Summary
1 Nomenclature
2 Classification and trends
3 Patristic Hermeneutics
4 Bibliographical references
The interest in the teachings of the Church Fathers marks current times with a return to the original sources of Christianity. As a determining antecedent along with the liturgical movement, the patristic movement was fundamental for the convocation and celebration of the Second Vatican Council, which has not ceased to affirm the unquestionable value of the Church Fathers for the renewal of faith in the present day. Alongside the history of dogmas, the Church believes in the contribution of the Church Fathers to “the interpretation and faithful transmission of each of the truths of Revelation” (cf. Optatam Totius n.16).
1 Nomenclature
With the advances in theological research, the elementary terminologies related to Patristic Sciences have multiplied and diversified, so that the concession of concepts was eventually redefined, causing the term “patristics” to gather more comprehensive conceptual elements. Until then, it was common to say that patristics was the study concerned with the theological thought of the Church Fathers, while patrology remained in the perspective of research on the life and writings of the same authors (cf. Cong. Catholic Education, 1990, n.49). In this way, patristics is redefined as a technical term used to determine the science responsible for analyzing and interpreting the set of ancient documents between the 1st century A.D. and the first clear signs of medieval methodology.
Parallel to the biblical sources that make up the material of a specific science for the study of the Holy Scriptures, the documentation of this patristic phase can also be classified as patristic sources, which will be established by the literary, iconographic, topographic, epigraphic, or archaeological material when this information relates to and represents elements that elucidate the social or religious reality of that period.
By definition, it is up to Christian archaeology to identify, decipher, and explain the oldest Christian sources found, for example, in sarcophagi, in the catacombs, when these begin to identify the presence of the Christian religious phenomenon, in statues, in objects common to ancient life and, on a large scale, in the function that various buildings had for worship, domicile, administration, social charity, among others. The funeral slab of Abercius is associated with the most important archaeological finds of all time and leads the list of the most valuable documents for Christianity (MORESCHINI, 1995, p.307). The Bishop of Hierapolis died in 216 AD. Three years before his death, he had his own mortuary inscription built, enriching it with Christological and ecclesiological allusions, conveying a clear feeling of devotion from the churches scattered throughout the world towards the Roman church, discoursing on the eucharist and on a possible homogeneous group of Pauline writings and, finally, dating and signing it. For this reason, the slab of Abercius is also called Regina Scriptarum, and is in the permanent collection of the Paleo-Christian Museum of the Vatican.
In turn, the concept “patrology” should be understood as the dogmatic product and the orthodox content present in the teachings of ancient writers, regardless of their function within or outside the ecclesiastical sphere. On the other hand, in the face of innovative and heretical movements that established an independent, distorted, and false rereading of the teaching that Jesus and the Apostles had instituted, the community of Christian faithful understood that the criterion of unquestionable authenticity to be followed was the “Christian antiquity” criterion, whose application was not based so much on temporal aspects, but on the fundamental elements of the doctrinal truth established by Jewish and Christian roots.
The terminology “Church Fathers” was first coined in a Protestant context, by the German theologian Johann Gerhard in 1637, with the purpose of defending a supposed antiquity of the theological concepts of the Reformers against Catholic dogmas. Re-evaluating this concept from the criterion of Christian antiquity, the Catholic Church incorporated it into its theological language, to indicate the authenticity of the Christian faith verified in the development of Catholic doctrine. In Brazil, Padres da Igreja became the translation most frequently used by Catholic publishers and authors, while Protestant books and articles tend to translate the same term as “Pais da Igreja”. “Church History” is understood as the form of approximate reconstruction of the events of Christian antiquity whose mentions are based on literary data present in ancient documents. However, this patristic reconstruction requires caution so that ancient concepts are not misinterpreted or applied to current situations as general rules, since access to the same historical events through literature is limited to being based on approximately twenty percent of the documents whose titles were cited in the books of the Church Fathers, which means that eighty percent of the books cited by ancient writers have not reached us (GRECH, 2005, p.37). Some errors become common in the evaluation of patristic sources, whether through anachronism, when the judgment is made outside the context in which the text was written, or when a piece of data from the past is arbitrarily proposed by the historical fundamentalism of those who try to revive past situations that are already obsolete or outdated structures.
There is also talk of “Patristic Literature” to designate the literary forms researched by those who seek to understand the rules of typology, allegories, rhetoric, and pedagogy that expand and enable a greater understanding of what ancient writers wanted to say when writing their texts. Original works and invaluable translations enrich the body of Patristic Literature in a linguistic landscape as vast as the geographical limits of ancient Christianity. These works were produced in the following languages: Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian, Georgian, Arabic, and Paleo-Slavic.
