There’s some fascinating activity at GrailCode.com, where my co-author Chris Bailey has summoned old Nennius forth from his ancient grave and from neglected library shelves. In Nennius we encounter an early Christian re-telling of the Celtic tales, which later bards would weave into the romances of the Holy Grail. Don’t miss Chris’s fascinating discussion, and don’t forget to order our book, The Grail Code — which (if I do say so myself) is one of the more entertaining ways to counter the Grail-related fabrications of The Da Vinci Code.

They were history’s most elite corps: 12 men, chosen by God Himself to establish His Church on earth.

Elite, yes. But the apostles, each and all, emerged from obscurity only to do their appointed work, and then faded again into obscurity. “Bartholomew we don’t know much about, Matthew almost nothing and Matthias nothing at all,” said C. Bernard Ruffin, author of an excellent popular history of the apostles’ later years, The Twelve: The Lives of the Apostles After Calvary. “None of the apostles seems to have had the slightest interest in perpetuating his own memory. Their whole beings centered on their Master, and on spreading the Good News.”

Thus most of what modern Christians know about the Twelve Apostles is what the apostles themselves wrote about the life and teachings of Jesus — the various books of the New Testament. After that, there are snippets, quotations and anecdotes in the documents of the early Church, and legends and oral tradition handed down among the peoples of the Middle East and India. But these are not widely known. Still, they are fascinating to consider. For example:

• What happened to Peter’s wife (see Mk 1:29-31)? And what about the couple’s children?

• What was John’s life like when he shared a home with Mary (see Jn 19:27)?

• What did the apostles do to celebrate Easter?

• How did a Jew like Thomas take the culture shock that went with evangelizing India?

Ruffin set himself the task of sifting through all the available evidence to answer such questions and compile vivid profiles of the Twelve Apostles and their lives after Jesus’ resurrection.

“Few things can be known for sure about events 2,000 years ago,” Ruffin told me in an interview about his book. “Yet, as I did my research, I was surprised to find that we know as much as we do, and especially that we have much material that is better than legendary. It comes on very good authority.”

Ruffin said that material on Jesus’ inner circle — Peter, James and John — is especially plentiful, and recorded by reputable and reliable early Christian authors. St. Polycarp, for example, whose writings survive, knew St. John the Apostle. The writings of Polycarp’s disciple, St. Irenaeus, relate many more stories of John. Another “hearer” of John, a bishop named Papias — whose work survives only in fragments — wrote about his master as well as the other apostles. Eusebius and St. Jerome, both historians of the fourth century, drew from these and other first-century documents, now lost, as they wrote their own works.

In addition to these, there are also fanciful and apocryphal books of “Acts” of the various apostles — novels, really, but sometimes based on real historical events.

Ruffin’s book sometimes reads like a detective story as he pieces stories together from far-flung sources. “A lot of it has to be supposition and guesswork,” he told me. “But if you have a number of apparently independent traditions about a certain event, and they’re reasonably similar to one another, I think you can be reasonably sure that they’re based on a real event.”

The chapter on the apostle Thomas provides a good example of Ruffin’s investigative technique. Early Church testimonies named Thomas as the apostle to the Far East, including China, but especially India.

“In the West, a number of traditions refer to Thomas’s work in India,” Ruffin said. “I cite papers in the Edessan archive, which we know from citations in Eusebius in the fourth century. There is more information in the ‘Doctrine of the Apostles,’ a Syrian document from the third century, and the ‘Acts of Thomas,’ which is one of the apocrypha. Centuries later, Marco Polo and Western missionaries found a number of Thomas traditions in India. The ancient Mar Thoma church, for centuries, has passed down an oral tradition called the ‘Rabban Song’ about Thomas. What is interesting is the degree to which the traditions in India seem to corroborate the traditions from the West.”

According to tradition, Thomas received his Indian mission in a vision of Christ. To go to India was, for Thomas, to travel to the end of the earth. It was a place as remote from his native Judea — in terms of geography, culture, climate and especially religion — as one could imagine. Thomas reportedly asked Jesus, “How can I, a Jew, go and preach the Truth to Indians?”

But, according to the ‘Rabban Song,’ preach he did. Through the 50s, 60s and early 70s A.D., he brought the Gospel through large areas of the Indian subcontinent, with intermittent success. Legends attribute 17,000 conversions to Thomas and his followers in that short time. Ruffin relates the tradition that Thomas was martyred on July 3 in the year 72 by priests of the goddess Kali who feared that the apostle’s religion was beginning to eclipse their own.

For years, these traditions were dismissed as folklore. Even some Catholic missionaries charged that ancient heretics invented the Thomas stories in order to fabricate apostolic origins for their teachings. Then, in the last hundred years, archeological discoveries began to confirm some of the historical details of the “Rabban Song” and “Acts of Thomas.” In the late 19th century, for example, coins were found with the image of a prince who plays a key role in Thomas’s story — and his dates correspond with those of Thomas’s work in India.

Though Ruffin approaches all ancient documents with caution, he refuses to follow those scholars who dismiss testimony as untrustworthy merely because it is old or because it shows fervor in faith.

“Some scholars tend to overly skeptical,” he said. “In approaching material like this, if you go into the project determined to throw it all out, you probably will persuade yourself to do so. But, then, what’s the point of beginning at all?”

Ruffin, a Lutheran pastor who also teaches history, recalled his own experience studying at Yale Divinity School and Bowdoin College. “When I was in seminary, some of my professors took skepticism to ridiculous extremes,” he said. “They were determined to distrust everything, so they did. If we applied the same skepticism to all ancient records that these historians apply to early Christian traditions, we would not only have no Church history, we would have no ancient history at all.

“It comes down to how much value you place on tradition,” he concluded. “As a Christian, I think that there are good reasons for us to believe the traditions, even as I acknowledge that not all traditions are of equal weight. Many of the traditions about the apostles do stand scrutiny.”

Ruffin’s favorite characters in the apostolic corps coincides with Jesus’ favorites: Peter, John and James. “Theirs are the most well-documented lives,” he said.

Ruffin tells a well-documented story of John, at an advanced age — “maybe 70 or 80,” he said — risking his life to save a soul.

