Introducing the Fathers

The Fathers need a genuine return to Church life and catechesis. We must not know merely what the Church Fathers believed but also how they believed. We have received doctrine from them through succeeding generations with the sensus fidelium intact, we pray. Several movements to reinvigorate interest in Patristic texts arose in the 19th and 20th century, among them the Oxford Movement and the Ressourcement component of the Nouvelle Théologie. The latter group, as well as the 20th century liturgical reformers and certain German speaking writers, selectively read the Church Fathers to advance novel concepts. A more genuine return to Patristics transpired in English Catholicism and Protestantism, as well as in the Orthodox Church. While the revival has not led to any significant changes at the parish level it has precipitated publishers to print affordable volumes of the Fathers. St. Vladimir's Seminary is one such publisher.

St. Vladimir generally puts out a good product, a faithful translation accompanied by a moderate introduction from a qualified academic. Their volumes from St. Cyprian of Carthage are introduced by Dr. Allen Brent, a leading professor of theology at King's College and the Lateran University. While one might think an introduction to a Church Father might merit a short biography and an outline of the work about to be read. Dr. Brent supplies these necessities and more. No fewer than three times in his edition of On the Church does Brent delve into the consequence of Cyprian's writing for the Papacy. Why? Because "Clearly Cyprian's theology of the Church seems to render unnecessary a pope of Rome as the guarantor of the unity of the Church." Brent writes off Cyprian's short and almost easily missed exegesis of Matthew 16:18 as a lingering foible from his pagan mindset, which, in the "tradition of Tertullian and Irenaeus.... made the See of Rome analogous to that of the emperor as princep, or as first citizen and leader of the Senate." Both in the introduction and in the actual text Brent rambles about the supposed forgery of the later version of the the purportedly papalistic text by proto-Ultramontanists as hypothesized by Edward Benson, father of Robert Hugh Benson, while acknowledging that other commentators believed Cyprian may have modified the text when his address reached a different audience. While I am sure St. Vladimir's is pleased that Dr. Brent penned his gloss of St. Cyprian, but I am equally sure they read past his equation of Anglican ecclesiology with Greek and in contrast to Roman.

Brent's dodgy ideas do not stop there. He goes on to lament that Cyprian "has not the fruits, if such they be, of modern literary criticism of the Fourth Gospel, which would see the Petrine passages, principally John 21, as the later imposition of a hierarchical principal in which Peter as a named individual receives the ministry of teaching and preserving the flock." In contrast to this "later imposition" of authority, "Many scholars would argue that Paul's early communities were charismatic" and "self-authenticating" coteries "united by the same Spirit." An honest question for Dr. Brent from someone who read History at two respected universities: just what is a self-authenticating community in the Spirit? Rather than answering a reasonable question, Brent passes another question: "Why cannot therefore the Church as the body of Christ be understood as such a self-authenticating movement of the Spirit, creating new communities without hierarchy, in which every Spirit filled believer receives the power to absolve?"

A more prudent question might be: why do men who do not trust the texts of the Gospels still, in one form or another, dedicate their lives to some fluid concept of Christianity which would render them irrelevant if taken to its full conclusion? The Holy Spirit does not blow where ever it will in the loose sense Brent asks it to. The Holy Spirit came once at Pentecost and is passed on by the Church, which is a community authenticated by the Spirit, not by itself.

I am deeply disappointed that St. Vladimir is publishing this sort of scholarship in their Popular Patristics series. Hopefully their seminary instruction is more traditional.

Dr. Brent is now a priest in the Ordinariate.

Modern Arians, the Fathers & the Trinity?

When first reading the Fathers of the Church one may be tempted to smile at the quaintness of those phenomenological writers of old and to congratulate more recent theologians for advancing from simplistic and obvious tenets of faith, like the Divinity of Jesus, to more complex and intellectually challenging fields like the mechanisms of justification and the temporal exchanges of merit concerning purgatory. Vatican I quoted St. Vincent of Lerins' Commonitory which gives a brief exposé on the development of doctrine, a concept which also influenced John Henry Newman in his conversion. 

