Oriental and Eastern Orthodox: questions

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Dear Father Gregory

Thank you for that helpful post.

I am slowly discovering that it is my own ignorance of sources rather than the absence of materials, which has resulted in me having less Oriental Orthodox works in English than I would like. Though it is absolutely true that many important works are in language other than English at present. But there seems to be a very active scholarly community which is working on the corpus of Oriental Orthodox texts, and if the reader has French then a massive library of translations of key texts becomes accessible.

I believe that there is a useful range of materials produced by some of the other Oriental Orthodox communities. For instance, this website has the text (which is available in print as well) of a long series of poetic texts by St Gregory Narekatsi, an Armenian of the

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This is a very moving book which is comparable in spiritual quality to the Eastern Orthodox Canon of St Andrew of Crete. He lived in the second half of the 10th century. I would recommend folk meditating on one of these poem prayers.

If you look at the bibliography (sources page) on the site you will see that there is a significant collection of works, a few of which are in English, but the majority are in Armenian. So there are modern works of high quality but often not in English. This will be a challenge for the churches in the next decades.

On the other hand, I have permission from the estate of Professor Nersoyan, one of the inspirations and founding fathers of St Nersses Seminary in the USA. The first work I will republish is called - The Christology of the Armenian Church. He has several others which I also have permission to republish, such as The Faith of the Armenian Church and A History of the Armenian Church.

I believe also that there are PhD theses which have been written by Oriental Orthodox scholars and which languish unpublished, and one such is The Patriarchate of Severus of Antioch, which I am presently formatting for a volume in the Oriental Orthodox Library.

As for the French materials, I am trying to organise a small group of bi-lingual Orthodox Christians to help translate these texts in a fairly organised manner, so we may be able to have more important primary texts in English soon. I am even working very hard on my own French skills to make use of these works.

To be honest I would rather read St Severus directly than read about him, though that is of course valuable as well, and we are fortunate that so much of his writing was saved in Syriac when the Eastern Orthodox burnt all his works in Greek. I am constantly challenged theologically and spiritually by his teaching and I think that within Oriental Orthodoxy our growth in the West will be accompanied by a representation in English of his teaching, which is, with St Cyril his master, the foundation of our thought. It is a blessing to find that more and more younger, and older Oriental Orthodox, are aware of and appreciate his teachings and can express them in dialogue with Eastern Orthodox.

So I guess the challenge for those of us who are formally members of the Oriental Orthodox communion is to ask what we can do to make the spiritual and theological tradition of our Church available in English. I am learning Syriac, and making progress, but I think I will have to leave Arabic to someone else!

Peter