Rhetoric in Classical Writers Read, I beg of you, Demosthenes or Cicero, or (if you do not care for pleaders whose aim is to speak plausibly rather than truly) read Plato, Theophrastus, Xenophon, Aristotle, and the rest of those who draw their respective rills of wisdom from the Socratic fountain-head. Do they show any openness? Are they devoid of artifice? Is not every word they say filled with meaning? And […]
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Jerome On Origen (Part I)
Origen’s Prolificity Antiquity marvels at Marcus Terentius Varro, because of the countless books which he wrote for Latin readers; and Greek writers are extravagant in their praise of their man of brass [Didymus], because he has written more works than one of us could so much as copy. … Our Christian man of brass, or, rather, man of adamant—Origen, I mean—whose zeal for the study of Scripture has fairly earned […]
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Jerome: The Letters of St. Jerome
The Indignity of Non-Fellowship Pardon, I beseech you, an aggrieved man: if I speak in tears and in anger it is because I have been injured. For in return for my regular letters you have not sent me a single syllable. Light, I know, has no communion with darkness, and God’s handmaidens no fellowship with a sinner, yet a harlot was allowed to wash the Lord’s feet with her tears, […]
Read moreJohn of Damascus: Exposition of the Orthodox Faith III
On the Dual Natures of Christ In the case of … our Lord Jesus Christ, we confess that there are two natures, one divine and one human, joined together with one another and united in subsistence, so that one compound subsistence is formed out of the two natures: but we hold that the two natures are still preserved, even after the union, in the one compound subsistence, that is, in […]
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On Paradise For our Creator, God, did not intend us to be burdened with care and troubled about many things, nor to take thought about, or make provision for, our own life. But this at length was Adam’s fate: for he tasted and knew that he was naked and made a girdle round about him: for he took fig-leaves and girded himself about. But before they took of the fruit, […]
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On the Eternal Generation of the Son For there never was a time when the Father was and the Son was not, but always the Father and always the Son, Who was begotten of Him, existed together. For He could not have received the name Father apart from the Son: for if He were without the Son, He could not be the Father: and if He thereafter had the Son, […]
Read moreHilary of Poitiers: On the Trinity
The Unity of God “That they all may be one, as Thou Father art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be in Us”. For those first of all is the prayer of whom it is said, That they all may be one. Then the promotion of unity is set forth by a pattern of unity, when He says, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I […]
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