From Abraham onwards, through many centuries, God has prepared the chosen people to receive the Messiah. Despite that, when the Messiah appeared, the greater part of the Jewish people rejected him.
In the Church of the Nations, that is to say, among the pagan peoples, the opposite happened. The soil that seemed to need more cultivation received the seed of the Gospel and brought forth the hundredfold.
Already, in the middle of raging persecutions, Christianity penetrated the worlds of Greece and Rome, of Syria and Egypt. The Christian message came into contact, or conflict, with popular thinking, with ancient cultures, with magical ideologies. The problem of the relation between reason and revelation appeared. And alongside serious attempts to translate faithfully the revealed Word into philosophical categories or contemporary expression, there occurred corruptions and ambiguities.
From that stemmed arguments about fundamental themes such as Christology and the doctrine of the Trinity. Leaflets were written, pamphlets published, treatises composed, councils called together.
Between the opposing views and contrasting styles of life it seemed utterly impossible to find a harmony that was not a distortion, or even some dialogue. Yet the Church succeeded. In the great councils of Nicaea, Ephesus and Chalcedon, the bishops managed to preserve the unity of the faith, and the possibility of the Gospel and culture illuminating one another.
The title that the bishops in these councils held is the same as today: Fathers.
The Fathers of the Church were, first of all, bishops, the defenders of orthodoxy. Associated with the bishops, under the same title are all the other Christian writers of the first centuries, the witnesses to the one faith. Often they are writing to attempt a solution to theoretical or practical problems worrying their contemporaries. Often they are commenting on the Scriptures, a few with weighty erudition, the majority with a deeply prayerful spirit and a sharp sense of practicality.
This last characteristic stands out particularly in the homilies of pastors. The pastors often seem, more than teachers, to be the mouthpieces of a people reflecting on the Word and shaping their lives in its light. As servants of their community, right to their very finger tips, the pastors manifest the faith, a faith which seeks complete fidelity.
So we do not find in them a theology manufactured out of thin air at a desk, an ascetic and lifeless theology, or worse than that, affected and alienating. We find a theology of suffering, endured and tested by a whole people, an authentic popular theology, an authentic ecclesial theology.
Probably, it is especially through their attitude of service that the Fathers have come to enjoy such enormous prestige, their words even coming to acquire a similar authority to the words of Scripture. The fact is that every believer recognizes himself or herself in what they say.
The golden period of patristic literature runs from the fourth to the sixth century. By convention, the age of the Fathers of the West is reckoned to end in the year of the death of Isidore of Seville in 636, and the age of the Fathers of the East with the loss of John Damascene which occurred in 749.
~Adapted from Thomas Spidlik, Drinking from the Hidden Fountain: A Patristic Breviary, Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World
