Friday, October 09, 2015

 

Knowledge of Greek and Interest in Patristics

Darwell Stone, letter to Frederick W. Langton (December 4, 1937, in F.L. Cross, Darwell Stone: Churchman and Counsellor (Westminster: Dacre Press, 1943), pp. 337-338 (at 338):
Thank you for what you say about the Lexicon of Patristic Greek. There is not much prospect of my finishing it, but perhaps I may leave for some one else the materials for the whole work and a piece ready for the press and at the most a bit printed, so I can hardly look forward to giving effect to your suggestion that I should put it into Latin eventually: perhaps it ought to have been in Latin from the first, as the chief interest in it is from abroad, and, though most foreign scholars read English after a fashion, Latin is easier to them. I remember once saying to Rawlinson, the present Bishop of Derby, when he was a don at Christ Church, that by the time that the Lexicon is finished there would be no one in England who knew Greek and no one who cared what the fathers thought; and he replied that this would not matter a bit because there would still be people in Germany who knew Greek and were interested in the fathers. Probably he was right about Germany, and let us hope that I was wrong about England.
Hat tip: Ian Jackson.



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