Anthony P. Gythiel, history professor and WSU’s resident medievalist until his retirement in 2010, was a perfectionist. His work demanded it.
His reputation as scholar, teacher and translator was based on it. His depth and breadth of scholarship was astounding. Like the academic owl of Minerva, he winged his way from scholarly discipline to discipline with relative ease.
His historical training and familiarity with 13 languages made him uniquely suited for the difficult work of translating theological-historical works about Eastern Christianity. Fourteen of his translated books have been published since 1985.
His first scholarly loves were philosophy and theology. A native of Poperinge, West Flanders, he earned an undergraduate degree in philosophy from the Philosophicum Néchin and a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Louvain, Belgium.
A former Jesuit missionary in Kinshasa, Zaire, he relocated in 1963 to the United States, where he earned a doctorate in comparative lit from the University of Detroit and, in 2008, was granted an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree from St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary in New York.
In 1992, the multi-award-winning teacher’s WSU office was in Fiske Hall’s Room 106. “When I moved into this office last summer,” he once explained, “there were some missing tiles over there,” and he pointed to a spot under a window, where several mismatched tiles made a unique pattern on the floor. “I laid those down myself.” Such is the work of a Renaissance man. Dr. Gythiel died May 15, 2014, in Wichita.
