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Holy Wisdom

Fathers of the Church

Ignatius of Antioch and Irenaeus of Lyon were among the first of a group of men who dominated the intellectual life of the Church for four centuries and who received a title that designated their entire era: the Fathers of the Church, so called because they lived in the formative age of Christianity, when seminal understandings were forged about many aspects of belief and practice. The Fathers’ writings about the Christian faith would profoundly influence the entire subsequent history of the Church.

The Fathers were exceptional both in learning and in holiness and were close to the time of Christ, all of which were thought to give them a superior understanding of the faith. Many of the Fathers were also bishops, and their speculations arose directly out of their responsibility of guiding their flocks through treacherous waters. They wrote not in a spirit of abstract speculation but with the sense that the welfare of souls was at stake.

Orthodoxy

Theology, however, was itself fraught with the possibility of error, and Christianity, much more than any other religion in the history of the world, placed doctrinal orthodoxy close to the center of its life, a sometimes excessive concern for doctrinal clarity that was motivated by both the Greek passion for philosophical certitude and the religious passion to be faithful to the Gospel. Sins could be forgiven, but false doctrine could not be, because it poisoned the soul. In order to enter the Kingdom, it was necessary to do the Father’s will, but no one could know the Father’s will unless he understood the Church’s teachings.

Thus the Church over time formulated a whole series of dogmas—things required to be believed—that were set forth in explicit creeds. The creeds were originally affirmations of faith by candidates for baptism, hence were cast in the singular “I believe” rather than the communal “We believe”, and the singular form was retained after they came to be recited during the Eucharist. The creedal texts varied rather widely, although they always included an affirmation of faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and the life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus. What was called the Apostles’ Creed developed over time out of other early affirmations. What was “believed” was found in the liturgy, what was “taught” was found in sermons and treatises, and what was “confessed” was found in creeds and official dogmas.

Magisterium

Already in the writings of Paul and in Acts there existed what would later be called the Magisterium (“master” or “teacher”)—a locus of authority capable of pronouncing definitively on matters of faith. While such pronouncements were always based on theological arguments, the authority of the Magisterium ultimately did not depend on the persuasiveness of such arguments, since heretics by definition remain unpersuaded. Heresy could be either false innovation or a stubborn clinging to true but inadequate old formulas. Originally, heresy was not distinguished from schism (“cutting”), but eventually schism was defined as a division in the Church that did not involve doctrine (for example, two rival claimants for episcopal office).

The Vulgate

Jerome, in his hermitage at Bethlehem, devoted himself to translating the whole Bible into Latin, a translation called the Vulgate (“people’s book”) because at the time Latin was the spoken language of most people in the West.

Prior to Jerome, Christians outside Palestine mainly relied for their knowledge of the Old Testament on the Septuagint, which had been written in Greek. Jerome, however, translated directly from the Hebrew.

Use of the Bible was facilitated by the invention of the book—pages of manageable size bound together so as to allow them to be turned over one by one, replacing long unwieldy scrolls that had to be laboriously unrolled. Gradually, the Greek word for a book (biblia) came to have only one meaning, the Bible.

Some books (Esther, Maccabees) appeared in the Septuagint but not in other compilations, and among local churches there were even some differences as to the books of the New Testament. St. Athanasius, the patriarch of Alexandria (d. 373), was the first to list definitively the twenty-seven books of the New Testament, and a few years later, the Council of Rome officially established the canon (“rule”) of the Scripture, decreeing precisely which books belonged there.

Speculative Theology

Judaism was to a great extent hostile to Hellenistic civilization, and, had Christianity remained entirely within the Hebrew cultural ambience, its theology would have developed in very different ways. In particular, it would probably have been content to affirm merely that “Jesus is Lord”, without inquiring too closely into the meaning of that affirmation. But Christianity went beyond its Jewish roots and spread wherever Hellenistic civilization was influential.

Had the majority of Jews not rejected the Gospel, it might not have been taken to the Gentiles. As it was, Greek, not Hebrew or Aramaic, was the first common language of the Church, the language of the New Testament. One of the Church’s greatest achievements—one of the great creative achievements in the history of the world—was to bring about a synthesis between Christianity and classical civilization in the highly sophisticated theology of the second through fifth centuries.

Christians realized quite early that the Evangelists and Apostles did not provide a detailed exposition of every aspect of their faith. Rather, their writings were an embryo or seed, containing the whole of divine revelation but subject to gradual unfolding, analogous to human life from conception to old age. Insofar as they were able, believers were required not to accept the teachings of their faith passively but to explore them ever more deeply. Thus, with the tools of Greek philosophy, Christian theology became philosophical.

Philosophy

The Church’s momentous decision to seek harmony with Hellenistic culture involved an almost passionate embrace of Greek philosophical ideas. This decision, which had deep and lasting results, was motivated by the recognition that Greek philosophy represented reason’s highest achievement, requiring that every attempt to understand the world must begin there. Although Irenaeus, against the Gnostics, warned against improper speculation about the inner nature of God, the Church assumed that man is intended to know God, that questions that arise from the Gospel are meant to be answered insofar as humanly possible. The assumption was a validation of that thirst for knowledge that was characteristic of the Greek mind.

But the embrace of philosophy could not be uncritical. On the contrary, philosophical sophistication helped make Christians aware of its pitfalls. Pagan philosophy not only offered profound insights into Christian beliefs, but served as an antidote to itself, enabling theologians to avoid falsifications of those beliefs that might arise precisely from philosophy. Christianity employed reason to illuminate divine mysteries but controlled those speculations by recourse to the revealed word in Scripture, a way of theologizing that became endemic in the Church.

Philosophy provided the means to explore religious dogmas in sophisticated ways, but such sophistication required embarking on uncharted territory where the possibility of error was great, employing terms like substance, being, and nature that were not found in Scripture but were nonetheless thought to illuminate divine truth.

