ΙΩΑΝΝΟΥ ΤΑΠΕΙΝΟΥ ΕΠΙΣΚΟΠΟΥ ΚΩΝΣΤΑΝΤΙΝΟΥΠΟΛΕΩΣ
ΠΕΡΙ ΤΗΣ ΕΝΩΣΕΩΣ ΚΑΙ ΕΙΡΗΝΗΣ ΤΩΝ ΤΗΣ ΠΑΛΑΙΑΣ ΚΑΙ ΝΕΑΣ ΡΩΜΗΣ ΕΚΚΛΗΣΙΩΝ
α´. Τὸ ἐπὶ πᾶσιν ἀψευδὲς τοῦ Σωτῆρος δίδωσι κἀμοὶ νῦν προοιμιαζομένῳ εἰπεῖν· Καλῶς ἐν Εὐαγγελίοις ὁ Κύριος ἔφη· Ἐρευνᾶτε τὰς Γραφάς. Τὸ γὰρ θεόλεκτον λόγιον τοῦτο παρὰ πολλῶν μὲν καὶ ἄλλων ἴσως ἐρρέθη, καιροῖς ἰδίοις ἐφαρμοζόμενον, οὐδὲν δὲ οἷον καὶ νῦν. Καὶ ὅτι τοῦτο καὶ οὐκ ἄλλο τῷ παρόντι πράγματι ἐφαρμόζει, περὶ οὗ νῦν ὡρμημένος λέγειν ἐγὼ τῆς Εὐαγγελικῆς πυξίδος ἐδανεισάμην τὸ πρόᾳσμα, αὐτὸ τὸ πρᾶγμα φανεῖ, ὁπηνίκα πρὸς τοὺς περὶ αὐτοῦ λόγους ἐπαποδύσεται, ὃ δὴ καὶ λέγεται τὸ πρᾶγμα τοῦτο, περὶ οὗ καὶ λέγειν ἤδη ὡρμήμεθα, ἡ τῶν Ἐκκλησιῶν ἕνωσις. Ἐκκλησιῶν, τίνων; Τῆς παλαιτέρας ῾Ρώμης, καὶ τῆς νέας τε καὶ ἡμετέρας· ὧν ἐπὶ τῷ πρὶν χωρισμῷ σπαραττόμενος, ἐπὶ τῇ νῦν ἑνώσει γέγηθα καὶ ἀγάλλομαι. Ἀλλὰ τοῦ χωρισμοῦ τούτου μνησθεὶς, διαπορούμενος κράζει· Ὦ πόθεν μοι δοθήσονται δακρύων πηγαί, ὡς ἂν ἀποκλαύσωμαι, εἰ καὶ μὴ ἀξίως, καὶ τῷ τοῦ πάθους μεγέθει ἀνάλογον, ἀποκλαύσωμαι δ᾽ οὗν ὅμως τὴν ἐντεῦθεν καταλαβοῦσαν τὴν καθ᾽ ἡμᾶς οἰκουμένην σκοτόμαιναν, τὴν ἐντεῦθεν ἐπελθοῦσαν τῷ πλάτει τῶν ῾Ρωμαϊκῶν σχοινισμάτων ζημίαν τοῦ ἡμετέρου λάχους, οὐ μόνον ἐπὶ τῷ τῆς σωματικῆς ἀρχῆς ἀκρωτηριασμῷ, πολλῶν πόλεων καὶ χωρῶν, νήσων τε μακροδιαστάτων, καὶ ἐθνῶν ὁλοκλήρων ἀφαιρέσει κολοβωθέντος, ἀλλά τε δὴ καὶ εἰς αὐτὴν τὴν εὐσέβειαν ζημιωθέντος, εἴ γε τῆς εὐσεβείας ἐστὶ ζημία Μωάμεθ καὶ Μουχούμετ, ἔνδον τῶν ἱερῶν σηκῶν ὀργιάζοντες, κἀκεῖσε, βαβαὶ τοῦ μύσους! ἐνθιασεύοντες, ὅπου πρὶν τὸ μέγα τῶν Χριστιανικῶν μυστηρίων ἀπετελεῖτο μυστήριον. Ὅτι γὰρ καὶ μέχρι τοσούτου ἡ τοῦ σχίσματος τούτου κακία, τὰ καθ᾽ ἡμᾶς ἐλυμήνατο ὁ πολὺς τῆς κακώσεως χρόνος, οὐ μόνος ἡμῖν τοῖς παθοῦσιν, ἀλλὰ καὶ πᾶσι τοῖς ἁπανταχοῦ γῆς ἔθνεσι δῆλον κατέστησεν. Εἰ δέ τις τὴν ἰσχὺν τοῦ ἀμάχου τούτου κακοῦ καὶ ἄλλως ἐθέλει σκοπεῖν, ἔχει διανοήσασθαι