Annotation CCXX

”So I will him to remain, till I come.” — John 21:22

Whether it is to be read SIC ["so"] or SI ["if"].

Augustine, narrating this period [passage] in tract 124 on John, Lorenzo Valla, in the Annotations on the New Testament, assailed with harsh reproaches — because, the truth of the Greek source being neglected, he [Augustine] had falsely thrust into the Gospel the particle “SIC,” reading “SO [Sic] I will him to remain,” for [that] which the genuine copies of the Greeks have, “Ἐὰν αὐτὸν θέλω μένειν,” “IF [Si] I will him to remain.” Erasmus, in the Annotations on the New Testament, against Valla, takes up the patronage of Augustine — but in such a way that Erasmus’s defense is far more odious than Valla’s accusation. For he so defends him as to say that pardon must be given to the man’s inexperience and simple credulity; who, although he was a holy man, upright, and endowed with a keen genius, was nevertheless credulous, and destitute of the aid of languages — without which the divine Scriptures cannot, as is fitting, be handled. To these [things] he adds that he came late to Christianity, and, soon, as a young man, was snatched to the episcopal office, so that he was compelled to learn by teaching what he taught, and to learn by writing what he wrote; and that, therefore, he is to be tolerated, if somewhere he does not attain what he aims at.

I cannot but greatly wonder that Erasmus, a man most learned in his own estimation, could think that Augustine had here slipped from ignorance of the Greek language — as if he were so devoid of Greek literature that, reading the Greek Gospel of John, he could not distinguish ἐὰν from ὄντως — since so many of his writings attest that he was not altogether ignorant of Greek letters. Nay, he himself, in the first volume of the Confessions, confesses that he learned Greek grammar while still a boy, and sang the songs of Homer in the literary school. I find also some sentences of Chrysostom, corrupted by the Pelagians, restored by him to their Greek integrity. Also the seven volumes of the Locutions of the Old Testament, in which he emends the sacred locutions to the Greek reading, and the Categories of Aristotle, translated by him into Latin, plainly show that he was not so destitute of Greek letters but that he could know that ἐὰν signifies “IF.”¹

George of Trebizond, a Greek, and most erudite in the Greek language, in the book which he wrote on this passage of John to Pope Eugenius,

shows that Augustine and the other Latin fathers translated Ἐὰν [as] “SIC” not from ignorance, but from design — because, just as the particle “SI” among the Latins, so the same [particle] among the Greeks, when joined to an indicative verb, is taken affirmatively; but with a subjunctive [verb], suspensively and dubitatively. But since Ἐὰν is here joined to an indicative, therefore the Latin fathers interpreted [it] not “SI” but “SIC” — lest, namely, the particle “SI” should trouble those [but] half-learned in the Latin and Greek tongues, on account of its double force. But by affirming “SIC,” they said [it] expressly, so that no one should doubt that that Greek particle too was there placed not otherwise than affirmatively. There are also [those] who think that Augustine read and wrote “SI,” and not “SIC,” but that it happened by the fault of the copyists that “SIC” was put for “SI”; and this they endeavor to persuade from Augustine’s own context.