/lit/ - Literature

>>23308844
Augustine might be better for your own spiritual growth, and a good piece of secondary literature will explain the common philosophical vocabulary and allusions. I’m not expert but I hope some people in this thread will give you some recommendations. Godspeed

>>23308844
>Should I read the pagan philosophers like plato and aristotle first
Reading the primary sources without commentary is a meme of Harris tweed-wearing, pipe-smoking, Chesterton-quoting "classical education" dilettanti. Proper classical education, which ends in sacred theology only after mastery of the trivium, quadrivium, and the natural sciences, builds on commentaries and manuals.
Reading Plato and Aristotle is acceptable for leisure but not if you want to have the sacramental worldview. Here are some paleo-Thomist manuals:
isidore.co/aquinas/
aquinas.cc
isidore.co/CalibreLibrary/Woodbury, Austin Maloney, S.M., 1899-1979/
isidore.co/CalibreLibrary/Pohle, Joseph, 1852-1922/
maritain.nd.edu/jmc/aristotl.htm
https://www.faith.org.uk/article/january-february-2014-the-collapse-of-the-manualist-tradition
https://onepeterfive.com/defense-manuals-manualism/
https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2008/11/neo-scholastic-revival.html

City of God by Augustine is pretty much the cornerstone of Catholic theology really long but a rewarding read. You could check out “This is the Faith” by Ripley if you want an explanation of what modern Catholics believe it covers pretty much every aspect of Catholic life

>>23308844
Literally just read the Apostolic Fathers and you will find out that Catholics/Orthodox have been practicing basically the same thing all the way back to Jesus and that the "original Christians" Protestants pretend to be like never actually existed.

Getting bogged down in Greek philosophy just for that end will be a distraction to that end, but really honestly just read the Enneads of Plotinus to get the condensed specific version of Platonism that Augustine was thinking with.

>>23308844
D.C. Schindler's stuff is quite good, you could start here although the prior volume on modern conceptions of freedom and their problems is good too.

Wallace's Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present is excellent too and fairly short and accessible although it does get into the weeds at points.

Michael Sugrue's The Teaching Company lectures on Plato are excellent, although obviously a mile wide and a inch deep for that.

Von Balthasar's book on St. Maximus is great but more advanced I'd say since it assumes a familiarity with Patristic philosophy.

Harmless' Augustine in His Own Words is a great introduction to Augustine's corpus. His book Mystics is a good introduction to many big writers, Evargrius, St. Bonaventure, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Merton, Hildegard, etc. He has a good book on the Desert Fathers too.

>>23309114
Schindler is really for everyone in that first book, for them to be able to see the value of the classical and medieval view in the modern context. His book on Plato is, by contrast, fairly technical, but it's also a good one.

>>23309124
Forgot Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. That's a pretty big classic on the value of the classical tradition for meeting the challenges of today's moral nihilism. But it's also maybe not quite where I'd start because it is more of a critique of modernity than summary of the past.

>>23308844
Read the greeks, because even if most people dont want to admit, christianity has been infused and influenced by them since the middle ages.
Also as far as I know if you study theology, you also start with the greeks and romans so you can understand the deeper meanings of people like Aquinas writings.

>>23308844
In my case, I was already very knowledgeable about Stoicism and somewhat knowledgeable about Platonism and Neoplatonism when I truly started to study Catholicism.

I think they made things easier for me, but maybe they are not strictly necessary.

I think that the anon who wrote about reading the Thomist manuals is good. Just remind to google when you see some terms that have a different meaning than what we are used to (usually, Aristotelian terms, Aristotle is the one Classical philosopher I understand the least because I thought his writing style was boring).

But remember to not pirate books, since it is a sin. Either buy them (Catholic books are not expensive, usually) or loaj them in a library, get some in the public domain, etc...

>>23309417
Pretty sure libraries are a sin

>>23309422
The Vatican has a few fairly famous libraries. So do Catholic universities (and I don't mean the CINO ones that have LGBT clubs and where they can't talk about Church doctrine).

>>23308844

If you're serious about this and want to really understand theology and people like Augustine, you need to understand Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus at the very least. Of those, you should start with Aristotle - this was the traditional curriculum. Aristotle teaches you to think carefully about philosophical issues in a way that Plato doesn't, he's much more scientific. So you work through Aristotle, then read Plato. Or read them at the same time, but definitely read Aristotle. Aquinas himself wrote good (though biased) commentaries that are all online and useful. At least for figuring out what an obscure passage means, Aquinas is just fine (he mostly plagiarized Averroes anyway).

Once you have a firm grasp on Aristotle and Plato, you're ready for Plotinus.

>>23309103
>>Catholics/Orthodox have been practicing basically the same thing all the way back to Jesus
>t. hasn't read the Apostolic Fathers

>>23309417
Some Catholic sites provide free faith oriented literature, it may all be public domain though, that I cannot attest to.

>>23308844
>Pope becomes openly apostate
>videos of the Catholic leadership worshipping Lucifer circulate
>"I'm a former protestant Christian looking to enter the Catholic faith."
You are an idiot.

>>23310014
You should know by now that faux-converts on the internet care much less about being faithful to Christ than they do about looking cool. Only, it's weird how they care so little about how they look right this moment, and just put their blinders on so all they can see is Catholicism in its purest form.

>>23309926
Origen is probably more important than Plotinus, but Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus are all worth reading. At the very least, the Isagoge is useful when you get to the Categories for Aristotle and the Prophyrean Tree.

But Origen represents the height of middle Platonism and the Biblical exegesis that would come to define the church of late antiquity, having a huge influence for the climate in which St. Augustine is writing. And he's the key to understanding St. Maximus and Evargrius.

St. Anthanasius would be another one.

>>23310014
>Pope becomes openly apostate
>videos of the Catholic leadership worshipping Lucifer circulate

Why spew hateful lies?

>>23310287
The pope is not an apostate. Slander will get you there though.

>>23310205
The only faux converts are Tradcaths... the very kind of person you're talking to.

>>23310373
Yes, you're not disagreeing with me, except that orthobros make up a good portion of them as well.

>>23310373
Tradcaths are the one saying that the Pope is an apostate and that the Catholic Church worships Lucifer?

>>23309926
Truly? Most advice on the internet seems to be to read the 5 dialogues (plato) as an introduction to philosophy before moving on to aristotle, which is apparently more difficult?
I'll definitely make use of st thomas' commentaries on aristotle's writings.
I'm interested in learning about the major developments in catholic theology through reading the primary sources, and I understand that this will be a multi-year project, so I would really appreciate if any one of you can suggest a "core" curriculum of books/documents that are absolutely necessary to read in the history of catholic thought from plato to the moderns like lubac or hildebrand, so that after reading these I can have a basic structure from which to start reading everything else that happens to catch my interest.
Many thanks!

>>23310398
I'm not that Anon. I think it is very good to study hard, but don't forget to make an effort to internalize things, rather than seeing everything in an overly intellectual way.

>>23310398
Plato's work is really great just on literary merit but it's also much easier to get the wrong idea of what Plato is talking about because of this. At times, he has Socrates advance bad arguments on purpose and a lot of the dialogues are left pretty open ended.

Aristotle is a lot drier. Not all of it is polished literary works, some is lecture notes compiled by his students. It's easier to not get anything out of Aristotle but confusion, but generally easier to avoid completely misunderstanding him.

The big thing with Plato is to not end up in a place where you think he is just saying "the body is bad, everything is determined by magical forms that float free or the world in their own magic space." It's a lot more nuanced, complex and beautiful than that.

Pic related has one of the more succinct explanations of the Forms I've seen. It also has the benefit of being quite accessible for most of it.

St. Augustine is a joy to read. St. Thomas can be a slog. One thing that helps is jumping to the response and then flipping back and forth between the objections and responses instead of reading it straight through.

Definitely don't miss Boethius, at least the Consolation of Philosophy. It's a work of art and a great attempt at synthesizing Plato and Aristotle. It wasn't the most copied book outside the Bible in the Middle Ages for no reason. Its a great description of the Platonic ascent.

>>23310398
The "Five" are good for being introductory, but The Republic and Phaedrus really are his peak. Symposium is up there too. The Statesman is more skippable but good to return to for explaining how the Good is filtered through normative measure in everyday life. The Protagoras and Gorgias are also really good. You'll see the bad sort of post-modernism really isn't anything new, but predates Socrates, and the responses to are still illuminating.

>>23308844
>P.S. I'm mainly interested in reading primary sources
Fair enough. Although I am no expert, I would note, as a point of possible interest, that the current generation of Thomist scholars does appear to be doing very interesting and important work, e.g., Dominic Legge, The Trinitarian Christology of St Thomas Aquinas.

>>23309103
>Catholics/Orthodox have been practicing basically the same thing all the way back to Jesus
>what were the ecumenical councils
Christianity didn't take shape until centuries after Jesus.

>>23311041
>Christianity didn't take shape until centuries after Jesus.

The Catholic Mass as described by St. Justin Martyr circa AD 155:

>And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place,

>and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read...

>then the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things.

>Then we all rise together and pray, and...when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen;

>and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given,

>and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons.

What Justin Martyr wrote tracks with the structure and substance of the Catholic Mass.

To wit: the liturgy of the word, with readings from the OT and NT, followed by the homily, followed by the liturgy of the Eucharist, the great Amen, and the distribution of Communion. After Communion, deacons or other authorized persons are given the consecrated Host(s) to be given to the sick and homebound.

In this same text, Justin Martyr's Apology, referring to the Eucharist, he wrote: "Not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Savior, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh."

>>23309941
>>23311041

>>23311083
I'm >>23311095

Was about to post this image here, but it didn't go.

>>23311041
>Christianity isn't legitimate because theological points were more explicitly developed by later theologians
This is like saying America didn't exist in the 1700s because the Declaration of Independence doesn't include multi-volume treatises on the appellate jurisdiction of the Washington D.C. Federal Court of Appeals.

Such a stupidly dishonest way of thinking when applied to literally any other topic.

>>23309941
Please, offer your own cognitive dissonance of how Ignatius' Epistle to the Smyrnaeans defending the real presence of the Eucharist, upholding the ecclesiology of bishops and literally using the term "Catholic Church" isn't actually regular Apostolic Christianity.

>>23311041
You can already find a LOT of the threads in Origen who is living just over a century after Jesus. And you can see where he is coming from in texts a generation before him (which is also around the later dates for the Gospels being finished). You could posit some sort of radically different ur-Christianity, but you're basically doing so without any sources.

>>23311798
Century and a half or so. But still. And you have sources from before him too.

>>23310989
That certainly does look interesting. I've added it to my reading list

>>23308844
I’m reading the Bible and reading the Greeks atm. I began with five dialogues, went back and studied the presocratics, and now am reading Hesiod and the Iliad. I want to gain an understanding of the myths and history of Greece before continuing on with the philosophy side of things. I figure by the time I finish the Bible I’ll be all caught up and ready to dive into theology.

Catholic or Orthodox?