Bakhtin & the Unfortunate Errata of Some of His Scholars

I have two Bakhtin-related things today. First, in order to avoid any confusion I thought I would post the passage from Bakhtin that I was referring to in my comment to Christopher Orr a couple of weeks ago, the wording of which I changed to fit the discussion. This is from his late essay, ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, which can be found in English in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas, 1998), p. 61:

Roman literary consciousness was bilingual. The purely national Latin genres, conceived under monoglotic conditions, fell into decay and did not achieve the level of literary expression. From start to finish, the creative literary consciousness of the Romans functioned against the background of the Greek language and Greek forms. From its very first steps, the Latin literary word viewed itself in the light of the Greek word, through the eyes of the Greek word; it was from the very beginning a word ‘with a sideways glance’, a stylized word enclosing itself, as it were, in its own piously stylized quotation marks.

The other thing: I don’t know if any readers of this blog have tracked down Ruth Coates’s fascinating article, ‘Bakhtin and Hesychasm’, which has been mentioned once or twice here, but I thought in case anyone else did that I would call attention to an unfortunate error there. On p. 75, Coates refers to the English translation of some of Bakhtin’s late notes, ‘From Notes Made in 1970-71’, Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas, 1994), pp. 132-58, where, on p. 148, Bakhtin writes, ‘The primary—natura non creata quae creat; the secondary author—natura creata quae non creat.’ Coates quotes this, and then comments:

This is the formula used by the medieval theologian Duns Scotus (c. 1266-1308) to define the ontological status of the divine ideas from which, according to the Church Fathers, the created universe springs. However, his formulation is not Orthodox. According to Eastern theology, the divine ideas are located not in the essence of God (as Augustine and Aquinas maintained), nor in the creation (as Scotus maintains in this formula), but in the energies of God: they are dynamic, says Lossky, ‘thought-wills’ (The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church [Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary, 1998], pp. 94-5).

But then, on p. 76, she has a lengthy quote from Lossky which made me do a double-take. See if it happens to you (if it hasn’t happened already thanks to your greater knowledge of mediæval Western philosophy than mine):

It is interesting to note that John Scotus Eriugena (whose theological system is a curious amalgam of Eastern and Western elements, a transposition of the doctrines of the Greek fathers upon a basis of Augustinian thought), represents the divine ideas as creatures, the first created principles by means of which God creates the universe (natura creata creans). Together with the Easterns, he puts the ideas outside the divine essence, but at the same time he wants to maintain with St Augustine their substantial character; and so they become the first created essences. Eriugena did not grasp the distinction between the essence and the energies; on this point he remained faithful to Augustinianism, and was therefore unable to identify the ideas with God’s creative acts of will. (Lossky, p. 96)

Demonstrating once again the error that’s being made, Coates then suggests that ‘Bakhtin was in a certain sense led astray by Duns Scotus here’ (p. 76). Coates is using the name ‘Duns Scotus’, whom she correctly places in the 13th century, whereas Lossky is referring to John Scotus Eriugena, whom John Longeway dates to c. 810-77 in his article on the Irishman in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd ed., ed. Robert Audi (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 1999), p.279!

Fortunately, while one wonders how she failed to see that the name Lossky used was different to the one she used, Coates is not solely to blame for this unfortunate error. If we turn to Emerson’s and Holquist’s footnote on the quoted passage from Bakhtin’s notes (Speech Genres, p. 157, n. 23), we read, ‘In a major essay by Duns Scotus (b. 810), De Divisione Naturae, the philosopher describes four modes of being . . . .’ Coates has actually corrected their misdating of Duns Scotus. What she has failed to correct is their misattribution of the 9th-c. text, De Divisione Naturae, or Periphyseon, to the 13th- and 14th-c. Duns Scotus, a text which Frederick Copleston tells us was condemned by Pope Honorius III in 1225, still 41 years before the latter Scotus was born (A History of Philosophy Vol. 2: Mediaeval Philosophy Part I, Augustine to Bonventure [Garden City, NY: Image, 1962], p. 148). Indeed, Duns was even a different kind of ‘Scotus’—a Scotsman rather than an Irishman. It is painful to find such a mistake in such a well written article!