Reading the patristic texts is not always easy. And sometimes, at first sight, it seems disagreeable.
The view of the physical world is rudimentary, simplistic. Some dissertations on the human faculties, on the five senses or on the structure of the body are deadly boring. Certain ‘genealogical trees’ of the virtues, certain ‘slotting-in games’ of the vices are even irritating. Certain notes on clothes and certain rules of behaviour are a nuisance or make us smile a little today.
We could go on, if instead of a simple introduction we were to write a treatise. But the remarks so far made are enough to prepare our reading of this ‘Patristic Breviary’. They are sufficient, that is, to help peel the skin off the texts presented and to reach the kernel itself. It is a rich kernel full of nourishment. A description of its value would need a number of pages far in excess of those necessary for an analysis of the occasional unpleasantness of the skin, which, in any case, always depends on the culture and the mentality of each age.
One thing we have already said about its value: the search for the proper connection between reason and revelation, and the practical and popular character, in the highest sense of these terms that a great part of patristic theology possesses.
Now for a moment let us pause to consider another aspect. The Fathers never dreamt of constructing a ‘Summa’ in which they included ‘everything – and, indeed, more than everything’ as has been written with a certain ironic humour.
To classify the visible and the invisible, created things and uncreated, so as to achieve a perfect combination, rather like a crossword, means to fossilize the Christian vision: to distort and then fossilize it, not realizing that in it both complexity and unity are possible. This is no thanks to any philosophical system but because complexity and unity are in the indefinable, indeed unfathomable mystery, of which we can catch a few tremulous glimpses.
While the Fathers made no claim to dismember and re-assemble the totality, this totality is the background against which they see each particular dimension of humanity, of the world, of God. Whatever subject they tackle, they invariably place it against the wider vision from which the subject draws its full significance.
This vision is the divine plan of universal salvation, which, if it is lost sight of, leaves only a philosophical position or some form of humanism left
The Fathers look at this divine plan in its development through time. It is not so much a matter of a theoretical scheme worked out in the mind of God, as of a God who actually puts it into effect.
‘My Father is working still, and I am working’ (John 5:17). This sentence spoken by Jesus in St John’s gospel opens out to the Fathers the prospect of an incredible dynamism: the universe and the heart of every human being, the infinitely great and the infinitely small, are a unique workshop in which the Father and the Word fashion a new creation. It is a creation of blessedness, glorious and glorifying, where God will be ‘all in all’, where he will no longer be called God, but ‘God-with-us’.
~Thomas Spidlik, Drinking from the Hidden Fountain: A Patristic Breviary, Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World
