I am being introduced to authors with whom I was unfamiliar but now feel as if I have picked up additional guides on a journey.  (More on that later.)  Robert Wilken’s book, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought is a journey into early church history and significant thinker-writers who “constructed a new intellectual and spiritual world” that still informs us today.

I appreciate Wilken’s emphasis on the mind-and-heart and take it as a personal reminder of the importance to guard one’s heart as the mind is developed (emphasis mine):

“The distinctive marks of early Christian thinking can be set down in a few sentences.
Christians reasoned from the history of Israel and of Jesus Christ, from the experience of
Christian worship, and from the Holy Scriptures (and early interpretations of the
Scriptures), that is to say from history, from ritual, and from text.  Christian thinking is
anchored in the church’s life, sustained by such devotional practices as the daily
recitation of the psalms, and nurtured by the liturgy, in particular, the regular celebration
of the Eucharist. Theory was not an end in itself, and concepts and abstractions were
always put of a deeper immersion of the res, the thing itself, the mystery of Christ and of
the practice of the Christian life. The goal was not only understanding but love, and at
various points in the book, in discussing the knowledge of God, the Trinity, the virtues,
and especially in the final chapter on the passions, I have tried to show the
indispensability of love to Christian thinking.”

Wilken, Robert Louis. The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.  pp xvii-xviii.

“If I speak in the tongues of man and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”  “Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus….”  (1 Cor 13:1-2 ESV; Phil 2:1 KJV)