It’s a little-known fact that many of the Egyptian streets once strolled by Clement, Origen, Athanasius, and Cyril were briefly considered as sets for Disney’s Finding Nemo.

OK, I made that up. But it’s true that the streets of Alexandria — the Roman Empire’s “City That Never Sleeps” — have long since been sleeping with the fishes. Now the Egyptians are pondering ways to take classics and patristics nerds like you on the grand underwater tour. And at times it does indeed sound like a job for Disney. This from Bloomberg:

After 15 years of hauling priceless relics from in and around its harbor, Alexandria municipal officials and Egyptian antiquity authorities are trying to figure out how to make thousands of artifacts still at the bottom accessible for viewing by the public.

Municipal officials want to create an underwater archaeological park. Proposals under consideration include construction of an underwater bubble auditorium, conversion of the harbor into a giant pool with filters to remove silt and pollution and a submarine on rails to ferry visitors around.

The goal is to push the city into the major league of antique tourist attractions, a club in Egypt long dominated by Cairo, Luxor, Aswan and Abu Simbel. Alexandria has a Roman amphitheater, a Greco-Roman museum, a combination Pharaonic-Greek-Roman National Museum and assorted columns scattered around town, yet it has never made the splash that, say, Luxor makes with its temples and tombs, much less Cairo, with the pyramids.

Alexandria’s potential surfaced, literally, in the early 1990s when European underwater archaeologists began to pull up stones, statues, pottery and jewelry. Egyptians knew the jumble of relics lay there — the first explorations took place in 1868 — but they thought of the colossal items as part of the environment, like reefs…

Alexander the Great founded the city in 331 B.C. Three hundred years later, Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, conquered it while pursuing Antony, a rival after the assassination of Julius Caesar …

Beginning in the fourth century A.D., earthquakes threw the city’s temples and palaces into the sea. Alexandria is now part of Egypt’s effort to attract more visitors.

Pope Benedict recently spoke of ancient Alexandria as “the symbolic city.” This blog has no shortage of material on Christian Alexandria. Click here and here for starters. Or just search on “Alexandria.”

The world’s foremost scholar of John Henry Newman has now written a beautiful introduction to doctrine and practice of the Catholic faith. It’s Mere Catholicism, by Ian Ker. As the title suggests, it is written very much in the spirit of C.S. Lewis, with comparable grace, clarity, and wit. Both a pastor and an Oxford don, Father Ker is a virtuoso in the use of analogy. He speaks of the sacraments as “the Church’s body language.” He discusses sin in terms of addiction. Unlike Lewis, perhaps, he is willing to tackle the vexed and divisive issues, such as sexual morality, which he treats in a masterly way in a chapter titled “Does My Body Belong to Me?” This is an excellent book for serious inquirers as well as those non-Catholics who simply want to understand their Catholic friends or family members.

Here’s another sidebar to my recent “introduction to the Fathers” article published in Our Sunday Visitor newspaper. I’ve posted the main body of the article in halves, Part 1 and Part 2, plus the first sidebar. I have more to say about the “Mothers of the Church” in the expanded edition of my book The Fathers of the Church.

Were there “Mothers of the Church”? Well, yes and no.

We possess very few writings by women from the ancient world. Christian women are probably slightly better represented than their pagan counterparts. The many collections of Sayings of the Desert Fathers actually include proverbs by women ascetics, who are called “Amma,” or “Mother.”

St. John Chrysostom (fifth century) carried on extensive correspondence with an abbess named Olympias, but her letters have not survived. His contemporary St. Jerome corresponded with many holy and scholarly women; but, again, we have mostly Jerome’s end of the conversation. Tertullian has preserved the words of the martyrs Perpetua and Felicity. In the late fourth century, St. Gregory of Nyssa wrote a profoundly moving biography of his sister St. Macrina. Around the same time, Egeria, a nun from Gaul, took a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and wrote it up for her convent back home.

Their contemporaries honored these women as maternal figures. The Church has always honored them as saints. There is no custom of calling them “Mothers of the Church,” but there is no reason why individual Christians might not revere them as such.

On the feast of the Assumption, the Pope spoke from the heart — and from St. Augustine, says CNS.

Giving his homily without using a text or notes, the pope said that according to St. Augustine, human history has been driven by a struggle between two kinds of love: love for God in which one “loses oneself and gives oneself” totally to him and loving oneself to “the point of disparaging God and hating others.”

Pope Benedict said this selfish love versus true love can be seen in the two images present in the feast day’s first reading from the Book of Revelation, an account of the encounter between the powerful dragon and the defenseless woman.

The dragon, he said, represents “power without mercy, without love, of absolute selfishness, terror, violence” as well as all “materialistic dictatorships” throughout history, including the Nazi and Stalinist regimes.

“Even today the dragon exists in new and different ways,” he said.

It is present in the form of materialistic ideologies that consider God as something expendable or pointless and that maintain life is all about “consumption, selfishness, amusement” and “taking all there is to get in this brief lifetime,” the pope said.

“Once again it seems absurd, impossible to defy this dominant mentality,” especially with the support it gets in the media, he said.

But, “nonetheless, we know that in the end the defenseless woman won” the battle against the dragon, signaling the victory of God’s love, he said.

The woman clothed with the sun and with the moon under her feet represents the Mary “living totally in God … penetrated by the light of God” and conquering death, said the pope.

“She tells us: ‘Have courage. In the end love wins,'” he said, adding that this love entailed living her life as a servant of God and giving herself totally to God and others.

The feast of the Assumption “is an invitation to have faith in God, to imitate Mary” and “to give our lives, not seize life,” Pope Benedict said.

