This volume tells the story of the Arabic translations of the Church Fathers. It is a subject on which I have been working with ever-growing passion for over twenty years.
I will begin with a personal recollection of how I first became aware that there were, in fact, Arabic translations of the Church Fathers. This was in July 2000. I was planning to write my Master’s thesis on cosmological symbolism in Dionysius the Areopagite — that most ‘mysterious’ of the Church Fathers — in comparison with cosmological symbolism in the Muslim theologian al-Ġazālī. While I was preparing to write the thesis, I had the good fortune of meeting Dr Fritz Zimmermann of Oxford University. I told him of my intention to compare Dionysius and al-Ġazālī. He listened carefully and then said, ‘Comparisons are nice. But before you do a comparison, it might be worth looking at the Arabic translations of Dionysius. Who knows, maybe al-Ġazālī was familiar with them’.
‘What? There are Arabic translations of Dionysius?’ I was completely startled. And here I should make a pause and explain why I was startled: I had already read some books and articles on Graeco-Arabica. None of them, to my recollection, mentioned not only Arabic translations of Dionysius, but Arabic translations of any of the Church Fathers. ‘Yes, there are Arabic translations of Dionysius’, Dr Zimmermann told me, ‘At Sinai. No one has studied them. Why don’t you start with this? After that, you can do your comparison’.
I followed his advice. As a first step, I opened — for the first time in my life — Georg Graf’s Geschichte der christlichen arabischen Literatur (GCAL), especially the first volume devoted to ‘Übersetzungen’. I also familiarized myself with Joseph Nasrallah’s Histoire du mouvement littéraire dans l’Église melchite (HMLÉM). Finally, I examined Aziz Suryal Atiya’s Hand-list and Catalogue Raisonné of Mount Sinai’s vast Arabic collection. Dr Zimmermann was right: there were indeed some scattered references to Dionysius the Areopagite in Arabic manuscripts at Sinai.
The next step was to look at the manuscripts themselves. As it happens, I was soon to travel to the United States: I had just been accepted to graduate school at Yale, and wanted to visit and explore what my future alma mater was going to be like. It seemed like a good opportunity to pay a visit, on the same occasion, to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., where microfilms of about a half of Mount Sinai’s Arabic manuscripts were kept.
I went there, registered, and ordered these microfilms. You needed special equipment to read them. The Library of Congress had a room with such microfilm-reading machines. I switched one machine on (a bright light in a dark room may have blinded me for a moment), put a microfilm in, and started reading.
Very quickly, I realized that (contrary to indications in the catalogues which only mentioned Dionysius’ Celestial Hierarchy and Ecclesiastical Hierarchy as being preserved in Arabic), the entire Dionysian corpus was available in an Arabic translation; moreover, there were additional translations of bits and pieces of the Dionysian corpus — for example, an Arabic treatise (mīmar) ‘On Good and Evil’ ascribed to Dionysius turned out to be a translation of a section from the Divine Names. In my Master’s thesis (published in two instalments in 2005 and 2007 — see Chapters 9 and 10 of this volume), I offered a first-ever analysis of these translations and a critical edition and annotated English translation of the first chapter of the Arabic version of Dionysius’ Mystical Theology — that famous treatise where Moses abandons all sensory and intelligible reality and goes into ‘the darkness where God was’, only to discover that God transcends all things and that it is only through renunciation of all knowledge, through ‘unknowing’ (
Another manuscript in Atiya’s Catalogue Raisonné caught my attention. This was MS Sinai ar. 66 from the thirteenth century. It contained a ‘Book of the Garden’ (Kitāb al-Rawḍa) by ʿAbdallāh ibn al-Faḍl, an eleventh-century Arabic Orthodox Christian writer from Antioch — about whom I had never heard at the time. Divided into seventy-one chapters arranged by topic, the Book of the Garden contained citations of dozens of Church Fathers and numerous Greek philosophers (see Chapter 8 of this volume). I ordered this microfilm as well. As I was looking at it with a mixture of amazement and disbelief, it became clear that the Arabic translations of Dionysius were just the tip of an iceberg, a very big iceberg.
