People are often shocked when they go to the early Christians hoping to find a solution to problems that have preoccupied Christians since the Reformation. They often find the Fathers relatively unconcerned. A case in point is the debate about what it means to be “saved,” and correspondingly what it means to be justified and sanctified. The post-Reformation tendency, especially among Protestants, is to section these terms off and consider them as discrete events, points on a timeline. The Fathers, however, preferred to speak of salvation as an irreducibly integrated process, which they called “divinization” — or “deification,” or “theosis.”

Those are daring terms, but they are biblical in essence, as is the idea that we share in divinity by our incorporation into Christ. The Apostle Peter said, after all, that Christians are “partakers of the divine nature.”

Whenever people asked me about this doctrine of the Fathers, I usually pointed them to two excellent modern explanations: Scott Hahn’s book First Comes Love and chapter 2 of Cardinal Christoph Schonborn’s book From Death to Life. These are excellent resources — thorough and winsome — but I always wished for something that was handier for evangelism, along the lines of those tracts I often find at the laundromat or supermarket (“Are YOU Saved?”). After all, why should the whole truth — why should our divinization — prove resistant to modern media?

Yesterday I discovered just such a handy booklet: Theosis: Partaking of the Divine Nature, by Mark Shuttleworth, an Orthodox layman. The 20-page booklet is, like the teachings of the Fathers themselves, saturated with the testimony of the Good Book.

“I said, ‘You are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High’ (Ps 82:6)… What on earth does it mean — “you are gods”? Doesn’t our faith teach that there is only one God, in three Persons? How can human beings be gods? … Theosis is the understanding that human beings can have real union with God, and so become like God to such a degree that we participate in the divine nature.”

Shuttleworth gives several pages over to New Testament quotations explaining the meaning and implications of our deification. He then summons the early Fathers to the witness stand: Origen, Athanasius, Basil, Cyril of Alexandria and others. C.S. Lewis even makes a cameo appearance.

This is a very useful little book, great to buy in bulk and stack in the back of the church. And it’s an invaluable tool for modern apologists.

The very first question I received when I launched this blog was from a group of tenacious Catholics living in the Mormon heartland of Utah. My correspondent said that Mormons were increasingly trying to invoke the Fathers’ doctrine of theosis as a sort of anticipation of the Mormon belief that the faithful will be made gods to rule over their own planets in the afterlife. These Utah Catholics, though, diligently applied themselves to studying and discussing the patristic doctrine, and formulating a deeply Christian, patristic response to their nearby neighbors.

The author of Theosis, Mark Shuttleworth, has put this ancient doctrine to the biblical test; he has put it into words that engage the mind; but, a man of extraordinary talent, he has also done something more with the doctrine. He has put it to beautiful music. Shuttleworth has translated these biblical and patristic notions into music in the contemporary praise idiom. His CD travels with me wherever I go. I especially love his setting for the ancient Trisagion and his own composition “My Lord, I Love You.” The disk is not yet available on the Web, but you can buy it directly from the artist. Just send a check for $15 ($12 for the CD; $3 for shipping and handling) to Mark Shuttleworth, 2962 Voelkel Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15216.

Then settle in for some truly divinizing listening.

This is from Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, in God’s Human Face: The Christ Icon:

“Theodore the Studite was convinced that iconoclasm ultimately is based on a rejection of the humility of God.”

What a stud … ite.

Hat tip: Scott Hahn, who sent it in response to this post.

Rod Bennett‘s at it again. Searching out the ultimate creative sources of Tolkien, Lewis, and J.K. Rowling, he follows the influences, Livingstone-like, till he reaches … the Fathers of the Church.

A visitor named Simon tells me that I should post my “top ten books on early Christianity…No, make that twenty!” Well, I could call him on a technicality because he never said “Simon says.” But I won’t, because I can’t resist his temptation. So I publish this list, with all the usual disclaimers: I do not, of course, endorse everything every author says in every one of these books; nor do I necessarily root for their favorite football teams. I, after all, am a Pittsburgher. Not all of these books are, strictly speaking, books on the Fathers. But these are the books whose scholarship on the Fathers has (in the words of my pre-teen kids) rocked my world.

