FATHERS OF THE CHURCH. The "fathers of the Church" are the great bishops and other eminent Christian teachers of the earlier centuries, who were conspicuous for sound ness of judgment and sanctity of life, and whose writings remained as a court of appeal for their successors, especially in reference to controverted points of faith or practice. A list of fathers drawn up on this principle will begin with the Christian writers of the 1st century whose writings are not included in the New Testa ment : where it ought to end is a more difficult point to determine. Perhaps the balance of opinion is in favour of regarding Gregory the Great (d. 604) as the last of the Latin fathers, and John of Damascus (d. c. 76o) as the last of the fathers of the Greek Church. A more liberal estimate might include John Scotus Erigena or even Anselm or Bernard of Clairvaux in the West and Photius in the East. The abbe Migne carried his Latin patrology down to the time of Innocent III. (d. 1216), and his Greek patrology to the fall of Constantinople ; but, while this large extension of the field is much to the advantage of his readers, it undoubtedly stretches the meaning of patrologia far beyond its natural limits. For ordinary purposes it is best to make the patristic period conterminous with the life of the ancient Catholic Church. In the West the Church enters the mediaeval stage of its history with the death of Gregory, while in the East even John of Damascus is rather a compiler of patristic teaching than a true "father." A further question arises. Are all the Christian writers of a given period to be included among the "fathers," or those only who wrote on religious subjects, and of whose orthodoxy there is no doubt? Migne, following the example of the editors of bibliothecce patrum who preceded him, swept into his great collection all the Christian writings which fell within his period; but he is careful to state upon his title-page that his patrologies include the "ecclesiastical writers" as well as the "fathers" and "doctors" of the Church; and an "ecclesiastical writer" is not necessarily orthodox. It is clear that in the circumstances the terms "father," "patristic," "patrology" must be used with much elasticity, since it is now too late to substitute for them any more comprehensive terms.
By the "fathers," then, we understand the whole of extant Christian literature from the time of the apostles to the rise of scholasticism or the beginning of the middle ages. However we may interpret the lower limit of this period, the literature which it embraces is immense. Some method of subdivision is necessary, and the simplest and most obvious is that which breaks the whole into two great parts, the ante-Nicene and the post-Nicene. This is not an arbitrary cleavage; the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325) is the watershed which actually separates two great tracts of Christian literature. The ante-Nicene age yields priceless records of the early struggles of Christianity; from it we have received' specimens of the early apologetic and the early f olemic of the Church, the first essays of Christian philosophy, Christian correspondence, Christian biblical interpretation: we owe to it the works of Justin, Irenaeus, the Alexandrian Clement, Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian. In these products of the 2nd and 3rd centuries there is much which in its own way was not surpassed by any of the later patristic writings. Yet the post-Nicene literature, considered as literature, reaches a far higher level. Both in East and West, the 4th and 5th centuries form the golden age of dogmatic theology, of homi letic preaching, of exposition, of letter-writing, of Church history, of religious poetry. Two causes may be assigned for this fact. The conversion of the empire gave the members of the Church leisure and opportunities for the cultivation of literary taste, and gradually drew the educated classes within the pale of the Chris tian society. Moreover, the great Christological controversies of the age tended to encourage in Christian writers and preachers an intellectual acuteness and an accuracy of thought and exprtssion of which the earlier centuries had not felt the need.
The ante-Nicene period of patristic literature opens with the "apostolic fathers," i.e. the Church writers who flourished toward the end of the apostolic age and during the half century that fol lowed it, including Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Poly carp of Smyrna and the author known as "Barnabas." (The term patres apostolici is due to the patristic scholars of the 17th cen tury. See Lightfoot, St. Clement of Rome, i. p. 3; "sub-apostolic" is perhaps a more accurate designation.) Their writings, like those of the apostles, are epistolary; but editions of the apostolic fathers now usually admit also the early Church order known as the Didache, the allegory entitled the Shep herd, and a short anonymous apology addressed to one Diog netus. A second group, known as the "Greek Apologists," embraces Aristides, Justin, Tatian, Athenagoras and Theophilus; and a third consists of the early polemical writers, Irenaeus and Hippolytus. Next come the great Alexandrians, Clement, Origen, Dionysius; the Carthaginians, Tertullian and Cyprian; the Romans, Minucius Felix and Novatian; the last four laid the foundations of a Latin Christian literature. Even the stormy days of the last persecution yielded some considerable' writers, such as Methodius in the East and Lactantius in the West. This list is far from complete; the principal collections of the ante Nicene fathers include not a few minor and anonymous writers, and the fragments of many others whose works as a whole have perished.
