Thought for the Evening: Tractatus Coislinianus

I am currently reading Walter Watson’s The Lost Second Book of Aristotle’s Poetics (I am only partway through, and don’t agree with everything, but I highly recommend it), so I’m thinking about the Tractatus Coislinianus.

Aristotle’s Poetics as we have it is known to be incomplete; it promises to discuss topics that it never gets around to discussing, and other references clearly attribute to the Poetics topics that we do not find in our extant version. The most obvious of these topics is comedy; almost the entire Poetics we have is about tragedy. Generally the best guess about why is that in Andronicus’s standard ordering of the works of Aristotle, the Poetics is the last book, and likely the original source collection for all the versions that have survived had lost its tail end, possibly at a point in the manuscript that obscured the fact that something was missing. Be that as it may, in 1839, J. A. Cramer was researching in the De Coislin collection in the Bibliotheque National and came across three manuscript pages that summarized an account of comedy. The manuscript, Coislinianus 120, seems to have been a manuscript from the Great Lavra on Mount Athos, copied at some point in the tenth century; it entered into the collection of the seventeenth century’s most remarkable book collector, Pierre Seguier de Coislin, and thence ended up in the Bibliotheque National. Cramer found the manuscript remarkable, and published it in his Anecdota Graeca series, suggesting that it was an abstract of the missing part of the Poetics.

Cramer’s suggestion was not widely accepted; it was the nineteenth century, and scholars were on a tear to prove that things were inauthentic. Jacob Bernays discussed the manuscript in 1853 and argued that while some parts may derive from Aristotle, the work as it exists in the Tractatus is inconsistent with views Aristotle elsewhere gives. This became the standard view of the text – that it was probably indirectly derived from the original Poetics, but garbled and mixed with non-Aristotelian elements, to such an extent that most of it was just not derived from Aristotle’s Poetics. In 1980, Umberto Eco, writing The Name of the Rose, used it as the source for his reconstruction of the lost second book of the Poetics, but Eco, of course, was writing historical fiction, and therefore could evade any scholarly opprobrium over using it in this way.

All of this began to shift in 1984, with Richard Janko’s Aristotle on Comedy argued that this entire scholarly tradition was wrong and at times poorly argued, claiming that the work was in fact what Cramer had thought it might be, an abstract of part of Aristotle’s Poetics. He therefore used it, along with the various already extant references and a couple of works with content closely related to that of Tractatus Coislinianus to reconstruct Aristotle’s account of comedy. As Janko was a scholar well reputed for his philological work, this had some weight, particularly when he refined and improved his work in his 1987 translation of the Poetics. Nonetheless, scholars still tend to resist the idea that the Tractatus is a genuine summary of the authenthic second book, although there does seem to be more acceptance of the possibility that it might at least go back to a post-Aristotle Peripatetic source, like Theophrastus. Many of the arguments don’t really seem to bear on the issue; it’s obvious that the Tractatus is a summary, for instance, not the original work, so it is pointless, as far as the question of connection to Aristotle goes, to give arguments that the summary itself is later than Aristotle.

In any case, Watson’s translation of the Tractatus’s definition of comedy (Walter Watson, The Lost Second Book of Aristotle’s Poetics, The University of Chicago Press (Chicago: 2012), p. 179):

Comedy is an imitation of action laughable and with no share in magnitude, complete, in speech made pleasing by accessories whose forms are different in different parts, by acting and not by narration, through pleasure and laughter achieving a catharsis of such emotions.

Links of Interest

* Zack Savitsky, Carlo Ravelli’s Radical Perspective on Reality, at “Quanta Magazine’

* Daniel D. De Haan, Aquinas on Perceiving, Thinking, Understanding, and Cognizing Individuals (PDF)

* Sagrada Familia recently became the world’s tallest church, beating out Ulm Minster. (Take that, Lutherans! Although Catholics also built Ulm Minster before the Lutherans took it over, so really, we are the undisputed champions.) The spire on Sagrada Familia is not finished yet, so it still has some growing to you.

* Garrath Williams, Kant Incorporated (PDF)

* Larry Sanger, Grokipedia: A First Look

* Riin Sirkel, Aristotle on Demonstrative Knowledge: Particulars Included (PDF)

* Patrick Flynn, Real Natures, at “The Journal of Absolute Truth”

* Nabeel Hamid, Teleology and Causation in Clemens Tipler (PDF)

* Kieran Setiya discusses Alice Ambrose and her complicated relationship with Wittgenstein, at “Under the Net”

Currently Reading

In Book

J.-K. Huysmans, En Route Walter Watson, The Lost Second Book of Aristotle’s Poetics Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

In Audiobook

Lois McMaster Bujold, Brothers in Arms Scott Lynch, Red Seas Under Red Skies Agatha Christie, Twelve Radio Mysteries Jim Butcher, Grave Peril