Abstract

In the midst of the renewed interest of philosophers and scholars in Classical Antiquity, the Italian Quattrocento bears testimony to the discovery, study and translation of many works from the Greek Patristic tradition, which nurture the humanists’ desire for a Poetic Theology and a new Anthropology. In that context, some of Gregory of Nyssa’s texts that had remained unknown to the West during the Medieval period receive their first Latin translations, made by prominent representatives of the Italian and Byzantine cultures. Arrived in Calabria early in the XVth century, the monk Athanasius Chalkéopoulos, who became bishop of Gerace and a close collaborator in the Roman Academy of Bessarion, translates Nyssen’s De oratione dominica and dedicates it to Pope Paul II. We present a critical edition of his version in this same volume. Here we will analyse the way in which the Byzantine translator pours into Latin the most interesting anthropological passages of Gregory of Nyssa’s homilies, which contain themes very dear to Renaissance humanists. Based on numerous conceptual affinities and on the marginal annotations to an Italian autograph copy by Chalkéopoulos himself, today at the National Library of Madrid, we will consider the possible reception of Gregory’s treatise by the count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, on such topics as assimilation to God and spiritual ascent, freedom from necessity and the creativity of free choice, the nature of human conflicts and their inner pacification, the problem of evil and the image of the serpent.