The Idea of God

Greek terminology helped Christian theologians describe the nature of God. The Old Testament spoke of God in ways that seemed to say that He was subject to emotion and capable of changing His mind. To the Greek philosophers, however, truth had to be immutable, so the Fathers insisted that God must be immutable and absolute, without limit or change, since change implies imperfection. The Fathers backed up the concept by also citing the voice that spoke to Moses from the burning bush—“I am Who am” (Ex 3:14, NAB) to show that God simply exists, without qualification, a rational conclusion confirmed by a biblical text whose full meaning might otherwise not be understood.

Justin

Justin also used Greek expressions to describe God. He declared that God must be everlasting, ineffable (His reality cannot be adequately expressed), nameless, changeless, impassible (He cannot be affected from outside Himself), and without origin—the Creator of all that is. Any other kind of being would be imperfect, hence could not be God. All of these Greek concepts corresponded with the Creator God of the Scriptures.

Origen

In the next century, Origen, also influenced by Neo-Platonism, asserted that God must be immaterial, because materiality too implies corruption and change. But the same Greek idea of perfection made it difficult for Origen to call God infinite, because that concept implies immobility, which would prevent Him from acting. Similarly, he found the concept of God’s omnipotence perplexing, because it seemed to make Him responsible for evil. Origen upheld the orthodox belief that God created the world out of nothing, but he found that concept also difficult to understand and modified it by speculating that the universe is in an eternal process of always being created.

Christology

That the Church ultimately formulated the dogma that Jesus is both fully God and fully man should not obscure the difficulties the early Christians had in comprehending how this could be. The early heresies roughly divided between those that slighted His divinity and those that slighted His humanity. In the Scriptures, Jesus is a man, especially in that He suffers and dies, yet He also has divine power over demons, illness, and the forces of nature. He is at the center of the Gospel, where He both makes continued references to His Father and promises the Spirit who is to come. But what is the relationship between the three? To these most basic questions, the Gospel itself provided no explicit answer.

The Logos

At the heart of the early theological controversies was John’s designation of Jesus as the Logos. Christianity was made intellectually accessible to Neo-Platonists through the claim that the Logos—the order and reason behind the universe—is nothing less than Christ the Divine Word, who existed from all eternity, an idea also present in Paul.

Ignatius of Antioch emphasized the unity of Christ in His twofold divine and human nature—spirit incarnated in flesh—and Irenaeus also affirmed the unity of the God-man, the Logos entering fully into human life in order to redeem mankind. God is not a remote being but makes Himself accessible to His creatures, even sharing their flesh.

Even though he was hostile to pagan thought in general, Tertullian also engaged in ambitious speculation. He argued that in Christ the divine and human substances remain distinct and, although the Logos was born of a human being, it was not incarnated as flesh. The antipope Novatian taught that Jesus’ only element of humanity was the flesh itself, not a human soul or mind. Tertullian coined the Latin word Trinity (“three in one”) and employed the nonphilosophical term person to designate each of the members of the Trinity. (At the time, person designated a mask of a type actors wore to present themselves to the public, but in applying it to the Trinity, Tertullian began a process by which it was eventually changed into its exact opposite—the individual’s true inner self.)

Rival Christologies

Alexandria and Antioch were the respective centers of two rival Christologies. Following Origen, the Alexandrian school tended toward a highly spiritualized understanding of Scripture, while the Antiochians took a more literal and historical approach. The theology of Antioch tended also to dominate the patriarchal see of Constantinople, so that the conflict, although primarily theological, carried immense ecclesiastical implications. Constantinople had status as a patriarchate only because it was the capital of the Empire, and in the view of many, especially at Alexandria, it did not deserve to rank with the more ancient sees.

St. Clement, the patriarch of Alexandria (d. ca. 217), founded the theological tradition of his see city, holding that the Logos “entered into” or “attached itself” to the flesh as Christ’s soul, making Christ free of all human passion.

Origen was a student of Clement and held that all souls exist from eternity, with one such soul destined for Jesus. Unlike other souls, Jesus’ soul was completely subject to the Logos, so that His humanity was neither substantial nor permanent and after the Resurrection He ceased to be human. But Origen also seemed to subordinate the Son and the Holy Spirit to the Father, thereby making Christ less than fully God and setting in motion a series of controversies that would keep the Church in turmoil for two centuries. Pope St. Dionysius (259-268) condemned what he considered the excesses of Alexandrian theology, and Origen died in exile, amidst doubts concerning his orthodoxy.

Arianism

The christological controversy came to a head in the early fourth century through the teachings of Arius (d. 336), a priest of Alexandria and possibly a disciple of Origen, who gave his name to what became the most persistent and divisive heresy in the history of the Church. Arius wanted to preserve the idea of God as wholly transcendent, hence as indivisible, hence as unable to impart His substance to any other being. The Logos did not exist from eternity but was created by God out of nothing, before time began. The Son is a perfect creature, but a creature nonetheless, without direct knowledge of God and called “divine” only as a kind of courtesy. (Arians sometimes referred to Jesus as an angel, at a time when the angelic nature had not yet been defined.) The Logos created the Holy Spirit, a formula that again made the three seem unequal.

Alexander, the patriarch of Alexandria (d. 328), condemned Arius as a heretic, but it was Alexander’s successor, St. Athanasius, who pursued the issue to its farthest point, accusing Arius of polytheism and exiling him from Alexandria. For Athanasius, theLogosdid not merely “enter into” a human person, as Arius held, but actually became man, continuing to exercise sovereign authority over the universe. Athanasius noted that the Church baptized in the name of Jesus and offered prayers to Him and that, if Jesus were not God, He could not have redeemed the human race.

In his exile, Arius won substantial support, including Eusebius of Nicomedia (d. 342), the patriarch of Constantinople (not the historian Eusebius), and when Constantine also endorsed Arius’ ideas, there was an uproar that led the emperor in 325 to call the Council of Nicaea (Asia Minor) to settle the issue. After an intense struggle, the Council condemned Arius, declaring the Son to be “consubstantial” with the Father, that is, sharing the same substance. The issue finally turned on the Greek letter iota—the Son ishomoousios (“the same” as the Father), not homoiousios (“like” the Father).¹

The Nicene Creed

Some time after Nicaea, a new creed was formulated to summarize orthodox beliefs. As against the Gnostics, the Nicene Creed affirmed that there is one God who is “Creator of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible”. Against the Arians, the Creed stated that Jesus was “of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made”, and against the Docetists (below) that He actually “suffered, died, and was buried”.

