This is volume 12 of the Catholic Library of Religious Knowledge.

Early Christian writings form a body of literature that has shaped Western culture as a whole, as Enrico Norelli and Claudio Moreschini demonstrate in this comprehensive book. The first six centuries of Christian experience impacted art and developed a philosophy that faced opposition, resolved internal conflicts, transposed itself into medieval civilization, and continues to influence culture today. Available for the first time in English, Early Christian Greek and Latin Literature highlights the special character of the gospel message, the nucleus of every Christian literary form. The earliest Christian works from the first through the fourth centuries are presented along with respected contemporary writings in the first volume. The second volume moves to the Golden Age of Christian literature. The major personalities of the time--Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, all writers of the highest rank--are matched with Greek-speaking authors such as Athanasius, the Cappadocians, and John Chrysostom, thinkers to whom present-day Christians turn once again for spiritual direction. This two-volume edition organizes the material in chronological order. Each segment's detailed discussion concludes with an up-to-date bibliography. It also includes a general bibliography and each volume includes an index of authors and anonymous works. Specialists in classics and medieval studies as well as general theologians, art historians, archaeologists, and other students of culture will find in this work an in-depth survey, quality scholarship, and an original approach.

This volume, offering an insight into the literary world of Rome in the fourth century AD, reflects an increased interest in the writers of the 150 years before the collapse of the Western Empire, who have long been over-shadowed by the pre-eminence accorded since the eighteenth century to the Golden and Silver ages. Among the writers examined are Ausonius, the poet, Imperial official and tutor to Gratian; Claudian, the last major ‘classical’ poet; Prudentius, and Paulinus of Nola, two of the founders of Christian Latin poetry; Symmachus, the letter writer and supporter of die-hard paganism; and St. Augustine, whose influence on Christian thought and the Middle Ages is incalculable. These essays consider how such writers responded to a world where vitality was ebbing from the old forms of political life, religion and literature, giving way to new institutions, modes of life and horizons of reflection.

This book explores the church-centric interpretation of ancient biblical exegete Tyconius in his hermeneutical treatise Liber regularum, highlighting how his underlying ecclesiology shaped his hermeneutical enterprise

Publisher Description

The Christian Church has continually looked to its beginnings to discover new insights and new strength for the present. Today the interest in early Christianity and its leaders is as lively as it ever was. Those who know these early days never tire in calling today’s Church back to the Scriptures and the Spirit directed history of the Church. In this book, Dr. Williams has given the preacher, teacher, and concerned layman a very readable, concise, and helpful guide to the teachings of the early Church leaders. He communicates the exciting quality of Christian theology as it came to expression in the thought and life of men to whom the Christian Church today is greatly in debt, and from whom, with humility, it can continue to learn and find inspirations. The early Church Fathers were concerned, in the words of the Apostle Peter, to make a defense to anyone who called them to account for the hope that was in them. They were concerned, as the Church is today, to understand the faith for themselves and to explain it to those outside the Church. Their answers to the following problems are still relevant: the relationship of God to all the world, redemption, the Trinity, the person of Christ, the relationship between God’s will and man’s, and the problem of church and state. Today the Church still possesses the faith that overcomes the world and seeks to practice that faith in all of life. Twentieth century Christians can be strengthened in that possession and practice through an acquaintance with the teachings of the early Church Fathers. This book will guide them.

Written between the mid-fourth and late sixth centuries to commemorate and glorify the achievements of early Christian saints, these six biographies depict men who devoted themselves to solitude, poverty and prayer. Athanasius records Antony's extreme seclusion in the Egyptian desert, despite temptation by the devil and visits from his followers. Jerome also shows those who fled persecution or withdrew from society to pursue lives of chastity and asceticism in his accounts of Paul of Thebes, Hilarion and Malchus. In his Life of Martin, Sulpicius Severus describes the achievements of a man who combined the roles of monk, bishop and missionary, while Gregory the Great tells of Benedict, whose Rule became the template for monastic life. Full of vivid incidents and astonishing miracles, these Lives have provided inspiration as models for centuries of Christian worship.

Locating the roots of the plain style in secular and philosophic classicism, Auksi examines theories on classical rhetoric from Demetrius and Dionysius of Halicarnassus to Cicero and Quintilian. He shows how biblicists deliberately transformed a heathen mode, and demonstrates that rhetoric served a pragmatic function among the church fathers. He also discusses the different responses of Renaissance translators, rhetors, polemicists, and humanists to the stylized medieval inheritance, paying particular attention to the issue of sacred plainness in preaching. The epilogue provides a convincing argument for the decline of the plain style in the late seventeenth century and describes how the almost vanished ideal of plainness was transformed by Methodists, Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites.