Who are the Fathers?
Even within (or despite) the narrowing confines of the “age of political correctness”, the term “the Fathers” (Patres) retains an unmistakable, 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, near. Very near.
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” so essential to the understanding of the Christian faith; in short, to the “consensus fidelium” 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.
There are as well the mothers, too, such as the Cappadocian women: the grandmother of Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, Macrina the Elder, their mother Emelia, their older sister, Macrina the Younger; Gregory of Nazianzen’s mother Nonna, his sister Gorgonia, and Basil’s two younger sisters. These women are understood to have contributed to the spiritual themes of deification and monastic devotion in the Cappadocian Fathers. And there is Anthusa, the mother of John Chrysostom, and, of course, there is Monica, the mother of Augustine who figures prominently in his Confessions.There are other important figures such as St. Perpetua and Felicitas, and the 4th century Etheria (or Egeria), famous for her pilgrimage to the Holy Land in her account, The Pilgrimage of Etheria. To name but a few.
Scripture and Creeds, Councils and Controversies, Traditions and Polities, Liturgies and Prayers – we cannot think any of these things apart from the Fathers in this broader sense. Without them, 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.
There are different ways of categorizing the Patristic period and within it different ways of organizing the moments of thought within it. Roughly extending from the end of the first century AD to the beginning of the seventh or even to the end of the eighth century, “the Age of the Fathers”, (also known as the Patristic Period), is variously described and gives rise to an important area of scholarly study, Patristics. 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 or seven: 1st Nicaea, 325; 1st Constantinople, 381; Ephesus, 431; Chalcedon, 451; 2nd Constantinople, 553; 3rd Constantinople, 681; 2nd Nicaea, 787. One might recall Lancelot Andrewes (1555-1626) convenient mnemonic device: “One Faith, Two Testaments, Three Creeds, Four Councils and Five Centuries”, though he was not narrowly dogmatic on that score.
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 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 of Antioch and Polycarp of Smyrna; 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, largely collected into the project by Philip Schaff and others in the translated works of the Ante-Nicene and the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, not to mention Migne’s mid-19th century monumental Patrologia Graeca and Patrologia Latina or for that matter, The Library of the Fathers by the Tractarian divines in the second half of the 19thcentury (in English), and other projects like The Fathers of the Church, The Ancient Christian Writers Series, and several others; by place, for instance, the Desert Fathers, such as Pachomius, Anthony, Evagrius Ponticus, 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 including Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Athanasius, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and extending perhaps to Maximus the Confessor, and the early and late Latin Fathers, embracing, among those already named such as Augustine, and figures like Ambrose of Milan, Hilary of Poitiers, Leo the Great, Gregory the Great, Boethius, and extending perhaps to Eriugena; 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 it is through the dynamic of their theological interchange that 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 framework of belief in which to think the three great and essential dogmas of the Incarnation, Redemption and the Trinity albeit in a number of different theological registers of thought.
The Calendar in The Book of Common Prayer (Cdn.) (pp.ix-xii) provides a fairly 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 16th and 17th 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 19th 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 has 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 now 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 or, on the other hand, aggressively progressive, contrary and dismissive of traditional orthodoxy. 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 revitalisation 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 are and what they have achieved. It means to think with them the high things of God in the mercies of Christ.
Rev’d David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor, NS
(2005, revised and extended, 2026)