Catena Aurea

Commentary

on the

Four Gospels,

collected out of the

Works Of The Fathers

by

S. Thomas Aquinas

vol. iii part i

St. Luke

Oxford,

john henry parker;

j. g. f. and j. rivington, london.

mdcccxliii

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The. following Compilation not being admissible into the Library of the Fathers from the date of some few of the authors introduced into it, the Editors of the latter work have been led to publish it in a separate form, being assured that those who have subscribed to their Translations of the entire Treatises of the ancient Catholic divines, will not feel less interest, or find less benefit, in the use of so very judicious and beautiful a selection from them. The Editors refer to the Preface for some account of the natural and characteristic excellences of the work, which will be found as useful in the private study of the Gospels, as it is well adapted for family reading, and full of thought for those who are engaged in religious instruction.

Oxford, May 6, 1841.

Preface

The. Catena on St. Luke differs from those on the three other Gospels, in its more frequent citations from the Greek writers. For besides the Commentaries of S. Ambrose and Bede, and certain Homilies of S. Augustine and Gregory, there seems to have been no other Latin work on St. Luke’s Gospel which St. Thomas could have used. How far he was himself acquainted with Greek, it seems difficult to determine; but from the expression feci transferri, in his Preface to the three later Gospels, it has been supposed, that for this part of his work he employed others to make translations for him from the Greek writers, which he afterwards inserted in his Catena, not always (as he says himself) giving the very words, but frequently only the sense of the passage.

From the ignorance of the Greek language at that time, it was not to be supposed that these translations would be free from error; and when we couple with this the carelessness of transcribers, we cannot be surprised that in course of time the text of the Catena should have become very corrupt, and the sense of whole passages, but particularly the names of their authors, involved in great doubt and obscurity. The mistakes on this latter point Nicolai thinks were chiefly owing to the abbreviated form and character in which the names were written, so that one name was often put for another, from its similarity; as Theophilus for Theophylact; while others were altogether omitted. In Nicolai’s edition, however, (which has been followed in the present volume,) very great corrections were made, for which, as the original works of most of the Greek writers quoted by S. Thomas no longer exist, he was chiefly indebted to the Greek Catenæ. By their assistance not only was the text carefully restored and amended from the original Greek, but the references verified afresh, and many for the first time supplied.

It may here then perhaps be useful to give first some account of the Catenæ used by Nicolai, and others which have been ...