The Fathers of the Christian Church

Weimer, Ch. 6, p. 2

The Fathers of the Christian Church

The early Christian “fathers” of the church continued to elaborate upon the Greek traditions that had so much influence upon early Christianity. They reinterpreted the sophists’ doctrines of emanation and soul to explain their own concepts of the universe, lending their new religion accessibility and validity among the Greeks they hoped to convert. Unlike the Gnostic sects, the more orthodox fathers of the church did not rely totally upon ranks of angels less perfect than the inexpressible Father to explain the creation of the world or the existence of evil within it. They did, however, increase the role of the Savior-Son, who had always been necessary and integral to the Christian sects, by interpreting according to a deeper reading of the beginning of the Gospel of John, giving Christ the role of Word, or Logos, as an intermediary between God and man.

Origen

The third-century scholar Origen was one major contributor to the doctrine of the Logos. Following the first few verses of John, Origen’s Word always existed as part of the Father in the spirit of Christ, and therefore took part in the creation of the universe.[1] The Father created coeternal souls upon whom to exercise His goodness and power, and the Son is his expressed image, the embodiment of the attributes of the Father earlier personified in the Gnostic archontes, so through the Son the Father becomes accessible to those coeternal souls, mediating between unity and multiplicity.[2]

This Son was begotten by an eternal act, the contemplation of the Father, so that the Son is derivative of the Father, and can be seen as a secondary version of God but still unified with God. Because the Son is a hypostasis of the Father, emanating from him, it is only partly true that they are “one in essence”—they are more accurately described as unified in will, love and action, but separate in person.[3] According to this logic, Origen is justified in saying in one of his writings that “we are not afraid to affirm, in one sense, two Gods, in another sense, a single God.”[4]

The Logos also contained “the models and forms of every creature,” incorporating the Platonic concept that gives shape, existence and purpose to all matter.[5] In this way, the Logos takes up the role of those daimones who, according to the Greeks, regulated the earth in an “administrative” capacity.[6] His takeover of this role assured superior function, because the authority of the Logos is eternal, whereas that of the daimones is temporal, making Him the “superior political authority” to rule in the world.[7]

Through the temporal authority of the Logos, the salvation of souls could be accomplished. Following logic found in Plato’s Phaedrus, evil, defined as imperfection, came into the world when certain beings lost their wings after they tired of contemplating the Father through the Word, and so these eternal souls became terrestrial souls.[8] The first being to fall was the coeternal soul of the devil, later followed by those who also chose his fate.[9] Incorporating the first strains of free will diverging from the Father’s plan that had been allowed to divine beings, Origen stated, “God does not know all things,” knowing neither sin nor sinners.[10] This lack of knowledge would point to an absence of evil in the original divine plan—how could the Father have intended the existence of imperfection if it were alien to Him, if demons were not creatures of God?[11] Again we arrive at the problem faced by the Platonists, and Origen gives a very Platonist, though Christian Platonist, answer.

Once the devil chose to fall, he brought evil into the world, but it is impossible for us to know why he did this, because we know nothing about his beliefs before he fell but we can know what demons have become and what they do on earth.[12] Through impiety, certain beings fell from heaven and took deformed terrestrial bodies, however, they are not fully terrestrial and still possess some foreknowledge.[13] They are defined by their choice for the practice of evil, having fallen from a “happy state,” and the devotion of their lives to the accomplishment of all things that contradict virtue.[14] While on earth, they can leave behind their bodies to “seduce and mislead men,” distracting them from God to things below.[15]

What was to be made of the Father’s reaction to the appearance of evil and imperfection in His creation? Through the governing power of the Logos, they have been assigned a “cruel but necessary function” in much the same vein as torturers serve a necessary function.[16] Not only do the demons steal and ransom men’s souls, but they cause famines, blights, pollution of the air, the destruction of crops, the death of animals and plagues among men; in short, they have charge over human calamity.[17] They unleash “the furor, the rage, the tribulation,” upon those who have become subject to them, but according to Origen Christians are exempt from this subjection to Satan’s ability to cause strife.[18]

This seems to be true because of both Christ’s temporal authority as the superior ruler, and the working of certain holy angels on the earth. Origen hints at this work when he explains that Michael, Gabriel and Raphael were named “after the functions that they have to fill in the entire world according to the will of God.”[19] These angels are of a nature that is totally different from that of other, terrestrial spirits, including demons, and carry out different functions, carrying prayers upward through the spheres of the universe[20] to the Father, from whom they receive grace.[21]

Aside from this detail, Origen does not give much information regarding the holy angels. In fact, he treats them as a given fact, citing common knowledge in relation to certain facts about them.[22] From this, we can assume that there is an accepted Christian doctrine regarding angels, but what this is in Origen’s eyes is hard to guess. We do, however, know his attitude toward enumerations of angels and lists of details usually associated with angels invoked for magical purposes: he refers to it as “indiscreet curiosity and silliness,” indicating perhaps that he shied away from any works that attempted to number or name angels, e.g. the Books of Enoch, in favor of an overarching doctrine regarding the entirety of the angelic host.[23]

But what of the soul that had fallen from heaven? It could be redeemed, after doing everything possible to protect its own reasonable nature, by proving itself worthy to re-ascend to a place near God through the power of the Logos.[24] The preliminary understanding of the incarnated Christ as the Logos of the Father was necessary to this ascent to rejoin the deity in heaven, the ascent otherwise being almost entirely Platonic. First the soul would concern itself with ethics and virtues in an effort to purify itself, and then it would contemplate the Father in its desire to transcend its perceived worldliness, trying to illuminate itself but still thinking of spiritual things by means of physical aids.