“In Smyrna, John had trained a certain young man in the faith. But then came a persecution, and John had to flee. When the apostle came back, he asked the local bishop what had happened to the fellow. At first, he was told that the man was dead. But with further inquiry, he found that the fellow had become a bandit. So John rode out to the back country where the man was hiding out. Soon, he was surrounded by members of the gang. John told the bandits that he wasn’t going to escape and he was asking for no mercy, but that he wanted to see their leader.

“When the bandit leader saw John,” Ruffin continued, “he turned to run away — but John ran after him! Remember, now, John was very old by this time. He called to the bandit, ‘Why are you running from your own father, who is unarmed and very old? Be sorry for me, my child.’ And the man fell to the ground sobbing. He repented and returned to the fold. The story showed that John had courage and endurance, even at an advanced age.”

Still, in the apostles’ biographies, there remains much more shadow than light.

“There are several different traditions about what happened to Matthew,” Ruffin said. “Some have him dying in Ethiopia, and some have him dying elsewhere. I labeled his chapter ‘The Phantom Apostle,’ because I can’t figure out what happened to him.”

Yet even the questionable material is valuable, he explained, because “it shows us the qualities that the early Christians esteemed above all others. Some of their stories may be metaphorical, describing more a spiritual state than a historical event. But I don’t think we should approach these cultures in a condescending way, explaining them away as prescientific storytellers.”

Most fascinating to modern Catholic readers, perhaps, will be the degree to which the apostles’ Church mirrors the Catholic Church today — in its sacraments, ritual, hierarchy, dogma and even its foibles.

But that shouldn’t be surprising at all. Ruffin cited St. Irenaeus, of the second century A.D., who “maintained that the apostles had ‘perfect knowledge’ and maintained that they appointed bishops to whom they passed on their sacred mysteries.”

Tracking the growth of Christianity 2,000 years ago is an ambitious undertaking for a sociologist. But Rodney Stark found it irresistible. Reading recent histories of early Christianity, he began to do some number-crunching. Soon, he says, it was a consuming “hobby.” And, before long, he had written a best-selling book, The Rise of Christianity (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).

What he found in his study of the first Christian centuries was an astonishing growth rate in the number of Christians of 40 percent per decade. From a small band of twelve, the Church had grown to 6 million people by 300 A.D. Stark maintains that the Emperor Constantine did not so much ensure Christianity’s success as acknowledge it. Constantine’s edict of toleration in 313 was overdue recognition that the Church had already won the empire.

But Stark is most interested in how the West was won. Contrary to pious histories, he holds that most growth came from individual conversions, and from the merchant and upper classes rather than the poor. Contrary to secular feminist pieties, he makes the case that most converts were women, that women benefited greatly from conversion, and that women were leaders in the early Church.

He also shows the remarkable effects of charity on Church growth. Christians, he demonstrates, were much more likely to survive epidemics because they cared for one another. And the pagans who received Christian care were much more likely to become Christians. In times of epidemic, Stark says, pagan priests and doctors were among the first to leave town.

Stark’s book vividly describes the misery of ordinary citizens of the pagan world. Most lived in cramped, smoky tenements with no ventilation or plumbing. Life expectancy was around 30 years for men and perhaps much lower for women. Hygiene was minimal. Medical care was more dangerous than disease, and disease often left its victims disfigured or dead. The human body was host to countless parasites, and tenements were infested by pests. For entertainment, people thronged to the circuses to see other people mutilated and killed.

Pagan marriage was no respite. Greco-Roman women suffered in predatory relationships rife with abortion and unnatural acts. But Christian marriage was a different story. Christian husbands and wives tended to love one another, as their religion required. Their mutual affection, Stark says, and their openness to fertility led to more children, and thus to a still higher growth in converts for the early Church.

Stark demonstrates that Christian doctrine, hope and charity transformed the Roman Empire—one person at a time.

Of The Rise of Christianity, the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper said: “It is ironic yet satisfying to find sociology, so often used to attack dogmatic Christianity, now objectively confirming some of the claims that Christianity has made for itself.”

Read my Touchstone interview with Rodney Stark here.

I regularly write about the Fathers in Touchstone. You’ll find some of that work by searching Touchstone’s archive here. (Just plug in my last name: Aquilina.)

Subscribe to Touchstone here.

Philo of Alexandria (died around 50 A.D.) is one of those fascinating figures at the periphery of early Christian history — though there is no firm evidence that he was ever even dimly aware of the just-emerging Christian movement. A busy man, he served, in his long life, as a Jewish community official, a diplomat, a teacher, and a theologian. Profoundly influenced by the Greek philosopher Plato, Philo remained a devout Jew. Though he held fast to the literal meaning of the Scriptures, he believed that they also yielded an allegorical meaning — about God, about history, and about morals. Philo’s speculations took him far. He was daring in his contemplation of God. From Scripture, Philo discerned the existence of a divine Logos, or Word of God, whom he went so far as to call a “deuteros theos,” or “second God.” Christians have found his doctrine to be a breathtaking anticipation of the truth revealed in the Incarnation of the Son of God.

My friend Scott Hahn speaks often of Philo’s use of the Greek term eucharistia — which literally translates as “thanksgiving,” though for Christians, of course, it means so much more. The French patrologist Jean LaPorte believed that it meant more for Philo, too, and he wrote a book on the subject, Eucharistia in Philo. LaPorte points out that Philo and other Alexandrian Jews used “eucharistia” as an equivalent of the Hebrew “todah,” which is the term for the thanksgiving sacrifice of bread and wine. In later work, La Porte went on to connect Philo’s “eucharistic” writings with those of the later Alexandrian Christians.

The great Italian scholar Enrico Mazza sees, in Philo’s work “On the Contemplative Life,” the immediate precursor of the liturgy of Christian Alexandria. In that work, Philo describes a monastic community of Jews, called the Therapeutae, who met early in the morning for the hearing of the Scripture, the singing of antiphons, and a ritual meal that had a sacrificial character. Eusebius concluded, in his history, that this community eventually converted to Christianity and formed the foundational generation of the Alexandrian Church. Mazza finds Eusebius’s argument possible, at least, given the similarities between Philo’s description of the Therapeutae and what we know of later Egyptian liturgy and monasticism.

