236 Damana Melikishvili

Ioane Petritsi And John Italus On Two Original Causes

Damana Melikishvili

The great medieval thinker and theologian Ioane Petritsi—“the Platonic Philosopher,” as contemporaries called him—is a representative of a new stage in the history of Christian thought. The study of his literary legacy has great importance for establishing trends of development in and theology both in and in the Christian Orient in general and the relationship between those trends with similar processes in Europe. The role of in the formation of the history of philosophy and medieval theological thought is well known. This philosophical trend, which is considered to be a link between ancient Greek philosophy and medieval thought, also exerted a strong influence on medieval Georgian thought, which is evidenced by the of the Corpus Areopagiticum by Ephrem Mtsire (Minor) in the 11th century. There is a listing of textbooks in the Gelati theological-philosophical school known as the Gelati Academy (12–13th centuries); this school was a Georgian analogue of the Mangana School in Constantinople and employed the same trivium-quadrivium system of subjects. This listing of books broadly contains the same Neoplatonic that was used as textbooks in medieval European schools.1 It was on the basis of those and commentaries that Ephrem Mtsire, Arsen Iqaltoeli, and Ioane Petritsi formed the formal- semantic system of Georgian philosophical-theological terminology. Those thinkers based their intellectual pursuits on the “highest philosophy” that had been established in the medieval centers of learning, in which the Dialectic of John Damascene, which was a compendium of Aristotelian logic based on his commentators, held the main place among the subjects of the so-called trivium-quadrivium. Ioane Petritsi introduced among the school compendia the renowned Elements of Theology by the celebrated Greek Neoplatonist the

1 დ. მელიქიშვილი, “გელათის სამონასტრო და ლიტერატურული სკოლა (აკადემია)—მთავარი მიმართულება და ლიტერატურულ-სააზროვნო ინტერესები” [d. melik’išvili, “gelat’is samonastro da literaturuli skola (akademia)— mt’avari mimart’uleba da literaturul-saazrovno interesebi” (D. Melikishvili, “The Gelati Monastic and Literary School (Academy)—its Main Trend and Literary and Speculative Interests”)], Bulletin of Kutaisi State University 1 (1993): 121–134; 2 (1993): 162–177. Ioane Petritsi And John Italus On Two Original Causes 237

Successor (“Diadochus”). In addition to his translation, Petritsi added an extensive commentary that is unique in its importance, for it contains not only a comprehensive consideration of Proclus’ philosophy, but also gen- eral discussions of the main issues of Greek (predominantly Platonic) phi- losophy, as well as his own Christian visions and interpretations, utilizing the principle of analogy based on the Neoplatonic structure of being. Judging by its form and style, Petritsi’s work represents a lecture course for his students. Throughout the course the author acquaints his students with Greek philosophical thought, and through expositions and argumentations he adduces quotations from and the Academics, and the Peripatetics, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, the Stoics, and commenta- tors on Plato and Aristotle (Porphyry, Asclepius, Plotinus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, and so forth). It is significant that at about the same time that Petritsi translated into Georgian and commented on Proclus’ Elements of Theology, in the mid-12th century, the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Comnenos assigned Nicholas of Methone to write a thrashing criticism of Proclus’ treatise so that readers would not be led to accept superstitious knowledge nor be tempted to offend the true Faith. A century later, in 1268, Thomas Aquinas assigned a translation of Proclus’ treatise to William Moerbeke. Interest in Petritsi was aroused at the beginning of the 20th century after the 1909 publication of N. Marr’s famous work Ioane Petritsi, a Neoplatonist of the 11th–12th centuries. Following this, in 1914 S. Gorgadze published Petritsi’s translation of Nemesius of Emesa’s Περὶ φύσεως τοῦ ἀνθρώπου; as a result, E. R. Dodds, editor of the edition of the Elements, became interested in Petritsi’s translation.2 The years 1937 to 1940 were important in the history of culture and the humanitarian sciences in Georgia: Simon Kaukhchishvili and Shalva Nutsubidze made an exemplary edition of Petritsi’s translation of Proclus as well as of his commentaries, the second volume of Ioane Petritsi’s

2 Н. Я. Mарр, Иоанн Петрицский, неоплатонник XI–XIIвв. [N. Ja. Marr, Ioann Petric- skij, neoplatonik XI–XII vv. (N. Marr, Ioane Petritsi, a Neoplatonist of the 11th—12th centuries)] (St-Petersburg, 1909); ნემესიოს ემესელი, ბუნებისათვის კაცისა, ბერძნულითგან გადმოღებული იოვანე პეტრიწის მიერ. გამოსცა ს. რ. გორგაძემ. გამოცემა საეკლესიო მუზეუმისა, Nr. 17 [nemesios emeseli, bunebisat’vis kac’isa, berjnulit’gan gad­moḡe­buli iovane petricis mier. gamosc’a s. r. gorgajem. gamoc’ema saeklesio muzeumisa, Nr. 17 (Nemesius of Emesa, On Human Nature, translation from Greek by Ioane Petritsi), ed. S. R. Gorgadze. Publications of the Ecclesiastical Museum, Nr. 17)] (: Saeklesio Muzeumi, 1914); Proclus, The Elements of Theology, revised text with translation, introduc- tion, and commentary by E. R. Dodds (Oxford, 11936; 21963).