Just how these texts were understood, and how their In monasteries East and West, OT Pseudepigrapha continued to be copied into the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Christian Transmission, and the Definition of ApocalypticĪt the end of her recent book, Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses, Professor Martha Himmelfarb poses my question in somewhat broader terms: Thus we arrive at the matter that I should like to touch on in this essay: the apparently unlikely relationship between this prominent medieval churchman and certain texts which were written anywhere from eight to twelve hundred years before his birth, and which, with only a couple of notable exceptions, were not included in the canon of either the Old or New Testaments, even though all - or most - of them appear under the names of saints from Israel's ancient or mythic past.
That he was, though, permitted access to so august a personage, together with the fact that he appears to have ended his days as the abbot of the great monastery of the Stoudios, may be taken as evidence that he was man of the highest ecclesiastical culture and status (4). He wrote controversial works as well, which will not occupy us here, and indeed at one point in his career confronted - not very successfully, as it turned out - the irascible papal legate, Humbert da Silva.
His treatises, On the Soul, On Paradise, and On Hierarchy, together with a number of letters and shorter works, were edited forty years ago by Jean Darrouzès for Sources chrétiennes (2), while his three hundred chapters on ascetical and mystical topics found their way into Nicodemus Hagiorites' eighteenth-century compendium, the Philokalia, as well as into J.P. Nicetas was also an author in his own right. Symeon the New Theologian (+1022) who wrote the latter's Vita and edited his works (1). He was a learned monk, perhaps best known as that disciple of St. Nicetas Stethatos was born sometime in the opening decade of the second Christian millenium and died, an old man, toward the eleventh century's end. A few observations, questions, and a final anecdote will then complete the essay. In what follows, I should like, first, to note the question of the survival of Old Testament pseudepigraphic writings in Christianity, and provide a glimpse in the meantime of the revolution underway over the past twenty years in the study of apocaplyptic literature then move, second, to illustrate the presence of apocalyptic motifs in Nicetas' writings, albeit in "interiorized form" in order to conclude in my third section with a second sketch, this time of the fourth and fifth century ascetic writers whom I believe provided Nicetas with the means for his appropriation of the ancient themes. So I offer this essay as, if nothing else, a sort of preliminary notice of elements and trends which lend further substance to frequent observations about the religious life of medieval Byzantium, and which point as well in certain other directions where further inquiry may prove fruitful, or, at the least, diverting. In spite of this apparent - and real - anachronism, it is precisely the echoes of an ancient literature from earliest Christian and pre-Christian, Jewish antiquity, together with the important modifications which that literature underwent at the hands of fourth and fifth century monastic writers, which struck me when I recalled what I had read previously in and about Nicetas, and which thus directed me back to his writings in order to discover, once again, yet more echoes - and those in great abundance - of the ancient currents and motifs which currently preoccupy me. This is five to twelve hundred years - together with vast cultural and demographic shifts - away from the central figure in my essay, Nicetas Stethatos. My interests lie in the first half millenium of the Eastern Christian world and are focused on a relatively narrow band: the ascetico-mystical literature of the Christian East and early monasticism, and, in still more recent research, on the roots of that literature in the New Testament matrix of Second Temple Judaism. "EARTHLY ANGELS AND HEAVENLY MEN": THE OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA, NICETAS STETHATOS, AND THE TRADITION OF "INTERIORIZED APOCALYPTIC" IN EASTERN CHRISTIAN ASCETICAL AND MYSTICAL LITERATURE Published in Dumbarton Oaks Papers 55 (2001) 125-153. Published in Dumbarton Oaks Papers 55 (2001) 125-153
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