ταύτην, καὶ ἐξ ὧν αὐτὸς ἐγὼ ἐκ μόνης μνήμης πάσχω τὰ νῦν. Ἄλλον γὰρ τοῦ προκειμένου λόγου ἔχων σκοπόν, περὶ τῆς ἐκκλησιαστικῆς εἰρήνης εἰπεῖν δηλαδή, καὶ ἀπολογήσασθαι τοῖς τε νῦν τῶν ἀνθρώπων, τοῖς τε ἐσύστερον, ὡς καλῶς παρ᾽ ἡμῶν ἡ τοῦ ὀλεθρίου τῶν Ἐκκλησιῶν σχίσματος ἠθετήθη διάστασις, καὶ ἀντηλλάγη αὐτῆς ἡ θεοφιλὴς εἰρήνη καὶ ἕνωσις, ἐγὼ δὲ τούτων ἀφέμενος, ἐπεὶ τῶν ἐκ τῆς διαστάσεως καταλαβόντων ἡμᾶς ἐμνήσθην κακῶν, συμφορὰς καὶ θρήνους πλέκειν ἠρξάμην. Καὶ εἰ μὴ τὸ τῆς προθέσεως κατεπεῖγον ἡμᾶς ἀνθεῖλκεν ἑτέρωθεν, τάχ᾽ ἂν ἅπασαν ἀρτίως τὴν κτίσιν πρὸς πένθος συνεκινήσαμεν, τὰ ἐπισυμβάντα τῷ Χριστιανισμῷ κακὰ διηγούμενοι, ἐκ τῆς τῶν Ἐκκλησίων διαστάσεως. Ἀλλ᾽ ὅτι μὲν καὶ ἐντεῦθεν ἡ ἄμαχος τοῦ κακοῦ τούτου ἰσχὺς ἀναφαίνεται, δῆλον ἐξ ὧν οὔπω καὶ συγχωρούμεθα πρὸς τὰ κατὰ σκοπὸν εἰσβαλεῖν.
De unione ecclesiarum 
October 3, 2007 at 3:25 am
Dear Peter,
Congratulations on this new site, which looks superb.
A quick practical question: is there an easy way of obtaining the complete Bekkos text in Greek?
Thanks for your help.
Cordially,
Adrian Walker
October 3, 2007 at 11:38 am
Hi, Peter—
I thought I had posted a comment here, but it seems not to have gone through. In any case, I would just like to repeat my congratulations on this new blog and my gratitude for your irenicism. It’s refreshing to see someone trying to think about Orthodox-Catholic relations from the point of view of the peace given in ecclesial communion.
A practical question: is there an easy way to obtain the Beccos text in Greek? (As well as his refutation of Photius?).
Cordially,
Adrian
October 3, 2007 at 3:54 pm
Dear Adrian,
Thanks for your two notes, and sorry for the delay in their appearing in the blog; the way this site is currently set up, I have to moderate comments, and it takes a while for me to read things and forward them to the site.