Imperial Intervention

But the decrees of Nicaea by no means ended the controversies, partly because of the actions of successive emperors. After the Council, the Arians appealed to Constantine, and over the next few decades, there followed a dizzying series of moves aimed at nullifying the results of Nicaea. Athanasius was exiled from his see five times, each time allowed to return, only to be exiled again as political alliances shifted.

When Constantine was dying in 336, he was baptized by the dubiously orthodox Eusebius of Nicomedia. Constantius II (337-361), Constantine’s son and successor, remained favorable to the Arians, who repudiated the authority of the see of Rome and continued the fight. Ironically, Julian the Apostate tended to favor the orthodox party, because he judged the Arians to be dominant and wanted to weaken the Church as much as possible.

At one point, Constantius summoned a council at Arles in Gaul that deposed Athanasius, a judgment in which the legates of Pope Liberius (352-366) acquiesced. Athanasius was driven out of Alexandria, and, when Liberius repudiated the judgment of Arles, the Pope was himself seized by the imperial troops and brought to the East, where he acquiesced in an ambiguous theological formula. But he once more repented his surrender, and the next emperor, Julian II, reversed the decision of Arles, although Arianism remained dominant in some places. (Liberius was the first pope not to be venerated as a saint.)

The emperor Valens (364-379) also supported the Arians, and the First Council of Constantinople (381), presided over by Meletius (d. 381), a bishop of Antioch whom Pope St. Damasus I (366-384) refused to recognize, seemed to uphold Arian ideas. But the condemnation of Arianism by the emperor Theodosius I in 388 was the final effective blow against a remarkably tenacious movement.

Docetism

But the slow vanquishing of Arianism only settled one side of the christological controversy—whether Jesus was fully divine. In part, precisely because of her strong affirmations of His divinity, the Church then found herself wracked with conflict over the question of His humanity. Antioch and Alexandria continued to represent alternative Christologies, now centering on the nature of Jesus, with the former positing both human and divine natures, united but distinct, the latter a total union of the two in which the human nature was absorbed by the divine.

Apollinarius (d. ca. 380), bishop of Laodicea (Asia Minor), was a disciple of Athanasius who was condemned by Pope Damasus and several councils and went into schism, claiming that Jesus has only one nature and that His flesh was already glorified during his earthly life. The term Docetism (from the Latin “to seem”) was first used to describe the Gnostics and later applied to a Christology that in effect claimed that Jesus’ human nature was an appearance only, even an illusion. (Some claimed that He was not actually crucified but slipped away, leaving Simon of Cyrene to suffer death on the cross.)

The Cappadocian Fathers

The mantle of theological orthodoxy now fell on Basil of Caesarea, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzen, who collectively became known as the Cappadocian Fathers, from the district of Asia Minor where they originated. (Basil and Gregory of Nyssa had been schoolmates of Julian the Apostate.) The Cappadocian Fathers held that there is a union of two natures (hypostases) in Christ—the “hypostatic union”—and that His human will did not sin, because the Logos controlled His human nature and rendered His flesh passive.

Hilary of Poitiers

St. Hilary of Poitiers, who helped transmit Eastern theology to the West, was one of the few Western theologians to write on the question, proposing that the Logos was solely divine before the Incarnation but “emptied” Himself(kenosis, in Paul’s words)—in order to become human, because only then could He interact with men. The two natures, each complete in itself, were united in one Person. Ambrose held a similar position.

Nestorianism

Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. ca. 428), anxious to counter any suggestion that God suffered or could in any way change, taught that in Jesus there were actually two “persons” united together—the divine dwelling in the human as if in a temple—of which only the human was incarnate, suffered, and died. Theodore denied that the prophecies of the Old Testament pertained to Jesus and spoke of a “loving accord” between Christ and His Father rather than of complete equality. Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople (d. ca. 451), was an ascetic monk from Antioch who became a disciple of Theodore and gave his name to this heresy.

Cyril of Alexandria

St. Cyril of Alexandria opposed Nestorian theology, asserting that Christ was only one Person and must have been the incarnate Logos, which alone had the power to bring salvation to mankind. Among other things, Cyril appealed to the Eucharist, where Christ shares His Body with His people. But Cyril resisted the claim of two natures in Christ, holding that the human nature did not exist of itself but only in conjunction with the divine. Instead Cyril articulated a position that became known as Monophysitism—“one nature” (from the Greek mono and phusis).

Theotokos

Theological passion was not confined to the learned. During the Arian controversy, it was noted that in their prayers the people reverenced Jesus as God, and a major issue in the Nestorian dispute was whether Mary is Theotokos—“Mother of God”—as she was popularly called, or only Christokos—“Mother of Christ”. The divine motherhood of Mary was considered essential as a guarantee of the true humanity of Christ, but Nestorius denied the title Theotokos because Jesus did not derive His divinity from Mary. (Some heretics held that Jesus passed through Mary as water passes through a pipe.)

Cyril, however, insisted that, since Jesus was one Person, Mary was His Mother without equivocation and therefore must be called Theotokos. Cyril appealed to Rome against Nestorius, and Pope St. Celestine I (422-432) upheld the appeal. Suspecting that Nestorius was a kind of crypto-Arian, Cyril demanded that he affirm that “the Word of God suffered in the flesh”, and at the First Council of Ephesus (431) the title Theotokos was affirmed and Nestorius and his followers were excommunicated. Nestorius retired to a monastery, claiming that he accepted all orthodox teaching. Cyril, however, did not win a complete victory and had to affirm that Christ had two natures.

