My travelling laptop contains the PDF’s of the books on the “right use of the fathers” which I discussed yesterday. This evening I sat down to re-download them here, and also sought out the volume by Barbeyrac to which they allude. In the process, I have stumbled across an interesting book.
In Fathers and Anglicans: The Limits of Orthodoxy (2001), Arthur Middleton discusses how Anglicans in the past have engaged with the fathers. This includes discussion of the very books that I was downloading. There is a preview on Google books here.
Middleton writes from an Anglo-Catholic perspective — preface by “the Lord Bishop of London” — but the material will be new to many.
Tired as I was, I found myself interested enough to read quite a number of pages online; and then to wonder just what a copy of this 400-page book would cost, so that I can read it in the evenings. Sadly the answer is nearly $25, and that is rather a lot for a book which one might read only once.
It would seem that this book is a perfect candidate to borrow from a library, were it not that my own local library would charge me nearly $10 to borrow it for a fortnight, and make me wait weeks for it.