Since the previous post I have been reflecting a bit on how Father Louth’s discussion of the gulf that opens up between a discipline and its history applies to theology and, more specifically, to patristics. This also helps to explain my own experience in seeking to get in touch with the Fathers. As someone with a theological background in which the Fathers were largely missing, my immediate inclination was to look for some sort of an academic programme. But, apart from the fact that western theological faculties do not generally go in for such things, and some other complicating factors, I was also uncomfortable with this because of the way the Fathers often appear to be dealt with in western academic circles. And this connects for me with Louth’s distinction, for patristics appears to be viewed largely in historical terms – if it appears in academic programmes then this is often together with Church History. Now I certainly have nothing against Church History. But my own interest in the Fathers is not simply to understand them in their historical context, important as this is. My interest in the Fathers is theological, but this is not simply an abstract interest in which they can be used as source material for building elaborate theological artifices or an armoury for defending particular positions. It is rather concerned with their life-giving role in passing on a living Tradition which is able to feed and sustain, but also challenge and transform.
Now this does not mean that we don’t need historical knowledge, nor does it deny that the Fathers are indeed a rich resource into which we can tap. And it also doesn’t exclude critical study, an appreciation of different traditions and our posing of awkward questions. But when such a critical approach loses its rootedness in the Fathers’ own commitment to ascesis, conversion and prayer, to being taken up in and transfigured into the Mystery of Christ, then it doesn’t seem to have much point.
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A postscript to a postscript: Shortly after writing this I came across Phil’s post at Hyperekperissou on Prayer and Patristics – Origen on How to Pray, in which he points to the Fathers’ importance in going beyond intellectual abstractions. It is also the first post in a series on Origen’s On Prayer, which looks very promising.
A vow of conversation 
April 15, 2008 at 8:25 am
I’ve only recently started reading your blog, but heartily agree with this sentiment. I am far more interested in conversing with the Fathers as theologically partners and mentors, than being an historian.
April 15, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Thanks for your recent posts. Really good stuff here. I think you’re assessment of the academic scene is unfortunately correct. I think it relates to the rise of historical-criticism. If patristic scholars are usually bracketed off as “historical theology” or “church history” the situation is even more dire for biblical studies. I think part of this relates to the ever-increasing emphasis on specialization, but it also reflects our modern presumption that the pre-critical mind has little to offer our enlightened minds.
April 16, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Thank you for your comments!
R.O. Flyer, you are quite right about Scripture. I’m hesitant to entirely dismiss everything connected to historical criticism, but it does somehow have to be seen in its proper perspective. Louth has a later chapter which deals with allegorical interpretation – and its dismissal by modern scholarship – which I hope to get to before too long!
(And, on the subject of Scripture, are you familiar with Sandra Schneiders’ The Revelatory Text?)
April 17, 2008 at 4:17 pm
I’m not familiar with the volume, but it looks interesting.
April 18, 2008 at 8:04 pm
The subtitle is Interpreting the New Testament as Sacred Scripture (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992). Schneiders describes in the introduction her graduate studies in Paris and Rome in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the heyday (in Catholic circles) of the historical critical method, and her questioning of how this related to Dei Verbum‘s description of Scripture as a “pure and lasting fount of spiritual life”. Her work is set particularly in the context of feminist ideology criticism and uses the work of Gadamer and Ricoeur to argue for an integral and transformative interpretation that takes the truth claims of the text seriously.
It’s a number of years since I read it and I’m not sure how I’d react to it now but the relationship between hermeneutics and allegorical readings is something that I’d like to explore at some stage.
August 26, 2010 at 9:35 pm
The Fathers: “their life-giving role in passing on a living Tradition which is able to feed and sustain, but also challenge and transform.”
Here is a wonderful description, from a 1969 conference in India, which gives a similar slant, evoking the idea of guru and disciple but in a Christian context: “Christianity is essentially the handing down of a spiritual experience: the experience which Jesus Christ, the Man par excellence, had of God the Father, and which he communicated to his apostles; and the experience which the Apostles had of Jesus the God-man, Redeemer of the world, who through his life-death-resurrection made all believers sharers of his Father’s life and glory.”
Such a “handing-down” occurs only within a relationship, even if one is relating via the written word. And I wonder if it is this quality of “relationship” which disappears when everything is objectified into something like a pressed flower, dried and labeled and dead.
August 27, 2010 at 2:29 pm
TheraP,
Thanks for the quote. It reminded me of what I (partially) quoted Father Boris Bobrinskoy saying on the mystery of Fatherhood in this post. He writes further:
“In the Tradition, that deposit of faith witnessed to by the gospel, revelation is always transmitted by heart to heart by the living, but also by heart to heart by those who are always living. Either a personal encounter or a book encounter may produce the living tradition of the Church, the living Tradition of the Fathers…”
This highlights also for me the importance of the person in an Orthodox understanding, the full ramifications of which I still need to get my mind around!
August 27, 2010 at 4:51 pm
I’m need to ponder this more and more myself. Because it is simply mind-blowing! The Mysteries of the Communion of Saints, of the Body of Christ, of our participation in the Incarnation (in all its ramifications). Here is a quote which I think pertains:
“Whether studying sacred scriptures / poetry, being in the presence of a mystic, opening oneself to sacred art, rites or mysteries, even placing oneself into the mindset of such a seeker (after Holy Mystery), we risk being transformed.”
From a post of mine here:
http://wisdom4nothing.blogspot.com/2009/12/be-transformed-by-renewal-of-your-mind.html
Thank you for everything you are doing here. I truly that you are providing a place of transformation– for those who come here with open hearts. You are simply doing what you need to do. But you are laying open for us key texts, key points of entry into the Kingdom. And somehow, I think, your own personal journey creates these cosmic ripples. How can it not? If we believe in the Mystical Body of Christ. The Priesthood of our Baptism. The Divine Life of the Trinity. It gives me goosebumps just to think about it!
Deep, reverential bow.