Saturday September 9, 2023
On the last day of the Annual Interdisciplinary School of Ancient Greek, Egyptology and Oriental Languages, assist. dr. Andra Jugănaru (Faculty of History, University of Bucharest) presented the life and personality of Saint Gregory of Nyssa (335-394) and read together with the students Valentin Cocan and Victor Zamfir a chapter from his first work, titled "Peri parthenias / On virginity", written at the request of his brother, Basil. The work focuses on the lifestyle of an authentic asceticism, embodied by Basil the Great and Macrina, in which every sin is the equivalent to adultery against the Heavenly Bridegroom.
In the Coptic language section, professor So Miyagawa (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics) presented his own experience as a researcher, working with non-digitized Coptic-language materials, and show us how to use the archives and digital databases, as well as the collections of papiri, manuscripts and other Coptic sources. The speaker showed how to search for the words "virtue" and "vice" in the online Coptic dictionary, as well as in the various corpora of texts.
In conclusion, Dr. Ana-Maria Răducan (ISACCL) read with the students some passages from Simeon the New Theologian, as well as from previous authors (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa) about mystical eros and divine love, as the supreme virtue that leads to the mystical experience and the state of dispassion (apatheia). Professor Maria Luiza Oancea (University of Bucharest) thanked all the participants and speakers for these wonderful days in which we read together from classical authors and enjoyed rich lectures on different aspects of virtue and vice in ancient languages and civilizations.
Dr. Ana-Maria Răducan (ISACCL) announced the topic of the next edition in 2024: „Truth and lie in Antiquity”.
