Hye Sharzhoom Armenian Action
Staff Report
From October 6-8, 2011, Dr. Sergio La Porta, Haig and Isabel Berberian Professor of Armenian Studies, attended the 30th anniversary meeting of the Association Internationale des Etudes Arméniennes (AIEA), which convened at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. The congress, which is held once every three years, is the largest such gathering devoted to Armenian Studies and was attended by dozens of scholars from institutions throughout the world.
There were three days of lectures consisting of seven sessions and twenty-one panels. In addition, distinguished lectures were delivered by Prof. James Russell, Prof. Zaza Alexidze, Prof. Thomas Mathews, and Prof. Marc Nichanian. Dr. La Porta said that he thoroughly enjoyed the conference particularly as it gave him the chance to connect with friends and colleagues, many of whom he had not seen since the last AIEA conference.
Dr. La Porta delivered a talk on the Armenian and Syriac versions of the scholia of John of Scythopolis on the corpus of works attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite. The Dionysian corpus was translated from Greek into Armenian by Step‘anos Siwnec‘i in the eighth century. Along with the corpus were translated marginal comments, called scholia, by John the bishop of Scythopolis, as well as by later commentators. In the Armenian tradition these explanatory remarks were attributed to Step‘anos Siwnec‘i himself and proved very important for the Armenian interpretation of the Dionysian texts in the monastic schools of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. John of Scythopolis, however, was a Chalcedonian monk whose Christology thus differed from that of the Armenian Church.
In the Armenian version of John’s scholia, overtly Chalcedonian interpretations are not present. An identical omission of this Chalcedonian material also occurs in the slightly earlier Syriac translation of the scholia by Phocas bar Sergius. As both the Armenian and the Syriac versions, which were not aware of each other, contain the same omissions, Dr. La Porta’s presentation suggested that they were both dependent upon a Greek version that had already omitted the Chalcedonian material. He then speculated that there may have been a non-Chalcedonian monastery in Constantinople from where both Armenian and Syriac anti-Chalcedonians could obtain theologically correct texts.
Dr. La Porta was very pleased that his paper was well-received and was excited that it sparked interest in future collaborative research in this area with other scholars.