Fathers of the Church, The.
1. The term 'Fathers'.—This term, as used in the sense of spiritual parents of the Christian faith and life, appears to have become current in the fourth century. It was so used by Christian teachers, who cited as authoritative the great teachers and guides who were their predecessors. By the 'Fathers' they meant, specifically, the earlier writers who carried on the work of instruction which was begun by Peter and John and the rest of the Apostles. As employed nowadays, the term has a great fluidity of meaning. In the widest sense it signifies all ecclesiastical writers (i.e. all writers within the Christian Church who treat of matters of Christian belief and practice) belonging to the older post-Apostolic period. In the narrower and more frequent sense it signifies only those ecclesiastical writers of the older post-Apostolic period who conform, more or less, to the Catholic tradition. As St. Vincent of Lérins lays it down, "Those alone should be named 'Fathers' who have been staunch in the communion and faith of the One Catholic Church, and have received ecclesiastical approbation as teachers".
2. Fathers and Doctors.—To such among the Fathers as were regarded as the most eminent the distinguishing title of 'Teachers' (doctores) was given. Thus in the Western Church Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory I were the four great Teachers or Doctors; while in the Eastern Church a similar position was assigned to Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Chrysostom. But others also have been acknowledged as Doctors, as Hilary of Poitiers, Cyril of Alexandria, John of Damascus, and our one English Father (born out of due season) the Venerable Bede—not to speak of the application of the term to some of the mediæval Schoolmen.
3. The Patristic Period.—While it is universally agreed that the Apostolic Age is succeeded by the Age of the Fathers, there is a difference of view as to when the Age of the Fathers terminates. Gregory I (the Great) is usually regarded as the last of the Latin or Western Fathers and the first of the Schoolmen, and John of Damascus as the last of the Greek or Eastern Fathers. But where the term 'Fathers' is broadly used to designate the older Church writers in general, the tendency is—and it is logically defensible—to extend the Patristic period far beyond the Age of the Great Fathers (325-451), and to include among the later Fathers
many mediæval writers. Thus the Abbé Migne, who in the middle of last century issued a monumental edition of the original Greek and Latin texts of the Fathers, carried the Latin Fathers as far as Innocent III in the beginning of the thirteenth century, and the Greek Fathers down to the Council of Florence and the fall of Constantinople in the middle of the fifteenth century.
4. Division and Classification.—The broadest division of the Fathers is according to locality, and is into Eastern and Western. To this the division according to language, into Greek and Latin, largely corresponds. But it is to be remembered that in the early Patristic Age, or before Tertullian, Latin was not used by ecclesiastical writers. It is also to be remembered that among the Eastern Fathers there were writers in Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic, as well as Greek. Another broad and general division is into ante-Nicene, Nicene, and post-Nicene; which is according to the principle that the Council of Nicæa (A.D. 325) marks the transition from a simple and unsystematized to a unified doctrinal testimony. But it is usual in Church history, while observing the aforesaid general divisions, to arrange the Fathers in certain historical groups, representing for the most part distinct schools of thought. There are, however, great names that cannot be conveniently treated under any historical group, such names as Irenæus, Athanasius, Jerome, Leo the Great, and Gregory the Great. Keeping this in view, we might classify the Fathers in accordance with the following scheme: (1) the Apostolic Fathers (the best known of whom are Clement of Rome, Ignatius, and Polycarp), who received their title not only as being younger contemporaries and perhaps personal disciples of Apostles, but also for their nearness and faithfulness to the Apostolic tradition; (2) the Greek Apologists (the most notable of whom is Justin Martyr), who sought to defend Christian truth on rational and philosophical grounds against both Jew and pagan; (3) the Alexandrians (outstanding among whom are Clement and Origen), who greatly furthered the development of Christian theology in general, but whose names are specially associated with the allegorical and mystical type of Scriptural interpretation; (4) the North African School (to which Tertullian and Cyprian belong), who shaped Christian Latinity, as well as the theology and ecclesiastical polity of the West; (5) the Cappadocians (in which group the most prominent members are Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa), who caught up the theology of Athanasius, providing it with well-defined terms, and so laying broad the foundations of the Greek orthodoxy; (6) the Antiochians (among whom Chrysostom, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Theodoret are the greatest), who were opposed to the Alexandrian mysticism and held by the literal and historical mode of Scriptural interpretation; (7) the Western Nicene Group (counting in their number eminent teachers like Hilary of Poitiers and Ambrose), who followed the Alexandrians in their exegetical method, and in their dogmatic theology Athanasius and the Cappadocians; (8) the School of Augustine, in which the Western theological tradition set by Tertullian and Cyprian culminated; (9) the School of Lérins (leading members of which are Hilary of Arles and Vincentius), which attempted to mitigate the extreme Augustinian doctrines of sin and grace.
