Codex Vatopedinus gr. 610 and Its Place in the Manuscript Tradition of Kallistos Angelikoudes’ Works

Abstract

The article deals with one of the oldest manuscripts containing a significant part of the theological chapters of Kallistos Angelikoudes, one of the most important hesychast authors of the late Byzantine period. Codex Vatopedinus gr. 610 was written in the late 14th c. It contains a great amount of quotations excerpted from Patristic literature. In the second part of the codex, one can find the chapters of Kallistos Angelikoudes; these 92 chapters were retrieved from a greater collection containing now about 200 chapters. The article discusses the content of the Vatopedi manuscript, pointing out to the use of many Patristic fragments included there in different works by Kallistos Angelikoudes. This may shed light on the origin and purpose of the manuscript. A further study of the history of the text of these chapters allows us to assess the place of the Vatopedi codex in the manuscript tradition of Kallistos Angelikoudes’ literary legacy. The Church Slavonic translation of this collection of Angelikoudes’ chapters made by Paisius Velichkovsky in the 1770—1790s reproduces many peculiarities of the Greek text contained in the Vatopedi manuscript and was presumably based on a copy of that codex.