The Lexicon and the Amphilochia

Two further monuments of Photius’s learning: the Lexicon, his dictionary of difficult classical and sacred vocabulary, long known only in a damaged form until a manuscript discovered in 1959 completed it; and the Amphilochia, his great collection of answers to theological, exegetical, and philosophical questions put to him by Amphilochius, Metropolitan of Cyzicus — often reckoned the most important of his theological works after the Mystagogy.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Byzantine

The Lexicon

The Lexicon (Greek Lexeōn synagōgē, “collection of words”) is a dictionary explaining the meanings of words drawn from classical and sacred texts, designed as a help to readers of authors whose vocabulary — especially the refined Attic diction prized by the educated — was no longer current in the ninth century (Theodoridis, Photii Patriarchae Lexicon [1982–2013], introduction; Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium [1983], ch. 5). It belongs to the long tradition of Atticist lexicography and draws heavily on earlier lexica rather than breaking new ground; it is generally regarded as an early work, and parts of it may well be the labor of Photius’s pupils as much as his own pen (the older assessment in the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, s.v. “Photius”; Wilson 1983). Its interest is partly philological in its own right and partly that, in glossing older authors, it quotes them — and so preserves fragments of classical literature otherwise lost.

To see what the Lexicon is for, one must recall the linguistic situation of educated Byzantium. The living Greek of the ninth century had moved far from the Attic dialect of classical Athens, yet that Attic remained the prestige idiom of high literature, and a cultivated writer was expected to imitate it. Reading the classical authors, the orators and historians whose vocabulary the Atticists prized, therefore required help with words and usages that had fallen out of currency or shifted in meaning — and it is that help the Atticist lexica, of which Photius’s is a late and learned representative, were composed to give (Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium [1983], ch. 5; Theodoridis, introduction). The genre had a long history before Photius, reaching back to the lexicographers of the Roman and late-antique periods; his Lexicon stands in that line, compiling and digesting the work of predecessors rather than constructing a dictionary from fresh observation. This dependence is not a defect but the nature of the genre, and it is precisely because Photius’s compilation drew on older lexica — some now lost — that it carries down to us glosses and quotations that would otherwise have perished. In glossing a rare word the lexicographer often cites the author in whom it occurs, so that the completed Lexicon turns out to be, among other things, a quarry of fragments from classical literature surviving nowhere else (Tsantsanoglou, New Fragments of Greek Literature from the Lexicon of Photius [1984]; Wilson 1983).

The textual history of the Lexicon is itself a small drama of modern scholarship. For long it was known only from the badly damaged Codex Galeanus (Trinity College, Cambridge), defective at both ends, with a Berlin manuscript supplying the opening down to the word aparnos. Because the one substantial witness was mutilated, the Lexicon circulated for centuries as a torso: editors could print and study only what the surviving leaves preserved, and the bulk of the alphabet stood beyond reach, with the recovery of the work’s lost classical quotations correspondingly blocked (Theodoridis, introduction; Pearse, summarizing the manuscript history). Then in 1959 the Greek scholar Linos Politis discovered at the Monastery of Zavorda in western Macedonia a manuscript containing the entire text from alpha to omega — the Codex Zavordensis — which at last completed the work and yielded a wealth of new classical quotations (Roger Pearse, summarizing the discovery; K. Tsantsanoglou, New Fragments of Greek Literature from the Lexicon of Photius [1984]). The find was a genuine event in classical philology: a single manuscript, surviving in a remote monastery, doubled the known text of a major lexicon and brought to light fragments of ancient authors that had been read by no scholar since the Middle Ages — a vivid instance of how much the transmission of antiquity hangs on the survival of individual books. On the basis of this manuscript the standard modern critical edition was prepared by Christos Theodoridis, Photii Patriarchae Lexicon, in three volumes (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1982, 1998, and — posthumously — 2013); the earlier editions of Richard Porson (1822) and S. A. Naber (1864–65), resting on the defective Galeanus, are superseded by it (Theodoridis, introduction; Bryn Mawr Classical Review on vol. III [2013]). The reference standard for the Lexicon is now Theodoridis rather than any Migne text.

The Amphilochia

The Amphilochia is Photius’s largest theological work and, after the Mystagogy, his most important. It is a collection of answers to questions — chiefly difficult points of biblical interpretation, but also dogmatic, philosophical, and miscellaneous problems — addressed to Amphilochius, Metropolitan of Cyzicus, one of Photius’s closest friends and oldest disciples, who had submitted the questions to him (the Amphilochia, in Patrologia Graeca 101; critical edition in Laourdas and Westerink, Epistulae et Amphilochia, vols. IV–VI; Wilson 1983). In form it is a quaestiones et responsiones work in the patristic mode: a question is stated, often a knotty discrepancy between scriptural passages or a problem of doctrine or natural philosophy, and Photius answers it, frequently at length and with marshaled patristic and rational argument.

