Introduction

Among other theological disciplines, patristics (or patrology) is a discipline that deals with the study of the works of the Holy Fathers of the Church. When they speak of the Fathers of the Church, they usually mean great theologians, such as, for example, Sts. Ignatius of Antioch, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, Gregory Palamas – saints whose teachings and names have firmly entered the Orthodox Tradition.

On the other hand, an equally integral and inevitable part of the history of Christian thought are such personalities as, for example, Origen, a heretic, but, nevertheless, a great Christian thinker and theologian. Although Origen was not a Father of the Church, without knowledge of his teaching, it is impossible to understand the logic of the development of Christian theology in the first five centuries, since his teaching lies at the basis of all the main currents of Eastern Orthodox thought of that time.

The concept of "Holy Fathers of the Church" is inseparable from the concept of Church Tradition, one of the deepest foundations of our faith. Holy Tradition, both with a large and a small "p", in turn is associated with the concepts of authority and selection. Christians have one Teacher, Christ, but His teaching was not written down by Him personally during His earthly ministry. Therefore, we receive the entire content of our faith, so to speak, "at second hand." The New Testament writings are the testimony of eyewitnesses chosen for this role by the Lord Himself (Matthew 10:1-5; Luke 6:14-15; 24-48, etc.). They were entrusted with keeping in mind and writing down all that they saw, heard, and touched (1 John 1:1). But the New Testament books were not written immediately after the events described in them, but several decades later. During this time, the memory of the life and words of Christ was transmitted from mouth to mouth, from person to person, and thus oral tradition arose. This tradition existed in the memory of individuals, but at the same time it was an expression of the faith of the Christian community, the Church. This community was created by Christ, and it can be said that after His coming it has always existed. As the Savior Himself promised, His disciples are guided by the Spirit of God Himself, the true source of life for the Christian community. Christ lives in the Church, and the Holy Spirit teaches His disciples "all truth" (John 16:13). Individuals do not live in a vacuum, but belong to the Church, which is the temple of the Spirit and the environment where there exist not only individual human customs and traditions, but also a single sacred Tradition, written or unwritten. The Holy Spirit guides the whole body of the Church, and therefore the Church, guided by her fullness of knowledge and authority, selects what is to become her Tradition.

This selection was carried out already in apostolic times. It is known that the Holy Apostle Paul wrote at least two more epistles that were not included in the New Testament canon. Nor was the epistle attributed to the Apostle Barnabas included in the New Testament. The Gnostic gospels were also rejected as apocryphal. Only Divine Providence can explain why certain works were rejected or accepted into the canon in the earliest times. At that time, there were no scientific and historical methods for establishing the authenticity of various records of Christ's words or the reliability of this or that apostolic writing. But nevertheless, it turned out that the selection was made correctly, even from a historical point of view. It is remarkable that even then apostolic authorship in itself was not the only criterion of truth. Thus, the two above-mentioned epistles of Paul were not included in the canon; The Epistle to the Hebrews probably does not belong to the pen of the apostle himself; the Evangelist Mark, as is well known, described from the words of St. Peter; finally, neither St. Luke nor the great Paul himself were among the apostles chosen by Christ during His earthly ministry. Thus the selection took place, and this selection was carried out by the authority and intuition of the whole Church, inspired and led by the Holy Spirit.

The life of the Church is inseparably linked with Holy Tradition, and in the historical pilgrimage of the New Israel there is a constant and urgent need for the Church's authoritative witness to its Tradition. The Fathers of the Church are considered to be such personalities, teachers and writers, in whom the Church unanimously recognizes authoritative witnesses, i.e. people who deeply understood and correctly interpreted the Revealed Truth.

The Roman Catholic Church, always striving for precise definitions, proposes the following formulation: the Father of the Church must meet three conditions: antiquity, holiness, and correctness of teaching. The Roman tradition especially emphasizes the presence of chronological boundaries: the Holy Fathers existed only up to and including the eighth century; the last father was St. John of Damascus. All outstanding theologians after Damascene are called by Catholics teachers of the Church, and not fathers.

In the light of the Orthodox understanding of Holy Tradition, such an approach is unacceptable. Our Church teaches that divine revelation is not limited by Holy Scripture, and Holy Tradition is not limited by any chronological framework. The Holy Spirit acts through people of all times, and the Church "recognizes" in people her "holy fathers" not because of antiquity, but guided by her inner intuition, on the basis of which Tradition is formed. Thus, for example, the father of the 1st century St. Gregory Palamas was proclaimed a saint: a few years after his death.

The basic and decisive condition in determining the truth of the teaching of a particular Church Father is the apostolic faith: it should always be remembered that the Church defines herself as an apostolic Church, not a patristic Church. A holy father is one who interprets the apostolic faith for his contemporaries in correct terms. Such a person clearly sees the problems of his time and preaches Christianity in such a way as to solve these problems, answer questions, and resist errors. A clear "legal" formulation in this case is impossible: the whole Church, the whole Tradition serves as a criterion. This lack of clear definitions is in a sense a great inconvenience - people like to be guided, guided, told how to act and what to think. The rise of the papacy can be seen to some extent as a manifestation of this universal desire for clear rules, external criteria, and recipes for truth.

Another Roman Catholic criterion of the Holy Fathers is the sanctity of life. This criterion is acceptable to us as well, with only one clarification: it does not mean that the Holy Fathers were absolutely sinless - only the Lord God can do this. The Church has never considered sinlessness to be a condition for recognizing someone as a saint. In antiquity, the concept of holiness was used much more widely than in our time, and there was no formal process of canonization. Half of all the medieval Byzantine patriarchs - those who were not formally condemned for heresy - were canonized by the Church. The final decision always belongs to the Church herself, and she alone knows whether the "candidate" satisfies certain internal requirements that are difficult to define, but nevertheless undoubtedly exist, reflecting the logic of the development of Tradition on the one hand and forming Tradition on the other.

If we consider the writings of the Holy Fathers of the Church to be a witness to the truth, we should be in spiritual continuity with them. This does not mean that we should blindly repeat everything that is written in Sts. Rather, it presupposes the assimilation of a certain internal logic, intuition, and the sequence of the development of patristic thought. On this free path there is always a danger of falling into heresy, but it must not be forgotten that no man, simply by virtue of his human limitations, is free from such a danger, and that, on the other hand, only the devil is completely heretic, who once and for all said "no" to God.

Like all people, the Fathers of the Church lived in a specific historical and cultural situation, and their writings were answers to certain questions addressed to specific individuals. All this is of great importance for the correct understanding of the works of the Holy Fathers. In order to really penetrate into the world of the Holy Fathers, to feel their thoughts, to find out why they spoke the way they did, and what all this means for us, the bearers of a different mentality, living many centuries later, in a different culture, we need to study history.

History is inseparably linked with Holy Tradition, but at the same time a distinction must be made between them. Accordingly, it is impossible to identify patristic literature with the history of Christian literature. Thus, as already noted, in the early Christian period there were many apocryphal writings that the Church did not recognize as "its own", divinely inspired, but which nevertheless are of great value for researchers of the early Christian, both historians and theologians.