In any event, Philo had a profound influence on early Christian theology. Clement of Alexandria knew him well, and Philo’s allegorical method seems to provided the foundation for the distinctive biblical interpretation of Christian Alexandria. St. Jerome — who had little good to say about Christians like Ambrose, Augustine, and Chrysostom — praises Philo to high heaven. In his “Lives of Illustrious Men,” he can’t find a negative word to say about him. (If you’ve read this brilliant but prickly saint, you know that this is an extremely rare occasion.)

It is, however, Ambrose who, more than any other Father, puts Philo to work for the Gospel. I remember someone once telling me that Ambrose counted Philo among the prophets of Israel, but I could not locate that passage as I was preparing this blog entry. (If you know where it is, please let me know.)

Jerome and Ambrose were content to work with Philo as a Jew who anticipated Christian themes and interpretive methods. Other authors, however, claimed more. Eusebius reported that Philo had met St. Peter in Rome and was favorably impressed, ever afterward looking kindly on Alexandria’s Christians. Epiphanius goes further and tells us that the “papal audience” in Rome led to Philo’s conversion. By the early Middle Ages, we find references to Philo not only as a Christian, but as a bishop! The process is well documented in David Runia’s book Philo in Early Christian Literature. You’ll find Dr. Runia’s excellent summary of Philo’s influence on early Christian thought right here.

I had planned this to be just a short entry, occasioned by my dipping into Philo this week at work. But here I am, several paragraphs deep. I’ll hit the pause button.

Getting ready for Sunday Mass? Think about what you’re doing. Think for a moment: What did it mean to be a Christian in the time of the Fathers?

What set those first believers apart from their neighbors? What was the single act that best defined their life in Jesus Christ?

For the first Christians, to be a believer meant to go to Mass. The Eucharist was then, as it is now, the source and summit of Christian life.

We see this clearly in the Church’s earliest history, the Acts of the Apostles. “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” “Day by day,” the author goes on, the Jerusalem Christians shared a common life of worship, “attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes” (Acts 2:42,46).

In Troas with Paul, Luke recounts, “On the first day of the week . . . we were gathered together to break bread” (Acts 20:7).

Wherever the first Christians assembled, they “broke bread.”

This was no ordinary meal. It was, rather, the fulfillment of the command of Jesus Christ at His Last Supper. “He took bread, and when He had given thanks He broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ ”

Jesus himself performed the first “remembrance” on the day of His resurrection. After His famous walk to Emmaus with two incredulous disciples, “When He was at table with them, He took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized Him; and He vanished out of their sight. . . . He was known to them in the breaking of the bread” (Lk 24:30-31,35).

To be faithful to Jesus, then, was to follow His command and His example. To keep faith was to give thanks and break bread in His memory. These actions, collectively, took their name from Jesus’ own words, “giving thanks,” in Greek, eucharistia — Eucharist.

More than a memorial

What did this thanksgiving mean to those founders of the Christian Church? It was a memorial, but it was more than that. The passage from Acts uses the Greek word “koinonia,” which can be translated “fellowship,” “sharing,” or “participation,” but “communion” is the preferred English term. The “thanksgiving” of the early Christians was a communion of persons — a communion of the believers with Christ and with one another.

St. Paul wrote to the Church in Corinth, around A.D. 51: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a communion in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:16-17).

The first Christians knew holy Communion as something more than symbolic. It was a mingling of bodies and souls. The closest analogy they could find was in the union of a married couple. Thus, the Book of Revelation refers to the Mass, mystically, as “the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rv 19:9).

Jesus himself had foretold His Eucharist in the most graphic, physical terms. “I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is My flesh” (Jn 6:51).

The early Church took Jesus at His word and always spoke of the Eucharist with the same flesh-and-blood realism. Belief in Jesus’ Real Presence was essential to a Christian’s profession of faith. To hold a different doctrine was an act of infidelity. “For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body,” wrote St. Paul, “eats and drinks judgment upon himself” (1 Cor 11:29).

That judgment held in the subsequent generations. St. Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of St. John the Apostle, wrote around A.D. 107 that a distinguishing mark of a heretic was the denial of the Real Presence. “From the Eucharist and prayer they hold aloof, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ.”

Eucharist fed the faith

All of this was the faith of the Church, before there were New Testament Scriptures, long before there were church buildings. The books of the New Testament were likely not completed until A.D. 90-100. The official list of the books of the Bible was not approved for the universal Church until 419. But the earliest liturgical manual we have, The Didache, was probably set to parchment around 48 A.D. (I follow Enrico Mazza in the dating of The Didache. His arguments are very persuasive.)

Moreover, Christianity arose long before the printing press. Few people had access to books of the various Gospels and letters that were in circulation.

Few people could read them anyway, as literacy was rare in many parts of the world.

Yet the faith endured because Christians received the Word and the sacrament within their eucharistic assemblies. Indeed, Word and sacrament were inseparable realities. As the early Christians read the books of the New Testament, they found not just isolated references to the Eucharist, but a sacramental motif pervasive from the very beginning of Jesus’ life. He was born, after all, in Bethlehem, which in Hebrew means “House of Bread.”

When Jesus multiplied the loaves, believers saw a foreshadowing of the Eucharist. When Jesus changed water into wine, He prefigured the transformation of wine into His blood. It is the overwhelming judgment of the Fathers of the Church that when Jesus instructed us to pray for “our daily bread,” He taught us to pray for the Eucharist. In third-century Africa, St. Cyprian wrote: “We ask that this bread should be given to us daily, that we who are in Christ and daily receive the Eucharist for the food of salvation, may not, by the obstacle of some heinous sin, be kept back from receiving Communion, from partaking of the heavenly bread, that we may not be separated from Christ’s body.”

St. Cyprian, like his scriptural forebears, spoke with precision here. For to be “excommunicated” meant literally to be excluded from Communion, which for believers is a sentence of death (see 1 Cor 11:30).

Indeed, the Eucharist was life itself for the Church, and believers preferred death to missing Mass. The martyrs of Abitina, in third-century Africa, told their accusers, “Without fear of any kind we have celebrated the Lord’s Supper, because it cannot be missed. . . . We cannot live without the Lord’s Supper.”