1. The Spirit of Early Christian Thought by Robert Louis Wilken.

2. The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries by Rodney Stark.

3. The Church of the Fathers by John Henry Newman.

4. The Spirituality of the New Testament and the Fathers by Louis Bouyer.

5. The Celebration of the Eucharist by Enrico Mazza.

6. In Procession Before the World: Martyrdom as Public Liturgy in Early Christianity by Robin Darling Young.

7. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600), vol. 1 in The Christian Tradition by Jaroslav Pelikan.

8. Face to Face: Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity by Robin Margaret Jensen.

9. The Christians as the Romans Saw Them by Robert Louis Wilken.

10. Mary and the Fathers of the Church: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Patristic Thought by Luigi Gambero.

11. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine by John Henry Newman.

12. Easter in the Early Church: An Anthology of Jewish and Early Christian Texts by Raniero Cantalamessa.

13. Patrology (four volumes) by Johannes Quasten.

14. Fathers of the Church by Hubertus Drobner.

15. Early Christian Doctrines by J.N.D. Kelly.

16. The Theology of Jewish Christianity by Jean Danielou.

17. In the Shadow of the Temple: Jewish Influences on Early Christianity by Oskar Skarsaune.

18. Symbols of Church and Kingdom: A Study in Early Syriac Tradition by Robert Murray.

19. Letter and Spirit: From Written Text to Living Word in the Liturgy by Scott Hahn.

20. Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words by Rod Bennett.

An obscure rabbi from a backwater of the Roman Empire, Jesus of Nazareth was hardly a “superstar” by today’s standards.

His fame was, for the most part, a local phenomenon. The world and its cultures took little notice of His coming and going. And so it remained for nearly a century.

Jesus’ claims to authority — and even divinity — surely would have seemed absurd to the average Roman citizen. A carpenter had come to save the world. He was God, yet He was publicly executed in a most humiliating way. And after a century, the world seemed no more saved then before.

To the most cultured, and to the movers and shakers of the Roman Empire, Jesus didn’t matter. He hardly merited a joke or a second glance. But that was just as it should be.

Back in 1994 Pope John Paul II pondered the pagan historians of antiquity as he prepared the Church for the millennium we now call home.

“This ‘becoming one of us’ on the part of the Son of God took place in the greatest humility,” he wrote in Tertio Millennio Adveniente (“As the Third Millennium draws near”). “So it is no wonder that secular historians, caught up by more stirring events and by famous personages, first made only passing, albeit significant, references to Him.”

Just what “passing” did they take, and why is it “significant”? Pope John Paul dedicated a paragraph to those rare testimonies in his long meditation on the incarnation of Christ.

The first he takes up is by Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian of the Roman Court, who wrote his “Antiquities of the Jews” about 60-65 years after Christ’s death. Josephus’ only undisputed reference to Jesus appears as he describes the severity of the Sadducees in judging offenders against the law.
The example he offers is that of the apostle James, “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ.” Yet Josephus is concerned here not with Jesus but with James, who was “delivered to be stoned.”

In a footnote, the Pope mentions another passage that appears in some manuscripts of “Antiquities of the Jews,” but is missing from others.
scholars who believe the passage is authentic claim that it had bee purged by copyists during times when Christians were persecuted. Those who believe it is false claim it was plugged in by pious copyists of later centuries. The Pope, in his footnote, acknowledges the dispute.

The passage comes as Josephus is relating the reign of Pontius Pilate as procurator of Judea. After a description of how Pilate rather violently put down rebellions, the text reads: “Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works – a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jew and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal man amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and 10,000 other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.”

The problem some scholars raise (and even some Church Fathers raised) is that if Josephus could make a statement of faith such as “He was the Christ,” such a faith should pervade the rest of his history – especially his reading of the prophets and patriarchs, and at the very least his reading of the death of St. James. But it doesn’t.

In recent centuries, some unbelieving scholars have used the paucity of references to Jesus in Josephus’ writings to argue against the Nazarene’s very existence. Yet they perhaps forget that Josephus elsewhere proclaims his own master, the Emperor Vespasian, to be the Messiah, and so the historian would probably be reluctant to give notice to the most promising “competition.”

In any event, a handful of Romans recorded their brief notice of Jesus and His followers as the years wore on.

Pope John Paul also mentioned the historian Tacitus, writing between A.D. 115 and 120 on the burning of Rome, which the emperor Nero had blamed on the Christians. Tacitus recorded that the founder of this sect (“hated for their abominations”) was one “Christus,” who “suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilate.”

