FATHERS
6
FATHERS
copate of Anicetus till that of Eleutherius (c. IGO-ISO),
with the intention of refuting the novelties of the
Gnostics and Marcionites by an appeal to tradition.
His work is lost. But the great work of St. Irena-us (c.
ISO) against heresies is founded on Papias, Hegesippus,
and Justin, and gives from careful investigation an
account of many Gnostic systems, together with their
refutation. His appeal is less to Scripture than to the
tradition which the whole Catholic Church has re-
ceived and handed down from the Apostles, through
the ministry of successive bishops, and particularly to
the tradition of the Roman Church founded by Peter
and Paul.
By the side of Irena?us must be put the Latin Ter- tiillian, whose book " Of the Prescriptions Against Heretics ' ' is not only a masterpiece of argument, but is almost as effective against modern heresies as against those of the early Church. It is a witness of extraor- dinary importance to the principles of unvarying tradi- tion which the Catholic Church has always professed, and to the primitive belief that Holy Scripture must be interpreted by the Church and not by private in- dustry. He uses Iremeus in this work, and his po- lemical books against the Valentinians and the Mar- cionites borrow freely from that saint. He is the less persuasive of the two, because he is too abrupt, too clever, too anxious for the slightest controversial ad- vantage, without thought of the easy replies that might be made. He sometimes prefers wit or hard hitting to solid argument. At this period controver- sies were beginning within the Church, the most im- portant being the question whether Easter could be celebrated on a weekday. Another burning question at Rome, at the turn of the century, was the doubt whether the prophesying of the Montanists could be approved, and yet another, in the first years of the third century, was the controversy with a group of opponents of Montanism (so it seems), who denied the authenticity of the writings of St. John, an error then quite new.
B. (1) The Church of Alexandria already in the sec- ond century showed the note of learning, together with a habit borrowed from the Alexandrian Jews, espe- cially Philo, of an allegorizing interpretation of Scrip- ture. The latter characteristic is already found in the "Epistle of Barnabas", which may be of Alexandrian origin. Panta^nus was the first to make the Cate- chetical school of the city famous. No writings of his are extant, but his pupil Clement, who taught in the school with Pantienus, c. 180, and as its head, c. 180-202 (died c. 214), has left a considerable amount of rather lengthy disquisitions dealing with my- thology, mystical theology, education, social observ- ances, and all other things m heaven and on earth. He was followed by the great Origen, whose fame spread far and wide even among the heathen. The remains of his works, though they fill several volumes, are to a great extent only in free Latin translations, and bear but a small ratio to the vast amount that has perished. The Alexandrians held as firmly as any Catholics to tradition as the rule of faith, at least in theory, but beyond tradition they allowed themselves to speculate, so that the " Hypotyposes " of Clement have been almost entirely lost on accoimt of the errors which found a place in them, and Origen's works fell under the ban of the Church, though their author lived the life of a saint, and died, shortly after the Decian persecution, of the sufferings he had undergone in it.
The disciples of Origen were many and eminent. The library founded by one of them, St. Alexander of Jeru- ealem, was precious later on to Eusebius. The most celebrated of the school were St. Dionysiiis "the (ireat" of Alexandria and St. Gregory of Neoca?saroa in Pontus, known as the Wonder- Worker, who, like St. NonnoHUS in the West, was said to have moved a mountain for a short distance by his prayers. Of the writings of these two saints not very much is extant.
(2) Montanism and the paschal question brought Asia
Minor down from the leading position it held in the
second century into a very inferior rank in the third.
Besides St. Gregory, St. Methodius at the end of that
century was a polished writer and an opponent of
Origenism — his name is consequently passed over
without mention by the Origenist historian Eusebius.
We have his "Banquet" in Greek, and some smaller
works in Old Slavonic.
(3) Antioch was the head see over the " Orient", in- cluding Syria and Mesopotamia as well as Palestine and Phoenicia, but at no time did this form a compact patriarchate like that of Alexandria. We must group here writers who have no connexion with one another in matter or style. Julius Africanus lived at Em- maus and composed a chronography, out of which the episcopal lists of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, and a great deal of other matter, have been preserved for us in St. Jerome's version of the Chronicle of Eusebius, and in Byzantine chronographers. Two letters of his are of mterest, but the fragments of his "Kestoi" or "Girdles" are of no ecclesiastical value; they contain much curious matter and much that is objectionable. In the second half of the third century, perhaps to- wards the end of it, a great school was established at Antioch by Lucian, who was martyred at Nicomedia in 312. He is said to have been excommunicated under three bishops, but if this is true he had been long restored at the time of his martyrdom. It is quite un- certain whether he shared the errors of Paul of Samo- sata (Bishop of Antioch, deposed for heresy in 268-9). At all events he was — however unintentionally — the father of Arianism, and his pupils were the leaders of that heresy: Eusebius of Nicomedia, Arius himself, with Menophantus of Ephesus, Athanasius of Anazar- bus, and the only two bishops who refused to sign the new creed at the Council of Nicoea, Theognis of Nicaea and Maris of Chalcedon, besides the scandalous bishop Leontius of Antioch and the Sophist Asterius. At Ceesarea, an Origenist centre, flourished under another martyr, St. Pamphilus, who with his friend Eusebius, a certain Ammonius, and others, collected the works of Origen in a long-famous library, corrected Origen's "Hexapla", and did much editing of the text both of the Old and the New Testaments.
(4) We hear of no writings at Rome except in Greek, until the mention of some small works in Latin, by Pope St. Victor, which still existed in Jerome's day. Hippolytus, a Roman priest, wrote from c. 200 to 235, and always in Greek, though at Carthage TertuUian had been writing before this in Latin. If Hippolytus is the author of the "Philosophuraena" he was an antipope, and full of unreasoning enmity to his rival St. Callistus; his theology makes the Word proceed from God by His Will, distinct from Him in substance, and becoming Son by becoming man. There is noth- ing Roman in the theology of this work ; it rather con- nects itself with the Greek apologists. A great part of a large commentary on Daniel and a work against Noetus are the only other important remains of this writer, who was soon forgotten in the West, though fragments of his works turn up in all the Eastern lan- guages. Parts of his chronography, perhaps his last work, have survived. Another Roman antipope, Novatian, wrote in ponderous and studied prose with metrical endings. Some of his works have come down to us imder the name of St. Cyprian. Like Hippoly- tus, he made his rigorist views the pretext for his schism. LTnlike Hippolytus, he is quite orthodox in his principal work, " De Trinitate".
(5) The apologetic works of TertuUian have been mentioned. The earlier were written by him when a priest of the Clnirrh of Carthage, but al)out the year 200 he was led to hcliovo in tlie Montanist prophets of Phrygia, and he hcudcd a Mimtanint schism at Car- thage. Many of his treatises are written to defend his position and his rigorist doctrines, and he does so
