The Consensus of the Fathers
The Fathers are the voice of Tradition — the witnesses through whom the Church recognizes her own mind. This section treats the consensus patrum (the convergence of the Fathers as a criterion of the faith, not a head-count), the conciliar formula “following the holy Fathers,” and the phronema — the mind or disposition of the Church that Florovsky’s “neo-patristic synthesis” sought to reacquire rather than merely to quote.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox
Overview
To appeal to Tradition concretely is, very often, to appeal to the Fathers. But the appeal is easily misunderstood as a matter of counting authorities or stacking citations. The Orthodox understanding is subtler: the Fathers are authoritative not as individuals but as witnesses to the one faith, and their consensus is a qualitative convergence recognized by the Church, not a majority vote. To “follow the holy Fathers,” as the councils repeatedly declared they did, is to think with the mind of the Church — the phronema — and it was the recovery of precisely this that Georges Florovsky called the “neo-patristic synthesis.”
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| the-consensus-patrum.md | The Fathers as the voice of Tradition; “following the holy Fathers” (Chalcedon); the Vincentian canon; the quality versus the counting of the Fathers; that individual Fathers can err |
| the-fathers-and-the-mind-of-the-church.md | The phronema; acquiring the mind of the Fathers rather than repeating their conclusions; Florovsky’s neo-patristic synthesis and “Christian Hellenism” |
See Also
- Scripture and Tradition — the Fathers as the privileged interpreters of Scripture
- The Councils and the Symbols — the councils’ appeal to the Fathers
- Tradition and the Modern Theologians — Florovsky’s neo-patristic program in full
- The Church Fathers — the topical article
- The Desert Fathers — the ascetic Fathers as bearers of Tradition