Text and Translation: The Bibliographic Record

This file is the source-critical companion to the First Part collection, surveying the Syriac and Greek editions, the principal translations into English and other languages, and the intractable problem of homily numbering that affects every reader who tries to compare one edition or translation with another. Questions of authenticity — which discourses in the Greek are genuinely by Isaac — are treated more fully in What Belongs to Isaac; the present file attends to the bibliographic and textual record.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / East Syrian)

The Syriac Foundation: Bedjan’s Edition

The critical starting point for any serious engagement with Isaac the Syrian’s First Part is the Syriac text established by Paul Bedjan in his Mar Isaacus Ninivita: De Perfectione Religiosa (Paul Bedjan, Mar Isaacus Ninivita: De Perfectione Religiosa [Paris/Leipzig, 1909]). Bedjan, a Chaldean Catholic priest of the Congregation of the Mission who devoted decades to the editing of Syriac patristic texts, produced a single-volume edition of eighty-two discourses — the number that corresponds to what Syriac tradition came to regard as the complete First Part. The edition was based on manuscripts available to Bedjan in the early twentieth century and remains, despite its age and the limitations of manuscript access at that period, the standard reference point for the Syriac text of the First Part. It is from this Syriac that the other major scholarly and translational work has been done, directly or indirectly, even where subsequent scholarship has identified readings in need of correction.

Bedjan’s edition has no critical apparatus in the full modern sense, and it reproduces the text of the manuscripts he used without the systematic comparison of witnesses that a contemporary critical edition would require. Nevertheless, for the better part of a century it served as the foundation of Isaac scholarship, and it is still cited as “Bedjan” with a discourse and page number in scholarly literature worldwide.

Wensinck’s English Translation

The first major scholarly English translation of the First Part was produced by the Dutch orientalist Arent Jan Wensinck: Mystic Treatises by Isaac of Nineveh (A. J. Wensinck, Mystic Treatises by Isaac of Nineveh [Amsterdam: Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1923]). Wensinck translated from Bedjan’s Syriac edition, rendering all eighty-two discourses in plain scholarly English. His work was not aimed at monastic or devotional use but at the academic study of Syriac Christianity and comparative mysticism; the prose is serviceable rather than beautiful, but it gives reliable access to the Syriac content for readers without Syriac.

Wensinck’s translation remains valuable precisely because it follows Bedjan’s Syriac directly, rather than the Greek. This means that it preserves the original author-citations — “the Blessed Interpreter” for Theodore of Mopsuestia, and so forth — that were altered in the West Syriac and Greek transmission (see The First Part for discussion of the substitution question). A reader who compares Wensinck with the HTM English translation based on the Greek will encounter differences not only of style but of theological reference, reflecting the two distinct textual traditions.

The Holy Transfiguration Monastery Translation

The standard Orthodox English translation, and in practice the most widely read English version of the First Part in ecclesiastical contexts, is the edition produced by the Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Boston: The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian (The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery [Dana Miller], 2nd ed. [Boston, 2011]). The first edition appeared in 1984; a substantially revised second edition, which incorporated updated scholarship and corrections to both translation and introductory material, appeared in 2011. The primary translator is identified as Dana Miller.

Critically, the HTM translation was made primarily from the Greek rather than from Bedjan’s Syriac. This is the appropriate choice for a text intended for Orthodox ecclesiastical use: the Greek of Patrikios and Abramios is the text through which the Eastern Church received and canonized Isaac, and it is the text represented in the Byzantine manuscript tradition that feeds directly into the Orthodox liturgical and hesychast heritage. The HTM edition contains seventy-seven homilies plus appendices — not eighty-two as in Bedjan — reflecting differences between the Greek manuscript tradition and the Syriac in how the collection was organized and bounded. The volume also includes an “Appendix: Table of Homily Equivalences” that provides a concordance between the HTM numbering, the Syriac (Bedjan/Wensinck), and other reference systems, an invaluable tool for cross-referencing that every serious student of Isaac should consult.

The introductory material in the second edition gives a careful account of the transmission history, including the Mar Saba translation and the textual questions raised by the author-name substitutions. The HTM editors align with Sebastian Brock’s position that these substitutions preceded the work of Patrikios and Abramios (Brock, “Syriac into Greek at Mar Saba,” OLA 98, 2001) — a point with implications for how we evaluate the fidelity of the Greek translators.

Pirard’s Critical Greek Edition

The most significant recent development in the textual scholarship of the First Part is the critical edition of the Greek Ascetical Homilies produced by Marcel Pirard (Marcel Pirard [ed.], critical edition of the Greek Ascetical Homilies [Holy Monastery of Iviron, Mount Athos, 2012]). Published by the Holy Monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos, this edition for the first time establishes the Greek text on a systematic manuscript basis, with an apparatus that allows scholars to trace the manuscript tradition with a precision impossible from the older printed Greek texts (the previous standard being the Theotokis edition of 1770, printed in Leipzig, which had been the basis for most Greek reading and for Russian translations for over two centuries).

