Philo of Alexandria in Five Letters of Isidore of Pelusium

CHAPTER NINE PHILO OF ALEXANDRIA IN FIVE LETTERS OF ISIDORE OF PELUSIUM 1. Introduction 155 2. Five letters: text, translation, commentary 159 3. Concluding remarks 179 Bibliography 180 1. Introduction One of the more obscure and unusual of the Church Fathers is Isidore of Pelusium, a Saint in both the Eastern and Western eccle siastical tradition. A weighty tome in Migne's Patrologia Graeca (vol. 78) contains a collection of some 2000 letters from his pen. From these, and from rather scanty reports in other sources, we learn that he was a priest of the church of Pelusium to the east of the Nile delta, just under halfway from Alexandria to Jerusalem.1 It appears that, appalled at the immorality and corruption of the local clergy, he came into sharp conflict with the bishop Eusebius and his fellow priests, and decided to retire to the desert. There for many years he lived the ascetic life of a desert monk, probably as a member of a monastic community (Kotv6~tov) .2 Through his epistolary activities, however, he maintained contact with a vast array of correspondents, ranging from humble folk in the neighbourhood and local civil and ecclesiastical dignitaries to eminent figures such as the Emperor Theodosius and the Alexandrian Patriarch Cyril. The dates of his birth and death can be approximately fixed on the evidence of the Letters. He was born, possibly at Alexandria,3 in about 365-375 AD.4 We may be fairly certain that it was at Alexandria * 1 For general accounts, including biographical and bibliographical deta~ls, see Schmid (1948) 1-8, Quasten (1960) 180-185, Ritter (1971), and above all Evieux ( 1975). I have not gained access to Fouksas ( 1970). 2 In the tradition he was the Abbot of a monastery, but this is not confirmed by early sources or the evidence of the Letters. Many of these, however, praise the monastic life. 3 This is affirmed by Ephraem, the 6th century Patriarch of Antioch, according to Quasten (1960) 181 (no reference_given). 4 The traditional date is 365, but Evieux has shown that Epp. 1.178, 489 cannot 156 CHAPTER NINE that he received his not inconsiderable training in classical litera ture, rhetoric, and (to a lesser extent) Greek philosophy. Here too, we may surmise that he first gained acquaintance with writers in the Alexandrian tradition such as Clement and Philo. But there is no evidence that he came into direct contact with the leading exegete and scholar of the church in [296] Alexandria, Didymus the blind.5 According to some sources he was a pupil of John Chrysostom, but this must be taken in a spiritual sense. Isidore was a great admirer of the bishop, and some of his letters are little more than extracts from the latter's works. In his exegesis and his theological views he reveals connections with both the Antiochean and the Alexandrian schools. The date of his death must be placed in about 435 AD, for the last topical references in the letters are to the Council of Ephesus ( 431) and the events that followed it. In the later Patristic and Byzantine period Isidore was above all famous for his huge collection of letters. According to Severus of Antioch (6th century) he wrote almost 3000. But the collection we have is confined to a round 2000 letters, collected during his life time or soon after his death and arranged into a definitive edition by the monks in the Akoimete monastery in Constantinople between 450 and 550.6 A selection of 49 letters on mainly christological subjects was translated into Latin by the Roman deacon Rusticus during the 6th century and appended to the Acta of the Council of Ephesus. The Letters were very popular during the Byzantine period. In the 9th century Photius describes him, together with Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus, as one of the masters of ancient Christian epistolography, and also calls him a model of the priestly and ascetic life. 7 The corpus of Isidore's letters is not very well known, and has been scarcely exploited for studies on intellectual life in the early 5th century. The main reason for the inaccessibility is the lack of a have been written to the Praetorian Prefect Rufinus (d. 395), so Isidore may have been born later. 5 To the contrary, it has been speculated that he was the fourth member of the student coterie of Synesius, to whom he writes some letters; cf. Lacombrade (1951) 54f. But it requires some imagination to see him as a serious student of the famous Neoplatonist philosopher and teacher Hypatia. 6 Cf. Quasten (1960) 182. The corpus in the edition in Migne contains 2012 letters in 5 books, among which are 19 doublets. Rusticus tells us that the edition he used in 566 contained 4 codices, each containing 500 letters. 7 Ep. 207 Lauordas-Westerink. .

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