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CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA
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Fathers of the Church. — The word Father is used in the New Testament to mean a teacher of spiri- tual things, by whose means tiie soul of man is born again into the likeness of Christ: "For if you have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet not many fathers. For in Christ Jesus, by the gospel, I have be- gotten you. Wherefore I beseech you, be ye followers of me, as I also am of Christ" (I Cor., iv, 15, IG; cf. Gal., iv, 19). The first teachers of Christianity seem to be collectively spoken of as "the Fathers" (II Peter, iii, 4). Thus .St. Irena;us defines that a teacher is a father, and a disciple is a son (iv, 41,2), and so says Clement of Alexandria (Strom., I, i, 1). A bishop is emphatically a "father in Christ", both be- cause it was he, in early times, who baptized all his flock, and because he is the chief teacher of his church. But he is also regarded by the early Fathers, such as Hegesippus, Iiena'us, and TertuUian, as the recipient of the tradition of his predecessors in the see, and con- sequently as the witness and representative of the faith of his Church before Catholicity and the world. Hence the expression " the Fathers ' ' comes naturally to be applied to the holy bishops of a preceding age, whether of the last generation or further back, since they are the parents at whose knee the Church of to- day was taught her belief. It is also applicable in an eminent way to bishops sitting in council, " the Fathers of Niccea", " the Fathers of Trent". Thus Fathers have learnt from Fathers, and in the last resort from the Apostles, who are sometimes called Fathers in this sense: " They are your Fathers", says St. Leo, of the Princes of the Apostles, speaking to the Romans; St. Hilary of Aries calls them sartcti patres; Clement of Alexandria says that his teachers, from Greece, Ionia, Coele-Syria, Egypt, the Orient, Assyria, Palestine, re- spectively, had handed on to him the tradition of blessed teaching from Peter, and James, and John, and Paul, receiving it "as son from father".
It follows that, as our own Fathers are the predeces- sors who have taught us, so the Fathers of the whole Church are especially the earlier teachers, who in- structed her in the teaching of the Apostles, during her infancy and first growth. It is difficult to define the first age of the Church, or the age of the Fathers. It is a common habit to stop the study of the early Church at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. "The Fathers" must undoubtedly include, in the West, St. Gregory the Great (d. 004), and in the East, St. John Damascene (d. about 754). It is frequently said that St. Bernard (d. 115.3) was the last of the Fathers, and Migne's " Patrologia Latina" extends to Innocent III, halting only on the verge of the thirteenth century, while his " Patrologia Gr^ca" goes as far as the Coun- cil of Florence (143S-9). These limits are evidently too wide. It will be best to consider that the great merit of St. Bernard as a writer lies in his resemblance in style and matter to the greatest among the Fathers, in spite of the difference of period. St. Isidore of Seville (d. C.3G) and the Venerable Bede (d. 735) are to be classed among the Fathers, but they may be said to have been born out of due time, as St. Theodore the Studite was in the East.
The Appeal to the Fathers. — Thus the use of the term Fathers has been continuous, yet it could not at first be employed in precisely the modern sense of Fathers of the Church. In early days the expression referred to writers who were then quite recent. It is still applied to those writers who are to us the an- cients, but no longer in the same way to writers who are now recent. Appeals to the Fathers are a sub- division of appeals to tradition. In the first half of the second century begin the appeals to the sub-Apos- tolic age: Papias appeals to the presbyters, and through them to the Apostles. Half a century later St. Irena;us supplements this method by an appeal to the tradition handed down in every Church by the suc- cession of its bishops (Adv. Hier., Ill, i-Lii), and Ter- tuUian clinches this argument by the observation that as all the Churches agree, their tradition is secure, for they could not all have strayed by chance into the same error (Prcescr., xxviii). The appeal is thus to Churches andtheirbishops, none but bishops being the authoritative exponents of the doctrine of their Churches. As late as 341 the bishops of the Dedica- tion Council at Antioch declared: " We are not follow- ers of Arius; for how could we, who are bishops, be disciples of a priest?"
Yet slowly, as the appeals to the presbyters died out, there was arising by the side of appeals to the Churches a third method: the custom of appealing to Christian teachers who were not necessarily bishops. While, without the Church, Gnostic schools were sub- stituted for churches, within the Church, Catholic schools were growing up. Philosophers like Justin and most of the numerous second-century apologists were reasoning about religion, and the great catecheti- cal school of Alexandria was gathering renown. Great bishops and saints like Dionysius of Alexandria, Gregory Thaumaturgus of Pontus, Firmilian of Cappa- docia, and Alexander of Jerusalem were proud to be disciples of the priest Origen. The Bishop Cyprian called daily for the works of the priest TertuUian with the words "Give me the master". The Patriarch Athanasius refers for the ancient use of the word o/jioova-io!, not merely to the two Dionysii, but to the priest Theognostus. Yet these priest-teachers are not yet called Fathers, and the greatest among them, TertuUian, Clement, Origen, Hippolytus, Novatian, Lucian, happen to be tinged with heresy; two became antipopes; one is the father of Arianism; another was condemned by a general council. In each case we might apply the words u.sed by St. Hilary of Ter- tuUian: "Sequenti errore detraxit scriptis probabili- bus auctoritatem" (Comm. in Matt., v, 1, cited by Vincent of Lerins, 24).
A fourth form of appeal was better foimded and of enduring value. Eventually it appeared that bishops as well as priests were fallible. In the second century
