The Earliest Latin Translation of Damascene's De Orthodoxa Fide III 1-8

THE EARLIEST LATIN TRANSLATION OF DAMASCENE'S DE ORTHODOXA FIDE III 1-8 Past centuries believed that the first Latin translation of the De orthodoxa fide was made around 1150 by a lawyer of Pisa, called Burgundio.1 At present it is certain that Burgundio was the first to make a complete translation of the work, but before him they had already, in Hungary, a partial version, the so-called "Cerban" translation of De orthodoxa fide III 1-8.2 Published by R. L. Szigeti, O.Praem.3 during World War II, in a country which at the end of the fighting disappeared behind the Iron Curtain, the first edition of "Cerban" is not well known to the West—nor even to the East, most likely. But, even not considering this unfortunate fact, the "Cerban" translation merits to be edited anew, and for the following reasons: 1) Szigeti knew that the Greek text used by the translator was most likely not completely identical with that published in the PG.4 Nevertheless, in his apparatus he constantly appears to be convinced of the contrary. Now, editing an old translation is not exactly correcting that version; the editor, we believe, has to try 1.This version, commonly quoted by the great Scholastics, was never published ; that frequently makes the edition of mediaeval texts uneasy: the editors have to refer to the PG, which many times has not the expression of the quotations , thus giving the impression that the Scholastics are speculating about something that never was said by Damascene. This is the fundamental reason why we are preparing an edition of Burgundio's translation. 2.At the time of "Cerban", Burgundio, Gerhoh, Arno, etc. the De orthodoxa fide had still only the original division in a hundred chapters; the division into four books with each its own number of chapters was introduced much later under the influence of the construction of Peter Lombard's Sentences. The older copies of the Burgundio version still have only the division into a hundred chapters; see, for instance, ms. Erfurt Amploniana F. 179, written around 1250, with more recent traces of the division into four books. At the time of Scotus the division into four books was already common, but not exclusive as yet. See Opera omnia, edit. C. Balk (Rome, 1950); in tome II, p. 19, for instance, we read "secundum Damascenum 54," which means in the now traditional division III 7 and not I 8, as noted by the editors. Though "Cerban" did not know the division in Books, we here adopt the common usage to make reference easier. 3.Translatio latina loannis Damasceni (De orthodoxa fide L. HI. c. 1-8) saeculo XH. in Hungaria confecta, (Budapest, 1940). 4.Ibid., 23, note 1. For the Greek text, see PG 94, 784-1228; the chapters translated by Cerban, ibid., 981-1016A. [49] [50] EARLIEST TRANSLATION OF DE ORTHODOXA FIDE III 1-8 to restore the text to what it was as it left the hands of the translator . Since the De orthodoxa fide was one of those Byzantine writings which was much worked over and a check-up of the Greek manuscripts with their numerous additions and omissions is evidence enough of this—and since we really have no idea of what type of Greek manuscript(s) was used by the Hungarian translator , our principle mentioned above gains special significance in our case. 2)The editor did not care about the old citations of the "Cerban" version. Now, some of them are preserved by manuscripts older than the codices of Admont and Reun, upon which the edition is based; moreover, in several instances the text of these quotations actually seems to be purer and closer to the architype than that of the manuscripts containing the complete version. 3)Sometimes Szigeti follows too slavishly his manuscripts; for instance, he retains the title of the second chapter as title of the entire fragmentary version; at the very end of chapter 5, we read two lines printed in brackets, which, in a footnote, are accompanied by the remark that those lines are not in the Greek text, but seemingly are the duplicate of a passage in chapter...