Good Books

A good book, in this study, is a book the Church has given, or has received and kept, so that the faith can be known and lived. It is not a book that happens to be moving. It is not a book that happens to be old. Age is not the test. Usefulness to a present argument is not the test. The test is whether the Church has handed the book on as Scripture, or as the Church's own teaching set in order, or as the work of a Father or a Doctor or a Saint whose writing the faithful may safely take up in order to follow Christ.

There are degrees, and the degrees matter.

The Bible is the book of books. The Church receives it as sacred and canonical, written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. A Catholic owes it a kind of attention owed to nothing else on a shelf. He does not improve it. He does not finish it. He hears it, reads it, and obeys it, inside the Church that knew it as Scripture before he was born.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church is not inspired. It is the modern summary of what the Church believes, celebrates, lives, and prays. It exists so that a teacher, and a believer who is willing to be taught, can find the faith stated in one place, with the sources named, and can be kept from inventing a private version.

The Fathers, and the great Doctors after them, are teachers. The Church reads them as witnesses of the faith once delivered. Augustine, Benedict, Thomas, and the eight named at the end of this file belong here. They may be argued with only in the sense that the Church has sometimes left a private opinion of theirs behind. They may not be used as a quarry of lines against the Creed.

The books of devotion, the Imitation, the Introduction to the Devout Life, the Story of a Soul, and the books of Montfort, are lower than Scripture and lower than the Catechism, and they are not therefore optional decorations. The Church keeps them because doctrine that is never prayed, and never obeyed in a kitchen or a cloister, dries into a performance. They are read after the faith, and in the faith, and they are not a substitute for either.

Tradition, in this file, means what the Church has handed on. Where a memory is tradition, it is called tradition. Where a later motto has been put into a saint's mouth, the motto is not treated as his sentence. Nothing below is offered as a new revelation.

The Bible is the collection of books the Church receives as Holy Scripture. They were written by men, and they have God as their author, because those men wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. The Church teaches that they hand on firmly, faithfully, and without error the truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, willed to be written. That last precision is the Church's own. The Bible is not a manual of astronomy, or of medicine, or of the politics of a modern state. It is not, for that reason, a book a reader may edit when a page judges him. It teaches saving truth, and it teaches it with the authority of God.

The Douay-Rheims, in Bishop Challoner's revision, is the old English Catholic text. Where this file quotes Scripture, it quotes that text, and only in short lines. In the Douay-Rheims, the second letter to Timothy says: "All scripture, inspired of God, is profitable to teach, to reprove, to correct, to instruct in justice." That is the profit. It assumes a man who is willing to be reproved.

The canon is seventy-three books. Forty-six belong to the Old Testament. Twenty-seven belong to the New. The count is not a private preference, and it is not a scholarly fashion. It is the list the Church has received, and has defined.

The Old Testament begins with the Law, the five books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Then the historical books: Josue, Judges, Ruth, the four books of Kings, the two books of Paralipomenon, the two books of Esdras, Tobias, Judith, Esther, and the two books of Machabees. Then the books of wisdom: Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Canticle of Canticles, Wisdom, and Ecclesiasticus. Then the prophets: Isaias, Jeremias with the Lamentations, Baruch, Ezechiel, Daniel, and the twelve lesser prophets, Osee, Joel, Amos, Abdias, Jonas, Micheas, Nahum, Habacuc, Sophonias, Aggeus, Zacharias, and Malachias.

Those are the Douay names, and a beginner using a newer Catholic Bible needs the door between the names. The first and second books of Kings are the books often called Samuel. The third and fourth books of Kings are the books often called the first and second books of Kings. Paralipomenon is Chronicles. The first and second books of Esdras are Esdras and Nehemias, often called Ezra and Nehemiah. Tobias is Tobit. The Canticle of Canticles is the Song of Songs. Ecclesiasticus is Sirach, and it is not the same book as Ecclesiastes. A reader who confuses those two has lost a book and doubled another. Isaias is Isaiah, and the other prophets are likewise the same men under older English spellings. The third and fourth books of Esdras, which some old Latin Bibles print in an appendix, are not part of the seventy-three. The Church did not define them as canonical. A beginner who finds them bound in at the back should not promote them, and should not be troubled.

Within those forty-six, some books and some passages have been cut out of lists the Church does not use. The Church does not cut them. Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and the two books of Machabees are Scripture. So is the fuller text of Esther, and the fuller text of Daniel, including the pages a reduced Bible lifts out. These books came to the Church in the Greek Scriptures which the Apostles and the first churches commonly used. They are not an optional appendix for the curious. They are read in the liturgy. They are the word of God. A Catholic does not apologise for them, and does not skip them in order to look agreeable.

The New Testament is the four Gospels, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; the Acts of the Apostles; fourteen epistles of Saint Paul, that is Romans, the two letters to the Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, the two letters to the Thessalonians, the two letters to Timothy, Titus, Philemon, and Hebrews; seven catholic epistles, that is James, the two letters of Peter, the three letters of John, and Jude; and the Apocalypse of Saint John. The Church's list counts Hebrews among the fourteen epistles of Saint Paul. That is how the canon is named. A beginner does not need a theory about the style of the letter before he reads it as Scripture.

Forty-six and twenty-seven are seventy-three. If a Bible on a table has fewer, it is not the Catholic Bible, however fine the English.

The Church did not invent this list in the sixteenth century. Tradition records that a council at Rome under Pope Damasus, in the late fourth century, already received it, and that the councils of Hippo and of Carthage, in Africa, received it in the same years, and that Pope Innocent I sent the same list to a bishop in Gaul at the start of the fifth century. The Council of Florence, in the decree for the Copts in the fifteenth century, named these books again. The solemn definition, given when the canon was being denied and cut, is the decree of the Council of Trent in the fourth session, on 8 April 1546. Trent received all the books, and all their parts, as they stand in the old Latin Vulgate, and it pronounced an anathema on anyone who refuses them as sacred and canonical. A later council of the Vatican repeated the substance: the books are canonical because, written under inspiration, they have God as their author, and because they have been handed on as such to the Church. The definition is the Church's. It is not an invitation to reconstruct the Bible from a private search of ancient catalogues.

The Bible is one book in two Testaments, and the two are not rivals. The Old prepares the New. The New fulfils the Old and does not throw it away. Our Lord taught that he had not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfil them. The Church took that teaching seriously when others did not. In the second century Marcion wanted a Christianity without the Old Testament, and without the God of Israel, and with a Gospel cut to fit. The Church refused him. The refusal still stands. A Catholic who reads only a few favourite chapters of the New Testament, and treats the Old as a discarded preface, is nearer to that refusal's enemy than he thinks.

Saint Augustine gave the Church a way of saying the unity, and the Church has repeated the way in catechesis ever since. The New lies hidden in the Old. The Old stands open in the New. The sacrifice, the lamb, the temple, the king, the exile, the promise to Abraham, the songs of the suffering just man: the Church reads these towards Christ, not because a modern reader has forced them, but because the risen Lord taught the disciples to read them so, on the road and in the upper room. The Old Testament remains the book of Israel, and the Church does not confiscate it by that reading. The Church confesses that the same God spoke it, and that his Son is its fulfilment, not its cancellation.

The Psalms hold a special place inside this unity. They are Scripture, and they are also the prayer book of the Church. The Divine Office is made of them. Our Lord prayed them. A beginner who learned no other page of the Old Testament would still owe the Psalms a life, said slowly, and said as prayer rather than as a passage to be got through.

A Catholic does not read the Bible apart from the Church. This is not a small rule of piety. It is how Scripture came to him at all. The Church was preaching, baptising, and celebrating the Eucharist before the New Testament was a collected book on a table. The Gospels and the letters were written in the Church, to churches, and received by the Church as the apostolic witness. The same Church, taught by the Spirit, knew which books were Scripture and which writings, however pious or ancient, were not. A reader who accepts the binding and rejects the teacher has already sawn off the branch he is sitting on.

The Douay-Rheims gives the scene in the Acts of the Apostles. Philip found the Ethiopian reading the prophet Isaias, and said: "Thinkest thou that thou understandest what thou readest?" The man answered: "And how can I, unless some man shew me?" He asked Philip to come up and sit with him. That is the shape of Catholic reading. Scripture is not self-explanatory to a stranger, and pride is not a substitute for a guide. The guide, in the ordinary life of a Catholic, is the Church: the liturgy, the Creed, the Catechism, the Fathers, and a living teacher who has the charge of souls.