Those martyrs had drawn deeply from three centuries of devotion — and more. For Christ did not invent the Eucharist whole cloth, but rather presented it as a fulfillment of the Old Covenant sacrifices. His Last Supper took place, after all, at a sacrificial meal, the Passover. Over time, many of the prayers of ancient Israel would be taken up into the Mass. Hear, for example, the cup blessing of the Passover liturgy: “Blessed are you, Lord God, creator of the fruit of the vine.”

The service of the synagogue repeats the words from Ezekiel (which appear again in Revelation): “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.” The Dead Sea Scrolls hint at other Jewish sources of Christian ritual: “When the table has been prepared for eating, and the new wine for drinking, the priest shall be the first to stretch out his hand to bless the first-fruits of the bread and new wine.”

Household churches

The early Christians must have had a vivid experience of the close communion of the Church. For, until the legalization of Christianity in 313, the Church owned no buildings. As we saw in the Acts of the Apostles, the faithful assembled for the Eucharist in family homes. Sometimes, when wealthy families converted, they turned over substantial estates for liturgical use. The Basilica of San Clemente in Rome may have been built upon just such a household. Another “house-church” was excavated, somewhat intact, in Syria. Late last year, a construction crew dug up yet another in Megiddo, near Jerusalem.

Still, though the first Christians were “at home” with the Eucharist, they were never casual in their practice. Their reverence was profound. In the third century, the Scripture scholar Origen of Alexandria wrote: “You who are accustomed to take part in the divine mysteries know, when you receive the body of the Lord, how you protect it with all caution and veneration lest any small part fall from it, lest anything of the consecrated gift be lost.”

In the fourth century, St. Cyril of Jerusalem exhorts his people to take the same care: “Tell me, if anyone gave you grains of gold wouldn’t you hold them with all care, on your guard against losing any? Won’t you keep watch more carefully, then, that not a crumb fall from you of what is more precious than gold and jewels?”

Just a few years later, St. Jerome — the greatest biblical scholar of the ancient Church — would write of the need “to instruct by the authority of Scripture ignorant people in all the churches concerning the reverence with which they must handle holy things and minister at Christ’s altar; and to impress upon them that the sacred chalices, veils and other accessories used in the celebration of the Lord’s passion are not mere lifeless and senseless objects devoid of holiness, but that rather, from their association with the body and blood of the Lord, they are to be venerated with the same awe as the body and the blood themselves.”

This is the reverence the early Christians gave to the sacrament they received. It was not reverence for the sake of ceremony. It arose naturally because they knew that here, under the appearance of bread and wine, was Emmanuel, God-with-us. It welled up within them because the Lord’s Supper was a meal they could not live without. They loved the sacrament as true lovers — because they were at the marriage supper of the Lamb.

And this reverence was more than a sometime thrill, the emotional response to beautiful liturgy. Reverence for the Eucharist was the foundation of a culture — a kingdom — that was thoroughly Christian.

According to one of the most ancient liturgical texts, our reverence for the Eucharist must be extended to the poorest of the poor: “Let widows and orphans be revered like the altar.”

No sooner had Christians “made it” in the ancient world than “it” collapsed all around them.

The Emperor Constantine declared his Edict of Toleration in 313, putting an end to Christian persecution by making Christianity an officially recognized religion in the Roman Empire. But it was evident, even then, that the Empire was beginning to totter. Constantine, who gave Christianity its license to operate, built up Byzantium as his capital, for more efficient administration of the East.

Still, the Empire continued to lose control, beset by rebellions within and attacks from barbarians at the frontiers. Religious squabbles, too, were no small matter, causing civil disturbances in the urban centers under Roman control. In 380, the Emperor Theodosius decided it was necessary to unify the Empire spiritually, and he declared Christianity, which had already won perhaps a majority of the people, as the official religion of the Empire. From then on, heresy and sacrilege became civil crimes. Citizens would be baptized — or lose their civil rights.

Yet these measures could not revitalize an Empire in decline. Early in the 5th century, Germanic tribes swept through the Roman province of Gaul (modern France). The Visigoths sacked Rome in 410. In 455, Vandals seized the city. The last emperor of the West died in 476. Rome, once synonymous with world order, descended into anarchy.

And, to a great degree, so did western Europe. With the fall of Rome, came a gradual collapse of civil order. The law had no force. The military dissolved. Travel, communications and trade could no longer proceed peaceably as under Roman rule.

Christians might have worried that all their work would be undone. With the collapse of the Empire, wouldn’t the Empire’s official religion also collapse? Other practical problems presented themselves. How could evangelization proceed without safe travel? The early Church had been spread significantly by merchants following the trade routes. How, too, would bishops in outlying lands keep up communication with Rome?

Remarkably, the Christian faith continued to spread amid the chaotic aftermath of the Empire’s collapse. In a few centuries, almost all the barbarian tribes would, in one way or another, accept the Gospel.

Who were the barbarians? The word conjures up images of mobs of hairy, primitives bearing clubs. But that wasn’t quite the case. In the Roman view, barbarians were those who lived outside the Empire. The barbarian tribes — the Vandals, Goths, Bulgars, Saxons, Alamans and Lombards, among others — occupied lands in what are today’s Germany, France, Eastern Europe, the British Isles and North Africa. Many of the tribes had advanced cultures. Barbarians traded with Rome and served as mercenaries in the Roman military.

Many barbarians were Christians, of a sort. Members of the Germanic tribes had, in the fourth century, been evangelized by followers of Arianism, a then-popular Christian heresy that denied Jesus was God or co-eternal with the Father. Arianism found a stronghold among the barbarians, even after it had been fairly thoroughly rooted out in the lands of the Empire.

Though the heretics were, in a sense, political victors now, their victory had little effect on Catholic Christians. The Arians tended toward tolerance and rarely persecuted their opponents. But, at the same time, the Arian bishops were a weak cultural force, exerting minimal influence on the barbarian tribes.

Meanwhile, the Catholic bishops emerged as leaders in the cities of the former Empire. Most of the bishops were educated men, chosen for their sound judgment. In the absence of law and order, citizens tended to look to the bishops for civic leadership. In some cities, the bishop served as mayor and magistrate. The bishops of Spain and France set up vast networks for social welfare, so that the poor did not free-fall now that Rome’s safety net had disappeared.