The readiest way to procure the texts of John Bekkos is to locate the nearest library copy of J.-P. Migne’s Patrologia Graeca and photocopy what you need; virtually all of Bekkos’s published works are in vol. 141 of this series. There are at least two republications of Migne’s Patrologia currently in print; one of them, by far the more expensive and with flimsier, paper bindings, is put out by Brepols in Belgium; the other, which has better bindings though slightly smaller pages, is published by the Κέντρον Πατερικών Εκδόσεων in Athens, under the title Ελληνική Πατρολογία. The Greek edition is hard to come by outside of Greece, or at least here in America; I tried ordering a copy of vol. 141 of it through Schoenhof’s Foreign Books, and ended up paying for the more expensive, Belgian edition instead. I unfortunately am not subscribed to the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae [http://ptolemy.tlg.uci.edu/], but, when I last checked, Bekkos was not yet on that vast electronic repository of Greek literature.
There is also now an electronic version of the whole of Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, from a company in Texas called the Religion and Technology Center, Inc. [web address: http://rosetta.reltech.org/reltech/PG/%5D. According to their website, they are now offering individual volumes of Migne for $25 a disk; however, if you plan to do any serious studying of the church fathers, you may find it worthwhile investing the $400, which gets you the whole Migne PG on a dvd. The RelTech version presents each page of Migne’s Patrology as a .jpg file, which means that one gets a photograph of the page, not editable text; the photographs are not of the highest resolution, which, added to the already poor quality of Migne’s original typeface, can make for difficult reading. But it is a very useful resource nonetheless, especially if, as I do, one lives in a rather isolated area, with no decent academic library nearby.
Besides Migne, there are two earlier published editions of Bekkos’s works. Leo Allatius, in the seventeenth century, did the original work of editing Bekkos’s writings and translating them into Latin; he published them in a 2-vol. work titled “Graecia Orthodoxa” (Rome, 1652 and 1659). Hugo Laemmer produced essentially a re-edition of Allatius’s work in the nineteenth century, with new introductions and notes (H. Laemmer, Scriptorum graeciae orthodoxae bibliotheca selecta [Freiburg, 1864]). Both of these editions are now very hard to find; Allatius’s original edition, in particular, is only to be seen in rare book rooms.
As for the text of De unione §1, presented here on the website, I typed it in by hand.
Bekkos’s refutation of Photius is found principally in two places. A shorter refutation is given in one of the works I have translated, the De unione ecclesiarum, §§ 34-48. A longer refutation, a point by point critique of Photius’s whole work The Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit, is given by Bekkos in his work, Refutatio libri Photii de processioni Spiritus Sancti; this was edited and translated into Latin by J. Hergenröther, and is published in Migne’s PG 141, cols. 725-864. Bekkos also criticizes Photius on historical grounds in his work De pace ecclesiastica; he produces original documents there to show that Photius shifted his story with regard to the Latin Church’s orthodoxy according to whether or not he received Roman recognition. That work has been edited and translated (partially) into French; see V. Laurent and J. Darrouzès, Dossier Grec de l’Union de Lyon, 1273-1277 (Paris, 1976). I have so far translated about half of it into English.
One last note: if you read German, you can find a German translation of some of Bekkos’s critique of Photius in J. Dräseke, Johannes Bekkos’ Widerlegung der Syllogismen des Photios (Wandsbek: Druck von Fr. Puvogel, 1912). Another thing not easy to find, or to read once one finds it.
Sincerely,
Peter
April 17, 2023 at 5:19 pm
Dear Peter,
I realize that this page has literally been vacant for 16 years, but I was wondering if you had ever completed that translation of the Refutatio. Thank you.
April 17, 2023 at 9:00 pm
Hello Matthew,
I have a complete English translation of Bekkos’s De unione, which includes a briefer refutation of Photius; I have not translated the longer refutation, the Refutatio libri Photii de processioni Spiritus Sancti. At this point, I am trying to finish an edition of the Greek text of the De unione, to go along with my translation; that is the main reason why this work is taking so long to complete. Over the past year, I’ve made considerable progress on that; my goal is to get it done by the end of this year. If I don’t find a publisher for the work, I may just self-publish it. Thanks for asking.
Peter Gilbert