Christ Church

“All men are seeking for thee”

These wonderful words from the Gospel for the Lenten Embertide capture the nature of our wilderness pilgrimage and complement the Temptations of Christ in the command from Deuteronomy that “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve.” All our longings, our seekings are for God. All of the freedom and dignity of our humanity as finite creatures are found in worship and service of God in his infinite beauty, goodness and truth. It is a central tenet of the Fathers and their teaching about our life in Christ.

But who are the Fathers? Reading what with the Fathers? Our Lenten Programme intends to take a brief look at reading the Scriptures with the Fathers without whom we really can’t even begin to make sense of what is meant by the Scriptures and the Faith. What follows is a brief consideration of the term “the Fathers” or Patres which gives rise to the concept of the Patristic period and Patristic studies. Their influence on theology and prayer is considerable and has contributed to the thinking of many subsequent theologians and ecclesial traditions, including Anglicanism.

The term has an almost magical hold on our imaginations. It evokes a larger world, a universe of doctrine, at once authoritative and compelling in spite of its strangeness, mystical in its remoteness and yet, like all things mystical, very near.

The point is that the Fathers are very much with us. If we are strangers to them, it is only because we have estranged ourselves from the “consensus patrum” (the consensus of the Fathers) so essential to the understanding of the Christian faith; in short, to the “consensus fidelium” (the consensus of the Faithful) of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. The Fathers, in no small measure, are the definitive voices of the essential catholicism of the Christian faith, to the sensus fidei, the understanding of the faith, which they in large measure worked out and defined. We can only enter into the breadth and depth of their understanding and wisdom.

Scripture and Creeds, Councils and Controversies, Traditions and Polities, Liturgies and Prayers – we cannot think any of these things apart from the Fathers. Without the Fathers, we cannot begin to say what the Faith is, let alone think it. They would have us think and to think in their company, the company of the Fathers. That includes reading the Scriptures with the Fathers.

Roughly extending from the end of the first century AD to the beginning of the seventh or the end of the eighth century, the Patristic Period or “the Age of the Fathers” is variously described. For some, it runs from Clement of Rome (c.100) to Isidore of Seville (d.636) in the West or to John of Damascus (d.749) in the East; for others, from Ignatius of Antioch (c.115) to Gregory the Great (d.604). The differences reflect differing sensibilities about the authority of the great “oecumenical” councils, for instance, whether one emphasizes four councils or seven: 1st Nicaea, 325; 1st Constantinople, 381; Ephesus, 431; Chalcedon, 451; 2nd Constantinople, 553; 3rd Constantinople, 681; 2nd Nicaea, 787. For classical Anglicans one might recall Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) convenient mnemonic device: “One Faith, Two Testaments, Three Creeds, Four Councils and Five Centuries” which encapsulates a strong sense of the mind of the Fathers and their formative role in shaping the Anglican theological tradition.

In general, the theological and spiritual writers from the first to the eighth centuries are known collectively as “The Fathers”. They embrace a wide range of theological outlooks, intellectual abilities and interests and different schools of thought, but together they comprise a remarkable uniformity of understanding about the essentials of the Christian Faith. They are altogether critical for the establishment of orthodoxy – right belief or right worship.

There are various ways of categorizing such a large collection of writers: by time, for instance, the Apostolic Fathers, such as Clement of Rome, Ignatius and Polycarp who are thought to have had a connection and association with the Apostles; the Ante-Nicene Fathers (before 325) such as Irenaeus and Tertullian; the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (325 and after), such as Athanasius, Chrysostom, and many more; by place, for instance, the Desert Fathers, such as Pachomius and Anthony, the Cappadocians, such as Basil and the two Gregories, the North African Fathers, such as Cyprian and Augustine; and, more comprehensively, by time and language of theological discourse, for instance, the early and late Greek Fathers and the early and late Latin Fathers, embracing most of those already named; and finally, by schools of thought and influence, such as the Alexandrian School with figures such as Clement of Alexandria and Origen, and the Antiochene School with Lucian of Antioch and Marcellus of Ancyra, for example.

