Patristics: The Church Fathers, from Justin and Origen to Tertullian and the Cappadocians

Patristics (from the Latin patres, “fathers”) is the name given to the thought of the early Christian writers, the Fathers of the Church, who between the second century and the early Middle Ages set out to explain, defend, and deepen the Christian faith within a culture saturated with Greek philosophy. The challenge was twofold. Outwardly, they had to answer the charge that Christianity was an irrational superstition. Inwardly, they had to fix what was to be believed about God, Christ, the world, and the soul in the face of rival interpretations. In both cases the Fathers had to choose among the conceptual tools at hand (Platonism, Stoicism, Aristotelianism) the ones that seemed to serve the faith, and to decide what to do with those that did not.

This article surveys the period from the standpoint of the history of philosophy: the apologists, Irenaeus and Gnosticism, the Alexandrians, Tertullian, the Cappadocians, the councils and their vocabulary, and the bridges to Scholasticism. Saint Augustine, the summit of Latin patristics, has his own article, Augustine: Confessions, Time, Free Will, and the City of God, and appears here only in his place within the whole.

1. The ground: Hellenistic philosophy and Alexandrian Judaism

When Christianity appeared, the Mediterranean world already offered a dense philosophical landscape: Middle Platonism, Stoicism (whose notion of the logos as reason immanent in the cosmos was decisive for the Fathers), school Aristotelianism, and skepticism. There was also an important precedent for the philosophical reading of a sacred text: Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE–c. 50 CE), a Hellenized Jew, had interpreted the Hebrew Bible with Platonic and Stoic categories through allegory. The Christian Alexandrians, from Clement to Origen, would inherit that method.

A historiographical debate accompanies the whole subject: the so-called Hellenization thesis, associated with Adolf von Harnack (1851–1930), according to which Christian dogma was in large part the work of the Greek spirit upon the Gospel. Later historians qualified the thesis: the Fathers did not simply adopt Greek thought but selected, transformed, and often corrected it, as the doctrine of creation out of nothing shows, which runs against the eternal matter of Platonism and Aristotelianism.

2. The apologists: Justin and the logos spermatikos

The Greek apologists of the second century (Aristides, Athenagoras, Theophilus of Antioch, Tatian, and above all Justin) addressed emperors and the educated public in order to rebut accusations against Christians and to present the new faith as a reasonable wisdom.

Justin, called the Martyr (c. 100–c. 165), was born in Flavia Neapolis, in Palestine (present-day Nablus). In the Dialogue with Trypho he narrates a philosophical itinerary in which he passes through Stoics, Peripatetics, Pythagoreans, and Platonists before finding in Christianity the only “sure philosophy.” He never gave up the philosopher’s cloak. His secure works are the two Apologies (addressed to Emperor Antoninus Pius and to the Senate; the second is shorter) and the Dialogue with Trypho.

His best-known philosophical contribution is the doctrine of the logos spermatikos (“seminal Word”), set out above all in the Second Apology (8 and 13). The term comes from Stoicism, where the “seminal reasons” are the rational principles that structure the cosmos. Justin identifies the Logos with Christ (the Word of the Prologue of John’s Gospel): all of humanity participates in him, and the pagan philosophers who lived according to reason obtained partial seeds of the truth. In the First Apology (46), Justin says that those who lived according to the Logos are in a sense Christians, even if they were thought atheists, and he cites Socrates and Heraclitus as examples. The full truth, however, appeared only in the incarnation of the Logos.

The consequence is a thesis of continuity: Greek philosophy is not, for Justin, an enemy of the faith but a partial preparation for it. The thesis would have a long career (in the form “philosophy as preparation for the Gospel”) and would be counterbalanced by hostile voices, such as that of his disciple Tatian, whose Address to the Greeks rejects Hellenic culture far more severely.

For the Stoic background of the term, see the article on Stoicism and the glossary entry Logos.

