The Fathers of the Church

After the death of the apostles, the faith was not left without masters. In the first centuries there arose a line of bishops, monks and teachers who had received the Gospel from the apostolic generation, defended it against error, explained and deepened it. They are called the Fathers of the Church, because they begot Christians to the faith and shaped the face of the Church. To read them is to hear the voice closest to the source, the one that tells us what the Church believed from the beginning.

Who the Fathers are

This title is not given to any ancient author whatever. Four marks are required. Antiquity first: the Fathers belong to the early centuries, from just after the apostles to about the eighth century. Then holiness of life: they are men the Church venerates as saints. Soundness of doctrine as well: their teaching accords with the faith of the Church, without error on what is essential. And finally the approval of the Church, which recognizes them as witnesses of her faith. None of them, taken alone, is infallible, and they sometimes err on a particular point; but when they all agree on a truth of faith, that common accord, called the consensus of the Fathers, is a sure witness of what the Church has always believed. They are divided into two families, according to the language in which they wrote: the Greek Fathers of the East and the Latin Fathers of the West.

The apostolic Fathers

The very first generation knew the apostles or their immediate disciples: it is called that of the Apostolic Fathers. Clement, bishop of Rome at the end of the first century, writes to the Church of Corinth, torn by quarrels, a letter to restore peace there: that the bishop of Rome should thus intervene in a distant Church already shows, very early, the particular rank recognized to his see. Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, is led to Rome to be given to the beasts; along the way he writes to the Churches letters in which he begs that he not be snatched from martyrdom, exhorts to unity around the bishop, and calls the Eucharist the medicine of immortality. It is under his pen that the expression “catholic Church”, the universal Church, appears for the first time. Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, had been the disciple of the apostle John; an old man, ordered to curse Christ, he answered that he had served him eighty-six years without receiving any harm from him, and was burned alive. Through these men, the chain that binds the Church to the apostles is visible to the naked eye.

Defending the faith against error

In the second century the faith had to defend itself on two fronts. Before the Empire that persecuted and slandered it, converted scholars took up the pen to explain it: they are called the apologists, from the Greek word meaning defense. The best known, Justin, a philosopher become Christian, shows that the truth sought by the pagan sages finds in Christ its fulfillment; he would pay for this fidelity with his head. Before the error that threatened the faith from within, others rose up. Gnosticism then claimed to reserve salvation to a few initiates by means of a secret knowledge, and set the God of the Old Testament against the Father of Jesus. Against it, Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, writes a great work in which he opposes to these hidden doctrines the faith received publicly from the apostles and kept in the Churches they founded: truth is not a reserved secret, but the deposit handed on in broad daylight and verifiable by the succession of bishops, of Rome in particular.

The third century is dominated by two immense writers whom the Church nonetheless does not count among the Fathers in the strict sense. At Carthage, Tertullian was the first to write theology in Latin and forged the words that would always be used, Trinity, person, substance, but ended outside the Church, won over by a rigorist sect; at Alexandria, Origen, a scholar without equal, commented on almost all of Scripture and taught it to be read by its spiritual sense, before several of his theses were later condemned. They are held to be great ecclesiastical writers, whose language and learning nourished all the Fathers. To the school of Alexandria, attached to the spiritual sense, will answer that of Antioch, faithful to the literal sense, and from their meeting the great controversies about Christ will be born.

The great age of the Fathers

The fourth century and the beginning of the fifth are those of the greatest Fathers, in the East as in the West. In the East, Athanasius of Alexandria leads the fight against Arianism and for the full divinity of Christ, which he defends at the council of Nicaea. Three friends who were bishops, called the Cappadocians, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa, complete the exposition of the faith in one God in three Persons and affirm, against new opponents, the divinity of the Holy Spirit, bringing to its full clarity the doctrine of the Trinity. John Chrysostom, patriarch of Constantinople, leaves such sermons that he will be surnamed Golden-mouth. In the West, Ambrose, bishop of Milan, stands up to emperors and baptizes Augustine; Jerome withdraws to Bethlehem to translate the whole Bible into Latin, in the version that will be called the Vulgate and will nourish the West for a thousand years, fixing the text of the Scriptures for the whole Middle Ages. Augustine, bishop of Hippo in Africa, is the greatest of the Latin Fathers, whose thought will mark forever the theology of grace. Gregory the Great, pope at the end of the sixth century, usually closes the list of the great Fathers of the West.

In the East, the age of the Fathers reaches further: it usually closes with John Damascene, a monk near Jerusalem in the eighth century, who gathered up the whole teaching of the Greek Fathers and defended the holy images against those who sought to destroy them. He is to the East what Gregory was to the West, and it is he who marks the eighth-century boundary.

Scripture and Tradition

What the Fathers hand on, they did not invent: it is the deposit received from the apostles, who had received it from Christ. This deposit passes through two channels of one same source. The apostles left writings, which form the New Testament; but they also taught and ordered many things by word of mouth, and this living transmission is called Tradition. Paul himself urged holding to both: “stand firm, and hold to the traditions you learned from us, whether by word of mouth or by letter.” 2 Thessalonians 2:15 Scripture and Tradition are not two rival sources, but two forms of the one Gospel, borne together by the Church. The Fathers are the privileged witnesses of this Tradition: born in the centuries when the Church still read Scripture nearest to the apostles, they tell us how she understood it. This is why what they believed everywhere and always carries authority for discerning the true faith.

Why we still read them

The Fathers are not outdated authors whom erudition alone would exhume. They are the first to have put into words what the Church believed: the Trinity, Christ true God and true man, grace, the sacraments, the place of Mary. The great councils spoke with their words, and the Church, still today, draws on their teaching to understand her own faith. To read them is to find again the living faith of a young Church, persecuted then victorious, intent on grasping the mystery it had received. Between the apostles and us, the Fathers are the bridge: through them, the faith of the origins reaches us without break.