The Consensus Patrum

The Fathers are the privileged voice of Tradition, and their consensus — the convergence of their teaching on the essentials of the faith — is a fundamental criterion of Orthodox theology. This file expounds the consensus patrum: the conciliar formula “following the holy Fathers,” the classic Vincentian canon, the crucial insistence that this is a matter of quality and not of counting, and the honest recognition that individual Fathers can and did err.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Fathers as the Voice of Tradition

When the Orthodox Church wishes to know the mind of Tradition on a disputed point, she turns characteristically to the Fathers — the great teachers and bishops, chiefly of the first eight centuries, whose sanctity, orthodoxy, and ecclesial reception mark them as authentic witnesses to the apostolic faith (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, pp. 204–207; and the topical article The Church Fathers). The Fathers are not revered as a source of revelation additional to Scripture, nor as infallible individuals, but as the voice through which the one Tradition speaks — men in whom the Church recognizes her own faith rightly understood and rightly expressed. To read the Fathers is to hear how the Church has always understood the Scriptures and confessed the faith, and it is in their convergence, the consensus patrum, that this witness carries its weight.

The classical statement of the criterion is that of St. Vincent of Lérins in his Commonitorium of 434. Seeking a rule to distinguish catholic truth from heretical novelty, he offered his famous canon: in the catholic Church “all care must be taken that we hold that which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est)”; and this is secured by attending to universitas (universality), antiquitas (antiquity), and consensio (consent) — and, where a question arises that the universal and ancient consent has not settled, by gathering “the opinions of the Fathers” who, “each in his own time and place, remaining in the communion and faith of the one Catholic Church, have been approved masters” (Vincent, Commonitorium 2.6; 3.8; 28–29; trans. NPNF II/11). The Vincentian canon is not a mechanical test — Vincent himself knew that strict universality and antiquity are hard to establish — but a description of the shape of catholic consent: the faith held broadly, from the beginning, and by the acknowledged teachers together.

“Following the Holy Fathers”

Nowhere is the authority of the patristic consensus more visible than in the councils’ own self-understanding. The Ecumenical Councils did not present themselves as legislating new doctrine but as following the Fathers who had gone before. The Definition of the Fourth Ecumenical Council at Chalcedon (451) opens its dogmatic decree with exactly this claim: “Following the holy Fathers (hepomenoi tois hagiois patrasin), we all with one voice teach the confession of one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ…” (Chalcedon, 451, Definition of Faith; trans. in Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1, 1990). The same posture governs the other councils: the Third Council (Ephesus, 431) vindicated Cyril’s letters as expressing the faith of the Fathers; the Sixth (Constantinople III, 680–681) and Seventh (Nicaea II, 787) grounded their definitions explicitly in the teaching of the approved Fathers, the Seventh appending florilegia of patristic testimonies to its decree (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, Fordham, 1974, on the conciliar appeal to the Fathers; and see The Councils as Tradition). The conciliar phrase became a formula of Orthodox theology as such: to teach rightly is to teach “following the holy Fathers,” and a theology that broke with the patristic consensus would by that fact convict itself of novelty.

This is why the Fathers function as a criterion and not merely as a resource. The Church does not weigh the Fathers as one weighs opinions to be accepted or rejected on their individual merits; she recognizes in their consensus the authoritative expression of her own faith, and measures later teaching against it. A doctrine that the Fathers unanimously held is held by Tradition; a doctrine they unanimously rejected is rejected by Tradition; and a novelty unknown to them is suspect precisely as novelty (Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, Nordland, 1972).

Quality, Not Counting

Yet the consensus patrum is emphatically not a head-count, and the Orthodox tradition has been careful to say so. It does not mean that every Father must be shown to have taught a doctrine, nor that a numerical majority settles a question, nor that a claim can be established by amassing the greatest pile of citations. The consensus is a qualitative convergence — the agreement of the Fathers as faithful witnesses on the essentials of the faith — recognized and received by the Church over time, not a statistic to be tallied (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 204–205; and the topical article The Church Fathers, on the consensus as convergence rather than count).

