The weird thing about patristics, though, is that it keeps telling me stuff which is totally new and different — and which I then realize I already kinda knew. Patristics is like going to listen to a great professor, and finding out that it’s all a very learned annotation and explication of my mom’s lectures from when I was eight. So I was just reading about explicit vs. implicit faith in that Mary in the Fathers book I found — and boy, did it make sense to me after reading the Fathers.

(It’s also really interesting, though disconcerting, to study anything and actually agree with just about everything the author says. I’m so used to fighting the wrong bits of what I’m being taught. But with the Fathers, I very seldom have to do anything but just take it in and learn. It really is like being back in elementary school, for that.)