By using a broad selection of ‘commentary discourse’, this chapter looks at the practice of reading, teaching and composing texts whose purpose is (partly) to explain older texts. Such commentaries, which can take various and sometimes unexpected forms, are of paramount importance for understanding the Byzantine intellectual and cultural framework of literary production, not only as a system of ‘authoritative mimesis’ but also as a system of ‘subversive anti-mimesis’. Thus, the chapter examines paraphrases of the Iliad, grammatical exercises such as the schede of Theodore Prodromos, lives of saints with integrated gnomologia, laudatory orations and novels, poetical treatises of political admonition (e.g. the anonymous Spaneas), scholia on ancient authors (like those produced by John Tzetzes on Aristophanes and Lycophron or by Eustathios on the Homeric poems), but also large-scale commentaries on Byzantine hymnongraphy (e.g. by John Zonaras on John of Damascus), philosophical and theological commentaries (Michael of Ephesos on Aristotle or Niketas of Herakleia on the Psalms). These texts represent different and yet interrelated discourses that highlight the key role of ‘commentary’ as a hermeneutic tool of and testimony to a broad spectrum of sociocultural and literary tensions within the longue durée of the Komnenian era.

This chapter argues that there is a logical aporia at the very heart of the Chalcedonian Definition: namely, that Jesus of Nazareth contributes nothing to the constitution of the “person,” or, said differently, that he stands in no real relation to the Logos. This aporia has its origins in a twofold historical pressure: the desire to affirm a unified subject and in Gregory of Nazianzus’ declaration that “the unassumed is the unhealed.” Throughout this chapter the historical conditions for this aporia are explored in the theologies of Origen, Apollinaris, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Cyril of Alexandria. The chapter argues that the majority of the bishops at Chalcedon followed Cyril in making the preexistent Logos as such to be the “person of the union,” leading to this aporia in the Chalcedonian Definition. The chapter ends with John of Damascus’ Christology and his solution to working with the given Chalcedonian definition.