Florovsky pressed this point hard, and gave it a memorable turn. To follow the Fathers, he argued, is not primarily a matter of quoting them but of sharing their vision: “The true theological tradition is not a museum of ancient formulas but a living stream.” What matters is the mind of the Fathers, their phronema, not the accumulation of their words; and a single Father who stands in the authentic line — Florovsky’s own example was St. Gregory Palamas, “following the Fathers” against innovation — may express the consensus more truly than a numerical majority who have drifted (Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” 1972; see The Fathers and the Mind of the Church). The weight of a patristic witness is measured by its sanctity, its orthodoxy, and its reception by the Church, not by the length of the citation.

There is even a striking patristic warning against mere counting. When the Emperor’s officials at the trials of the seventh century pressed St. Maximus the Confessor with the fact that patriarchs and bishops had subscribed to the monothelite formula, Maximus refused to be moved by the tally of authorities, holding to the truth of the faith against what was, at that moment, the numerical and institutional majority (Maximus the Confessor, The Trial (Relatio Motionis) and Dispute at Bizya; trans. in Allen and Neil, Maximus the Confessor and His Companions, Oxford, 2002; see St. Maximus the Confessor). The episode became a permanent Orthodox parable: the consensus of the Fathers is the consensus in the truth, and can be borne, at a given hour, by the few or even by one.

That Individual Fathers Can Err

The honest correlate of “quality, not counting” is the frank admission that individual Fathers — even great ones — could and did err, and that no single Father is treated as infallible. The tradition names the cases without embarrassment. Origen, for all his genius and influence, held opinions on the pre-existence of souls and the apokatastasis (universal restoration) that were later rejected, and were anathematized under Justinian and associated with the Fifth Council’s milieu (543/553). St. Gregory of Nyssa’s leanings toward a universal restoration are not received as the Church’s teaching. From the Eastern vantage, aspects of St. Augustine’s teaching on grace, predestination, and original sin have been regarded as at least one-sided, even while Augustine is honored as a Father and saint (Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, pp. 205–206; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1974, on the limits of individual patristic authority).

[Corrected: it is a common but inaccurate popular claim that "the Fathers never disagreed" or that any single Father may be cited as simply decisive. The Orthodox tradition holds neither. What is authoritative is the *consensus* on the essentials, discerned and received by the Church; individual Fathers may err on particulars, and where a Father's private opinion (a *theologoumenon*) diverges from the common mind, it is not thereby the teaching of the Church. Ware states the rule plainly: "The Fathers... are not to be treated as infallible," and Orthodoxy distinguishes the abiding consensus from the personal opinions even of the greatest (Ware, *The Orthodox Church*, 1993, pp. 205–206).]

This admission does not weaken the consensus patrum; it defines it. The authority lies not in the individual but in the convergence, not in the letter of any one teacher but in the mind they share when they are faithful — the mind of the Church herself. And that mind, the phronema, is the subject of the companion file: for to follow the Fathers is finally not to catalog their sayings but to acquire their way of seeing.

See Also

References

  • Vincent of Lérins. Commonitorium 2.6; 3.8; 28–29. Trans. C. A. Heurtley, NPNF II/11. (The Vincentian canon; the appeal to the approved Fathers.)
  • Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils. Ed. Norman P. Tanner. Vol. 1. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990. (Chalcedon 451, Definition: “Following the holy Fathers.”)
  • Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (The Fathers and their authority; the consensus as convergence; the Fathers not infallible, pp. 204–207.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Collected Works vol. 1. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (“St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers”; the mind of the Fathers versus the museum of formulas.)
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974. (The conciliar appeal to the Fathers; the limits of individual authority.)
  • Allen, Pauline, and Bronwen Neil, eds. and trans. Maximus the Confessor and His Companions: Documents from Exile. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (The trials; Maximus against the majority.)