Report on Recent Activity A ) Connections with the CERL

I I I . R E S E A R C H G R O U P I N M E D I E V A L P L A T O N I S M György Geréby and István Perczel

I) Introduction

From 1998, a new research center was founded at the CEU, the aim of which was to contribute to a better understanding of what Platonism and anti-Platonism meant i n the Middle Ages, by analysing certain issues considered as essential i n the development of alternative theological and philosophical strategies between ca. 300 and 1300, both i n Byzantium and beyond, that is to say, in the Eastern part of the oikumene, and in the Latin West.

Our aim is to build up an international reserch team (partly based on our former students) integrated into the international scholarly network. Since we have already been in contact for some years with the Centre de I 'Etude des Religions du Livre (CERL) in Paris, a research group associated to the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, directed by Prof. Alain Le Boulluec, as well as with the De Wulf-Mansion Centre, at the Institute of Philosophy of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, directed by Prof.

Carlos Steel, we wanted to give these co-operations a more institutional form. We also wanted to establish a similar co-operation with Italian centers, like the research groups "Origen and the Alexandrian Tradition" and La diffusione dell'eredità classica nell'età tardoantica e altomedievale. Forme e modi di transmissione. Our new center also intends to function as a meeting point for East-Central European and Western European scholars in our field and a connecting link between the already existing Western European networks and their Eastern European counter­

parts which we considered as needing to be created.

U) Report on Recent Activity

CERL and also to gather material for a publication mentioned here-below, under paragraph 1/a. We agreed in starting a multifaceted, interactive collaboration, mainly consisting of the following points:

A l ) Publications:

A l a ) István Perczel is contributing to the publications of the CERL. A great encyclopedic work on Byzantine Theology is being prepared by the latter team, with Dr. Giuseppe Carmelo Conticello as editor i n chief. István Perczel has written the entry on the anti-Origenist condemnations of the Fifth Ecumenical Council.

Another paper by István Perczel: Denys l'Aréopagite, Evagre le Pontique et les condamnations antiorigénistes du Cinquième Concile Ecuménique could be prepared thanks to the collaboration of several members of the CERL. Prof. Zenon Kaluza has read and revised it from the point of view of philosophical consistency and French language and Prof. Alain Desreumaux from that of the Syriac, and again of French language. It has also been read by Prof. Alain Le Boulluec and now will be sent to Prof Xavier Teixidor, a leading expert on Syriac philosophical texts.

The paper (ca. 40 pages) became thus a fine example of international team work. It has been accepted for publication recently by the Parisian Revue des Etudes Augustiniennes on the recommendations of Proff. Alain Le Boulluec and Carlos

Steel.

A l b ) Prof. Alain Desreumaux who is on the editorial board of the series Apocrypha has suggested that Irma Karaulashvili, an alumna of our department, may prepare the critical edition of the Armenian version of the Doctrine of Addai, an important apocryphal text. A reworked version of the M A . thesis of Miss Karaulashvili, read and highly appreciated by Prof. Desreumaux, may serve as the introduction to this edition.

A l e ) Prof. Bernard Outtier, a renowned kartvelologist (that is, specialist in Georgian studies) has proposed a similar project to another alumna of the CEU Department of Medieval Studies, Victoria Jugeli. She would take part in the edition of the Lives of the Prophets i n a Georgian version.

A i d ) The CERL is open to further collaboration of the kind. We have also proposed to prepare joint publications through the CEU Press or other publishers i n Hungary. The attraction of such a proposal may reside in the fact that the waiting period for publication in France, as elsewhere in the West, is quite long, at least one year. The proposal was favourably received, even i f further details should still be clarified. A pioneer publication of this kind may be the one that we plan to edit in connection with a Summer University program co-organized whith the CERL.

A2) Summer University

We have agreed with Professor Le Boulluec that, taking advantage of the facilities provided by the CEU Summer University (SUN), we would propose to the SUN a co-organized course on "The Many Cultural Centers of the Medieval Oikumene." We had originally planned a workshop on the same subject one year ago, but we realized that the SUN would provide much more efficient means for realizing our aim: bringing to Eastern Europe new ideas emerging in Western scholarship, on the one hand, and fostering the emergence of such ideas by organizing encounters between Western and East European scholars, on the other.

Our proposal for a joint SUN course received most enthusiastic answers from several research centers, that is, besides the CERL, also the De Wulf Mansion Center i n Leuven and La diffusione dell'eredità classica nell'età tardoantica e altomedievale. Forme e modi di transmissione which unites several researchers scattered all over Italy. Together, we elaborated a SUN course proposal which was recently accepted by the SUN board. We intend to publish a volume on the same subject with the contributions of the SUN professors.

A3) Conference on Eucharist and Philosophy

We have also agreed to co-organize a conference i n Budapest on "Eucharist and Philosophy", a topic widely discussed in the West during the Middle Ages. The special feature of the conference will be that it would treat the same problem also in the Byzantine and Syrian cultures. The conference will be held in November 1999.

A4) Joint research on manuscripts

During discussions with Prof. Alain Desreumaux it became clear that we have many common interests, one of them i n manuscripts: Latin, Greek, and Syriac. Prof.

Alain Desreumaux, a member of the CERL, is also the head of the French mission, sponsored by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for the exploration of Syrian Christianity in India, embracing its monuments, inscriptions, and manuscripts.

Since István Perczel has already planned a field trip to India for mapping up, describing, and microfilming Syriac manuscripts, we were only too glad to agree on a joint mission. The French team has already made very good progress in exploring the Syriac manuscripts i n Kerala, but there is an immense amount of material and still a lot of work to do, for which international cooperation is needed. István Perczel went to Kerala in September 1998, and began his work. Thanks to the information generously supplied by Prof. Alain Desreumaux, he was able to discover an important manuscript, containing an entire translation of the Dionysian Corpus in Syriac, with running commentaries (Kuriakos Bar Shamuna's version written i n

AD. 776, in a X I X t h century copy). He has also made a microfilm copy of a treatise On the angels (Al malakhë), inspired by Pseudo-Dionysius. But this is only the beginning of a long work, which w i l l take many years. The Syriac manuscripts in the Kerala libraries-numbering several hundreds-should be systematically catalogued and microfilmed. At the same time there arose the idea that the most urgent task would be to do something for the manuscripts of Tur Abdîn (East Turkey), where one finds the most important collections of Western Syriac codices.

A joint field trip to Tur Abdîn is planned by French, Syrian, and Hungarian scholars.