Love is stronger than hatred, he said, and the seemingly weak God, who came to the world as a baby, is strong. Though faith in God may seem weak against all earthly powers, it “is the true power in the world,” said the pope.

Roger Pearse reports on the XV International conference on patristics studies at Oxford. (OK, it’s the closest thing we have to the New Journalism.)

It’s a great feast today. Celebrate it with a festival of good reading.

Always begin with David Scott’s overview.

Then get the patristic take.

Proceed to Jim Davila for the OT foreshadowings.

Buy a good book — like Stephen J. Shoemaker’s The Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption. The author includes full texts and detailed scholarly analysis of the ancient traditions regarding the end of the Virgin Mary’s earthly life. (My review is here.)

And last, but not least: Pray for me!

The reviews make these books sound so enticing: Early Christian Literature: Christ and Culture in the Second and Third Centuries, by Helen Rhee. Hat tip on the review: Rogue Classicism.

Ben C. Smith continues his discussion of the canon by examining the list of Epiphanius.

Adrian Murdoch has just left the blogosphere. Stop by to wish him well.

Last year, with several others, I got caught up briefly in Father Z’s dispute over the attribution of several chestnuts to St. Augustine. Everyone knows, for example, that the man from Hippo said “Roma locuta, causa finita” (Rome has spoken; the matter is settled). And everyone knows that he said “In necessariis unitas …” (In necessary matters unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity). The problem with these quotations — and several others, including “He who sings prays twice” — is that no one can find them in the works of Augustine.

I proposed that they represent the crystallization of Augustine’s arguments. “Roma locuta” is a summary of his Sermon 131.10. “In necessariis” is a summary of his famous Letter to Januarius. Good teachers tend to distill long treatises into simple, memorable principles. Augustine himself did this, and I think he inspired others to do the same for him down the centuries. It was a habit (and useful mnemonic) in the Middle Ages, when I’ll wager these sayings found their brief and lovely form.

All this came back to me when a friend — who was way behind on his reading — passed me an article from the February 19 & 26 New Yorker: “Notable Quotables” by Louis Menand, in which the author discusses the evolution of “quotes.”

Sherlock Holmes never said “Elementary, my dear Watson” … Leo Durocher did not say “Nice guys finish last” … William Tecumseh Sherman never wrote the words “War is hell” … Gordon Gekko, the character played by Michael Douglas in “Wall Street,” does not say “Greed is good”…

So what? Should we care? Quotable quotes are coins rubbed smooth by circulation. What Michael Douglas did say in “Wall Street” was “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.” That was not a quotable quote; it needed some editorial attention, the consequence of which is that everyone distinctly remembers Michael Douglas uttering the words “Greed is good” in “Wall Street” … When you watch the movie and get to that line, you don’t think your memory is wrong. You think the movie is wrong.

“For lack of a better word” spoils a nice quotation — the speech is about calling a spade a spade, so there is no better word … What Leo Durocher actually said (referring to the New York Giants baseball team) was “The nice guys are all over there, in seventh place.” The sportswriters who heard him telescoped (the technical term is “piped”) the quote because it made a neater headline. They could have done a better job of piping. “Nice guys finish seventh” is a lot cleverer (and also marginally more plausible) than the non-utterance that gave immortality to Leo Durocher. But Leo Durocher doesn’t own that quotation; the quotation owns Leo Durocher, the way a parasite sometimes takes over the host organism. Quotations are in a perpetual struggle for survival. They want people to keep saying them. They don’t want to die any more than the rest of us do.

I like that. We haven’t been inaccurate. We’ve been “piping” Augustine, “telescoping” him. We’re salvaging his quotes by misquoting him. Such goodness, surely, is even better than greed, and certainly better than finishing last — or, perish the thought, getting dropped from the next edition of Bartlett’s.

Today’s the shared memorial of two former enemies, Saints Pontian and Hippolytus, pope and antipope (respectively). It’s an amazing story. I’ll be talking about P&H with Bruce and Kris McGregor on KVSS radio this morning, and eventually the audio will migrate to their Aquilina page.

Jeff Ziegler leads us to these links:

— St. Pontian.
— St. Hippolytus.
— The “Apostolic Tradition of St. Hippolytus is the source of Eucharistic Prayer II.
— Dieric Bouts the Elder, St. Hippolytus Triptych (after 1468).

The following appeared as a sidebar to my article in Our Sunday Visitor. I’ve posted the main body of the article in halves, Part 1 and Part 2. For the complete story, buy the book!

Not every Christian who wrote in antiquity is considered a Church Father. Theologians have settled on four criteria that must be fulfilled:

1. sound doctrine;

2. holiness of life;

3. Church approval; and

4. antiquity.

Those ancient Christians who don’t meet all these criteria are often described as “ecclesiastical writers” rather than Church Fathers.

Still, there is no official list of the Fathers, no process of canonization similar to a cause for sainthood. The ancient list attributed to Pope Gelasius is of uncertain origin; and, in any event, it was drawn up while the age of the Fathers was still in progress, so it misses some important later figures.

Some scholars say that Tertullian, Origen, and Eusebius should be called “ecclesiastical writers” rather than Fathers. Tertullian veered off into the Montanist heresy late in life. Origen seems to have experimented with several weird theological notions. Eusebius was a bit too cozy with the most notorious heretics of the fourth century, the Arians.

Yet recent reconsiderations have been kind to those three men. The Catechism of the Catholic Church cites Tertullian explicitly as a Father of the Church (n. 1446) and nine times invokes Origen as an authority. A French scholar summed up the matter: “the valuable services that these men have rendered to the Church” make them “exceptions.”

Some early authors would use the word “Father” only to describe a bishop, but eventually the term was extended to priests (like Jerome) and laymen (like Justin).