Access to the Church Fathers

[Senyorico]

Do you know where to access the 38 Volume Set of the writing of the Church Fathers that is translated fairly? Pdf or online may work. I’ve seen some works of Philip Schaff and there have been reviews that he tries to make it look like that the Fathers were not Catholics. Thanks!

 

[Bithynian]

38 Volume Set

There’s no set canon of Church Father works. Many scholars use, for referencing and citation, the Greek and Latin volumes compiled by J. P. Migne in the 19th century. The Latin Fathers comprise some 221 (yes, two hundred and twenty one) volumes, and the Greek Fathers at 161 volumes. (Mind you Migne’s edition covers all periods, not just the pre-Great Schism Fathers.)

For the more popular works, such as Augustine’s City of God and Confession, there’ll be many, many translations of varying quality available online and in print. Often Oxford and Penguin have some translations available.

Most Fathers’ works have never been translated into contemporary English, and older translations such as Schaff (whose writing is generally quite good) are the only ones available.

Some have only been translated very recently and can only be bought from academic publishers. For e.g. St Andrew of Caesarea’s commentary on Revelation was translated only in 2011 and is published by the Catholic University Press of America.

With all that in mind, you’re better off finding recent translations of specific works that you wish to read.

 

[phil19034]

You can start here: CHURCH FATHERS: Home

 

[adf417]

Here is one that has multiple translations for each.

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/

 

[fredystairs]

Not answering your question directly but if you have a particular question concerning a specific issue, you can go to the Catholic Answers website, type in the specific issue and then type in “father”. An article or two may pop up describing what the Fathers taught about that issue.

Sorry if you already knew this.

Pax

 

[JSRG]

Do you know where to access the 38 Volume Set of the writing of the Church Fathers that is translated fairly? Pdf or online may work.

The “Church Fathers” series is often divided into several sections: “The Ante-Nicene Fathers” (10 volumes) and “Nicene & Post-Nicene Fathers First Series” (14 volumes) and “Nicene & Post-Nicene Fathers Second Series” (14 volumes).

They’re available online in a number of locations. I believe all of it is at New Advent:
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/

If you’re just looking for a specific work of a church father, New Advent is the easiest because all of the individual works are listed there. It also, in my view, has the best format for reading. The downside is that all the footnotes are missing–it doesn’t even tell you where the footnotes should be, so that you’d at least know to look for them if it seems important–which can be irritating in some cases. And if you’re looking for a specific page of a specific volume (as could happen if someone is giving a citation), it is of no help, as everything is organized by the specific works.

CCEL has the full series:
https://www.ccel.org/fathers.html

This does retain the footnotes. However, I dislike their reading format tremendously, as you can only look at small bits at a time.

Sacred Texts seems to have the full set, and their format seems to show more at once than CCEL:
https://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/ecf/index.htm

These retain footnotes.

If you want to look at the volumes in as close as possible to what they were when they were printed–other than actually looking at the printed ones, of course–then there is archive.org, which hosts scanned (but searchable!) copies of all of the volumes. Only problem with archive.org is there does not seem to be a convenient volume list. You have to basically do a search for the volume you’re looking for and then click on it, and to make things confusing you’ll have uploads of the same volume from different people who have scanned them.