Tag: From my diary

Fr. Dale A. Johnson has kindly sent me a PDF of his new book, The Goodspeed Syriac Fragments, Barhanna Monographs 2, New Sinai Press, 2009. ISBN 0-4116-1950-3.  The book is 34 pages long.

One difficulty some may have with it is that it is a little hard to work out what it contains, and what the object of the book is, other than by going through and looking.  An index would have been a very good idea, even for so short a book. 

In fact the purpose of the book is to point out various aspects of these manuscripts that might be of wider interest, and highlight them, while attaching photographs of the source.  The content is therefore similar to a journal article, rather than a monograph.

The book is clearly self-published; although the Library of Congress details at the front and ISBN look very professional, the remainder seems more like a PDF export from a Word document, in Times Roman font.  It would have been better if it had been justified text; but it does bring home to me the limitations of what can be done at home. 

The book consists of three chapters, each with images of excerpts from a manuscript,  Goodspeed Ms. 829, 716, and 823, with notes in English.  No transcription of the material or full translation is given.  The images come from the online website.

For Ms. 829, an introduction is followed by images and translations of the text.  For the other two manuscripts, there is an introduction and then a series of images.

One thing that is not made clear to the reader, is that it does not publish the entire manuscript in any case.  823 for instance is 18 folios long, as I learn from the useful introduction to the chapter about it.  It’s a fragment of a Peshitta NT ms.  Some points of interest are made, and then images given of parts of several pages.

Syriacists interested in the text of the New Testament will doubtless add it to their collection.  But the book seems a little overpriced, considering that it contains only a limited amount of original material.  However this material does highlight some interesting points in these manuscripts.

Copies may be obtained from here.

UPDATE: I have revised the review after becoming aware that the colour images are all online.

I received a delightful email today from someone calling themselves Pseudonymous.  I can’t ask his permission to post it, since he gave no valid email address.  But I would like to reply, and this seems to be the only way to do so.  The email began:

You commented that Lewis apparently was unaware of IVF: perhaps it was too Low Church for him to take seriously. I wonder whether he had any knowledge of J. I. Packer’s writings or the sermons of David Martyn Lloyd-Jones.

I wonder too.  But I don’t think that Lewis would worry about churchmanship. 

… as for the pseudonym, you seem to be several titles ahead of me in the game of “oh, that hasn’t been translated yet” and I’m rather cranky that you got there first 🙂

I’m not sure that I entirely understand.  I certainly wouldn’t want to discourage anyone wanting to translate stuff.  But there is no end of useful texts that have never been translated, and I would encourage anyone to take some on and get them translated!  The more the merrier!

This blog allows anonymous comments, and the email address supplied is not vetted.  So feel free to reply that way.

I have now reached the end of the monster, 2,000 page, volume three of the collected letters of C. S. Lewis.  I seem to have averaged around 300 letters a day.  It is quite a testimony to the charm of his literary style, even with stock letters, which many of these were, that I reach this point without burning eyes and a headache.

Most of the letters are perhaps of limited interest.  Nevertheless there are enough new ones which are interesting to make the task worthwhile.  I took to folding down corners on letters I might want to look at again, after about 900 pages.  I should probably do the same again.

These five days immersed in another man’s life have been a little surreal.  For that is precisely what so long a book, even skimmed as I did, involves.  I think a better sense of the ordinariness of it all comes out; what we might have felt if we had met Lewis professionally, or something.

One thing that I had never realised was that his final illness began not that long after the last volume of the Narnia stories was published.  This was in 1954. He fell ill in 1957 and was never well again, dying in 1963.   How much of his possible output we must have lost!   He died young, in other words, growing “old early” in his own phrase.  To become an invalid in your mid-50’s is a sad thing. 

Likewise I had never realised that Till We Have Faces was conceived under the influence of Joy Davidman.  I cannot say that I like this work, nor the later fragments in a similar vein.  The Lewis that we all loved in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, and in the Narnia stories, seems to disappear under this influence.

Another detail that comes out from this collection is that Lewis was not treated rightly, financially, by Geoffrey Bles, his publisher.  The details of the sums involved are not given, but one example that is given is the way that the US rights for Lewis’ books were dealt with.  Originally Bles arranged for US publication. The US publishers sent Lewis’ royalties to Bles, who deducted a ‘fee’ before passing on what remained.  On the retirement of Bles, he wisely took himself to a literary agent, which meant that the last two Narnia stories had a different publisher, but also that much greater sums were paid in royalties.

Again it is curious that Lewis had apparently never heard of the IVF (now UCCF), even though it was the largest student Christian movement in both Oxford and Cambridge at the time. 

Is this volume an essential purchase?  I could hardly say so.  On the contrary, this is barrel-scraping with a vengeance!  But even so, enough remains of the summer wine to be worth sampling.

I’ve been reading the massive 2,000 page third volume of the Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis (available here).  It must be one of the very few books of which I can say, “I’ve only read 700 pages so far”!  What an ass the publisher was, not to split it into three.

I’m not finding anything very special in the book.  It looks as if it is purely for completists.  The volume of letters with a memoir by Warnie is certainly more accessible, and frankly contains nearly all the interesting material.

