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What love says is this: “It is in my hand, so I will share it with the needy.” The perfect Christian is the one who embodies the command, “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.” That is genuine enjoyment! That is accumulating real riches.
The Son is the Radiance of the eternal light, the perfect Mirror of God’s activity, and the Image of His goodness.
Origen:
Armenia thus became the first nation on earth to accept Christianity as its established religion.
The soul longed for the One, as a wanderer longs for his native land.
The brightest features of his moral character were his generosity with money, his sense of justice as a ruler, and his purity in matters of sex – all his Christian biographers gloried in the third of these virtues, so rare in politicians at that time.
We must also recognise that Constantine had nothing to gain, either in the political or military sphere, by professing the Christian faith;
Indeed, Constantine often made speeches to his court in which he condemned Pagan idolatry and sang the praises of Christianity as the one true faith; and when his courtiers clapped and cheered him, he would always redirect their applause by pointing upwards to heaven.
They were ready to suffer anything for their faith, rather than offer to idols the worship that is due to God alone.
Constantine entered Rome and broke with tradition by refusing to offer thanks to the gods for his triumph.
He made Christian bishops into part of the Empire’s legal structure, by decreeing that in a civil law dispute, the two parties could take their case to the local bishop, if they so desired, and the bishop’s decision would have all the force of law.
he introduced a system of state welfare in the form of child maintenance grants for the poor, which helped to discourage the common Roman custom of killing unwanted children at birth.
Constantine also tried to outlaw the bloodthirsty games of the gladiators; but old social habits die hard, and it was not until the reign of the emperor Honorius (395-423), when Christianity was widely accepted as the Roman faith, that the games finally ceased
As well as summoning the Council, Constantine also helped the assembled bishops at Nicaea to formulate the Creed of Nicaea.
When Ambrose finally allowed him to enter church again, the emperor had to kneel and beg God’s forgiveness before the whole congregation, which he did with passionate sorrow, tears streaming from his eyes.
Active church life, however, was not really to Gregory’s liking; he was a sensitive, inward-looking person, who preferred writing poetry in solitude to the vicious cut-and-thrust of fighting Arians in the public arena of Church politics and theological debate.
The difference between the persons never tears apart the unity of their nature; and the oneness of their essence does not destroy their proper marks of distinction.
The Roman Catholic Council of Trent, however, in 1546 decreed that the apocrypha was divinely inspired and part of the Old Testament, anathematising all who disagreed.
(Jerome was one of those people who find it easy to pick a quarrel and then turn a quarrel into an all-out war.)
in fairness to Augustine it must be pointed out that Christian emperors had been using their power to punish religious nonconformists ever since Constantine the Great. Augustine actually opposed this policy at first, and then simply offered a theological argument to justify an existing practice. However, it is true that people used Augustine’s arguments, and the great authority of his name, to justify the persecution of religious nonconformists throughout the Middle Ages and Reformation period in the West.
Every Christian was to be a sort of monk who lived in the world instead of in a monastery or a cave.
The true Christian life was not sinless perfection, but a daily desperate struggle with the sin that still dwelt in human nature.
There is nothing colder than a Christian who does not work for the salvation of others.
John Chrysostom:
Don’t tell me, “It is impossible for me to influence others.” If you are a Christian, it is impossible for you not to influence others!
If you say, “I, a Christian, cannot be of service to others,” you have offended Him and called Him a liar.
It is easier for light itself to be darkness than for a Christian not to give light.
John Chrysostom:
It is not possible for a Christian’s light to lie concealed. So brilliant a lamp cannot be hidden!
In loving You, O Lord, I do not just have a fuzzy feeling; my love is definite and certain. Your Word touched my heart, and from that moment I began to love You.
Augustine:
No-one has ever gone to heaven through an easy life.
We derive the names of most our days from these Germanic gods: Tuesday (Tiwaz’s day), Wednesday (Wodin’s day), Thursday (Thor’s day), Friday (Freya’s day), Saturday (Saeter’s day).
Jerome in Bethlehem said, “My voice is choked, broken with sobs as I dictate this letter. The city that conquered the entire earth has now itself been conquered!”
Genseric (428-77) launched a campaign of violent and bloody conquest, destroying towns and cities, slaughtering their Catholic inhabitants.
The West’s greatest theologian, Augustine of Hippo, died while a Vandal army was besieging his city.
Gregory and his fellow bishops had a hard time trying to convince their Frankish flocks that being a Christian involved a break with Pagan customs and a change of moral lifestyle.
but no-one can rob Boethius of goodness, the soul’s true and eternal treasure, which comes from participating in God Himself, Who is the Supreme Good.
Boethius offered what became the classic solution to this problem. He argued that God does not experience time as we do, as “past, present and future”; God does not dwell in time – He created time, just as He created space, and He is above and beyond the limits that time and space impose on us. In His own all-seeing mind, God views the whole of time in a single glance, as if it were all “present” in a sort of “eternal now”. So God sees “future” things happening as we would see something happening in the present.
In His own eternal present, God simply “sees” us performing actions which, to us, are in the future.
As a young man, his parents sent him to study in Rome, but this heavenly minded student fled in horror from its corrupt city-life, and became a hermit, living in a cave in Subiaco (east of Rome). Here he battled with demons and with terrible temptations to sexual impurity – which he cured by rolling about naked on thorns and nettles!
Gregory preferred to call himself “the servant of the servants of God”. (Later popes have retained this title too, but not usually in the humble spirit of Gregory.)
He opposed the superstitious veneration of images or icons of Christ, the Virgin Mary and the saints, but approved of using them to adorn churches as teaching aids for those who could not read.
it is historically false to speak of Roman Catholicism until the great East–West schism of 1054; prior to this, all Christians in East and West24 were one united Church, and did not collectively acknowledge the supremacy of the pope
The theology and spirituality of Western Catholicism in the 6th century were certainly not Protestant, but neither were they “Roman Catholic”;
“The time of my release is near, and my soul longs to see Christ my King in all His beauty”; “I am not afraid to die, for we have a God who is good beyond comparison.”
“cold to the things of this world, and burned with a love for the future life alone”.
its treatment of slavery, recognising slaves as human beings created in God’s image, not mere pieces of property.
Justinian’s edict of 533, in which he declared that the person of Christ was the divine Logos, and that this divine person had suffered on the cross in the human nature which He had taken.
He argued that the Saviour’s human nature never existed as a human person, but became personal by existing “in” the divine person of the Son. In other words, there never was a moment when Jesus’s human nature existed independently of the divine Son; the person of the Son incarnated Himself as a human soul and body, which were always personally His, and had no reality apart from Him.
Pseudo-Dionysius taught that God is utterly above and beyond anything the human mind can understand. We cannot say what God is; we can only say what He is not. We cannot even say that God “exists”, for He is beyond what our limited minds understand by existence.
“May God grant that I do not condemn anyone, nor say that I alone am saved. But I prefer to die rather than violate my conscience by defecting from what I believe about God.”
