Celestial Hierarchy in Arabic Translation

ongoing

CHArT aims at investigating how Arabic Christianity living in a predominantly Islamic environment assimilated its own foundational religious heritage through a momentous translation process from Greek into Arabic. The case study is chosen among the unpublished Arabic translations of the mysterious Christian theologian known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (early 6th century CE), whose entrance in the Arab world in the 10th-11th centuries intertwines with crucial Middle Eastern intellectual milieus. CHArT’s overarching objective consists in charting the assimilation of this author in Arabic, by publishing both the Arabic translations of Pseudo-Dionysius’ influential treatise On Celestial Hierarchy and placing them for the first time into the broader Arabic cultural landscape. The project objectives will be achieved thanks to an interdisciplinary combination of textual criticism, codicology, paleography, as well as disciplines which will shed light on the cultural milieus behind the translations. The project results will open up new fields of research on the Arabic, Byzantine, and Georgian fortune of Pseudo-Dionysius, as well as on possible cross-pollinations between religious cultures within the Islamic world. In turn, this will contribute to the broader goal of reconstructing the history of Christianity in the Middle East and its relationships with Islam.