The same letters say it as doctrine. The second epistle of Saint Peter, in the Douay-Rheims, says: "Understanding this first, that no prophecy of scripture is made by private interpretation." Private interpretation here is not the modest work of paying attention to a sentence. It is the claim to be one's own magisterium. The Church has always understood the warning in that way. A Catholic may study, and ask, and even be puzzled. He may not set his puzzle above the faith.

In the constitution on Divine Revelation, the Second Vatican Council said again what Trent and the Fathers had held, and said it for this age. Scripture and Tradition come from the one source, God revealing himself. They are one sacred deposit. The Church's teaching office is not above the word of God. It serves the word, and teaches only what has been handed on. The task of giving an authentic interpretation, of Scripture and of Tradition alike, has been entrusted to the living teaching office of the Church alone. That office is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ. A Catholic who honours the Bible and despises the Pope and the bishops in their teaching, or who honours an opinion of his own and calls it the plain sense of a verse, has left this constitution unread even if he can quote a verse from it.

The Latin Church also has a Bible in the Church's own Latin, the Vulgate, the text associated with Saint Jerome, of whom more is said with the Fathers. Trent judged that this old Latin Vulgate was to be held as authentic in public lectures, disputations, preaching, and exposition, so that the faith would not be blown about by a new version every season. The decree does not forbid translation. The Church has always translated, so that the people may hear. It forbids a Catholic to treat the Church's Bible as one suggestion among others. In English, the Douay-Rheims stands in that line. Other translations exist which the Church has approved, and a beginner may use one of them, provided the book in his hands contains the seventy-three, and provided it is an edition the Church has allowed. The point is not a brand. The point is the canon, and the Church beside the book.

Begin at the altar, not at a scheme. On Sunday the Church reads the Bible in the Mass, an Old Testament page, or a page from the Acts or the Apocalypse, a psalm, an apostolic letter, and a Gospel, set side by side on purpose. That is not a shortened Bible for people who will not study. It is the Church showing, every week, how the two Testaments speak of Christ in the presence of his sacrifice. A beginner who never misses that reading, and who takes the texts home, has already begun in the right school.

For private reading, begin with one Gospel, not with a plan to conquer the whole Bible by a date. Saint Luke is a right beginning: the infancy, the mercy, the parables, the road to Emmaus, which is itself a lesson in reading. Saint John is a right beginning: the Word made flesh, the Bread of life, the vine, the wounds, the chapters the Church leans on at Christmas, in Holy Week, and in Easter. Choose one. Read a short portion. Read it again. Do not run. When a sentence is hard, do not invent a meaning that flatters you, and do not despair. Ask what the Church says, in the Catechism, in the liturgy of the day, or of a priest. Keep the Creed in the room. A reading that contradicts the Creed is a misreading, however clever.

After one Gospel has become familiar, the Acts of the Apostles tell how that Gospel reached the nations. The letters of Saint Paul are then read with a church in view, not as abstract essays. Romans is not the first letter to open on a tired evening. A shorter letter, read twice, will do more. The Psalms can be going on all the time, one of them, prayed, not skimmed. The Old Testament as a whole is a life's work. Genesis, Exodus, the prophets, and the wisdom books will open when the Gospel is already loved. Tobias and the Machabees will not be left to a footnote.

Do not read in order to collect verses for a fight. Do not read as if every sentence were a private oracle about tomorrow. Do not drop a book because the first chapter is a genealogy or a law of sacrifice. Those pages are teaching you how God prepared a people. And do not let any other book in this file, however holy, push the Bible off the table. The others exist to serve it and to keep you from reading it alone.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church is the modern summary of Catholic doctrine. Pope John Paul II promulgated it by the apostolic constitution Fidei depositum on 11 October 1992, and gave it as a sure reference for the teaching of the faith, and as a sure norm for other catechisms. A Latin typical edition followed in 1997, issued under the same Pope, and that Latin text is the reference by which translations are judged. A reader who meets a small difference between an early translation and a later printing is meeting the ordinary care of the Holy See over its own book. He should use a current edition the Church has authorised. He should not go hunting the differences as if the faith had become a puzzle of editions.

The book is arranged in four parts, and the four are older than 1992. After the Council of Trent, the Church published the Roman Catechism, under Pope Saint Pius V, in 1566, and arranged it in the same fourfold way: the Creed, the sacraments, the commandments, and prayer. The Catechism of the Catholic Church stands in that line. It is not a new religion composed at the end of the twentieth century. It is the deposit set out again, for bishops, for those who write local catechisms, for priests, and through them for the faithful.

The four parts are these.

The first part is the profession of faith. It follows the Creed: God revealing himself and the response of faith; the one God; the Father almighty and his creation; the Son, his incarnation, his death and resurrection, and his coming again; the Holy Spirit; the Church; Our Lady; the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and life everlasting. A person who studies this part knows what he is saying when he stands at Mass on Sunday.

The second part is the celebration of the Christian mystery. It teaches what the liturgy is, the work of Christ and of the Church, and then it teaches the seven sacraments: what each one is, what it does, how it is celebrated, and who ministers it. The Holy Mass is the centre. A person who studies this part knows what he is standing inside, and why the rites are not a local custom that a parish may redesign to suit a mood.

The third part is life in Christ. It begins with the dignity of the human person, with society, with law, and with grace, and then it walks the Ten Commandments. Worship is there, and speech, and the body, and theft, and the poor, and the common good. It is not a book of private tips. It is the moral teaching of the Church. A person who comes to it only to arm himself against other people's sins, and who leaves before the paragraphs that judge his own state, has not read it.

The fourth part is Christian prayer. It teaches what prayer is, how the Church has prayed, and how a life of prayer is sustained, and then it takes the Our Father petition by petition. A beginner who says he does not know how to pray should not be too proud for this part. The Church is not ashamed to teach the prayer Our Lord taught, line by line.

Each paragraph is numbered. The numbers are a mercy. A priest in one country and a reader in another can point to the same sentence without describing a page. The paragraphs are full of quotations from Scripture, from the councils, from the popes, from the liturgy, and from the Fathers. The quotations are there so that anyone can see the Catechism leaning on the faith it summarises. This file does not copy those paragraphs out. A study that pasted them would be a disguise for the book, and the book is easy to obtain.

In 2005 Pope Benedict XVI presented a Compendium of the same Catechism, in questions and answers, with a short appendix of prayers. The Compendium is a door. It is not a rival, and it is not an excuse for never reading the larger book. Where a beginner is lost in the length, the Compendium can show him the shape, and then he should go to the numbered paragraphs themselves.

No single Doctor sat down and composed it as Augustine composed a treatise. It was drafted by a commission of bishops and theologians at the request of the Pope, revised after the bishops of the world had been consulted, and given to the Church by the successor of Peter. That is the authorship that matters. The Church is the teacher. The Catechism is the Church's book. A Catholic does not sit above it and decide which parts suit the age. He may find a paragraph hard. The hardness is often the hardness of the faith itself, stated without decoration.

The Church keeps it so that the faith will be one faith. Left to himself, a devout man builds a religion out of the sermons he liked, the scandals he has heard, and the verses he understands. The Catechism stands in the way of that construction. It says what the Church believes about God, about Christ, about the sacraments, about marriage, about death, about prayer. It says it at length, with the sources in view, so that a teacher cannot honestly claim not to know the mind of the Church. It does not add to the deposit. It guards the deposit and makes it teachable.

It is also kept because the older catechisms, precious as they are, were not a complete modern statement. The Roman Catechism remains a great book, and a beginner who later reads it will find the same faith in a sixteenth-century voice. The Catechism of 1992 is the summary for now. Local books, including the question-books used for generations in particular countries, are good servants when they agree with it. They are not a higher court.

Do not begin at the first paragraph and march to the last in a fortnight. You will have turned pages. You will not have been catechised. Choose the part that answers the ignorance you actually have. If the Creed is still a formula you recite and could not explain, begin with the first part, and take it in portions, one article of the Creed at a time. If the Mass is still a ceremony whose parts you cannot name, begin with the second part, and read the teaching on the Eucharist slowly enough that the next Sunday is different. If a moral question is pressing, go to the commandment that governs it, and read the whole section, not the sentence you hoped to find. If prayer has collapsed into worry, read the fourth part, and then pray the Our Father with the book closed.

Read it as a learner, not as a reviewer. The tone is doctrinal on purpose. It is not trying to charm. When a paragraph cites a council or a Father, let the citation remind you that the sentence is not a fashion. When you disagree, assume first that you have not understood, and ask a priest who will answer from the Church and not from his own inventions. Use the numbers. Write them down. Return to the same paragraph a week later. The Catechism rewards a second reading more than a first sprint.

