Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 7.djvu/347

 HESTCHIUS

303

HESYCHIUS

the question gradually died out, but the Orthodox still maintain the Tomus of 1351 as binding; the real distinction between God's essence and operation re- mains one more principle, though it is rarely insisted on now, in which the Orthodox differ from Catholics. Gregory Palamas is a saint to them. They keep his feast on the second Sunday of Lent and again on 14 November (Nilles, "Kalendarium manuale", Inns- bruck, 1897, II, 124-125). The office for this feast was composed by the Patriarch Philotheus. In the nineteenth century there was among the Orthodox a certain revival of interest in the question, partly his- torical, but also speculative and philosophical. Nico- demus, a monk of Athos, defended the Hesychasts in his 'E7xei/3i5ioi' avix§ov\(VTix^v (1801); Eugenius Bul- garis and others, especially Athos monks, have again discussed this old controversy; it is always evident that their theology still stands by the Tomus of 1.351, and still maintains the distinction between the Divine essence and energy.

There was a very faint echo of Hesychasm in the West. Latin theology on the whole was too deeply impregnated with the Aristotelean Scholastic sj'stem to tolerate a theory that opposed its very foundation. That all created beings are compo.sed of actus and potentia, that God alone is actus purus, simple as He is infinite — this is the root of all Scholastic natural the- ology. Nevertheless one or two Latins seem to have had ideas similar to Hesychasm. Gilbertus Porre- tanus (de la Porree, d. 1154) is quoted as having said that the Divine essence is not God — implying some kind of real distinction; John of Varennes, a hermit in the Diocese of Reims (c. 1396), said that the Apostles at the Transfiguration had seen the Divine essence as clearly as it is seen in heaven. About the same time John of Brescain made a proposition: Creatatn liiccm infinitum et immensam esse. But these isolated opin- ions formed no school. We know of them chiefly through the indignant condemnations they at once provoked. St. Bernard wrote to refute Gilbert de la Porree; the University of Paris and the legate Odo condemned John of Brescain's proposition. Hesy- chasm has never had a party among Catholics. In the Orthodox Church the controvers3^ waged furiously just at the time when the enemies of the empire were finally overturning it and unity among its last defend- ers was the most crying need, is a significant witness of the decay of a lost cause.

I. Sources: The chief sources for the whole story are Nike-

PH0H08 GreGORAS, Pw/iaiKj) iffTopia, ed. bv ScHOPEN in 2

vols. (Bonn, 1829-1830), Migne, P. G.. CXLVIII-CXLIX; John VI Kantakuzenos. "laToptai, ed. Schopen in 3 vols. (Bonn, 182S-1832); and in P. G., CLIII-CLIV. The pub- lished works of Palamas are in P. G.. CL-CLI; those of Bar- LAAM in P. G., CIA; of Akindynos. ib., CLI. Kvdones, Adv. Grerj. Palam. in Arcudius, Opusc. aurea theol. (Rome, 1670). Further bibliography and accounts of the various writers who took part in this controversy in Krumbacfier, Byzantinische Litteratur (2nd ed., Munich, 1897), 100-06, 293- 300, etc.

II. Literature : .Allatius. De eccl. occut. et orient, perpettia con- sensiane (Cologne. 1648); Stein, Studien iiber die Heiycliasten. des XIV Jahrh,. (Vienna, 1874); Holl, Enthvsiasmus und Bms- geu^att bei dem griechischen Mbnchthum (1898); Engei-hardt, Die Arsenier und Hesychasten in Zeit&chr. f. histor. Theologie, VIII (1838), 48 sqq.; Miklosich and Miller, Acta patri- archatus Constantinop. (Vienna, 1860).

Adrian Fortescde.