However, intellectual fulfillment and spiritual piety will profit very little from advanced schools of theology in the modern day. Knowing the concept of a sacramental form and how to deduce it for Confirmation will not profit the soul of modern man, whose religious experience rarely extends beyond an occasional Christmas Mass and whose education is confined to the dullest and most monotonous of topics (specialized training, business courses, IT etc). What could appeal to these people?

The Church Fathers are the most obvious choice. The Fathers, particularly the Apostolic Fathers, did not rely as heavily on technical terms, particular philosophical traditions, and an established Christian culture as did the Scholastics, the casuists, the neo-Scholastics, and the manualists. Their own culture was marked by either persecution or confusion. A few of them came from neo-Platonist backgrounds (St. Augustine, Origen, and St. Dionysius), but even those writers' influence is inessential to accepting their claims. Another advantage of the Fathers is that they did not live in an orthodox Christian society. They were either persecuted by the Empire, fighting heresy, and persecuted by heretics. Their appeals were to laity in homilies and letters, and to other thinkers in tracts, although even their educated audiences were not "theologians" in the later sense of the word. Consequentially their language, framework, and approach is much more intuitive for modern readers, appealing to instinct rather than specialized traditions of logic. Also, their claims are easier to check. Every American home owns some sort of Bible and dozens of Bibles are available for free online in English alone. Finding a chapter of Mark is much easier for the lax modern man than finding and understanding the Common Doctor.

Perhaps the greatest strength of the Fathers is that the bulk of their tracts and polemics focus on the consubstantiality of the Trinity and the Divinity of Jesus Christ. The Church may have settled this matter in the year 325AD, but Arianism is far from gone. One might say that the error of Arius is as prevalent now as it was in the time of Diocletian, and Christianity is more hated now than it has been in any time since Diocletian. Why should Catholics focus their sights on the Fathers and the Trinity? Because sacramental forms, transubstantiation, indulgences, propitiation, and Papal infallibility are all quite useless without a proper understanding of Who God is and Who Jesus Christ is. Case in point a dear friend of mine.

My friend, let us pretend his name is George, grew up in a gay household, was nominally Catholic, never received any form of religious instruction whatsoever, served 15 years in the military, was stationed at Ground Zero for the two weeks following 9/11, received a very prized but specialized education, and now works in the political sphere to promote American imperialism. What he has kept from the Church is an understanding of guilt. George is a good man and a good friend, but his understanding of Christ and Christianity is quite troubled. Like most modern Americans he accepts the existence of God and calls Jesus the "Son of God," but cannot identify Him with God. "Jesus" is George's "buddy" while "God" is George's maker. I once shared with George that haunting Byzantine petition "That the end of our life may be painless, unashamed, Christian, and peaceful, and for a good answer before the awesome judgment seat of Christ, let us ask! Grant this, O Lord!" "God" will judge George, but "Jesus" will intervene and assure George of his salvation.

Unlike the Arians, whose theological malice existed among a world familiar with Scripture and the Sacraments, George has no religious education and has been trained by the world to have no familiarity with the humanities or with the religious imagination. George has been molded in ignorance, but ignorance will not split the Trinity into three separate creatures. When I shared with George that eternal sentence of Our Lord's "Before Abraham was I am" (John 8:58) and intimated that, with no material objects Jesus could not have been fashioned but rather was "begotten," the poor man was horrified. He has thought, and might still, that "Jesus" was a super-special "Son" made by "God" for our benefit. The concept of Three Divine Persons in One God nearly caused his mechanistic, rational mind to explode—quite an accomplishment considering George's high IQ. He pondered the matter for a short time and then, as the world trains modern men to do, he swept the matter under the rug and forgot about it.

