eranos/eranisteon

Right, this may seem a little pedantic, but I do have a background in linguistics and it's hard to break the habits of a lifetime :o)

I've been a bit troubled by the term eranisteon ever since we first came across it. Rahner's translation makes use of the phrase 'beggar's collection' but the thing is that eranisteon obviously isn't a noun. The noun for one of those pot-luck meals we were talking about is the related term, eranos, and it seems that there is a massive literature on the practice of the eranos both in antiquity and in the early church. The term eranisteon is the neuter of a verbal adjective derived - I think - from the verb eranidzo. Perseus offers an online edition of Hubert Weir Smyth's Greek grammar and this is how Smyth deals with verbal adjectives:

Verbal forms that share the properties of nouns are called verbal nouns. There are two kinds of verbal nouns. 1. Substantival: the infinitive [...]. 2. Adjectival (inflected like adjectives): a. Participles [...]. b. Verbal adjectives: In -tos, denoting possibility [...]. In -teos, denoting necessity, as grapteos that must be written.

So eranisteon isn't simply the name of the 'beggar's collection'. It expresses the whole idea: 'there there must be a collecting'. I think it must have the same sort of connotations as eranos but expressed in a different grammatical form.

As I say, this may be a rather rarified point and, in the end, it may not make much difference to the work. But I like it for two reasons:

1. A word that means 'there must be a collecting' seems more exciting to me than a word that just means 'a collective meal'. There is more dynamism in the word, somehow.

2. The term eranos is the name of an international discussion group which has been considering questions of religion, philosophy, and so on since the early 1930s. (See the wikipedia entry here for a bit of information - some famous names have been associated with the group and, as it happens, Rahner mentions them in the introduction to his book.) As such, I think it's just as well that we have a related but different word to work with.

As I say, there is a massive literature on the eranos and I don't propose that we plough through all of it. But, at the same time, I might post some of the more interesting odds and ends that I come across in the next week or so.