The Fathers of the Church are the saintly bishops and priests of the first centuries who bear witness to the apostolic tradition and hand it on in their writings and ministry. They identify the canon of Scripture, exemplify the principles of biblical interpretation, shape the early liturgies, compose the creeds, define the rule of faith, and lay the foundations of canon law and the Church’s pastoral activity. Reading them is indispensable for a Catholic education. Perhaps the Fathers of the first two centuries are the best place to start. They are called the Apostolic Fathers because they learnt the faith from the Apostles or their immediate successors. Mike Aquilina has written widely on the Fathers of the Church and will share his pick of the best books on the Apostolic Fathers.
Mike Aquilina is author of more than sixty books, including The Fathers of the Church and The Mass of the Early Christians. He is executive vice-president of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology. He also serves as a contributing editor of Angelus News and general editor of the Reclaiming Catholic History series published by Ave Maria Press. He hosts the “Way of the Fathers” podcast for Catholic Culture. He has co-hosted eleven television series on EWTN. Aquilina is also a poet and songwriter, whose works have been recorded by Dion, Paul Simon, Van Morrison, Amy Grant, Bruce Springsteen, and others.
- Four Witnesses: The Early Church in Her Own Words
(also available for Kindle)
by Rod Bennett - The Early Church (33–313): St. Peter, the Apostles, and Martyrs
(also available for Kindle)
by James L. Papandrea - The Christians as the Romans Saw Them
by Robert L. Wilken - The Rise of Christianity
by Rodney Stark - We Look for a Kingdom: The Everyday Lives of the Early Christians
(also available for Kindle)
by Carl J. Sommer - Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers
(also availble for Kindle)
by Andrew Louth
Who are the Church Fathers and why should we read them?
Well, the Fathers are those we venerate in a special way as teachers in the Catholic Church. We venerate them as teachers and witnesses from the first generations of Christianity. It is an important role that they play. They show us what life was like in the Church during the first century, and so on, up to the middle of the eighth century. They reveal the culture as it was in the time of our Lord. We have such a hard time imagining what life was like in those times because we have technologies today that that they could not dream about then. There was no electricity. There were no mass media. There was no easy transportation to get from one place to another. Life expectancy was very short and infant mortality was very high; childhood mortality was very high. It is a world much different from our own. The Fathers give us a window into that world, and it is a window into the world of the New Testament. They were viewing that world—the world of our Lord, of Saint Paul, and the other apostles—from a privileged position. They share that position with us.
They were also the early commenters on Sacred Scripture. They witness to us the way the Church has always interpreted Sacred Scripture and acted upon the content of Revelation. This is also very important to us.
We learn how to live as Christians, as the early Christians did, from the writings of the Church Fathers. They are teachers. They are witnesses. They are the ones who set things down in writing and whose writings have survived.
It took a lot of effort and a lot of trouble to preserve those writings because as I said, there were there were no mass media nor printing presses. Every single page that we have of the Church Fathers—and I have an office full of these books—had to be copied out by hand, laboriously, and at great expense. You had to hire a scribe to do it. They also did it at great risk. It was a capital crime then to own a Christian book.
The Fathers’ works were copied out over and over again because they were not writing on acid-free paper in those days. The copies themselves were perishable. They had to be re-copied again and again, each time at great expense and great risk. Yet the Christians of that time thought it important enough to take that risk, to make that expense, and copy the works of the Fathers, to preserve them for future generations, including our own. This a precious legacy that we have in the Church.
"The Fathers are those we venerate in a special way as teachers in the Catholic Church. We venerate them as teachers and witnesses from the first generations of Christianity"
Unfortunately, if I'm not mistaken, we only we only have a fraction of their writings. Many of them have been lost.
That is right. The Fathers refer to other works that we no longer possess. We have lists of books by a certain author, and yet we only possess one book by that author. At the same time, things turn up all the time. In the last hundred years we have discovered long lost works by Saint Augustine or by Melito of Sardis. These things have just turned up in archives around the world or walled up behind the plaster in a monastery. You never know what we are going to find in the future decades.
