As the name of the series implies, the book takes up the English translation of two volumes of the “mother” series Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis 223 and 223A: the first volume on Thomas Gallus’s Explanation of the Angelic Hierarchy and the second volume on his Glosses on the Angelic Hierarchy. However, the translation of the four other writings by Thomas Gallus that appeared in the latter volume (Explanation of the Mystical Theology;Explanation of the Divine Names; Explanation of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy; Explanation of Five of the Letters of Dionysius) has not been included. There can be no doubt that the dissemination of these four other writings through the so-called “red” series would give medievalists and historians of Christianity a wider knowledge of Thomas Gallus’s angelic conceptions, which attempt to link the Eastern angelological tradition with the conceptions at work in the West in the first half of the thirteenth century. At the same time, these other writings reveal the breadth of the author’s theological reflection on crucial themes of his time.
The consecutive edition of the translation of the two Latin works Explanation of the Angelic Hierarchy and Glosses on the Angelic Hierarchy, which are disjoined in the series Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaeualis 223 and 223A, responds to Thomas Gallus’s own wishes. Indeed, the scholar explicitly writes at the end of Explanation of the Angelic Hierarchy that the book should be read with the Glosses on the Angelic Hierarchy, despite the twenty years separating the two texts according to Gallus’s preface (26). However, in Declan A. Lawell’s translation, the Glosses are presented after the Explanation, although the Glosses had been written first and long before. For those who wish to measure the evolution of Gallus’s thinking on celestial hierarchies, it is therefore necessary to begin reading on page 267 with the Glosses, then return to the beginning of the book after them. Lawell’s deliberate choice of the reverse chronological order of Gallus’s works justifies the function of “commentator” to which he reduces Gallus (27). This explains the choice of first giving the Explanation of the work of Dionysius the Areopagite (or rather, Pseudo-Dionysius), De Coelesti Hierarchia, written in Greek in the fifth century, on the celestial hierarchies, including the angels, before presenting the Glosses. The editorial option taken is fully justified in view of the major role played by the work of Pseudo-Dionysius on scholasticism and the doctrine of the Catholic Church. It is also true that the lapidary nature of the Glosses prevents us from fully entering into Gallus’s understanding of the work. However, it is not impossible to detect nuances in Thomas Gallus’s thinking, twenty years apart.
Unsurprisingly, given the high standards of the Corpus Christianorum series, Lawell’s translation of it in the present work is remarkable. The translator sometimes justifies his translations in the introduction: for example, the verb coaptare translated as “compare” corresponds rather to “fit together, make apt” (27). Such details show both the translator’s desire to make his translation understandable today, and the editor’s high level of knowledge of Thomas Gallus’s work. Clearly, the notes in the Corpus Christianorum series are irreplaceable in this respect. The present translation, in keeping with the “red” series, has few or no notes. Not only is Lawell a specialist in the work of Thomas Gallus, he also has a thorough knowledge of the literary context of the time. Thus, the same example of the verb coaptare and the use of the conjunction id est to introduce an explanation of a word, phrase or idea not easily understood in the thirteenth century (27) enables him to deduce the level of the audience targeted by the Explanations: students or monks whose knowledge is not yet very advanced and who need comparisons for didactic purposes.
The lengthy introduction to the two translated works by Thomas Gallus is also very useful and well done. Lawell achieves the feat of addressing both specialists in the development of angelology in the West and an educated public. For example, he describes the ongoing investigation into the geographical origin of Thomas Gallus. Without being definitive, Lawell seems to opt for a Welsh origin, hence the proper name, rather than one in Gaul. The network of Thomas Gallus and the rapid reception of his work in the British Isles seem to support this view. Nevertheless, Thomas Gallus is also known as Thomas of Vercelli--the city in Piedmont where Thomas was invested as founding abbot--hence his nickname Abbot of Vercelli, or Thomas of Paris because he began his career as a lecturer at the University of Paris and was an Augustinian canon regular in the abbey of Saint Victor in Paris (9-17).
In writing about Pseudo-Dionysius, Thomas Gallus is part of a Western Latin reception that predates him by several centuries, and that seeks to understand and order the proliferation of angelic figures since the advent of apocalypticism in Jewish and then Christian writings. Without recalling the extent of the phenomenon from the last centuries before the Christian era, [1] the community or ecclesial hierarchies emerging in Christianity questioned the potential or real competition that angels could constitute as models of divine intercession for humans. Christian theologians are wary of angels, who sometimes encounter remnants of local pre-evangelization beliefs in the West, or even establish direct mediation between God and/or Jesus Christ and believers without passing through the places and people instituted for this purpose. In this respect, Thomas Gallus and others such as Iohannes Scottus look to the works of Pseudo-Dionysius for theological answers to the “invasion” of angels in religious literature and Christian beliefs. As is often forgotten, theological debates revolve not only around what is called the Trinity, i.e., the relationship between Jesus Christ and God, as well as the Holy Spirit, but also the place of the multitude of angelic figures: angels, seraphim, throne-chariots, cherubim, all of which abound in the Book of Ezekiel, and whose imagery of the divine throne and its entourage are at the heart of apocalyptic research, i.e., access to new divine revelations from the heavens. Thomas Gallus is fully aware of these debates, and the challenge of translating the work of Pseudo-Dionysius written several centuries earlier into Latin is also to provide arguments to contain developments on angels in Christianity. In this, he does not ignore the works of other theologians. For comparison, he cites Iohannes Scottus, whose translation is called the “other” or the “old translation” (19); he also alludes to the translation of Hilduin, the abbot of Saint Denys in Paris, and such scholars as Maximus the Confessor and John of Scythopolis (19). The indices of references to the works of Pseudo-Dionysius (408-410) and to the authors cited (411) are extremely useful.
In this tradition of translation-commentary of the celestial hierarchy after Pseudo-Dionysius, it remains difficult to assess the place of Thomas Gallus and the reception of his work in his own time and in the centuries that followed. It seems to me that they are weak. It is true that the explanations of the work of Pseudo-Dionysius found with Thomas Aquinas, almost a contemporary of Thomas Gallus, constitute a response and echo without comparison in the Roman Catholic Church with Summa Theologica I.108, which takes up the Dionysian tripartitions based on the proximity of celestial entities to God. A (quick) comparison between Thomas Aquinas and Thomas Gallus shows that the target audience is not the same. While the former is a virtuoso at interpreting the ideas of Pseudo-Dionysius at a high intellectual level and transposing them into Christian ideas, the latter paraphrases Pseudo-Dionysius--without always fully understanding the Greek, incidentally--with simpler explanations that are also easier to challenge. This is why Thomas Gallus’s work was not well received, although Lawell seems to defend Thomas Gallus (24-26).
Be that as it may, Lawell’s high level of erudition, reflected in his introduction and the quality of his translations, makes this volume a must-have for anyone interested in angelology, and especially in the passage of Eastern angelological conceptions to the West.
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Note:
1. cf. D. Hamidović, L’insoutenable divinité des anges (Paris: Cerf, 2018).