The Greek Fathers

Papers presented at an international conference held in early 2018 on the campus of Ave Maria University in Florida.

Laurens van der Post shared a deep-rooted attachment to Europe, Africa and Japan and this book is a testament to his commitment to writing and initiating cultural and political commentaries on the issues and personalities of his time. A Walk with a White Bushman brings together his conversations with Jean-Marc Pottiez. The result is a book brimming with ideas, insights, people and events; at once thoughtful and exciting, mellow yet full of promise, autobiographical but also topical.

This revision of the 1992 Greek-English edition features updated introductions, bibliographies, and textual witnesses. Essential for the serious student of early Christianity.

People have pondered conflicts between science and religion since at least the time of Christ. The millennia-long debate is well documented in the literature in the history and philosophy of science and religion in Western civilization. Science and Eastern Orthodoxy is a departure from that vast body of work, providing the first general overview of the relationship between science and Christian Orthodoxy, the official church of the Oriental Roman Empire. This pioneering study traces a rich history over an impressive span of time, from Saint Basil’s Hexameron of the fourth century to the globalization of scientific debates in the twentieth century. Efthymios Nicolaidis argues that conflicts between science and Greek Orthodoxy—when they existed—were not science versus Christianity but rather ecclesiastical debates that traversed the whole of society. Nicolaidis explains that during the Byzantine period, the Greek fathers of the church and their Byzantine followers wrestled passionately with how to reconcile their religious beliefs with the pagan science of their ancient ancestors. What, they repeatedly asked, should be the church’s official attitude toward secular knowledge? From the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century to its dismantling in the nineteenth century, the patriarchate of Constantinople attempted to control the scientific education of its Christian subjects, an effort complicated by the introduction of European science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Science and Eastern Orthodoxy provides a wealth of new information concerning Orthodoxy and secular knowledge—and the reactions of the Orthodox Church to modern sciences.

For anyone to be called a Father involves these four conditions. First, he must be an Author, whose works are still extant. The fathers are important because they are quoted as authorities in theology. Obviously, then, they are all people who wrote works that we can quote. St Antony the Hermit, St Lawrence, St Sebastian are not fathers because they have left no writings. Secondly, he must be a Catholic, who lived in the communion of the Church, whose writings are correct and orthodox. Otherwise the writer’s authority is of no value as a witness of the Catholic faith. Apollinaris of Laodicea († c. 390) and Tertullian († 240) were learned and prolific authors; but they are not fathers because they were heretics. Thirdly, a father is a person of eminent sanctity as well as learning. The title is an honourable one given only to saints, or rather it includes and involves the title of saint. So Clement of Alexandria († c. 217) and Origenes († 254) are not strictly fathers, because they are not saints. As a matter of fact, the root of the matter in this case, too, is the want of orthodoxy that prevents them from being either saints or fathers. The fourth criterion is antiquity. This is the most difficult one to determine exactly. Aeterna Press

The Apostolic Fathers is an important collection of writings revered by early Christians but not included in the final canon of the New Testament. Here a leading expert on these texts offers an authoritative contemporary translation, in the tradition of the magisterial Lightfoot version but thoroughly up-to-date. The third edition features numerous changes, including carefully revised translations and a new, more user-friendly design. The introduction, notes, and bibliographies have been freshly revised as well.