Recommendations in Early Christian Writing

A reader writes and says:

I am not a Catholic, but a Presbyterian. For some reason I'm very drawn to Catholic blogs, though I have no desire to become a Catholic (sorry). At any rate, I've been shoring up on my theological reading. I started with some CS Lewis, but then I felt I really needed a BACKGROUND. So I bought St Augustine's Confessions. It has been wonderful!

I know there is a wealth of early Christian literature, but I feel somewhat overwhelmed and unsure of what order to go in. I'd like to build upon what Augustine taught me. I'm also open to reading lit crit of these same authors. Of course Aquinas and Merton are on my "to read" list, but I don't want to skip around and become confused or overwhelmed.

In short: what do you recommend I read next?

While I can perhaps claim to have read a little more early Christian writing than the average bear (sadly, much of the bear population is still illiterate) I don't feel that I'm by any means an expert, and I suspect that some of our readers would be able to answer this question rather better than I could, so I asked her permission to answer the question partially in a post, and then open things up for readers.

My first thought is that Augustine's Confessions are are incredibly good place to start such a task. For my money, it's nearly unmatched in combining readability with some fairly deep theological and philosophical thinking. This makes suggesting follow-ons particularly difficult. Additionally, I'd warn that a lot of early Christian writing is not, at least to my experience, super-readable. I think I'd originally had the idea that early Christian writing would be fairly basic, and that you'd see a gradual increase in complexity up until the high middle ages when (according to stereotype) the Scholastics were calculating the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin. This is now, however, how it works out. Christianity spread as Roman and Hellenistic civilizations were fusing in a cosmopolitan Mediterranean world, and the early Christians very quickly (well before Augustine) started looking at theological questions through the most advanced philosophical and scientific understandings of their day. Given that some of these are not only complex, but fairly alien to our modern way of thinking, this can make for some tough going, at least for a non-specialist like me.

A good place to start might be right at the beginning. There's a slim Penguin Classics book entitled Early Christian Writings which collects the Epistle of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians, the Epistles of Ignatius of Antioch, the Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians and the Didache. These works are very, very early -- basically contemporary with the books on the New Testament -- but unlike some of the "other gospel" things that float around they were widely read and respected by orthodox Christians.

Only slightly later is St. Irenaeus (who lived from around 130 to 202 AD). His famous work is a defense of the doctrine of the Incarnation of Christ against the Gnostic heresy titled Against the Heresies. There's a fairly readable, edited version of this put out by Ignatius in which Irenaeus' work is cut down a bit and organized thematically, published under the title Scandal of the Incarnation. (I found this fairly readable as a college sophomore. I haven't read the full version, so I don't know how it is by comparison.)

About 50 years later than Irenaeus is Origen -- who is an interesting guy but not terribly readable. Most of the Origen that I read utterly mystified me, but I did have a strong affection for his Commentary on the Song of Songs (a book length work) which is fascinating both as a window on the incredibly detailed way in which the ancients approach the scriptures -- very different from modern literary analysis, but not for lack of complexity -- and simply because you can see a great mind doing backflips for the sheer intellectual joy of it.

Only slightly before Augustine would be St. Athanasius, one of the great Fathers of the Church, and a leader of the Council of Nicea. One of his great works, which is fairly readable, is his On the Incarnation (this edition is fairly readable and features an introduction by C. S. Lewis.)

Rome was sacked during Augustine's lifetime, and you start to see some big changes in the tenor of Christian intellectual life, molded in part by the increasing changes in society. Working through Late Antiquity and into the Medieval period, I'd suggest the following as fairly readable and emblematic:

The Desert Fathers by Helen Waddell provides a lot of stories about the early monastics in one easily accessible package.

The Rule of St. Benedict by St. Benedict is probably something of a must read both as a work of spirituality and because it is so influential on later Christian monastic history.

The Life of St. Benedict written by St. Gregory the Great gives a good feel for the practice and spirituality of the period.

Moving forward a good long ways (from the sixth century to the twelfth) you would probably want to read The Little Flowers of St. Francis (a collection of incidents and sayings of St. Francis written down by one of his friars) and St. Bonaventure's Life of St. Francis. These are both quite short and readable, and while not by any means deeply theological in the way that an Augustine or a Athanasius is, they give an intense feel for a type of spirituality which St. Francis embodied and which has remained with Christianity in various forms ever since.

