Thus, just as in doctrine he represents a reac- tion in Egypt from the extremer type of Egyptian theology, so too in exegesis Isidore, Egyptian and Alexandrine though he was, modified the alle- gorical traditions of Alexandrine exegesis under the influences of Chrysostom’s writings. He takes up a middle position between those who interpreted the whole of the Old Testament directly of Christ, and those who refused so to interpret any of it: éya 6¢ dvayxalus pyul dupbrepa yeyercOa, 76 TE wh rdvra edéx Oar mept avrod kal 7d wh mavTedOs Ta Kar’ adrov ceovynoOa (ii. 195). He will not refuse to allow some place to allegorical interpretations, and he gently rebukes a correspondent who had asked for a purely literalist explanation of some provisions of the Mosaic legislation : rods ras Gewplas bropal- vovTas Kal TO ypdupa eis TO TvEeDUa werapvOulfovras ovK 018” brws alriacdmevos, Kalroe modNdns dPéud Twa Tols dkpownevors héyorras, abra Ta Tpdyywara épunvev- Ojval cor Nurap&s mapexddeoas (ii. 81). Even in matters belonging to the New Testament, alle- gorical interpretations can be found in Isidore ; but to what a subordinate position, at least in dealing with the Pauline epistles, he relegates the allegorical sense, may be illustrated from Zp. iv. 129, where, in enumerating many possible explana- tions of the precise meaning of 1 Co 6} els 76 tdvoy cua auaprdver, he has recourse to allegorizing as a ninth alternative only: e 5 Kal tparfvar Fuds Botre els rhy THs aNAyyoplas Oddy, évdry Eorw % AeXO7- comeyn.
47. Cyril of Alexandria (commentaries Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians).—
Cyril, the great opponent of Nestorianism, was archbishop of Alexandria from 412 till his death in 444, Nothing is known as to the date of his birth. His relations to Isidore of Pelusium seem to have been those of a younger to an older man, but he was of sufficiently mature years in 403 to be present, in the train of his uncle and predecessor Theophilus, at the Council of the Oak which con- demned Chrysostom. The overpowering dogmatic
on
PATRISTIC COMMENTARIES
interest of Cyril’s career and writings has natur- ally tended to obscure the interest of his exegetical work ; yet the bulk even of what is preserved of the latter class is far more considerable than that of the former, and the original discrepancy must have been greater still. Too much stress need not be laid on the statement of Cassiodorus, in the preface to his Inst. Dw. Litt., that Cyril was one of those who had expounded in the Greek lan- guage the Divine Scriptures of the Old and New Testament ‘ab ipso principio usque ad finem’; for not only Clement of Alexandria (of whose Hypoty- poses it was more or less true, see below, p. 520°), but Chrysostom, Gregory, and Basil, are: included under the same heading, and there is every reason to suppose it inexact in the case of the latter writers. But out of the seven volumes which make up the only complete edition of Cyril’s works— that of Aubert (Paris, 1638)—four consist wholly of exegetical matter; and yet this edition contained nothing on the New Testament except the portions which have survived of the commentary on St. John. For two centuries after Aubert little more was done; but the last seventy years have witnessed the recovery of a Syriac version of the commentary on St. Luke, and of considerable fragments in the original Greek of commentaries on St. Matthew and on some of the Pauline epistles.
That Cyril had commented on the Epistle to the Hebrews there was a good deal of ancient evidence, in Theodoret, Leontius, Facundus, and others, to show ; but for the epistles of St. Paul, properly speaking, the only direct witness that was in print until within the last sixty or seventy years appears to have been a, solitary quotation (itself perhaps taken from a Catena):in the Acts of the Second Council of Niczea in 787 (Mansi, xiii. 289). The ‘definition’ of the Iconoclastic Council of 754 had appealed to 2 Co 5’ 1’, and the answer of the orthodox appeals, among other interpreters, to Cyril: cal Kdpuddos dé 6 ’AXegavdpeds 6 bréppaxos Ths elNekpwvods Tuav mlorews capyrivwr huivy TO avTo pyrov otrws dtepunvever* "Ererdn yap yéyovev dvOpwimros 0 povoyevis To0 Ocod Adyos (there follows a passage of some 18 lines).*
Cramer’s Catenze on the Epistles to the Corin- thians (A.D. 1841) and Romans (A.D. 1844) first supplied sufficient material to prove the existence of continuous commentaries; for his Catena on 1 Corinthians contained sixty quotations from Cyril, his Bodleian Catena forty-four quotations for Ro 1-8, and his Munich Catena about seventy for Ro 7-16. Similar proof for 2 Corinthians (the epistle cited in the Second Nicene Council) was not long delayed, for the 3rd volume of Mai’s Nova Patrum Bibliotheca—the title-page of which bears the date 1845, though the year 1849 is mentioned in the preface—published from the Vatican Catena, MS gr. 762, a whole series of Cyrilline excerpts on Romans (pp. 1-47), 1 Corinthians (pp. 48-82), and 2 Corinthians (pp. 83-103), together with one frag- ment apiece from other sources for Galatians and Colossians; a Latin translation follows in part 2 of the same volume, pp. 1-67. For the first two epistles Mai had been largely anticipated by Cramer, since two of the latter’s MSS (that on 1 Cor. and the Bodleian Catena on Romans) were descendants, collateral or direct, of Mai’s Vatican MS ; but for the latter chapters of Romans Mai’s matter was partly, and for 2 Corinthians it was wholly, new. ; :