The Consensus Patrum Rightly Understood

The closing statement of the whole guide: what the consensus of the Fathers is (a qualitative convergence recognized by the Church) and is not (a head-count, an oracle, a quarry of proof-texts); why patristic fundamentalism betrays the Fathers it quotes; and how the ordinary believer, who may never open Migne, already lives with the Fathers — because the Liturgy is the people’s patrology.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

What the Consensus Is

The consensus patrum — the agreement of the Fathers — is the operational form of patristic authority: no single Father binds the Church; their convergent witness does. The classical Western formula is the Vincentian canon: hold “what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all” (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est), where universality, antiquity, and consent function as tests, and — Vincent’s own refinement — the agreement of the approved teachers, not of everyone who ever wrote, supplies the “all” (Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 2–3; trans. NPNF II/11; see St. Vincent of Lérins). The Orthodox reception of the canon is appreciative and corrective at once: taken mechanically it proves too little (on a strict reading almost nothing has been believed “everywhere, always, by all”) and misses the point that consensus is recognized by the Church, not computed by the historian — the argument developed for this repository in the Holy Tradition compendium (see The Consensus Patrum; Florovsky, “The Authority of the Ancient Councils and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972; Ware, The Orthodox Church, London: Penguin, 1993, ch. “Holy Tradition”).

Three refinements guard the concept, all demonstrated in this guide’s earlier sections:

  1. Quality, not arithmetic. In the mid-fourth century the numerical majority was against Nicaea; the consensus was carried by the witnesses the Church afterwards recognized (see Athanasius and the Nicene Faith). Counting citations is not discerning consensus.
  2. Convergence, not unanimity. Individual Fathers erred — Gregory of Nyssa’s universalism, Augustine’s predestinarian logic — and the Church received the witnesses while sifting the opinions; conversely, condemned writers said much that is true, and the Church kept it (Origen’s exegesis, Evagrius’ psychology, Tertullian’s vocabulary) (see The Problem Cases; Florovsky, “The Authority of the Ancient Councils,” 1972). The consensus is a sieve in both directions.
  3. Recognized, not self-certifying. The organ of recognition is the whole Church — councils reading florilegia from checked codices, the liturgy keeping some texts and letting others fall silent, the slow reception by the praying people (see The Fathers in the Councils; on reception, the companion file The Reception of Tradition).

Patristic Fundamentalism as a Danger

If the consensus is quality, convergence, and recognition, then there exists a characteristic way of getting it wrong from the conservative side, which recent Orthodox writing has named patristic fundamentalism: treating the corpus as a flat database of infallible sentences, any one of which, quoted, ends discussion (the term and diagnosis in Kalaitzidis, “From the ‘Return to the Fathers’ to the Need for a Modern Orthodox Theology,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2010): 5–36; the same danger named from within the neopatristic camp by Florovsky’s polemic against the “theology of repetition” — “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, 1972; and by Behr’s insistence that the Fathers be read theologically, not talismanically — Behr, The Way to Nicaea, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001, introduction). Its habitual forms, each a violation of something this guide has documented:

  • Proof-texting without context — the iconoclasts’ method, which Nicaea II answered by demanding whole codices (see The Fathers in the Councils); a sentence of a Father, stripped of its occasion and opponent, can be made to teach nearly anything.
  • Flattening genre and audience — applying the desert’s monastic maximalism directly to lay life, or a Father’s polemical hyperbole as calm dogma; the tradition itself distinguishes akribeia and oikonomia, counsel and precept (see The Desert, Cassian, and the Ladder; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993).
  • Ignoring the sifting — citing spuria as genuine (the pseudo-Athanasian formula that misled Cyril; the “Greek Ephrem”), or a condemned writer’s speculation as patristic doctrine, because the name on the manuscript is venerable (see Manuscripts, Migne, and the Critical Editions).
  • Weaponizing the Fathers against the Fathers’ own work — using patristic quotation to refuse every contemporary question, when the Fathers themselves were precisely the ones who answered their contemporary questions in the language those questions required (Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” 1972; the point conceded on all sides of the post-patristic debate — see The Neopatristic Synthesis and Its Critics).

The diagnosis is not a license for its opposite error — the dismissal of patristic authority as historically conditioned opinion; METHODOLOGY §4.1 states this repository’s standpoint, and the Church’s, that the Fathers are normative witnesses of the faith. Fundamentalism and dismissal are twin failures of the same discernment: both refuse the labor of reading the Fathers as the Church reads them — whole, in context, in convergence, in prayer.

The Fathers and the Ordinary Believer

The guide ends where most Orthodox actually meet the Fathers: not in Migne, but at Vespers. The Liturgy is the people’s patrology, and the claim is concrete:

  • The Eucharistic anaphoras served throughout the year bear the names and substantially the theology of Basil and Chrysostom (Taft, The Byzantine Rite: A Short History, Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1992, on the two liturgies and their history).
  • The Creed sung by the whole congregation is the Fathers of Nicaea and Constantinople; the Synodikon of the first Sunday of Lent and the feast of Palamas on the second are conciliar patristics set to music (see Isaac, Symeon, and Palamas).
  • The canons and stichera of the great feasts are versified patristic theology — John of Damascus and Cosmas of Maiuma for Pascha and Nativity, with whole lines of the paschal canon drawn from Gregory the Theologian’s festal orations (Louth, St John Damascene, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, ch. on the hymnography and its Nazianzen sources).
  • Chrysostom’s paschal homily is read aloud in every church each Pascha; the pre-communion prayers in the people’s prayer books stand under the names of Chrysostom, Basil, Symeon the New Theologian, and John of Damascus (the received prayer books and the Pentecostarion; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, on the liturgy as the laity’s theological formation).
  • The Lenten prayer repeated with prostrations in every parish is ascribed to Ephrem — with the attribution’s critical fragility duly noted in this guide, and its formative power undiminished by the footnote (see Athanasius and the Nicene Faith).

This is why the Orthodox instinct has never been that the Fathers are specialists’ property. The believer who keeps the fasts, sings the Creed, hears Chrysostom at Pascha, and prays Ephrem’s prayer in Lent is being formed by the consensus patrum in its native medium — lex orandi, lex credendi (see Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi). Reading the Fathers on the page — for which Section 08 gave the path — deepens that formation; it cannot substitute for it. And this, finally, is the answer to the question with which the guide began. Who is a Father? The teacher in whom the Church, praying, recognizes her own voice; and the age of such recognition, like the prayer, has no end (Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” 1972; Ware, The Orthodox Church, 1993, ch. “Holy Tradition”; see The Unending Age of the Fathers).

See Also

References

  • Vincent of Lérins. Commonitorium 2–3. Trans. NPNF II/11. (The canon; the approved teachers.)
  • Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. 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.”)
  • Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (Ch. “Holy Tradition”: consensus, the fallibility of individual Fathers, the liturgy as formation.)
  • Kalaitzidis, Pantelis. “From the ‘Return to the Fathers’ to the Need for a Modern Orthodox Theology.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2010): 5–36. (The “patristic fundamentalism” diagnosis.)
  • Behr, John. The Way to Nicaea. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001. (Introduction: reading the Fathers theologically.)
  • Taft, Robert F. The Byzantine Rite: A Short History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992. (The anaphoras of Basil and Chrysostom.)
  • Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (The festal hymnography and its patristic sources.)
  • The service books: the Lenten Triodion (the Synodikon; the Sunday of Palamas; the Prayer of St. Ephrem); the Pentecostarion (the paschal canon; Chrysostom’s paschal homily); the received Orthodox prayer book (pre-communion prayers).