BOOKS OF THE WEEK
Church Fathers
The Fathers of the Western Church. 21s.) By Robert Payne. (Heinemann.
WITHOUT the patristic writings of the first six centuries or so of our era, or had they been other than they were, how would apostolic Christianity have developed ? It is an interesting speculation, and one to which there is no answer. Anyhow, there it is, the extra- ordinary tree that sprouted from the Gospel acorn, shaped and watered and pruned by assiduous hands and incessantly active minds, and a flow of language unrivalled in any other field. Mr. Payne, in his lively book, complains that the Fathers are neglected by us. Theology is not today a popular subject, and the Church Fathers have perhaps slumped together with the sermons and religious treatises perused by our ancestors ; still, they remain in the general consciousness ; for good (or ill or both), they made the Church, its structure, its order, its creeds, its doctrines.
Copious extracts from them abound on the pages of the Roman Missal and Breviary. They gave us the Vulgate (which Mr. Payne, a little surprisingly, calls an " impeccable translation "), the heresies and their so eloquent refutations (there is all too little about these in this book), the Trinity, the ingenious twisting of the Old Testament into prophecy and allegories of the New, the great shrine of liturgical worship which towered up in a few centuries over the life and words of Christ, the authoritarian hierarchy which ordered and ruled it, as well as a great mass of theological thinking and teaching which has been accepted or disputed ever since. You may neglect the Fathers, but you cannot escape them. They annoyed Milton as much as bishops and monks did, but he quoted from them con- tinually. Their characteristically different voices combined to form the voice of the church militant here on earth, didactic, metaphysical, philosophic, mystical, urgently moral, at times angelically poetic, always defining, adding, enlarging, distorting by their individual lights the word delivered to them. As Mr. Payne writes :
" They added new dimensions to the original texts.... A half remembered utterance of Jesus recorded by one of the apostles could and did become a battleground for furious sects ; and there
L followed, in the long, unhappy, and glorious history of Christianity, enormous processions of scholars and preachers only too anxious to interpret Jesus's words according to their own proclivities."
Books on the patristic writings are, and have always been, many. On the Fathers themselves, as characters, much less has been written. Mr. Payne's book balances happily between exposition, of person- ality and precept, illustrating one by the other. " I have attempted," he says, " to show the Church Fathers as dramatic characters in the long drama of Christianity." This he has done ; his Fathers stand out as living, vehement figures, rather larger than life ; and this they no doubt were. The most violent is Jerome, with what Dean Milman called " his almost unrivalled faculty of awakening hatred," his snarling ill-temper, his ferocious invective rivalled only by Ter- tullian. As sex-ridden as a Freudian psycho-analyst, but loathing it, he shockingly turned the Song of Solomon into an erotic expres- sion of Christ's relation to the Church, imposing this strange view on subsequent commentators. He was a great intellectual ; compared with the other great Fathers—Augustine, Ambrose, Gregory—he was not a great character.
The beauty of the mind and teaching of Ambrose, and its effect on Augustine, are here well suggested ; Augustine himself, the most interesting of all, must necessarily largely escape so brief a sketch ; he is well illustrated by extracts from his writings, and his imperious, sensuous, magnificent personality is vividly conveyed ; but his con- versations and disputations with his pupils at Cassiciacum come over in this rendering with the kind of forced brightness with which colloquial translations are apt to tinkle. Also present on these pages are Saints Paul, Benedict, Bernard, Francis, Justin Martyr, Thomas Aquinas and a rich entourage of supporting characters ; even for those well versed in the patristic writings, this book makes a lively human background to the formidable mass of theology, philosophy and doctrine they expound. ROSE MACAULAY.
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