This famous commentary from St. Thomas Aquinas is now more accessible than ever! The Catena Aurea (or, Golden Chain) is a compilation of Patristic commentary on the Gospels and contains passages from over eighty Church Fathers. In this masterpiece, Aquinas seamlessly weaves together extracts from various Fathers to provide a complete commentary on all four Gospels.
It was Pope Urban IV who commissioned St. Thomas Aquinas to bring together the Catena Aurea in a bid to make readily available to the academic public an orthodox patristic commentary on the Gospels. His work manifests an intimate acquaintance with the Fathers of the church and provides an excellent complement to the modern attempts to understand how the fathers read scripture. Corresponding to each of the four Gospel writers, the Catena begins by putting forth the verses to be analyzed and then takes each verse phrase-by-phrase and provides the early Fathers' insights into the passage.