More on Gregory of Nyssa's 'Letter to the Monk Philip'

Abstract

For some 1500 years the existence of an otherwise lost letter by Gregory of Nyssa was known from a few Greek fragments. Collaborative work by several scholars over two centuries led eventually to the recovery of a full text of the letter in the early 20th century. In this paper, this letter is revisited, bringing to bear on the Greek and Latin texts a study of the Syriac translation made in the late 7th century by John Maron, founding patriarch of the Maronites. The topic of the letter is Christology: who is Christ, and why does it matter what he is and what he is not? We gauge the tenor of Gregory's pre-Chalcedonian Christology and see how skilfully the Green anthologists and the Syriac translator used this letter as a patristic 'locus classicus' to make their appeal to the Monophysites of the 6th and 7th centuries. Finally, a revised 'edition' of the letter is synthesised in English from the Greek, the Latin and the Syriac.