Forging Identities between Heaven and Earth: Commentaries on Aristotle and Authorial Practices in Eleventh-and Twelfth-Century Byzantium (original) (raw)
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Reading and Commenting on Aristotle in Byzantium
in Kaldellis/Siniossoglou, The Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium (forthcoming), 2017
In the prologue to his paraphrase of Aristotle's De anima, the thirteenth-century monk and scholar Sophonias famously draws a clear-cut distinction between commentaries proper and paraphrases. 1 Paraphrases differ from commentaries in that 1) the latter are longer; 2) whereas commentaries discuss each lemma of Aristotle in sections, paraphrases rephrase the text in a continuous manner; 3) they involve different authorial practices: whereas commentators distance themselves from the text, paraphrasts impersonate Aristotle himself; and 4) though both aim to elucidate Aristotle's text, the former do so by interpreting it, while the latter dismantle and then reassemble Aristotle's words. Sophonias furthers this distinction by referring to Themistios, the most famous late-antique paraphrast of Aristotle, and by promising to follow in the footsteps of Michael Psellos. 2 Sophonias' distinction rests on Simplikios' prologue to his commentary on Aristotle's Categories. 3 According to Simplikios, 1) the ideal commentator must show a vast and deep knowledge of Aristotle's work; 2) he must be impartial, neither presenting certain statements of Aristotle's as unsatisfactory, nor defending them as though he were one of Aristotle's disciples; and 3) with respect to Plato and Aristotle's allegedly different views, he must go beyond the letter (lexis) towards the real meaning (nous) of these philosophers' views in order to uncover their harmony. 4 Aristotle was read endlessly in Byzantium and received the attention of erudite scholars who more or less matched Simplikios' first requirement. However, with respect to impartiality, when facing difficult passages and regarding the differences between Plato and Aristotle, the agenda of many Byzantine Aristotelian scholars was at odds with that of Simplikios. In spite of the autonomy of the commentators' agenda, it is undeniable that the Byzantines read and interpreted Aristotle through the prism of late-antique interpreters: the Church Fathers on the one hand and the lateantique commentators on the other. 5
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The eleventh to twelfth-century theologian and philosopher Eustratios of Nicaea authored commentaries on books 1 and 6 of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. In this paper I show the extent to which Eustratios is indebted to the ancient commentary tradition as well as how he departed from the earlier model of commentary in order to answer contemporary questions of meaning. In order to do so I discuss Eustratios' hermeneutics and textual approach, its dependence upon the ancient model and its novelties in detail. I argue that Eustratios provided a fundamental contribution to the formation of a specifically Byzantine commentary tradition. Finally, this paper also investigates the historical circumstances of Eustratios' career as a commentator and highlights how Eustratios' literary and philosophical output reflects on his patron, the princess and historian Anna komnena.
The Byzantine Reception of Aristotle's Theory of Meaning
Methodos, 2019
Les érudits byzantins ont composé, principalement à des fins éducatives, des paraphrases et des commentaires sur la logique aristotélicienne et, en particulier, sur le De interpretatione. Certaines de ces oeuvres trahissent clairement leur origine ancienne et d'autres témoignent soit de traditions anciennes perdues, soit des tentatives des Byzantins d'expliquer le texte d'Aristote. Mon but est de présenter les commentaires byzantins sur les premiers chapitres du De interpretatione, dans lesquels nous trouvons des traces de la théorie de la signification d'Aristote. Je commence par rassembler le matériel textuel pertinent du XI e au XV e siècle, ensuite, je discute des points de vue byzantins sur quatre sujets qui ont un intérêt philosophique et historique : les mêmes pensées sont-elles partagées par tous ? En quoi les ressemblances, les symboles et les signes diffèrent-ils ? Les noms sont-ils par nature ou par convention ? Les parties des noms composés signifient-elles ?
While still in its infancy, 1 the study of Byzantine philosophy has finally emerged as a relatively discrete discipline. Among the many challenges that it has faced before reaching this point has been the suspicion that philosophy in Byzantium operated largely in subordination to Christian theology and should therefore be studied by specialists in the development of Orthodox doctrine. But a discrete modern discipline requires a (relatively) autonomous subject, which is why attention is being drawn to the selfstanding commentaries that many Byzantine thinkers wrote on ancient philosophical works that in many respects owe little to their Christian historical context. Byzantine philosophers, moreover, continued the discussion of ancient problems and contributed original arguments to them, and they applied philosophical thinking to the resolution of topics in other fields. It is possible, then, to 'analyse [their writings] systematically … to show that their reasoning and argumentation was no less philosophical than the philosophical work of any other period in the history of philosophy'. 2 In a recent presentation of the state of the field, Katerina Ierodiakonou and Dominic O'Meara seem to counter the notion that Byzantine philosophy cannot be studied independently of theology. 3 Besides, neither discipline was institutionalized, which enabled philosophers to operate outside the institutional constraints that existed in the West; philosophy was part of general higher education, making it an attractive field of study