Fingers crossed. What led you to study the Fathers and write about them?
Well, when I was little, I used to read books about archaeology, such as Schliemann's account of his discovery of Troy. I wanted to be like that guy: to go, have your trowel in hand, just dig for a while, discover a great city or some great treasure, or unearth some ancient temple that was stunning in its beauty. As you get older you find out what it is really like. You learn that archaeologists spend weeks on end with a toothbrush and a toothpick, going over little pieces of plaster that they are pulling out of the ground. It is laborious work. It is tedious work. It takes a lot of patience, and I didn't have a lot of patience. But I did have this attraction to antiquity and to artefacts. So, as I got more serious about my faith, I was drawn to the works of the early Church Fathers because they are artefacts. We can touch these works and we are touching something from that period. We are finding those years suddenly illuminated for us, whereas before they had been in obscurity. Now we can see them, and we can see them fairly clearly. That excited me.
The Church Fathers, in addition to being all those wonderful things that I mentioned earlier, are also very lively personalities. Once you start getting into reading them, especially Fathers such as Ignatius of Antioch or Clement of Rome, they capture your heart. You know that you want to be friends with these people. You are hooked.
That is how I got hooked. I got to reading the Church Fathers when I was was young. Then, I got into journalistic work. I was writing, doing a lot of freelance work, and struck up friendships with several of the publishers that I was working for. One of them noticed this and asked me to write a popular introduction to the Church Fathers, because, at that time, there was no such book.
I wrote that book, and writing it really changed the course of my life. It surprised everyone by becoming popular and actually selling some units So, my publisher wanted more books on the Church Fathers, and who better to write them than Mike Aquilina?
The thing about this field is that the scholars either do not have time to write popular books or they do not have the inclination. Sometimes they do not have the particular skill that it takes to write for a popular audience. So, I was there to do journalism and have as my beat the first four centuries, and some fun doing it. I have been having fun for the last thirty years or so doing it.
There are various ways of reading the Fathers of the Church. Theologians tend to read the Fathers as witnesses to the apostolic tradition and doctrinal development. They study in detail the theological thought of each Church Father. Is it fair to say, that you, without neglecting the doctrinal side, read them more as a historian? Most of the books that you have selected focus on the historical and social background of the early Christians.
Yes, that is true. I am trying to reach ordinary people. As I said, when I started doing this, there just were not popular books about the Fathers. I was being asked to write the books that I needed to read but were just not there. I had to immerse myself in a lot of the academic literature and I enjoyed that. But the books that I produced were aimed at an intelligent, engaged, popular audience. I was trying to reach ordinary people in the pews who have a great curiosity about antiquity.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls after World War Two was a bombshell. Suddenly the Dead Sea Scrolls were everywhere. There was a lot of interest in them. There were books about them. There were conferences about them. It ended up being a cottage industry. This shows us that there is a desire to have this engagement and encounter with the ancients, our most distant ancestors. The sales of that first book, The Fathers of the Church, and then the book that I did as a follow up, The Mass of the Early Christians, have confirmed that there is that interest out there. People want to know these things, and they are willing to plunk down at least a few dollars to learn about them. It is a natural curiosity, that is paired in this case with a supernatural curiosity. These are our fathers in the faith. They are great saints. We want to have that bond with them.
1.
The first book on your list is Rod Bennett’s Four Witnesses. It presents excerpts from the writings of four early Church Fathers and martyrs—Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin, and Irenaeus of Lyon—and tells their story. Why have you chosen this book?
Well, because that is a book that gives us this imaginative entry into the world of the Fathers. Rod Bennett, just to give a little bit of his background, was a convert to the Catholic faith.