I have attempted the rationalized explanation of the Trinity before with George and gotten no where with it. A mind trained in logic normally can only function according to the assumptions accepted in its era. Although right wing politically, the assumptions of Goerge's era descend from the materialism of Marx, Engels, and the Capitalists, and from the science of Darwin, and from the pseudo-scientific "social sciences" of economists such as Keynes and the neo-classicists. The best path in my experience is to appeal to more basic and human elements when discussing the Divine, elements shared by most people. My conversations with the un-churched and un-believing are the primary sources of my frustration with legalistic theology which I voice here so often. St. Gregory Nazianzen's concept of the Trinity based on the process of thinking—wherein the Father is the mind, the Son is speech and words, and the Holy Spirit the breath flowing from the mouth—has been far more successful with George than most methods of teaching the Trinity since then. Similarly, explaining the Incarnation to George became easier with that aphorism from St. Athanasius, "God became man so that man might become God." After assuring himself that God had not smited us for such a "disturbing" thought, he began to understand the Church's teaching on the two natures of Christ and on the Trinity. Is this obsession over the Trinity too harsh given George's upbringing? Perhaps, but we Catholics must not forget that the un-revised Creed of Nicaea ended with "But those who say: 'There was a time when he was not;' and 'He was not before he was made;' and 'He was made out of nothing,' or 'He is of another substance' or 'essence,' or 'The Son of God is created,' or 'changeable,' or 'alterable'—they are condemned by the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church."

As the world becomes increasingly secular few people will have the concerns of past times. In 1960 America, when Ike was cleaning out his desk draws to make room for Kennedy, most people asked whether the Catholics or the protestants were right about what Christianity is. These days the few curious people are asking if God even exists. Those who accept the existence of God construct a fitting God in their minds and a fitting Jesus, too. Lost in all this is the Trinity and the Jesus of the New Testament. Lost is God as He is. Before we can discuss the Immaculate Conception we must be able to communicate the most basic and absolutely fundamental parts of the faith, above all, Who God is. The Fathers can help.

Big Money Religion, Ex-Catholics, and the Eucharist

In New England there are three major religious groups: Catholics, non-practicing Catholics (either cultural Catholics, lapsed, apostates, or just plain inactive), and the irreligious. Texas, I have found, is something entirely different.

Jerry Falwell gets dunked

Religion here is an industry, and a big one at that. During drives through Frisco and Irving I passed half a dozen or so megachurches in each town. A megachurch, for my international readers, is a uniquely American bit of Protestantism wherein a team of pastors raises a congregation numbering in the high four or low five digits and builds an entertainment facility to use as a house of worship. It is, as one Evangelical put it, like going to the movies. I attended a Evangelical service once as a social courtesy and did not participate in the actual service. Initially I thought the service would offend me, but time and patience revealed pity and not antipathy to be the proper disposition towards these folks: no Sacraments, no Holy Spirit, no Fathers, no liturgy. These people are not little Luthers. They are Luther's victims. But like Luther they have capitalized on their Protestantism and translated their authority into political capital.

Apparently one Democrat candidate for governor in Texas intends to run entirely on a pro-abortion platform. Her money, obviously, comes from outside the state. Regardless Texas will prove a challenge for her. The money behind these megachurches warrants awe and the pastors do not shy from encouraging their congregants from "voting according to [their] Sunday beliefs." No wonder Jerry Falwell's "Moral Majority" was able to raise Ronald Reagan to the Presidency.

But is this religion? Is this Christianity?

The Roman martyred our Fathers among the Saints for not being Roman enough, for being the "other." Had the Christians been enemies of the Empire or its friend they would have received predictable treatment. The Roman subjugated many enemies, such as the Jews, and then re-appropriated their political systems to their own ends. Given the Church's entirely other worldly view this was not possible and many God glorified many of the Church with martyrdom, not with political coalitions.

A more Catholic outlook on how the Bible
is the "Word of God"

The multimedia empires of megachurch Protestantism really have no place among Christianity as I recognize it. The Catholic, and Orthodox, Church always try to maintain positive relationships with monarchies and local governments in order to assure her own rights and freedom to operate. The state and local authorities usually complied because 99% of people were Catholic. When that was not the case a pluralism was accepted, but the Church still kept her outlook practical and her goals militant, not commercial. Even the Anglican Church, which I have criticized on this blog, can be said to follow the traditional pattern more than megachurchdom. 

