Free Sailing from Byzantium by Colin Wells Page B

theWesterners on a daily basis. Merchants especially, but also diplomats, papal legates, mercenaries, even the odd touring noble—the West's presence at the imperial court had grown insistent. Deluged by petitions for this or that imperial favor, each of which had to be translated from Latin, Cydones soon grew frustrated with the lame attempts of the court translators to keep up with it all. He realized he had little choice but to learn Latin himself. Among the Western presence in Constantinople were Franciscan and Dominican friars, and it was a Dominican whom he knew from the Genoese quarter at Pera, across the Golden Horn, that Cydones found to instruct him.
    Despite his heavy workload, Cydones tells us, he made rapid progress (like Barlaam, he didn't suffer from false modesty), and soon he was as fluent “as if trained by my parents from childhood.” So to give him something he could really get his teeth into, his delighted teacher presented him with “a little book” to work on, the
Summa Contra Gentiles
of Thomas Aquinas, one of two works in which Aquinas lays out his plan for reconciling the faith of the theologians with the reason of the philosophers. ∗ Reading the West's Angelic Doctor was like coming home, Cydones tells us, and it ultimately set him on the path to conversion. “Having tasted the lotus,” he says, he couldn't hold back; Aquinas came as a progressive revelation as he read and translated further. As he stacked the Latins up against the Greeks who attempted to refute them, it was the Greeks who seemed to come up short, blindly parroting old arguments that didn't address the detailed and sophisticated reasoning of a writer such as Aquinas.
    In 1353, by which time he himself had been elevated to the position of prime minister, Cydones decided to write out a translation of the whole book. In doing so he caused quite a stir, for he made no secret of his new fascination. The emperor himself took an interest, supporting Cydones’ efforts as beneficial to Byzantine culture—and of course to Cantacuzenos’ own avid theological curiosity.
    The last part of Cydones’ manuscript of the translation, written out by his secretary with notes in Cydones’ own hand, survives in the Vatican library. At the end, Cydones left a celebratory note in Latin, no less. Its immediacy (not to mention its sentiment, familiar to any classics student) spans centuries: “The book is finished, may praise and glory be to Christ. Demetrius of Thessalonika, servant of Christ, translated this book from Latin into Greek. He worked at it for one year, finishing at 3 P.M., December 24, 1354.”
    Only a month before, Cantacuzenos had abdicated in favor of John V, now in his early twenties and married to Cantacuzenos’ daughter Helena. With time on his hands now, Cydones says, Cantacuzenos copied out the manuscript himself, which certainly must have taken some effort. He also passed it on to others, creating a most unexpected ripple of Thomism in the highest circles of Byzantine power.
    In conjunction with his younger brother Prochorus, whom (though he doesn't say) it seems likely he may have tutored in Latin himself, Cydones went on to make Greek translations of many of Aquinas’ works, as well as works of various other Latin theologians. Both made translations of St. Augustine, and Prochorus also translated some of Boethius’ theological writings. Of the two, Prochorus Cydones was the more strident anti-Hesychast, although he himself was a monk in one of the monasteries of Mt. Athos and (unlike Demetrius) never converted to Catholicism. Demetriuswould not always be able to shield him from persecution, and the Hesychasts succeeded in having Prochorus anathematized in 1368. He went into exile and died shortly thereafter. Demetrius himself would be similarly anathematized, but only after his own death.
    The Cydones brothers’ enthusiasm for Aquinas reveals the temperament that the Byzantine humanists shared with the Catholics,