You say Aquinas is already on your list, and working chronologically this is where he'd fit in. Maybe one of our readers could suggest a particularly good framing text. If you are reading parts of the Summa, I would particularly recommend questions 2 and 44 as dealing with "big questions" in an interesting way that gives you a good feel for how Aquinas works.

This is something I know I am into far more than most people, but I can't help putting in a good word for reading Dante's Divine Comedy, perhaps the greatest work of theological poetry ever written. Shake off any English-class idea that it's just a dour poem about how people Dante didn't like were being tortured, and as you read it try to focus on Dante's personal journey as he first recognizes the nature of sin in Inferno, then learns to replace it with virtue in Purgatorio, and finally comes to appreciate the types of perfection in Paradiso. It can help to read this together with C. S. Lewis' Discarded Image, which is about the medieval cosmological and philosophical world view. The notes written by Dorothy Sayers for her translation of Dante are also great in this regard, but unfortunately his poetry doesn't really hold up all that well. Bulky though it can be, reading her commentary along with some more successfully poetic translation can work well.

I get spottier as I get more modern, and it probably starts to depend a lot whether you're looking more for Christian practice and spirituality or more academically oriented theology.

Some possible choices I would recommend (without much explanation, as I'm running out of time) would be:

The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis
Introduction to the Devout Life by Francis de Sales
Apologia pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman
Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton

Many Parents, One Sin

This started out as a comment on Kyle Cupp's post, in which he asks about original sin in light of polygenism, however it quickly became clear I was writing too much for it to be a comment, and I haven't written a good post on the intersection of evolution and theology in a while, so I decided to turn it into a response post instead.

Just to frame up the question briefly, let me quote the same passage Kyle did from Pius XII's 1950 encyclical Humani Generis, in which Pius addresses the question of the Church's understanding of human origins in light of modern (evolutionary) science. In summary, Pius sees no conflict between a Catholic understanding of humanity and evolutionary science, but he does lay out one possible area of conflict:

When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.

So while Pius XII is quite comfortable with the evolutionary account of human origins so long as there is one clear ancestral couple who were first infused by God with a soul, and who are described in the Bible in the story of Adam and Eve, he expresses grave reservations as to whether we can accept a view of human history in which not all humans are descended from a single ancestral couple, who fell and thus bequethed us original sin. However, as Kyle points out, modern evolutionary science (sixty years further down the road from Pius XII's encyclical) suggests with near certainty that there was at any given point in time a population of humans from whom the subsequent generation was descended -- there never was a population bottleneck after which all subsequent humans were descended from one ancestral couple. (There are single ancestors, and doubtless single ancestral couples, whom all modern humans share as an ancestors, "Mitochondrial Eve" and "Y-Chromosomal Adam" for example, but in the generations immediately after these individuals there were many humans who were not related to them. It was only over tens of thousands of years of genetic mixing that we reached a point where all humans shared those single ancestors.) Further, there is very strong genetic evidence that on a few (rare) occasions, archaic human populations in various parts of the world interbred with the ancestral modern human population which spread out of Africa and which all humans share. Thus, those of European descent have a tiny genetic contribution which appears likely to have derived from Neandertals, but people who no European ancestry do not share this genetic heritage. Thus, mixing with Neandertals clearly came at some point after the otherwise common origin of all humans.

Let me see if I can step back to the basic question here (whether our understanding of original sin is modified if we accept a scientific understanding that we are descended not just from one unique pair of original humans, but rather from a population of original humans) and take a run at it, because this is something which has always seemed pretty straight-forward to me whereas many people find it rather worrying. (Whether this means I have any particular insight on the matter, or if it simply means I'm theologically tone deaf, you shall have to tell me. I hesitate to find little difficulty where a recent pope found much -- but perhaps there are some areas in which the passage of time is helpful.)

If I were to summarize the doctrine of Original Sin as I undertand it, leaving all questions of evolution aside, I would say: Original Sin is a stain, defect, or corruption which marks the soul of every human born since the fall. We are born with it, and it inclines us to sin. All humans (Mary aside) have been born with Original Sin since the sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve.

Now, let us bring into mind the apparent scientific truth that there was never a single "first" human couple (at least in the biological sense) from whom all modern humans are descended, but rather that there was a small population of humans who are the ancestors of all of us, some descendants of whom on a few subsequent rare occasions appear to have mixed with some regional archaic human populations elsewhere in the world as they spread out.