The quaestiones et responsiones — “questions and answers” — was a long-established Christian literary form, practiced before Photius by such Fathers as those who set out to resolve the apparent contradictions of Scripture or to instruct on points of doctrine through a series of posed problems and reasoned solutions. Its appeal lay in its flexibility: a body of disparate difficulties, with no necessary order among them, could be gathered and met one by one, each answer self-contained. Photius’s Amphilochia is a late and learned specimen of the genre, and its character reflects the man — the same critical intelligence that weighed books in the Bibliotheca here turned to weighing the hard places of Scripture and the disputed questions of doctrine and philosophy (Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium [1983]; Laourdas and Westerink, Epistulae et Amphilochia IV–VI). Many of the questions concern the reconciling of scriptural passages that seem to conflict, a perennial labor of the Christian exegete; others touch dogmatic or even cosmological matters, so that the collection ranges, like its author, across the whole field of sacred and profane learning. The work shows the range of his mind turned to the service of exegesis and doctrine, and it is a principal source for his theology outside the controversies. It reveals Photius the exegete: not a mystic commentator but a marshaller of arguments and authorities, resolving difficulties by close reading, by the citation of the Fathers, and by the application of reason — the same method, transferred to Scripture, that made him the most formidable controversialist of his age (Wilson 1983).

The number of questions is given variously, and the variation is itself a matter of the manuscript transmission rather than a settled figure. The prologue speaks of about three hundred questions; the critical edition, numbering the pieces as they stand in the manuscripts, reaches a higher total in the region of three hundred and twenty-nine — so that the work is properly described as containing “about three hundred questions according to the prologue, some three hundred and twenty-nine as numbered in the critical edition,” the count being variable across the manuscript tradition (Laourdas and Westerink, Epistulae et Amphilochia IV–VI; the older account in the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, s.v. “Photius”). Part of the reason for the unsettled figure is the very nature of a quaestiones collection: its pieces are loosely strung and could be grouped, divided, or augmented as the work was copied, so that different branches of the tradition transmit somewhat different bodies of questions, and the prologue’s round number need not match the tally of any one manuscript. The Greek text is printed in PG 101, the volume of Migne assembled for the Amphilochia from a Vatican manuscript with the help of Hergenröther; the modern standard is the Laourdas–Westerink edition, which prints the Amphilochia together with Photius’s letters, the two bodies of material being closely related in their transmission (Laourdas and Westerink, Epistulae et Amphilochia).

Two Faces of One Learning

The Lexicon and the Amphilochia show the two faces of Photius’s erudition that the Bibliotheca had already displayed together: the philologist’s mastery of the classical inheritance, and the theologian’s command of Scripture and the Fathers. The one serves the reading of pagan antiquity; the other serves the understanding of the faith. Yet the two faces share a single method. In the Lexicon Photius gathers, sifts, and arranges the verbal lore of his predecessors to make the classical authors legible; in the Amphilochia he gathers, sifts, and arranges the testimony of the Fathers and the resources of reason to make the hard places of Scripture and doctrine intelligible. The lexicographer’s habits — collecting authorities, comparing usages, resolving obscurities — are the same habits, transposed, that the exegete brings to the discrepancies of the sacred text. This continuity is what gives the corpus its unity, and it is why the same critical temper recognizable in the Bibliotheca is recognizable equally in the dictionary and in the theological responsa (Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium [1983]; Mango, The Homilies of Photius [1958], introduction).

That a single man should have produced, alongside the Bibliotheca and the Mystagogy, both a major classical lexicon and a vast collection of exegetical and dogmatic responsa is itself the measure of the reputation he held in his own age and has held since — the most learned man of Byzantium, whose learning ran without seam from the classical authors he summarized to the doctrine he defended (Wilson 1983; Mango 1958, introduction). The learned corpus and the controversial career are not two Photiuses but one: the scholar who read everything and the patriarch who would not let the Creed be altered. The instruments forged in the study — the command of the sources, the discipline of comparison, the readiness to render a verdict — were the same instruments he carried into the controversies, and the Lexicon and the Amphilochia stand as the quieter monuments of the mind that the Mystagogy and the great disputes would later display under fire.

See Also

References

  • Theodoridis, Christos, ed. Photii Patriarchae Lexicon. 3 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1982, 1998, 2013. The standard modern critical edition, based on the Codex Zavordensis.
  • Tsantsanoglou, K. New Fragments of Greek Literature from the Lexicon of Photius. Athens, 1984. On the classical quotations recovered from the completed Lexicon.
  • Photius. Epistulae et Amphilochia, ed. B. Laourdas and L. G. Westerink. 6 vols. Leipzig: Teubner, 1983–1988. Vols. IV–VI contain the Amphilochia.
  • Amphilochia, in Patrologia Graeca 101 (Migne). The earlier collected text.
  • Wilson, N. G. Scholars of Byzantium. London: Duckworth, 1983, ch. 5. On the Lexicon, the Amphilochia, and Photius’s learning.
  • Pearse, Roger. “The Lexicon of Photius” (roger-pearse.com), summarizing the manuscript history and the 1959 Zavorda discovery by Linos Politis; used to locate the discovery, cross-checked against Theodoridis.
  • The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, s.v. “Photius.” On the Lexicon’s dependence on earlier lexica and the count of the Amphilochia.