A marvelous point in the Office of Readings on the Saturday before Pentecost Sunday from “a sermon of an unknown African author of the sixth century”:
And so if anyone says to one of us: ‘You have received the Holy Spirit; why do you not speak in tongues?’, he should reply: ‘I do speak in every tongue. for I am in the Body of Christ, the Church, which speaks in every tongue. For what did god signify by the presence of the Holy Spirit if it was not that his Church would speak in every tongue?’
Rather amazing that this “unknown author” should have at his fingertips the answer for today’s hard-core pentecostalists, isn’t it?
BTW, the Latin typical edition of the Liturgy of the Hours gives the reference of this passage as “Sermo 8, 1-3: P[atrologia] L[atina] 65, 743-744.
A quick internet search – since I have not yet bought a complete set of Migne off eBay or aLibris – shews that the author is the unknown pseudo-Fulgentius, since PL 65, 151-838 contains his works.
How much was lost when North Africa fell to its invaders, the Latins scarpered back across the Mediterranean, and the remaining local Christians died the death of dhimmitude?
I am reading an interesting book at the moment called “The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque” which suggests that Christianity didn’t really “disappear” under dhimmitude, but continued (obviously) as a formative influence upon early Islam (less obvious–that’s what the book is about) and developed its own “Arabic” theology (the book is about that too!).