The Unending Age of the Fathers

Western scholarship conventionally closes the patristic era with St. John of Damascus in the East and St. Gregory the Great or St. Isidore of Seville in the West; Orthodoxy refuses the closure. This file states the Orthodox position — that the Holy Spirit has never ceased to raise up Fathers, and that Photius, Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory Palamas, and Mark of Ephesus are Fathers in the full sense — and gives Florovsky’s and Ware’s classic modern arguments for it, together with what the position does and does not imply.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Conventional Closure

Every Western manual of patrology ends somewhere, and the endings are conventional: for the Greek Fathers, the death of St. John of Damascus (c. 749); for the Latins, the death of St. Gregory the Great (604) or of St. Isidore of Seville (636) (Quasten, Patrology, vol. 1, Utrecht/Westminster: Spectrum/Newman, 1950, ch. 1, stating the conventional termini; Altaner, Patrology, trans. Graef, Freiburg: Herder, 1960, §1, giving Gregory/Isidore and John of Damascus as the boundaries). The convention has practical sense — a reference work must stop — and it also encodes a theology. On the scholastic account, the Fathers belong to the formative age of doctrine: they are the quarry from which the medieval doctors built; after them come not Fathers but theologians, systematizers of a deposit already complete. Peter Lombard’s Sentences and Thomas Aquinas’ Summa cite the Fathers as auctoritates, voices from a closed golden age (on the Damascene’s role as a source for Lombard and Aquinas, see Louth, St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, introduction).

The Orthodox Church has never accepted this picture of herself. The point is not sentimental; it is dogmatic, and it was stated most sharply in the twentieth century by Georges Florovsky: “the Church is still fully authoritative as she has been in the ages past, since the Spirit of Truth quickens her now no less effectively than in the ancient times” — and therefore the appeal to the Fathers cannot be an appeal to a closed past (“St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972). To declare the age of the Fathers ended would be to declare that the Holy Spirit once spoke through holy teachers and now does not — a claim no Orthodox ecclesiology can sustain, since the Church’s life is the continuing Pentecost, not the curatorship of a deposit (Florovsky, “The Ethos of the Orthodox Church,” in Aspects of Church History, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1975; Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957, ch. 1, on Tradition as the life of the Spirit in the Church).

The Witnesses After the “End”

The Orthodox refusal is not a theory; it is a calendar. The Church did not stop recognizing Fathers in 749; she went on doing what she had always done — receiving, citing, and commemorating her great teachers as Fathers:

  • St. Photius the Great (c. 810–c. 893), Patriarch of Constantinople, whose Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit is the foundational patristic-style refutation of the Filioque and whose Bibliotheca preserved for us the memory of hundreds of lost ancient books; the Church commemorates him as “Pillar of Orthodoxy” (6 February) (see the full collection St. Photius the Great; on his patristic stature, Louth, Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681–1071, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007, chs. on Photius).
  • St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), to whom the Church gave the very title reserved for John the Evangelist and Gregory of Nazianzus — “the Theologian” — three centuries after the supposed close of the patristic age. The epithet “New” concedes the lateness and overrides it in the same breath (see St. Symeon the New Theologian; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ: Saint Symeon the New Theologian, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1986).
  • St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), whose defense of the hesychasts and articulation of the essence–energies distinction was received by the Councils of Constantinople of 1341, 1347, and 1351 and entered the Synodikon of Orthodoxy — conciliar reception of the same kind the fourth-century Fathers received. Florovsky’s essay on Palamas exists precisely to argue that here is a Father in the strict sense, doing in the fourteenth century what Athanasius did in the fourth (Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, 1972; Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, London: Faith Press, 1964; see St. Gregory Palamas).
  • St. Mark of Ephesus (1392–1444) and St. Nicholas Cabasilas (14th c.) continue the line to the eve of the fall of Constantinople — the one as the confessor at Ferrara–Florence, the other as the mystagogue of The Life in Christ (see St. Mark of Ephesus and St. Nicholas Cabasilas).

Kallistos Ware draws the conclusion in the standard modern introduction: it is a mistake, he writes, to regard the patristic age as ended in the fifth or eighth century, “for many Orthodox writers would say that the age of the Fathers has never come to an end”; the Orthodox Church “has never attempted to define exactly who the Fathers are, still less to classify them in order of importance,” and a saint of any century — he instances the possibility of Fathers in the modern era — may prove to be a Father (Ware, The Orthodox Church, new ed., London: Penguin, 1993, ch. “Holy Tradition”). Twentieth-century Orthodox usage has, cautiously and without formal act, begun to speak of recent teachers in patristic terms — St. Silouan the Athonite, St. Sophrony of Essex, St. Paisios — and the repository treats those figures in their own collections with the sobriety their recent glorifications require (see St. Sophrony of Essex).

