two, and a man with normal innards would read and absorb a few poems at a sitting. After that, it was suggested, the pages just read could be torn out and, in this, pre-toilet-paper age, devoted to a different but convenient purpose. Certainly editions of that period were printed on absorbent paper. In this way, he advised, a great store of learning could be acquired during a portion of the day otherwise wasted. Was it, perhaps, Lord Chesterfield who advised thus?
Grant’s book consists of short entries on authors, plus a list of works and short bibliography. It’s the kind of work that has been superceded by Wikipedia, in many ways; and yet Kiddipedia, as we might equally call it — “the encyclopedia that any child can edit!” — is not nearly as good. The labour in compiling the book must have been considerable, but Grant makes a good job of it.
I had never heard of the book, in truth, but came across it accidentally, mentioned on some website. I got it, because I love handbooks of solid information. They can be valuable companions at bed-time as well, for again, that is an occasion in which to read a few pages, and then drift off.
In my last post I mentioned how Quasten’s Patrology is becoming rather out of date. For me, the most annoying thing is that I find myself looking at works thinking “that would be interesting to translate”, only to find that translations have come along since he wrote.
Looking at Amazon I discover that it is published by Thomas More Publishing, who turn out to be an imprint of Ave Maria Press. This website lists their imprints, which include “Christian Classics”, the name that appears inside my own copies.
After a bit of thought, I wrote to the general enquiries email at Ave Maria Press, asking that they pass the email to the directors. I asked whether they do, in fact, own Quasten; whether they have considered updating it; or whether they would consider it.
Would it really be such a big task to improve the book? The bibliographies of translations could be updated, perhaps, relatively easily, with the assistance of l’Année Philologique and the internet. Probably most of us could do this, given some secretarial assistance, and it might be interesting to do. Much of the text doesn’t really need changing.
But then again I mainly use volume 3, on Greek writers. Volumes 1 and 2 are thin, and really in need of expansion, particularly in the light of the Nag Hammadi discoveries. This element really requires a professional scholar.
Revising Quasten is not “research”, so I can foresee problems in finding a scholar willing to do it. “Research” is everything, in the current climate, and those who fail to publish it find their jobs at risk. But surely we ought to be able to do something?
What sort of changes, I wonder, would we make to Quasten, if we could?
Yesterday’s post on Chrysostom and the Jews led to some interesting questions about his other work, Against the Jews and Pagans that Christ is God. These I have pursued in the comments thread.
A look at Quasten’s Patrology says that the work is untranslated; but Quasten was getting tired by the time he did volume 3, and it is nearly 50 years old in any event. Isn’t it time that someone revised the work and brought it up to date? It’s not as easy as it might be to see who owns the book; but since it has remained in print ever since, it ought to be in everyone’s interest to update it.
The work seems to have been translated into French as long ago as the 1860’s, in Bareille’s translation of all of Chrysostom’s works.[1] A lot of these are on Archive.org, repackaged as just the translations, and volume 1 contains the work under the title La divinité du Christ [2].
Much more important is the unpublished dissertation of Fr. Norman G. McKendrick, S.J., in 1966.[3]. This not merely included an English translation, but also what P.W.Harkins described as an excellent critical Greek text. This was based on a fresh examination of the manuscripts. McKendrick drew up a stemma, dividing the manuscripts into 2 families. The thesis is accessible from UMI, if you have $37 to spare, and is evidently an important work. McKendrick himself died in 2002.
The final event in the history of the text was a published translation by P.W.Harkins, in 1985 as the second item in a volume in the Fathers of the Church series.[4] Harkins had already produced the first published translation of the Eight homilies against the Jews in FOC 68. He decided to rename the work to omit mention of Jews, however, which is perhaps less than ideal, and has certainly hampered at least one correspondent of mine!
So the work is out there, and there is even a study of the manuscripts.
Isn’t it a pity, tho, that US dissertations remain locked inside a commercial company’s database? Once Proquest were providing a valuable service, in that they produced print-offs of what would otherwise be entirely inaccessible. You could order these from anywhere.