The third and last volume of the Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis is out, and available here from Amazon.com.  Santa brought me a copy of the UK edition (with rather nicer cover) for Christmas.

I’ve started reading it, and find to my astonishment that it is almost 2,000 pages long.  The paper is the sort you find in a bible — extra thin, to keep the volume size within bounds.  In fact it is nearly twice the page-count of my Gideons’ bible.  What can the publisher have been thinking?  Who can read such a monster without massive indigestion?

So far I have read the letters for 1950, which certainly accentuate the misery that Britons experienced after the war from the austerity measures of the Labour government, worsened by an untimely ideology.  The shortages of basic food and clothing are a constant theme. 

There are new letters here, and longer versions of those already familiar.  I’m certainly glad to have more Lewis than I did.  But I think that I would have been gladder if it had been split into two halves! 

It is forty years after we were told “All you need is love”.  The law of unintended consequences means that more of us than ever before are on our own at Christmas.  Sometimes this is because we have no close family. Sometimes it is that we cannot be with them, for whatever reason.  This year, as it happens, I’m one of them, because my family are away.

So what to do?  Not everyone likes the peace and quiet.  I suspect that it would be very easy to sit around and be miserable, feeling sorry for oneself!   That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.  Just because we’re on our own, why shouldn’t we make a little effort for ourselves? 

I have a plastic Christmas tree which lives in the loft most of the year, and a few decorations for it and some fairy lights.  I got this down last weekend, and I will put it up on Christmas Eve.  I find that, if we don’t do this, it feels as if Christmas never comes and that’s rather depressing.  Most of us grew up having family Christmases, after all!  Our “inner man” expects to have Christmas, and gets all unhappy if it never comes.  So while I shall not go to town, the Christmas tree will go up, and will remain up until the end of the Christmas holidays.

The Christmas cards that I have received I shall place on the top of my bookshelf in my sitting room.  That’s about all the decoration I will do, but it will be enough for one.  I’m not going to wear myself out; but I do mean to do something.

I’ve ordered a few books from Amazon in the last week.   But I have left them in their packing.  These will go under the tree, and I shall open them on Christmas morning at one hour intervals. 

I’ve also got in some food for a Christmas lunch, suitably scaled for one.  I’ve always wanted to buy a whole Edam cheese, in its red wax covering; this evening I did so, and it will appear on my table on Christmas day.  I shall have some nuts and chocolate, I shall read the books, and I will watch the TV, at least as far as good taste allows.  And I shall celebrate the good season!

There may be snow outside, there may be only us indoors, but we can lift a glass to the spirit of Christmas.  I think that I might even read A Christmas Carol again!

Many good wishes to everyone reading at Christmas!

(Normal blogging will resume before Christmas, but I wanted to get this in now!)

An interesting discussion in BYZANS-L began with this comment:

Pero Tafur had an interesting conversation in 1437 with John VIII.  He had complained to John about a theft, the thief was taken,  his eyes put out and his hands cut off.  Pero asked why they didn’t just execute him.  John said that no man had the right to condemn another man’s soul.  Pero comments that one saw a lot of mutilated people in Constantinople.

Pero Tafur was a Spanish visitor to Constantinople at that time.  His book, translated by Ross and Power, is here.  It’s from chapter 17:

One day the Castilian captain who was there sent for me, because one of his men had been killed at sea by a Greek, with intent to steal his ship, and I went to him, and we took the criminal and the corpse to the Emperor that justice might be done. Although the Greeks did not wish it, yet out of his great regard for me, and because I said that our people might otherwise take vengeance upon those who were innocent, the Emperor sent at once for the executioner, and in front of the Palace he ordered the criminal’s hands to be cut off, and his eyes to be put out. I enquired why they did not put him to death, and they replied that the Emperor could not order his soul to be destroyed.

They told me also that when Charlemagne took Jerusalem, on the way by which his people had to return, many of them travelled through Greece and were killed by the Greeks, and that the others, when they heard of this, took the road through Tartary and Russia, where the inhabitants were Christians, and from there they passed into Hungary and Germany. It is said that the reason why the Russians of those parts are so beautiful, is that many Frenchmen settled there and married. The Emperor Charlemagne then came up against Constantinople, and made great war on the Emperor of Greece, but in the end they had to make peace, and the Emperor, as penance for the killing of those men, promised to fast during the whole of Lent, which they say is observed differently than with us (since the Greeks cannot reconcile it with their consciences to eat fish with blood, but only shell-fish, and, further, that no one, however great his crime, should be put to death, but that the punishment was to be loss of hands and eyes. In Greece, therefore, there are many maimed and blinded men.

This is the manner in which the Despot gave us justice, and we were content with what he did.

An interesting attitude; that maiming is more  merciful than death.  It is easy for us to be interested in the Byzantines; but they enjoyed an evil reputation in Europe, weak, unmilitary, crafty and cruel.  Their vices destroyed them, and we should remember this.  For their fate awaits every society that forgets simple virtues for the sake of expediency and abstract dogma.

On the other hand, there was probably many an emperor who would have said that becoming emperor might not be the best thing in the world, given the short life expectancy, but it was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick!