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/lit/ - Literature

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2983610 No.2983610 [Reply] [Original]

What are some important Christian text outside of the Bible?

>> No.2983626
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2983626

Mere Christianity by CS Lewis

>> No.2983630

I personally think that what is noteworthy in Christianism is not the Bible, but its philosophers.

Recommending the main ones: Augustine, Aquinas, Marsilius, Luther, and Calvin.

>> No.2983634

Nothing, die.

>> No.2983633

The ones I have found most worth reading in no particular order:

Augustine of Hippo - Confessions, City of God
Dante - The Divine Comedy
Julian of Norwich - Revelations of Divine Love
Jeremy Taylor - Holy Dying
Sir Thomas Browne - Religio Medici
Dietrich Bonhoeffer - The Cost of Discipleship

>> No.2983639

Butler's Lives of the Saints and Fox's Book of Martyrs.

>> No.2983643

>>2983639
>Foxe's

>> No.2983645

Pensées, Blaise Pascal

>look at that accent aigu and marvel!

>> No.2983655

Let´s not forget about Milton!
>Paradise Lost
>Paradise Regain´d

>> No.2983658

I rather enjoy the poetry of St. John of the Cross. It's mostly about fucking Jesus.

>> No.2983659

>>2983655
Or Langland, Donne, Herbert, Hopkins etc

>> No.2983663

If you want a text on how Christianity developed, MacCulloch's "Christianity, The First Three Thousand Years" is pretty well regarded. I only read about a third of it, because it's rather dense and over a thousand pages.

>> No.2983666

>>2983663
Speaking of history Bede and Eusebius are well worth reading too!

>> No.2983668

Tertullian.

>> No.2983675

TALMUDIC BOOKS

>> No.2983677

Anselm, Adelard, Pseudo-Dionysus.

>>2983663
>dense and over a thousand pages.
Btw, does anyone around here have COMPLETELY read the City of God? That thing is huge...

>> No.2983680

>religious crap
>important
lel
Next you tell me philosophy is important.

>> No.2983682

>>2983677
>Btw, does anyone around here have COMPLETELY read the City of God? That thing is huge..
Yes. In Latin. I hate myself.

>> No.2983685

>>2983680
>zomg le troll!!11!eleven.xD

Happy now, anon?

>> No.2983708

>>2983675
Are they really worth reading? All I know about them is the awesome story of the rabbis who tell God to GTFO when they're talking shop and God admits they're right.

>> No.2983712
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2983712

Aquinas in da house, yo. Check out Summa Theologica.

>> No.2983773

C.S. Lewis' various non-fiction essays & books (incl. "The Screwtape Letters") are useful; so is most of S. Kierkegaard's corpus (I know he usually gets co-opted as "The Father Of Existentialism" by lazy academics, but he's a Christian thinker first and foremost). But the Bible is the one that counts.

>> No.2983783
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2983783

Sure is Western Christianity in here...

>> No.2983845

>>2983610

OP, a serious answer for once.

Ignore all the other newbs recommending C.S.Lewis or Aquinas or whatever; what you want are the writings of the Church Fathers.


Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Fathers

Then google 'church fathers' and start reading.

>> No.2984075

>>2983845
Yes OP, a serious answer, because no one here have already said to read Augustine!

>> No.2984122

>>2983783
>literal patriarchy
check yr privilege

seriously though a lot of good ones have been mentioned but you might also want to check out the Book of Common Prayer, particularly the 1928 version

"Man, that is born of a woman, hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay.
In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased?"

>> No.2984131

>>2984122
Oh good call. Everyman's Classics publishes a great edition of the 1662 version.

>> No.2984681

>Mere Christianity by CS Lewis
>In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others. We do believe that some of the people who tried to change the moral ideas of their own age were what we would call Reformers or Pioneers–people who understood morality better than their neighbours did. Very well then. The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.

What? Lewis, you goddamn retard, I'm obviously comparing other moralities to the one I happen to hold. How the fuck did you get to be a professor at Oxford?

>> No.2984782

Anon already mentioned this one, and I'd like the emphasis this book. The Screwtape Letters.

>> No.2984788

The New Testament

>> No.2984790

>>2984782
>>2983626

DFW's favorite book.

>> No.2984811

On the literal interpretation of genesis
Life of Constantine

>> No.2984873

>>2984681

Mere Christianity is adapted from radio sermons Lewis made, and it shows. It's fucking crap which has no place anywhere outside an evangelical's greasy fist. Honestly, I don't know why anyone would recommend him - this is the man who championed the trilemma as a legitimate reason to believe in the truth of Christianity. Trash fantasist, trash apologist. Mediocre bullshit so intent on relating to the skeptic that it loses all traces of religious feeling - to say nothing of logical merit.

