Mind, Intellect, and Thought(s): Noetic Terms in the Greek Monastic Literature and their Reception in the Medieval South Slavonic Translations
Mind, Intellect, and Thought(s): Noetic Terms in the Greek Monastic Literature and their Reception in the Medieval South Slavonic Translations

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this paper is to investigate the Medieval (South) Slavonic reception of Greek vocabulary relating to certain noetic terms (i.e. ‘mind’, ‘intellect’, ‘thought’). This lexical layer was particularly important for parts of the Patristic literature such as the monastic writings. Its diachronic semantic development is interesting not only because it relates to anthropological understandings of the human being, but also because of its relations to classical and post-classical Greek thought and its reception in the Christian milieu. The paper tries to outline the reception of these ideas through their translation in Old Church Slavonic from the 10th and 11th centuries, and then in the later period. As a beginning, a short diachronic overview of the semantics of each of the researched lexical units is provided. Then, the Slavonic equivalents are presented first in the most ancient Cyrillo-Methodian translations, then those accomplished in the First Bulgarian State, and finally the translation decisions attested in the texts of the later period, 13th–14th centuries.

• Details
• Contents