The Robber Council

Subsequently, a monk of Constantinople named Eutyches (d. 454) taught that Jesus was not fully human. Cyril’s successor Dioscorus (d. 454) supported Eutyches, as did the Second Council of Ephesus (449), under strong pressure from the emperor Theodosius II (408-450). The emperor rebuffed the initiatives of Pope St. Leo I the Great (440-461), causing Leo to condemn Ephesus II as a “robber council”. During the council, Monophysite monks beat the patriarch of Constantinople so badly that he died of his wounds, but elsewhere the Monophysites themselves were subjected to severe persecution.

Chalcedon

The next emperor, Marcian (450-457), supported Leo, who sent his “Tome” (“book”) to the Council of Chalcedon (451), in which he summarized the doctrine that Jesus was one Divine Person possessing two natures in perfect union with one another, making it proper even to say that the Son of God died. Not solely because of Leo’s intervention, Chalcedon adopted that formulation; and, although not immediately accepted everywhere, its decrees would serve as the touchstone of all later orthodox belief.

The Trinity

Just as the christological controversies struggled to do justice to both the divine and the human in Jesus, trinitarian controversies faced the challenge of remaining faithful to monotheism while treating Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as both one and three.

Modalism

Modalism, also called Sabellianism after one of its leaders, was an early third-century attempt to understand the Trinity as “modes” of a single Person—the same Being manifesting itself in three different ways. It was sometimes called Patripassianism—“the Father suffered”—leading Tertullian to jibe that the modalists had crucified the Father.

Monarchianism

A generation later, Paul of Samosata (d. 275), bishop of Antioch, was condemned for the heresy of Monarchianism, which sought to uphold the absolute sovereignty of the Father by denying that the Son and the Spirit are distinct divine Persons. One version of this was Adoptionism, which made Jesus a man who was adopted by the Father. Popes St. Zephyrinus (199-217) and St. Callistus I (217-222) showed some sympathy for Monarchianism, but Callistus eventually condemned the doctrine; and the Church at Rome accepted Tertullian’s trinitarian theology.

Cappadocian Trinitarianism

It was primarily the Cappadocian Fathers who developed the theology of the Trinity, according to which there are three hypostases (natures) in one ousios (“being”), none subordinated to the others. The Cappadocian Fathers laid the foundations of the theology of God, identifying Him as the First Cause of all that exists and the Unmoved Mover of the universe, setting forth both objective and subjective paths to knowing Him, and insisting on the necessity of “negative theology”—since God is ultimately beyond human understanding, whatever is affirmed of Him in human terms (for example, that He is just) must also be denied as inadequate.

Holy Spirit

In contrast to Christology, the theology of the Holy Spirit was underdeveloped in the early centuries. Some theologians denied the divinity of the Spirit, but the Doxology (“praise”)—“Glory be to Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit”—affirmed it. Just as he championed the divinity of the Son, Athanasius did the same with respect to the Spirit.

The Council of Constantinople (381) declared that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and is no less adored and glorified”, but the Council’s authority was not fully accepted in the West, which eventually affirmed that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from both the Father and the Son” (filioque, in Latin).

Soteriology

Christ’s death on the Cross was universally affirmed as important, but there was not complete unanimity as to its exact meaning. Soteriology (from the Greek for “savior”) was not the subject of bitter dispute in the way that other questions were, but there was some uncertainty. Mankind was saved through the Incarnation, but salvation was variously understood as having been achieved by Jesus’ example, by His teachings, or by the infusion of divine life into the human soul. (Justin Martyr, for example, primarily emphasized Jesus as the teacher of righteousness, to be emulated by His followers.)

In general, Western theology held that men inherit Adam’s own sin, while Eastern theology taught that they merely inherit weak natures that make them prone to sin. In Eastern theology, men undergo “deification”, becoming increasingly like God even as God condescends to become man.

Both Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria taught that the divine image in man has been tarnished but not destroyed by Adam’s sin and that Christ shed His Blood in order to ransom mankind from the devil. In accordance with his dominant allegorical understanding of Scripture, Origen made the Fall a cosmic myth about the rebellion of preexistent souls against their Creator, a rebellion of which the story of Adam and Eve is an allegory. Jesus’ death began the process of the devil’s defeat, and eventually—there being no Hell—all fallen souls will be gathered back to their Creator. The Cappadocian Fathers developed the idea that Jesus ransomed mankind from the devil, offering His life to His Father to appease the divine wrath toward sinful men and, in the ultimate act of love, taking mankind’s punishment on Himself.

Mary

The tradition that Mary remained a virgin throughout her life was very ancient. In the West, Irenaeus formulated what became the common doctrine—just as Christ the New Adam atones for the sin of the first Adam, Mary was the New Eve who overcame the first Eve’s infidelity. The Book of Revelation’s vision of a woman crowned with stars (12:1) and the Book of Genesis’ vision of a woman’s heel crushing the head of a serpent (3:15) were understood to refer to Mary’s role in redemption, and images from the Song of Songs (“Rose of Sharon”; “Ivory tower” [7:4]) were also applied to her.

The East always led the way in Marian devotion. The first known Marian apparition in the history of the Church was to St. Gregory Thaumaturgus (“the Wonder-Worker”, d. ca. 270), a bishop in Asia Minor. Eastern ideas were introduced into the West by Ambrose and others, and the Nestorian controversy led to the custom of dedicating churches in honor of Mary, notably St. Mary Major in Rome, and eventually to Marian feasts. Images of Mary appeared fairly early, first as holding the baby Jesus, later at the Annunciation and the Visitation.

Ecclesiology

Ecclesiology—the theology of the Church—was also not in much dispute in the early centuries, though the Montanists and the rigorists denied the possibility of the forgiveness of sin. Expanding on Paul, virtually all the Fathers defined the Church as the Body of Christ and understood baptism as infusing recipients with new life, incorporating them into that Body, permitting them to share in Christ’s divinity, and giving them the gift of eternal life. As against the Donatists, the orthodox held that, while human agency is required, Christ is the true administrator of the sacraments, whose efficacy is due to the power of the Holy Spirit.