But for many years before his conversion, he edited Wonder Magazine, a magazine of genre fiction. It was for fans of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He had Ray Bradbury writing for him. Rod was operating at a very high level of imaginative retelling. He is a remarkable guy who has a great skill for the novelistic retelling of the stories of the Fathers.
He always tries to use as many of the actual words of the Father as he can, and he incorporates them into a novelistic semi-fictional presentation of what was going on at the time. When you read books like Four Witnesses and its sequel you are encountering the Fathers and getting to know them as characters. You become attached to them and sense a growing friendship with them
The great value of these books is that they include actual excerpts from Fathers, but they are seamlessly woven into the narrative, as if it is all part of the same novel.
I really recommend the works of Rod Bennett, beginning with Four Witnesses, which has changed so many lives.
Often, when you hear conversion stories, especially those of former Protestants, they talk about the books that influence them. Four Witnesses is often on those lists. Last year, I was giving some lectures in Rome. On the flight over, I could see that the man across the aisle was reading Four More Witnesses. So, I said a prayer for that guy and for a fruitful reading of that book.
2.
The second book comes from the Reclaiming Catholic History series that you edit: James L. Papandrea’s The Early Church (33–313): St. Peter, the Apostles, and Martyrs. What makes this a good introduction to the Apostolic Fathers?
Because you see the clear continuity between the Apostolic Fathers and the very next generation. It is not that there was some hard cultural or intellectual break between the apostles and the generation that came after them. No, this was this was the generation of their disciples: the men they had converted to the faith, baptised, prepared, and given the commission to take the Gospel to the world. So, you see the continuity between the New Testament and the time of the Apostolic Fathers, the title we give to the earliest Church Fathers.
I would say that every one of the authors or books on this list really does represent the author. This was the case with Jim Papandrea. I revere his works. I have a shelf of the behind me, and I draw from them quite often. This one is representative and is his most popular work.
Jim, like Rod, is a novelist also. He is a great scholar. He is a preeminent scholar of the third century Latin Fathers and has written major works on Novatian. You cannot study that period in Rome without getting into the works Jim Papandrea.
At the same time, he is a popular novelist. He has written mystery stories, children stories, books for adolescents. He is also a popular songwriter. So, he is someone who can communicate these writings and this world in a very direct way. When you read him, you are entering that world again.
Today, the obstacle to reading the writings of the Fathers is not access. There was a time when it was hard to get your hands on these books. They were printed by these obscure presses in faraway places. Your local public Library was not going to carry them. You had to make an effort to get them. Now, most of the writings of the Fathers are available for free online at newadvent.org at tertullian.org.
Access is not the problem anymore. What we need today is an imaginative entry into that world: a way of gaining access that is that is more vivid, vital, and full of understanding. The first two authors on our list give us that experience and they take us into that world in a very vivid way.
3.
Unlike the preceding books, the third one, Robert L. Wilken’s The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, studies how pagans in the Roman Empire viewed the growing religion. Wilken explains that he began by studying the Christian apologists. However, he realised that he could not fully understand them unless he also understood the attitudes and intellectual framework of the non-Christian world in which they lived, moved, and thought. To gain such an understanding, he looks at what five pagan authors—Pliny, Galen, Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian the Apostate—think about Christianity. How can looking at Christianity through the eyes of these authors help us understand the Fathers, and, more generally, Christianity?
Well, again, this the world in which the Apostolic Fathers lived. During those first centuries, Christians made-up a significant but tiny minority of the people in any given city. What was the dominant culture that they had to deal with?
The other thing that I want to understand is the psychology of the prosecutors. Why did they feel that these peace-loving Christians were such a threat to the social order? And they did! They made a big effort to kill a lot of Christians, especially during the third-century persecution of Decius, and then that of Diocletian. It is interesting to understand why they were doing this and going to so much trouble. It was a lot of trouble. You were alienating a large portion of your populace and cutting them out from a lot of productive activity. You were cutting out their ability to pay taxes or contribute to the legal system. Many of the early Christians, or a significant number of them, were lawyers, judges, or prominent persons within their community.