>> No.2984894

The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church by Vladimir Lossky

Never read it, but I heard it's quite important and held in high regard

>> No.2984928
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2984928

>>2984873
>to say nothing of logical merit

Then why don't you say something about it? The trilemma isn't a proof and it's unfortunate you've misconstrued it as such—its only purpose is to combat the mealy-mouthed claim that Jesus was "a great teacher" but not divine. The point is that he was either divine and he knew it, merely human and didn't know it, or merely human and lying. Only one of these inspires confidence in his teachings.

>>2984681
You left out the important part of this quote. "The reason why your idea of New York can be truer or less true than mine is that New York is a real place, existing quite apart from what either of us thinks. If when each of us said 'New York' each means merely 'The town I am imagining in my own head', how could one of us have truer ideas than the other? There would be no question of truth or falsehood at all." When you create a basis of comparison, something more than, "Your idea is not my idea and my idea is right," you have created something independent of your own idea. Sorry you'll never get to be a professor at Oxford :(


I can also throw in a suggestion that you flip through the Table Talk of Martin Luther because parts of it are crazy
>The emperor Frederick, father of Maximilian, invited a necromancer to dine with him, and, by his knowledge of magic, turned his guest's hands into griffins claws. He then wanted him to eat, but the man, ashamed, hid his claws under the table.

>> No.2984940

>>2984928
>When you create a basis of comparison, something more than, "Your idea is not my idea and my idea is right," you have created something independent of your own idea
But that doesn't in any way prove this Real Morality exists, only that people would find it nice if it did. However, Lewis claims that this argument proves it.

>> No.2985057

>>2984940
I don't know if it's put forth as a proof. The claim he's opposing is that morality is something that's only social and taught. What he's saying, I think, is that even within this social framework there's an assumption of Real Morality externally. I'm tired and not reading very carefully so this might be off.

More from Table Talk
>A gentleman being at the point of death, a monk from the next convent came to see what he could pick up, and said to the gentleman: Sir, will you give so and so to our monastery? The dying man, unable to speak, replied by a nod of the head, whereupon the monk, turning to the gentleman's son, said: You see, your father makes us this bequest. The son said to the father: Sir, is it your pleasure that I kick this monk down stairs? The dying man nodded as before, and the son forthwith drove the monk out of doors.

>> No.2985069

>>2984681
Meh put that shit into symbolic form to test its validity.

>> No.2985073

>>2985069
Also, Tolstoy, Gospel in Brief.

>> No.2985076
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2985076

The writings of Augustine and Aquinas.

>> No.2985090

Gnostic Christian texts like the Nag Hammadi codices.

http://gnosis.org/naghamm/nhlcodex.html

At least, they're the ones I find the most fascinating.

>> No.2985612

>>2985057
Here's the beginning of that section:
>Other people wrote to me saying, ‘Isn’t what you call the Moral Law just a social convention, something that is put into us by education?’ I think there is a misunderstanding here. The people who ask that question are usually taking it for granted that if we have learned a thing from parents and teachers, then that thing must be merely a human invention. But, of course, that is not so. We all learned the multiplication table at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it. But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked? I fully agree that we learn the Rule of Decent Behaviour from parents and teachers, and friends and books, as we learn everything else. But some of the things we learn are mere conventions which might have been different–we learn to keep to the left of the road, but it might just as well have been the rule to keep to the right–and others of them, like mathematics, are real truths. The question is to which class the Law of Human Nature belongs. There are two reasons for saying it belongs to the same class as mathematics.

The second of those reasons is the paragraph I quoted before. He's not arguing for an assumed perfect morality, but one that really does exist.

>> No.2985685

>>2985612
Yeah, and he means to add weight to the 'Truth' of Real Morality by saying we're "bound to" argue in this way, but obviously that's not really very epistemologically compelling. A lot of Lewis' work is meant for popular consumption, not academic, but that's even less compelling of an argument.

one more from Table Talk tho
>A rich Jew, on his death bed, ordered that his remains should be conveyed to Ratisbon. His friends, knowing that even the corpse of a Jew could not travel without paying heavy toll, devised the expedient of packing the carcass in a barrel of wine, which they then forwarded in the ordinary way. The wagoners, not knowing what lay within, tapped the barrel, and swilled away right joyously, till they found out they had been drinking Jew's pickle! How it fared with them you may imagine.
Martin Luther ur p fucked up