Christ also appears, by name only, in the “Lives of the Caesars,” by the historian Suetonius, writing around A.D. 121.

Another brief but more telling remark comes in the testimony of Pliny the Younger, writing in A.D. 111-113 when he was Roman governor of Bithynia, on the Black Sea. Reporting his routine interrogations and torture to the emperor Trajan, Pliny spoke of the Christian sect as something harmless. They gather once a week, he wrote, “on a designated day, before dawn, to sing in alternating choirs a hymn to Christ as to a God.”

The pagan Pliny’s report, then, is among the earliest records of orthodox Christology – relating the early Church’s belief of the divinity in Christ. (Dan Brown, call your office.)

Perhaps the Pope could have mentioned more in Tertio Millennio Adveniente. For instance, Celsus, an anti-Christian polemicist of around A.D. 180, never for a moment doubted that Jesus had lived. Rather, he directed his attacks at the divinity of Christ and the veracity of His miracles.

The mother of all early pagan records, perhaps, was by the neoplatonist Porphyry, who wrote 15 volumes against Christ – again, never denying that He had lived, but taking aim rather at the Church’s idea of Who and what Jesus was.

Porphyry’s nastiness was so offensive to Christians, however, that they fairly thoroughly wiped it out, once they were running the empire. Today, Porphyry is known only from what the Church Fathers said in response to him.

It is one of the ironies of history that all those contemporaries who made such passing reference to Christ should themselves become passing references in today’s record of that pivotal moment in human history.

In Tertio Millennio Adveniente, Pope John Paul, after giving a paragraph to Josephus, Suetonius, Tacitus and Pliny, swept on to 54 paragraphs about Jesus of Nazareth whose birth the world marked in the year 2000.

Indeed, today the world marks all its years from the birthday of that obscure carpenter of so many years ago.

If Christians can draw a lesson for themselves, maybe it is that they should expect little from today’s media and opinion-makers – who may be tomorrow’s footnotes.

But the truth about history endures in the Lord of History. Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever.

A stunning insight on the Fathers’ reading of Holy Scripture:

…at any mention of “wood” the Fathers will immediately jump to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then link that to the wood of Noah’s ark, and then the ark of the covenant, and so on. O’Keefe and Reno show how these “random associations” are more like the music expert’s ability to hear just one bar of music and immediately recall the whole symphony it came from.

In the Fathers’ reading, seemingly superfluous words can echo off even the remotest corners of Scripture. When they hear “wood,” that word becomes like a musical theme to trace through the symphony of redemption, beginning with the Fall at the tree and culminating in the triumph of the Cross.

That’s from Ryan J. Jack McDermott’s review of the book Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible, by John J. O’Keefe and R. R. Reno. The review appears in the current (May) issue of Touchstone. If you love reading the Fathers, you should subscribe today.

When historians speak of the “Cappadocian Fathers,” they mean three men of the late fourth century: Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus. Unfortunately, modern historians have spoken least of the third man, Gregory of Nazianzus. In Saint Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography, John A. McGuckin has begun to remedy the situation.

The most introspective of the three Cappadocians, Gregory resisted, first, ordination to the priesthood and, later, elevation to the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Immediately after ordination, he fled from the first office; and from the second he opted for an early retirement. As a poet, he has merited translations by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Cardinal Newman (here, here and here). As a memoirist and correspondent, he ranks alone with Augustine in the patristic era. Tradition hails him as the only Father whose teaching was pure and without error. Gregory’s life was caught up in the great conflicts of the time: the persistence of Arianism, Julian’s revival of paganism, the emerging controversies over the divinity of the Holy Spirit.

McGuckin, who is professor of early church history at Union Theological Seminary in New York, has a rare gift for putting the most abstruse theological debates into accessible language — without sacrificing the necessary precision. His anti-Western and anti-Scholastic biases, which were red herrings in his study of Cyril, are present but more muted in this excellent volume. The book includes helpful maps, an excellent bibliography and a minimal index.

If you’d like to read Gregory’s poetry in a modern English translation, you’re in luck. Peter Gilbert’s fresh translation, On God and Man: The Theological Poetry of St. Gregory of Nazianzus, is out in paperback in St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press’s Popular Patristics Series. It’s very low-priced — so low-priced and so good that you’ll probably feel guilty and want to send the translator a tip for doing such a great job.

