(Thank you, David Tibet, for the useful suggestions, especially regarding the Coptic text!)

Proclus of Constantinople was held in high regard in Coptic Egypt. His fame was largely due to the fact that Proclus allied himself, from the beginning, with Cyril of Alexandria in the controversy with Nestorius.

(This icon of Proclus is taken from here)

Besides the four genuine homilies that have been reported to date in Coptic (CPG 5800, 5812, 5822, 5832), we have also a number of other spurious texts attributed to his name. In this post I would like to introduce an interesting fragment in the Sahidic dialect, which contains two Christological extracts from the works of Proclus. The fragment has not been identified until now in any publication. As we shall see, it raises several problems that I have been unable yet to solve. I hope to discuss this at greater length in an article which is in preparation.

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The collection of Coptic manuscripts in the Louvre Museum holds, under the call number “R 116,” a detached fragment from a parchment codex (paginated 33-34). The paleographic features suggest that the manuscript was produced in the 10^th century in the scriptorium of Touton, located in the Fayyum oasis. As I said above, this fragment has neither been published, nor identified, before.

However, a key to the identification of the text is supplied by its Christological tone. The fragment discusses the relationship between the human nature and the divine nature of Christ, a topic which caused problems during the Nestorian controversy. Indeed, the entirety of the recto and the first half of the verso’s first column contain an excerpt from Proclus of Constantinople’s Homily on the Virgin (CPG 5800), a polemical sermon directed against the teachings of Nestorius. The extract from the homily about Mary is followed by another fragment from Proclus, this time from his third homily, in which the patriarch of Constantinople discusses the Incarnation of the Lord (CPG 5802). Both quotations are so much altered that they are often hard to recognize. For example, at one point where the Greek original reads “a union of two natures,” the Coptic version mentions “a single nature, not two.”

What is more, I find it absolutely strange that the two Proclian quotations are not separated by any marker in the manuscript. They are combined in such a way that they seem to form a continuous textual unit.

(In the following lines, the references to Proclus’ homilies are given according to the most recent edition, and English translation, by Nicholas Constas,[1] the former Harvard professor who became a monk in the Simonopetra Monastery, Mount Athos.)

Tentative translation from Coptic

First Extract = Constas, Proclus of Constantinople, 138,55-140,65

“3. […] (If it is) shameful unto you that God inhabited the womb of a virgin, it is also shameful unto the angels to serve unto man. 4. He who is impassible by his nature endured many sufferings on account of his compassion for us. For our Lord Jesus did not become man through accretion (procope), but through his compassion for us, in the way we worship it and in our confessing God who bore holy flesh for us from the Virgin. This which he himself had made became for him mother. He who is motherless according to his essence, he who is fatherless according to his dispensation (oikonomia). For how is he ‘fatherless’ and ‘motherless,’ according to the saying of Paul? If he is a man like us, then he is not motherless for he has a mother. If he is God, then he is not fatherless, for he has his Father in heaven. But now, he is one and the same and not two, motherless because he is the Creator, but he is also fatherless, as he became man.”

Second Extract = Constas, Proclus of Constantinople, 200,39-43

“5. […] He was conceived without intercourse, he took form (morphe) without pain. He to whom shape was not given at all had incarnated. For it is a birth and a beginning of the one who had no beginning. On the one hand it was the beginning of his humanity, on the other hand the divinity had neither beginning nor ending. He who was formless took form and there was no increasing in the Trinity so as to become Tetrad, which means that 3 did not become 4. A single union, a single bringing in (?) of a single nature, not two, a birth of a single Son, a unity of the flesh without any destruction, for he is not changing […]”

A few words are required regarding the two texts of Proclus from which the citations were extracted. The first quotation comes from a homily abundantly attested in virtually all languages of the Christian East, Coptic included. It is thus not surprising that Proclus’ Homily on the Virgin is one of the most beautiful and popular Marian texts, being used in the Byzantine liturgy.

On the other hand, things are exactly at the opposite as regards Proclus’ Homily on the Incarnation, from which the Louvre fragment quotes a passage. The only manuscript witnesses mentioned by Constas are two Greek codices, namely Vaticanus graecus 1633 (9^th-10^th century) and Vaticanus Barberinus 497 (17^th century), but the latter is only a late copy of the former. These scanty testimonies are completed by a couple of extracts from the same homily, which occur in two different Greek florilegia.

One of them is included in a Patristic anti-Chalcedonian florilegium, which is preserved in a Greek manuscript in Vatican (Vaticanus graecus 1431). The text was published a long time ago by Eduard Schwartz.[2] I find it very interesting that this quotation coincides, grosso modo, with the one which I have previously identified in the Louvre fragment! Unfortunately, I have been unable to check whether the other extract also occurs in the anti-Chalcedonian collection, as the only edition of the Greek text is unavailable in the libraries to which I have access. So if one of you out there has Eduard Schwartz’s Codex Vaticanus gr. 1431. Eine antichalkedonische Sammlung aud der Zeit Kaiser Zenos (Munich 1927), please contact me.

Returning now to the fragment in Louvre, one could ask what kind of text this is. Was the leaf detached from a Christological anthology? Or perhaps it simply comes from the work of another author in which Proclus is extensively quoted? Either way, I find it very strange that the two extracts are not separated in the manuscript but they rather give the impression that they were intended to form a whole.

All these questions would probably be answered easily if someone would find other fragments from the same manuscript. So far, I have not been able to discover other related fragments, even if the hand that has copied the Louvre leaf looks familiar to me. But who knows: saepe dat una dies, quod non evenit in anno.