Without belaboring my personal background, I was raised in a Christian tradition that gave little to no attention to historical Christianity. Early figures in the church have been nothing more to me than names I recognized…I know nothing about them, what they believed, etc. Like a lot of other folks raised in an evangelical setting, I would say CS Lewis is probably the oldest Christian writing I have encountered.

I was recently inspired to look into the church fathers, and I bought a copy of Augustine's Confessions, which I'm about halfway through. It has rocked my world a bit, and I love it. It has given me a perspective I never knew I was missing, and I want to seek out a deeper understanding of early Christian thought.

So I'm seeking recommendations for books or other writings either from or about prominent early Christian theologians/philosophers in the same vein as the Augustine work I'm reading now.

It's hard to beat Augustine's Confessions. Nothing comes close wrt pastoral and practical value.

You can check out this series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_Patristics_Series

Out of that list, I would buy On the Holy Spirit (Basil), On Wealth and Poverty (Chrysostom), On the Unity of Christ (Cyril), and On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ (Maximus the Confessor) first.

Patristics is a whole realm of study. The Ante-Nicene fathers are good to read, and pretty short. You can get them for free online.

Collections can be a good way to learn. "A Patristic Treasury: Early Church Wisdom for Today" is a good one.

This has been my emphasis this year so far. This is a major pitfall of modern Protestantism, in my opinion.

Right now I am reading:
2,000 Years of Christ's Power, Volume 1
The Age of the Early Church Fathers
Nicholas Needham

Recently Finished:
The Early Church
Henry Chadwick

I intend to go deeper into some of the specific writings but wanted to spend some time with an overview at first.

Chrysostom's homilies are a great read and free online

This website seems to be a veritable gold mine: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/

Banger

These are some suggestions: "Four Witnesses: Early Church in Her Own Words" , "Four More Witnesses: Further Testimony From Christians Before Constantine", "Those Twelve-The Gospel Through the Apostles' Eyes". These are written Rod Bennett, a convert to the Catholic Church. They are published by Ignatius Press; however you can read about them on Amazon. I found them to be very informative and extremely well written and easy to follow.
I also would recommend, "Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church" A 2,000 year history by H.W. Crocker III.

My wife and I converted thirty years ago on the Easter Vigil. I would say that we both "read our way into the Catholic Church" and have never looked back. God bless you on your journey.

Note: The Four Witnesses are Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus of Lyons.

Thanks all for the responses!

I was reading about On the Incarnation and came across this essay from CS Lewis, which he wrote as a forward to an English translation of the work. Thought it would be of interest to some here.

Quote:

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There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals, and that the amateur should content himself with the modern books. Thus I have found as a tutor in English Literature that if the average student wants to find out something about Platonism, the very last thing he thinks of doing is to take a translation of Plato off the library shelf and read the Symposium. He would rather read some dreary modern book ten times as long, all about "isms" and influences and only once in twelve pages telling him what Plato actually said.

The error is rather an amiable one, for it springs from humility. The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.

The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism. It has always therefore been one of my main endeavours as a teacher to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.

This mistaken preference for the modern books and this shyness of the old ones is nowhere more rampant than in theology. Wherever you find a little study circle of Christian laity you can be almost certain that they are studying not St. Luke or St. Paul or St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas or Hooker or Butler, but M. Berdyaev or M. Maritain or M. Niebuhr or Miss Sayers or even myself.

Now this seems to me topsy-turvy. Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet.

A new book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light.

Often it cannot be fully understood without the knowledge of a good many other modern books. If you join at eleven o'clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said. Remarks which seem to you very ordinary will produce laughter or irritation and you will not see whythe reason, of course, being that the earlier stages of the conversation have given them a special point.

In the same way sentences in a modern book which look quite ordinary may be directed at some other book; in this way you may be led to accept what you would have indignantly rejected if you knew its real significance. The only safety is to have a standard of plain, central Christianity ("mere Christianity" as Baxter called it) which puts the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective. Such a standard can be acquired only from the old books.

It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.

All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlookeven those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly unitedunited with each other and against earlier and later agesby a great mass of common assumptions.

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth centurythe blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?"lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill.

The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.

I myself was first led into reading the Christian classics, almost accidentally, as a result of my English studies. Some, such as Hooker, Herbert, Traherne, Taylor and Bunyan, I read because they are themselves great English writers; others, such as Boethius, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Dante, because they were "influences." George Macdonald I had found for myself at the age of sixteen and never wavered in my allegiance, though I tried for a long time to ignore his Christianity.

They are, you will note, a mixed bag, representative of many Churches, climates and ages. And that brings me to yet another reason for reading them. The divisions of Christendom are undeniable and are by some of these writers most fiercely expressed. But if any man is tempted to thinkas one might be tempted who read only con- temporariesthat "Christianity" is a word of so many meanings that it means nothing at all, he can learn beyond all doubt, by stepping out of his own century, that this is not so.

Measured against the ages "mere Christianity" turns out to be no insipid interdenominational transparency, but something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible. I know it, indeed, to my cost. In the days when I still hated Christianity, I learned to recognise, like some all too familiar smell, that almost unvarying something which met me, now in Puritan Bunyan, now in Anglican Hooker, now in Thomist Dante. It was there (honeyed and floral) in Francois de Sales; it was there (grave and homely) in Spenser and Walton; it was there (grim but manful) in Pascal and Johnson; there again, with a mild, frightening, Paradisial flavour, in Vaughan and Boehme and Traherne.

In the urban sobriety of the eighteenth century one was not safeLaw and Butler were two lions in the path. The supposed "Paganism" of the Elizabethans could not keep it out; it lay in wait where a man might have supposed himself safest, in the very centre of The Faerie Queene and the Arcadia. It was, of course, varied; and yetafter allso unmistakably the same; recognisable, not to be evaded, the odour which is death to us until we allow it to become life:

an air that kills
From yon far country blows.

We are all rightly distressed, and ashamed also, at the divisions of Christendom. But those who have always lived within the Christian fold may be too easily dispirited by them. They are bad, but such people do not know what it looks like from without. Seen from there, what is left intact despite all the divisions, still appears (as it truly is) an immensely formidable unity. I know, for I saw it; and well our enemies know it. That unity any of us can find by going out of his own age.
It is not enough, but it is more than you had thought till then. Once you are well soaked in it, if you then venture to speak, you will have an amusing experience. You will be thought a Papist when you are actually reproducing Bunyan, a Pantheist when you are quoting Aquinas, and so forth. For you have now got on to the great level viaduct which crosses the ages and which looks so high from the valleys, so low from the mountains, so narrow compared with the swamps, and so broad compared with the sheep-tracks.

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