St. Maximus the Confessor's Questions and Doubts (review)Joshua Lollar

Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 19, Number 1, Spring 2011,pp. 150-152 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/earl.2011.0012

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contenuto liturgico della Benedictio finale (Tract. XI) inducono Conti ad attribuire lo scritto all’inizio del movimento religioso, intorno alla metà degli anni Settanta del IV secolo. I Canoni, che condensano in 90 brevi sezioni l’insegnamento paolino, sono l’unica opera di cui si può affermare con certezza la paternità di Priscilliano; essi subirono l’intervento correttivo di un certo Peregrino, il quale migliorò il testo, eliminando alcune espressioni eterodosse. Lo stile piano e chiaro del prologo, così diverso da quello della maggior parte dei Trattati, si spiega con il genere e lo scopo particolare dell’opera, che tuttavia, secondo Conti, presenta delle somiglianze con il tono e lo stile del Tract. III. Il frammento citato da Oro-sio, che costui afferma appartenere a quaedam epistula scritta da Priscilliano in persona, presenta alcuni termini che si riscontrano nei Trattati e rivela affinità di stile con il Tract. III; per questo Conti giudica con interesse il breve passo che non va collocato nel contesto gnostico in cui lo pone Orosio, ma che si accorda con il moderato dualismo che emerge dai Trattati. Tuttavia la brevità del passo, l’ignoranza del contesto generale della lettera da cui è tratto e l’impossibilità di valutare l’intervento di Orosio inducono a valutare con cautela questo testo. Tra le opere spurie il De Trinitate fidei catholicae, che rivela una tendenza fortemente monarchiana, fu ascritto al milieu priscillianista, forse a Priscilliano stesso, da G. Morin, che per primo pubblicò il testo (1913); Conti concorda con H. Cha-dwick (1976) sull’uso di termini e citazioni bibliche tipiche dei priscillianisti, ma esclude la paternità di Priscilliano e sottolinea la distanza di stile e di contenuto rispetto ai Trattati di Würzburg. L’ipotesi dell’origine priscillianista dei Prologhi monarchiani ai vangeli, avanzata da J. Chapmann (1906) sulla base di analogie lessicali e contenutistiche, ripresa e sostenuta da J. Regul (1969) e da Chadwick, è condivisa anche da Conti, il quale tuttavia scarta l’idea che l’autore possa essere proprio Priscilliano.

Il commento, accurato e ben documentato sui risultati della recente bibliografia scientifica, affronta le principali questioni che emergono dai testi e consente un inquadramento storico generale delle tematiche ivi espresse.

Maria Veronese, Università degli Studi di Foggia

St. Maximus the Confessor’s Questions and Doubts Translated by Despina D. PrassasDeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010 Pp. x + 236. $40.

In St. Maximus the Confessor’s Questions and Doubts, Despina D. Prassas pro-vides a translation with introduction and annotation of José Declerck’s critical edition of the Confessor’s Quaestiones et Dubia (hereafter QD), found in volume ten of the Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca and originally published in 1982. It is the first English translation of the text and is, therefore, a welcome addition to the literature on Maximus.

Prassas begins her introduction with a brief account of the rather unclear details

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of Maximus’s life. She tends to give more weight to the Greek vita tradition, which reports a Constantinopolitan milieu for Maximus’s upbringing and education, than to the earlier Syriac life, which was published by Sebastian Brock in 1973, and which claims that Maximus was born in Palestine and received his spiritual formation among “Origenists” in a monastery there. Readers will also want to be aware of the recent and compelling argument for a Palestinian and Alexan-drian context for Maximus’s early formation made by Christian Boudignon in “Maxime le Confesseur etait-il Constantinopolitain?” (in B. Janssens, B. Roosen, and P. Van Deun, eds., Philomathestatos: Studies in Greek and Byzantine Texts Presented to Jacques Noret for his Sixty-Fifth Birthday [2004]).