3. Irenaeus of Lyon and the struggle against Gnosis

The Christianity of the second and third centuries coexisted with movements that presented themselves as possessors of a superior saving knowledge, gnosis (gnôsis). Among the Gnostic teachers were Valentinus and Basilides; Marcion is a separate and distinct case: he rejected the Old Testament and distinguished the just God of the Law from the good God of Jesus, without being classified unanimously as a Gnostic. In broad outline, Gnostic systems shared a dualism between a supreme God and an inferior creator (the demiurge), a negative view of the material world, and salvation as the recollection of what the soul is in its origin. For a conceptual account, see the glossary entry Gnosis.

Irenaeus of Lyon (c. 130–c. 202), of Asian origin (Smyrna) and bishop in Lyon, wrote around 180 the work Against Heresies (Adversus haereses), whose full Greek title translates as Detection and Overthrow of the Falsely So-Called Knowledge. It is the main source for the study of Valentinianism and other systems, and at the same time a positive treatise. Among his central theses:

• The unity of Creator and Redeemer: against dualism, Irenaeus holds that the God who made the world is the same who redeemed it in Christ.
• The goodness of matter and flesh: creation is good, and salvation concerns the whole human being, body included.
• Recapitulation (anakephalaíosis): Christ sums up human history in himself, retracing Adam’s course in order to heal it.
• The rule of faith and apostolic tradition as a criterion against arbitrary readings of Scripture.

The contrast with Neoplatonism is instructive. Plotinus, in the treatise Against the Gnostics (Ennead II.9), criticizes a similar dualism on independent philosophical grounds, defending the beauty of the cosmos (see the article on Plotinus). Irenaeus and Plotinus, on opposite sides of the border between philosophy and faith, converge in defending the goodness of creation.

4. The Alexandrians: Clement and Origen

Alexandria, the city of Philo and of a great library, was the first major center of Christian philosophical theology, around the catechetical school.

4.1 Clement of Alexandria

Clement (c. 150–c. 215) wrote the Protrepticus (an exhortation to the Greeks), the Paedagogus (the moral education of the Christian), and the Stromata (“Tapestries,” a miscellany). For him, Greek philosophy was given to the Greeks as the Old Testament was given to the Jews: a “pedagogue” leading to Christ (a thesis defended above all in the Stromata). Clement draws extensively on poets and philosophers, and describes the perfect Christian as the true Gnostic, one who knows and loves, positively reclaiming a term the Gnostics had monopolized. His theology is apophatic in important respects: God transcends every definition.

4.2 Origen

Origen (c. 185–c. 253) was the most ambitious Christian intellectual of Antiquity. He worked in Alexandria and later in Caesarea in Palestine, and produced the Hexapla (a comparative edition of the Old Testament), biblical commentaries, the apologetic treatise Against Celsus (c. 248), and above all On First Principles (Peri Archôn, in Latin De principiis, written around 220–230), the first systematic exposition of Christian theology. According to tradition, he died around 253 as a result of the tortures suffered in the Decian persecution. His exegetical method distinguishes, in the Alexandrian manner, the bodily (literal), psychic (moral), and spiritual (allegorical) senses of Scripture.

On First Principles has come down to us mostly in the Latin translation of Rufinus (c. 398), who altered it, which makes it hard to determine exactly what Origen maintained. Among his most discussed theses:

• The eternal generation of the Son: the Son is begotten of the Father from always, an idea important for the later Arian controversy, although some of Origen’s formulations sound subordinationist.
• The pre-existence of souls: souls would have existed before bodies, as created intelligences that drifted from God in varying degrees, and the material world would be the place of their education.
• Rational freedom: every rational creature is free, and the variety of conditions results from the use of that freedom.
• Apokatastasis (apokatástasis): the final restoration of all creatures to God, a theme Origen treats speculatively and exploratively, not as assertive dogma.

The later condemnation requires historical nuance. In 543, Emperor Justinian issued an edict against the doctrines attributed to Origen, accompanied by anathemas. Tradition also links the condemnation to the Second Council of Constantinople (553), but the attribution of the specific anathemas to that council is disputed by historians, as is the exact scope of what was condemned: the targeted theses were in part those of sixth-century “Origenist” monks, heirs of Evagrius Ponticus (d. 399), rather than necessarily Origen himself. Note also that Gregory of Nyssa, who likewise taught a form of apokatastasis, was never condemned, and that Origen continued to be read and esteemed by many later authors, among them the Cappadocians, who compiled an anthology of his texts, the Philocalia, attributed to Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus.