But in the age of the internet, there is no need for the paper versions, and PDF’s of the theses could usefully (and at almost no cost) appear on the web.
An email from a correspondent revealed to me that the anonymous translation of John Chrysostom’s Eight homilies against the Jews was no longer accessible at the Fordham University site. This is a nuisance. What to do?
Back in 1998 Paul Halsall created the Medieval Sourcebook site there. He included this translation which he found online on anti-Jewish sites. The origins of the translation are unknown; it is not the standard translation found in the Fathers of the Church series. But Dr Halsall has long since moved on to other things, and the site seems rather neglected.
I have notified Fordham that the page is missing. But since the site is no longer actively maintained, even if the page should reappear, there is a considerable possibility that it will vanish again. If it remains missing, people looking for the text will be forced to find it in strange places.
Lately US universities have acquired a reputation for political intolerance and censorship. I have no way of knowing how true this is, but if it is correct, I can imagine that students and lecturers might find it unsafe or impossible to access the extremist sites on which copies of this translation presumably may still be found. Indeed might even referring to such a URL in an essay not place an unwary student at risk of official victimisation from an ill-disposed person? The Fordham site has a page indicating that there were calls for censorship, and suggesting that Dr Halsall displayed some professional bravery in placing it on his site.
In the circumstances I have felt that it would serve everyone best to add the anonymous translation to my own collection of translations of the Fathers, where it may be safely consulted by everyone, and sits next to other works of Chrysostom not found in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers collection. It is here:
http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/index.htm#Chrysostom_Against_the_Jews
The enquiry that reached me was in fact searching for a translation of Chrysostom’s sermon “Against Jews and Pagans, that Christ is God”. This has never been translated, as far as I know, which is a pity. It would be nice to complete the list of Chrysostom’s anti-Jewish works.
UPDATE: The Fordham page has mysteriously reappeared. The URL is different, tho: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/chrysostom-jews6.asp
I’ve been translating from Russian the preface to a group of works by Methodius, as I mentioned here. It’s no work of scholarship, but the end product, from some Google Translate and the kind help of Maureen in the comments, is now online here:
http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/methodius_preface_chub.htm
It’s public domain as usual: do whatever you wish with it.
Someone has just emailed me to ask where they can find the Eight Homilies against the Jews by John Chrysostom. For years these have lived at a Fordham University page, but today I find them gone. The Archive.org archiver gives June 2011 as the last version. It’s probably just a glitch; but if not, I shall have to consider including them in my own collection.
UPDATE: It seems to be a great day for stuff to vanish from the web. The Cyprian Project lists of PG and PL volumes also seem to have gone.
Michael Gilleland has been trying out German on Google Translate, with mixed results.
I used to tell students, “This passage makes sense in Latin, and your English translation has to make sense, too. It isn’t nonsense in Latin, and it can’t be nonsense in English.” Google Translate’s version of Wilamowitz’s German seems to fail the “intelligibility” test.
Does Microsoft’s Bing Translator do any better?
I wasn’t aware of the existence of Bing Translator (which for some reason makes me think of defunct US sit-com Friends) , but the more the better, in my experience — you can sometimes get part of the meaning from one, and part from another.
German IS a problem in Google translate. Part of the reason for this is the involuted word order, for which, I believe we have Martin Luther to thank. Part of the reason is the lengthy sentences that German literature written by scholars tends to favour.
What I have found is that often you can get enlightenment by breaking down a sentence into bits. If you put each clause on a separate line, and do the same with what looks like the main verb at the end, it helps. You’ll often do better to translate one such sentence into more than one English sentence anyway.
But in the end, you will still need some knowledge of the language. These toys do not do all the job for you. But they help considerably.
I’m having difficulties with a (paid) translator at the moment. The following neatly sums up the problem:
This passage makes sense in Latin, and your English translation has to make sense, too. It isn’t nonsense in Latin, and it can’t be nonsense in English.
