Church Fathers

I think many of the church fathers we are dealing with were nuts. I don’t think that just because they can throw together a few theological statements cohesively proves their sanity. Self castration (eek!) and other forms of bodily mutilation, failing to wash themselves…sometimes for decades, diatribe after venomous diatribe against people who believe differently than themselves, these are just a few symptoms of the symptoms of their madness.

We…and I mean modern society, seem determined to continue holding these folks in high repute just because they were on the winning side and their “truth” was the truth that has echoed down through the ages. My wife works as a public defender and we have joked that these “Fathers”, if they were espousing their rhetoric today, or behaving as the histories represent them, would be hooked and booked and given a thorough psychological examination, many of whom would fail, being found to be a danger to themselves and/or others. I know, I know, we should try to look at them as their contemporaries did…well, a filthy, unwashed, self mutilating madman spewing hate was just as crazy in late antiquity as he is now.

If we are able to step beyond apologetic misconceptions and view these people through a different lens, the way we see things change. So many of them spent more time attacking other believers than promoting their own beliefs. Irenaus and his “masterwork” was a religious intolerant that would not be accepted by most of us in today’s relatively pluralistic society. Augustine expended considerable time and effort attacking Manicheans and Pelagius and some people revere him as a saint. I know apologists say he felt obligated to renounce Manichaeism since he had promoted it before but that is just making excuses. Would we accept the same from a Catholic leader who joined the Mormon Church and then started publishing anti-Catholic books? Would we nod in approval as he condemned Catholics as heretical? I don’t think so. These people sound like the Jerry Fallwell’s and Pat Robertsons’ of their day.

Now, none of this means that everything they said or wrote is crazy. Charles Manson made some very astute observations about capitalism and the mistreatments of the poor by the rich….but he was a crazed homicidal lunatic. None of this means that they are not worthy of study….Hitler wrote Mien Kamph and in order to understand the history of Nazi Germany it needs to be read and understood. In order to understand the evolution of Christianity we need to understand the men who established conventional orthodoxy. When we look at them through the lenses of rose colored glasses we fail to see them and the system the established for what it and they were.

The “Fathers” established a church that gave us intolerance, persecution hate, war and pogroms. It gave us corruption, greed, lust, and the secularization and politicization of the Christian tradition. Through the middle ages the Church was a political monstrosity that sought to exert its power throughout Christendom, bestowing and withholding church favor in furtherance of a narrow and partisan political agenda. It gave us the Crusades. It gave us the sack of Constantinople and the destruction of the Eastern Empire, it gave us the Inquisition, and the depth of its corruption led to the reformation and the resulting religious wars that wracked the European continent, it gave us the slaughter of indigenous people around the world, and many, many more horrific crimes across the globe and across time to numerous to enumerate.

These “Fathers” were what they were and failing to look at them for what they were is failing to see them for who they were….as it was written, “By their fruits you shall no them”. The fruits of the fathers are there for all to see….intolerance, persecution, death, war.

When I look back through the mists of time I have much, much more in common with the Gnostics and the Pagan Mystery religions than any of the Fathers or the Ortho-Catholic Church they brought into being.