And do not make it do the Bible's work, or the Bible do its work. The Catechism without Scripture becomes a system hanging in the air. Scripture without the Catechism becomes a set of texts at the mercy of the reader. The Church gave you both.

Two books are the door. He wrote far more than two, above all On the Trinity, and commentaries, and the long works against the Manichees, the Donatists, and the Pelagians. A beginner who tries to read him entire will not read him at all. The Confessions come first. The City of God comes after. His life as a man, the garden at Milan, the years as bishop of Hippo, and the day of his death, is told with the Saints. What follows is the shape of the books.

The Confessions are a prayer. That is the fact which governs every page. Augustine is not offering the public a memoir in the modern sense, though he tells his life and tells it with a severity against himself that memoirs usually avoid. He is speaking to God, and the reader is allowed to overhear. He wrote it in about the year 397, when he was already a bishop, looking back at a life that had included a mistress, a son, a career of rhetoric, and nearly ten years among the Manichees, who taught two eternal principles and despised the flesh in a way the Church does not. The book is thirteen books long. A reader who wants only the story, and who drops it when the story seems to pause, has not read the book he thinks he has read.

The first nine books are the life. He begins with infancy and boyhood, and with the truth that a heart made by God cannot settle until it comes home to God. He tells of a theft of pears, done not because the fruit was good but because the company of sin was sweet, and he uses that petty theft as a way into the nature of sin itself. He tells of Carthage, of ambition, of the woman he lived with, of Adeodatus his son, and of his joining the Manichees because they seemed to answer questions that the Catholics of his youth had not answered well to his pride. He tells of his mother's tears. Monica is never far from the page. He leaves Africa for Rome and then for Milan, where Ambrose is bishop. Ambrose's preaching begins to undo the caricature of the faith which Augustine had been despising. He is convinced in mind before he is converted in will. He delays. He asks, in substance, to be made chaste, but not yet. That delay is one of the reasons the Church keeps the book. It is not the story of a man who always meant well.

In a garden in Milan the delay breaks. He hears what he takes to be a child's voice from a neighbouring house, chanting two words that mean: take up and read. He opens the letters of Saint Paul and meets the sentence that tells him to put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh. He does not treat this as a method other men must stage. He tells it as what God did to him. He was baptised by Ambrose at the Easter Vigil in 387, together with his son. The same year, at Ostia, waiting for a ship towards Africa, he and Monica stand at a window and talk their way towards a joy that would not be cut off by any turn of the conversation. She dies there. The account of her death is not an ornament. It is the end of the story he was given, the mother who had followed him across the sea, buried far from Africa, content, because God was not tied to a grave.

The tenth book turns from the past to the man he is now. Baptism was not the end of the struggle. Memory, the senses, and pride still have their wars. A reader who wanted a tidy conversion, finished in the garden, is made to stay with a bishop who still has to tell the truth about his present life. The last three books then leave narrative altogether and meditate on the opening of Genesis: on time, on creation, on the heaven and the earth, and on the Church and the Trinity read in those first pages of Scripture. This is not an appendix for specialists. It is Augustine saying that the life he has just told was always about God, and that Scripture is where that life has to go if it is not to remain a story about Augustine. A beginner should not start with these three books. A beginner should not skip them and then claim the Confessions.

Why the Church keeps the book is plain from the use the Church has made of it. It teaches conversion without theatre. It teaches grace, because Augustine cannot save himself by effort, and he knows it, having tried. It teaches that the body is not the enemy the Manichees said it was. It teaches a man how to confess to God in sentences that are not vague. And it teaches, by its last three books, that a converted mind goes to Scripture rather than to endless talk about its own past.

How a beginner should read it: books one to nine, slowly, as prayer overheard, not as a novel to finish on a journey. Stop when a page describes you. Then book ten. Then, when the story is truly known, the last three books, a little at a time, with Genesis open beside them. Do not begin Augustine with the City of God. Do not begin him with a collection of quotations about grace. Let him speak to God first.

The City of God is a different kind of book, and a much larger one. It runs to twenty-two books. He began it after the sack of Rome by Alaric in the year 410, and he finished it about 426. Pagans said that the city had fallen because the old gods had been deserted, and had therefore deserted Rome. A Roman official, Marcellinus, asked Augustine to answer. The answer took him the rest of his working life, and it became far more than a pamphlet about one disaster.

The first ten books answer the charge and clear the ground. Rome had suffered before the Church was born. Earthly cities rise and fall for reasons that do not prove the Gospel false, and their survival would not have proved the Gospel true. The worship of the Roman gods, and even the best of the pagan philosophers, the Platonists, whom Augustine treats with a real respect, cannot give the way to blessedness. Christ is the mediator. A beginner should know that these books are a reply. They are full of Roman learning. They are not the heart of the work, and they are not a waste. They stop a reader from using the fall of an empire as a theological argument.

The last twelve books are the theology of the two cities. They tell where the two cities come from, how they run through history, and what their ends are. The two cities are not two towns on a map, and they are not simply the Church as a political body set over against a state. They are two societies of rational creatures, angels and men, and they are made by two loves. One love is the love of God, carried as far as the forgetting of self. The other is the love of self, carried as far as the forgetting of God. In this age the two cities are mixed together, in every people, and often in one heart. They will be separated at the judgement. From that principle Augustine reads history: Cain and Abel, the city of men and the city that lives by faith, the course of Israel, the coming of Christ, the age of the Church, the peace which an earthly city can truly give and which is still not the peace of God, the last judgement, the resurrection of the body, the misery of those who refuse God, and the happiness of the city that sees him.

Why the Church keeps it: because it stops the faithful from asking of any earthly order what only the city of God can give, and because it stops them from despising earthly peace, justice, and the common good as if those were nothing. It is the great book about hope that is not optimism, and about politics that is not salvation. The Church has drawn on it for centuries whenever men have panicked at the fall of a public order, or have tried to baptise a public order as if it were the Kingdom.

How a beginner should read it: not first, and not fast. Read the Confessions before it, so that you know the man and the praise. If the whole is more than a season can hold, read the opening, so that the sack of Rome and the charge against the Christians are clear, and then read the books in which the two loves and the two ends are set out, with a guide, a priest or a Catholic teacher who will not turn the work into a slogan. Do not use a summary, including this one, as a substitute. And do not read it in order to win an argument about the news. He wrote it for people who were doing that. The cure was to lift their eyes to the end.

The Rule of Saint Benedict is a rule of life for monks living together. It is not a memoir, and it is not a book of mystical elevation. It is a practical order for a monastery: who is in charge, how the day is prayed, how faults are corrected, how guests and the sick are received, how a newcomer is admitted, and how the brethren are to love one another without grimness. It was written for the monks of Monte Cassino, in the first half of the sixth century. The Church receives it as Benedict's, and knows his life through the second book of the Dialogues of Saint Gregory the Great, written a generation and more later. That life is told with the Saints. The Rule is the book here.

It has a prologue and seventy-three short chapters. Benedict gathered what was already wise in the monastic tradition and set it down short enough that a community could live it. He says, in the way the prologue moves, that he means to establish a school of the Lord's service, and that he hopes to appoint nothing harsh and nothing too heavy, though a certain strictness will be there at the beginning for the correction of faults, and should not frighten a man away. The way narrows in order to open. That is the tone of the whole. He had seen harsher experiments. He wrote for ordinary men who would still be there in ten years.

The first chapter distinguishes kinds of monks. He writes for cenobites, men in a monastery under a rule and an abbot. He is severe about those who wander from house to house, and about those who live in small groups with no rule but their own appetite. The severity matters. The Rule is not a licence for religious individualism with a medieval flavour. It is a common life.

The abbot, in the chapters that follow, holds the place of Christ in the house. He is to teach more by his life than by his words. He calls the brethren to counsel, and then he decides. The monastery is not a parliament, and it is not a tyrant's hall. A later age that wants only one of those two pictures will misread him.

Then comes a long list of the tools of good works, many of them taken straight from Scripture: to love God, to love one's neighbour, not to do to another what one would hate to receive, to tell the truth, to honour the old, to relieve the poor, to prefer nothing to the love of Christ. A beginner who read no other chapter could examine a day against that list and have enough work for a season.

Obedience, restraint of speech, and humility follow. Humility is set out in twelve degrees, beginning from the fear of God and descending, as he puts it, until humility is in the body, the voice, and the way a man walks, and has turned into love. It is a ladder downward that is in fact the way up. The Church has used it whenever a soul has mistaken religious feeling for holiness.