The present volume is a record of my continuous exploration of this ‘iceberg’, which, oddly enough, becomes bigger the more one studies it. There is still so much that is unknown about the Arabic translations of the Church Fathers; thus, every new discovery reveals more material that has yet to be studied. It is only now that we can begin to take stock of the vast quantities of translations that exist.
The volume is divided into six parts. Part I (‘Christian Graeco-Arabica’, Chapters 1–3) is largely historical. It provides an overview of the Arabic translations of the Church Fathers, with focus on the most important translation centres and the most significant translators and translations. Part II (‘Translations in Palestine and Sinai’, Chapters 4–5) discusses some of the earliest Arabic translations of Christian material ever made (eighth–tenth centuries). Part III (‘Translations in Byzantine Antioch’) offers an overview of translation activity in what was arguably the most important centre of Christian Graeco-Arabica: Antioch under Byzantine rule (969–1084). Part IV (‘Dionysius in Damascus’, Chapters 9–10) deals with the Arabic versions of the Dionysian corpus. Part V (‘Lost in Greek, Found in Arabic’, Chapter 11) presents a striking example of a Patristic treatise originally written in Greek but preserved only in an Arabic translation: the Noetic Paradise (in Arabic: al-Firdaws al-ʿaqlī). Finally, Part VI (‘Patristic Themes in Islamic Thought’, Chapter 12) will broach the difficult subject of a possible Muslim reception of Patristic material. I will show that an Arabic paraphrase from the ninth century does seem to link, unexpectedly, precisely the two authors whom I had once intended to compare: Dionysius and al-Ġazālī. Thus, by the end of this volume, my story will have come full circle.
…
I am deeply grateful to Paolo Sachet who invited me to publish a collection of my articles on the Arabic translations of the Church Fathers in his new series ‘Receptio Patristica’ (Brill) and to Yael Isaacs and Eline Badry (Brill) for seeing this volume through production.
In consultation with Dr Sachet, twelve articles were chosen for this volume: eleven of them published before, and one brand-new contribution (Chapter 7: ‘An Eleventh-Century Arabic Manuscript of Ephrem’s Homilies’).
Dr Sachet generously took it upon himself to secure the necessary permissions. I thank him for taking care of this crucial task and extend my gratitude to the following publishers: Wiley Blackwell (Chapter 1), Oxford University Press (Chapter 2), Brill (Chapters 3, 6, and 12), Gorgias Press (Chapter 4), Fr. Joseph Obeid and the journal Parole de l’Orient (Chapter 5), LEIZA Verlag (Chapter 8), Peeters (Chapters 9–10), and Cornell University Press (Chapter 11). These chapters originally appeared in the following publications:
| Chapter 1 |
‘The Fathers in Arabic’, in K. Parry (ed.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Patristics, Chichester, 2015, pp. 442–55; |
| Chapter 2 |
‘Section VI: Arabic [Translations of Byzantine Literature]’, in S. Papaioannou (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Literature, Oxford, 2021, pp. 642–62; |
| Chapter 3 |
‘Christian Graeco-Arabica: Prolegomena to a History of the Arabic Translations of the Greek Church Fathers’, Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 3 (2015), pp. 188–227; |
| Chapter 4 |
‘The Earliest Dated Christian Arabic Translation (772 AD): Ammonius’ Report on the Martyrdom of the Monks of Sinai and Raithu’, Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 16 (2016), pp. 29–38; |
| Chapter 5 |
‘Syro-Arabic Translations in Abbasid Palestine: The Case of John of Apamea’s Letter on Stillness (Sinai ar. 549)’, Parole de l’Orient 39 (2014), pp. 79–131; |
| Chapter 6 |
‘The Beginnings of the Graeco-Syro-Arabic Melkite Translation Movement in Antioch’, Scrinium 16 (2020), pp. 306–32; |
| Chapter 8 |
‘Greek into Arabic in Byzantine Antioch: ʿAbdallāh ibn al-Faḍl’s Book of the Garden (Kitāb ar-Rawḍa)’, in Z. Chitwood and J. Pahlitzsch (eds), Ambassadors, Artists, Theologians: Byzantine Relations with the Near East from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries (Byzanz zwischen Orient und Okzident 12), Mainz, 2019, pp. 227–38; |
