Author(s): Balázs Déri / Language(s): Hungarian
Issue: 1/2008
The present study points out that a passage in the exegetic work of Saint Gerard, bishop of Csanád (Hungary) (Gerardi Moresenae aecclesiae seu Csanadiensis episcopi Deliberatio supra hymnum trium puerorum, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Clm 6211, 123v —124r , ed. Gabriel Silagi, in CCCM 29, 1978, lib. VII, 971—994) is partly a word by word quotation, and is partly a paraphrase from Tractatus sive homiliae in psalmos of Saint Jerome (S. Hieronymi presbyteri Tractatus sive homiliae in psalmos, in Marci evangelium aliaque varia argumenta, ed. D. Germanus Morin, CCSL 78., 1958, p. 281). It was formerly thought by several medievalists, based on this locus, that the author, on writing about Manichaeans and “Greeks”, might have alluded to the Bogumilism as a contemporary heresy in the Balkan. (Moreover, the entire work is considered an anti-heretical tractate, by the interpretation of this and similar loci.) Since the passage is a mere quotation of an antic text, it cannot be a proof of the spreading of Bogumilism in Hungary in the 11th century. Finally, Saint Gerard’s additions referring to his own age do not mean that he applies Jerome’s text concretely to a certain heresy, but they warn the reader only to the incessantly present danger of heretical thinking. (This was at that time, in the early Christian Hungary, the actual threat of relapse to paganism.)
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