The chapters on the Work of God arrange the psalms through the night office and the hours of the day. The Work of God is the Divine Office. Nothing is to be set before it. A monastery exists, first, to sing the Psalms. Labour and study are real, and they are not the first thing. A layman reading this in a house full of children is not commanded to reconstruct a sixth-century timetable. He is commanded, by honesty, not to pretend that the chapter does not say what it says. The Church's day is held up by the Psalms. Monks are the brethren who have promised to sing them in common.

Later chapters order penalties, the holding of goods in common, the weekly kitchen service, the sick, the guests, the porter, the cellarer, meals, reading at table, and the great silence after Compline. The sick are to be served as Christ himself. Guests are to be received as Christ, and the abbot and the community are to meet them with a real courtesy, including prayer, before they are fed. Hospitality in the Rule is not a slogan about openness. It is a rite, and it has a limit, because the house is a house of prayer and not an inn with a chapel attached.

There is a chapter in which idleness is called the enemy of the soul, and the hours are therefore appointed for work and for holy reading. People like to give Benedict a motto, pray and work, as if it were a verse of the Rule. It is a fair later summary. It is not his sentence. What he wrote is more exact: the day holds the Office, and it also holds work and reading, because a monk with empty hours will not stay a monk. In the chapter on the reception of newcomers, the new man is kept waiting, the Rule is read to him more than once, and he promises stability, a conversion of his life, and obedience. Those three promises are the Benedictine vow. Near the end, if a brother is given a task that is too heavy, he may say so, humbly, and then he obeys. The good zeal of the chapter before the last is a zeal of charity, not of bitterness: the brethren are to outdo one another in honour, to bear with infirmities, and to prefer nothing whatever to Christ. The last chapter says that this Rule is only a beginning on the way of life. The rest is Scripture, the Catholic Fathers, and the monastic teachers who went before. Benedict sends the reader onward. He does not imprison him in seventy-three chapters.

The Church has never imposed the Rule on the laity as a law. The Church has lived with it for fifteen centuries because communities could keep it, and because it makes one life out of the Mass, the Office, work, silence, and the guest. Western monks took it as their ordinary rule. Where the public order failed, the houses often remained, and with them the Psalms, the copying of books, the care of the sick, and a hospitality that was not sentimental. Pope Paul VI named Benedict a patron of Europe, a judgement about that history. The buildings of Monte Cassino have been destroyed and raised again. The Rule is the thing that could be carried.

The Church also keeps it because of its discretion, the word Gregory used of it. It is strict enough to form a man and moderate enough that he need not break. A fervour that cannot be lived on a dull Thursday is not the holiness the Church is looking for in a rule.

Read the prologue, the chapter on the tools of good works, the chapters on humility, the chapters on the sick and on guests, and the last two chapters. Then stop, and live with what you have read. If it has taken hold, read the chapters on the Office, so that you understand what you are not living, and so that you understand the Divine Office when you meet it in a parish or an abbey. Do not found a monastery in your kitchen by imposing silence, fasting, or a borrowed authority on people who have not professed the Rule. A household is not a cenobium. The wisdom that can come home is smaller and more real: speech that is rarer, a guest who is Christ, a promise that is kept, a day that has some prayer in it which is not cancelled by mood, and a humility that does not need to be seen. If the monastic life itself is the question, the person to speak to is a monk, not a private reading plan.

The Summa Theologiae is the ordered account of sacred doctrine which Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote for beginners in that science. He says so at the outset, in his own prologue: he is not writing a display for experts, and he wants to follow the order of the subject itself, rather than the order of somebody else's book or the accidents of debate. He began it in the 1260s, taught and wrote at the same time, and did not finish it. In December 1273, while celebrating Mass, he was given something he would not describe. The report kept by his brethren is that he set the pen down and spoke of everything he had written as straw beside what he had been shown. He stopped. In the following March, on the way to the general council at Lyons, he died at the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova, on 7 March 1274. The unfinished page is part of the book a reader must understand. The Church's honour of him, and the day the calendar keeps, belong to the study of the Saints. Here the point is the work.

It is not the only large book he wrote. The Summa contra Gentiles is a different work, in four books, written to set out the truth of the faith in a way that could be followed by those who do not already share the Scriptures. A beginner should not confuse the two Summae. The one this file means, when it says the Summa, is the Summa Theologiae.

The Summa is not divided into chapters of continuous essay. It is divided into questions, and each question into articles. An article is one precise ask, of the form: whether this is so. Once the shape of an article is learned, any page in the work can be read. Until it is learned, every page will be misread.

The shape is always the same.

The article states the matter. Then come objections. These are the strongest reasons Thomas can marshal for the side he judges to be wrong. They often sound confident. They often sound as if they were his conclusion. They are not. A person who quotes an objection as the teaching of Saint Thomas has not begun to read him, and has probably begun to deceive someone else. Then comes a short word on the contrary, usually from Scripture, from a Father, or from a received master, set against the objections. Then comes the body of the article, his own answer. In the ordinary English it opens with the words "I answer that". Read the body before you trust any impression the objections have made. Then he replies to the objections one by one. He seldom calls the objector a fool. He says in what respect the sentence was true and in what respect it was false. The distinctions live in those replies. Skip them, and you will think him cruder than he is.

The work has three parts, and the second part is itself in two.

The first part treats of God: sacred doctrine itself, the one God, the blessed Trinity, creation, the angels, the six days, man, and the government of creatures. It asks what can be known of God and how, and what must be said of him if the Creed is true.

The first half of the second part treats of man on the way back to God. It begins with man's last end, which is God himself, and only then treats human acts, the passions, habits, vice and sin, law, and grace. The order is the teaching. Moral theology does not begin with a list of prohibitions. It begins with what a person is for. A beginner who is frightened of the Summa, and who yet has a real question about happiness, or about law, or about grace, is often safer here than in the most abstract articles on the divine names.

The second half of the second part treats the virtues one by one. Faith, hope, and charity come first, the theological virtues. Then prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, the cardinal virtues, with the sins and the gifts that belong to each, and then the states of life, including contemplation and action, and the offices of certain men. This is the part to open when the question is particular: what charity is, what lying is, what religion requires, what courage is for.

The third part treats of Christ and the sacraments. The Incarnation, the life and death and resurrection of Christ, and then Baptism, Confirmation, the Holy Eucharist, and Penance. He had entered the treatise on Penance when he stopped. What follows in printed copies, on the rest of Penance, on the Anointing of the Sick which the older books call Extreme Unction, on Holy Orders, on Matrimony, and on the resurrection, is the Supplement. It was not written by him as part of the Summa. After his death, companions arranged it from his earlier commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, so that the sacraments he had not reached, and the last things, would not be missing from the course. A reader must know which pages are the Summa and which are that completion. Both are his teaching. They are not the same kind of page. An honest edition marks the difference. The guide you are reading now is not an edition.

The full text lives at New Advent, in the English of the Fathers of the English Dominican Province:

New Advent, the Summa in English

It is not copied into this file. This file is the guide, not a part of the Summa. No article is reproduced here, not even a short one, because a short one would teach the reader to live on fragments, and because the work is already published whole for anyone who will go to it. Use the guide to learn the shape. Use New Advent, or a printed copy of the same translation, to read Thomas.

Thomas is a Doctor of the Church, the one often called the common doctor, because the Church has used him as a shared teacher and not as the property of a single school. The Summa is the clearest reason. It takes the whole of doctrine, God, man, Christ, and the sacraments, and it sets the questions in an order a mind can follow, without refusing Scripture and without refusing the hard distinctions. Pope Leo XIII commended him again when the age was trying to do philosophy in one room and theology in another. The Church did not canonise every philosophical tool he borrowed. The Church canonised the friar, and has proposed his way of teaching as a sure help. The report of the straw belongs with that honour. He did not mistake his own Summa for the vision of God. A reader should not mistake it for that either. It is straw in that sense only: it is not the face of God. It is still, short of Scripture and of the Church's own definitions, one of the greatest servants a mind can have.

Do not begin at the first article and intend to reach the Supplement. You will stop, and you will think the stop is his fault. Learn the shape of one article, slowly, with a teacher if you can, until you can tell an objection from a reply in your sleep. Then read by questions that answer a real ignorance, not by a programme of conquest. A parishioner who wants to know what the Church's great teacher says of the Eucharist should go to the treatise on the Eucharist in the third part. A person tangled in the idea of law, or of habit, or of the last end, should go to those questions in the second part. The treatise on the life of Christ is often a better first country than the opening questions on sacred doctrine, because it is nearer the Gospel, and because Thomas there is commenting, in his own method, on the mysteries the liturgical year already walks.