2 Classification and trends
In general, the criteria for identifying a Church Father are antiquity, ecclesiastical approval, holiness of life, and orthodoxy (SANTINELLO, 1973, p.6). Initially, the limits of the patristic period were established up to Isidore of Seville (†636) for the West and up to John of Damascus (†749) for the East. However, upon noticing the continuity and evidence of the patristic methodology in periods that reach the literary production of Charlemagne’s court, recent studies revise these limits, proposing them up to the 9th century (LUISELLI, 2003, p.9-17).
The Apostolic Fathers are the first figures of patristics, so named because they were disciples of the Apostles of Christ. The main and oldest works are: “The Epistle of Barnabas”, “The Shepherd of Hermas”, the letters of Clement of Rome, the epistolary in seven works of Ignatius of Antioch, the letters of Polycarp of Smyrna, “Papias”, and the “Didache”, also known as the “Doctrine of the Apostles”. Thus, the focus on the ecclesiastical structures and reflections of these texts is highlighted, from which important information can be extracted about the social aspects involving the gatherings of Christians in their home celebrations and the vast landscape of ministries exercised in these celebrations. The theme of the irrefutable importance of the episcopate is constantly treated in these works. Thus, in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, what scholars normally call Christian self-awareness is noted, that is, the way in which Christians distanced themselves from the religious practices of paganism, Gnosticism, and Judaism, thus forming a religion with clearly distinct elements.
The succeeding generation faced the great persecutions of the Roman Empire in the second century, as Christians were accused of opposing public order (pax deorum), since the faithful of the Church opposed offering sacrifices to the pagan gods, refusing to observe the governmental principles through which it was believed the well-being of the citizens was preserved. Christian apologetics was born from the need to defend those accused of Christianity in the courts of persecution. As for the apologist authors or apologists, one can cite St. Justin, Tatian, Athenagoras, Melito of Sardis, Irenaeus of Lyons, Hippolytus of Rome, Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius, among others.
After the harshest period of persecutions around the end of the third century, the primitive community had to worry about safeguarding the faith in the face of the intensification of theological and political issues. Now, Origen and Clement of Alexandria promote their works in the East, while from the West, already Latinized, important works emerge such as those written by Tertullian. Many questions remain open given the difficulty and obscurity for which the biblical texts did not offer greater explanations. Thus, typology, as an anticipation of historical events, and allegory, as the meaning of the elements of the texts (SIMONETTI, 1985, 14), show, for example, that Jesus dies with the crown of thorns, as was typologically anticipated by the lamb that appears caught in the bushes in the sacrifice of Isaac, or that the red cord – towel or cloth for Clement of Rome and others – that Rahab hung from her window would represent the allegory of the blood of Christ for the salvation of sinners. Not all biblical terms, however, encompass the vast content of the mystery revealed by Christ to his Church, as can be observed during the Arian controversy, which is why the Council of Nicaea was proclaimed by Emperor Constantine in 325. The issue that pitted Arius and the Christians of orthodox doctrine against each other concerned the divinity and origin of Jesus Christ from the Father, in the form of insufficient biblical terminology that the opponents presented to defend their opinion. For the council fathers of Nicaea, the best way to resolve that impasse was the promulgation of a symbol of faith, that is, the production of guidelines that clarified the orthodox way of believing and teaching the faith of the Church. All the efforts of the council fathers brought to light the term “consubstantial,” which was not found in the Bible, but served to help in the discernment of the truth that the Church had always preached about the divinity of the Son of God. Among the most famous Fathers of this period, Eusebius of Caesarea, Athanasius, and Hilary of Poitiers stand out.
Also notable were the Cappadocian Fathers – Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, and John Chrysostom – who played a fundamental role in understanding the Trinitarian faith in the second half of the 4th century. In fact, in the work “Against Eunomius,” by St. Basil, the question of the divinity of the Holy Spirit clearly appears, against which view the heretics established that, like the Son, the Holy Spirit was also a creature of the divinity. The Cappadocians responded to the threats against the Holy Spirit and became essential references for the Council of Constantinople in 381, in which the symbol that is known to this day as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed was proclaimed.