The Syriac life seeks to taint the image of Maximus with its charge of “Ori-genism,” and this question, because most scholars place the composition of the QD before Maximus’s involvement in the christological polemics of his day, is indeed the primary doctrinal-historical issue Prassas considers relevant to the QD. She acknowledges the obvious and undeniable influence of Origen and Evagrius—and especially Didymus the Blind in the QD—on Maximus, but notes that there is only one direct reference to Origen’s doctrine in the QD, in question 19, which treats Gregory of Nyssa’s use of the term apokatastasis (“restoration”). Prassas writes, “it is not entirely clear whether Maximus’s explanation is precisely the same as Origen’s” and therefore she rejects the claims of the Syriac life regarding Maximus’s intellectual formation (13). This does not seem to be a very strong argument. The QD are so thoroughly Origenian (if not “Origenist”) in inspira-tion that to say the question on apokatastasis is “the only direct reference to any teaching of Origen in the QD” is to focus too narrowly upon the sixth-century anathemas. Nor does such a statement appreciate what was most likely the heart of an intellectually oriented—i.e. Origenian or Evagrian—monastic life, which Prassas herself ably describes in the core of her introduction to the content of the QD: the theoretical contemplation of the inner meaning of Scripture and its application to the ascetical practices of the monks (see 21–37).

While Prassas rightly tries to avoid systematizing the diverse questions of the QD, she does offer some rubrics for orienting the reader to the content of the translation. Within the general scope of the work—teaching on the ascetic life—Prassas identifies a number of “principles,” or components of the general intellectual “framework” of the QD, such as principles of “(biblical) interpre-tation, theological anthropology, anagogy, and typology” (22). She identifies typical “monastic topoi” found in the QD: “the passions, the virtues, and evil,” as well as “theoria” and “praxis.” Finally, Prassas discerns certain “tools” used by Maximus for the conveying of his teaching: “allegory, typology, etymology, number symbolism or arithmology, military terminology, anthropomorphosis,” and so on.

Regarding the translation itself, which is the most important contribution of the work, it is clear that Prassas has chosen to render Maximus’s Greek in an English idiom that corresponds as far as possible to Maximus’s own style and syntax. This is helpful in certain ways and indeed makes it easy to follow along with Declerck’s edition. However, the English is rather rough in places, occasion-ally ungrammatical, and sometimes hard to follow on its own terms. In addition,

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while the translation is a helpful tool for the study of the Greek text, it does contain mistakes—both typographical and of translation—and must therefore be used with care. There are words or phrases left untranslated in, for example, QD 43, 61, 130, and 180. These are, no doubt, merely accidental omissions. There is also a clear mistranslation in the last sentence of QD 170, as well as some lesser inaccuracies in, for example, QD 35, 63, 158, and 159. Nevertheless, the translation is generally reliable and Prassas has rendered us a great service by striving so vigorously with Maximus’s difficult Greek.

The collection of Quaestiones et Dubia itself is an excellent text for beginning a study of Maximus. It contains many of the themes that pervade Maximus’s thought more generally, but his style of interpretation, both of Scripture and of the fathers, is easier to follow in the QD than in, for example, the two collec-tions of Ambigua or in the Questions to Thalassius. Prassas’s work is, therefore, definitely to be recommended.

Joshua Lollar, University of Notre Dame

Jason David BeDuhn Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma 1: Conversion and Apostasy, 373–388 C.E. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010 Pp. viii + 402.

Traditionally, the so-called “conversion” of Augustine from the “error” of Man-ichaeism to the emerging orthodoxy of Nicene Christianity has been viewed by scholars as simply one, often preliminary, episode in his later career and legacy as a revered theologian. Few have paid any real attention to what initially attracted Augustine to Manichaeism in the first place and to the pivotal role his experience within that community played in his later intellectual and theological development. Typically, historians are content to take Augustine’s own version of these events, as recounted in his Confessions, for granted and to dismiss his attachment to the Manichaeans as the product of an immature mind. In this book, however, Jason BeDuhn puts Augustine’s Manichaean experience under a microscope, meticulously dissecting it in vivid and compelling detail, demonstrat-ing once and for all the crucial importance this period has within the wider arc of Augustine’s career.

The journey begins in backwater Numidia, in the town of Thagaste, where Christianity was still an amorphous mixture of sectarian communities, some Donatist, some Nicene, and others Manichaean (26). In fact, as BeDuhn reminds us, Augustine’s membership in Manichaeism did not mean participating in another religion, but rather in a community that saw itself as the “True Church” (26). While Manichaeans certainly never outnumbered other Christians in terms of their membership, the relative coherence of their doctrinal system, ritual pro-gram, and organization did pose a serious and competitive threat to its rivals