Читать книгу The Journey: How an obscure Byzantine Saint became our Santa Claus - David Price Williams - Страница 87

Alexandria near the meeting house where I was studying with Eusebius. There was quite a community of believers in that area so I had no difficulty finding a place.

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The months seemed to disappear like smoke and my time in Alexandria sped by. In the end I devoted more than two years to studying Christian theology from Eusebius and from other luminaries I met there. It was a life so very different to the aimless existence I had led in Patara. As I immersed myself in study and prayer; I became acquainted with profound ideas about the meaning of our life on earth.

One of the great Christian intellectuals who had lived in Alexandria was the Athenian scholar Clement who was still very much remembered here, almost a hundred years later. He had been very deeply versed in the writings of the ancient Greeks, especially in the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey’ of Homer, books which I had been forced to read as a child. But he had gone on to compare what he described as ‘this pagan literature’ with the teachings of our Lord to emphasise the truly revolutionary thinking that Christianity represented. He showed how the steadfast love of God described by Jesus totally triumphed philosophically over the casual relationships even the Homeric heroes endeavoured to have with the manifestly petulant and prejudiced gods of the old world of Mount Olympus. Clement had a mastery of the

DAVID PRICE WILLIAMS