If you want to meet the Cappadocian Fathers, all together and on their home turf, read Anthony Meredith’s study, aptly titled The Cappadocians.

You can also listen to my KVSS radio interviews on Gregory, Gregory and Basil. They are, like the best things in life, free.

They were history’s most elite corps: 12 men, chosen by God Himself to establish His Church on earth.

Elite, yes. But the apostles, each and all, emerged from obscurity only to do their appointed work, and then faded again into obscurity. “Bartholomew we don’t know much about, Matthew almost nothing and Matthias nothing at all,” said C. Bernard Ruffin, author of an excellent popular history of the apostles’ later years, The Twelve: The Lives of the Apostles After Calvary. “None of the apostles seems to have had the slightest interest in perpetuating his own memory. Their whole beings centered on their Master, and on spreading the Good News.”

Thus most of what modern Christians know about the Twelve Apostles is what the apostles themselves wrote about the life and teachings of Jesus — the various books of the New Testament. After that, there are snippets, quotations and anecdotes in the documents of the early Church, and legends and oral tradition handed down among the peoples of the Middle East and India. But these are not widely known. Still, they are fascinating to consider. For example:

• What happened to Peter’s wife (see Mk 1:29-31)? And what about the couple’s children?

• What was John’s life like when he shared a home with Mary (see Jn 19:27)?

• What did the apostles do to celebrate Easter?

• How did a Jew like Thomas take the culture shock that went with evangelizing India?

Ruffin set himself the task of sifting through all the available evidence to answer such questions and compile vivid profiles of the Twelve Apostles and their lives after Jesus’ resurrection.

“Few things can be known for sure about events 2,000 years ago,” Ruffin told me in an interview about his book. “Yet, as I did my research, I was surprised to find that we know as much as we do, and especially that we have much material that is better than legendary. It comes on very good authority.”

Ruffin said that material on Jesus’ inner circle — Peter, James and John — is especially plentiful, and recorded by reputable and reliable early Christian authors. St. Polycarp, for example, whose writings survive, knew St. John the Apostle. The writings of Polycarp’s disciple, St. Irenaeus, relate many more stories of John. Another “hearer” of John, a bishop named Papias — whose work survives only in fragments — wrote about his master as well as the other apostles. Eusebius and St. Jerome, both historians of the fourth century, drew from these and other first-century documents, now lost, as they wrote their own works.

In addition to these, there are also fanciful and apocryphal books of “Acts” of the various apostles — novels, really, but sometimes based on real historical events.

Ruffin’s book sometimes reads like a detective story as he pieces stories together from far-flung sources. “A lot of it has to be supposition and guesswork,” he told me. “But if you have a number of apparently independent traditions about a certain event, and they’re reasonably similar to one another, I think you can be reasonably sure that they’re based on a real event.”

The chapter on the apostle Thomas provides a good example of Ruffin’s investigative technique. Early Church testimonies named Thomas as the apostle to the Far East, including China, but especially India.

“In the West, a number of traditions refer to Thomas’s work in India,” Ruffin said. “I cite papers in the Edessan archive, which we know from citations in Eusebius in the fourth century. There is more information in the ‘Doctrine of the Apostles,’ a Syrian document from the third century, and the ‘Acts of Thomas,’ which is one of the apocrypha. Centuries later, Marco Polo and Western missionaries found a number of Thomas traditions in India. The ancient Mar Thoma church, for centuries, has passed down an oral tradition called the ‘Rabban Song’ about Thomas. What is interesting is the degree to which the traditions in India seem to corroborate the traditions from the West.”

According to tradition, Thomas received his Indian mission in a vision of Christ. To go to India was, for Thomas, to travel to the end of the earth. It was a place as remote from his native Judea — in terms of geography, culture, climate and especially religion — as one could imagine. Thomas reportedly asked Jesus, “How can I, a Jew, go and preach the Truth to Indians?”

But, according to the ‘Rabban Song,’ preach he did. Through the 50s, 60s and early 70s A.D., he brought the Gospel through large areas of the Indian subcontinent, with intermittent success. Legends attribute 17,000 conversions to Thomas and his followers in that short time. Ruffin relates the tradition that Thomas was martyred on July 3 in the year 72 by priests of the goddess Kali who feared that the apostle’s religion was beginning to eclipse their own.