So, what was it about Christianity that that made it so alien to the Roman mind and seem to be a significant threat?
Is important for us to ask this question, indeed, to do so every day, in every age. Even today, if we are attacked by people outside the Church or the dominant culture, it is important for us to ask why, so that we can prepare a proper, effective response. Otherwise, we are just going to be spitting into the wind.
Wilkens also notes that many of the themes identified by the first pagan critics of Christianity have remained critical issues: Christianity's relationship to Judaism, creatio ex nihilo, Christ's divinity and humanity, biblical truth, Christianity's relation to civil religion. Do we still need to look to the Church Fathers for answers to these questions?
Yes, because the Church Fathers gave compelling answers to these questions. Today, we need to consider empirical science as well. At that time, it was pretty primitive. While today we need to go deeper in different ways, I think it is still important to study the Church Fathers.
Take Celsus. He was the great writer of encyclopaedias and gathered together all the knowledge on a particular field. He wrote encyclopaedias of medicine, agriculture, and so on. He was revered for his knowledge. Yet the Fathers were willing to take on that kind of intellectual and put good arguments out there. The ones that Origen posed against Celsus in the third century are still solid today. Further on, Julian the Apostate brings up a lot of the arguments of the “new atheists”, especially the arguments of the extreme historical critics. The early Fathers generally responded to these arguments in very intelligent and useful ways.
4.
Your fourth choice is The Rise of Christianity by Rodney Stark, who passed away earlier this year. Stark was a leading sociologist of religion. In the introduction, he mentions Wilken's The Christians as the Romans Saw Them as one of the books that sparked his interest in early Christianity and led him to undertake a more rigorous sociological study of its rise. What are the main takeaways from Stark's book and how can his findings help us understand the Church Fathers?
Well, you know, Stark identified himself as an agnostic when he wrote this book. He had no vested interest in making us look good. But boy, did he make us look good.
" Stark says that so many of the things that made Christians countercultural during that time and brought on the pagan persecution were the very things that made Christianity distinctive and different. So, if you want to be successful as a religious movement, you lean into those things."
What he showed is that the Church grew worldwide at a fairly steady rate of about 40% per decade from the first to the fourth century. Now, this was a time of intense persecution. It was a time of many social and natural disasters. Stark brings those up and he shows how the Christians responded to social disasters, invasions, threats from the Barbarians, natural disasters, such as plagues and floods. He notes how the Christians were doing things that none of the pagans were. The Christians had a religious basis for charitable actions, to the point of self-sacrifice. During these times, they invented the institution we know today as the hospital, because there were epidemics at that time. How do you provide medical care for a lot of people when a plague hit your town. Who were the first people to leave? The doctors! They knew and could see the constellation of symptoms. They knew what was causing it, in general, and that there was nothing they could do to stop it. So, they left town to protect themselves and their families, and you can't blame them for that. But the Christians were duty-bound to care for the sick. They took care even of the pagan sick, their neighbours who were persecuting them. Those who survived wanted to become Christians because they were so moved by their love. We see this happening over and over again throughout that period. Stark says that so many of the things that made Christians countercultural during that time and brought on the pagan persecution were the very things that made Christianity distinctive and different. So, if you want to be successful as a religious movement, you lean into those things. You lean into the things that make you different, that make you distinctive. You keep on getting the message out there by way of the apologists to explain the truth with clarity and charity. But lean into the differences and you will have growth because accommodation does not really get us anywhere.
Stark argues that the early Christian mission to the Jews was successful overall, and that, as you mentioned, Christianity rose through its exponential growth rather than mass conversions. Is the early Christianity of the Fathers instructive for the pastoral practice of the Church today?
