“The literary compositions of studious premodern Christians place much less emphasis upon authorship than do those of curious moderns. …. The literary works of the doctores ecclesiae are very often saturated with allusions to and echoes of Scripture and the works of their predecessors, many of them not marked in any way, but instead woven invisibly and indivisibly into the fabric of their own words. This lack of marking of alien words is often because the echoes and allusions are thought sufficiently obvious not to need marking….”

Griffiths, Paul J. Intellectual Appetite : a Theological Grammar. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), page 182.