In the post-Nicene period the literary output of the Church was greater. Only the more representative names can be men tioned here. From Alexandria we get Athanasius, Didymus and Cyril; from Cyrene, Synesius; from Antioch, Theodore of Mop suestia, John Chrysostom and Theodoret ; from Palestine, Euse bius of Caesarea and Cyril of Jerusalem ; from Cappadocia, Basil, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus. The Latin West was scarcely less productive ; it is enough to mention Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo, Leo of Rome, Jerome, Rufinus and a father lately restored to his place in patristic literature, Niceta of Remesiana. Gaul alone has a goodly list of Christian authors to show : John Cassian, Vincent of Lerins, Hilary of Arles, Prosper of Aquitaine, Salvian of Mar seilles, Sidonius Apollinaris of Auvergne, Caesarius of Arles, Gregory of Tours. The period ends in the West with two great Italian names, Cassiodorus and Pope Gregory I., after Leo the greatest of papal theologians.
The reader to whom the study is new will gain some idea of the bulk of the extant patristic literature, if we add that in Migne's collection ninety-six large volumes are occupied with the Greek fathers from Clement of Rome to John of Damascus, and seventy six with the Latin fathers from Tertullian to Gregory the Great. The Greek patrology contains, however, besides the text, a Latin translation, and in both patrologies there is much editorial matter.
For a discussion of the more important fathers the student is referred to the articles which deal with them separately. In this place it is enough to consider the general influence of the patristic writings upon Christian doctrine and biblical interpretation. Can any authority be claimed for their teaching or their exegesis, other than that which belongs to the best writers of every age? The decree of the council of Trent (ut nemo . . . contra unanimum consensum patrum ipsam scripturam sacram interpretari audeat) is studiously moderate, and yet it seems to rule that under certain circumstances it is not permitted to the Church of later times to carry the science of biblical interpretation beyond the point which it had reached at the end of the patristic period. Roman Catholic writers, however, have explained the prohibition to apply to matters of faith only, and in that case the Tridentine decree is little else than another form of the Vincentian "canon," curandum est ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est. The fathers of the first six or seven centuries, so far as they agree, may be fairly taken to represent the main stream of Christian tradition and belief during the period when the apostolic teaching took shape in the great creeds and dogmatic decisions of Christendom. The English reformers realized this fact ; and notwithstanding their insistence on the unique authority of the canon of Scripture, their appeal to the fathers as representatives of the teaching of the undivided Church was as wholehearted as that of the Tridentine divines. Thus the English canon of 1571 directs preachers "to take heed that they do not teach anything in their sermons as though they would have it completely held and believed by the people, save what is agreeable to the doctrine of the Old and New Testaments, and what the Catholic Fathers and ancient Bishops have gathered from that doctrine." The patristic writings are no longer used as an armoury from which opposite sides may draw effective weapons, offensive or defensive; nor on the other hand are they cast aside as the rub bish of an ignorant and superstitious age. All patristic students now recognize the great inequality of these authors, and admit that they are not free from the faults of their times ; it is not denied that much of their exegesis is untenable, or that their logic is often feeble and their rhetoric offensive to modern taste. But against these disadvantages may be set the unique services which the fathers still render to Christian scholars. Their works com prise the whole literature of the Church during the decisive cen turies which followed the apostolic age. They are important wit nesses to the text of the New Testament, to the history of the canon, and to the history of interpretation. It is to their pages that we owe nearly all that we know of the life of ancient Chris tianity. We see in them the thought of the ancient Church taking shape in the minds of her bishops and doctors; and in many cases they express the results of the great doctrinal controversies of their age in language which leaves little to be desired.