In philosophical terms, Origen is a Christian Platonist: he thinks the hierarchy of being in Platonic terms and the history of the world as a pedagogical process of return. But his doctrine of creation out of nothing and his rejection of the eternity of matter set him apart from pagan Platonists.

5. Tertullian: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”

Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus (c. 155–c. 220), of Carthage, was the first great Christian writer in Latin. He wrote the Apology (197), On the Prescription of Heretics (De praescriptione haereticorum, c. 200), Against Praxeas, On the Flesh of Christ, On the Soul, and others. He later joined Montanism, a prophetic and rigorist movement.

5.1 The famous question

In De praescriptione haereticorum 7, Tertullian asks the question that became the emblem of an attitude of distrust toward philosophy: “Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?” (“What, then, has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”). He goes on with analogous questions about the Academy and the Church, and concludes that after Christ Jesus Christians have no need of curiosity, nor of inquiry after the Gospel. The context is the struggle against heretics, who, he says, feed on philosophical speculation: the aim is to show that the truth has already been handed down by the rule of faith and that endless inquiry is suspect.

This is, however, a rhetorical and polemical stance, not a wholesale rejection of philosophy. Tertullian himself makes ample use of Stoic categories: in On the Soul he holds that the soul is corporeal, in a Stoic manner. Recent readings tend to describe him as an intellectual trained in rhetoric and Roman law, not as a simple adversary of thought.

5.2 “Credo quia absurdum”: what Tertullian did not say

The phrase “credo quia absurdum” (“I believe because it is absurd”) is often attributed to Tertullian and is one of the most popular quotations about him, but it does not appear literally in his works. The source of the misunderstanding is De carne Christi (On the Flesh of Christ) 5, where, defending the reality of the incarnation and death of Christ against those who denied it as unworthy of God, he writes in paradoxical wording: “prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est” (“it is wholly credible, because it is unfitting/foolish”) and “certum est, quia impossibile” (“it is certain, because it is impossible”).

Three points of interpretation matter here:

1. The original wording speaks of ineptum (“unfitting,” “foolish”) and impossibile, not absurdum; the formula credo quia absurdum is a later reduction, of modern origin.
2. The context is rhetorical: Tertullian argues that the scandal of the cross, precisely because it is so improbable, cannot be a human invention, so that improbability serves as a sign of truth. Scholars note that the argument has a precedent in commonplaces of classical rhetoric, such as those in Aristotle’s Rhetoric about the improbable that turns out to be credible.
3. It does not follow that Tertullian defended a programmatic irrationalism. Reducing his position to the slogan impoverishes it.

The formula “credo quia absurdum” and the appeal to the absurd as a criterion of faith would reappear, in another context, in modern reflection on fideism; see the article Philosophy of Religion: Theodicy, Fideism, and Experience.

5.3 Doctrinal contributions and Latin vocabulary

In the treatise Against Praxeas, Tertullian coins the Latin Trinitarian vocabulary: God is una substantia in tres personae, and the term trinitas appears in his work. That vocabulary would be taken up and refined in the councils and by Augustine (see below). His Apology and his polemic against Marcion also remain important sources.

6. The Cappadocians and the philosophy of the Trinity

The Trinitarian controversy of the fourth century is a decisive episode in the history of philosophical concepts. The presbyter Arius of Alexandria (c. 256–336) held that the Son, though the first and highest of creatures, was neither eternal nor of the same nature as the Father. The Council of Nicaea (325) responded by declaring the Son homoousios (“consubstantial,” “of the same essence”) with the Father. A decisive defender of that position was Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 296/298–373), author of On the Incarnation of the Word.

It was in this debate that the three Cappadocians made their contribution. Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–379), Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–c. 395), his younger brother, and Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329–c. 390), Basil’s friend, were men of refined rhetorical and philosophical formation, who studied in Athens (in the case of Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus) and knew Platonism well.