After the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople, the council that discussed, among other topics, the dogma of the theotókos, concerning Mary, Mother of God, was celebrated in Ephesus in the year 431. With this, Christianity was divided between those who accepted the orthodox interpretation of Cyril of Alexandria, by which the council of Ephesus declared that Mary is the mother of God, and the heretical stance of Nestorius, who insisted on denying Mary’s maternity in relation to the divinity of Christ, therefore, the Virgin should only be known as “mother of Christ” in the opinion of the heretics. The theological problems inherent in this issue were typically Christological, as the understanding of the Nestorians promoted great obstacles to the comprehension of the true divinity of Christ, thus repeating the errors of Arianism and Sabellianism. Defeated by Cyril’s arguments, Nestorius was deposed from the see of Constantinople. Unfortunately, Nestorianism gained several followers throughout antiquity.
At the dawn of the fifth century, the Latin literature of the Church is enriched by the works of Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome. This is the phase in which the ecclesiastical authorities, that is, the bishops, are faced with important social situations for the contextualization and development of the life of the Church: a) the Roman Empire organizes its governmental administration based on the Christian principles established by the edict of Theodosius in 380, which definitively established Christianity as the official religion of the Empire. In fact, despite the importance given to the Edict of Milan decreed by Emperor Constantine in 313, it cannot be forgotten that this edict only provided for the licitness of Christianity until that moment. The Edict of Milan prescribed that the Christian religion was licit, while the edict of Theodosius made it official for the Roman citizen. b) the devotion to the martyrs is reinforced with the regularization promoted by the bishops, when their relics are transferred from the catacombs to the altars of the Churches, thus instituting the cult of devotion to the saints, from the perspective of those who had lived the integrity of the Christian faith in all its demands. c) in 410, the barbarians arrived in Rome and thus determined, with their displacement, a new form for the cities of the Roman Empire. With this, the pastoral and theological needs will suffer essential consequences that will determine the path the Church will choose for its mission in the world.
Of utmost importance was the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which defended, against the Monophysites, the faith in Jesus Christ through which the union of the two natures (human and divine) in one person was defined, thus clarifying what the Church teaches about the hypostatic union. Centuries later, in 681, with the Third Council of Constantinople, an end was put to the difficulties of Monothelitism and Monoenergism. Finally, the great homilies and theological treatises produced by the holy fathers under the light of grace, moral, and sacramental life multiplied. In this sense, Paschasius Radbertus is inserted among the authors of the closing of the patristic period with his grandiose and important work on the Eucharist titled De Corpore et Sanguine Domini in 831.
3 Patristic Hermeneutics
The Church Fathers unanimously recognized the difficulties that arose from reading the Holy Scriptures and ended up tracing paths by which they believed these difficulties could be overcome. For them, it was fundamental to respect the basic laws of composition to understand the true meaning that the biblical author would have given to their text. Therefore, on numerous occasions, the solution to biblical difficulties was based on the basic understanding that grammar and rhetoric gave to the same texts. Although biblical interpretations are diverse, in relation to contemporary exegesis, since the remote times of Christianity, readers of the Holy Scriptures were instructed to ask about the literary genre of the texts and the intention of the authors when writing them. The basis for biblical investigation in the first centuries – as Irenaeus of Lyons demonstrates – was in the evaluation of the veracity of the text that Christians should use, as pseudo-Christian literature and apocryphal writings were multiplying. Among other determinations, biblical interpretation at this time could not dispense with the Church’s rule of faith. No proposal for interpretation could be considered valid if it contradicted the teachings of the Christian faith, transmitted by Christ to his Apostles and by the Apostles to successive generations.
In the third century, the reader of the Holy Scriptures is invited to read the same pericope progressively according to the literary sense, which alerts him to the material circumstances described there; according to the ethical sense, which places him before the moral values not necessarily mentioned in the text; finally, according to the spiritual sense, the true value towards which the inspired text wants to guide every man. The school of Alexandria – with Clement and with Origen – was the great promoter of this hermeneutic method.
Among the patristic hermeneutical proposals, the rules of Tyconius stand out, corrected and explained by Augustine in the third book of De Doctrina Christiana, where the saint from Hippo admits it is necessary to start from the clear texts – whose understanding leaves no doubt – to understand the obscure texts. According to Augustine, there is no contradiction of any kind between the texts of the Holy Scriptures. The difficulties arise from the limitation of human language, through which God chose to transmit his truths. According to Augustine, the attentive reader considers, for example, that all biblical texts deal with the inseparable unity between Christ and the Church, finding in this unity the answer to the difficulties and apparent biblical contradictions.
