The Four Criteria and Their Limits

The manuals of patrology define a Church Father by four marks: orthodoxy of doctrine, holiness of life, approval by the Church, and antiquity — and each of the four, examined honestly, bends under the weight of the actual tradition. This file works through the criteria, the indispensable distinction between Fathers and mere “ecclesiastical writers,” the meaning of the consensus patrum, the patristic phronema, and the working vocabulary of the discipline (patrology vs. patristics).

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Classical Criteria

The textbook definition descends from the Western manual tradition and is conveniently stated at the opening of Johannes Quasten’s standard Patrology: the Fathers of the Church are those ancient writers distinguished by doctrina orthodoxa (orthodox doctrine), sanctitas vitae (holiness of life), approbatio ecclesiae (the approval of the Church), and antiquitas (antiquity) (Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1, Utrecht/Westminster: Spectrum/Newman, 1950, ch. 1, on the concept of “Father” and the fourfold criteria; the same schema in Berthold Altaner, Patrology, trans. Hilda Graef, Freiburg: Herder, 1960, §1). The schema is old: the instinct behind it is already at work in the fifth century, when Vincent of Lérins defines the authoritative teachers as “those alone who, though in diverse times and places, yet persevering in the communion and faith of the one Catholic Church, have been approved teachers” (Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 3; trans. NPNF II/11; see the full collection St. Vincent of Lérins), and when the Council of Chalcedon prefaces its Definition with the formula that became the Church’s signature: “Following the holy Fathers” (hepomenoi tois hagiois patrasin) (Chalcedon 451, Definition of Faith; Price and Gaddis, The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005, vol. 2, session 5).

Each criterion says something true. Orthodoxy of doctrine is first because a “Father” is by definition a begetter of children in the faith: the metaphor is Pauline — “though ye have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers: for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel” (1 Corinthians 4:15) — and a teacher who begets children into heresy is no father but, in the language of the tradition, a corrupter. Holiness of life is second because in the patristic understanding theology is not an academic performance but the fruit of purification: “if you are a theologian, you will pray truly; and if you pray truly, you are a theologian,” in the famous sentence of Evagrius (Evagrius, On Prayer 60; trans. in The Philokalia, vol. 1, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, Ware, London: Faber, 1979). Ecclesiastical approval is third because no man makes himself a Father: the title is conferred by reception — by the Church reading, citing, and living from a writer across generations. Antiquity is fourth because the Fathers are, on the classical account, the witnesses of the formative age, closer to the apostolic source.

Where Each Criterion Bends

The criteria are a serviceable rule of thumb; they are not an algorithm, and the actual tradition strains every one of them (Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1, ch. 1, acknowledges the qualifications; Florovsky’s essays press them harder from the Orthodox side — “The Authority of the Ancient Councils and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972).

Orthodoxy of doctrine does not mean inerrancy. Individual Fathers erred on particular points without forfeiting the title: Gregory of Nyssa appears to have taught some form of the apokatastasis, and the Church, which condemned the Origenist version of that doctrine, has never condemned Gregory — the Seventh Ecumenical Council could still call him “father of fathers” (Nicaea II 787, in the acts; Price, The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018) [Disputed: the extent of Gregory’s universalism is itself contested — Ramelli reads him as a consistent teacher of apokatastasis (The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis, Leiden: Brill, 2013), while more traditional readers contextualize the passages]. Augustine taught on grace, predestination, and original sin things the East never received, and remains a Father — with an asterisk discussed elsewhere in this guide (see The Latin Fathers and the Augustine Question). The criterion means that the overall trajectory of a writer’s teaching stands within the Church’s faith, and that the Church has been able to receive his witness as her own — not that every sentence is dogma (Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, 1972, on the Fathers as witnesses rather than oracles).

Holiness of life is normally sealed by canonization, but not always. Clement of Alexandria was long commemorated in some Western martyrologies and then removed; Tertullian and Origen, whatever their sanctity of labor, are not saints (see The Problem Cases). Conversely, the Church venerates as a saint at least one great teacher whose ecclesial body was not in communion with her — Isaac the Syrian, bishop of the Church of the East, received into the Orthodox calendar by the sheer force of his writings (Alfeyev, The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian, Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2000, ch. 1; see Isaac, Symeon, and Palamas). The criterion, in other words, describes the normal case and admits exceptions the Church herself has made.

Ecclesiastical approval is real but rarely formal. There is no conciliar decree listing the Fathers; there are conciliar florilegia — the anthologies of patristic citations by which the councils proved doctrine — and there are the liturgical commemorations, and there is the continuous fact of citation (see The Fathers in the Councils). Approval is thus a matter of reception over time: Justinian’s letter and the acts of the Fifth Ecumenical Council enumerate the Fathers “whom we follow in every way” — Athanasius, Hilary, Basil, the two Gregories, Ambrose, Augustine, Chrysostom, Theophilus, Cyril, Leo, Proclus — a working list, not a closed canon (Constantinople II 553, in the conciliar documents; Price, The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009, vol. 1).

Antiquity is the criterion Orthodoxy declines to enforce at all, and that refusal is important enough to receive its own file (see The Unending Age of the Fathers).