It gives us an appreciation for the difference Christianity has made in society, as we have it today. At the end of the book, he has an interesting chapter: “A Brief Reflection on Virtue”. He makes the case that Christianity really did provide us with certain virtues, ways of looking at life, and habits of living, that make life today a lot better, less violent and cruel than it had been. I found remedies for some of these things, though not cure-alls. Life in the Christian regime has not been perfect, but he says that it has been a big improvement over what was before. He attributes that to Christian principles and practices. It is good for Christians to appreciate that apart from Christianity, it is a hard to make a civilization with the kind of freedom and rights that we enjoy, or the kind of human dignity that we that we acknowledge today. We expect these ideas about human dignity, rights, and equality to exist everywhere. We expect institutions like the hospital or the university. However, these are the great contributions of Christianity. I believe that, historically, they are not possible apart from the Gospel. Maybe we are going to find out in the course of history that they are not possible apart from the Gospel at all.
There is a really good book that came out a few years ago and was a New York Times bestseller: Dominion by the British historian Tom Holland. He is not a Christian but an agnostic, and he is horrified by what he sees in the world. He fears that we are losing civilization because we are losing hold of our Christianity. Again, this man is writing as a non-Christian, but he is terrified of what the future might hold if we have a reversion to the kind of paganism that was the dominant culture at the time of the early Church Fathers.
They overcame that. They converted that world successfully. We need to learn how to do what they did if we want life to be liveable for our children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren.
5.
Finally, there is Carl J. Sommer’s We Look for a Kingdom: The Everyday Lives of the Early Christians. What does it add beyond the preceding books?
We can read the works of the Early Fathers and of historians and come to think of the ancient world as peopled by intellectuals, always standing around with their finger in the air and having these metaphysical conversations that we do not understand. We can get the impression that everyone was literate and had enough money to live a comfortable life. That is just not true. Most people were illiterate. Unlike the Fathers and the educated pagans, they left no real trace in history.
Using archaeology and a lot of the documentary records, Carl Sommer gives us insight into the world as it was experienced by ordinary people: ordinary Christians and their Pagan neighbours. What was life like? How did you get your food if you lived in a city? What kind of food did you eat? What kind of money were you using? Were you bartering?
Carl Sommer gives us a look at that world and helps us to understand its workings on the ground. If you were travelling in the early part of the twentieth century, you needed the Baedeker Guide for whatever country you were visiting. That was the gold-standard for understanding the customs of that country, a little bit of the language, and what to expect when you got there. When I was travelling in the early part of this century, I used to get the Blue Guide to whatever city I was living in.
Well, Carl has given us a Baedeker Guide or a Blue Guide to the ancient world, so that we can understand what life for ordinary folks. It is an invaluable book about our ancestors and helps us to understand what happened during centuries-long process of conversion of the Empire. It help us understand what happened in in the lower classes, the people who made-up perhaps a majority of the converts during that time. These are the people who really conquered the world.
6.
For your extended list, you propose. Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers edited by Andrew Louth. This contains Maxwell Stanforth’s translation of the writings of the apostolic fathers. Why have you chosen this edition rather than other translations?
Well, the other translations are good too. I chose this one because it is easily accessible. You can buy it for a few dollars in the Penguin Classics edition.
I have many different collections of the Apostolic Fathers. Probably, my favourite collection in terms of the translations and the notes is the multi-volume edition that Kenneth J. Howell did for the Coming Home Network. I went with Andrew Louth’s edition in Penguin Classics because it is not only easily accessible, but also a single volume edition. The most Catholic of all the editions available is Kenneth Howell’s. Its notes and introductions are wonderful. But, Andrew Louth’s edition is a very good, ecumenical translation and introduction to the earliest texts.
There is also this Michael Holmes’ edition. It has the texts of the Fathers in the original language along with the translation, if you want to take that extra step
All of those other books are really just preparation to get you into the ancient texts and to help you to read them as an intelligent and sympathetic reader.
This is where you want to end up. You want to end up in the texts themselves, reading the Fathers, encountering them one-on-one, and getting to know their writings.
