The Patristic Mind

The Fathers are the privileged interpreters of Scripture in the Orthodox Church — not as individual authorities to be quoted against each other, but as witnesses to and bearers of the mind (phronema) of the Church. To read “with the Fathers” is to read within the Rule of Faith, the consensus patrum, and the living tradition in which Scripture was written and is rightly heard.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Why the Fathers, and in What Sense

Orthodoxy holds that Scripture is rightly interpreted within the Church, and the concrete bearers of the Church’s interpretation across the centuries are the Fathers — the holy teachers and pastors whose reading of Scripture the Church has received as faithful. But the Orthodox appeal to the Fathers is easily misunderstood if it is imagined as a claim that the Fathers are infallible individually or unanimous on every point. They are neither. The Fathers frequently disagree on particular exegetical questions; some erred, and the Church has not received every opinion of every Father. What Orthodoxy affirms is that the Fathers, taken together and read with discernment, transmit the phronema — the mind, the interior disposition and understanding — of the Church, and that their overall trajectory and theological framework of interpretation is normative even where their details vary (see Holy Scripture in Orthodox Theology; Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition, Nordland, 1972, ch. 5; and the topical article on the Church Fathers).

Georges Florovsky captured the character of this appeal in his program of a “neo-patristic synthesis”: to be Orthodox is not to repeat the Fathers’ words as a dead archive but to “acquire the mind of the Fathers” — to think as they thought, in the same Spirit and within the same faith, so that one reads Scripture from within their vision rather than merely citing them (Florovsky, “St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” in Bible, Church, Tradition, and his 1936 Athens address programmatically calling for a “return to the Fathers”; see The Historical-Critical Method). To read with the patristic mind is thus a matter of formation, not of proof-texting.

The Rule of Faith

The oldest and most basic expression of the patristic mind is the Rule of Faith (regula fidei, kanōn tēs pisteōs, kanōn tēs alētheias) — the summary of the apostolic preaching, the “plot” or “hypothesis” of the whole of Scripture, transmitted from the apostles and confessed in baptism. St. Irenaeus, contending in the late second century with Gnostics who reassembled the biblical materials into an alien story, argued that Scripture must be read according to this Rule. He offered his famous image: the heretics take the beautiful mosaic of a king that the true tradition composes and rearrange the same tiles (tesserae) into the picture of a dog or a fox, then claim it as the original — the pieces (the biblical texts) are genuine, but the pattern (the hypothesis) is falsified (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.8.1; 1.9.4). The Rule of Faith is that true pattern: the one story of the one God, creator and redeemer, fulfilled in Christ. To read Scripture “with the mind of the Church” is first of all to read it according to this apostolic hypothesis, so that no cleverness of interpretation is allowed to overturn the faith (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.10.1; 2.27–28; Frances M. Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, Cambridge, 1997, on the Rule as the interpretive key).

The Rule of Faith is not a rival to Scripture but the summary of Scripture’s own coherence; it is what later crystallized in the Creeds. This is why, for Orthodoxy, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and the definitions of the Ecumenical Councils function as authoritative readings of Scripture — the Church stating, against error, what her Scriptures mean on the questions at issue (see The Seven Ecumenical Councils). The councils do not add to Scripture; they defend its right reading.

The Consensus Patrum

Related to the Rule of Faith is the principle of the consensus patrum — the agreement of the Fathers. Where the Fathers, across time and place, converge on a reading of Scripture, that consensus carries authority as a witness to the Church’s mind. The classic criterion is that of St. Vincent of Lérins: to hold “what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all” (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est) — the tests of universality, antiquity, and consent (Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 2). Vincent applied this precisely to the interpretation of Scripture: because Scripture, being deep, is read variously, the Church needs the line of the “prophetic and apostolic interpretation” directed by the norm of the ecclesiastical and catholic understanding (ibid.).