Many Catholics, or ex-Catholics, seem to have purchased one edition or another of this American product called the megachurch. Today at a business event I found two instances of ex-Catholics. One was an Evangelical who married a Catholic woman in a Catholic parish—despite his disdain for the gay priest—because the faith was important to her. She now attends his church.... Another fellow was raised Catholic, but left the Church, married, and continues in ignorance. The first fellow attends a more "moderate" brand of megachurch wherein they admit the Bible ain't really the "Word of God" while the other fellow seems to possess a more fundamentalist focus. Despite all this, the second man's wife insists that they attend midnight Mass every Christmas. Why? "She likes Communion and thinks it's important."

Those two exchanges revealed something important to the Rad Trad. The Catholic Church is still recognizable to these people, but, as she was in her early Roman days, she is still the other. Megachurches rarely if ever do "communion" so where would she get the idea that it matters? Why go to a church that does "communion" on a night that is, to Americans, the most important of the year? In the former case the man might have done well to realize that the Church does not believe the Bible is the Word of God in the same way Protestants do. Protestants tend to view the Bible as Muslims view the Koran: God dictated and someone wrote the literal meaning. The Church has a more mature view of the Bible as a whole (she assembled it after all) and in parts (formed by the Fathers, use of those languages, a chain of interpretation, and the Holy Spirit).

Much like the early Romans many American Protestants of various denominations swing between places of worship, be it Bacchus or Baptist, seeking what they know to be missing and they continue to miss it because they are looking in the wrong places. As the Romans discovered, and as these souls hopefully will discover, no Roman or American product solves spiritual woes. They real solution is the "other," the Catholic Church. They are not unlike the women at the tomb on the morning of the Resurrection. They sought one thing and found, or did not find, something entirely different (they probably did not understand even the physical event for days): 

The radiant angel standing within the tomb, cried out to the Myrrh-bearers: Why O women Disciples, do you mingle myrrh with your tears of pity? Look upon the tomb and rejoice, for the Savior has risen from the dead.

Blessed are You , O Lord, teach me your statutes.

Very early in the morning, the myrrh-bearers ran lamenting to your tomb. But the angel stood by them and said: Do not weep, the time of lamenting has passed. Announce the Resurrection to the Apostles.

Blessed are You, O Lord, teach me your statutes.

The myrrh-bearing women came with myrrh to your tomb, O Savior, and heard the angel say to them: Why do you think that the Living One is among the dead, for as God He has risen from the dead.

Let us pray to St. Monica for these souls and souls like them, that they may one day return to Christ's fold.

God bless you all!

New Series: Lesser Known Fathers

The Rad Trad knows his readers seem to like series and t like all things liturgical. The liturgical orientation will not be stopping, but seeking to write something new and at a loss for material, the Rad Trad has decided to begin, starting next week, a series on the Fathers of the Church less known to us. Our tendency is to look primarily to the four original Latin doctors: Ss. Augstine, Ambrose his mentor, Jerome his amusing correspondent, and then Pope Gregory the Great. For diversity we often add the original Greek doctors: Ss. Athanasius, John Chrysostom, Gregory the Theologian, and Basil the Great. Aside from Athanasius, who figures prominently in Cardinal Newman's conversion, and John the Golden Mouth, whose homilies make many appearances in the Office, we are not readily familiar with the Greek doctors or many other Fathers, East or West. 

I propose to discuss and review works of the following "lesser known" Fathers of the Church on a weekly basis:

• St. Gregory the Theologian (or Gregory Nazianzus)
• St. Gregory of Nyssa
• St. Basil the Great
• St. Isaac of Syria
• St. Anthony the Abbot (as told by St. Athanasius)
• St. John of Damascus
• St. Hilary of Poitiers
• St. Maximus the Confessor
• St. John Climacus
• St. Cyprian of Carthage
• St. Isidore of Seville
• Wildcard: Origen's book on prayer. His posthumous condemnation for heresy gave him a bad reputation until the last few decades. In some sense he was the first person to attempt theology as we know it and no one, to my knowledge, reproached him while he lived. That does not make his odd theories on the soul doctrinally sound, nor do I give much credence to his ideas on salvation, but I cannot help but think the negatives of his reputation are exaggerated. His book on prayer has always been popular in Eastern Christendom and does not involve the dodgy opinions that elicited his condemnation at Constantinople II. This one is a maybe.
Any more ideas?