John Anthony McGuckin

Источник

Patristics

JOHN A. MCGUCKIN

A relatively modern term deriving from the Latin Patres, or “Fathers.” It was also known as patrology up to the mid-20th century, though this latter designation has now been restricted mainly to signify reference manuals dealing with the works of the fathers of the church. The fathers were the bishops, outstanding theologians, and lead­ing monastic elders ofthe early church, who left behind them authoritative bodies of spiritual, biblical, liturgical, and dogmatic writings. The age of the fathers is generally seen as extending from after the apostolic era (beginning of the 2nd century) to the 8th and 9th centuries, whose great luminar­ies then included St. John of Damascus and St. Photios the Great. John is, in many ways, a certain sign of the closing of the patristic age, with his works gathering together as a kind of encyclopedia of the earlier author­itative materials to form a synthesis of patristic theology for the later church’s reference. In terms of Latin patristics, the traditional cut-off point has been signifi­cantly extended beyond this time, even up to the medieval western theologian Bernard of Clairvaux, who is sometimes called, in the Catholic Church, the “last of the fathers» Even so, there is not a hard and fast historical line, as Orthodoxy understands it, for some of the late Byzantine writers such as St. Symeon the New Theologian of the 11th century, or St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), for example, certainly enjoy a high “patristic status” in contemporary Orthodoxy. The word generally means, in Orthodox circles, those definitive and highly authoritative theologians of the church in its classical ages who represent purity of doctrine allied with great holiness of life; a life that manifests the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in their acts and their consciousness, such that they are not merely good speculative thinkers, or interest­ing religious writers, as such, but rather substantial guides to the will of God, and Spirit-bearers (pneumatophoroi) whose doc­trine and advice can be trusted as conveying the authentic Orthodox tradition of faith and piety. This does not mean that every single thing any one of the fathers ever wrote is given “canonical” status. Ortho­doxy admits that the general rule of human authorship applies even among the saints, for as the adage tells, “even Homer nods,” but it does mean that collectively, and by the consensus of the fathers among themselves, and by the manner in which they stand in a stream of defense of the ecumenical faith of the church, they together comprise a library of immense prestige and authority. They are thus collec­tively strong and concrete evidence for the central tradition of the Orthodox Church. This is why the church affords them a very high theological authority, not as great as the Scriptures or the ecumenical councils, but certainly alongside the latter; for it was from their writings that the doctrine of the great councils generally emerged.

The concept of “patristic witnesses” can be seen in the earliest writings of the church. Notable figures such as Ignatius, Polycarp, or Clement of Rome clearly enjoyed a significant status even in their own times as elders in the faith. But the formal growth of the idea that the “fathers” were a collec­tive defense against heterodoxy was mainly a product of the anti-Arian writers of the 4th century, which came to be adopted pas­sionately by the Greek and Latin churches of the 5th century and afterwards. One of the early and classical examples of this spe­cifically happening is the hagiography of Antony the Great written by Athanasius of Alexandria (Life of Antony), which depicts him as one of the great fathers who person­ally represents a standard of truth, holiness, and orthodoxy. Another is the hagiography of Athanasius by St. Gregory the Theolo­gian (of Nazianzus: Oration 21; see also Oration 33.5), which lauds Athanasius as a father and pillar of orthodoxy for his defense of Nicea (see also St. Basil the Great’s Epistle 140.2). By the 5th century, the concept of “authoritative fathers” was being appealed to specifically and systemat­ically to establish pedigree lines of doctrine; most notably by St. Cyril of Alexandria, who began to assemble florilegia of the “sayings of the orthodox fathers” in his conflict with Nestorius, thus beginning a style of theologizing that soon became a standard way of doing Orthodox theology ever after. The idea of bringing the evidence of the fathers together soon came into the synodical process of the ecumenical coun­cils, which more and more, after the 5th century, saw themselves as the defenders and propagators of the “theology of the fathers” (see Canon 7 of the Council of Ephesus, 431; and the Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 451; Definition of the Faith 2; 4). Patristics in this sense clearly corresponds to a certain vision of theology as the “defense and maintenance of Ortho­doxy» This remains its essential meaning in the Orthodox Church today. Orthodoxy has generally accepted the great fathers of the Latin church as its own (Sts. Ambrose, Gregory the Great, Leo, and so on), though it has significantly distanced itself from many of the ideas of other influential early Latin thinkers (Arnobius, Tertullian), including St. Augustine, who so dominated the West’s sense of patristic teaching, but hardly impressed himself upon the East.

In modern academic use “patristics” means something more general, less specific, than this idea of the “guides of Orthodoxy,” and simply designates the study of Christian antiquity, leading to the often paradoxical position that much of modern academic patristic study is devoted to the heterodox writers of the ancient world: a thing which Orthodoxy would strictly exclude from the category of“patris- tics,” though in so doing it has perhaps tended to narrow down the field in some unfortunate ways, leaving out some of the great contributors to Christian theology who were not bishops, or monastics, such as the numerous women saints from ancient times (who were literarily “invisi­ble” in the main) or heterodox theologians of great merit (of significance, that is, beyond the specific “mistakes” of certain of their stances) such as Origen or Mar Theodore Mopsuestia (both of whom were major and lofty biblical interpreters of high spirituality but were the subjects of concil­iar condemnations for specific doctrinal errors that caused their larger body of writings to be marginalized or lost). The massive 19th-century collections and editions of J. P. Migne (Patrologia series graeca and series latina) comprising hundreds of volumes of ancient and medi­eval Greek and Latin texts is a virtual canon of patristic literature (understood in the wider sense of a library of all the early theologians). Patristic theology today gen­erally remains an important and valid branch of the theological disciplines, per­haps given a greater stress in Orthodox and Roman Catholic academies than Prot­estant, and one that enjoyed a veritable renaissance in the 20th century as many excellent critical editions of primary texts, and sophisticated historical analyses, enlivened the field.

SEE ALSO: Cappadocian Fathers; Christ; Ecumenical Councils; Fatherhood of God; Holy Spirit; Incarnation (of the Logos); Logos Theology; Philosophy; St. Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 293–373); St. Cyril of Alex­andria (ca. 378–444); St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359); St. John Chrysostom (349–407); St. John of Damascus (ca. 675-ca. 750); St. Maximos the Confessor (580–662)

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Bardenhewer, O. (1908) Patrology. St. Louis: Herder.

McGuckin, J. A. (2004) The Westminster Handbook to Patristic Theology. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.

Prestige, G. L. (1940) Fathers and Heretics. London: SPCK.

Quasten, J. (1975) Patrology, vols. 1–3. Utrecht: Spectrum.


Источник: The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity / John Anthony McGuckin - Maldin : John Wiley; Sons Limited, 2012. - 862 p.

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