Catena Aurea Is Shipping Soon!

We’ve discussed the Catena Aurea on the blog before, but before the special Pre-Pub price expires, I wanted to share how excited I am about its completion.

For those unfamiliar with it, the Catena Aurea is a commentary on the Gospels made up of quotations from Church Fathers and other commentators compiled by Thomas Aquinas. The English translation was edited by yet another great theological mind, John Henry Newman. An earlier post from Rosie Perera explains very well how great a resource this is, but I want to explain the benefits of the Logos edition in particular.

Aside from the basic advantages of a Logos edition—like higher accuracy in the capture of the text—there are a few specific things that we’ve done to make the Catena Aurea more usable than ever.

For one thing, print editions of the Catena Aurea have a very compact format, with patristic quotations strung together in long paragraphs and their sources only indicated by brief abbreviations and marginal notes.

In the Logos edition, we’ve added spacing to make the quotations easier to see. We’ve expanded, standardized (and, where necessary, disambiguated) the abbreviations for Church Fathers names to allow for easy identification of the source and consistent searching across the volumes. We’ve added pop-ups giving information from the front matter identifying who an author is and when he wrote, and we’ve moved marginal references into more precise locations in the body text.

Most of all, we’ve linked around 3,000 patristic references that are found in the Early Church Fathers, so that, in combination with that set (in either the Protestant or Catholic editions), you can instantly explore the broader context of many of the quotes. This makes it easy to use the Catena as a starting point for deeper study of the Church Fathers and, since the quotes in the Catena are often very brief and are occasionally condensed from longer passages, it can sometimes be particularly important for establishing the complete thought of the author.

With linking of Bible references, indexing by Bible verse, and integration as a commentary into your Passage Guide, this makes the Logos edition more powerful and easy to use than anything else available.

Even at full price of $139.99, the Logos edition of the Catena Aurea is a bargain, when you consider that you’re getting a richer, more powerful resource than comparably priced print sets, but until November 30, you can get it at the special Pre-Pub price. Don’t miss out!