Perhaps the archetype of this learned leader was Pope St. Gregory I — Gregory “the Great” — who reigned 590-604. He saw Rome in its ruin and looked with hope to the mission fields to the North and West, where he sent an increasing number of his monks. Gregory also urged the local nobility and landowners in these countries to actively evangelize their tenants — even if it meant raising their rent until they accepted baptism.

Yet, according to Richard Fletcher’s history of the period, “The Barbarian Conversion” (Henry Holt), the conversions proceeded steadily, peacefully and, for the most part, without coercion.

Fletcher does, however, question whether the conversions were sincere or very deep. The missionaries faced a motley mix of pagans, Arian heretics, and backslidden and badly catechized Christians. Most of the local pagan beliefs were informal and non-exclusive in their demands. Thus, some people thought of Christianity as another round of rituals to add to their accumulated pagan practices. A substantial number of homilies from the period condemn worship at pagan shrines and sacrifices to idols.

Fletcher multiplies examples of barbarians mixing religions: an East Anglian king erected a Christian altar in his pagan temple; a Spaniard consults both his Christian priest and the local pagan shaman, just to be safe.
The bishops took dramatic measures to make their point. St. Martin of Tours’ favored method of eradicating pagan worship was setting fire to shrines. In southern Italy, St. Barbatus melted down a golden image of a snake-god and used the gold to make a paten and chalice for Mass.

But, according to Fletcher, Gregory the Great suggested “adaptation,” rather than destruction, of pagan temples. The pontiff wrote to his English mission in 601: “The idol temples of that race should by no means be destroyed, but only the idols in them. Take holy water and sprinkle it in these shrines, build altars and place relics in them.” Gregory tells the missionaries to encourage the locals to continue slaughtering their animals, as if for sacrifice, but now for celebration and praise of God instead. “Thus while some outward rejoicings are preserved, they will be able more easily to share in inward rejoicings.”

“It is doubtless impossible to cut out everything at once from their stubborn minds,” Gregory said. “Just as the man who is attempting to climb to the highest place, rises by steps and degrees and not by leaps.”
Gregory was right, of course. The old habits died hard. And, as Christianity became the norm in more barbarian territories — especially among the ruling classes — there were more material reasons for converting. Indeed, many missionaries tried to work a tribe from the “top down,” persuading the chief and other leaders first.

It worked — sort of — in Denmark, where each convert would receive a new suit of clothes after baptism. Fletcher quotes a ninth-century monk’s tale of a soldier who went through the water only to find that the clerics had run out of new suits. Handed a ragged old tunic, the soldier was so outraged that he confronted the emperor himself: “Look here! I’ve gone through this ablutions business about twenty times already, and I’ve always been rigged out before with a splendid white suit; but this old sack makes me feel more like a pig farmer than a soldier!” The monk lamented that more Danes came each year, “not for the sake of Christ but for mundane advantages.”

But there are worse incentives than bribery. The first Holy Roman emperor, Charlemagne, used coercion when he conquered the stubborn Saxons in 782, slaughtering 4,500 prisoners, then inviting the remaining barbarians to baptism. In Charlemagne’s Saxony, refusal to be baptized was punishable by death, as were eating meat in Lent, cremation of the dead and attending pagan rites. Charlemagne’s method would serve as a model for later forced mass conversions, such as those of the conquistadors in Spanish America. And, into the 20th century, the forced conversion of the Saxons has been blamed for historical disasters from the Protestant Reformation to the rise of Nazism. (The latter diagnosis came from no less than Sigmund Freud.)

Still, Charlemagne’s slaughter was the exception. We can better see the norm in missionaries such as the Irish monk St. Columbanus, who Christianized and tribes through France, across the Alps and into Italy. His colleagues and successors in Irish monasteries would spend the centuries of the Dark Ages carefully preserving classical learning by copying out manuscripts, then returning this heritage, with the Gospel, to the peoples of Europe. Their achievement was memorialized in Thomas Cahill’s bestseller, “How the Irish Saved Civilization” (Anchor).

Both Fletcher and Cahill’s books gained favorable notice and good sales. Both are reconsiderations of an age whose history has too often been distorted by anti-Catholic prejudice. Yet neither Fletcher nor Cahill is immune to this. Fletcher rarely misses an opportunity to question the motives of an act of charity or apostolic impulse in any saint, bishop, missionary or martyr. His book is heavy on sarcasm. Cahill, for his part, casts St. Augustine as the great villain in Church history, bequeathing Christians a legacy of sexual hangups and self-loathing, over against the fun-loving leprechaun St. Patrick, who, Cahill suggests, was something of a pagan at heart.

Yet Fletcher clearly understands that the barbarian conversion was not merely a matter of bowing to this shrine rather than that one. With Christianity, came a worldview and a moral code often widely at variance with those the barbarians had known. Some tribes had been polygamous; Christianity would put an end to that. Some practiced infanticide and marriage to near kin. As Christians, they would not.

And we can’t underestimate the radical shift that each convert had to undergo, from worshiping many fickle gods to worshiping just one jealous Lover.

“Come, then, after you have freed yourself from all the prejudices possessing your mind.”

We can take that line, from the second-century “Letter to Diognetus,” as evidence that anti-Christian prejudice has been with the Church from Day One. In the Roman Empire of those days, pagans caricatured Christian morality as prudery and mocked its mysteries as nonsense. Christian religion was often confused and conflated, in Roman and Greek accounts, with Judaism and the myriad “mystery cults” thriving in Asia Minor at the time.

But amid the babble and bigotry came a group of early Church Fathers known as “the apologists.” Following St. Peter’s counsel, they sought always to “be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks for a reason for your hope” (1 Pt 3:15). Some, like Justin Martyr (c. 100-c.165), spoke the highly technical language of the Platonist philosophers, who were somewhat confused about the Christianity they sought to refute. Others spoke to Jews, and still others to the devotees of the mystery cults.

But one apologist offered a different method. He produced a documentary of sorts — a vivid, impressionistic account of how the earliest Christians REALLY behaved. In the face of hatred, he showed a community that lived in true love.

We don’t know his name, the author who wrote the stunning “Letter to Diognetus.” But he was addressing a high Roman official, and deferentially, assuming that the great Diognetus was intelligent and open-minded (and, certainly, that God’s grace was all-powerful).