For years, these traditions were dismissed as folklore. Even some Catholic missionaries charged that ancient heretics invented the Thomas stories in order to fabricate apostolic origins for their teachings. Then, in the last hundred years, archeological discoveries began to confirm some of the historical details of the “Rabban Song” and “Acts of Thomas.” In the late 19th century, for example, coins were found with the image of a prince who plays a key role in Thomas’s story — and his dates correspond with those of Thomas’s work in India.

Though Ruffin approaches all ancient documents with caution, he refuses to follow those scholars who dismiss testimony as untrustworthy merely because it is old or because it shows fervor in faith.

“Some scholars tend to overly skeptical,” he said. “In approaching material like this, if you go into the project determined to throw it all out, you probably will persuade yourself to do so. But, then, what’s the point of beginning at all?”

Ruffin, a Lutheran pastor who also teaches history, recalled his own experience studying at Yale Divinity School and Bowdoin College. “When I was in seminary, some of my professors took skepticism to ridiculous extremes,” he said. “They were determined to distrust everything, so they did. If we applied the same skepticism to all ancient records that these historians apply to early Christian traditions, we would not only have no Church history, we would have no ancient history at all.

“It comes down to how much value you place on tradition,” he concluded. “As a Christian, I think that there are good reasons for us to believe the traditions, even as I acknowledge that not all traditions are of equal weight. Many of the traditions about the apostles do stand scrutiny.”

Ruffin’s favorite characters in the apostolic corps coincides with Jesus’ favorites: Peter, John and James. “Theirs are the most well-documented lives,” he said.

Ruffin tells a well-documented story of John, at an advanced age — “maybe 70 or 80,” he said — risking his life to save a soul.

“In Smyrna, John had trained a certain young man in the faith. But then came a persecution, and John had to flee. When the apostle came back, he asked the local bishop what had happened to the fellow. At first, he was told that the man was dead. But with further inquiry, he found that the fellow had become a bandit. So John rode out to the back country where the man was hiding out. Soon, he was surrounded by members of the gang. John told the bandits that he wasn’t going to escape and he was asking for no mercy, but that he wanted to see their leader.

“When the bandit leader saw John,” Ruffin continued, “he turned to run away — but John ran after him! Remember, now, John was very old by this time. He called to the bandit, ‘Why are you running from your own father, who is unarmed and very old? Be sorry for me, my child.’ And the man fell to the ground sobbing. He repented and returned to the fold. The story showed that John had courage and endurance, even at an advanced age.”

Still, in the apostles’ biographies, there remains much more shadow than light.

“There are several different traditions about what happened to Matthew,” Ruffin said. “Some have him dying in Ethiopia, and some have him dying elsewhere. I labeled his chapter ‘The Phantom Apostle,’ because I can’t figure out what happened to him.”

Yet even the questionable material is valuable, he explained, because “it shows us the qualities that the early Christians esteemed above all others. Some of their stories may be metaphorical, describing more a spiritual state than a historical event. But I don’t think we should approach these cultures in a condescending way, explaining them away as prescientific storytellers.”

Most fascinating to modern Catholic readers, perhaps, will be the degree to which the apostles’ Church mirrors the Catholic Church today — in its sacraments, ritual, hierarchy, dogma and even its foibles.

But that shouldn’t be surprising at all. Ruffin cited St. Irenaeus, of the second century A.D., who “maintained that the apostles had ‘perfect knowledge’ and maintained that they appointed bishops to whom they passed on their sacred mysteries.”

Uh-oh, they’ve let my friend Rod Bennett out of his cage again. That’s the only explanation for the headline you just read.

Visit Rod’s blog for the best in contemporary satire. And read his book on the Apostolic Fathers, Four Witnesses. You’ll know the earliest Fathers as you never knew them before. They’ll be real and vivid characters in the story of your life.

Two thousand years of Church life have proven the old Preacher true: There’s nothing new under the sun (Eccl 1:9). In the era of the Church Fathers — the first eight centuries of Christianity — the Church faced many of the difficulties it faces today: the threat of heresy, challenges to authority, priests abusing their position of trust, quixotic quests for common ground, lax clergy and uppity laity, rigorist clergy and lax laity.

Father George Kaitholil, a priest of the Society of Saint Paul in India, has examined those early Church responses and found them to be useful models for life in these latter days. His book Church: The Sacrament of Christ examines the “patristic vision” in light of modern theology.

I interviewed him about his book, shortly after its release in 1998.