6.1 Ousia and hypostasis

The Cappadocians’ main conceptual service was to make precise a vocabulary that was still ambiguous in the original Nicene text: the final anathema of the creed of 325 treated hypostasis and ousia as near synonyms. The Cappadocians distinguished them:

• ousia: what is common, the shared essence or nature: what the three divine persons are in common;
• hypostasis: the proper mode of individual existence: what distinguishes Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The resulting formula, “one ousia, three hypostases,” became the standard of Greek Trinitarian theology. Basil sets it out, among other works, in Against Eunomius and in the treatise On the Holy Spirit (c. 375). Letter 38, on the difference between ousia and hypostasis, which uses the analogy of the universal and the particular (what is common, such as “man,” and the concrete individual), is traditionally attributed to Basil; many scholars now attribute it to Gregory of Nyssa, and the question of authorship remains debated. See the entries Ousia and Substance for the Aristotelian background of the terms.

The analogy is philosophically significant because it touches the problem of universals: treating the divine nature as something common to three and the hypostases as “individuals” early on raised the objection of tritheism, which Gregory of Nyssa confronted in texts such as That There Are Not Three Gods. On the medieval development of the problem of universals, see the article on Peter Abelard.

6.2 Other themes

• Gregory of Nyssa is the most philosophical of the three. In On the Making of Man and in the dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection (with his sister Macrina), he discusses the nature of the soul, and in the Life of Moses he describes the spiritual life as an infinite ascent (epektasis): since God is infinite, the soul never exhausts the knowledge of him, and progress is eternal. He also held a form of universal restoration (apokatastasis).
• Gregory of Nazianzus is called “the Theologian.” His five Theological Orations (380) formulate the doctrine of the Trinity and of the Holy Spirit with rhetorical refinement.
• Basil is also the author of the Homilies on the Hexaemeron, a commentary on the creation account that engages the natural science of his day.

7. Councils and vocabulary: a synthetic overview

The relation between philosophy and theology is well measured by the councils:

The vocabulary mobilizes, in varying degrees, philosophical terms already current: ousia (“essence,” “being”) and physis (“nature,” see the entry Physis), hypostasis (“subsistence”), prosopon (“face,” “person”). Latin renders them as substantia, natura, and persona, and the translation did not always correspond to the Greek: substantia can translate both ousia and hypostasis, which generated misunderstandings between Greeks and Latins. This was the origin of the concept of person: from theatrical mask (prosopon, persona) to metaphysical category, and later the definition of Boethius (naturae rationabilis individua substantia, “an individual substance of a rational nature”).

8. Augustine as the summit of Latin patristics

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) leads Latin patristics to its highest point. A reader of the “books of the Platonists” (see the article on Plotinus), he articulated De Trinitate with psychological analogies, developed the doctrine of evil as privation, of time and memory in the Confessions, of grace and free will in the controversy with Pelagius, and a theology of history in the City of God. He synthesizes in a single author almost all the lines of earlier patristics, and for a thousand years he was the chief philosophical authority of the Latin West. For the development of these theses, see the article devoted to Augustine and the article on free will and determinism.

9. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

Around the year 500 (late fifth or early sixth century), a corpus of works circulated (The Divine Names, Mystical Theology, The Celestial Hierarchy, and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy) signed by “Dionysius,” the man converted by Paul on the Areopagus of Athens (Acts 17:34). The attribution is false: the author, probably Syrian and unknown, receives the conventional name Pseudo-Dionysius. The corpus makes a remarkable synthesis of late Platonism, especially the Neoplatonism of Proclus, with the Christian faith. See the article on late Neoplatonism.

His main theses:

• Negative (apophatic) theology: God is beyond every name and concept; one can only say what he is not, and even affirmations are surpassed in the “divine darkness” of an unknowing that unites.
• The divine names: nevertheless it is legitimate to attribute to God names drawn from creatures (Good, Being, Life, Wisdom), as the cause of all perfections, along a threefold way of affirmation, negation, and eminence.
• Hierarchy: the cosmos and the Church are ordered in degrees, through which divine illumination descends and the soul returns to God, a scheme of clear Neoplatonic ancestry of procession and return.