| Chapter 9 |
‘New Evidence on the Arabic Versions of the Corpus Dionysiacum’, Le Muséon 118.3–4 (2005), pp. 219–40; |
| Chapter 10 |
‘The Arabic Version of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s Mystical Theology, Chapter 1: Introduction, Critical Edition, and Translation’, Le Muséon 120.3–4 (2007), pp. 365–93; |
| Chapter 11 |
‘The Noetic Paradise’, in S. Noble and A. Treiger (eds), The Orthodox Church in the Arab World (700–1700): An Anthology of Sources, DeKalb, 2014, pp. 188–200 and 320–22; |
| Chapter 12 |
‘From Dionysius to al-Ġazālī: Patristic Influences on Arabic Neoplatonism’, Intellectual History of the Islamicate World 9.1–2 (2021), pp. 189–236. |
All these articles have been thoroughly revised, corrected, and updated to reflect new developments in the field; the titles have occasionally been modified as well. Bibliographic references have been adjusted to the conventions of the ‘Receptio Patristica’ series. Repetitions and redundancies have been eliminated to the degree possible, and cross-references between the chapters have been added. I have also taken this opportunity to include some new material — notably, as already mentioned, the new Chapter 7, as well as Appendix A and Appendix B to Chapter 9, but also a plethora of smaller additions throughout the volume. In view of these large-scale revisions, I ask future readers to refer, to the degree possible, to this volume instead of the original publications.
I am deeply grateful to Fr. Justin of the Holy Monastery of Mount Sinai, who generously shared with me high-quality photographs of Sinai manuscripts and gave me permission to use them. These illustrations have, quite literally, added colour to what would otherwise be a tediously monochrome book. They also provide interested readers with a vivid sense of what the precious physical objects containing these translations — the manuscripts (some of them over a millennium old) — look like in reality.
I owe a debt of gratitude to great many people, especially André Binggeli, Fr. Oleg Davydenkov, Ioana Feodorov, Emiliano Fiori, Joe Glynias, Sidney Griffith, Dimitri Gutas, Habib Ibrahim, Grigory Kessel, Fr. Sergey Kim, George Kiraz, John Lamoreaux, Basile Lourié, Sergey Minov, Juan Pedro Monferrer-Sala, Dmitry A. Morozov, Joshua Mugler, Samuel Noble, Johannes Pahlitzsch, the late Constantin Panchenko, István Perczel, Adrian Pirtea, Claudia Rapp, Alexandre Roberts, Barbara Roggema, Giulia Rossetto, Sabine Schmidtke, Gregor Schwarb, the late Nikolai Seleznyov, Nikolaj Serikoff, Sarah Stroumsa, Jack Tannous, Kevin van Bladel, Ronny Vollandt, Elvira Wakelnig, Vevian Zaki, and — as already mentioned — Fritz Zimmermann. I am also grateful to Tamara Pataridze for her help with Georgian. All these wonderful scholars — as well as many more members of the NASCAS online mailing list on Arabic Christianity — have helped and encouraged me in various ways and generously shared books, articles, unpublished materials, and expert advice. This book would not have become what it is without their support. Their input on subjects discussed in this volume has led me to crucial information reflected on many of this book’s pages and in several cases has saved me from errors; I am, of course, solely responsible for those mistakes, omissions, and imperfections that remain.
It is only my wife Ksenia and our children Anna, Alexey, Maria, and Vera who can not only guess but have actually seen how much time and effort has gone into writing this volume. (An explanation is needed here: I do all my writing ‘in the thick of it all’, i.e., at home, with the door to the office wide open, and with the children, when they are not in school, playing right next to me or even under my desk.) I dedicate this book to Ksenia and our children, my wonderful and beloved family!
Halifax, Nova Scotia
14/27 October 2024
Sunday of the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council