Well said, Mr. G.
This evening I sat down with the text of Michael Chub’s preface to his edition of a selection of the works of Methodius.[1]. I took the output from Google Translate, and went through it, smoothing and amending.
I got a very long way! It’s about 3,400 words, and nearly all of it fell into English quite neatly. But not all. If you know Russian, some thoughts in the comments on the following would be useful.
My first stop was:
The literary activity of St. Methodius, as can be seen, coincides with the end of the donikeyskogo period of development of theological thought, and, to some extent, can be regarded as a peculiar result of this development.
The period in question is that before the Edict of Milan in 313; but as I wrote this, it came to me that this meant “ante-Nicene”.
So far so good; but bluff and a machine translator will only take you so far. Now it gets hard.
Молитва св. Мефодия, известная только в славянском тексте, вне всякого сомнения, ^ принадлежит к числу наиболее ранних христианских молитв. Употребленные в ней формулировки и выражения чрезвычайно характерны для суждения о догматическом словоупотреблении доникейской эпохи. Заслуживает особого внимания то место молитвы, где говорится о победе над смертью, совершенной страданиями и умерщвлением Бесстрастного и Бессмертного. Здесь встречаются и скрещиваются слоза и мысли, знакомые уже древнейшей христианской Церкви (сравн. Игнатий Богоносец, „Послание к Поликарпу”, 3, 2; Григорий Неокесарийский, „Послание к Феопомпу”, 7, 8, ІО) и прочно вошедшие в молитвенный обиход последующих веков (сравн., напр., в „Последовании на сон грядущим” в современных молитвословах Молитва вторая). Вся молитва имеет большое значение для суждения о прочности и устойчивости церковных традиций и, в частности, о способах сохранения и передачи этих традиций.
The prayer of St. Methodius, known only from the Slavonic text, no doubt, belongs among the earliest Christian prayers. Its formulation and expression are extremely characteristic for evaluating the dogmatic discourse of the ante-Nicene era. Deserving of special attention is a passage in the prayer, which says the victory over death, suffering and killing of a perfect passionless and Immortal. Here you can meet and interbreed sloza and thought, already familiar to the ancient Christian Church (cf. Ignatius, “Epistle to Polycarp,” 3:2, Gregory of Neocaesarea, “Message to Theopompus”, 7, 8, 10) and entered the everyday life of prayer of later ages (compare, for example, in the “Succession before sleep” in the modern prayer book, Prayer Two). The whole prayer is important for judging the strength and stability of church traditions and, in particular, on how to preserve and pass on these traditions.
I’ve often wanted to interbreed sloza and thought, of course. Whatever sloza is. Nor did the previous sentence make sense to me either.
При чтении трактата „О прокаженин” следует помнить, что по замыслу автора это диалог.
9) When reading the treatise “On prokazhenin” should be remembered that the author’s idea is a dialogue.
Mine too, as it happens!
Ссылки на Свящ. Писание после цитат не принадлежат св. Мефодию. Они вставлены в текст перевода для удобства чтения, причем прямые цитаты снабжены ссылками в круглых ( ) скобках, а непрямые цитаты и реминисценции — в квадратных скобках [ ].
Quotation marks from Holy Scripture are not by St. Methodius. They have been inserted into the translation for readability, and direct quotations are provided with round brackets, and indirect quotations and reminiscences – in square brackets [].
I’m pretty sure I’m confused here. Does the text really put scripture in brackets? Or in quotes?
По связи речи следует здесь же отметить, что проф. Н. Г. Бонвеч совсем не затрагивает тему о наличии аграфов в творениях св. Мефодия.
Speech Communication should also be noted here that Prof. N. G. Bonwetsch does not affect the subject of the presence of agrapha in the works of St. Methodius.
Any ideas?
The final chunk is rather serious: it’s the list of manuscripts and libraries of the Old Slavonic text. Not that I can’t get a general idea: but specifically it’s not great.