Marriage

The Gnostic and Manichaean heresies had the effect of strengthening the Church’s teaching about the essential goodness of marriage, while at the same time guarding against disordered human appetites. The procreation of children was held to be the divinely ordained purpose of marriage, so that all forms of contraception, abortion, and sodomy were condemned in the strongest terms. Impotence rendered a marriage invalid, since in principle the man could not beget children, but sterility did not, and some theologians even disapproved of habitual continence, if its purpose was to prevent conception. For centuries, coitus interruptus—the sin of Onan (Gen 38:8-10), who spilled his seed upon the ground—was probably the common method of contraception, although there were also drugs and potions of dubious effectiveness. Some moralists thought that all forms of contraception amounted to abortion.

Drawing partly on the Stoics, the Fathers developed a theory of human sexuality according to which desire in itself was suspect, not because the flesh is evil but because passion might make the married couple forsake reason and become slaves to their emotions. Augustine, who experienced the power of sexual desire in his own life, proposed a teaching that never became official Catholic doctrine. He taught that the “loss of reason” that takes place in sexual intercourse is the means by which Original Sin is transmitted from parents to children and that even for married couples sexual desire is at least a venial sin.

“Spiritual marriage”, in which husband and wife refrained from sexual intercourse for the sake of the Kingdom, was sometimes extolled, and, whatever that may have implied about the flesh, it had the effect of exalting an ideal of marriage based on friendship and mutual respect. To some extent, the ideal of spiritual marriage receded as monasticism developed, and “spiritual friendships” between men and women became a feature of monastic culture. One of the few reasons for which a marriage could be dissolved was to allow both parties to enter monastic life.

Women

In general, the society was patriarchal, giving men authority over women, but some theologians emphasized the complementarity of the sexes, implying some degree of equality, or understood human beings as primarily spiritual, which made sexual differences relatively unimportant, although Paul’s proclamation that in Christ “there is neither male nor female” (Gal 3:28) was understood to refer to the Kingdom of Heaven.

Some theologians considered women less spiritual than men, hence as sources of carnal temptation, although recognized communities of virgins and nuns seemed to belie that.

Women could be learned. Basil and Gregory of Nyssa were educated by their grandmother, St. Macrina the Elder (d. ca. 340), and their sister, St. Macrina the Younger (d. 379), while the legend of St. Catherine of Alexandria (d. ca. 250) portrayed her as a philosopher so brilliant that she confounded the greatest pagan sages. St. Paula (d. 404), who followed Jerome to the Holy Land, and St. Marcella (d. 410), another of his disciples, who was martyred by the Visigoths, learned biblical languages at his behest.

Eschatology

There was some divergence of opinion among the Fathers concerning the fate of the soul after death. While its immortality was universally affirmed, some thought that it underwent a kind of sleep until the Last Judgment, when all will arise together. Belief in the resurrection of the body was universal, but there was disagreement as to the form the risen body would take.

The Theological Context

Odium Theologicum (“Theological Hatred”)

Esoteric theological debates were by no means irrelevant to the mass of believers in the East, who often aligned themselves with particular factions. (When an Arian bishop entered the public baths of his city, for instance, everyone else withdrew, unwilling to share the water with a heretic.) While some of this was blind partisanship, the common people had keen religious sensibilities and were quick to detect things that went against their own piety, as many did in sensing that Arius was insufficiently respectful of Jesus’ divinity or that some theologians denied the title “Mother of God”.

Sometimes such partisanship manifested itself in rioting, and Basil and Gregory Nazianzen lamented that in some ways ecumenical councils brought out the worst in bishops. Cyril actively encouraged mob violence at Alexandria, and the debates at Nicaea and other councils sometimes erupted in strife, as when St. Nicholas of Myra (d. ca. 350) (the original of the Santa Claus legend) reportedly pulled the beard of an Arian bishop in vexation.

Lex Orandi Lex Credendi

During this period, the Church adopted the maxim lex orandi est lex credendi (literally, “The law of prayer is the law of belief”), meaning that the authentic teachings of the Church are found first of all in her liturgy, which is prior to dogma both temporally and in importance. The continued authority of the Old Testament, for example, was demonstrated by the fact that from the beginning the Church had used the Psalms in her prayers, and Augustine taught the existence of Purgatory (a place of purification or purging), based on the ancient custom of praying for the dead, justified by the Book of Maccabees (see 2 Macc 12:40-46). Arianism was refuted by pointing out that baptism was administered in the name of the Son as well as of the Father and, although liturgical prayers were ordinarily directed to the Father through the Son, the controversy gave rise to new prayers directed to Jesus. Chrysostom lamented a decline in the reception of Communion by the laity, apparently motivated by their heightened sense of Christ’s divinity and their own unworthiness.

East and West

The Church in the East was a good deal more populous and sophisticated than that in the West, and it was primarily Easterners who were exercised by theological debate, while Westerners wondered whether the great controversies involved over-subtle questions of a kind that the Greek mind found fascinating. The West manifested the pragmatic Roman spirit, paying more attention to concrete issues and following the metaphysical disputes of the East with a certain detachment, although ultimately the popes issued final judgments on the great theological debates.

A rare exception was the case of the Spanish bishop Priscillian (d. 385), who was suspected by some of his fellow bishops of harboring Gnostic beliefs and whom they denounced as a sorcerer, which under Roman law was a capital offense. Priscillian was the first person in the history of the Church to suffer the death penalty at the behest of the ecclesiastical authorities, an action that was denounced by Ambrose, Martin of Tours, and others, so that Priscillian’s accusers were forced to resign their sees.

Augustine of Hippo

North Africa was the exception to the West’s relative lack of theological activity, and the greatest of the Latin Fathers was Augustine, who was born in North Africa to a pagan father and a Christian mother, St. Monica (d. 387). After living a hedonistic and rather aimless life, Augustine began exploring a variety of spiritual movements, especially a type of Gnosticism called Manichaeism after its founder, all of which proved unsatisfying.