It would be wrong to suppose that there is anything monolithic about the viewpoints these writers embody. Yet through the dynamic of their theological interchange the fundamental principles of the Christian faith were hammered out. Error and heresy are equally defined in the process of determining the Faith, in justice to the witness of the Scriptures and with respect for the integrity of philosophical thought. As Richard Hooker (c.1555-1600) had occasion to remark, “all heresies,” too, are brought within the scope of the Fathers’ doctrinal achievement.

The great achievement of the Fathers was to establish and define the fundamental framework of belief about the person and natures of Christ, the redemption of mankind by Christ’s saving work and the identity of God as Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost; in short, they laid out the essential framework of belief in which to think the dogmas of the Incarnation, Redemption and the Trinity.

The Calendar in The Canadian Book of Common Prayer (pp.ix-xii) provides a representative roll-call of the Fathers for our commemoration. Most of those already mentioned are contained there. It is an important reminder of how our understanding of the Faith stands in critical continuity with the Fathers.

For Anglicans that sense of continuity with the Fathers and their critical role in the establishment of essential doctrine has been a commonplace of Anglican spirituality and theological consideration. In the formative period of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, the Fathers were much studied and appealed to as expressing the basic consensus fidelium which cannot be diminished nor added to with respect to what is essential to salvation; an outlook captured succinctly by Archbishop John Bramhall (1594-1663): “That which was once an essential part of the Christian Faith is always an essential part of the Christian Faith; that which was once no essential, is never an essential.”

Again, in the nineteenth century there was a revival of interest in the Fathers by the Anglican Divines of the Oxford Movement. In the face of the fragmentation of religious authority in their day, they sought in the Fathers the basis for the renewal of the Church of England’s devotion and life. Rev’d Dr. Robert Crouse aptly described the outlook of the Tractarian Divines (so-called because they wrote tracts) towards the Fathers as “devout perusal.”

That tradition and approach to the Fathers needs to be complemented by a greater attention to “the Mind of the Fathers” without which our piety becomes flabby and sentimental, our religion personal and private and merely romantic. We need to recover “the Mind of the Fathers” for the renewal of our understanding of the essential things of salvation, for the recovery of “doctrine in devotion,” and for the revitalization of the mission and life of the Church. To engage our contemporary world and church in the confidence of the gospel, we need to be in the company of the Fathers. To be in the company of the Fathers is to find out who they were and what they have achieved. It means to think with them the high things of God in the mercies of Christ and to read with them the Holy Scriptures which they read and have passed on to us.

In the mid thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas put together a remarkable compilation of the teachings of the Fathers on each of the four Gospels known as the Catena Aurea, the Golden Chain. He canvassed a great range of texts, at least as they were known to him, putting together a compendium of comments and observations and sermons by the various Fathers of the early Church. In more recent times, his comments have been collected together on the Sunday Gospels used in the Roman order to provide an interesting and helpful commentary on the Eucharistic lectionary. They coincide for the most part with the readings that arise out of the Sarum rite that has shaped the Prayer Book tradition.

It will suffice, perhaps, to mention a few observations about the Gospel for the First Sunday in Lent from some of these Fathers that help us to ponder the wisdom of the Scriptures and its meaning for us in our wilderness pilgrimage.

Gregory the Great says “Let us observe what follows, namely that the devil leaving Him, angels minister to Him. From this what do we learn, if not the twofold nature of the One Person? For it is a man the devil tempts; and the same person is God to Whom angels minister. We recognize then our own nature in Him; for unless the devil saw Him as man he would not have tempted Him. We venerate in Him His own divinity; for unless He were God of all, angels would not have come and ministered to Him”.

St. Augustine (De Trinitate IV, 13) asks “Why did He allow Himself to be tempted? That He might as our Mediator help us to overcome temptations; not alone by assisting us, but also by His example.”

Jerome states that “It was the purpose of Christ to triumph by means of humility.”

Gregory argues: “So the Lord, when tempted by the devil, made answer in the precepts of the Divine Word … that he might give us an example: so that as often as we suffer from evil men, we may be turned rather towards the words of divine truth than towards vengeance”.

Jerome rightly observes: “And let us note that the Lord draws His answers only from the Book of Deuteronomy; that He might set forth the mysteries of the second law.”

“Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God and Him only shalt thou serve;” the essential complement to our Lenten pilgrimage. “All men are seeking for thee.”

Rev’d David Curry
Lenten Programme I: Reading with the Fathers
Eve of Ember Friday, February 22nd, 2024