The final step is the difference between Platonism and Christianity: true contemplation of the Father is achieved when union is provided by God’s mercy, bringing the soul into the realm of the Forms.[25] Once this has been achieved, Origen’s mysticism centered on Christ is transcended in favor of a mysticism centered on the Logos/Word as a means for knowing the Father, and “knowing God is being known by God, and that means that God is united to those who know him, and give them a share in his divinity.”[26] It is Origen’s need for an intermediary to humble itself from the divine realm that shows his ties to Plotinian and Iamblichan Platonism—taken in when he studied as a Christian alongside Plotinus under Ammonias Saccas—and the fact that it is Christ who serves at the intermediary who bestows mercy that makes Origen undeniably Christian. The end to which he believes Christians accomplish union with the divinity, however, seems to be tied to the Non-canonical Jewish Apocrypha, in that the salvation of Christians will give them the place and the mystery once enjoyed by the fallen angels as the stars of heaven, as Enoch rose to take the place of highest angel in the Book of Enoch.[27]

Augustine of Hippo held the same to be true, that God “would by His grace collect, as now He does, a people so numerous, that He thus fills up and repairs the blank made by the fallen angels.”[28] Men now played a greater role in the divine plan, not only as subjects for salvation, but as future ministers and angels.

Augustine of Hippo

This heightened role of man in relation to the angels relegated supernatural beings to an obscure realm between that of the divine and our own, and in the fourth-century writings of Augustine, the emphasis is more on the personal experience of God through mercy than on the communication of a message through the angels.

Augustine, like other early Christians, was influenced by the syncretism and sophism of his Mediterranean environment. He praises the philosophers Socrates and Plato, saying, “none come nearer to us than the Platonists,” espousing the belief that the soul longs to return to the One who made it, but Augustine continually goes beyond the doctrines of the philosophers to expound the Christian interpretation of such matters as were discusses by the Platonists.[29]

Though he was Plotinian on matters relating to soul, Augustine like Origen departed into Christian waters in holding that God actively aids the union of men with Himself through the incarnation of the Word. This Word-made-flesh is also necessary to man’s response to God, because without the “condescension” of the incarnation, man would despair of the attainability of union or would seek union out of pride.[30] The Word, being the true image of God and the prototype for man, was then mediator as a focus of meditation, in that “the soul will only come to God through loving the image of God it finds in itself, if this image is a true image, the result of true self-knowledge.”[31] In this contemplation, God will bestow grace to complete the union, disclosing knowledge of Himself within the soul and giving the believer a transitory experience of ecstasy, an ascending to the realm of soul.[32]

Also unlike the Neo-Platonists, Augustine wrote that believers should not seek the aid of intermediaries in attaining salvation, thereby questioning Porphyry’s and Iamblichus’ theurgy as a means to salvation, eventually refuting it as “a craft which accomplishes not only good but evil among gods and men.”[33] He reasoned this by virtue of the facts that theurgy is unnecessary to the salvation of the intellectual part of the soul, and that the demons upon which theurgy relies cannot be trusted to have the soul’s best interests in mind.[34] Demons, says Augustine, “are neither mediators nor interpreters between men and the gods,” but cause “harm by bestowing pretended benefits…or else openly and undisguisedly doing evil to men.”[35] The Greeks only believed demons to be necessary as intermediaries because the gods who were interested in human affairs could not have contact with terrestrial beings, and so needed a go-between, whereas the Christian God had contact with men through the person of Christ, and so it is only men who need intermediaries, but the Lord has found room in the divine plan to make use of demons.[36] If the demon is cursed to have a contrary nature in punishment for his first sin, “why should not God have permitted him to tempt the first man…?”[37]

Whence came these wicked angels? Augustine believes angels and demons to be of the same nature, but having a “difference in their wills and desires.”[38] The angels as a whole were created within time, being creatures made by God and having a beginning and so not coeternal with God, perhaps at the moment indicated by the creation of light, as they are most suitably compared with incorporeal light.[39] This light being good, its division from the darkness could signify the division of the good from the wicked angels, in that the absence of God can be called darkness.[40] The “cause…of the blessedness of the good is adherence to God,” but their original good nature could not have caused a defective will in the wicked angels, so this cannot be the explanation for their fall.[41] The cause of evil, then, “is not an effecting of something, but a defect.”[42] The will becomes evil when it turns to things inferior to itself, the turning itself being the wicked act, and the cause of damnation for the demons.[43]

The good angels, then, remained so by virtue of their obedience to their creator. They receive all their power form God, and by their nature cling to God, who uses them to communicate with men, as men cannot bear contact with the inexpressible.[44] As the measure of grace awarded them, they are “illumined by the Light that created them,” receiving all their knowledge in themselves and in the Word of God, “in which they see the eternally abiding causes and reasons according to which they were made.”[45] In their contemplation, God speaks to them in his own matter, the meaning of which they then communicate to men, in order to effect their salvation.

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

The writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, whether in truth authored by the fifth-century monk or whether they are pseudepigraphical works, “completed all the main lines of the mystical theology of the Fathers,” also continuing the philosophical traditions of the Neo-Platonists through the channel of one of their last great teachers, Proclus Diadochus.[46] After Proclus, Dionysius interpreted the hypostases of One, Intelligence and Soul as God, angels and demons, and human souls, but without incorporating the Neo-Platonists’ emanation. In Dionysian mysticism, illumination was the tie between the three, the angels passing this light from God through their own ranks, and then on to men.[47] The purpose of these hierarchies is to provide sensible images of the heavenly minds so as to aid humans in their ascent to godliness.[48]