Theological Dissertation on the Theologoumena of Macarius Magnes

Benevolent Reader, if you seek the causes of the interrupted work concerning the explanation of the Theologoumena theological propositions/doctrines of MACARIUS MAGNES, perhaps this alone will suffice: that I have hitherto been awaiting more certain information regarding the manuscripts of this lost author from the regions of Italy. I have now been sufficiently informed—both by the celebrated GIOVANNI LAMI, in the Deliciae Eruditorum Delights of the Learned published in Florence in 1738, and by the splendid Catalogue of the Venetian Library of St. Mark, which was published very recently in 1740 under the authority of the Venetian Senate and the direction of Marc' Antonio Zanetti and Antonio Bonoioanni—that nothing of the complete work of Magnes is to be found in Venice any longer, but that the manuscript which Francisco Torres once used has, by probable conjecture, been transferred to Spain. For the aforementioned LAMI, after having said in the preface to Volume IV of his Deliciae (p. 19) that TORRES was indeed worthy of no pardon for having not published the work of Magnes which he had read, nor for having indicated the place where it might be found, later changed his opinion in the preface to Volume IX (in which the Letters of Maximus Margunius are contained), p. 29, writing as follows: But is the Jesuit Torres a liar? Far from it. But if he is not a liar, certainly some manuscripts of the Venetian Library have been lost. He is also worthy of pardon; for if he did not publish the work of Magnes which he had read, he nevertheless stated that it existed in the Venetian Library, contrary to what I myself had once thought. But now I will only say that I suspect that the most desired work of MAGNETS was transferred from the Venetian Library to Spain, to the Library of St. Lawrence of the Escorial, along with other manuscripts which I learned were sent there in the past. Perhaps among those manuscripts were these books of Macarius Magnes, which the Spanish Ambassador Don Diego Hurtado de Mendoza removed from the Venetian Library, a matter about which Domenico Molino complains gravely in a letter written from Venice to Johannes Meursius in 1622, which is found among the Letters of Marquard Gude edited by the celebrated Pieter Burman (pp. 130–131). The following words are particularly relevant: I shall see to it that as soon as possible the catalogue of the Greek books which are in the public library comes into your hands;