INTRODUCTION

Bar Hebraeus as a mystic

Bar Hebraeus may perhaps be called the best known of Syriac authors in Europe. This popularity is due as well to his agreeable style as to the variety of his vast knowledge; nearly every Semitic scholar will find among his works one or the other which is interesting to him. It has however hardly been observed that this brilliant man with his brilliant career has gone through a religious crisis which made him appear before himself no longer as the high dignitary of the Jacobite church, but as a poor and humble beggar for religious light, a soul which on its way unto the union with God had only reached the stage where light is still dim and shadows are prevalent.

Yet this crisis has not to be concluded from scanty biographical notes; it has been described by himself in plain terms and the present translation of his Book of the Dove will make this clear to every reader. In the introduction to the one hundred sentences which form the fourth chapter, he tells how he got wearied by theological and ecclesiastical quarrels; how he was not satisfied either by the science of the Greeks, and how he passed into a spiritual abyss in which he would have perished if God had not saved him. Gradually and slowly he turned to the mystic authors and finally to mystic life. The outcome of this concluding period of his bodily and spiritual career are his mystic writings which hitherto have not met with the recognition which they deserve; one