Read the body first. Then the replies. Then the objections, so that you can see what he was answering. Never quote an objection as his mind. Never quote a single sentence of the body as if the replies did not qualify it. And never prefer a handbook of extracted theses to the article itself, once you are able to read an article. Handbooks have their hour, when a teacher is showing you the map. They become a form of laziness when they replace him. When an article is too hard, leave it and say so. Pride of finishing pages is not study. One article understood, and obeyed where it touches life, is more of Thomas than a hundred articles underlined.

The Imitation of Christ is a book of following Our Lord in the ordinary inward life. It comes from the early fifteenth century, and the Church has long received it as the work of Thomas à Kempis, a canon of the Augustinian house of Mount Saint Agnes, near Zwolle. He was born at Kempen, and he lived the hidden life of a canon, copying books, praying the Office, and writing for his brethren and for souls in the same school. That school is called the New Devotion. It wanted Christians to copy the humanity of Christ in a simple and serious life, and it distrusted a cleverness that never converted anyone. The book grew in that soil. Read it under his name. The Church has not asked the faithful to wait for a better theory of who held the pen.

It is written in a plain Latin, and it is short enough to live with and deep enough to last a life. After the Bible, it is the book that has most often been found in Catholic hands, in cells, in parish houses, and beside the beds of the dying. It is in four books.

The first book is a set of admonitions for the spiritual life. It warns against vanity, against a curiosity that collects opinions, and against a knowledge that can define virtue and will not practise it. He would rather feel a true sorrow for sin than know how to discuss it. That preference, in its substance, is a medicine for a real sickness, the sickness of the schools when the schools forget charity, and the sickness of a reader of this very file if he learns the list of books and does not follow Christ. It is not a ban on doctrine. Thomas à Kempis was a man of the Church, formed in a tradition that assumed the Creed. A person who sets the Imitation against Saint Thomas, as if one had to choose, has misunderstood both. One teaches you to see. The other teaches you to obey what you have seen, and to suspect yourself when you would rather talk.

The second book turns to the inner life: familiarity with Christ, a clean conscience, peace, the cross accepted early rather than late, and a friendship with Our Lord that is not the same thing as being comforted by religion. It is a short book. It is not a light one.

The third book is the longest. Christ and the faithful soul speak by turns. It is called a book of inner consolation, and the consolation is real, and it is the consolation of a soul that is being asked to surrender. A reader who came for softness will be asked for the will. The voice of Christ in these pages is not a claim that Thomas à Kempis was taking dictation as the evangelists did. It is a device of devotion, Christ speaking in the words of a disciple who has soaked himself in the Gospels. A Catholic reads it as devotion, not as a new revelation.

The fourth book is of the Blessed Sacrament. It is the point towards which the other three have been walking, whether the reader noticed or not. It prepares the soul for Holy Communion: reverence, love, humility, the wish to be made clean, the sureness that the sacrament is Christ and not a symbol invented to encourage us. A reader who stops at the end of the third book has taken the morals and left the altar. The Church does not read the Imitation that way. Do not stop there.

No council sat down to compose it, and the Church has not defined it as a document of the magisterium. The Church keeps it by a longer and quieter act: by putting it in the hands of novices, of priests, and of lay people, for six centuries, and by recognising in it a book that does one thing without distraction. It places the reader in front of Christ and asks him to follow. Saints have lived on it. It has survived changes of taste that buried more fashionable books. The severity is part of the reason. It will not flatter a spiritual life that consists of reading about the spiritual life.

One short chapter a day, in the morning if possible, and often one sentence carried into the day is enough. The chapters are brief on purpose. Do not read five of them in order to feel that the book is under way. Read it as addressed to you. When it stings, do not argue with the page and do not despair. When a line seems to despise learning, remember the sickness it was written to cure, and then go back to the Catechism without shame, because the Church is not asking you to choose. Above all, reach the fourth book, and read it in a state that can end at Mass. The Imitation apart from the Blessed Sacrament becomes a refined self-examination. That is not what he wrote.

The Introduction to the Devout Life is a book about holiness for people who live in the world. Saint Francis de Sales wrote it first as instructions for a married woman under his direction, Louise de Charmoisy, and he published it in 1609, giving it a more settled form in the years that followed. He calls the reader Philothea, a soul that loves God. He was bishop of Geneva, living at Annecy because Geneva was not open to its bishop, and he was a confessor of rare gentleness who did not confuse gentleness with indifference. Pope Pius IX declared him a Doctor of the Church in the nineteenth century. The Church has also given him to writers as a patron. His life is not told among the particular Saints of the earlier study. The book is the subject here.

It is in five parts, and the five are a path, not a miscellany.

The first part takes a soul from the first desire for a devout life to a firm resolution. It teaches how to purge mortal sin and the affection for sin, how to make a meditation, and how to place oneself in the presence of God. It asks for a general confession at the beginning. That request is serious, and it belongs with a priest. It is not an invitation to conduct a private trial of one's whole life every month, which is how scrupulous people misuse a good book.

The second part is on prayer and the sacraments: morning and evening prayer, the Mass, confession, and Communion. He wanted frequent confession and frequent Communion in an age when many devout people still hung back. A beginner should notice that. Devotion, for him, is not a substitute for the sacramental life. It grows out of it.

The third part is the practice of the virtues, and it is the part that shows why the book is famous. Patience, humility, gentleness, obedience, chastity, poverty of spirit, friendship, speech, dress, recreations, and the duties of one's state are treated as they actually occur in a household and a town. He insists that devotion must be fitted to the state of life. The devotion of a bishop is not the devotion of a married woman, and neither is a reduced holiness. Holiness is one. The practices differ. A soldier who tried to live like a Carthusian would become a bad soldier and a comic monk. A married woman who was told that holiness was impossible in a nursery had been lied to. Francis tells the truth to both.

The fourth part is on temptations, sadness, anxiety, and the remedies. He is an enemy of the anxiety that dresses itself as a tender conscience. He is not an enemy of repentance.

The fifth part is on renewing the soul and confirming the resolutions: how to examine the year, how to repair what has slipped, and how to begin again without theatre. It is meant to be used, once a year, and not merely agreed with.

He wrote another and larger book later, the Treatise on the Love of God, for readers who wanted the doctrine of holy love at full length. It is a great book. It is not the Introduction. A beginner who finds it first should know that the Introduction is the door, and that the Treatise assumes a soul already trying to live what the Introduction taught. Jane Frances de Chantal, who founded the Visitation with him, is not Philothea. Confusing the two women confuses the two books.

The Church keeps it because it destroyed a false idea that has never quite died: the idea that real holiness is for the cloister, and that a person in the world may aim at being decent and no more. Francis teaches a devout life that can be lived by a shopkeeper, a courtier, a wife, a man of affairs, without pretending they are monks and without leaving them in their worldliness. Gentleness is his particular mark, gentleness with one's neighbour and gentleness with one's own soul, and the Church has judged that gentleness to be safe. It does not blur the commandments. It stops a penitent from beating himself in a way that is only another form of self-regard.

Read the first part once, seriously. If you make the general confession he asks for, make it with a priest, finish it, and do not turn it into a permanent occupation. Then live in the second and third parts. One chapter at a time is the right speed. Practise the chapter. The book expects practice. It is not harmed by being obeyed in a small way, and it is wasted by being admired. Keep the fifth part for a day of review. If a chapter on dress or on parties seems remote from your life, do not sneer at it and do not force its examples. Take the principle, which is that devotion enters the details of a real state of life, and apply it to the details you actually have. And do not use his gentleness as a permission to avoid a hard teaching of the Church. He would have been the last bishop to allow that.

The Story of a Soul is the account Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face wrote of her own life, under obedience, in the Carmel of Lisieux. Her name in the world was Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin. She was born at Alençon on 2 January 1873, entered Carmel in 1888, and died of tuberculosis on 30 September 1897, aged twenty-four. Her parents, Louis and Zélie, are Saints as well. The person is honoured in the study of the Saints, including the canonisation, the title of Doctor of the Church given in 1997, and the reason her feast falls on 1 October. This file does not retell that life as a second biography. It says what the book is.