Two cautions keep this from becoming mechanical. First, consensus does not mean unanimity on every detail; it means the broad and stable agreement of the tradition on the substance of the faith and the main lines of interpretation. The Fathers’ many local disagreements — on the dating of a book, the meaning of a phrase, the propriety of allegory — do not touch this consensus and are freely acknowledged (Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition, ch. 5, on the non-mechanical character of patristic authority). Second, the criterion is discerned within the living Church, not applied as an external formula; the Church recognizes her own mind in the Fathers, as she recognized her own Scriptures in the canon (see The Bible as the Church’s Book).

Against Private Interpretation

The corollary of reading with the patristic mind is the Orthodox refusal of private interpretation — not of private reading, which is encouraged, but of the individual’s making himself the final arbiter of Scripture’s meaning against the mind of the Church. The warrant is scriptural: “no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation (idias epilyseōs)” (2 Peter 1:20), and the Ethiopian’s “How can I understand, unless someone guides me?” (Acts 8:31). The Fathers are that guide. This is not a suppression of thought but its formation: the Orthodox interpreter is freed from the isolation of the solitary reader and set within a communion of readers stretching back to the apostles (Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993, “The Bible”; Breck, Scripture in Tradition, SVS Press, 2001, ch. 1; see Reading with the Church).

Holiness and Interpretation

A distinctive feature of the Orthodox account is that right interpretation is bound to holiness. The Fathers are interpreters not merely because they were learned but because they were holy — men purified by ascetic struggle and prayer, in whom the same Spirit who inspired the Scriptures could speak. St. Athanasius closes On the Incarnation by insisting that to understand the Scriptures one must imitate the life of the saints, for “an honest mind and a life modelled on the saints” is needed to enter their meaning (Athanasius, On the Incarnation 57). The interpreter and the interpreted are joined: one reads the Word rightly to the degree that one is being conformed to the Word. This is why Orthodoxy locates the highest interpretation not only in the schools but in the saints and in the prayer of the Church, and why the ascetic and the exegete are, in the patristic ideal, the same person (see Scripture and the Life of Prayer; Scripture and the Transformation of the Reader). Interpretation, in this vision, is not finally a technique but a fruit of communion with God.

A Living, Not a Frozen, Authority

Finally, reading with the Fathers is not antiquarianism. To acquire the patristic mind is to be able to read Scripture as they read it — christologically, ecclesially, toward theosis — including in the face of questions they never met. Florovsky’s neo-patristic synthesis was precisely a summons to creative fidelity: to think with the Fathers about the modern world, not merely to catalog their sayings (Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition, ch. 5; and see The Orthodox Biblical Recovery). The patristic mind is thus a living hermeneutic, handed on and exercised anew in each generation — the same Spirit, in the same Church, reading the same Scriptures toward the same Christ. Within that shared mind there is real diversity, and the greatest instance is the difference of the two exegetical schools, treated next (see Antioch and Alexandria).

See Also

• Antioch and Alexandria — the diversity within the one patristic mind
• Christ the Key to the Scriptures — the christological center of patristic reading
• Scripture within Holy Tradition — the ecclesial context of interpretation
• Reading with the Church — the practical application
• Church Fathers — the topical article on the Fathers

References

• Irenaeus of Lyon. Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses) 1.8.1; 1.9.4; 1.10.1; 2.27–28 — the Rule of Faith and the mosaic image.
• Vincent of Lérins. Commonitorium 2 — the ubique, semper, ab omnibus criterion applied to the interpretation of Scripture.
• Florovsky, Georges. Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View. Collected Works, vol. 1. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (Ch. 5; the neo-patristic synthesis and “acquiring the mind of the Fathers.”)
• Young, Frances M. Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. (The Rule of Faith as interpretive key.)
• Athanasius of Alexandria. On the Incarnation 57 — the need for a holy life to understand the Scriptures.
• Breck, John. Scripture in Tradition. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001. (Ch. 1; the phronema of the Church.)
• Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (“The Bible”; against private interpretation.)
• Scripture: 2 Peter 1:20; Acts 8:31.