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Focusing on major figures such as St. Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa, as well as a host of less well known thinkers, Robert Wilken (the author of The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity) chronicles the emergence of a specifically Christian intellectual tradition. He provides an introduction to early Christian thought on topics including early Christian worship, Christian poetry and the spiritual life, the Trinity, Christ, the Bible, and icons, and shows that the energy and vitality of early Christianity arose from within the life of the Church. While early Christian thinkers drew on the philosophical and rhetorical traditions of the ancient world, it was the versatile vocabulary of the Bible that loosened their tongues and minds and allowed them to construct the world anew, intellectually and spiritually. These thinkers were not seeking to invent a world of ideas, Wilken shows, but rather to win the hearts of men and women and to change their lives. Early Christian thinkers set in place a foundation that has endured. Their writings are an irreplaceable inheritance, and Wilken shows that they can still be heard as living voices within contemporary culture.
This is a wonderful narrative history by a preeminent patristics scholar. If you want to learn more about people like Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, check out this book.
The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God | 