Pirard’s edition is the modern scientific foundation for work on the Greek Isaac. It supersedes the Theotokis text for scholarly purposes and provides the indispensable reference point for any future translation or theological study that aims to engage the Greek tradition critically. Its publication on Athos is itself fitting: the Athonite monastic tradition has been among the most intensive readers of Isaac in the Orthodox world, and the monks of Iviron brought to the project both scholarly and spiritual investment.

The Numbering Problem

Any reader who attempts to compare passages across two or more editions of the First Part will quickly encounter a problem that has no clean solution: [Disputed: homily numbering differs across the Greek (and HTM English based on it), Bedjan’s Syriac, and Wensinck — there is no canonical numbering; e.g. the merciful-heart homily is HTM 71 / Wensinck 81]. This discrepancy is not a minor inconvenience. It arises from substantive differences between the manuscript traditions in how the collection was divided, ordered, and bounded; scribal decisions about where one discourse ended and the next began were not made uniformly across all witnesses, and different editors and translators made different choices about which manuscript groupings to follow.

The Theotokis Greek edition of 1770 has its own numbering system, which neither corresponds exactly to Bedjan/Wensinck nor to the HTM English. Russian translations in the pre-revolutionary and modern periods have used yet other systems. Scholars citing Isaac must therefore specify which edition they are using, and readers comparing secondary literature should expect that “Homily 43” in one source and “Homily 43” in another may not refer to the same text. The HTM concordance appendix is the best practical guide for navigating this, but no single reference resolves the underlying diversity in the tradition.

The problem has a deeper cause worth noting: the collection was never, in antiquity, given a definitive authorized form with stable canonical numbering. Isaac’s discourses circulated, were copied, were combined or divided by scribes working in different monasteries and different linguistic communities, and were organized according to the practical needs of the communities using them. This is characteristic of patristic ascetical literature generally and should be understood as a feature of living textual tradition rather than editorial carelessness.

Non-Authentic Material in the Greek First Part

A further bibliographic matter with significant implications for readers is the presence, in the Greek First Part, of texts that are not by Isaac of Nineveh at all. Two categories of intrusion have been identified by modern scholarship.

First, [Disputed: sources differ on whether 3 or 4 discourses of John of Dalyatha entered the Greek under Isaac’s name]. John of Dalyatha (also known as John Saba, or “the Elder of Dalyatha”), an East Syrian mystical writer of the eighth century whose work is closely related in style and content to Isaac’s, was apparently confused with Isaac at some point in the transmission process; several of his discourses entered the Greek collection and have been transmitted there as Isaac’s own (Sebastian Brock, “Isḥaq of Nineveh,” GEDSH [Gorgias, 2011]). The identification of these texts as John’s rather than Isaac’s is a result of modern comparative study of the Syriac sources and does not appear to have been recognized in the Byzantine manuscript tradition.

Second, an abbreviated letter by Philoxenus of Mabbug — a sixth-century West Syrian theologian — entered the Greek tradition in a form conflated with material surrounding what the Greek numbers as Homily 76. Philoxenus of Mabbug’s “Letter to Patrikios” (a different Patrikios from the Mar Saba translator) circulated in Syriac ascetical literature and found its way, in abbreviated form, into at least one branch of the transmission. The result is that portions of the Greek Homily 76 area reflect Philoxenian rather than Isaacan authorship.

These authenticity questions are treated in fuller detail in What Belongs to Isaac. From a bibliographic standpoint, what matters here is that readers of the Greek First Part — including those reading it in the HTM English translation — are reading a collection that contains a small but identifiable body of non-Isaacan material alongside the authentic core. The HTM editorial apparatus notes some of these issues; the Pirard critical edition provides the most systematic treatment at the level of the Greek text itself.

Other Languages

Beyond the foundational Syriac and Greek, the First Part has been transmitted in Georgian, Church Slavonic, Romanian, Serbian, Arabic, and Latin — a testimony to the universality of Isaac’s reception across the Orthodox world. The Georgian version, deriving from the Mar Saba Greek, is among the earliest (Brock, “Syriac into Greek at Mar Saba,” OLA 98, 2001, p. 207). The Slavonic version became the vehicle for centuries of Russian monastic reading; the Russian translation published by the Holy Trinity–St. Sergius Lavra draws from this tradition. Latin versions made from the Greek gave medieval Western readers access to an Isaac who was, however, largely unknown to the Latin scholastic tradition. French, German, and Italian translations exist in the modern period; the Italian scholarly edition by Sabino Chialà deserves mention in connection with the Second Part, treated in The Rediscovered Parts.

See Also

References

  • Paul Bedjan, Mar Isaacus Ninivita: De Perfectione Religiosa (Paris/Leipzig, 1909).
  • A. J. Wensinck, Mystic Treatises by Isaac of Nineveh (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1923).
  • The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian, trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Dana Miller), 2nd ed. (Boston, 2011).
  • Sebastian Brock, “Syriac into Greek at Mar Saba: the translation of St Isaac the Syrian,” in The Sabaite Heritage, ed. J. Patrich, OLA 98 (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), pp. 201–208.
  • Sebastian Brock, “Isḥaq of Nineveh,” in Gorgias Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Syriac Heritage (GEDSH) (Gorgias Press, 2011).
  • Marcel Pirard (ed.), critical edition of the Greek Ascetical Homilies (Holy Monastery of Iviron, Mount Athos, 2012).