Conversion

While teaching rhetoric at Milan, he met Ambrose and was converted after hearing a voice—an angel, he thought—commanding him to read a passage from Paul that condemned the life of the flesh. While still a recent convert, he felt his heart wrenched by Athanasius’ account of Anthony of the Desert, and he returned to Africa to found a monastery. But on a visit to the town of Hippo, he was spontaneously acclaimed by the people as their new bishop and reluctantly left his monastery for an active life in which he both governed the local church and engaged in prodigious theological speculation that shaped the entire subsequent religious history of the West.

Augustine wrote systematic treatises on many subjects, including biblical exegesis. He produced a large number of sermons, innumerable letters, and On Christian Doctrine, which was the first comprehensive guide to Catholic teaching. He was continually consulted by people from outside his own diocese, and he offered authoritative judgments on every kind of religious question.

The Confessions

He explored the relationship between God and the soul in a new literary genre that he invented—the autobiography—whose title, Confessions, meant not an admission of guilt (although it was that) but a profession of faith. The Confessions was not primarily a narrative of the events of the author’s life but an account of his inner spiritual journey, especially the paradox whereby he sought truth yet kept turning away from it, until finally touched by divine grace. For Augustine, the crucial mystery of existence was the human will and its perverse attraction to evil. He was the first person in history able to recount his own subjective experiences while looking at them with ruthless objectivity, writing a psychologically acute account of his inner life that had no equivalent in the ancient world.

Neo-Platonism

Neo-Platonism affirmed that the spiritual, transcendent, unseen world is real and the world of experience a pale copy that can give only hints of ultimate reality. Despite his experience of enslavement to the sins of the flesh, orthodoxy required Augustine to acknowledge matter as God’s good creation. But in Neo-Platonic fashion, he defined it as the least of God’s creatures.

The soul is born with the seeds of all truth, which it receives from its Creator. But the body obscures those truths by deflecting the mind’s attention to ephemeral material things, so that the less sensual a man is, the more likely he is to find truth, which is only gradually discovered through interior contemplation. Because of the insubstantiality of the world, meaning cannot ultimately be found in human experience. Knowledge is necessarily inward-looking, the recovery of lost memories, of the truth buried within the soul.

Time and Change

Like practically all thinkers of his time, Augustine was obsessed with the mystery of mutability—why things change and, since they do, how it is possible to know the truth. The chief theological problem for Augustine was how changing beings can relate to God, whose chief attributes are eternity and immutability, without which He would not be the ultimate reality. Augustine concluded that the mind’s grasp of mere fragments of truth, the human sense of the incompleteness of life, and glimpses of unchanging eternity amidst the flux of time all affirm the existence of God, who alone is the absolute Being, the eternal truth.

The Human Will

Paradoxically, Augustine was preoccupied with the human will precisely because he saw human freedom as fragile and problematic. Man is not totally depraved, but his nature is badly scarred, so that he wars within himself, buffeted by the unlawful urges of concupiscence (desire). Direct divine intervention was necessary to make Augustine recognize his own derelictions.

In the most famous line of the Confessions, Augustine cried out, “Our hearts are restless, and they shall find no rest until they rest in Thee!” Happiness consists in partaking of the immutability of God, who created the universe out of love, in order to associate His creatures with Himself. But Augustine’s anguished struggle to find the truth was continually thwarted by his own nature, his will enslaved to sin, leading him to define freedom as it would be understood throughout the whole subsequent history of Christianity—not the ability to do whatever he willed but the ability to obey the divine law. In order to achieve peace and happiness, it was necessary to subordinate the human will to the divine, to choose between spiritual and material goods, since the divine order is being continually deflected downward by a human nature oriented to its own selfish ends.

Left to themselves, all men are drawn to evil, hence all deserve damnation. Grace is literally a “gift”, freely bestowed by God, without which men are powerless to do good. Augustine thought God predestined only a finite number of souls to Heaven, accommodating His grace to each individual in accordance with His foreknowledge of how each will respond to the gift and allowing wicked people to do evil in order to manifest the power of God’s wrath.

Human Nature

Augustine’s negative attitude toward sexuality to a great extent stemmed from his own early surrenders to unbridled lust. Whereas other vices (avarice, gluttony) could be controlled, his experience of lust was of complete loss of self-control, the very negation of true freedom and the obliteration of the image of God in the soul. Following Ambrose, he insisted that men inherit the sin of Adam—Original Sin—through the biological act of procreation itself, thereby making sin basic to human nature.

A necessary corollary of Augustine’s position was that infants need to be baptized as soon as possible after birth and that unbaptized infants cannot enter Paradise but are instead sent to Limbo (“boundary”), which is technically Hell, in that those who live there are deprived of the presence of God, but they do not experience active torment.²

Augustine’s position on the sinfulness of infants was based partly on his own experience and his deep insight into human psychology. One of the most famous passages in his Confessions is his story of stealing pears as a child, not because he was hungry but simply out of a perverse desire to do something forbidden. (By contrast, some of the Eastern Fathers held that newborn infants are innocent and only fall into sin when they became old enough to choose evil freely.)

Pelagianism

In keeping with his understanding of human nature, Augustine played a crucial role in combating the heresy that, after Gnosticism, posed the most serious threat in the West—Pelagianism, a heresy that, characteristic of the West, did not turn on abstruse metaphysical speculation but on practical implications. Pelagius (d. ca. 425) was a monk from Gaul who traveled widely, teaching that men do not inherit the sin of Adam but sin only in imitating him. Children are inherently sinless, and salvation can be attained by the vigilant protection of one’s innocence, vigorous asceticism, and the cultivation of virtue.

Jerome condemned Pelagius’ ideas with his usual ferocity, as did various popes and bishops, although Pelagius had popular support even at Rome and some episcopal support as well. Largely because of Augustine’s efforts, the provincial Council of Carthage (418) condemned Pelagius and declared that Original Sin is inherited by every infant and that grace is indispensable.

