“The children of the philosophers speak of geometry and music and grammar and rhetoric…”
The children of the philosophers speak of geometry and music and grammar and rhetoric and astronomy as being ancillary to philosophy; and in the same way we might speak of philosophy itself as being ancillary to Christianity.
Origen · Letter to Gregory · ANF IX, Letter to Gregory §1
The sentence that settled how the Greek church would use pagan learning. Origen is writing to a former pupil who could have been a distinguished Roman lawyer, and rather than telling him to abandon his training he tells him to subordinate it: the schools already treat geometry and rhetoric as servants of philosophy, so let philosophy in turn serve theology. Gregory took the advice, became bishop of Neocaesarea, and wrote a panegyric on his teacher that survives.
How this is known
These words were matched, word for word, against this project’s own copy of the volume cited.
Section 1 of the Letter to Gregory, in the region of ANF vol. 9 that carries the letter, outside the quotation marks the translator uses for Scripture. The letter is its own region: the volume prints it under the Commentary on John’s title page and numbers its sections in the same style, so a declaration that did not separate them would have credited this sentence to the commentary.
Read in Menzies, ANF vol. 9 (1897) · Allan Menzies
Also by
- Origen every saying recorded of this person, and their page