Almási Gábor (ELTE BTK, Budapest)
This paper is raising an old question: Who was the real author of Themistius’s oration addressed to Emperor Valens on religious toleration (the so-called ‘Twelfth Oration’)? When the oration appeared in 1605, in the Latin translation by Andreas Dudith, as the editor Georg Rehm claimed, the Greek text was already missing. The next editor Denys Petau reproduced the missing Greek text, translating from Latin and relying on the text of Themistius’s Fifth Oration, which was in great part, as Petau first noticed, a kind of variation of the ‘Twelfth’. This great similarity between the Fifth and ‘Twelfth’ Orations became the subject of suspicion in the beginning of the 20th century, when Richard Foerster famously concluded that the oration was a Renaissance forgery. Although Dudith’s surviving manuscripts contain no reference to the oration, Foerster had no qualms about attributing it to this rightly famous Central European humanist. Similarly, Pierre Costil maintained in his Dudith-monograph (1935) that the ideas expressed in the oration represented Dudith’s most firmly held convictions on religion.
Around ten years ago, a Polish and a British scholar – Roubert Goulding and Dudith’s most dedicated researcher Lech Szczucki – independent of each other discovered new documents in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, which prove that Dudith had indeed something to do with the forgery. In his study of the problem, Goulding has concurred: “the forthright support for freedom of religious belief, however heterodox they may be, entirely matches Dudith’s own thoughts on this subject. Indeed, in his letters in favour of religious liberty, Dudith occasionally used arguments identical to those in the twelfth oration”.
In my paper I will try to prove that the oration does not express Dudith’s most firmly held convictions on religion as it has been believed since Foerster. Having presented the argument of the oration and outlined its originality, I will analyse its rather problematic relationship to the Fifth Oration and point out its Platonic tendencies. I will then present the curious new sources discovered by Goulding and Szczucki. Finally, I will indicate the great differences between the religious toleration of the fourth-century pagan philosopher Themistius, and the religious ideas of tolerant humanists – like Dudith – in the sixteenth century.