Letter to Gregory
Origen · 235 · Before the division · public-domain-translation
2 claims in this dataset rest on this source.
Sentences remembered from it
A short letter of about 235 to a former pupil — Gregory, afterwards bishop of Neocaesarea and called Thaumaturgus — urging him to turn his Greek legal and philosophical training on the reading of Scripture. It carries the sentence that settled how the Greek church would use pagan learning: that as geometry and music and grammar and rhetoric are ancillary to philosophy, so philosophy itself is ancillary to Christianity. It survives because Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus copied it into the Philocalia, their anthology of Origen.