Reading the Fathers

A homily is not a treatise, a letter in controversy is not a catechism, and a saint's life is not a chronicle. Most misuse of the Fathers begins with reading one genre as though it were another.

Alexandrian writers tended toward allegory, Antiochene writers toward the plain sense, though the contrast is often drawn too sharply and both schools used typology. Origen shaped the practice of both, which is one reason his condemnation did not remove his influence.

The practical rules are simple and easily forgotten: read the surrounding passage, identify the edition and translation, check whether the work is genuinely by the author whose name it bears, and ask whether the Church received the position or merely preserved the text.

Follow this theme through the archive

• Origen

  The greatest biblical scholar of the ancient Church and the source of much later exegesis, condemned by name in the sixth century. His influence and his condemnation are both real and neither cancels the other.

  Father or writer

• Clement of Alexandria

  Teacher at Alexandria who argued that Greek philosophy had prepared the Greeks for Christ. Honoured in some Orthodox usage and not universally; his reception is genuinely mixed.

  Father or writer

• Ephrem the Syrian

  Deacon, poet and teacher who did his theology in hymns rather than treatises, and whose Syriac writing is the great witness that the Church's thought was never only Greek and Latin.

  Father or writer

• How to read a Father

  Genre, edition, attribution and reception — four questions to ask before you quote anything.

  Lesson