This volume presents a complete collection of all the editions, translations and studies of Augustine's "Sermones ad populum," both authentic and pseudepigraphic, introduced by an essay on their transmission since the Maurists and their present state. Extensive indexes analyze the topics of the sermons and all entries, and present especially access to all the publications on every single sermon.

These essays propose a new dating of, and historical setting for the letters of "Ignatius of Antioch." In so doing this volume forms an important contribution to the study of Monarchianism and early church history as well. An examination of the fragments of Noetus of Smyrna, the founder of Monarchianism, leads to the discovery of the oldest Regula fidei, and of its origin as part of anti-gnostic polemics. On the ground of late second-century parallels, especially Melito and Irenaeus, this Regula can be dated between 160 and 180 CE. It is within this context that the so-called...

The Theosophy, written by an anonymous Monophysite theologian in the early years of the sixth century CE, is a work in four books with a final world chronicle. Heir to a long apologetic tradition, it aims at demonstrating that there is a basic harmony between Christian faith and pagan theology. For this reason its author quotes at length numerous pagan prophecies of the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. This volume proposes the first comprehensive critical edition of all the extant fragments of this work, in an attempt to reconstruct the general framework and to...

The giant treatise Contra Celsum is Origen's main and longest work. It is of significance for both Greek Patristics and Ancient Philosophy. However, the extant text of the treatise is lacunose and corrupt. Two outstanding editions - by Paul Koetschau (1899) and Marcel Borret (1967-1969) - are not critical enough. The editor tried to restore Origen's original text and presents the reader with a reasonably reliable text.

Origen's Cosmology and Ontology of Time constitute a major catalyst and a massive transformation in the development of Christian doctrine. The author challenges the widespread impression about this theology being bowled head over heels by its encounter with Platonism, Gnosticism, or Neoplatonism, and casts new light on Origen's grasp of the relation between Hellenism, Hebrew thought and Christianity. Against all ancient and modern accounts, the ingrained claim that Origen sustained the theory of a beginningless world is disconfirmed. He is argued to be the anticipator and forerunner of...

Pontius Meropius Paulinus (ca 353-431), one of the greatest poets of Late Latin Poetry and author of an important correspondence, was born in a wealthy family of the Gallo-Roman aristocracy in Bordeaux. After his spectacular conversion to asceticism and his sacerdotal ordination, he set up definitively as a monk in Italy, in Campanian Nola besides the tomb of St. Felix. There, Paulinus devoted his considerable fortune to the restructuring of the monumental complex which has appeared around this holy place, since the early years of the fourth century and mainly a church. This book is a...

There can be no doubt that there is a link between early Christian statements on human dignity and the corresponding modern concept, as it appears ever more frequently in current bioethical debates. This study attempts to throw light on the surprisingly complex process of the emergence of such a Christian concept of human dignity in antiquity and portrays it as a process governed by contradictions and antagonisms: between biblical and platonic anthropology; between a platonic and a stoic perception of humanity; between gnostic and antignostic cosmology; between biblically based criticism of...