The book is three manuscripts, not a work she planned as a single volume for the public. The first, written for her sister Pauline, Mother Agnes of Jesus, tells her childhood and the years up to her life in Carmel. The second is a letter to her sister Marie of the Sacred Heart, and it is the place where she sets down, most directly, her vocation of love in the heart of the Church. The third, written in her last months for Mother Marie de Gonzague, the prioress, tells the life inside the convent. After her death the manuscripts were gathered and published, in 1898, under the title by which the Church has loved them ever since. Early editions were edited by the sisters who prepared them. Later Catholic editions have restored her own wording more closely. A reader should take a Catholic edition and read it as her account. The arguments about editing are not the book. They should not become a reason to avoid the book, or a hobby that replaces it.

Her sentences are not copied in this file. The book may still be treated as under copyright in some places, and a study would be a poor excuse for pasting a life that ought to be read as a life. What follows is a description, so that a beginner knows what he is opening and how to read it.

The teaching the Church names in these pages is the little way. Thérèse had read the lives of the great Saints, and she had fed on the Imitation of Christ from her youth, and she did not see in herself the great exterior penances and the great works. She took Our Lord at his word about spiritual childhood. God is Father. She is a little child who cannot climb a steep staircase of heroic display, and who will therefore lift her arms to be carried. Confidence comes before fear. Very small things, the duties of the day, the charity that no one sees, the endurance of a difficult sister, are done with great love, because great things had not been given her to do. She wanted to be a missionary and a martyr. The desire was real. The life she was given was a cold cloister in Normandy. She did not cancel the desire. She offered it, and she came to understand her vocation as charity at the heart of the Church, which is why the Church could afterwards name her, who never left Carmel, a patron of the missions beside a man who crossed the world.

The book also tells a darkness. In her last illness the sense of heaven was taken from her feelings, and she held the faith without the feeling. A reader who knows only the sweetness of certain pages, and who has not stayed for that darkness, does not yet know the little way. It is not a technique for staying cheerful. It is trust when the feelings give no help.

The Church keeps it because the little way is the Gospel for people who will not be given a dramatic stage, which is most people, and because a Doctor's title was put on these few manuscripts, letters, and poems on purpose. The Church judged that the teaching is sure. It is not a reduction of the faith to niceness. It assumes the Carmelite life, the Mass, the Office, Our Lady, the Holy Face, and a very sharp sense of her own nothingness without grace. A person who takes the manner and leaves the doctrine will become sentimental. A person who refuses the manner, because it is young and French and full of flowers, may miss a Doctor. The manner is hers. The doctrine is the Gospel's: unless you become as little children, you shall not enter.

Read it once through, quietly, as a life, not as a system to be mined for slogans. Do not copy her family, her illness, or her vocabulary. Do not decide in advance that you are too modern for her. Stay long enough to see the doctrine under the manner: confidence, hidden charity, the offering of a desire one cannot carry out, and faithfulness in a darkness. Then read it again later, more slowly. If a page seems merely sweet, wait. The severity is in the smallness she accepts, and in the darkness she does not decorate. Let her own book do that work. This one will not do it for her by quotation.

Saint Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort was a priest in western France at the turn of the eighteenth century. He died in 1716, worn out by missions, and Pope Pius XII canonised him in the twentieth century. He founded the Company of Mary and the Daughters of Wisdom. Two books of his are the ones a Catholic meets, and they belong together. One is on the Rosary. The other is on consecration to Our Lord through Our Lady. His life is not given a separate place among the calendar entries of the earlier study. The books can be known here.

The Secret of the Rosary is a preaching book. It is made of short chapters which he calls roses. Each one is brief, concrete, and aimed at a person who might actually pray the Rosary rather than admire the idea of it. He writes of the prayers, of the mysteries, of the distractions, of the way to say it with other people and alone, and of the good the Church has seen where the Rosary is kept. It is not a treatise of Marian theology in the manner of a Summa article. It is a missionary's book. The Rosary itself, bead by bead, is learned as a prayer. This book exists to make a person pray it, and to clear away the excuses. It does not replace the Rosary. A reader who finishes it and does not take up the beads has missed the only point Montfort would have cared about.

True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin is the book of consecration. He wrote it near the end of his life. The manuscript was hidden in the troubled years that followed, and it was found again in the middle of the nineteenth century, at the mother-house of the Daughters of Wisdom. The Church has had it since that finding, and has not treated it as a curiosity. The teaching is that a Christian belongs entirely to Christ, and that the sure and humble way to belong to him is to go by his Mother, and to give oneself to him through her. Montfort uses a hard word for this gift. He calls it a slavery of love. He means the opposite of forced servitude. He means a free, total, and joyful belonging, of the kind the Apostles were not ashamed to claim when they called themselves the servants of Jesus Christ. The word still startles, and it should be understood before it is either swallowed as a slogan or refused as an insult. Nothing in the book puts Our Lady in the place of the one Mediator. The whole book is a way of going to him, in the company and under the care of the woman who is already his Mother and ours.

The practices are outward and inward. Outwardly, a person prepares over some weeks, a preparation commonly kept as thirty-three days, and makes the consecration on a feast of Our Lady, with a formula, and often with a renewal year by year. Inwardly, he learns to do what he does through Mary, with her, in her, and for her, so as to do it more truly through Jesus, with him, in him, and for him. The shorter work called The Secret of Mary is the same teaching in brief. It is not a third system. A beginner who finds the smaller book first may live with it, and then read the larger one when the consecration has become a real question rather than a new interest.

No sentences of his are pasted here. The English versions a reader meets are not all of one kind, and this file will not risk a line that belongs to a translator. The account is enough to know what the books are for. His own pages are easy to find in Catholic editions.

The Church keeps them because they make two ancient things practical: the Rosary, and the truth that one goes to Jesus with Mary and not around her. Popes have commended this way. Pope John Paul II took his episcopal motto, Totus tuus, from Montfort's consecration, which is a fact of the Church's recent life and not a decoration added by devotees. It tells a beginner that the Holy See did not regard the book as a private eccentricity. The books are kept, also, because they are usable by people who will never read the City of God. A ploughman in the Vendée could learn the Rosary from a rose a night. A pope could wear the consecration on his coat of arms. The same teaching bears both.

If the Rosary is still unfamiliar, or is familiar and careless, begin with The Secret of the Rosary, one rose at a time, and let each rose end in the prayer itself rather than in a resolution to become the sort of person who reads about the Rosary. If the Rosary is already part of the day, and the question is now about belonging to Our Lady so as to belong more entirely to Christ, read True Devotion slowly, and do not make the consecration on the enthusiasm of the first sitting. Use the preparation he asks for. Talk to a priest. Understand the hard word before you say it. Then, if you make the consecration, live it on ordinary days, in work and in patience, and not only on the feast when the formula was read. Renew it. Do not collect Marian books in place of this obedience. One of his, lived, is worth a shelf of the others described.

The Fathers are the teachers of the early centuries whom the Church recognises as witnesses of the faith: men of antiquity, of orthodox doctrine, of holiness of life, and of the Church's own approval. In the West the age of the Fathers is commonly taken as running down through Saint Gregory the Great; in the East, through Saint John Damascene. The dates are a help, not a doctrine. What matters is the recognition. A Father is not infallible in every sentence, as a Pope can be infallible when he defines. Fathers sometimes press a point too hard. They sometimes disagree about a discipline, or about a question the Church had not yet had cause to settle in a definition. The Church reads them inside the one faith, and does not build a private religion on a favourite paragraph.

The test the Church has loved, when the question is whether a teaching is truly ancient, is the one Saint Vincent of Lérins gave in his Commonitory. In his own Latin he asks for what has been held everywhere, always, and by all. That is a rule of thumb for recognising the faith, not a permission to ignore a later definition, and not a vote. It keeps a reader of the Fathers from mistaking a local opinion for the Catholic faith.

The eight names on this shelf are a map, not a complete library. They are set in an order a mind can walk. Ignatius and Polycarp still touch the age of the Apostles. Irenaeus received Polycarp and wrote down the rule of faith against the sects. Athanasius defended the Council of Nicaea and wrote the short book on why the Word took flesh. Ambrose preached that faith in Milan so that Augustine could hear it, and baptised him. Jerome, at the asking of a pope, put the Scriptures into the Latin the Western Church would live in. Chrysostom preached those same Scriptures in Antioch and in Constantinople until the preaching cost him the city. Gregory, monk and pope, wrote the pastor's book and the life of Benedict, and sent monks to the English. A person who reads one work from this shelf, entire, is no longer depending on summaries alone. A person who reads sentences from all eight, in a book of extracts, is still depending on a summariser.

They are read here as a shelf of books. Where the man also has a place among the Saints of the earlier study, the life is not repeated.

