Aquilina - The Fathers of the church : an introduction to the first Christian teachers

EXPANDED
EDITION

The
Fathers
of the
Church

An Introduction to the
First Christian Teachers

EXPANDED
EDITION

An Introduction to the
First Christian Teachers

MIKE AQUILINA

Most of the Scripture verses cited in this work are taken from the Revised Standard Version Bible, Catholic Edition 1965 and 1966 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. and are used by permission of the copyright owner. Some verses are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, Catholic Edition 1989 and 1993 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. and are used by permission of the copyright owner.

English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church for the United States of America copyright 1994, United States Catholic Conference, Inc. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. English translation of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Modifications from the Editio Typica copyright 1997, United States Catholic Conference, Inc. Libreria Editrice Vaticana.

Quotations from the documents of the Second Vatican Council are from the Vatican Web site, www.vatican.va .

If any copyrighted materials have been inadvertently used without proper credit being given in one manner or another, please notify Our Sunday Visitor in writing so that future editions may be corrected accordingly.

Copyright 1999, 2006 by Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, Our Sunday Visitor, Inc. Published 2006
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All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts for critical review, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Write:

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ISBN-13: 978-1-59276-245-3
ISBN-10: 1-59276-245-X (Inventory No. T296)
LCCN: 2006927086

Cover design by Rebecca J. Heaston
Cover photo and interior crucifix image courtesy Saint Isaac of Syria Skete
Interior design by Sherri L. Hoffman

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

For Terri

An intelligent, discreet, and pious young woman
is worth more than all the money in the world.
Tell her that you love her more than your own life,
because this present life is nothing,
and that your only hope is that the two of you pass
through this life in such a way that,
in the world to come,
you will be united in perfect love.
ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM

It was a brilliant summer day. My father, then pushing eighty, took me with him on a long drive down a country road. Our local reservoir had been contaminated, and we were going to draw water by the gallon jug from a remote stream.

Usually a silent man, Pop was talkative that day, and as he drove along and as we hiked to the spring, he told me many storiesabout his childhood, his fathers early death from tuberculosis, my Uncle Leos paternal care for the family after Grandfather died. These were stories I had never heard in our three decades of casual conversation at home.

I drank in every wordmore eagerly, I must admit, than I would later sip the spring waterand when we got back to the house, I wrote down all I could recall, as near to Pops own words as my memory would allow.

The words of our natural fathers are precious to us. Our fathers are key to a mystery we spend a lifetime trying to solve: ourselves. Their past is our own, given to us in so many silent ways as they guide our childhood steps. The paths we walk are paths to which they led us, or drove us. Their words and deeds are critical details in the story of our own lives and our salvation.

If all that is true of our natural fathers, how much more true of our fathers in Christian faiththe Fathers of the Church that gave us new life in Baptism?

Because of this desire to know my ancestors in faith, and because I believe you share this desire, I wrote this book. I am not a scholar, and this is not a scholarly exploration of the lives or works of the Fathers. For simplicitys sake, I have tried to avoid most of the academic controversies and just tell the story. Readers who want to dig deeper should look up each and all of the works included in my bibliography in the appendix at the back of this book.

Bob Lockwood, who was then my publisher, was the first person to suggest that I write this book, and for that Ill be forever grateful. Greg Erlandson, who is now my publisher, asked me to prepare this new edition, which I have enjoyed writing every bit as much as the first. My editors Jim Manney and Jackie Lindsey helped shape the content of the book, for maximum utility and readability. I am much indebted to those who read the first edition in manuscript: Father Ronald Lawler, O.F.M. Cap., Christopher Bailey, Bradley Fallon, John Murdock, Mark Sullivan, and Cary Valyo. In the preparation of this expanded edition, I pestered my colleagues David Scott, Dr. Scott Hahn, and Rob Corzine much more than I should have. I thank all of these good people. Their love and knowledge of the Fathers made this work better than my best intentions ever could.

I owe another great debt of gratitude to the many university and seminary professors who used the first edition of The Fathers as a textbooka use for which that edition was hardly equipped. At the request of these gentle scholars, I have included some minimal citations with this edition, so that interested readers can track down my sources. Still, I have kept these minimal, so that ordinary lay readersmy primary audiencewill not be frightened away or bored to tears. The good doctors have also led me to correct and nuance my text here and there, and for that, too, Im very grateful.

I have taken most of my selections and quotations (though not all) from the nineteenth-century Edinburgh edition of the Fathers, published in thirty-eight volumes as The Ante-Nicene Fathers and The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. When doing so, I have indicated the edition, series, volume number, and page number. Thus, NPNF1 2:129 would represent page 129 of volume 2 of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1.

The Edinburgh edition is praiseworthy for its clarity, but language does change over the course of a century. So, in most cases, I have edited the translations to make them intelligible to todays reader. I have, whenever possible, compared the end product to other translations (and even, occasionally, the Latin or Greek originals) to ensure accuracy. Some of the Fathers poems I have chosen from alternative sources: St. Gregory of Nazianzuss