“I see thee, most excellent Diognetus, exceedingly desirous to learn the mode of worshiping God prevalent among the Christians, and inquiring very carefully and earnestly concerning them, what God they trust in, and what form of religion they observe,”

Christianity was a curiosity then, when this author set his stylus to parchment. He refers to the Faith as “this new kind of practice [that] has only now entered into the world.” Most scholars say the “Letter to Diognetus” was composed in the first half of the second century in Athens, Greece.

The most venturesome scholars dare to attribute the letter to the first known Christian apologist, St. Quadratus (died c. 129), a bishop of Athens and a disciple of the Apostles. There is almost no documentary evidence for this claim, except that early Christian writers refer to a brilliant letter that St. Quadratus wrote to the Roman Emperor Hadrian around 124, in defense of the Faith.

And the “Letter to Diognetus” is nothing if not brilliant, in both style and substance.

The letter assumes that its reader has heard, and perhaps believes, many of the common rumors and misunderstandings about Christianity. So the author is careful to distinguish Christianity, first from the other pagan religions, then from Judaism.

One obvious belief that set Christians apart from ordinary Roman citizens was monotheism. Our first forebears in the Faith steadfastly refused to worship idols. Yet other citizens of the empire, the “Letter” points out were only too willing to bow down before gods of silver, gold, brass, wood and earthenware. In describing these idols, the writer goes into some detail about six shrines, perhaps describing specific temples in the city of Athens.

“Are they not all liable to rot?” he concludes. “Are they not all corruptible, these things you call gods?” The author points out that such polymorphous polytheism had become a cynical and even contemptuous practice for the Romans. Yet, he goes on, “you (Romans) hate the Christians because they do not deem as gods” the idols in the pagan shrines.

For their intransigent monotheism, and their reverence for the Hebrew Scriptures, Christians were often called a Jewish sect. The writer of the “Letter” acknowledges this and praises the Jews for resisting pagan temptations. Yet, he insists, Christians are NOT Jews. First, he says, the “blood and the smoke” of the Temple sacrifices has been surpassed by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Next, he points out that the prescriptions of the Law and the rabbinical tradition — regarding circumcision, diet and Sabbath observance — were considered obsolete by Christians.

Yet, if Christians were not pagans and not Jews, who were they? That is the subject of the final section of the epistle.

In this section the author overwhelms his reader, not so much with dogma, but with small glimpses of the everyday life of the Church’s founding families.

First of all, he says, you can’t tell a Christian just by looking. “For the Christians are distinguished from other men neither by country, nor language, nor the customs which they observe. They neither inhabit cities of their own, nor employ a peculiar form of speech, nor lead a life which is marked out by any singularity . . . [They follow] the customs of the natives in respect to clothing, food and the rest of their ordinary conduct.”

Christians blend in, he says — to a point.

Where they are set apart is in their charity for each other and their upright moral behavior. Here, the “Letter” writer makes more important distinctions.

Christianity did not, as some rumors claimed, entail severe asceticism and universal celibacy. The “Letter” explains that Christians, like everyone else, “marry and beget children.” Yet they differ essentially from the merely worldly because Christians reject immoral pagan practices, such as abortion and infanticide. Christians “do not destroy their offspring,” the letter states. Nor did Christians sleep around, as the pagans did: “They have a common table, but not a common bed.”

Christians are good for the economy and the social order, the “Letter” claims. Believers, after all, “obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives . . . They are poor, yet make many rich.” And good Christians don’t make trouble for the pagans, the “Letter” writer seems to say, even though pagans often make trouble for Christians. “They love all men, and are persecuted by all. . . . they are insulted, and repay the insult with honour. . . . When punished, they rejoice as if quickened into life.”

Our author follows this with his most remarkable statement: “To sum it up — what the soul is in the body, Christians are in the world.” According to this ancient Athenian, Christians, then, are the life-giving principle in the world. You can’t see them — but without them, the whole human enterprise is doomed.

“The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world. The soul dwells in the body, yet is not of the body; and Christians dwell in the world, yet are not of the world. . . . The soul, when but ill-provided with food and drink, becomes better; in like manner, Christians, though subjected day by day to punishment, increase the more in number.”

What gives Christians strength to live this way? The “Letter” writer gives a brief, but breathless testimony to the divine origin of the Christian faith. Without this faith, he demonstrates, all humankind, through all history, has dwelt in misery.

Then the “Letter” ends in the only way such a Christian testimony can, with a plea to Diognetus (the debauched, homosexual Emperor Hadrian?) for personal conversion.

“With what joy do you think you will be filled? Or how will you love Him who has first so loved you? If you love Him, you will be an imitator of His kindness. And do not wonder that a man may become an imitator of God. He can, if he is willing. For it is not by ruling over his neighbours, . . . that happiness is found. . . . On the contrary he who takes upon himself the burden of his neighbour . . . by distributing to the needy, becomes a god to those who receive.”

If Diognetus or Hadrian were not convinced, many more would be. If not by a letter, then by the lives of so many anonymous Christians. Just a few centuries after the “Letter to Diognetus” was composed, the pagan West passed away. Yet the “Letter,” providentially, lived on till very recently.

Then, in 1870, the only surviving manuscript of the “Letter” was destroyed. Today, perhaps the pagan West is returning, and a billion invisible Catholics — the soul of the modern world — must write the letter anew, now as then, in the everyday details of their ordinary lives.

I’m pleased to see, from comments and email, that folks are interested in — or at least curious about — the Fathers of the Syriac tradition. There’s been renewed interest in these men in recent years, and it’s long overdue. The old patristics manuals tended to divide the Fathers into Greek and Latin (meaning east and west) and then lump the Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian Fathers in, almost as an afterthought, with the Greeks. But they don’t quite fit there.

The Syriac Fathers were the founders of a different Christian culture with its own literary and theological style. They used neither Greek nor Latin, but rather Syriac, which is the dialect of Aramaic used in Edessa (modern Urfa in Turkey). They spoke the language of Jesus, and their earliest writers were in close conversation with the rabbis of Babylonian Judaism. Indeed, they engaged in controversy with the rabbis. The brilliant and prolific modern rabbi Jacob Neusner finds in St. Aphrahat, for example, a model — “remarkable and exemplary” — for Jewish-Christian dialogue. Aphrahat is, says Rabbi Neusner, “an enduring voice of civility and rationality amid the cacaphony of mutual disesteem.” The Syriac Fathers preserved a semitic style of Christianity that likely was similar in many ways to the Church’s founding generation.

