St. Isaac of Nineveh's Gnosticchapters in Sogdian

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chapter 4 St. Isaac of Nineveh’s Gnostic Chapters in Sogdian: The Identification of an Anonymous Text from Bulayïq (Turfan)

Adrian Pirtea

1 Introduction*

From the once flourishing monastery of Rabban Shāpūr in Khūzestān (SW Iran), where they were originally composed, the ascetical and mystical works of St. Isaac of Nineveh (seventh century) have reached and inspired Christian communities East and West, be it in their Syriac original or in various Medieval translations. The role played by the Palestinian monastery of Mār Sābā in this transmission was essential: not only was the Greek translation of Isaac made here by the monks Patrikios and Abramios in the late eighth-early ninth century, but the earliest Arabic and Georgian translations are also connected to the cultural activity at this Palestinian monastery.1 The Greek translation2 then served as a basis for the diffusion of Isaac’s works in Europe: several Western European vernacular versions are dependent on the Latin translation made from the Greek (ca. thirteenth century),3 while the two Slavonic translations

* I wish to thank Dan Batovici and Madalina Toca for their kind invitation to present my find- ings in the panel “Caught in Translation: Versions of Late Antique Christian Literature” (EASR Annual Conference, Leuven, 18–21 September 2017) and to contribute to this volume. I am also grateful to Nicholas Sims-Williams, Sebastian Brock and Adam Benkato for their comments, suggestions and corrections on an earlier draft of this paper. 1 On the role of Mār Sābā, see Sebastian Brock, “From Qatar to Tokyo, by way of Mar Saba: The Translations of Isaac of Beth Qaṭraye (Isaac the Syrian),” ARAM 11–12 (1999–2000): 475–84; id., “Syriac into Greek at Mar Saba: The Translation of St. Isaac the Syrian,” in The Sabaite Her- itage in the Orthodox Church from the Fifth Century to the Present, ed. Joseph Patrich (Leuven: Peeters, 2001), 201–8;Tamara Pataridze, “Isaac from the Monastery of Mar Saba:The History of the Origin of the Multiple Translations of St Isaac the Syrian’s Work and Their Distribution in the Holy Lavra,” in St Isaac the Syrian and his Spiritual Legacy: Proceedings of the International Patristics Conference, Held at the Saints Cyril and Methodius Institute for Postgraduate Studies, Moscow, October 10–11, 2013, ed. Hilarion Alfeyev (New York: St Vladimir Seminary Press, 2015), 39–50. 2 Marcel Pirard, Abba Isaak tou Syrou: Logoi Askētikoi (Hagion Oros: Monē Ivēron, 2012). 3 On these translations, see Sebastià Janeras, “Some Examples of Changes of Meaning in the

(fourteenth and eighteenth century) safeguarded Isaac’s reception in the East- ern Orthodox world.4 In contrast to these well-known Western translations, this paper explores a hitherto unknown episode of the Oriental reception of St. Isaac’s works, an episode which involves a monastic center ca. 5000km to the east of Mār Sābā. It was probably by the ninth or tenth century that Isaac of Nineveh’s writings reached the East Syriac monastery atXipang near Bulayïq in ChineseTurkestan, by way of an early Christian Sogdian translation which is extant in a complete folio from the Sogdian MS. E27 (formerly C2).5 The original manuscript frag- ment was part of the Turfan collection in Berlin, but was lost during or imme- diately after the Second World War. Fortunately, old photographs of the frag- ment are still extant. Although already edited and translated by Nicholas Sims- Williams in 1985,6 this fragmentary Sogdian translation has so far remained unidentified. As will be shown here, the manuscript contains excerpts from Isaac’s Second Part, specifically from Isaac’s still unedited Kephalaia Gnostika (II.3). In itself, the fact that Isaac was known and read by the East Syrian monks of Turfan should not come as a surprise, as it only confirms the well attested inter- est of Sogdian Christians for their spiritual forefathers in Syria and Mesopota- mia. Still, the effort of Sogdian monks to translate Isaac is highly significant in that it represents a contemporary, but entirely independent phenomenon from the Western reception of Isaac in Syria, Palestine, and the Byzantine Empire. Furthermore, the existence of a “Sogdian Isaac” is remarkable for several rea- sons: (1) it adds a new language on the list of medieval translations of Isaac’s corpus (along with Greek, Georgian, Arabic, Geʿez, Latin, and Slavonic); (2) it is a precious witness to the reception and translation of Isaac’s lesser-known Second Part; (3) it can give us some insights into the history of the Syriac text itself and help us understand the way in which Isaac’s collection of Kephalaia was compiled; (4), it can also give us a better understanding of the Sogdian ver-

Latin and Vernacular Translations of Isaac the Syrian,” in St Isaac the Syrian, ed. Alfeyev, 69– 86. 4 For a good overview of the various translations of Isaac’s works, see Sabino Chialà, Dall’ascesi eremitica alla misericordia infinita. Ricerche su Isacco di Ninive e la sua fortuna, (Firenze: Leo Olschki, 2002), 325–62; Sebastian Brock, “Isaac the Syrian,” in La théologie byzantine et sa tradition, ed. Carmelo G. Conticello (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 331–43. On the Georgian translation in particular, see Tamara Pataridze, “Les Discours ascétiques d’Isaac de Ninive: Étude de la traduction géorgienne et de ses rapports avec les autres versions,” Le Muséon 124.1–2 (2011): 27–58. 5 On the new Sogdian fragments of Isaac that have since been identified, see below n. 24. 6 Nicholas Sims-Williams, The Christian Sogdian Manuscript C2 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1985), 69–77.