Ante-Nicene Fathers/Volume IV/Commodianus/The Instructions of Commodianus/Chapter 1

Introductory Note

to the

Instructions of Commodianus.

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[ 240.]&#160; Our author seems to have been a North-African bishop, of whom little is known save what we learn from his own writings.&#160; He has been supposed to incline to some ideas of Praxeas, and also to the Millenarians, but perhaps on insufficient grounds.&#160; His Millenarianism reflects the views of a very primitive age, and that without the corrupt Chiliasm of a later period, which brought about a practical repudiation of the whole system. &#160; Of his writings, two poems only remain, and of these the second, a very recent discovery, has no place in the Edinburgh series.&#160; I greatly regret that it cannot be included in ours.

As a poetical work the following prose version probably does it no injustice.&#160; His versification is pronounced very crabbed, and his diction is the wretched patois of North Africa.&#160; But the piety and earnestness of a practical Christian seem everywhere conspicuous in this fragment of antiquity.