The Treatise Against Hermogenes


Book Description

Hermogenes was still living when Carthage's native son took up his pen to oppose him, but that did not make Tertullian's polemic more considerate, or his satire less passionate and biting. Hermogenes taught a form of materialism. Tertullian brilliantly convicts him of contradiction. +







Against Hermogenes


Book Description

The doctrine of Hermogenes has this taint of novelty. He is, in short, a man living in the world at the present time; by his very nature a heretic, and turbulent withal, who mistakes loquacity for eloquence, and supposes impudence to be firmness, and judges it to be the duty of a good conscience to speak ill of individuals. Moreover, he despises God's law in his painting, maintaining repeated marriages, alleges the law of God in defense of lust, and yet despises it in respect of his art. He falsifies by a twofold process--with his cautery and his pen. He is a thorough adulterer, both doctrinally and carnally, since he is rank indeed with the contagion of your marriage hacks, and has also failed in cleaving to the rule of faith as much as the apostle's own Hermogenes. However, never mind the man, when it is his doctrine which I question. He does not appear to acknowledge any other Christ as Lord, though he holds Him in a different way; but by this difference in his faith he really makes Him another being, --nay, he takes from Him everything which is God, since he will not have it that He made all things of nothing. For, turning away from Christians to the philosophers, from the Church to the Academy and the Porch, he learned there from the Stoics how to place Matter (on the same level) with the Lord, just as if it too had existed ever both unborn and unmade, having no beginning at all nor end, out of which, according to him, the Lord afterwards created all things.




Hermogenes' on Types of Style


Book Description

Cecil Wooten has produced the first translation into any modern langauage of a key treatise of the ancient world. He provides a faithful English translation of Hermogenes' analysis based on a reliable Greek text established by Rabe at the beginning of thi




Invention and Method


Book Description

This volume contains the Greek text, textual apparatus, and first published English translation of two treatises on rhetoric, with introductory material and notes. Once attributed to Hermogenes of Tarsus, these treatises are now believed to be by unknown authors writing in the second or third century C.E. or later. The first treatise, entitled On Invention, is a handbook for students providing formulas to aid them in the composition of declamations on assigned themes. The second treatise, On the Method of Forcefulness, discusses prose style with special attention to figures of speech. Extensive notes interpret the often-difficult content and relate it to other writing on rhetoric. The Greek text is that of Hugo Rabe (1913).




A Treatise on the Soul


Book Description

Tertullian, a native of Carthage in North Africa, was an Early Church writer who lived between 155 and 240 A.D. A Treatise on the Soul is a fascinating, philosophical work which reads much like Plato or Greek philosophers of antiquity.




Hermogenes and the Renaissance


Book Description

Annabel M. Patterson offers here a reassessment of the place of Hermogenes, a Greek rhetorician of the second century A.D., in literary history. She shows that the literary men of the European Renaissance-scholars, critics, and poets-found Hermogenes' Concerning Ideas both important and extremely useful, and she finds that they vigorously applied his concepts to create "a lovely conformitie." The author first gives the history of this treatise on style and a detailed critical analysis of the Seven Ideas or categories of style. The book then demonstrates genre by genre how knowledge of the Seven Ideas can improve one's understanding of poetic development, especially in England, and reveals how the Ideas operate in the works of Tasso, Donne, Sidney, Shakespeare, Marvell, Jonson, Spenser, Milton , and many other poets and critics. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.




Theology, Creation, and Environmental Ethics


Book Description

Winner of the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise, 2009 This book argues that the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) sets up a support system for a "logic of domination" toward human and earth others. Conceptually inspired by the work of theologian Catherine Keller and feminist philosopher of the environment Val Plumwood, it follows a genealogical method in examining how the concept of creation out of nothing materializes in the world throughout different periods in the history of the Christian West.




The Descent of God


Book Description

This is a fascinating study which confirms that there is as much support in the Fathers as in heterodox sources - though different - for the idea of a suffering God. Louis Dupre, Yale University Joseph Hallman here makes a significant contribution to the perennial theological dilemma: how can an unchanging God relate to a changing world? The author displays a mastery of the patristic sources as well as familiarity with contemporary philosophical approaches to the issue. The Greek philosophical assumption of the immutability of God has retained a profound influence on Christian thought until modern times despite the attempts of patristic writers to harmonize the Incarnation with God's immutability. Hallman suggests that the most promising resolution to this dilemma comes to us in the work of Whitehead. Carl A. Volz, Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary Hallman's book is unusual and timely. Hallman is a systematic thinker, not a historian, yet he has taken the time to read the early Christian sources attentively, and his conclusions are surprising and provocative. In a sense, this book is a theological version of candid camera: it sets forth those things that early Christian thinkers are not supposed to have said.... In an age in which historians of Christian thought ignore contemporary thinkers, and systematic theologians act as though Christian thought began with the Enlightenment, 'The Descent of God' is a challenge to both brands of obscurantism. Robert L. Wilken, University of Virginia




On Illustrious Men (The Fathers of the Church, Volume 100)


Book Description

Often cited as a source of biographical information on ancient Christian authors, On Illustrious Men provides St. Jerome's personal evaluations of his forebears and contemporaries, as well as catalogs of patristic writings known to him




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