Aquilina: In your book you describe an ancient Church in which modern Catholics would find much that is familiar. We can even recognize many of the topics of debate — such as the nature and extent of Church authority, the relationship between Church and state, and even liturgical change. What light can the Fathers shed on modern discussions of these issues? Why have these issues remained current through 2,000 years?

Fr. Kaitholil: The Fathers never imagined the Church as a democratic organization in which authority comes from the will of the people. Though democratic processes are used in the Church, its authority comes from God’s will. Christ alone chose His twelve apostles. Peter, chief among them, was not elected by them, but appointed by Christ. The Church’s authority extends to faith, morals and interpretation of the Word of God, and has to guide and regulate these.

The Church-state relationship was a live question then, as now, because both have extensive powers that often come into conflict. In many instances, Church and the state have tried to control each other. Emperors and kings interfered in Church matters, while the Church consecrated emperors.

Emperor Constantine convoked the Council of Nicea in 325. That was a sign of the coexistence of the Church and the state and cooperation between them. This was even more clearly seen in the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Emperor Marcian convoked it at the request of the Roman Synod.

The ideal Church-state relationship would be one of mutual respect and support. The Church should remain the highest authority in theological and spiritual matters while recognizing the supremacy of the state in political and civil matters. The fourth century witnessed this.

Aquilina: In what ways was the Church of the patristic era different from the Church we know today?

Fr. Kaitholil: The Church in the patristic era struggled to cultivate faith and morals in a non-Christian world. Then the Church had more problems from without; today she has more problems from within.

Aquilina: In debates today, some Catholics — citing patristic precedents — tend to emphasize the authority of the local bishop over that of the pope. Does this accurately represent the Fathers?

Fr. Kaitholil: Not at all. There were sometimes disagreements between popes and bishops — for example, between Bishop Cyprian and Pope Stephen I regarding heretical baptism. Cyprian advocated parity and communion among all bishops, but did not place the authority of the bishop over that of the pope. He taught that Christ instituted a unique episcopate in Peter, and that all the bishops, in their communities, represent the see of Peter. Cyprian also considered the see of Peter as the principal church; all other churches were to be in communion with it.

Other Fathers, like Ignatius of Antioch and Irenaeus of Lyons, also insisted on the primacy of the See of Rome. This primacy, however, is not papal absolutism, an idea the Fathers did not teach.

Aquilina: Meanwhile, others say that their loyalty to the pope gives them freedom to reject the authority of their local bishop. Again, they invoke the Fathers, noting that many bishops succumbed to the Arian heresy. What is the consensus of the Fathers on this issue?

Fr. Kaitholil: It is absurd to think that loyalty to the pope justifies rejection of the authority of the local bishops. Just the contrary. As Cyprian held, the local bishop represents the see of Peter. There is a wide consensus among the Fathers regarding the authority of the local bishop and the need of being in communion with him. When a bishop is no longer in communion with the pope, he breaks off from the Church, and the pope as the chief pastor intervenes to do the needful. If a bishop is a confirmed heretic, fidelity to the pope demands rejection of that bishop’s authority.

Aquilina: How did the Christians of the patristic era view their local bishops? What can we learn from this today?

Fr. Kaitholil: They viewed their local bishops as their spiritual leaders, teachers and guides in faith, morals and liturgy. They accepted the discipline of the bishops and supported them in their pastoral ministry. The people formed well-knit communities around their bishops, who kept them united. Here again, Cyprian insists that concord with the bishop is the condition for peace and unity in the community. He taught that the Church was built upon the bishops. The individual members of the community, through their bishops, belong to the one universal Church. The lesson we learn here is one of communion, cooperation and docility.

Aquilina: How did the Christians of the patristic era view the pope? What can we learn from this today?

Fr. Kaitholil: As I see it, Christians of those times viewed the pope as the center of unity, the source of guidance and encouragement for the whole Church. Jesus appointed Peter chief shepherd, the key holder and the rock foundation. From the earliest times, churches in other places accepted the Church of Rome as the center of unity and acknowledged that authority over the whole Church belongs to the successor of Peter. Today the jurisdiction of the pope over the bishops — which Cyprian did not favor — is an accepted fact.

The authority of the college of apostles is a shared one, exercised in communion and love. Yet Peter has a special duty to strengthen others in faith, as we see in Luke 22:32. According to Pope Leo the Great, Peter is the prince of apostles. The primacy of the pope subjects the bishops to him, and collegiality unites them to him.

