Matthew Pereira: Rewriting and Reordering Tradition from the Borderlands: John Maxentius and the Scythian Monks

This reassessment explores the reordering of the conciliar tradition by the Scythian monks, which was thereafter transmitted through a constellation of networks leading to its amplification. Hailing from Scythia Minor, a Latinized enclave encircled by Greeks in the eastern Roman Empire, these monks reformed canonical knowledge by reinserting two systematically silenced teachings into canonical discourse: theopaschism and predestination. This rereading attends to the rhetorical and hermeneutical arguments wherein the monks reassigned these doctrines to church fathers in a manner that transgressed cultural and linguistic boundaries. From their early writings – Capitula Maxentii Ioannis and Libellus fidei – then onwards, the Scythian monks professed that the Word of God suffered in the flesh along with an Augustinian doctrine of divine grace, which included predestination in their last two writings. Rather than dismissing their theological tradition as bizarre and accidental (see previous historians), this reading argues that their hybrid alternative was contoured by the Latinization (i.e. Romanization) of their homeland. This reassessment also traces the interactions between the monks with allies and adversaries that led to the proliferation of their alternative tradition and led to the vindication of the Cyril of Alexandria’s theopaschite teachings at the Council of Constantinople II (553) under Emperor Justinian. This historical case study contributes to the mapping of reordering canonical knowledge by tracing the interrelated practices of translating, rewriting, reordering and transmitting tradition.