The dogmatic interest was a much stronger one than the exegetical in the generations which succeeded Isidore; and it appears probable that his letters owe their survival as a collection to the use made of them in the Monophysite controversy. Whether or no he survived till the outbreak under Dioscorus of the secular struggle, Isidore was sufficiently Antiochene, in theology as well as exegesis, to have spoken with no uncertain sound about the truth of Christ’s manhood: Qeod déos ob Aéyerat, Xpicrod yap 7d wdbos yéyove, capkwhévros Sndovdre Oeod cal TH mpoodyer THs capKds Td mdOos brouelvavtos (Ep. i. 124); éx picewy duoty 6 els imdpxwv vids (Ep. i. 323, to Cyril); év éxarépas rais gicecw els brdpxe vids Ocod (Hp. i. 405). Conse- quently we find the writers on the Chalcedonian side, Ephraem of Antioch, Leontius of Byzantium, Facundus of Hermiana, appealing to his authority ; while the great Monophysite writer Severus attempts (according to Stephen Gobar, in Photius cod, 232) to turn the edge of the appeal by accus- ing Isidore of Origenism. The principal strong- hold at Constantinople of the Chalcedonians was the monastery of the Acwmete or ‘Sleepless ones’; and it was the Accemetz who, somewhere in the century 450-550 A.D., collected and pub- lished an edition of 2000 of Isidore’s letters. Facundus apparently quotes from this collection ; and nearly fifty letters were excerpted from it and translated into Latin (together with a very numerous series of documents bearing on the Nestorian controversy) by a scholar of the time of Justinian, whose work is preserved to us in two MSS of the 12th cent., Casinensis 2 and Vaticanus 1319.
From the same collection of 2000 letters, and from no other source, all our Greek MSS are derived. The oldest of them (Grotta Ferrata B a 1), written in 985, and never yet employed for the printed texts, contains 1600 letters, num- bered from 1 to 600, and from 1001 to 2000; another at Paris (gr. 832, of the 13th cent.) con- tains the first 1213 letters ; while two 16th cent. MSS at the Vatican (Vat. gr. 649-650 and Vat. Ottob. gr. 341-383) contain the whole 2000, num- bered through continuously from the first to the last. One or two more give some portion of the collection in its proper order ; but a much larger number give groups of letters selected out of the rest because of their connexion with some par- ticular topic. Thus Bodl. Laud. gr. 42, sec. xu., contains thirty-eight letters on the Psalter, arranged in the order of the Psalms with which they deal, though to each letter is still prefixed its proper number in the continuous series. Within this class one MS distinguishes itself from the rest, both for the large bulk of letters which it contains and for the influence which it has exer- cised upon the printed texts,—Venice Marcianus 126, sec. xiv.: of its 1148 letters, the first division, EXTRA VOL.—33
PATRISTIC COMMENTARIES 513
484 in number, are concerned exclusively with the exegesis of different parts of Scripture. *
Unfortunately, the history of the printed texts became entangled at an early point with this other or indirect line of the manuscript tradition. The editio princeps, prepared by the abbé Jacques Billi, and published posthumously at Paris in 1585, was taken, indeed, from the Paris MS above men- tioned, and consisted therefore of the first 1213 letters of the original collection. These were divided by the editor, it is not clear on what grounds, into three books, the first comprising 500, the second 300, and the third the remaining 413 ; but, apart from this division into books, the letters then printed were printed in the exact order in which the Accemetz had arranged them. To the next editor, Rittershusius, or rather to the MS on which he relied, is due the confusion which still prevails in the printed texts of Isidore. He used a Munich copy of the Venice MS, and found in it as many as 230 letters which had not appeared in Billi’s edition ; his own edition, published at Heidelberg in 1605, repeated Billi’s three books, and added to them a fourth, consisting of the 230 new letters, thus raising the total number to 1443. As we haveseen that the interest of the scholar (who- ever he was) who put together the collection of the Venice MS was in the first place exegetical, it is not surprising that the fourth book should contain a specially large proportion of strictly exegetical letters, or that the editor who finally completed the printed collection, the Jesuit A. Schott, though he was able to add 569 new letters from the Vatican Library, added few of the more strictly exegetical sort. Schott published his 569 letters as a fifth book} (without reprinting the earlier books), first in Greek alone, Antwerp 1623; next in a Latin version only, Rome 1624 ; and finally in both Greek and Latin, Frankfort 1629. The four books of Billi-Rittershusius and the fifth book of Schott were combined in the Paris edition of Morel, 1638 ; and this edition (which has Greek text and Latin translation throughout) has never been super- seded, though the imperfections of its text are only less glaring than its faults of typography and defective indexes. Something was done for the improvement of the text in the publication by P. Possinus, Rome 1670, of collations made from Roman MSS, under the direction of cardinal Bar- berini, some thirty years earlier ; and these notes of Possinus are incorporated at the foot of the page in Migne’s reprint of Morel’s text (Patr. Gr. 78). Four dissertations by German, French, Swedish, and Italian scholars respectively — Niemayer, (Halle, 1825; reprinted in Migne), E. L. A. Bouvy (Nimes, 1884), V. Lundstrém (in Zranos, vol. ii. [Upsala, 1897] p. 68), and N. Capo in Studi di filologia classica, ix. (Florence, 1901)—have each contributed something to our knowledge of the MSS of Isidore ; but a new edition remains one of the desiderata of Patristic literature. t