What of the above definition of original sin would we need to change in light of this? To think about it, I'd like to break the definition into two parts:

a) Original Sin is a stain, defect, or corruption which marks the soul of every human born since the fall. We are born with it, and it inclines us to sin. All humans (Mary aside) have been born with Original Sin

b) since the sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve.

First let us address a). It seems to me that within a Catholic understanding of God's revelation to us, we probably do not need to see any problem with a) as a result of accepting a scientific account of the history of humanity in which there was never a single original couple whose children made up all the rest of humanity.

On the face of it, one might ask, "But if our understanding of original sin is derived from thinking that the story of Adam and Eve was a basically historical account, doesn't that mean that with Adam and Eve removed, we must revise our understanding of what original sin is, or if it exists at all?"

I think, however, if we take a Catholic approach to scripture and to Church teaching, this is not the case. First, we understand that the Bible consists of a number of genres and that they contain several levels of meaning. I would propose that the opening chapters of genesis belong to the genre of mythology. This does not mean (as some people seem to take the word to mean) that they are nice stories to read to children under the age of ten but are essentially false and of no relation to "reality". Rather, mythology is a way of expressing deep truths about ourselves and the world through a narrative which may well not be historically true. However, myths are not "just a story", nor are they "false". They're simply not meant to be true in the same way that a history book or a newspaper story is meant to be true.

While many in the history of the Church may have assumed (for lack of any reason to think otherwise) that the story of Adam and Eve (and other Genesis stories such as the story of Cain and Able and the story of Noah) was historically true -- our understanding of what scripture is does not require that we believe so. Further, as Catholics we believe that Christ instituted the Church in order to safeguard His teachings, and sent the Holy Spirit to guide the Church and protect her from teaching error.

Now, if original sin were just some theological gloss which people had proposed in order to explain certain elements of the Genesis story, then I could see proposing that it needed to be revised or abandoned given a change in our understanding of the genre and historical accuracy of parts of Genesis. However, original sin is clearly a doctrine of the Church which has been taught authoritatively since the time of the Church Fathers. If we believe at all that the Holy Spirit prevents the Church from teaching error, then clearly we can accept the Church's basic account of original sin as correct -- even if it was in part arrived as through taking a mythological narrative to be more historically accurate than it now appears to have been.

Because of this, it seems to me that everything contained in a) can be taken as true, regardless of whether one takes the story of Adam and Eve literally or mythologically.

Now as to b), here it seems that we have several possible ways we can consider the story of Adam and Eve as presented in Genesis in light of what we currently believe we understand about the history of the human species due to the discoveries of modern science.

1) We could hold that at some point in the distant past, God chose a single pair of humans and made them like himself by infusing them with immortal, rational and moral souls. These first parents fell in some way which was best described to God's chosen people through the Genesis story. Their children all had souls, and at some points interbred with the rest of the early human population, with the result that at some point in the still quite distant past all humans had "Adam and Eve" as one of their ancestors and possessed a soul.

2) We could hold that at some point in time God infused the entire population of humans with souls, and one couple from among them were tested and fell. Given this eventuality, one could hold either that 2.a) as a result of the sin of the representative couple, all humans were stained with original sin at once or 2.b) only the descendants of this fallen couple had original sin, but through some sequence of events, all of us are direct descendants of them. (It strikes me that this leaves the most room for a really fascinating set of fantasy novel plots.)

3) One could hold that they may well never have been a single couple who went through a fall, but that this mythological story was inspired or guided in development by the Holy Spirit in order to describe to the Israelites (and eventually to us) the fallen nature of humanity and the nature of humanities relationship with God. In this way of thinking, we pretty much have to admit that while there was clearly some "fall" at some point after humans came to have souls and be able to have a moral consciousness and awareness of God, and after which humanity possessed original sin and all that that entails, we really have no idea what it was that happened other than that God chose to describe it and its results to us via the story of Adam and Eve.

To the extent that I have an opinion on the matter, I might lean towards 3), but honestly I'm a bit hesitant to even pick one. This is in part because, given the stance outlined by Pius XII above, I don't want to head off in directions which are in any way incompatible with our Church, but more so because I really don't think that it matters. What we do have in Genesis is the story that God chose to place (or allow to develop, depending on how you want to look at it) in the sacred writings of His chosen people. As such, I'm fairly confident that it tells us what we need to know about our nature and our relationship with Him. And given that we, at this remove, have no way of actually finding out "what really happened", I can't see that it's worth speculating much over or putting deep thought into. After all, the best we could do is build our own "just so" story, based on what we think most likely, and unlike God, we don't have the benefit of having been there.