For centuries, the uncertainties of travel and communication made it difficult for those in authority even to know the facts of a case, much less to make a competent judgment. Often the popes knew only what they were told by partisan representatives, who offered versions of events most favorable to their own causes. Thus Pelagius was condemned by Pope St. Innocent I (401-417), the condemnation was withdrawn by his successor St. Zosimus (417-418), but he was condemned again when the African Church appealed to Zosimus. The Council of Ephesus, a year after Augustine’s death, made the condemnation definitive.

Semi-Pelagianism

But some orthodox people suspected Augustine of still holding Man-ichaean positions, making divine grace irresistible and human nature seem entirely evil, thereby ignoring Christ’s call to universal salvation. In Gaul, some theologians formulated a position that came to be called “semi-Pelagianism”, which, despite the name, in effect came to define Catholic orthodoxy.

Cassian affirmed that grace is resistible and compared the human heart to flint, which is capable of striking off sparks that God can set alight. God wills that all be saved but foresees that many will not be. The monk St. Vincent of Lerins (d. ca. 445) objected to Augustine’s formulation as a novelty, asserting that the Church teaches only those things that have been believed “always, and everywhere, and by everyone”, a maxim that was often later cited as the criterion of orthodoxy.

Pelagianism was again condemned at the Council of Orange (529), which affirmed that death and sin are inherited from Adam and that divine grace is necessary for any good human choice. But despite Augustine’s enormous prestige, the Council stopped short of fully embracing his own statement of the question, and it condemned the doctrine of predestination.

The Nature of Evil

Augustine came as close to “solving” the mystery of evil as any theologian could, defining it, in Neo-Platonic terms, as nothing—the absence of good, a destructive negation—since otherwise the all-good God would be the author of evil.

Numerology

Plato had redeemed matter through mathematics, which transforms what is individual, concrete, and perishable into what is abstract, general, and eternal. (A physical ball is only a rough approximation of the geometric idea of the sphere, for example.) Partly based on this, Augustine formulated a theological discipline that had great influence for more than a thousand years but was eventually forgotten: numerology, the belief that hidden proportions exist between creatures and their Creator and can be understood through mathematical relationships. Certain numbers are fundamental—three because of the Trinity, four because of the Gospels—making their combinations, especially seven, equally significant. Seven also brings the Trinity together with the four basic physical substances—earth, air, fire, and water—thereby symbolizing creation. Practically all numbers in the Old Testament, such as the size of an army, had hidden mystical significance.

The Trinity

Augustine went further than any other theologian in attempting to understand the Trinity. The Word is the image of the Father and the prototype of all lesser beings, containing within Himself the divine Ideas, the patterns of everything that can possibly exist. The Holy Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son, a truth expressed in the filioque clause of the Creed. Whatever can be said of one Person of the Trinity must be said of all, Augustine insisted. The three share one will and act wholly in union with one another, cooperating fully in every divine action, so that, for example, the triune God, not the Father alone, created the universe, although it is permissible to “attribute” particular functions to each of the three Persons, as a help to human understanding.

Augustine found images of the Trinity everywhere in the universe, especially in the human soul, which measures time in a trinitarian way—the past as remembrance, the present as attention, the future as expectation—thereby making man not time’s slave but its master and creator. The past does not die but is incorporated into the present and the future, partaking of the immutability of God Himself. Augustine was the first philosopher of history, the first man to discern an inner pattern in what to the ancients seemed like meaningless flux. In affirming the goodness of the flesh, Irenaeus and others remained faithful to the dogma of the Incarnation, and Augustine extended that fidelity to the redemption of time.

The Two Cities

Augustine’s great book The City of God was partly a work of history. Ultimately, history has no meaning and will pass away, its whole course, apart from divine grace, merely a series of towers of Babel. But for Augustine it had temporary meaning insofar as the Kingdom of Heaven is an extension of the earthly kingdom. “Two loves built a city”, Augustine announced, with the story of Cain and Abel as the paradigm of human history—the continuing struggle between love of God and love of self, good and evil, divine grace and human selfishness, replaying itself in every generation.

The Earthly City

The true significance of the world, according to Augustine, lies in the largely hidden birth processes of the City of God, a process for which the Church, conscious of her historical mission, serves as a dynamic force. The City of God is brought into being by divine love and is present wherever the power of that love is felt, thereby giving unity and significance to history. Because of human sinfulness, earthly kingdoms are inevitably founded on injustice and self-will, but God brings good out of evil, thereby giving even the earthly city its proper place in the moral order.

Wheat and Tares

Augustine forestalled any attempt to find the City of God on earth. The divine City is not identical with the Church, in that the City can never be fully realized on earth, even though City and Church are closely related. Augustine condemned Donatism and Pelagianism partly for what he saw as their elitism, their implicit rejection of the Church as the refuge of sinners—a mixed community of good and bad people. The parable of the wheat and the tares shows that mere membership in the Church is not a guarantee of salvation, since God’s will is inscrutable and no one knows for certain who is among the elect.

The Heavenly City

The City of God is timeless and eternal, transcending all earthly kingdoms, superseding the old literal millenarianism that expected the Kingdom to be established on earth. Instead, Augustine equated the reign of Christ on earth with the struggling “Church Militant” that would eventually be gathered up into the “Church Triumphant”, an idea that came to be the general understanding in the West, discouraging speculation about the end of the world.

Divine and Human Law

Augustine was a profoundly important political thinker because, following Ambrose, he deprived the state of its aura of divinity and subordinated it to the higher divine purpose, a subordination that made Western ideas of freedom and justice possible. In some ways, he was the antithesis of the historian Eusebius, in that he posited a dualism in which Empire and Church met but did not intermingle and Christians gave the state external loyalty only. Whereas Tertullian condemned the state as demonic and Eusebius surrounded the emperor with a divine aura, Augustine made the emperor himself subject to the Church.

