The Letters of Ammonas: Successor of St Antony

Fairacres Publications 72This book contains the fourteen surviving letters of St Ammonas, one of the disciples of St Antony the Great. The main topics of these letters are the gifts of the Spirit, spiritual direction and discernment of the will of God. Derwas Chitty made a draft translation of these letters from the Greek and early Syriac versions; after his death, Dr Sebastian Brock carried out a thorough revision and added an introduction and a bibliography.Derwas James Chitty (1901-71), an Anglican priest and Church historian with a particular interest in Orthodoxy, devoted much of his life to the study of early Egyptian and Palestinian monasticism, summing up the fruits of forty years’ research in his notable book, ‘The Desert a City’. He spent the last three years of his life in retirement at Llangwnadl on the Lleyn Peninsula in North Wales.Sebastian Brockwas born in 1938 and is generally acknowledged as the foremost and most influential academic in the field of Syriac language today. He is a former Reader in Syriac Studies at the Oriental Institute of the University of Oxford and currently a Professorial Fellow at Wolfson College. His books include: ‘The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem the Syrian’ and ‘The Syriac Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life’.Read more