Dadisho Qatraya

The Syriac term šapyuta (ܫܦܝܘܬܐ) is very often encountered in diverse ascetical texts and contexts, being related to many aspects of Syriac spirituality. The present paper aims to research and to present the meanings that arise with various uses of it and to deepen the reader’s understanding of its semantic and theological content. Examining the texts of authors such as Ephrem, John the Solitary, Sahdona, Isaac of Nineveh, Dadišo Qatraya, Simon of Taybuteh, John of Dalyatha, Joseph Hazzaya and others, it becomes obvious that šapyuta is a key term for the Syriac monastic environment, a kind of knot where several plans of Syriac spiritual theology come together and connect with one another. As we analyze the connotations, and especially the contextual significations of the term šapyuta, this investigation is simultaneously an entry in the Syriac spirituality’s great themes: the primordial state of man and the fall, the stages of the spiritual life, the ascetical anthropology, the ascetical works etc.

A present study deals with manuscript evidence for the work ‘On stillness’ of Dadīšōʿ Qaṭrāyā, an East Syriac monastic author of the second half of the 7th c. After a survey of the history of research of that work, the manuscripts used in a recent edition of del Río Sánchez are presented with some additions and corrections. Afterwards a list of eight new witnesses is provided with concise indication of their content. It is followed by a discussion of the evidence the newly identified witnesses provide. In sum, a total of eight new manuscripts ranging in date between the 13th and the turn of the 20th c. witness to a particular text form (markedly different from the one found in the East Syriac witnesses) of the work that was circulating in the Syrian Orthodox milieu as a part of a corpus attributed to Isaac of Nineveh. Although a majority of the manuscripts is limited only to the first treatise of the work, the evidence of two early manuscripts strongly suggest that initially the text that was taken over in the Syrian Orthodox tradition was more extensive. Significantly, the new text preserved in two manuscripts, if indeed belonging to the ‘On stillness’, is not attested in the East Syriac witnesses at all. The importance of the West Syriac recension therefore lies in its evidence for a study of an original work of Dadīšōʿ as well as in its documentation that allows to trace the history how an East Syriac monastic text was taken over and appropriated in the Syrian Orthodox tradition.