Fathers and Ecclesiastical Writers

The manual tradition therefore distinguishes: a Father meets the criteria; an ecclesiastical writer (scriptor ecclesiasticus) is an ancient Christian author whose work matters — sometimes enormously — but who fails one or more of the tests (Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1, ch. 1, on the categories; Altaner, Patrology, 1960, §1). Origen and Tertullian are the paradigm cases: the former condemned after death, the latter lapsed into Montanism in his own lifetime, and both nevertheless indispensable — Tertullian gave Latin theology its vocabulary, Origen gave Greek theology its exegetical instrument. A third category, Doctor of the Church, is a specifically Roman Catholic juridical title conferred by papal act and has no Orthodox equivalent; the nearest Orthodox usage is the liturgical acclamation of the Three Great Hierarchs and Ecumenical Teachers — Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom, celebrated jointly on 30 January, a feast established at Constantinople in the eleventh century to end disputes over their precedence (the Synaxarion for 30 January; on the feast’s origin under Alexius I Comnenus and John Mauropous, see the entry in the Great Synaxaristes tradition; Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3, 1960, on the three hierarchs).

The distinction is not pedantry; it is the Church protecting her own speech. “Not everyone who wrote is a Father”: to cite Origen and to cite Athanasius are two different acts, and the tradition has always known it — the sixth-century pseudo-Gelasian decree De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis already sorts ancient authors into received, qualifiedly received, and rejected (the Decretum Gelasianum, a sixth-century Gallic compilation traditionally ascribed to Gelasius; text discussed in Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1). This guide follows the same discipline: the problem cases are treated honestly and at length, precisely because pretending they are simple would falsify the tradition (see The Problem Cases).

The Consensus Patrum and the Phronema

The authority of the Fathers is corporate. No single Father is infallible — “no single Father is the tradition,” and the Church has never taught otherwise; what binds is the consensus patrum, the convergence of the Fathers in witness to the one faith (Florovsky, “The Authority of the Ancient Councils and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, 1972; Ware, The Orthodox Church, London: Penguin, 1993, ch. “Holy Tradition,” on the consensus and on the fallibility of individual Fathers). The consensus is qualitative, not arithmetical: it is not established by counting heads — on some questions the numerical majority of ancient writers was wrong, as the Arian crisis proved — but by the Church’s recognition that in these witnesses her own mind, the phronema of the apostles, is speaking (Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, 1972, on “the mind of the Fathers”; the theme is developed for this repository in The Consensus Patrum and The Consensus Patrum Rightly Understood).

Phronema — the word Paul uses in Romans 8:6 for the “mind” of the flesh and of the Spirit — has become the standard Orthodox term for the disposition, the instinctive orientation of thought, that the Fathers share and that the student of the Fathers must acquire: not a database of citations but a way of thinking with the Church (Florovsky, “The Ethos of the Orthodox Church,” in Aspects of Church History, Collected Works vol. 4, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1975; cf. Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, ch. “Holy Tradition”). To “follow the holy Fathers,” Florovsky insisted, is to acquire their mind, not to repeat their conclusions — a distinction with sharp consequences, taken up in Section 09.

Patrology and Patristics

Finally, the vocabulary of the discipline. Patrology is, strictly, the study of the Fathers as authors — lives, works, manuscripts, editions, authenticity: the discipline of which Quasten’s four volumes are the standard instrument; the word was coined by the Lutheran theologian Johannes Gerhard, whose Patrologia appeared posthumously in 1653 (Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1, ch. 1, on the history and definition of the discipline). Patristics (or patristic theology) is the study of the Fathers’ doctrine — historically a division of dogmatic theology (theologia patristica) as against biblical and scholastic theology (Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1, ch. 1). In current academic usage the terms blur, and a third, deliberately neutral term — “early Christian studies” — has increasingly displaced both in the secular academy, precisely because it does not concede that the writers studied are Fathers of anything (on the terminological shift see Elizabeth A. Clark, “From Patristics to Early Christian Studies,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. Harvey and Hunter, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). The Orthodox writer can use all three terms, but should know what each concedes: this guide says “the Fathers,” because from within the Church that is simply what they are (METHODOLOGY §4.1).

See Also

References

  • Quasten, Johannes. Patrology. Vol. 1: The Beginnings of Patristic Literature. Utrecht/Westminster, MD: Spectrum/Newman Press, 1950. (Ch. 1: the concept of “Father,” the four criteria, Fathers vs. ecclesiastical writers, patrology vs. patristics, Gerhard’s Patrologia of 1653.)
  • Altaner, Berthold. Patrology. Trans. Hilda C. Graef. Freiburg: Herder, 1960. (§1: the definitions and categories of the manual tradition.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Collected Works vol. 1. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (“The Authority of the Ancient Councils and the Tradition of the Fathers”; “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers.”)
  • Florovsky, Georges. Aspects of Church History. Collected Works vol. 4. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1975. (“The Ethos of the Orthodox Church.”)
  • Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (Ch. “Holy Tradition”: the Fathers, the consensus, the fallibility of individuals.)
  • Price, Richard, and Michael Gaddis, trans. The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon. 2 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005. (The Definition: “following the holy Fathers.”)
  • Price, Richard, trans. The Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 553. 2 vols. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009. (The enumerated Fathers “whom we follow in every way.”)
  • Price, Richard, trans. The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. (Gregory of Nyssa acclaimed “father of fathers.”)
  • Vincent of Lérins. Commonitorium. Trans. NPNF II/11. (Ch. 3: the approved teachers.)
  • Evagrius Ponticus. On Prayer 60. In The Philokalia, vol. 1, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1979.
  • Ramelli, Ilaria. The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis. Leiden: Brill, 2013. (The disputed reading of Gregory of Nyssa.)
  • Alfeyev, Hilarion. The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2000. (Isaac’s reception across confessional lines.)
  • Clark, Elizabeth A. “From Patristics to Early Christian Studies.” In The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. (The terminological shift in the academy.)
  • Scripture: 1 Corinthians 4:15; Romans 8:6.