Poetry and Poetics

Kevin KALISH The Invention of a Poetic Tradition:
Greek Christian Poetry and its Modern Reception
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Aldus Manutius published an important collection of
classical poetry entitled Poetae Christiani Veteres. Such a collection may strike the modern classical
scholar as odd—ancient poets are fine, but ancient Christian poets? His collection is remarkable because
it presents, for the first time in Western Europe, an anthology of Greek Christian poets—Gregory of
Nazianzus, John of Damascus, Nonnos’ paraphrase of the Gospel of John—alongside more familiar Latin
poets of late antiquity (Prudentius, Juvencus, etc). Aldus’ compilation raises many questions: Was there
the notion of a school of Greek Christian poets before Aldus published this anthology? Likewise, why
has this tradition faded from memory? In this paper, I will explore how this tradition emerged in late
antiquity and how it was transmitted, both to the Renaissance and beyond.
The phenomenon of a school of Greek Christian poets allows us to examine the tradition of Greek
poetry across many centuries and across many cultural divides. This school emerged in the fourth and
fifth centuries at a time of great cultural transition. At a time when poetic activity was flourishing, these
Greek Christian poets—among the most prominent was Gregory of Nazianzus, author of some 17,000
lines of verse—sought to write themselves into the history of ancient Greek poetry. These Christian poets
became, at least to Byzantine readers, part of an unbroken tradition with the poets of antiquity. For
example, most classicists are familiar with Eustathius, the Byzantine commentator on Homer—but few
know that he also wrote learned commentaries on the great hymn writer John of Damascus.
This paper, in addition to exploring how Christian poets created a tradition of continuity with the
past, will also look at how this poetry was subsequently received. It would be wrong to speak of a single
tradition, since the fate of these poets varied across cultures. This school of Greek poets did not fare so
well in Western Europe after the Renaissance. They only come onto the horizon again during the
nineteenth century in conjunction with the Oxford movement: Cardinal Newman translated some of
Gregory of Nazianzus’ poems and Elizabeth Barrett Browning even wrote an essay on “The Greek
Christian Poets.” Yet in Greece and Russia—cultures historically linked to Byzantium—the situation has
been different. A number of handbooks on Byzantine hymnography exist in Modern Greek and each has
a section on the poets of the classical tradition. But one of the most interesting and unique books on this
subject is one that is not well known in classical or even Byzantine scholarship: the Russian scholar
Sergei Averintsev’s Poetika Rannevizantiiskoi Literatury. Thus what we must explain is not only the
creation of tradition in late antiquity, but also the various transmissions and receptions of this tradition—
and these paths take us from Byzantium to the Italian Renaissance to the wide-ranging world of modern
scholarship.