What the Open Age Does and Does Not Mean

The confession that the patristic age is open is easily misused, and the tradition guards it with three qualifications.

First, openness is not inflation. That there can be new Fathers does not make every modern theologian one. Florovsky’s point cuts both ways: the Fathers are constituted by the Church’s reception, not by chronology in either direction — antiquity does not make a Father (Tertullian is ancient), and modernity does not unmake one (Palamas is late). The title is conferred by the same slow corporate recognition in every century, and it is rare in every century (Florovsky, “The Authority of the Ancient Councils and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, 1972; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, ch. “Holy Tradition”).

Second, openness does not level the generations. The Fathers of the formative dogmatic age retain a specific kind of authority: the Ecumenical Councils spoke in their words, and the later Fathers themselves claimed nothing except fidelity to the earlier ones. Palamas presented his theology explicitly as the teaching of “the saints” before him; Symeon the New Theologian insisted his doctrine of conscious grace was the doctrine of the Scriptures and the Fathers (Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, 1964, on Palamas’ patristic argumentation; Krivochéine, In the Light of Christ, 1986). The open age is a continuity of witness, not a license for novelty: the new Father says nothing new — he says the old thing with new power, against a new denial. This is why the Orthodox account of the Fathers is inseparable from its account of Tradition itself (see Holy Tradition, especially The Consensus Patrum).

Third, openness is itself the anti-archaeological principle. Florovsky coined the phrase “theology of repetition” for the failure mode of a piety that treats the Fathers as a completed archive to be quoted: such repetition, he argued, is actually a betrayal of the Fathers, who were not repeaters but creative confessors of the faith against the errors of their own day. “To follow the Fathers does not mean simply to quote their sentences; it means to acquire their mind, their phronema” (Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, 1972). The open patristic age is thus the standing rebuke both to the Western closure (the Fathers ended) and to a certain Orthodox temptation (the Fathers ended and that is fine, we shall quote them forever) — a temptation this guide returns to under the name of patristic fundamentalism (see The Consensus Patrum Rightly Understood).

The Damascene as “Seal,” Not Terminus

The traditional honorific for St. John of Damascus — treated fully in Section 06 — is instructive here. He is called the one who “sealed” the patristic synthesis: his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith gathered the dogmatic labor of six centuries into one ordered whole, and both Byzantium and the Latin West treated it as the summary of the Fathers (Louth, St John Damascene, 2002, on the De Fide Orthodoxa and its afterlife). But a seal on a synthesis is not a tombstone on an age: within a century of his death the Church was again producing patristic theology in the iconoclast crisis he had himself anticipated, and the man anathematized by the iconoclast council of 754 was vindicated by the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787 — the conciliar rhythm of the patristic age continuing exactly as before (Louth, St John Damascene, 2002, ch. 7, on Hiereia’s anathemas against “Mansur” and the rehabilitation at Nicaea II; see Leo, Maximus, and the Seal of the Fathers). Orthodoxy keeps the honorific and refuses the terminus: the Damascene closed a chapter; only the Lord closes the book.

See Also

References

  • 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 Church still fully authoritative; the phronema; the “theology of repetition.” “The Authority of the Ancient Councils 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 age of the Fathers not ended; no official list of Fathers.)
  • Quasten, Johannes. Patrology. Vol. 1. Utrecht/Westminster, MD: Spectrum/Newman Press, 1950. (Ch. 1: the conventional termini of the patristic era.)
  • Altaner, Berthold. Patrology. Trans. Hilda C. Graef. Freiburg: Herder, 1960. (§1: Gregory/Isidore and John of Damascus as boundaries.)
  • Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (The Damascene as synthesis; Hiereia and Nicaea II; his afterlife in Lombard and Aquinas.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681–1071. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007. (Photius as a Father after the “end.”)
  • Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957. (Ch. 1: Tradition as the life of the Spirit.)
  • Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. London: Faith Press, 1964. (Palamas’ conciliar reception; his patristic method.)
  • Krivochéine, Basil. In the Light of Christ: Saint Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022). Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1986. (Symeon’s title and his claim of continuity.)
  • Price, Richard, trans. The Acts of the Second Council of Nicaea (787). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018. (The conciliar rhythm continuing after the Damascene.)