Christian Classics Ethereal Library

01/25/2023

This coming Monday, January 30, all of our websites - including CCEL, My.Hymnary, Hymnary and Zeteo - will be unavailable between 6 and 9 pm EST as we perform necessary maintenance. Apologies in advance and please plan accordingly. Thx!

12/23/2022

Christmas greetings from all of us at CCEL. May the peace and promise of the miracle and mystery of the incarnation of the Son of God be yours this season and always.

12/09/2022

Interesting post today from The Writer's Almanac (you can find Paradise Lost on ccel.org):

Today is the birthday of English poet, pamphleteer, and historian John Milton (1608). When he was blind, impoverished, and living in seclusion in the countryside, Milton wrote Paradise Lost, considered the finest epic poem in English.

Milton was born in Bread Street in London to a solidly middle-class family. His father was a scrivener and composer of church music who doted on his son, providing him with a private tutor. Milton was smart, precocious, and dedicated. He wrote his first psalms at 15. His brother recalled, “When he was young, he studied very hard and sat up very late, commonly till twelve or one o’clock at night.”

After attending Christ’s College in Cambridge, where he was notorious for his temper and good looks, he underwent six years of intensive independent study, reading literature, mathematics, and languages, eventually teaching himself French, Spanish, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, and Greek. He did a “continental tour” of Europe (1638) and even met the astronomer Galileo, who was then under house arrest.

The first edition of Paradise Lost comprised 10 books of over 10,000 lines of verse. Book IX is the longest, with 1,189 lines; Book VII is the shortest, with only 640 lines.

Milton was 60 years old when it was published in 1667. During the poem’s composition he suffered, gout, depression, and the death of his second wife and infant daughter. Paradise Lost has influenced countless artists and writers, from Salvador Dali to William Blake to Mary Shelley, who was inspired to write Frankenstein after reading Paradise Lost.

11/13/2022

Happy birthday to St. Augustine, born this day in 354 AD.

Accepted by most scholars to be the most important figure in the ancient Western church, St. Augustine was born in Tagaste, Numidia in North Africa. His mother was a Christian, but his father remained a pagan until late in life. After a rather unremarkable childhood, marred only by a case of stealin...

10/06/2022

On Monday, October 10, we will be performing some necessary maintenance as we work to keep our sites running efficiently and effectively. Between 8 and 11 pm EST, both Hymnary and CCEL will be unavailable and between 9 and 11 pm EST, My.Hymnary will be unavailable. Please plan accordingly. Thx!

09/30/2022

More interesting info from the Writer's Almanac:

On this day in 1452, the first section of the Gutenberg Bible was finished in Mainz, Germany, by the printer Johannes Gutenberg. Little is known of Gutenberg's early history or his personal life except that he was born around the year 1400, the youngest son of a wealthy merchant, but from the time of the appearance of his beautiful Bibles he has left an indelible mark on human culture.

Ancient books had primarily been written on scrolls, though an innovation in the second century A.D. — that of the codex, a sheaf of pages bound at one edge — gave us the familiar book form we recognize today. Early codices were produced by hand by monks in scriptoriums, working with pen and ink, copying manuscripts one page at a time so that even a small book would take months to complete and a book the size of the Bible, rich with color and illuminations, would take years.

Gutenberg's genius was to separate each element of the beautiful, calligraphic blackletter script commonly used by the scribes into its most basic components — lower case and capital letters, punctuation, and the connected ligatures that were standard in Medieval calligraphy — nearly 300 different shapes that were then each cast in quantity and assembled to form words, lines, and full pages of text.

He also invented a printing press to use his type, researching and refining his equipment and processes over the course of several years. In 1440, Gutenberg wrote and printed copies of his own mysteriously titled book, Kunst und Aventur [Art and Enterprise], releasing his printing ideas to the public. And by 1450, his movable-type printing press was certainly in operation.

It is unclear when Gutenberg conceived of his Bible project, though he was clearly in production by 1452. He probably produced about 180 copies — 145 that were printed on handmade paper imported from Italy and the remainder on more luxurious and expensive vellum. Once complete, the Bibles were sold as folded sheets, the owners responsible for having them bound and decorated, so that each surviving copy has its own unique features like illumination, dashes of color, marks of ownership, and notes and marginalia.

Only four dozen Gutenberg Bibles remain, and of these only 21 are complete, but what Gutenberg created went far beyond the reach of those volumes. By beginning the European printing revolution, he forever changed how knowledge was spread, democratized learning, and allowed for thoughts and ideas to be widely disseminated throughout the known world. In his time, Gutenberg's contemporaries called this "the art of multiplying books," and it was a major catalyst for the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, and even the Protestant Reformation. In 1997, Time magazine named Johannes Gutenberg "Man of the Millennium" and dubbed his movable type as the most important invention of a thousand years. His name is commemorated by Project Gutenberg, a group of volunteers working to digitize and archive cultural and literary works, while making them open and free to the public. His name was even placed in the skies as the planetoid Gutemberga.

Mark Twain wrote in 1900, in a congratulatory letter to mark the opening of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz: "What the world is today, good and bad, it owes to Gutenberg. Everything can be traced to this source, but we are bound to bring him homage ... for the bad that his colossal invention has brought about is overshadowed a thousand times by the good with which mankind has been favored."

