One of the recurring themes of the Second Vatican Council was a commitment to return to the sources of the Catholic faith. Whatever the Council Fathers had in mind by this repeated stressing of the need for ressourcement, the Holy Spirit had His eyes upon the turmoil that was to follow. Not only would there be a continued proliferation of Protestant sects, there would also be widescale dissent within the bounds of the Catholic Church as well. Add to that sciences like the Historical-Critical method and the recipe for confusion was complete. As we approach the 60th year since the calling of the Council, it is time that we take their recommendation to heart and begin to study one of the major fonts of Christian wisdom, the Church Fathers.
Knowledge of the Church Fathers is woefully lacking among most Catholics and, what little is known, is mainly in the form of apologetical snippets. Some think it sufficient to admire the Fathers from afar seeing them as a “great cloud of witnesses”, but not really sure what it is that they witness to. But, more than just satisfying our nostalgic longings, the Church Fathers, like our human fathers, are vital to our identity as Christians. A person who has no history, or has forgotten it, is in a very real way less goes through an identity crisis. Like the amnesiac, they are lost, and, more relevant to the concern here, they are malleable to the suggestions of others who will tell them who they are. Christians are so easily manipulated into believing falsehoods about the Faith because they do not know their history. Studying the Church Fathers is the only remedy when Christian identity as a whole is threated.
Revelation as Give and Take
Why is this the case? Because Revelation is a two-way street. God is always the Great Initiator, but His communication, to be true communication, must be received. A message that is neither received nor understood is no message at all. A second, related principle, is articulated St. Thomas Aquinas, who says that “whatever is received, is received according to the mode of the receiver.” With respect to the Church Fathers, we must look at them as the ones who truly received the fullness of God’s Revelation. It was spoken to them in a manner that they could receive it. It is meant for us too, but it must, in a sense, pass through their hands. If we want to receive that same message, a message that was given directly to them, then we should look at the way they understood the message. Their role, as one author has put it, is to issue the “Church’s great Amen” to Revelation. They received it and said Amen, which means “I agree” or “I got it.” By tracing what they believed revelation to be saying, we can then give our own Amen.
Now to be clear, we should not expect our beliefs to be the same as theirs. Revelation wasn’t given to them as a dead letter. We should expect it to be made more explicit as it is “received according to the mode of the receivers” in each generation. As both wisdom based on Christian patrimony and human knowledge grows, we become in a certain sense more receptive to the fullness of God’s revelation. What they received in seed form, we receive as a sapling or a full-grown tree. All that we believe explicitly, they believed implicitly. They give us an unbroken chain to the Apostles enabling us to trace the path from implicit to explicit. So, rather than trying to go back to what they believed exactly (as some antiquarianizers do), we should make sure we can trace what we believe back to what they believed.
It is the fact that the Church Fathers had the “voices of the Apostles echoing in their ears” (St. Irenaeus) that gives them an authoritative voice in the Church. They are not infallible like Scripture or the Church, but their authority is more in a constitutive sense. They tell us what the Apostles meant. All that we believe today must be traced back through their voices because they link us to the Apostles. If what is believed today contradicts what they say, then it is most certainly a false doctrine.
An Example
Take for example the Canon of Scripture (for a more detailed explanation of the forming of the Canon read this previous post). We see as early as 96AD in Clement’s Letter to the Corinthians authoritative quotes from 13 New Testament books along side many Old Testament quotations. He seems to put them both into the category of inspired Scriptures. Fast forward 50 years and there is almost universal agreement on which books are to be treated as inspired and used in the liturgy with a few exceptions. By the fourth century we have an official list of the books of Sacred Scripture that was reaffirmed several times since then. This example is illustrative because, if we want to know which books the Apostles were handing on and constitute true Revelation, then we should go to the men whose hands were open to receive it and not a former Augustinian monk some 1500 years after the event.
The Church does not maintain an official list of Church Fathers, but if such a list did exist, it would likely contain the names of about 100 men. She identifies a Father using the criteria that St. Vincent of Lerins, himself a Church Father, articulated in the 5th Century. He said that the Fathers are “those alone who though in diverse times and places, yet persevering in the communion and faith of the one Catholic Church, have been approved teachers.” They are marked by four qualities: sound doctrine, Church approval, antiquity, and holiness of life. The latter, holiness of life, can never be overestimated. Saints not only walk the walk, but also talk the talk. They live rightly because they believe rightly. Each Father may have made mistakes because they speculated on questions that had not yet been answered, but when they reliably pass on what was unquestionably believed at the time they wrote. We know this, not because just one of them wrote it, but because many of them did. They showed the unanimous consent of the Church in her beliefs. This is why the First Vatican Council said “it is not permissible from anyone to interpret Holy Scripture in a sense contrary to this, or indeed against the unanimous consent of the Fathers.”
It is with more than a little irony that the prevailing “Spirit of Vatican II” has rejected the Fathers even though the real spirit encouraged revisiting them. For those who want to defeat that Spirit they would do well to ad fontes!