À qui la lettre <i>Sur les décrets de Nicée</i> d’Athanase d’Alexandrie (<i>CPG</i> 2120) était-elle adressée ?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The surviving manuscripts have not preserved the name of the recipient of the long letter On the decrees of Nicaea, written in 350/351 by Athanasius of Alexandria. He can be identified as Maximus the philosopher according to the author of an anti-Origenistic treatise on the pre-existence of souls (second quarter of the sixth century), a work we know from the abridged version in Athos, Vatopedi 236 and from the interpolations in the first chapter of the second book of the Sacra (parallela) in Vat. gr. 1553. This interpretation may be considered as plausible on three accounts : the compiler of the anti-Origenistic treatise had access to unusual sources ; the quote from On the decrees of Nicaea is free of an error that, to judge by the edition of Opitz, affects the whole direct tradition ; and towards the end of his life (373), Athanasius wrote another letter to Maximus the philosopher (CPG 2100). Even if this document turns out not to be genuine (Kannengiesser, 1987), it might still confirm the information transmitted in the anti-Origenistic florilegium : the exordium of On the decrees of Nicea and the Letter to Maximus show some similarities, suggesting that the author of the latter might have used the former, borrowing from it, among other elements, the name of the addressee of the pseudepigraphical document he intended to compose. The fact that On the decrees of Nicaea was directed to Maximus demonstrates that the correspondence between the two men straddled at least two decades. However, it does not supply any new evidence to answer the question of whether or not the correspondent of Athanasius was identical to the homonymic cynical philosopher who ruined the final years of Gregory of Nazianzus.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".