Основной рукописью для работы над текстом названных творений явился „Сборник” XVI века, хранящийся в Ленинграде в Государственной Публичной Библиотеке имени Салтыкова-Щедрина (Q I 265).
Текст основной рукописи сличен с текстом следующих рукописей;
- Рукопись Библиотеки Академии Наук Союза ССР 16. 16. 2 (XVII в.).
- Рукопись Библиотеки им. Ленина из собрания Московской духовной академии №41, ранее находившаяся в Троице-Сергиевой Лавре (нач. XVII в.).
- Рукопись Государственного Исторического Музея из Синодального собрания №170 (XVI в.).
- Рукопись Библиотеки им. Ленина из собрания Моск. дух. академии № 40, написанная для Арсения Суханова (XVII в.).
- Рукопись Библиотеки им. Ленина из собрания Общества Истории и Древностей Российских № 137 (XVII в.).
Кроме указанных выше рукописей, были привлечены следующие;
- Рукопись Госуд. Исторического Музея из Уваровского собрания № 115 (XVI в.).
- Рукопись Госуд. Истор. Музея из собрания Чудовского монастыря № 233 (XVI — XVII в).
- Рукопись Госуд. Истор. Музея из собрания Чудовского монастыря № 205 (XVII в.).
- Рукопись Госуд. Истор. Музея из собрания Единоверческого монастыря № 12 (XVII в.).
- Рукопись Госуд. Истор. Музея из собрания Барсова № 264 (подделка — довольно искусная — под XVI век, воспроизводящая, по-видимому, слово в слово текст старинной рукописи, послужившей образцом для настоящей).
OK. This comes out as something like this:
The main manuscript for the text of these works is the Sbornik 11 of the XVI century, kept in the Leningrad State Public Library in the Saltykov-Shchedrin (QI 265) 10.
The main text was produced by collating the following manuscripts;
1) Manuscript Library of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR 16. 16. 2 (XVII century).
2) Lenin Manuscript Library, from the Collection of the Moscow Theological Academy, number 41, previously found in the Trinity-Sergius Lavra (the beginning of the XVII century.).
3) The manuscript of the State Historical Museum of the Synodal Assembly number 170 (XVI century).
4) Lenin Manuscript Library, from the collection of the Spiritual Academy of Moscow number 40, written for Arsenius Sukhanov (XVII century).
5) Lenin Manuscript Library, from the meeting of the Society of History and Russian Antiquities number 137 (XVII century).In addition to these manuscripts, the following were involved;
6) The manuscript gov’t. Historical Museum of Uvarov meeting ? 115 (XVI century).
7) The manuscript gov’t. History. The Museum from the collection of the monastery Chudovsky No 233 (XVI – XVII c).
8 ) The manuscript gov’t. History. The Museum from the collection of the monastery Chudovsky No 205 (XVII century).
9) The manuscript gov’t. History. The Museum from the collection of ? 12 Edinoverie monastery (XVII century).
10) The manuscript gov’t. History. The Museum from the collection of Autograph No 264 (a forgery – a rather ingenious one – from the XVI century, reproducing, apparently, word for word the text of an ancient manuscript that served as a model for this).
Could anyone with Russian skills help here? We need to get a reliable list of manuscripts, if we’re going to put it online, as some poor soul may one day make his travel plans by this!
But that’s it. Otherwise the 3,400 words is pretty much done.
In the UK, the crackdown on political dissenters online is getting into high gear. I don’t know how much is going on, but I see ever more reports, and I certainly don’t go looking for them. But it seems clear that people are routinely being denounced to the police for what they say online. The “offences” are various, and the list of possible Wrong Things To Say gets longer every day (although one thought-crime — of disapproving of Jewish people — is showing signs of dropping off the list). This example came my way today.
On the 15th November it was reported:
Mr Smith, aged 28, said he stood by comments on his personal Twitter account that illegal immigrants should leave the country saying, “It is my right to write what I think – but I didn’t mean any offence.”
