CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Pachulia, Dachi |
|---|---|
| Title | Hymns of Synesius of Cyrene in Their Christian and Platonist Context |
| Summary | The thesis intends to promote the importance of Synesius of Cyrene as a thinker and a philosopher in general. First of all, this is achieved by stressing his influence on Proclus on the one hand and Pseudo-Dionysius on the other. Therefore, the thesis suggests, that in the Athenian philosophical school Christian Neoplatonist philosophers, such as Synesius were indeed read and discussed. The suggestion continues that it was under Proclus that the author of Dionysian corpus got acquainted with Synesius’ writings. But while Proclus was probably ignoring the Christian tenet of Synesius’ philosophy, Ps.-Dionysius held this very nature of Synesius’ thought the most important to “Christianize Proclus”, in other words to construct his own Christian metaphysical system to match it with the pagan counterpart. Thus, in the first chapter of the thesis, I stress the influence of Synesius’ hymns on Proclus’ hymns and Ps.-Dionysius’ letters. The second and third chapter of the thesis intends to further emphasize the uniqueness of Synesius’ thought. It starts with the rethinking of Theiler’s and Hadot’s thesis on Christian Platonist philosophers, who were denying the originality of their thought by making them dependent on Porphyry, the student of Plotinus. In the third chapter, I try to reconstruct the metaphysics of Synesius’ hymns concentrating on the anthropology of the hymns that I argue to be Christocentric in its nature. This is again in order to emphasize the uniqueness of Synesius’ hymns and to stress the novelties that he introduced in Christian and Neoplatonist philosophy in general. In the appendices I provide my own translation of the nine hymns of Synesius with some notes and remarks in the footnotes. There I also present my translation of the hymn Ὦ πά& #x3bd;τ&# x3c9;ν ἐπ έκ& #x3b5;ι&# x3bd;α (O, the One who is beyond all), that was attributed to Ps.-Dionysius by Martin Sicherl. Appendices end with my research on the mentioned hymn. In that chapter one can observe how Synesius’ hymns are echoed in the Dionysian hymn and it makes the attribution of the hymn to the authorship of Ps.-Dionysius even more credible. |
| Supervisor | István Bodnár |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/pachulia_dachi.pdf |
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