~by St. AelredThe perfection of brotherly love lies in the love of one’s enemies. We can find no greater inspiration for this than grateful remembrance of the wonderful patience of Christ. He who is more fair than all the sons of men offered his fair face to be spat upon by sinful men; he allowed ...

N.B.: This is the under-construction revised second edition of my July 2008 post: "Filioque: Fathers, Popes, & Councils." 1. The Eastern Orthodox differ from Catholics in that the former deny that the υπόστασις [hypostasis] of the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son; at most, they will gr...

~by St. AugustineHear, O God, my petition, listen to my prayer. Who is speaking? An individual, it seems. See if it is an individual: I cried out to you from the ends of the earth while my heart was in anguish. Now it is no longer one person; rather, it is one in the sense that Christ is one, and we...

~by St. Clement of RomeLet us fix our attention on the blood of Christ and recognise how precious it is to God his Father, since it was shed for our salvation and brought the grace of repentance to all the world.If we review the various ages of history, we will see that in every generation the Lord ...

This was going to be a term paper for Faith & Critical Reason but for sundry reasons it was not to be and it did not end up nearly long enough anyway; my term paper was instead on reasons for safeguarding the environment. I was moved by the style of the Church Fathers to write this in a homileti...

Those Christian scholars familiar with the apocryphal Gospel of Judas and its gnostic/antiCatholic undercurrents will not be surprised to find out that the real situation in the 2nd century Mediterranean was actually far 'worse' than the happy-face images that the National Geographic specials and ot...

We may predicate of Origen Adamantius of Alexandria "holiness of life," "a certain antiquity," "citations, with praise, as an authority as to the Faith by some of the more celebrated Fathers," and I'm not sure but perhaps there was "public reading in Churches in early centuries." He passes the third...

There's much to say about the angels as the bearer of the Mosaic law, that law which is dearer to me now that I have seen the face of the law. But I'll let Daniélou cite a splendid passage from Origen: "This view of St. Paul's [Gal. 4:16, Col 2:8, Heb 2:5-8] is developed by Origen in his commentary...

[Note: I started this series elsewhere but have decided to finish it here. This will be the first of three posts which I'm pasting verbatim] Several summers ago I was at Loome Theological Booksellers in Stillwater, Minnesota, and bought several books including Robert Hugh Benson's eminently practica...

One of the few pleasures of having been off sick for a few days was making my way through Leo Donald Davis' "The First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325-787): Their History and Theology".  It is really one of the first major works in English to try to grasp the whole movement of the 7 Ecumenical Counc...