5. Value of Patristic Study.—Among the Fathers are many great thinkers and writers (not to say orators, organizers, and statesmen) who should be studied for their own sake, and for the influence they have wielded. We would only indicate here some of the various uses of patristic study. (1) The student of the Bible turns to the Fathers, and especially the earlier of them, for light upon the problem of the true or original text of the Bible—although very few of the Fathers knew the Hebrew tongue, and only Origen and Jerome can throw direct light upon the Old Testament text. To the Fathers also, especially great exegetes like Origen, Chrysostom, Jerome, and Augustine, the Biblical student turns for light upon the meaning of the sacred text, and for knowledge of the history of its interpretation. (2) The student of Church history finds first-hand material in the Fathers for the older post-Apostolic period. This material is supplied in the tractates and letters of the Fathers generally. But patristic writers from Eusebius downwards furnish us also with formal histories of the Church of both a general and special character. Patristic histories, as indeed all histories, are to be used with critical caution. And not only do the Fathers inform us as to the course of events; we are dependent upon them for our knowledge of the development of creed and liturgy, ritual and order, and other Christian institutions. (3) The student of ecclesiastical dogma and Christian theology in general cannot dispense with the study of the Fathers. The patristic was the formative and, in a sense, conclusive period of Christian theology. In the ancient Greek theology the idea of God was developed, and in the so-called Nicene Creed and the Chalcedonian Definition the doctrines of the Trinity and the Person of Christ respectively received their final Greek dogmatic expression. Landmarks in the history of this dogmatic development are the names of Origen, Athanasius, Basil and the Gregories, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Leo the Great. In the ancient Latin theology, in accordance with the more practical genius of the Westerns, the doctrine
of man was developed, and of sin and grace. With this anthropological or soteriological, as distinguished from the other more strictly theological movement, the names of Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine are principally associated. It was left to the mediaeval theologians to work out the doctrine of the Work of Christ.—Bibliography: F. W. Farrar, Lives of the Fathers; E. Leigh-Bennett, Handbook of the Early Christian Fathers; S.P.C.K., The Fathers for English Readers (a series of biographies); also Early Church Classics (a series of translations); H. B. Swete, Patristic Study (1902: an excellent introduction to the field of patristic learning, with useful bibliographies); W. Bright, The Age of the Fathers.
Fat´imite Dynasty, a line of caliphs claiming descent from Fatima, the favourite daughter of Mohammed, and of Ali her cousin, to whom she was married. In the year 909 Abu-Mohammed Obeidalla, giving himself out as the grandson of Fatima, endeavoured to pass himself off as the Mahdi or Messiah predicted by the Koran. Denounced as an impostor by the reigning Caliph of Bagdad, he fled into Egypt, became Caliph of Tunis, and soon conquered all Northern Africa from the Straits of Gibraltar to the borders of Egypt. His son wrested Egypt from the Abbasides in 970 and founded Cairo. The Fatimite dynasty was extinguished in 1171, on the death of Al Adid, the fourteenth caliph, and a new line began with Saladin.
Fatty Acids, the homologues of formic and acetic acid; so called because the members first studied were obtained from fats and oils, e.g. butyric acid from butter, stearic acid from stearin, palmitic acid from palm-oil. These acids are present united with glycerol in the fats as glycerides, and are obtained from them by saponification with superheated steam or mineral acids, when the fatty acid is liberated, floats to the surface, and glycerol remains in solution. They are all monobasic acids; the lower members are colourless liquids, and the higher members from C7H15COOH upwards are colourless solids. The general formula for the series is CnH2n + 1COOH (where n = the number of carbon atoms in the alkyl group).