Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6.djvu/31

 FATHERS

FATHERS

Jerome; the popes condeinned the innovators and the emperor legislated against them. If St. Augustine has the unique fame of having prostrated three heresies, it is because he was as anxious to persuade as to refute. He was perhaps the greatest controversialist the world has ever seen. Besides this he w-as not merely the greatest philosopher among the Fathers, but he was the only great philosopher. His purely theolo- gical works, especially his " De Trinitate", are unsur- passed for depth, grasp, and clearness, among early ecclesiastical writers, whether Eastern or Western. As a philosophical theologian he has no superior, except his own son and disciple, St. Thomas Aquinas. It is probably correct to say that no one, e.xcept Aris- totle, has exercised so vast, so profound, and so benefi- cial an influence on European thought.

Augustine was himself a Platonist through and through. As a commentator he cared little for the letter, and everything for the spirit, but his harmony of the Gospels shows that he could attend to history and detail. The allegorizing tendencies he inherited from his spiritual father, Ambrose, carry him now and then into extravagances, but more often he rather soars than commentates, and his " In Genesini ad lit- teram", and his treatises on the Psalms and on St. John, are works of extraordinary power and interest, and quite worthy, in a totally different style, to rank with Chrysostom on Matthew. St. Augustine was a professor of rhetoric before his wonderful conversion; but like St. Cyprian, and even more than St. Cyprian, he put aside, as a Christian, all the artifices of oratorj' which he knew so well. He retained correctness of grammar and perfect good taste, together with the power of speaking and writing with ease in a style of masterly simplicity and of dignified though almost colloquial plainness.

Nothing could be more individual than this style of St. Augustine's, in which he talks to the reader or to God with perfect openness and with an astonishing, often almost exasperating, subtlety of thought. He had the power of seeing all round a subject and through and through it, and he was too conscientious not to use this gift to the uttermost. Large-minded and far-seemg, he was also very learned. He mastered Greek only m later life, in order to make himself familiar with the works of the Eastern Fathers. His "De Civitate Dei" shows vast stores of reading; still more, it puts him in the first place among apologists. Before his death (431) he was the object of extraor- dinary veneration. He had founded a monastery at Tagaste, which supplied Africa with bishops, and he lived at Hippo with his clergy in a common life, to which the Regular Canons of later days have always looked as their model. The great Dominican Order, the Augustinians, and nimiberless congregations of nuns still look to him as their father and legisla- tor. His devotional works have had a vogue second only to that of another of his spiritual sons, Thomas a Kempis. He had in his lifetime a reputation for miracles, and his sanctity is felt in all his writings, and breathes in the story of his life. It has been remarked that there is about this many-sided bishop a certain symmetry which makes him an almost faultless model of a holy, wise, and active man. It is well to remem- ber that he was essentially a penitent.

(9) In Spain, the great poet Prudentius surpassed all his predecessors, of whom the best had been Juven- cus and the almost pagan rhetorician Ausonius. The curious treatises of the Spanish heretic Priscillian were discovered only in 1SS9. In Gaul Rufinus of Aquileia must be mentioned as the very free transla- tor of Origen, etc., and of Eusebius's "Historj'", which he continued up to his own date. In South Italy his friend Paulinus of Nola has left us pious poems and elaliorate letters.

D. (1) The fragments of Nestorius's writings have been collected by Loofs. Some of them were pre-

served by a disciple of St. Augustine, Marius Mercator, who made two collections of documents, concerning Nestorianism and Pelagianism respectively. The great adversary of Nestorius, St. Cyril of Alexandria, was opposed by a yet greater writer, Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrus. Cyril is a very voluminous writer, and his long commentaries in the mystical Alexandrian vein do not much interest modern readers. But his princi- pal letters and treatises on the Nestorian question show him as a theologian who has a deep spiritual insight into the meaning of the Incarnation and its effect upon the human race — the lifting up of man to union with God. We see here the influence of Egyptian asceticism, from Anthony the Great (whose life St. Athanasius wrote), and the Macarii (one of whom left some valuable works in Greek), and Pa- chomius, to his own time. In their ascetical systems, the union with God by contemplation was naturally the end in view, but one Ls surprised how little is made by them of meditation on the life and Passion of Christ. It is not omitted, but the tendency as with St. Cyril and with the Monophysites who believed they follow-ed him, is to think rather of the Godhead than of the Manhood. The Antiochene school had exaggerated the contrary tendency, out of opposition to ApoUin- arianism, which made Christ's Manhood incom- plete, and they thought more of man united to God than of God made man. Theodoret undoubtedly avoided the excesses of Theodore and Nestorius, and his doctrine was accepted at last by St. Leo as ortho- dox, in spite of his earlier persistent defence of Nestorius. His history of the monks is less valuable than the earlier writings of eyewitnesses — Palladius in the East, and Rufinus and afterwards Cassian in the West. But Theodoret's "History" in continua- tion of Eusebius contains valuable information. His apologetic and controversial writings are the works of a good theologian. His masterpieces are his exegeti- cal works, which are neither oratorj- like those of Chrysostom, nor exaggeratctlly literal like those of Theodore. With him the great Antiochene school worthily closes, as the Alexandrian does with St Cyril. Together with these great men may be mentioned St. Cyril's spiritual adviser, St. Isidore of Pelusium, whose 2000 letters deal chiefly with allegorical exe- gesis, the commentary on St. Mark by Victor of Antioch, and the introduction to the interpretation of Scripture by the monk Hadrian, a manual of the Antiochene method.

(2) The Eutychian controversy produced no great works in the East. Such works of the Monophysites as have survived are in Syriac or Coptic versions. (3) The two Constantinopolitan historians, Socrates and Sozomen, in spite of errors, contain some data which are precious, since many of the sources which they used are lost to us. With Theodoret, their con- temporary, they form a triad just in the middle of the century. St. Nilus of Sinai is the chief among many ascetical writers. (4) St. Sulpicius Severus, a Ciallic noble, disciple and biographer of the great St. Martin of Tours, was a classical scholar, and showed himself an elegant writer in his " Ecclesiastical History". The school of Lcrins produced many writers besides St. Vincent. We may mention Eucherius, Faustus, and the great St. Caesarius of Aries (543). Other Gallic writers are Salvian, St. Sidonius Apollinaris, Genna- dius, St. Avitus of Vienne, and Julianus Pomerius. (5) In the West, the series of papal decretals begins with Pope Siricius (3S4-9S). Of the more important popes large numbers of letters have been preserved. Those of the wise St. Innocent I (401-17), the hot- headed St. Zosimus (417-8), and the severe St. Celes- tine are perhaps the most important in the first half of the century; in the second half those of Hilarus, Sim- plicius, and above all the learned St. Gelasius (492-6). Midway in the century stands St. Leo, the greatest of the early popes, whose steadfastness and sanctity