Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 6.djvu/33

 FATHERS

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FATHERS

smaller "canons" of St. Paul's Epistles by Priscillian. Hadrian of Antioch was mentioned above. St. (iie^ory the (ireat compares Scripture to a river so shallow that a lamb can walk in it. so deep that an elephant can float. (Pref. to " Morals on Job"). He distinguishes the historical or literal sense, the moral, and the allegorical or typical. If the Western Fathers are fanciful, yet this is better than the ex- treme literalism of Theodore of Mopsuestia, who re- fused to allegorize even the Canticle of Canticles.

(b) Preachers. — We have sermons from the Greek Cluirch much earlier than from the Latin. Indeed, Sozomen tells us that, up to his time (c. 450), there were no public sermons in the churches at Rome. This seems almost incredible. St. Leo's sermons are, however, the first sermons certainly preached at Rome which have reached us, for those of Hippolytus were all in Greek; unless the homily " Adyersus Alea- tores" be a sermon by a Novatian antipope. The series of Latin preachers begins in the middle of the fourth century. The so-called "Second Epi.stle of St. Clement" is a homily belonging possibly to the second century. Many of the commentaries of Origen are a series of sermons, as is the case later with all Chrysostom's commentaries and most of Augustine's. In many cases treatises are composed of a course of sermons, as, for instance, is the case for some of those of Ambrose, who seems to have rewritten his sermons after delivery. The " De Sacramentis" may possibly be the version by a shorthand-WTiter of the course which the saint himself edited under the title "De Mysteriis". In any case the "De Sacramentis" (whether by Ambrose or not) has a freshness and naivete which is wanting in the certainly authentic "De Mysteriis". Similarly the great courses of ser- mons preached by St. Chrysostom at Antioch were evidently written or corrected by his own hand, but those he delivered at Constantinople were either hur- riedly corrected, or not at all. His sermons on Acts, which have come down to us in two quite dis- tinct texts in the MSS., are probably known to us only in the forms in which they were taken down by two different tachygraphers. St. Gregory Nazianzen complains of the importunity of these shorthand- writers (Orat. xxxii), as St. Jerome does of their in- capacity (Ep. Ixxi, 5). Their art was evidently highly perfected, and specimens of it have come down to us. They were officially employed at councils (e. g. at the great conference with the Donatists at Car- thage, in 411, we hear of them). It appears that many or most of the bishops at the Council of Ephesus, in 449, had their own shorthand-writers with them. The method of taking notes and of amplifying re- ceives ilUustration from the Acts of the Council of Constantinople of 27 April, 449, at which the min- utes were examined which had been taken down by tachygraphers at the council held a few weeks earlier. Many of St. Augustine's sermons are certainly from shorthand notes. As to others we are uncertain, for the style of the written ones is often so colloquial that it is difficult to get a criterion. The sermons of St. Jerome at Bethlehem, published by Dom Morin, are from shorthand reports, and the discourses them.selves were unprepared conferences on those portions of the Psalms or of the Gospels which had been sung in the liturgy. The speaker has clearly often been preceded by another priest, and on the Western Christmas Day, which his community alone is keeping, the bishop is present and will speak last. In fact the pilgrim jEtheria tells us that at Jerusalem, in the fourth cen- tury, all the priests present spoke in turn, if they chose, and the bishop last of all. Such improvised com- ments are far indeed from the oratorical discourses of St. Gregory Nazianzen, from the lofty flights of Chrysos- tom, from the torrent of iteration that characterizes the short sermons of Peter Chrysologus, from the neat phrases of Maximus of Turin, and the ponderous

rhythms of Leo the Great. The eloquence of these Fathers need not be here described. In the West we may add in the fourth century Gaudentius of Hrescia; several small (•(lUcctions of interesting sermons appear in the fifth century; the sixth opens with the numer- ous collections made by St. Ca'sarius for the use of preachers. There is practically no edition of the works of this eminent and practical bishop. St. Gregory (apart from some fanciful exegesis) is the most practical preacher of the West. Nothing could be more admirable for imitation than St. Chrysostom. The more ornate writers are less safe to copy. St. Au- gustine's style is too personal to be an example, and few are so learned, so great, and so ready, that they can venture to speak as simply as he often does.

(c) Writers. — The Fathers do not belong to the strictly classical period of either the Greek or the Latin language; but this does not imply that they wrote bad Latm or Greek. The conversational form of the KoLVTj or common dialect of Greek, which is found in the New Testament and in many papyri, is not the language of the Fathers, except of the very earliest. For the Greek Fathers write in a more clas- sicizing style than most of the New Testament writers ; none of them uses quite a vulgar or ungrammatical Greek, while some Atticize, e. g. the Cappadocians and Synesius. The Latin Fathers are often less classical. TertuUian is a Latin Carlyle; he knew Greek, and wrote books in that language, and tried to introduce ecclesiastical terms into Latin. St. Cyjirian's "Ad Donatum", probably his first Christian writing, shows an Apuleian preciosity which he eschewed in all his other works, but which his biographer Pontius has imi- tated and exaggerated. Men like Jerome and Augus- tine, who had a thorough knowledge of classical litera- ture, would not employ tricks of style, and cultivated a manner which should be correct, but simple and straightforward ; yet their style could not have been what it was but for their previous study. For the spoken Latin of all the patristic centuries was very different from the written. We get examples of the vulgar tongue here and there in the letters of Pope Cornelius as edited by Mercati, for the third century, or in the Rule of St. Benedict in Wolfflin's or Dom Morin's editions, for the sixth. In the latter we get such modernisms as cor murmurantem, post quibus, cum responsoria sua, which show how the confusing genders and cases of the classics were disappearing into the more reasonable simplicity of Italian. Some of the Fathers use the rhythmical endings of the " cur- sus" in their pr6se; some have the later accented endings which were corruptions of the correct proso- dical ones. Familiar examples of the former are in the older Collects of the Mass; of the latter the Te Deum is an obvious instance.

(d) East and West. — Before speaking of the theologi- cal characteristics of the Fathers, we have to take into account the great division of the Roman Empire into two languages. Language is the great separator. Wlien two emperors divided the Empire, it was not quite according to language ; nor were the ecclesiasti- cal divisions more exact, since the great province of Illyricum, including Macedonia and all Greece, was attached to the West through at least a large part of the patristic period, and was governed by the arch- bishop of Thessalonica, not as its exarch or patriarch, but as papal legate. But in considering the literary productions of the age, we must class them as Latin or Greek, and this is what will be meant here by West- ern and Eastern. The understanding of the relations between Greeks and Latins is often obscureil by cer- tain prepossessions. We talk of the "unchanging East", of the philosophical Greeks as opposed to the practical Romans, of the reposeful thought of the Oriental mind over against the rapidity and orderly classification which characterizes Western intelligence. All this is very misleading, and it is important to go