Henri Paul André Saffrey, 1921-2021

Résumé En

Henri Paul André Saffrey first trained as a scientist, attending the prestigious École Centrale. In 1944, he became a Dominican and took the religious name of Dominique. Henri Dominique Saffrey was initially a Latinist. Under the direction of Fr. Dondaine, Fr. Saffrey edited in 1954 the Commentary of St Thomas Aquinas on the Liber de causis, a book translated from Arabic into Latin and attributed to Aristotle, but whose content is inspired by Proclus' Éléments de Théologie, thus continuing the works of Fr. Chenu who had shown that Thomas' Platonism was just as significant as his Aristotelianism. The publication of Thomas' Commentaire in 1954, accompanied some years later by a major article on the Liber de causis, was followed in 1955 by a book on the fragments of Aristotle's De Philosophia, reissued in 2016 at the same time as a seminal article by Harold Cherniss. Fr. Saffrey went to study at Oxford with Professor E. R. Dodds, and in 1961 was awarded a doctorate in Philosophy, which was a critical review (with introduction, translation, and commentary) of book II of Proclus' Théologie Platonicienne. After that, he became 'Chercheur' at the CNRS (Paris) from 1962 to 1989, as part of the Équipe de Recherche UPR 76 established and directed by Jean Pépin to which I had the honour and the privilege of belonging, along with Alain-Philippe Segonds, Joseph Combès and Marie-Odile and Richard Goulet. Following in the footsteps of Fr. André Jean Festugière, in whose honour he published Mélanges with E. Lucchesi in 1984, Henri Dominique Saffrey leaves behind him a monumental body of scientific work. This was mainly devoted to the edition and the interpretation of major works of Greek Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity, after Plotinus, from the IV-VI centuries AD, from Porphyry to Damascius. His doctorate prepared him to undertake for the « Collection des « Universités de France », in collaboration with L. G. Westerink (eminent scholar in the fields of neoplatonic and byzantine philology) the colossal critical