Synodal Manuscript 108: John of Damascus in Slavonic Translation

Synodal Manuscript 108, folio 7 verso, with the end of John the Exarch’s prologue, a cinnabar rubric and a coloured ornamental initial.

Folio 7 verso of the Theology of John of Damascus in John the Exarch’s Slavonic translation, late twelfth or early thirteenth century, State Historical Museum, Moscow.

Synodal Manuscript 108 preserves an early East Slavic copy of John the Exarch’s translation of the Theology of St John of Damascus. Written on parchment, probably at Vladimir or Rostov, the codex is generally dated to the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century. The page reproduced here is folio 7 verso, where the translator’s prologue ends and the opening chapter of the theological text begins. Within the manuscript, this leaf forms a material threshold: one textual voice closes in the left column, while another enters through rubrication, enlarged lettering and an ornamental initial.

Now in the State Historical Museum in Moscow, Synodal Manuscript 108 belongs to the former Synodal Collection. It comprises 210 folios measuring approximately 36.5 × 29 cm, though leaves have been lost and the lateral margins and corners of many others were cut back. The museum guide includes the manuscript among the important late twelfth-century parchment codices preserved in the collection.

The Page Architecture of Synodal Manuscript 108

The text is copied in two columns in a formal Cyrillic bookhand conventionally termed ustav. Its broad, upright letterforms remain distinctly separated, with a measured ductus and a comparatively regular vertical rhythm. Word division is limited, while abbreviations and superscript signs compress familiar theological expressions. The main writing, now brownish in tone, occupies a relatively narrow text block set against ample areas of bare parchment. Such margins belonged to the visual proportions of the medieval codex and later also provided space for ownership notes and other additions.

Folio 7 verso, although the surviving parchment bears the evidence of long use, is organised with particular care. The upper part of the left column contains the concluding lines of John the Exarch’s prologue. Below them, a small cinnabar tailpiece, assembled from pen-drawn knots and symmetrical flourishes, marks the termination of this preliminary text. Close to the foot of the column begins a large display heading. The word prěpodobĭnago—“of the venerable”—is divided by the column break: its opening letters appear at the bottom left, while the remainder continues at the head of the right column.

Reading descends through the closing prose, pauses at the tailpiece, then resumes in enlarged coloured lettering on the opposite side. The displacement gives the transition an unusual visual force, with the translator’s address ending before the text moves into the authority of John of Damascus.

Rubrication and the Ornamental Initial

Cinnabar distinguishes the titular passage in the right column from the darker body text. The heading identifies the author as John of Damascus, monk and presbyter, and introduces a discourse on the true or Orthodox faith concerning the incomprehensibility of the divine nature. Certain characters carry accents or details in a second colour, introducing small variations within the compact rubric.

Beneath the heading stands an ornamental initial, apparently the Cyrillic letter Б beginning the word Boga, “God”. Its elongated vertical stem is articulated with red contours, blue infill and darker internal strokes. Curving extensions develop into small vegetal forms near the lower termination; above, the letter projects into the surrounding space of the column. The ornament remains part of the written sign, enlarging and elaborating it without becoming an independent image or a historiated initial.

Restrained in this folio, the palette of Synodal Manuscript 108 depends principally on blue and red, with darker accents defining the ornamental structure. The catalogue records yellow, green and white colouring elsewhere among the manuscript’s initials, indicating a broader chromatic range across the codex than folio 7 verso alone displays.

The Opening of the Theology

The work called Bogoslovie, or Theology, represents John the Exarch’s Slavonic rendering and adaptation of the Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, the third part of John of Damascus’s Fountain of Knowledge. The translation was produced in Bulgaria around the end of the ninth or beginning of the tenth century, within the intellectual environment associated with the Preslav Literary School.

John the Exarch translated forty-eight of the Greek work’s one hundred chapters. Difficult passages were sometimes shortened, explanatory additions introduced, and terminology adjusted for an emerging Slavonic theological vocabulary. The result circulated as a coherent work in its own right, sometimes under the title Nebesa (“Heavens”) and, in Synodal Manuscript 108, as a “Discourse on the True Faith”.

No early Bulgarian witness of this translation is known to survive. Its oldest manuscript tradition is East Slavic, a circumstance that gives Synodal Manuscript 108 particular textual importance. Olga Sapozhnikova’s textual study, which discusses the manuscript tradition of the translation, identifies Synodal Manuscript 108 as the earliest parchment witness used as the basis of the principal scholarly editions. The codex therefore records the transmission in medieval Rus’ of a Bulgarian translation made several centuries earlier.

Free Translation

The securely identifiable rubric and opening lines may be rendered freely as follows:

Of our venerable father John of Damascus, monk and presbyter: a discourse on the true faith, concerning the incomprehensibility of the divine nature.

No one has ever seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, has made him known. The divine nature is therefore ineffable and incomprehensible…

The opening scriptural sentence draws upon John 1:18 and introduces the first chapter’s central proposition: human language and thought cannot contain the divine essence. On folio 7 verso, colour and enlarged lettering precede the regular cadence of the darker ustav script in which the argument continues.

Dating, Condition and Scribal Evidence

The manuscript has no surviving scribal colophon that supplies a firm date or place. Its attribution to Vladimir or Rostov and its placement around the turn of the thirteenth century rest principally upon palaeographical comparison. Some later scholarship has proposed an earlier date in the first half of the twelfth century, so the chronology remains a matter of palaeographical assessment. The conventional catalogue dating of Synodal Manuscript 108 to the late twelfth or early thirteenth century continues to be widely used.

On folio 7 verso, the parchment retains a slightly granular surface together with discolouration, scattered stains and darkened areas near the edges. A rounded loss interrupts the lower edge, while the upper corners show abrasion and deformation. The principal writing and ornamental elements nevertheless remain largely legible, even where the leaf records the effects of handling and age.

Elsewhere, Synodal Manuscript 108 contains additions from several periods. Brief prayers and scribal notes occur on folios 30 verso and 55, while a later hand copied the beginning of a psalm on folio 112 verso. On folio 210 verso, a cryptographic marginal prayer, probably written during the second half of the fourteenth century, asks St John of Damascus to intercede for a servant named Akindin. Sketches of ornamental motifs on the same folio preserve another, less formal encounter with the codex.

From the Kremlin to the State Historical Museum

By the seventeenth century, Synodal Manuscript 108 was kept in the Moscow Kremlin palace, as indicated by the inventory annotation verkhovaya. In 1661 Patriarch Nikon presented it to the Resurrection Monastery of New Jerusalem near Moscow. His long donation inscription, distributed across folios 1–26, invokes biblical punishments against anyone who might appropriate the volume, conceal it or erase the record of its dedication.

Following Nikon’s removal from the patriarchal throne, the codex entered the patriarchal vestry treasury and appears in inventories compiled in 1675 and 1718. Konstantin Kalaidovich rediscovered Synodal Manuscript 108 in 1813 and brought it to scholarly attention. During the nineteenth century it became a basis for editions and linguistic studies of John the Exarch’s translation. Since 1920 the manuscript has been preserved in the State Historical Museum, still bound in its eighteenth-century leather-covered boards.

The long documented history of Synodal Manuscript 108 can be read against the more immediate evidence of folio 7 verso: dark script, cinnabar rubric, coloured initial, worn parchment. Here the transition from translator to translated authority is carried by the page itself, down the left column and into the opening text at the right.

(The translation was edited by E. Wilson.)

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