[Footnotes have been moved to the end and renumbered]
1. Reading e0n toi=j to&poij . Migne has e0n toi=j tu&poij "in their impressions." The intention was not fulfilled until a year or two later, after his visit to the Church of Babylon.
2. The use of the word "philosophy" to designate Christianity is common in the writings of the fourth century, and may perhaps be traced back to Origen's synthesis of the Gospel and philosophy. It is employed in a twofold sense, of the Christian religion generally and of asceticism in particular. Cf. Greg. Naz., Or., VII, 9 (describing the asceticism of his brother Cresarius): "As philosophy is the greatest, so is it the most difficult, of professions, which can be taken in hand by but few, and only by those who have been called forth by the divine magnanimity." See a careful note in Boulenger, Gregoire de Nazianze, Discours funèbres (Paris, 1908), p. lvi.
3. Thecla was a contemporary of St. Paul, according to the Acts of Paul and Thecla, which may well have been founded on fact. See article "Thecla" in Dictionary of Christian Biography, and the chapter on Thecla in Sir W. M. Ramsay's Church in the Roman Empire.
4. toi=j a)semnote/roij peri\ tw~n gunaikei/wn dihgh&masin .
5. e1rgon de\ tw~n kata_ th_n zwh_n tau&thn spoudazo&menon ou)de\n, o#ti mh_ pa&rergon . The play on words is hard to reproduce.
6. In the long dialogue, De Anima et Resurrectione (Migne, XLVI, 11-160), Gregory purports to reproduce this conversation.
7. In order to assure them that she was really dying, she uttered aloud the prayer in the next paragraph.
8. According to the well-known story, the Cross was discovered by Helena, mother of Constantine the Great (c. 327). The earliest mention of the wood of the Cross as a relic seems to be in Cyril of Jerusalem's Catechetical Lectures, See iv. 10, "The whole world has since been filled with pieces of the wood of the Cross." Cf. x. 19, xiii. 4.
9. eu)ruxwri/an .
This text was transcribed by Roger Pearse, 2003. All material on this page is in the public domain - copy freely.
Greek text is rendered using the Scholars Press SPIonic font, free from here .