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Document Details : Title: Prochorus Cydones's Unfinished Translation of Augustine's De Vera Religione Subtitle: An Annotated Critical Edition Author(s): ATHANASOPOULOS, Panagiotis C. , DEMETRACOPOULOS, John A. Journal: Augustiniana Volume: 76 Issue: 1 Date: 2026 Pages: 11-151 DOI: 10.2143/AUG.76.1.3295614 Abstract : This study presents a critical edition of Prochorus Cydones’s partial (or partially extant) Greek translation of Augustine’s De Vera Religione. In addition to an apparatus criticus and an apparatus fontium, the edition includes an apparatus comparationis, which records numerous salient lectiones shared by the translation and the manuscript tradition of the Latin original, as well as features of Cydones’s translation that can be explained by the Latin manuscript tradition. Besides, evidence on Cydones’s translation technique is offered. On the basis of the probable reception of the translation by Demetrius Cydones, the translation is dated to 1364/65. The translation is set in the context of Prochorus Cydones’s anti-Palamite agenda: Augustine’s Plato-based anti-Manichaean rejection of the vision of anything corporeal as a vision of the divine was presented, anachronistically, against Gregory Palamas’s doctrine of the literal visibility of God as light. With this in mind, this article provides a detailed demonstration that ch. III of Augustine’s text was directly based on a Latin translation of Plato’s Phaedo (perhaps by Apuleius) and that Prochorus Cydones was aware of this and took it into account for shaping the phraseology of his translation of the Plato-based Augustinian passages. It is also argued that Augustine’s ideas about the relation of the Christian religion to philosophy in De Vera Religione are in tune with Prochorus and Demetrius Cydones’s view that philosophy is compatible with Christianity and that theology, which is based on the lumen revelationis, should respect philosophy, which is the outcome of the lumen rationis. Finally, it is pointed out that the translation was used by Bessarion in his In calumniatorem Platonis as well as by George Scholarius - Gennadius II in his anti-Muslim De unica via ad salutem hominum. The Appendix offers a full list of the passages from Augustine’s De Vera Religione quoted or referred to in other late Byzantine translations of Latin texts, mainly texts by Thomas Aquinas. |
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