Theosis Library

About

The Translator

Theosis Library is the work of Matt Mattimore, a classicist with a degree from the University of Notre Dame. Proficient in Latin, Matt spent three summers conducting archaeological fieldwork at ancient Butrint in Albania — a Roman-era site at the crossroads of Greek and Latin culture, where layers of civilization from the Hellenistic period through the Ottoman era lie exposed in a single landscape.

That experience of standing in the physical ruins of the ancient world — reading inscriptions in situ, handling artifacts that hadn’t been touched in centuries — shaped a lasting conviction that these texts deserve to be read, not just studied. The early Christian debates about divinity, knowledge, and the nature of the soul are among the most fascinating intellectual conflicts in human history. The Gnostic traditions that the mainstream Church fought to suppress, and the Church Fathers who described those traditions in the process of arguing against them, left behind a literature that is extraordinary in its depth and strangeness. Most of it has never been translated into English.

Methodology

Each translation in this library is produced through a rigorous process:

  1. Source identification. Texts are identified from the Patrologia Graeca, Patrologia Latina, critical editions, and other scholarly sources. Priority is given to texts that have never appeared in English or exist only in outdated Victorian-era translations.
  2. AI-assisted draft. An initial draft translation is generated from the original Greek or Latin using Claude by Anthropic. The AI is given specific instructions about theological terminology, structural fidelity to the original, and the identification of ambiguous or disputed passages.
  3. Translator review. The draft is reviewed and corrected by the translator against the Latin text (and Greek where available), with particular attention to theological precision and ambiguous passages. This is not a rubber stamp — AI-generated translations of patristic texts contain errors, and every passage is checked against the original.
  4. Scholarly annotation. The translator adds notes on key terms and why they were rendered as they were, ambiguous passages and how they were resolved, variant readings between manuscripts, scriptural allusions with chapter and verse, connections to other texts in the library or to known Gnostic writings, and theological significance.
  5. Publication with sources. The translation is published with full links to the original source text so readers and scholars can verify the work. Transparency about methodology is not optional — it is foundational.

Why This Matters

The Patrologia Graeca alone contains 161 volumes of Greek Christian writing spanning 1,400 years, from the Apostolic Fathers through the fall of Constantinople. Only a fraction has been translated into English, and much of what exists is in outdated 19th-century Victorian prose that obscures as much as it reveals.

The Latin Fathers — Tertullian, Augustine, Marius Victorinus, and many others — contain equally rich material. The early debates about divinity, knowledge, and the nature of the soul are not abstract theological puzzles. They are the record of people wrestling with the deepest questions human beings can ask: What is the relationship between the human and the divine? Is there a spark of the infinite within us? Can a human being participate in the nature of God?

The Gnostic traditions that the mainstream Church fought to suppress asked these questions with particular urgency — and the Church Fathers who described Gnostic beliefs in the process of refuting them inadvertently preserved ideas whose original texts are largely lost. These texts deserve to be read by anyone who cares about the history of ideas, not just the handful of scholars who can read Greek and Latin.

Hyperborean Press

Theosis Library is a project of Hyperborean Press. As the library grows, collected translations will be published as print volumes — carefully typeset editions with full scholarly apparatus, intended to stand alongside the best academic translations while remaining accessible to serious general readers.