Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6.djvu/30

 FATHERS

FATHERS

or theology, though he is learned enough to be abso- lutely orthodox. lie is a holy man and a practical man, so that his thoughts are full of piety and beauty and wisdom; but he is not a thinker. None of the Fathers has been more imitated or more read; but there is little in his writings which can be said to have moulded his own or future times, and he cannot come for an instant into competition with Origen or Augus- tine for the first place among ecclesiastical writers.

(5) Syria in the fourth century produced one great writer, St. Ephraem, deacon of Edessa (306-73). Most of his writings are poetry; his commentaries are in prose, but the remains of these are scantier. His homilies and hjmins are all in metre, antl are of very great beauty. Such tender and loving piety is hardly found elsewhere in the Fathers. The twenty-three homilies of Aphraates (326-7), a Mesopotamian bishop, are of great interest.

(6) St. Hilary of Poitiers is the most famous of the earlier opponents of Arianism in the West. He wrote commentaries and polemical works, including the great treatise "De Trinitate" and a lost historical work. His style is affectedly involved and obscure, but he is nevertheless a theologian of considerable merit. The very name of his treatise on the Trinity shows that he approached the dogma from the West- ern point of view of a Trinity in Unity, but he has largely employed the works of Origen, Athanasius, and other Easterns. His exegesis is of the allegorical type. Until his day, the only great Latin Father was St. Cyprian, and Hilary had no rival in his own genera- tion. Lucifer, Bishop of C'alaris in Sardinia, was a very rude controversialist, who wrote in a popular and almost uneducated manner. The Spaniard Gregory of niiberis, in Southern Spain, is only now beginning to receive his due, since Dom A. Wilmart restored to him in 1908 the important so-called "Tractatus Ori- genis de libris SS. Scripturte", which he and Batiffol had published in 1900, as genuine works of Origen translated by Victorinus of Pettau. The commenta- ries and anti-Arian works of the converted rhetorician, Marius Victorinus, were not successful. St. Eusebius of Vercellse has left us only a few letters. The date of the short discourses of Zeno of Verona is uncertain. The fine letter of Pope Julius I to the Arians and a few letters of Liberius and Damasus are of great interest.

The greatest of the opponents of Arianism in the West is St. Ambrose (d. 397). His sanctity and his great actions make him one of the most imposing fig- ures in the patristic period. Unfortunately the style of his writings is often unpleasant, being affected and intricate, without being correct or artistic. His exe- gesis is not merely of the most extreme allegorical kind, but so fanciful as to be sometimes positively absurd. And yet, when off his guard, he speaks with genuine and touching eloquence; he produces apo- phthegms of admirable brevity, and without being a tleep theologian, he shows a wonderful profundity of thought on ascetical, moral, and devotional matters. Just as his character demands our enthusiastic admira- tion, so his writings gain our affectionate respect, in spite of their very irritating defects. It is easy to see that he is very well read in the classics and in Christian writers of East and West, but his best tlioughts are all his own.

(7) At Rome an original, odd, and learned writer composed a commentary on St. Paul's Ejiistles and a series of questions on tlie Old and New Testaments. He is usually spoken of as Ambrosiaster, and may perhaps be a converted Jew named Isaac, who later apostatized. St. Damasus wrote verses which are poor poetry but interesting where they give us infor- mation about the martyrs aiul the catacombs. His sec- retary for a time was St. Jerome, a Pannonian by birth, a Roman by baptism. This learned Father," Doctor maximus in Sacris Scripturis", is very well known to

us, for almost all that he wrote is a revelation of him- self. He tells the reader of his inclinations and his antipathies, his enthusiasms and his irritations, his friendships and his enmities. If he is often out of tem- per, he is most human, most affect ionate, most ascetic, most devoted to orthodoxy, and in many ways a very lovable character; for if he is quick to take offence, he is easily appeased, he is laborious beyond ordinary endurance, and it is against heresy that his anger is usually kindled. He lived all the latter part of his life in a retreat at Bethlehem, surrounded by loving dis- ciples, whose imtiring devotion shows that the saint was by no means such a rough diamond, one might say such an ogre, as he is often represented. He had no taste for philosophy, and seldom gave himself time to think, but he read and wrote ceaselessly. His many commentaries are brief and to the point, full of infor- mation, and the product of wide reading. His great- est work was the translation of the Old Testament from the Hebrew into Latin. He carried on the textual labours of Origen, Pamphilus, and Eusebius, and his revision of the Latin Gospels shows the use of admirably pure Greek MSS., though he seems to have expended less pains on the rest of the New Testament. He attacked heretics with much of the cleverness, all the vivacity, and much more than the eloquence and effectiveness of TertuUian. He used the like weapons against any who attacked him, and especially against his friend Rufinus during their passing period of hostility.

If he is only "perhaps" the most learned of the Fathers, he is beyond doubt the greatest of prose writers among tlicra all. We cannot compare his energy and wit with the originality and polish of Cicero, or with the delicate perfection of Plato, but neither can they or any other writer be compared with Jerome in his own sphere. He does not attempt flights of imagination, musical intonation, word-painting; he has no flow of honeyed language like Cyprian, no torrent of phrases like Chrysostom; he is a writer, not an orator, and a learned and classical writer. But such letters as his, for astonishing force and liveliness, for point, and wit, and terse expression, were never written before or since. There is no sense of effort, and though we feel that the language must have been studied, we are rarely tempted to call it studied language, for Jerome knows the strange secret of polishing his steel weapons while they are still at a white heat, and of hurling them before they cool. He was a dangerous adversary, and had few scruples in taking every possible advantage. He has the unfor- tunate defect of his extraordinary swiftness, that he is extremely inaccurate, and his historical statements need careful control. His biographies of the hermits, his words about monastic life, virginity, Roman faith, our Blessed Lady, relics of saints, have exercised great influence. It has only been known of late years that Jerome was a preacher; the little extempore dis- courses published by Dom Morin are full of his irrepressible personality and his careless learning.

(8) Africa was a stranger to the Ariaii struggle, being occupied with a battle of its own. Donatism (311-411) was for a long time paramount in Numidia, and sometimes in other parts. The writings of the Donatists have mostly perished. About 370 St. Op- tatus published an effective controversial work against them. The attack was carried on by a yet greater controversialist, St. Augustine, with a marvellous success, so that the inveterate schism was praotioally at an end twenty years before that saint's tleath. So happy an event turned the eyes of all Cliristeiidum to the brilliant protagonist of the African Catholics, who had already dealt crushing blows at the Latin Mani- cha^an writers. From 417 till his death in 431, he was engaged in an even greater conflict with the philosophical and naturalistic heresjr of Pelagius and Ca-lestius. In this he was at first assisted by the aged