The Patristic Period

The patristic period
As I shared last week, the desert fathers and mothers focused more on
the how than the what. Their spirituality was very practical: virtue and prayer-based.
Now we turn to its parallel, the Patristic Period, which emphasized the what—the
rational, philosophical, and theological foundations for the young Christian religion.
This period stretches from around 100 CE (the end of the Apostolic Age) to either
451 CE (with the Council of Chalcedon) or as late as the eighth century (Second
Council of Nicaea in 787 CE).
The word patristic comes from the Latin and Greek pater, father. The fathers of the
early Church were primarily “Eastern” in that they lived in the Middle East and Asia,
which are East relative to Europe. We must admit that because women were often
not allowed education or formal authority in this patriarchal period of history and
religion, the majority of documented leadership is by men. (I am sorry to say, much
of today’s Church and culture is still not congruent with Jesus’ and Paul’s attitudes
toward women, who were both far ahead of their cultural stage and training.)
Alexandria in Egyptian Africa was a primary center for learning and culture across
many fields—philosophy, art, medicine, literature, and science—during the
Hellenistic and Roman periods (310 BCE–330 CE). The library in Alexandria was
probably the largest in the ancient world. Greek, Eastern, Jewish, and Christian
thought intersected in this environment, bringing together diverse perspectives and
many saints and scholars.
One of the key teachers of the Alexandrian school, Origen (184–254), is considered
by some to be the first Christian theologian. Many of his ideas,
particularly apocatastasis (“universal restoration”), were largely misunderstood and
thus declared heretical in the sixth century. The Alexandrian
interactive/dynamic/mystical understanding of Jesus’ human and divine natures
(developed by Athanasius, Cyril, and Bishop Dioscorus) became dominant for a while
but was later rejected at the Council of Chalcedon, which insisted that Jesus had two
very distinct natures. These then became hard to reconnect on any practical level—
in Jesus and in us!
Building on the work of the Alexandrian school, the Cappadocian Fathers (in what is
now Turkey) further advanced early Christian theology with their doctrine on the
Trinity. The three theologian saints Basil the Great (330–379), his younger brother
Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus (329–389) sought to give Christianity a
solid scholarly status, on par with Greek philosophy of the time. They developed an
intellectual rationale for Christianity’s central goal: humanity’s healing and loving
union with God.
We’ll explore these early Eastern theologians’ views on Christ, Trinity, theosis,
universal salvation, and hesychasm (prayer of rest) throughout this week’s
meditations.
References:
I recommend Amos Smith’s study of the Alexandrian mystics, Healing the Divide:
Recovering Christianity’s Mystic Roots (Resource Publications: 2013), for which I
wrote the Afterword.
For a simple chronology outlining the key figures and events of the Early Christian
Church and Patristic Period, click here.
Alexandria had long boasted a school of classical study that practiced the allegorical
interpretation of the Homeric epics and the Greek myths. This method
of exegesis was taken over by Philo and from him by Christian scholars of Alexandria
in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–c. 215) and Origen (c.
185–c. 254) did not completely rule out the literal sense of scripture—
Origen’s Hexapla, a six-column edition of various biblical versions, was a monument
to his painstaking study of the text—but claimed that the most meaningful aspects
of divine revelation could be extracted only by allegorization. Clement stated that
the Fourth Gospel was a “spiritual gospel” because it unfolds the deeper truth
concealed in the matter-of-fact narratives of the other three. Origen treated literal
statements as “earthen vessels” preserving divine treasure; their literal sense is the
body as compared with the moral sense (the soul) and the spiritual sense (the
spirit). The true exegete, he claimed, pursues the threefold sense and recognizes the
spiritual (allegorical) as the highest. Later, the Antiochene fathers,
represented especially by Theodore of Mopsuestia (c. 350–428/429) and
John Chrysostom (c. 347–407), patriarch of Constantinople, developed
an exegesis that took more account of literal meaning and historical context. But the
allegorizers could claim that their method yielded lessons that (while arbitrary) were
more relevant and interesting to ordinary Christians.
In the West the Alexandrian methods were adopted by Ambrose (c. 339–397),
bishop of Milan, and Augustine (354–430), bishop of Hippo, especially as formulated
in the seven “rules” of Tyconius (c. 380), a Donatist heretic (one who denied
the efficacy of sacraments administered by an allegedly unworthy priest), which
classified allegorical interpretation in relation to: (1) the Lord and his church, (2) true
and false believers, (3) promise and law, (4) genus and species, (5) numerical
significance, (6) “recapitulation,” and (7) the devil and his followers. There were
other Latin exegetes, like Ambrosiaster (commentaries ascribed to Ambrose) and,
supremely, Jerome (c. 347–419/420), the learned Latin Father, who paid close
attention to the grammatical sense. In the Old Testament, Jerome appealed from
the Greek version to the “Hebraic verity” and in such a work as his commentary on
Daniel provided some fine examples of historical exegesis. Augustine, though not
primarily an exegete, composed both literal and allegorical commentaries and
expository homilies on many parts of scripture, and his grasp of divine love as the
essential element in revelation supplied a unifying hermeneutical principle that
compensates for technical deficiencies.

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