Just War

Another of the innumerable ways in which Augustine had momentous influence was his understanding of war. The New Testament diverged from the Old, he judged, in that war has no place in the Kingdom of God. But war remains part of the Kingdom of Man, so that when the state acts in accordance with its true end—that of maintaining peace—it is in harmony with the divine purpose, but when it wages war unjustly, it becomes identified with evil. Augustine thereby laid the foundation for the theory of the “just war” that would guide most Christian thinking on the subject for the next fifteen hundred years, laying down certain conditions that have to be met before Christians could in good conscience participate in it: that it be declared by established authority, fought for a just cause (essentially to defend oneself or others) and for good motives, and used as a last resort when all else fails.

Coercion

Augustine reluctantly accepted coercion in matters of religion because the Donatists of North Africa had become a fanatical, often violent sect, with armed bands sometimes raiding the churches of the orthodox and killing people whom they despised as traitors to the faith. The civil authorities regarded the sect as criminals who required severe punishment, and, after agonized meditation, Augustine agreed, justifying such action not because the state has a right to intervene but because the Church has the right to make use of worldly power to achieve her spiritual ends.

Papal Authority

By Augustine’s day, the authority of the bishop of Rome was well established. None of them attended any of the great councils, although they sent legates, their absence dictated partly by the difficulties of travel but perhaps primarily by their understanding of their office as not that of one bishop among many but as supreme over all. In determining which councils were authentic and which were not, the judgment of the see of Rome was always crucial. Cyril of Alexandria presided at Ephesus in lieu of the pope, and Nestorius complained because the bishop of Rome was not present.

The distance between Rome and Constantinople perhaps also allowed the popes a certain detachment and, above all, an essential independence from imperial control, while the two Eastern patriarchs suffered because of the state’s authority. Constantine and his successors wanted obedient bishops, and overall the Eastern hierarchy remained highly vulnerable to political pressure.

Paradoxically, the fact that the popes did not play a crucial role in the theological disputes was itself a kind of tribute to their authority: they were respected not because of their personal qualities or achievements but solely because of their office, including the perception that the see of Rome had never been the seedbed of heresy but had always retained the authentic faith.

Bishops in the East often asked for support from the bishop of Rome, gestures that confirmed the enormous prestige of the Roman see but did not necessarily imply complete acceptance of papal authority, since the often-chaotic conflicts of the Eastern church led bishops to look for allies wherever they could find them. When Basil of Caesarea asked for his support, Pope St. Damasus refused, because he mistrusted Basil, and when Gregory Nazianzen was translated to Constantinople, Damasus was among those condemning the move as irregular, forcing Gregory to resign.

Divisions

The see of Rome was itself not free of the troubles that affected so much of the East. Riots accompanied Damasus’ election (see Chapter Four above, p. 84), partly because he had failed to support Liberius during the latter’s exile and death. But Damasus, despite the controversial circumstances of his election, was one of the most assertive of the early popes, making the strongest claims to date concerning his authority as the heir of both Peter and Paul. The First Council of Constantinople (381), whose decrees were not fully accepted in the West, acknowledged the primacy of the see of Rome but called Constantinople “the New Rome”, a claim Damasus ignored. (Constantinople was not originally an apostolic see, and its status was entirely due to secular politics.)

Chrysostom

Chrysostom, first a desert hermit, then a monk of Antioch, was made patriarch of Constantinople by the emperor Arcadius (395-408). Chrysostom was an ardent reformer, who from his monastic days retained a certain attitude of misogyny and only gradually came to a positive view of marriage. His attempts to reform the clergy and to depose bishops for simony—the sin of attaining Church office by bribery, named for the character Simon the Magician in Acts—made him highly unpopular. When Chrysostom exercised his authority vigorously against a bishop accused of heresy and reportedly compared Arcadius’ wife to the Old Testament harlot Jezebel, the emperor declared Chrysostom deposed and sent him into exile, where he died.

Innocent I nullified Chrysostom’s deposition, and, at least in that instance, the church at Antioch, Chrysostom’s original home, accepted the Pope’s authority. Innocent’s support was to no avail, although later, partly at Innocent’s insistence, the church at Constantinople restored Chrysostom‘s name, as one of its greatest glories. The principal liturgy of the Eastern church is attributed to him and bears his name. Innocent, one of the most important of the early popes, asserted his authority wherever possible, as in establishing the canon of the Bible. His condemnation of Pelagius brought him praise from Augustine, who extolled “the Apostolic See”.

Bishops and Emperors

The Council of Chalcedon protested imperial control of the Church, and the lives of Athanasius, Chrysostom, and Ambrose showed that a courageous bishop could withstand imperial wrath. Chalcedon hailed Pope Leo for his “Tome”, with the Fathers crying out, “Peter has spoken through the mouth of Leo.” But as the emperors shifted more and more authority to the see of Constantinople, Leo protested, to little avail.

In contrast, Ambrose, a contemporary of Chrysostom, showed a remarkable degree of independence from imperial control, on one occasion simply taking possession of a church that the authorities wanted to give to the Arians. After a riot destroyed a synagogue in Asia Minor, Emperor Theodosius I ordered local Christians to pay restitution, which led Ambrose to threaten him with excommunication, whereupon the emperor prostrated himself before the bishop and begged for absolution. (Ambrose’s purpose was probably not to defend anti-Jewish violence but to assert the independence of the Church from state control.) A few years later, when Theodosius ordered a massacre of rioters who had killed an imperial official, Ambrose did excommunicate him. Theodosius repented of his actions as a result of Ambrose’s strong protests and the emperor received pardon from Ambrose.

These incidents demonstrate a reality that would persist in the West for the next thousand years: although the Church lacked physical power, her spiritual authority was such that she could triumph even over the threat of military force.

The Barbarian Onslaught

Augustine wrote the City of God primarily to refute the pagan claim that the sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 410 was due to the wrath of the gods against the impious Christians; it was, he asserted, due to Rome’s own sins. But as he lay dying in 430, Hippo itself was under siege by a people so terrible that their very name became a synonym for destructiveness—the Vandals. Justinian would later briefly reconquer North Africa, but the golden age of the Fathers, the most creative period in the entire history of the Church, was over. In the West, a long darkness was descending.