The Book of the Dove

of them, the commentary upon the Book of Hierotheos, has even not yet been edited.

Mystic works

The other two, however, are accessible to readers since some years. The Book of the Dove has been twice edited: by G. Cardahi 1) Rome 1898. and by Paulus Bedjan, by the latter together with the Ethikon 2) Paris 1898.; these texts may be called very satisfactory as a basis for a translation. Besides these three works of some extent there is still a small mystic tract edited by Bedjan together with the Ethikon and the Book of the Dove 3) p. 600 et seq. entitled: A Narrative on the youth of the Mind.

From a note in Codex Rich no. 1794 in the British Museum it appears that the Ethikon has been written by Bar Hebraeus in the year 1590, i. e. 1278 A. D., 8 years before his death. It is probable that the Book of the Dove was composed after the Ethikon; it has even been called an abridged edition of it. I have objections against this qualification, as may be seen further on, but so much is true, that nearly all the materials out of which the first three chapters of the Book of the Dove are composed, are to be found in the first three chapters of the Ethikon. And the fourth chapter of the Book of the Dove seems to betray in its personal tone something of the approaching departure. So the work may have been composed after A. D. 1278.

Now the author tells us in the introduction to the sentences that he has devoted seven years to the study of mystic authors. With this date we may combine a note in Cod. 7189 Rich in the British Museum, in which a reader tells us, that he has spent ten years in enquiries after the volume containing the Book of Hierotheos with the commentary of Theodosius. All researches were in vain till, by an act of Providence, the Katholikos universal bishop/head of the church Bar Hebraeus, the light of the East, was gained for the sake of research and then the present copy was found,