With the Nestorian schism in the fifth century, many disaffected Christians took refuge in the Persian East, which was beyond the political influence of Byzantium. For centuries, the East Syrians went their way, having little contact with the West, but sending missions to China and India. Along the centuries, some of these churches returned to communion with the west. And, as if to prove my recurring point that “the Fathers are news”: Rome’s ecumenical dialogue with the Syriac churches has borne more fruit than any other. In 1994, Pope John Paul II signed a “Common Christological Declaration” with Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV, essentially resolving “the main dogmatic problem between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church” — in other words, clearing up the Nestorian troubles, once and for all. In 2001, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity went a step further and approved the sharing of Communion between the (Catholic) Chaldean Church and the (so-called Nestorian) Assyrian Church of the East.

It’s good to be breathing with both lungs again. For a couple of millennia, the churches of the far east have kept a lively devotion for the Syriac Fathers. It’s great that we in the west are beginning to recover this part of the Church’s common heritage. In fact, Hubertus Drobner’s massive manual of patrology — which is due out in English any day now — includes a respectable section on the Syriac Fathers. You’ll find well-stocked online libraries at The Syriac Studies Electronic Library and Saint Ephrem the Syrian Library.

If you’re even mildly interested in an encounter with these Fathers, please dig deep and read the superlative introduction to the field by Jesuit Father Robert Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition. It’s frightfully expensive, but worth every penny, and just out in a new, updated edition (2004). An affordable and accessible introduction is Sebastian Brock’s Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life.

If you want to learn about the plight of the Christian remnant in the lands of Aphrahat and Ephrem, read William Dalrymple’s chilling From the Holy Mountain : A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East.

The Easter Vigil always bowls me over. What a beautiful recovery we made by restoring that Mass in the twentieth century. I’m pleased, too, that the new missal mandates the use of all seven readings except in the case of “grave pastoral necessity.” It’s awesome to read the Fathers’ accounts of the Vigil. In Africa of Augustine’s time, it was an all-night affair, culminating at daybreak!

It struck me last night how much we lost when we (in the English- and German-speaking worlds) stopped calling our greatest feast day “Passover,” as Christians do in almost every other language (Pesach, Pascha, Pasqua, etc.). The Easter Vigil liturgy makes the connection so clear. It really is a Christian haggadah. “This is the night” of our deliverance from Egypt. If we don’t get to the Vigil Mass, though, it’s easy to miss it.

I hope that those who couldn’t get out on Saturday still had a chance to read St. Melito, who also makes the connections between the Old Testament and the New. Also, the profound study of the Christian Passover in the patristic era, by the great Italian patrologist Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, O.F.M. Cap.: Easter in the Early Church: An Anthology of Jewish and Early Christian Texts.

The world has never known comfort as we know it today. Millions of us have grown used to luxuries that the ancient emperors never dreamed of, and we’ve come to consider them necessities: motor travel, aspirin, and a warm shower, to name just three.

Compare these to the ordinary miseries endured by citizens in the ancient world. Most lived in cramped, smoky tenements with no ventilation or plumbing. If one of those rooms caught fire, the blaze could consume whole city blocks in minutes; and this was a fairly regular event.

Life expectancy was around 30 for men and lower for women. Hygiene was minimal. Medical care was more dangerous than disease, and disease often left its victims disfigured or dead. The human body was host to countless parasites, and tenements were infested by pests. The bodies of the dead were often left to rot in the town sewer, which usually ran down the middle of the street.

Ancient sources say that the stench from a city could usually be detected from miles away. And country life was worse.

This was the world of the early Christians, the Fathers of the Church, and yet they are as joyful a group as you’ll ever meet. The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar described the Fathers in this way: “Greatness, depth, boldness, flexibility, certainty, and a flaming love — the virtues of youth are marks of patristic theology.”

Those words do not describe most of us on days when we’re troubled by a hangnail, a malfunctioning air conditioner, or a high pollen count.

Yet Balthasar’s description, as a general statement, is all the more amazing when you consider the discomforts our Fathers faced every day — not to mention their mortal peril from persecution.

Then as now, happiness depended more on a person’s disposition than on his circumstances. What was it that filled the Fathers with such constant joy? “I greet you in the blood of Jesus Christ,” said St. Ignatius Antioch, “which is eternal and abiding joy.”

Jesus’ blood — poured out in His suffering and self-giving, poured out in baptism, poured out in the Mass — was the source of the early Church’s joy. Christians shared His blood and His body, and so they didn’t worry so much about indulging the limitless hungers of their own sensuality. Remarkably, though they suffered extreme deprivation, they exhorted one another to still-greater fasting, so that they might live more perfectly the life of Jesus Christ, sharing in the cross of Christ, His outpouring of love.

They knew something that we perhaps have forgotten. Though they had few comforts in life, they knew they were destined to lose even the few they had.

We should take heed. If we feed our every desire and indulge our every habit as a need and a right, then our losses will leave us bitter and estranged from God. Time, age, illness and “doctor’s orders” can take away our taste for chocolate, our ability to enjoy a cold beer and even the intimate embrace of a loved one. Only the blood of Christ is everlasting joy. “And what else is it to live happily,” said St. Augustine, “except to know that one has something eternally.”

The Fathers were ready to leave everything behind, and do it joyfully. Even today we meet Christians who are able to remain serene amid extreme suffering and even when facing death. It’s not just a matter of temperament. It is the coursing of the blood of Christ, shed for them, the blood of Christ that they’ve taken as their own life’s blood, even as their earthly life drains away.

Like their Fathers in faith, they’ve tasted from the fountain of eternal youth, and that’s all they need to live joyfully amid difficulties.

Today, the media map out many paths to joy. The shelves of the bookstore promise much in The Joy of Cooking, The Joy of Sex, and even The Joy of Linux. The soda machine near my house boasts “The Joy of Cola.” But all joys that pass are false. All joys that pass leave us in sadness, unless they, like the everyday lives of the Fathers and martyrs, are washed in the blood of the Lamb.