Ignatius was bishop of Antioch. Tradition places his martyrdom at Rome under Trajan, early in the second century. On the way to the beasts he wrote letters which the Church has kept as a treasure from the generation after the Apostles. Seven are received as his: to the Ephesians, to the Magnesians, to the Trallians, to the Romans, to the Philadelphians, to the Smyrnaeans, and to Polycarp.

They are short, urgent, and already full of the Church's shape. He writes of bishop, presbyters, and deacons as the order of a local church. He tells the faithful to do nothing that matters without the bishop, and he ties that obedience especially to the Eucharist and to the unity of the one body. In the letter to the Smyrnaeans the phrase "the catholic Church" is already there, meaning the Church spread through the whole world, as against a conventicle gathered around a private teacher. A beginner should feel the weight of that. The word is not a medieval invention. It is in use while men who had seen the Apostles' disciples are still alive. He is fierce against those who deny that Christ truly took flesh, suffered, and rose. The Eucharist, for him, is the flesh of Christ, and a Christianity that turns it into a mere sign has already left the Church he is writing to.

The letter to the Romans is the one to read first. He begs that church not to intervene and save him. He wants to be ground by the beasts so as to become the pure bread of Christ. This is not a contempt for life. It is the desire of a bishop who will not be robbed of a martyrdom he understands as the way to God. A beginner reads it in an evening, and then the letter to the Smyrnaeans. The other five can follow. They do not need a commentary so much as they need a reader who still believes that a bishop and an altar are normal.

Polycarp was bishop of Smyrna, and the receiver of one of Ignatius's letters. Irenaeus, who had heard him in youth, says that Polycarp had known John. That is the Church's tradition, carried by a named bishop who had no reason to invent a grandfather in the faith. Two writings belong to him on this shelf. One is his own letter to the Philippians, short, pastoral, and woven out of Scripture, the voice of a bishop steadying a church. The other is the Martyrdom of Polycarp, which is not by him. It is a letter from the church of Smyrna, telling the churches how their bishop died, in the middle of the second century.

The Martyrdom is the earliest full account of a martyr's death outside the New Testament, and it teaches the Church how to remember. Polycarp is old. He will not curse Christ in order to save a few years. He has served him for eighty-six years, and Christ has not wronged him. The fire is prepared. The blade finishes what the fire did not. The brethren gather what is left of his body and keep the anniversary of his death as his birthday into heaven. The Church's habit of keeping a martyr on the day he died begins in pages like these. The letter is also careful. It does not admire people who throw themselves at death. Polycarp waits, prays, and is taken. A beginner can read the Martyrdom in one sitting. It is a better door into the age of the martyrs than a modern retelling.

Irenaeus is the fuller book on this part of the shelf. He was a bishop of Lyons, from Smyrna, a hearer of Polycarp, and he wrote, late in the second century, the work called Against Heresies, in five books. The heresies were the Gnostic systems: mythologies of many divine beings, a contempt for the God of the Old Testament, a shame about the real flesh of Christ, and a claim to possess a secret knowledge above the faith which the churches preached in public. The book is long because the myths were many. He answers them one by one, and then he turns, especially in the third book, to the positive faith.

What he hands on is the Church's faith in a form a beginner can still recognise. There is one God, and he is the Creator, not a lesser craftsman to be escaped. The Word really took flesh from Mary. The body will really rise. The faith is public, the same in the apostolic churches, and it can be stated in a short rule, a creed before the later creeds were fixed word for word. The bishops stand in a succession from the Apostles, and a believer who wants to know the faith can look to the churches they founded, Rome among them, rather than to a hidden tradition of the pure. The Gospels are four, no more and no less. He loves the reasons a theologian of a later age might think merely poetic: four regions of the world, four winds, one Church, one Gospel in four books. A Catholic should hear this as the early Church's certainty, not as a riddle. He also teaches recapitulation. Christ takes up the whole human story, Adam's included, and heals it from inside. Eve's disobedience and Mary's obedience belong in that healing. The Church has never let that comparison go.

How to read him: not all five books on the first approach. Begin with the third book, where the apostolic preaching, the succession, and the four Gospels are set out. Remember the warning that also governs the Summa. He quotes the heretics in order to destroy them. The poison is not the remedy. A guide helps a beginner tell the two apart. There is a shorter work, the Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, which the Church has also received under his name. It is a good second step. Against Heresies remains the book by which he taught the ages.

Athanasius was bishop of Alexandria through the long fight that followed the Council of Nicaea. He died in 373. Nicaea had confessed the Son as of one being with the Father, not a creature, not a high angel, not a lesser god. Many in the empire found it convenient to blur that confession. Athanasius did not. Tradition remembers him as the man who stood when standing was costly. He was exiled more than once. The old phrase says: Athanasius against the world. The phrase is a memory, not a licence for stubbornness in a private cause. He was stubborn for the Creed.

Two books are the ones a beginner can know by name and can actually read.

On the Incarnation is an early work, written while he was still a young man in Alexandria, to explain the faith to someone coming into it. It asks why the Word became man. Man had been made in the image of God and had turned back towards corruption and nothing. Repentance alone could not repair a nature that was coming apart, and a debt owed by man had to be borne in a way that healed man. The Word by whom all things were made took a body, met death in the flesh, and undid it, and restored the image. Athanasius insists that this was fitting for God, not unworthy of him. The cross is not an embarrassment added to a philosophy. It is the victory. The end of the Incarnation, in his teaching, is that human beings are brought to share the life of God. That is not a modern exaggeration. It is his doctrine, and it is the Church's, already heard in the promise that we are called to be partakers of the divine nature.

The Life of Antony, written soon after the death of the desert father Antony, carried the monastic vocation out of Egypt and into the whole Church. It is the book Augustine's friend told him about in the days before the garden in Milan. The Confessions and this life touch. A beginner who has read the one will understand why the other shook a generation: a rich young world discovered that a man could give everything away and live, for decades, for God alone, and that the Church recognised the life as Catholic and not as a sect.

In a festal letter of 367, written to his church in Egypt, Athanasius listed the books of the New Testament as the Church still holds them. The list is a witness. It is not the moment the Church invented the Bible, and it is not a subject to run away into. Trent defined the canon. Athanasius shows the canon already in the Church's use, in Alexandria, three centuries after the Apostles and twelve centuries before Trent.

How to read him: read On the Incarnation entire. It is one of the few books of the Fathers a beginner can finish in a few evenings, and it is a better first reading than a history of imperial councils. Then, if the monastic life has begun to mean something beside Benedict, read the Life of Antony. Do not begin with the controversial pamphlets. They assume the Creed he was defending, and On the Incarnation will teach you to love the Creed before you learn who attacked it.

John Chrysostom was a priest of Antioch and then patriarch of Constantinople. He died in exile in 407. The name Chrysostom means golden-mouthed. It was given because he preached, and the Church has kept the sermons in a quantity no beginner will exhaust. That quantity is itself a fact. The early Church did not think a short homily of vague comfort was the normal preaching of a bishop. He opened Matthew, and John, and the letters of Paul, above all Romans, and he stayed with the text until his people had been fed and judged by it.

The book to know as a book, rather than as a library of homilies, is On the Priesthood, in six books. It is a dialogue with his friend Basil, springing from the weight of the priestly office, which both of them had tried, in different ways, to reckon with. He writes of the dignity of the priesthood, of the danger of it, of the skill a pastor needs, and of the judgement that hangs over a man who handles holy things badly. A layman should read it before he despises a priest. A man thinking of orders should read it before he romanticises orders. It is not a long book. It is a severe one, and the severity is affectionate.

The homilies are why the Church calls him a Doctor. He will not separate the altar from the poor. A golden chalice beside a hungry congregation draws his anger, and the anger is Catholic, not political. He preached that way in a capital, to people who could hurt him, and in the end the court and his enemies drove him out. He died on the road. The Church's judgement is his feast, and the liturgy that bears his name. The Byzantine tradition ascribes the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom to him. That ascription is tradition, and the Eastern Churches have prayed under his name ever since. A Latin Catholic who never hears that liturgy still owes him the homilies, because the Latin Church also reads Paul through him.

How to read him: choose one work. Either On the Priesthood, read straight through, or a set of the homilies on Matthew, a few at a time, with the Gospel open. Do not buy the complete Chrysostom and begin at volume one with a plan of conquest. He is a preacher. Hear him on one book of Scripture until the hearing changes the way you read that book in the Mass.