On November 11, he posted: “Respect to all the heroes 11/11/11 now to all the illegal *****, **** off out of are country all call of duty could become a reality – kill um.”
I’m not sure that calling for the immigrants to be killed is not incitement to violence, but for some reason none of the stories make that point. For the press it’s all about being “raaaacist”. We could pronounce it “Jewish”, with a comic German accent, if we wanted to labour the point. It’s about opinion, it seems, rather than violence.
By the 18th, the BBC reported:
Worcester City Football Club has suspended one of its players after he posted an alleged racist remark on Twitter. A tweet, from striker Lee Smith’s account, prompted other users to accuse him of “spreading hatred”.
Officers from Gloucestershire police yesterday arrested Lee Smith, the 28-year-old Worcester City Football Club right winger on suspicion of a public order offence, but he was released after being given “strong words of advice”, said officers.
Notice how none of this reporting suggests that he was in trouble for inciting violence, which I would have thought might have been an option. Instead it was his opinion that was on trial.
In the end he was let off with a warning not to do it again. Evidently the establishment didn’t want to prosecute him for some reason — we’re not told why.
There’s some nasty precedents being set here, even if you are leftist in your politics. At the moment it is people on the political right who are being attacked in this way, and the silence of the political left has been deafening, since the authors of the thought-crime process are mainly on the left.
But this is very unwise politics. You have to hate people pretty badly to want to lock them up for their opinions. In this country we have refrained from this for centuries. You can only get away with it, while you have a predominance of power.
But any such political imbalance of power is unlikely to persist, for times change. Indeed they have changed suddenly in my time. I remember when Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979. Suddenly the left-ish certainties, which had controlled all political discourse during the 70’s, vanished as if they had never been, and the market become king. When the Blair/Cameron era vanishes, as in time it will, will a newly elected hard right party — and hard times will produce these — use “anti-hate” laws to lock up everyone on the left who objects?
You bet they will. And no-one will murmur a word against it.
Once it becomes acceptable to lock people up for what they say, it becomes acceptable to lock people up for what they say. It just becomes a question of power, and of who decides what is on the list. Anyone like to imagine how some “seditious language” laws might be used? Or some “disloyalty to this country” laws? If such were enacted, how many members of the parliamentary Labour party would evade prosecution? And hard times produce such attitudes.
Mind how you go.
Few of us know much about the technical treatises of antiquity. My last post, on Hero of Alexandria, inevitably mentioned his two works of this kind. When I went to look at the volume in which a translation exists,[1] I was drawn into the question of how these works reach us.
As long ago as 1867, Wescher addressed this question, and, since his work is online, we can inform ourselves what he thought.[2] The following notes are taken from Marsden’s volume, however.
The collection of works in Greek consists of Biton’s Construction of War Machines and Artillery; Hero’s Belopoeica and Cheiroballistra, and Philon’s Belopoeica.
Our knowledge of this collection depends in the main on four manuscripts. All contain Biton and Hero, but only P and V contain Philon.
There is also information to be had in the following:
There are other and more recent manuscripts, but all of them are copies or descendants of these eight.
It seems that a single uncial manuscript of Biton and Hero survived into the 9th century, when two copies were made from it. One of these, M, survives, and contains traces of the Ionian dialect in Biton and Athenaeus Mechanicus. The other is lost, but was the ancestor of F. However at some point the dialect in this family was normalised.
Some time later, someone in the Byzantine world decided to create a collection of seige and tactical works. This collection used the second family as a source; added three works of Philon, the Belopoeica, Parasceuastica, and Poliorcetica; and also added tactical works from a third source, creating a compendium of works. P and V are copies of this collection.
In the process of compilation, however, the compiler managed to lose some of the diagrams. Spaces are left in the text for three diagrams in Biton, which do appear in M, and one of them in F (the portions of the text where the others would be is not preserved in F). There are likewise spaces in the text of Philon, where illustrations should be, which the compilation did not preserve.