Homilists

Homilists Among the homilists who have distinguished themselves in the primitive Church, Origen (3rd century) ranks first. The schools of Alexandria and Antioch appear to have been the great centers of this class of sacred literature and in the early centuries we find the names of Hippolytus, Metrodorus, Clement of Alexandria, and Gregory Thaumeaturgus principally distinguished. But it was in the following centuries that the homily received its full development in the hands of the early Greek fathers Ephraim the Syrian, Athanasius, the two Gregories of Nazianzum and of Nyssa, Basil the Great, Chrysostom, the two Cyrils of Alexandria and of Jerusalem, and Theodoret; in the Latin Church, Cyprian, Ambrose, Augustine, Leo the Great, Gregory the Great, Peter Chrysologus, Fulgentius and Caesar of Aries. In later centuries, Venerable Bede, the popes Saobinian, Leo II and III, Adrian I, and the Spanish bishops Isidore of Seville and Ildefonsus, continued to use the homiletic form. — Chambers, Cyclop. 5, 399. SEE CATECHETICS; SEE CATECHISTS; SEE HOMILETICS; SEE HOMILIARIUM; SEE HOMILY.