Aquilina: How did lay Christians of the patristic era view their own role in the Church and in the world? What can we learn from this today?

Fr. Kaitholil: Lay Christians were deeply involved in the mission of the Church and collaborated with their pastors. They were open to social and cultural life, and adapted themselves to new conditions. They considered themselves the people of God, pilgrims and strangers in the world but at home everywhere.

Cyprian held that every member of the Church has an honorable function. The laity formed active and united communities and played their role in organization and activity.

Tertullian was a fervent lay theologian and preacher. So was Origen, before he was ordained a priest. Their writings still inspire many. The lesson for us is that the Christian community is not to be a passive flock, but to be active in Church life under the guidance of legitimate authority.

Aquilina: What can we learn from the divisions within the early Church and the ways the Fathers conducted themselves in debate? What behavior was productive? What wasn’t?

Fr. Kaitholil: Divisions in the early Church were generally based on convictions and not personality conflicts or quest for advantage. In debate, the Fathers were often fiery, fanatical and polemical. They used Scripture and logic, but also resorted to argumentum ad hominem. They took clear positions and were willing to bear the consequences. Some of them went by their own wisdom and did not follow the magisterium of the Church, thus paving the way for divisions.

Yet the debates led to clarification of ideas, to greater precision in doctrine, to creative thinking and deepening in theology. Free thinking and honest expression of thought were thus productive.

It’s astonishing that the finest minds in patristic and biblical studies have felt compelled to set aside their important work to respond to Dan Brown. But, since they’ve done it — and done it so well — we should read what they have to say. Jesuit Father Gerald O’Collins, a venerable prof at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, took his razor to the Code and sliced it up for our amusement and apologetic recycling. So did Chrysostom scholar Margaret M. Mitchell, who chairs the Early Christian Lit department at University of Chicago Divinity School.

They’re good reading for us, and for people we know who’ve been troubled by the Code.

Viewing the mosaics of Ravenna, Italy, is a truly visionary experience — even for those of us who have never seen them up close. They were completed during a transitional period in a true cultural borderland. Ravenna was Byzantium’s capital in the West, and so the images shine with the transcendent quality of eastern icons. Yet they also possess the warmth and representational character of western art. Somehow, too, they incorporate the most developed symbolic sense of paleo-Christian art. I’m no art historian and no critic, so I’m making it sound like a mishmash. But it’s not. For the Christian who’s passionate about patristic history, Ravenna is the sweetest eye-candy the world has to offer.

It’s probably best if you just go and see for yourself. There’s an Italian website that offers a a virtual tour in English. Another site gives you a sampling of the images, but the text is in Italian. Same goes for this one, which offers a catalog of many mosaic details, close-up.

The Ravenna mosaics make great screen savers, desktop backgrounds, and e-cards. They’ll inspire you to pray. Go wild.

Oh, by the way, the image of the Fathers at the top of this blog — it’s from Ravenna, of course.

In his Wednesday audience talks, Pope Benedict has been unpacking a notion dear to the Fathers of the Church: the Apostolic Tradition. The talks are worth our study, especially the most recent, “The Living Gospel, Proclaimed in its Integrity” (May 3, 2006), in which he invokes characters as diverse as Tertullian of Carthage and Clement of Rome. Good stuff.

Tradition is, therefore, the living Gospel, proclaimed by the apostles in its integrity, in virtue of the plentitude of her unique and unrepeatable experience: By her work, faith is communicated to others, until it reaches us, until the end of the world. Tradition, therefore, is the history of the Spirit that acts in the history of the Church through the mediation of the Apostles and their successors, in faithful continuity with the experience of the origins.

It is what Pope St. Clement of Rome explained toward the end of the first century: “The Apostles,” he wrote, “proclaimed the Gospel to us sent by the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ was sent by God. Christ, therefore, comes from God, the Apostles from Christ: Both proceed in an orderly way from the will of God. Our Apostles knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that disputes would arise around the episcopal function. Therefore, foreseeing the future perfectly, they established the chosen ones and ordered them that at their death other men of proven virtue assume their service” [Ad Corinthios,” 42.44: PG 1, 292.296].

This chain of service continues to our day; it will continue until the end of the world…

Read the rest at Zenit.