In the process of faith instruction, the mystagogue performs the function of revealing to the catechumen the mysteries that they must embrace at the time of baptism. Given the aforementioned difficulties, the content of the Christian faith is considered arcane, that is, its transmission provides for access to secret information (mysteries), which only the initiated, that is, catechumens, could receive. Twenty-four mystagogical catecheses of Cyril of Jerusalem (†387) have come down to modern times in groups of texts that described a pre-catechetical period in which the aspirants were called ‘the enlightened’ and were offered an introduction to baptism, transmitted in one catechesis. The larger group of texts, with 18 catecheses, was a reference for the meetings that occurred during Lent. Finally, right after baptism, which was celebrated on Easter night, 5 catecheses were intended for the neophytes in an attempt to explain to them what they had not been able to understand until then.
André Luiz Rodrigues da Silva. Brazil.
4 Bibliographical references
ALTANER, B. Patrologia: vida, obra e doutrina dos padres da Igreja. São Paulo: Paulinas, 1988.
CONGREGAÇÃO PARA A EDUCAÇÃO CATÓLICA. Instrução sobre o estudo dos Padres da Igreja na formação sacerdotal. Petrópolis: Vozes, 1990.
CONTRERAS, E.; PEÑA, O. Introducción al estúdio de los Padres. Período pre-niceno. Azul: Monastério Trapese de Azul, 1991.
DROBNER, H. R. Patrologia. 2.ed. Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 2002.
FLORIAMO, G; MENOZZI, D. Storia del Cristianesimo. L’antichità. Bari: Laterza, 1997.
GOMES, C. F. Antologia dos Santos Padres. São Paulo: Paulinas, 1979.
GRECH, P. Il messaggio bíblico e la sua interpretazione: saggi di ermeneutica, teologia ed esegesi. Bologna: RevBSup, 2005.
GROSSI, V.; DIBERARDINO, A. La chiesa antica: ecclesiologia e istituzioni. Roma: Borla, 1984.
HAMMAN, A. Os padres da Igreja. São Paulo: Paulinas, 1985.
LIVINGSTONE, E. A. Studia Patrística. Vol. XXII: Cappadocian Fathers, Chrysostom and his greek contemporaries, Augustin, Donatism and Pelagianism. Leuven: Peeters, 1989.
LUISELLI, B. La formazione della cultura europea occidentale. Roma: Herder, 2003.
______. Storia culturale dei rapporti tra mondo romano e mondo germanico. Roma: Herder, 1992.
McGRATH, A. E. Christian theology. An introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
MORESCHINI, C.; NORELLI, E. Manuale di letteratura cristiana antica greca e latina. Brescia: Morcelliana, 1999.
______. História da literatura cristã antiga grega e latina. I: De Paulo à era constantiniana. São Paulo: Loyola, 1995.
______. Storia della letteratura cristiana antica greca e latina. II: Dal concilio di Nicea agli inizi del Medioevo. Brescia: Morcelliana, 1996.
ORBE, A. La teologia dei secoli II e III: Il confronto della Grande Chiesa con lo gnosticismo. Vol. 1: Temi veterotestamentari. Roma: Gregoriana, 1996.
______. La teologia dei secoli II e III. Vol. 2: Temi neotestamentari. Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 1995.
PADOVESE, L. Introdução à teologia patrística. São Paulo: Loyola, 2004.
PENNA, R. Le prime cominità cristiane. Roma: Carocci, 2011.
SANTINELLO, G. Storia del pensiero occidentale. Vol. 2. Milano: Marzorati, 1973.
SESBOUE, B.; WOLINSKI, J. O Deus da Revelação. São Paulo: Loyola, 1997.
SIMONETTI, M. Lettera e/o allegoria. Un contributo alla storia dell’esegesi patrística. Roma: SEA, 1985.
______. Letteratura Cristiana antica. Testi originali a fronte. 3: La separazione fra Oriente e Occidente (dal quinto al settimo secolo) . Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 2000.
______. Letteratura Cristiana antica. Testi originali a fronte. 2: Dall’epoca costantiniana alla crisi del mondo antico (quarto secolo). Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 2000.
______. Letteratura Cristiana antica. Testi originali a fronte. 1: Dalle origini al terzo secolo. Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 1996.
SIMONETTI, M.; PRINZIVALLI, E. Letteratura Cristiana antica. Profilo storico, antologia di testi e due saggi inediti in appendice. Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 2003.
______. Storia della letteratura Cristiana antica. Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 2002.