Jerome was a priest, a monk, and for a time the secretary of Pope Damasus. He died at Bethlehem in 420. The book for which the Church will not let him be forgotten is the Bible in Latin. Damasus asked him to revise the Latin Gospels, which had grown confused in copying. He did it. He went on, in Bethlehem, to translate the Old Testament from the Hebrew, with the help of Jewish teachers, and with a sharpness of temper he did not always control. The result, completed and corrected across his life and in the Church's use after him, is the Vulgate, the common Latin Bible. For more than a thousand years it was the Bible of the Latin liturgy, of theology, and of preaching. The Douay-Rheims is an English Bible made from that Latin tradition.

Trent's decree on the authentic Vulgate, already met in the section on Scripture, is the reason a Catholic honours this labour without turning Jerome into an oracle of textual fashion. The Church asked a scholar to serve the word. He served it. The Church then judged the text, in the Church's own authority, and held it fast so that preachers would not be blown about. Jerome is the Doctor of that service. A beginner meets him, first, simply by reading a Catholic Bible and knowing whose work stands behind the Latin Church's centuries of hearing it.

He lived at Bethlehem, near the cave of the Nativity, in a monastic household that included the Roman widows and virgins who had left a great life to live beside the Scriptures, Paula and her daughter Eustochium among them. The letters he wrote to them, and to many others, are a large book in themselves. Some of the letters are harsh. He made enemies easily, and he enjoyed making some of them. The Church canonised the man and received the translation. The Church did not canonise every insult, and did not make every opinion in a preface into a doctrine. The same caution that governs a reading of Augustine governs a reading of Jerome. Take the faith. Take the Bible he served. Do not take the temper as if it were part of the Creed.

How to read him: do not begin with the controversies. Begin by using the Bible, and then read one or two of the prefaces he set before the biblical books, which are short, concrete, and full of the cost of the work. A letter on the monastic life, read with the caution just given, can follow. The complete letters are a shore, not a first swim.

Gregory's life, the papacy in a hungry Rome, the title servant of the servants of God, and the mission to the English, is told with the Saints. Three books are the ones this shelf exists to name.

The Pastoral Rule, or Pastoral Care, was written when he was drawn to the papacy, and it became the book by which the Latin Church trained bishops for centuries. It is in four parts. The first asks what sort of man ought to come to rule, and what sort ought not. The second asks how the pastor is to live, because a life that contradicts the preaching empties it. The third, the longest, teaches him to speak differently to different people: men and women, rich and poor, the cheerful and the sad, the bold and the timid, those who sin in secret and those who sin in public. The fourth brings him back to himself, so that the work of teaching does not ruin the teacher by vanity or by exhaustion. A layman who reads it will understand what the Church expects of a priest, and will examine his own tongue before he examines the clergy. A priest who has never read it has missed a book the Church put in the centre of his office.

The Dialogues are four books on holy men of Italy, written as conversations. The second book is entirely the life of Saint Benedict. Anyone who has read the Rule and has not read this life has the constitution without the man. Gregory is not writing a modern biography. He is writing the Church's early portrait, signs and all, and the Church has been content to know Benedict through it. The other three books tell of further holy men, and of death and the life beyond, in a Roman voice that is pastoral rather than curious.

The Moralia, or Morals on the Book of Job, run to thirty-five books. He began them as conferences for the monks who were with him in Constantinople, when he was still a deacon of the Roman church. They read Job in a literal sense, a moral sense, and a sense that leads to Christ and the Church. It is a great book and a very long one. It is not a beginner's first Gregory. It is named here so that no one orders it by mistake, thinking it is the book of Gregory, when the Pastoral Rule was the one intended. Later, when the Psalms and Job are already friends, the Moralia can become a life's companion. Gregory also ordered the Church's prayer and the Church's music in ways the tradition remembers. The Roman chant bears his name. The books of chant as they have come down are later than his lifetime. The name Gregorian is the Church's memory of him, not a claim that he wrote every melody now sung under it.

How to read him: the Pastoral Rule first, entire, even if you are not a priest. Then the second book of the Dialogues, beside the Rule of Benedict. Stop there for a long time. The Moralia can wait without being despised.

Ambrose was bishop of Milan from 374 until his death in 397. He is the Father who makes this shelf touch Augustine in the flesh. Tradition says he was still a catechumen, and the governor of the province, when the people acclaimed him bishop, a child's voice crying out the choice, and that he was baptised, ordained, and consecrated in a short span of days. He then studied the faith he had been seized to teach, which is a more honest beginning than it sounds. Augustine came to Milan, heard him preach, was undone by him, and was baptised by him at the Easter Vigil of 387. The Confessions are, in that sense, a fruit of Ambrose's pulpit.

The books a beginner can finish are On the Mysteries and On the Sacraments. They are the instructions he gave to the newly baptised, explaining what had been done to them at the font and at the altar. In that age the deepest rites were not unpacked beforehand. After baptism, the bishop opened them: the water, the anointing, the white garment, the Eucharist as the body and blood of Christ. A Catholic who wants to know how the early Church spoke of the sacraments, in a cathedral rather than in a speculation, should read these. They are short. They assume the rites. They do not argue a stranger into belief from nowhere.

Ambrose also taught his people to sing the faith. A number of the oldest Latin hymns are his, or of his school, and the Latin Church has never stopped needing what he knew: that a congregation which sings the doctrine keeps the doctrine. And he taught the empire a lesson it dislikes. After the massacre at Thessalonica, he required the emperor Theodosius to do public penance before he returned to the sacraments. The received account is not a legend invented to decorate a bishop. It is the Church remembering that the altar is not a department of the palace, and that a pastor who will not say so is not in Ambrose's line.

How to read him: On the Mysteries and On the Sacraments, after you have been to Mass enough times to recognise what he is describing. Then let his hymns, if you meet them in the Office, be part of the reading. The longer doctrinal works can wait. You will already have met him where it most matters, at the font, at the altar, and in the garden where Augustine finally opened Saint Paul.

Do not read the Fathers in order to collect lines against other Christians, or against the Pope, or against the present. That use turns teachers into weapons, and it is how people leave the Church while believing they have become ancient. Read one work, from beginning to end, in a translation the Church would not be ashamed of. The older English sets of the Fathers, made in the nineteenth century, are plain and sometimes stiff, and they are honest. The stiffness is no reason to correct the Father into a modern tone. If a sentence is hard, sit with it. If a sentence seems to clash with the Catechism, assume you have misread the Father or have not yet learned the distinction the Church later made, and ask. Do not advertise the clash.

A right first choice from the shelf, if this is the one book you begin, is Athanasius on the Incarnation, or the Martyrdom of Polycarp, or Ignatius to the Romans. Each can be finished. Each will make the later books, Augustine included, easier to recognise as Catholic.

Do not begin with all of them. A shelf bought in a month and read in none is not knowledge. It is a way of feeling Catholic without the labour. These books have waited for centuries. They can wait until one of them has been begun properly, and lived in, and in some real sense finished.

If you have not yet lived with the Gospel, begin there, and begin inside the Church. Choose one Gospel, Saint Luke or Saint John. Read a little at a time. Hear it on Sunday in the Mass, in the company of the Old Testament and of the apostolic letters, and do not set your private reading above that hearing. Keep the Creed beside you. When you are lost, ask the Church, not a stranger with a theory and a verse. Do not open the City of God, the Summa, the Catechism, and a Father on the same evening in order to feel that the study has started. The Gospel is not one item on a list. It is the book the other books exist to serve. Stay with it until it is no longer new to you. The others will still be there.

If the Gospel is already being heard at Mass, and you want a second book for this season, choose one, and refuse the others until this one has done its work.

Choose the Catechism, one part only, if the need is to know what the Church teaches and to stop reconstructing the faith from fragments.

Choose the Imitation of Christ, one short chapter a day, and the fourth book included, if the need is to follow Christ in small things and to be made simpler.

Choose the Introduction to the Devout Life if you live in a household, a trade, or a marriage, and you have half-believed that holiness is for monks.

Choose the Confessions if the need is to see a real conversion told to God, with the delays left in.

Choose the Secret of the Rosary if the beads are still a duty you do not understand, and let the reading end in the prayer.

Choose On the Incarnation if you want one Father, complete, and not a tour of eight names.

Do not choose the Summa, and do not choose the City of God, and do not choose the whole shelf of the Fathers, as the first book. They are great. They are not the door. When the door you have chosen has been walked through, one of them can be the next, and by then you will know which question is actually yours. Until then, one book. Begin it. Finish it. Then, and only then, take up another.