Some years ago I had a desperate need for St. Cyril of Alexandria’s Commentary on John. It’s among his most frequently cited works, but it’s extremely hard to find. As far as I know, there’s been only one edition in English, published in the Oxford Library of the Fathers series in 1870s and ’80s. Few copies survive, and those that do are usually kept in the inaccessible, protected vaults of university and monastery libraries. But I finally finagled a copy through interlibrary loan — and it arrived with its pages still uncut! It’s spine was brittle and papers crumbling, but it had never been opened, never been read, in more than a century of life on a library shelf. It took an entire day, but I managed to cut the papers and photocopy both enormous volumes without destroying them. I read the commentary hungrily, and I still go back to it often. Cyril is an Alexandrian somewhat allergic to allegory, yet keen to examine the types of Christ in the Old Testament. His is a theological exegesis, and he pays special mind to the Trinity, the Incarnation, the sacraments, and the divinization of man.

I’m thrilled today to note that volume 2 of the Commentary is now available online at The Tertullian Project’s own library of the Early Church Fathers. TTP is a knockout of a site for the Tertullian-obsessed, but it is also home to transcriptions of rare editions of Origen, Eusebius, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Ambrose, and Pseudo-Dionysius, not to mention many lesser-known ecclesiastical writers — and the most notorious of the anti-Christian writers, like Porphyry and Julian. While there are countless online transcriptions of the famous Edinburgh edition of the Fathers — and in endless varieties of format — The Tertullian Project has turned its attention to the older series, the unusual series, and the odd translations and studies that were not part of any series.

Where I live, it’s a cold, gloomy, rainy day today — a perfect day to spend browsing The Tertullian Project. But even if you spend a sunny day on this site, it’ll be a day well spent.

If the Patristics Movement were a body, John Henry Newman would be the adrenal gland — the source of its energy and drive. Or maybe he would be the pituitary, since he personally accounts for much of its early growth.

With the works of Newman (who was then an Anglican), patrology made the transition from an academic hobbyhorse to a popular fascination. He knew how to tell a story, and his stories delivered his doctrinal and ascetical points rather painlessly. I’m thinking here particularly of his early books The Church of the Fathers and The Arians of the Fourth Century — and, of course, his novel Callista: A Tale of the Third Century.

Newman’s Fathers are real men, sometimes difficult, enduring heartbreak, quarreling with one another. He doesn’t sugar-coat Jerome or Cyril, for example; they don’t hold the glaze very well anyway. His telling of the up-and-down friendship of Basil and Gregory (in The Church of the Fathers) really tugs at the heartstrings, even as it expands the Christian mind.

All this is a prelude to my expression of gratitude to Father Drew Morgan (like Newman, an Oratorian) for the work of his National Institute for Newman Studies. Based in Pittsburgh, the Institute hosts an enormous Newman research library, publishes a fine journal, and promotes the work of scholars. (I encourage you to donate to the cause. Your money will be put to good use.) The Institute also hosts one of the cleanest, best-kept, and most easily searchable databases on the Web — The Newman Reader — which holds all the collected works of Newman, plus the major biographies. Thus, with just a few keystrokes, you can round up everything Newman ever had to say about Athanasius, Ambrose, Augustine, Anthony … And he did have plenty to say.

Visit the Institute’s websites today. Visit the library if you’re ever in Pittsburgh. And pray for their good work. When God blesses Father Drew Morgan, He blesses all of us who love the Fathers.

I’ll end with a quote from St. Francis de Sales, which I pulled from a letter of Newman indexed at The Newman Reader: “The ancient Fathers … spoke from the heart to the heart, like good fathers to their children.”

That’s a very good question. My father, God rest his soul, had a stock response whenever people asked him what his youngest son did for a living.

“Mike’s got quite a racket,” Pop would say. “He finds authors who’ve been dead so long they can’t collect royalties. Then he re-publishes their work under his name.”

Pop was talking about my books on the Church Fathers — the ancient Christian authors who caught my attention, some years back, and never let it go.

He was joking, of course. Even with cataracts and Coke-bottle glasses, he saw enough of my life to conclude that no one ever got rich in my “racket.”

But if you’ve read the Fathers, you know they’re worth a little sacrifice. And if you know they’re worth it, that’s probably why you landed on this blog. The Fathers make for rewarding reading, and anything that reads so well is worth talking about. Blogging is one good way to carry on the conversation.

We’re the blessed heirs of two centuries of intensive study of the Fathers. Prolific scholars like John Henry Newman and Prosper Gueranger got it going. Giants like Quasten, Danielou, de Lubac, Balthasar, Wilken, and Pelikan have kept it going. The Patristic Movement — with two other movements, the Biblical and the Liturgical — defined the twentieth-century trend of Catholic ressourcement, the “return to the sources.”

And it all came to full flower in the Second Vatican Council, most especially in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, whose anniversary we celebrate this month: “The words of the holy Fathers witness to the presence of . . . living tradition, whose wealth is poured into the practice and life of the believing and praying Church” (DV 8). The fathers witness to the canon, the creeds, and the teaching Church, all of which are indispensable to a Christian’s sure and steady grasp of Scripture. For this reason and many others, Dei Verbum “encourages the study of the holy Fathers of both East and West” (23). And the document practices what it preaches, citing as authorities many of the great Fathers: Irenaeus, Cyprian, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine.

It is surely because of this conciliar endorsement that we received, in 1994, a Catechism so rich in the Fathers. The Catechism lists the Fathers among its “principal sources, after the Bible but before the liturgy (n. 11; see also n. 688).

The last generation has also witnessed an explosion of publishing in patrology. There are currently three major series of the Fathers in print in English! There are two series that collect the Fathers’ abundant commentaries on each of the books of the Bible. And there are countless smaller series, anthologies, and studies. My small, popular books are a drop in that glorious bucket.

This is not to say the patristic retrieval has always gone smoothly. The Da Vinci Code managed to make a complete muddle of early Christian history — and reach more readers than Newman did in his hyperproductive lifetime. (Another reason to start a blog.)

Maybe my occasional posts on this blog will help other enthusiasts find their way to the good stuff. I’ll also post, free of charge, my occasional radio interviews on the early Church, and my even more occasional lectures on the Fathers.

My own father was right: it’s quite a racket. And for that we thank the God of our Fathers! In the words of one of the greatest Fathers: Te deum laudamus.