07/12/2022

From the Writer's Almanac (TWA) comes word that today is the birthday of novelist and priest Charles Kingsley, born in Holne, England (1819). They say that he is best remembered for his children's book The Water-Babies (1863), an allegorical story written to teach Christian values.

TWA added that the Water-Babies was extremely popular when it was published, and they quote Kingsley writing this: "I am not fond, you know, of going into churches to pray. We must go up into the chase in the evenings, and pray there with nothing but God's cloud temple between us and His heaven! And His choir of small birds and night crickets and booming beetles, and all happy things who praise Him all night long! And in the still summer noon, too, with the lazy-paced clouds above, and the distant sheep-bell, and the bee humming in the beds of thyme, and one bird making the hollies ring a moment, and then all still — hushed — awe-bound, as the great thunderclouds slide up from the far south! Then, there to praise God!"

05/26/2022

From the Writer's Almanac (and see our entries on Luther here, https://ccel.org/home3/search?text=Martin+Luther&genreID=&orderBy=Relevance)

It was on this day in 1521 that German priest and theologian Martin Luther was declared an outlaw and his writings were banned by the Edict of Worms. The edict made Luther more of a hero than he already was and it’s a big reason that Protestantism caught on so quickly.

Luther decided to become a priest after getting caught out in a thunderstorm one night. He swore to God that if he survived he would enter the religious life. He did survive and he went on to study theology, become ordained, and get a job as a professor in Wittenberg. As he became more and more involved in the church he began to grow disgusted with some of its practices. He was especially angry about the church’s sales of indulgences, which were said to decrease the time a person had to spend in purgatory.

On the eve of All Saints’ Day in 1517, Luther nailed to the door of his church 95 theses attacking the sale of indulgences and other excesses of the church. They were originally written in Latin, but they became so popular that people demanded they be translated into German, and so they were. Hundreds of copies were printed up on a printing press, which was still a fairly recent invention, and Luther’s message spread throughout Germany and Europe.

Religious leaders and politicians began to realize how dangerous he was becoming to the traditional church, and in April of 1521, a group of Roman princes pressured Emperor Charles V into forming an assembly in the city of Worms to try to get Luther to reject his writings.

On his trip to Worms, Luther was celebrated as a hero at most of the towns he passed through. He refused to recant and went back to Wittenberg to start the reformation.

04/07/2022

There is an ongoing power outage at Calvin University that Consumers Energy is working to resolve. If the outage lasts long enough, our backup power may run out causing our sites to go down.

Thank you for your patience and sorry for any inconvenience!

03/28/2022

Happy birthday to St. Teresa of Avila.

Born in Avila, Spain, on March 28, 1515, St. Teresa was the daughter of a Toledo merchant and his second wife, who died when Teresa was 15, one of ten children. Shortly after this event, Teresa was entrusted to the care of the Augustinian nuns. After reading the letters of St. Jerome, Teresa resolve...

03/04/2022

Next Tuesday evening, March 8, all of our websites, including CCLE.org and Hymnary.org, will be unavailable between 6 and 9 pm EST. We will be making some system configuration changes and updates to improve site reliability. Apologies in advance.

01/31/2022

From the Writer's Almanac daily email this morning comes this inspirational account of Thomas Merton.

Today is the birthday of Thomas Merton, born in Prades, France (1915). His mother was an American and his father was from New Zealand. They were both artists and they met at an art school in Paris. Merton’s mother died of stomach cancer when he was six years old; ten years later his father died of a brain tumor.

Merton converted to Catholicism in 1938 while he was a student at Columbia University. He taught English for a while at St. Bonaventure College, but he continued studying Catholicism and the spiritualism of William Blake. On December 10, 1941, he quit his job and entered the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky to begin his life as a Trappist monk. He continued studying and kept journals full of his questions and musings. His superior at the monastery, Father Abbot Dom Frederic Dunne, noticed his talent for writing and encouraged him to continue. He began by translating religious texts and writing biographies of the saints.

In 1961 Merton wrote, “It is possible to doubt whether I have become a monk (a doubt that I have to live with), but it is not possible to doubt that I am a writer, that I was born one and will most probably die as one.” Over the course of his life Merton wrote more than 70 books, 2,000 poems, and numerous essays and lectures. He’s perhaps best known for his spiritual autobiography and conversion narrative, The Seven Storey Mountain (1948). It’s been compared to the Confessions of St. Augustine. He ends the book with the line Sit finis libri, non finis quaerendi: “Here ends the book, but not the searching.”

From The Seven Storey Mountain:

“It is only the infinite mercy and love of God that has prevented us from tearing ourselves to pieces and destroying His entire creation long ago. People seem to think that it is in some way a proof that no merciful God exists, if we have so many wars. On the contrary, consider how in spite of centuries of sin and greed and lust and cruelty and hatred and avarice and oppression and injustice, spawned and bred by the free wills of men, the human race can still recover, each time, and can still produce man and women who overcome evil with good, hatred with love, greed with charity, lust and cruelty with sanctity.”