The authority the corpus acquired, given its apostolic attribution, was immense. It was translated into Latin in the ninth century by Hilduin and then by John Scotus Eriugena, and strongly influenced medieval mysticism and Scholasticism: Thomas Aquinas cites it frequently, and negative theology runs through later history, from Meister Eckhart to contemporary debates.

10. Boethius and the transition to Scholasticism

Boethius (c. 480–524) is often described as the last Roman and the first Scholastic. He intended to translate the works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin and to show their agreement, a project he did not complete. He translated and commented on Aristotle’s Categories and On Interpretation and Porphyry’s Isagoge, whose question about universals (do they exist in themselves or only in thought?) dominated medieval logic (see the article on late Neoplatonism). His Opuscula sacra apply logic to Trinitarian and Christological theology, and the Consolation of Philosophy, written in prison, joins philosophical consolation and a Christian horizon and treats divine foreknowledge and human freedom through the notion of eternity as the “complete, simultaneous, and perfect possession of unlimited life.” His work served as an intermediary between the ancient and medieval worlds: for centuries it was essentially the only route by which the Latin West reached Aristotelian logic.

10.1 From patristics to Scholasticism

The border between patristics and Scholasticism is not sharp. The end of Latin patristics is customarily placed with Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636) and that of Greek patristics with John of Damascus (c. 675–c. 749), although the dates vary with the criterion. Between the end of Antiquity and the eleventh century, the West preserved the legacy of Augustine, Boethius, and the Dionysian corpus, and the Carolingian renaissance (ninth century), with John Scotus Eriugena, reopened philosophical discussion. Scholasticism proper arises from the eleventh century and consolidates in the twelfth and thirteenth with renewed contact with Aristotle through translations from Arabic and Greek. Its culmination, the synthesis of Thomas Aquinas, presupposes almost everything the Fathers had built: the Trinitarian vocabulary, the doctrine of creation, the use of Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism in the service of a rational theology. See the article Thomas Aquinas: Faith and Reason, the Five Ways, and the Scholastic Synthesis and the article on Maimonides, a parallel example, in the Jewish world, of the same problem of faith and reason.

11. Assessment: what patristics left to the history of philosophy

1. Concepts of person and relation: from the Trinitarian controversy arose categories (hypostasis, person, subsistent relation) that later philosophy reused, from anthropology to ethics.
2. Creation out of nothing: against the eternal matter of Greek thought, patristics affirmed a contingent world dependent on God, a metaphysical idea of enormous reach.
3. A way of relating faith and reason: from Justin (“seeds of the Logos”) to Tertullian (suspicion of philosophy) and Augustine (“I believe in order to understand”), the Fathers offered the models on which later tradition lived.
4. The transmission of Platonism: without Christian mediation, a good part of late Platonism would not have reached the Middle Ages.
5. Negative theology and speculative mysticism: from Clement and Gregory of Nyssa to Pseudo-Dionysius, an apophatic tradition that influenced all medieval mysticism.

References

AUGUSTINE. Confessions; On the Trinity (De Trinitate); The City of God.

BASIL OF CAESAREA. Against Eunomius; On the Holy Spirit; Homilies on the Hexaemeron.

BOETHIUS. The Consolation of Philosophy; Opuscula sacra.

CHADWICK, Henry. Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition: Studies in Justin, Clement, and Origen. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.

GREGORY OF NYSSA. On the Making of Man; Life of Moses; On the Soul and the Resurrection.

IRENAEUS OF LYON. Against Heresies (Adversus haereses).

JUSTIN MARTYR. First Apology; Second Apology; Dialogue with Trypho.

KELLY, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines. London: A. & C. Black, 1958.

ORIGEN. On First Principles (Peri Archôn / De principiis); Against Celsus.

PELIKAN, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971.

PSEUDO-DIONYSIUS THE AREOPAGITE. The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Luibheid. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.

TERTULLIAN. On the Prescription of Heretics (De praescriptione haereticorum); On the Flesh of Christ (De carne Christi); Against Praxeas; Apology.

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