Hesychius of Alexandria, grammarian and lexi- cographer; of uncertain date, but assigned by most authorities to the later fourth or earlier fifth century. We have no information whatever about him, his parentage, or his Ufe; beyond what can be learned from the epistolary preface to his Lexicon. This purports to be written by "Hesychius of Alexan- dria, Grammarian, to his friend Eulogius": its au- thenticity was needlessly questioned by Valckenaer. It tells us that the author bases his work on that of Diogenianus (probably Diogenianus of Heraclea, who in Hadrian's reign composed one of the successive anthologies of Greek minor poetry which are imbedded

in the " Anthologia Palatina"), who first digested into a single lexicon the various dictionaries of Homeric, comic, tragic, lyric, and oratorical Greek, adding also the vocabularies of medicine and history. The letter ends with "I pray to God that you may in health and well-being enjoy the use of this book"; but Hesy- chius is commonly held to have been a pagan. The work has certainly not come do'mi to us in its original form: it contains biblical and ecclesiastical glosses, of which the preface gives no hint. It is generally agreed that these are a later interpolation; and there is no good ground for identifying this Hesychius (as Fabricius did) with his namesakes, a third-century bishop and a translator of the Scriptures (Barden- hewer, tr. Shahan, 160). The classical part of the Lexicon is of the greatest importance to Greek scholars, not only as a rich vocabulary of otherwise unknown words and rare usages, but as a mine of in- formation about ancient Realien and lost authors ; few instruments have been equally serviceable for the critical emendation of Greek poetry texts.

The disturbance in that alphabetical order which Hesychius (in the preface) says he carefully followed, is only one of many evidences that the book has been altered in the process of tradition: Ernesti held that the true author lived in the first century, and that his work, excerpted by Diogenianus, was roughly brought up to date by the interpolated additions of an other- wise unknown Hesychius; others, that Hesychius's book was "contaminated" with a lexicon attributed to St. Cj'ril of Alexandria. Whoever it may have been who added the "GlossiE Sacris" to Hesychius, they have received much separate attention. They derive, says Ernesti, from three sources: (l)the paraUelism of Scripture, i. e. a word is glossed by the correlative word in the parallel half- verse; (2) the synonym, or explanatory doublets of the sacred writer; (3) the early commentators, such as Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion. The difficulties of exploring Hesychius's sources and utilizing his stores are aggravated by the bad state of the text; the Lexicon, frst printed hv Musurus (fol. ap. Aldum) at Venice in 1514, had only been transmitted in a single deeply-corrupt fifteenth- century codex.

The standard complete edition is by Schmidt (Jena, 1857); of the Gtossw SacrcE, by Ernesti (Leipzig, 17R5). Discussions and elucidations in Bentley. Epistolw: Valckenaer, Opuscuta, i, 175; also MCller and Donaldson, Literature of Ancient Greece, ili, 384; Croiset, Hist, de la litt. Gr., V, 975; and in gen- eral, Pauly, Real-Encyclopadie, s. v.

J. S. Phillimore.

Hesychius of Jerusalem, presbyter and exegete,

probably of the fifth century. Nothing certain is known as to the dates of his birth and death (433?), or, indeed concerning the events of his life. Bearing as he does the title toO irpea^vTipov, he is not to be confused with Bishop Hesychius of Jerusalem, a contemporary of Gregory the Great. A monograph on this brilliant scholar, whose fame has been so long obscured, would fill one of the most lu-gent needs of patristic theology.

The writings of Hesychius of Jerusalem have been in part lost, in part handed down and edited as the work of other authors, and some are still buried in libraries in MS. Whoever would collect and ar- range the fragments of Hesychius which have come down to us must go back to the MSS.; for in the last edition of the Fathers (P. G.. XCIII, 787- 1560) the works of various writers named Hesy- chius are thrown together without regard for order under the heading "Hesychius, Presbyter of Jerusalem ". About halt of the matter under " Hesy- chius" must be discarded, namely, the commentary on Leviticus (787-1180) which is e.xtant only in Latin and is unauthentic, being based on the Vulgate text rather than the Septuagint, and therefore the work of a later Latin (Isychius). The collection of ascetic