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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 May 2021
‘Faith’ is one of Christianity's most significant, distinctive and complex concepts and practices, but Christian understandings of faith in the patristic period have received surprisingly little attention. This article explores two aspects of what Augustine terms fides qua, ‘the faith by which believers believe’. From the early second century, belief in the truth of doctrine becomes increasingly significant to Christians; by the fourth, affirming that certain doctrines are true has become central to becoming Christian and to remaining within the church. During the same period, we find a steady growth in poetic and imagistic descriptions of interior faith. This article explores how and why these developments occurred, arguing that they are mutually implicated and that this period sees the beginning of their long co-existence.
I am grateful to Alec Ryrie and the committee of the Ecclesiastical History Society for the invitation to speak at its 2019 Summer Conference, and to participants for their stimulating responses to the paper.
1 ‘Faith’ is a placeholder for the complexity of Greek pistis, Latin fides and comparable terms in other languages of early churches, whose meanings include ‘trust’, ‘trustworthiness’, ‘faithfulness’, ‘good faith’, ‘a pledge’, ‘a guarantee’, a legal trust, a rhetorical proof, ‘belief’ and (among Christians) the ‘new covenant’, the content of doctrine and ‘the faith’.
2 Teresa Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith: pistis and fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches (Oxford, 2015), 103. Why pistis language became so important to Christians so early remains uncertain. Calling people to trust in God may go back to Jesus himself: ibid. 350–2. Other Jewish groups in this period self-designate as (for example) wise, pure or faithful, so ‘the [truly / properly] faithful’ may have begun as a self-designation among Jewish Christians: ibid. 238–9. The absolute trustworthiness of God and Christ was part of early preaching at a time when trust, especially in people, was widely perceived as difficult and precarious: ibid. 36–122. Pistis language is unlikely, however, to have arisen to refer to believing in the resurrection (although it also came to mean that), because hoi pisteuontes and hoi pistoi are used interchangeably for ‘the faithful’, and the latter cannot mean ‘believers’: ibid. 239–41.
3 Ibid., especially 262–306, 347–93.
4 Notable exceptions include Oscar Cullmann's essay collection, La Foi et le culte de l’église primitive (Paris, 1963); Ignacio Escribano-Alberca, Handbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 1/2a: Glaube und Gotteserkenntnis in der Schrift und Patristik (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1974); Elliott, Mark, ‘Pistis Christou’, in Bird, Michael F. and Sprinkle, Preston M., eds, The Faith of Jesus Christ (Milton Keynes, 2010), 277–90Google Scholar; O'Donovan, Oliver, ‘Faith before Hope and Love’, New Blackfriars 95 (2014), 177–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These make significant contributions on specific questions, such as the evolution of creeds, the relationship between pistis and gnosis, and whether Christians sought to imitate the faithfulness of Christ.
5 Biblical quotations are taken from the New American Bible, Revised Edition.
6 Whether all Jews were strictly monotheistic in this period is debated, but believing (for instance) that multiple supernatural powers existed or that Elijah or Enoch was taken into heaven by God did not necessarily entail worship: Newman, Carey C., ed., The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism (Leiden, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hurtado, Larry W., One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism, 3rd edn (London, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Morgan, Roman Faith, especially 212–443.
8 This is why historians speak of ‘orthodoxy’ (right opinion) rather than ‘orthopisty’ (right faith or belief).
9 I am indebted to Mark Edwards for sharing his unpublished essay, ‘Pistis and Platonism’.
10 For example, Plutarch, Moralia 165b, 359f–360b, 417a; idem, Life of Numa 4.3–4, Lucian, Icaromenippus 10; idem, Alexander 38, cf. Morgan, Teresa, ‘Doxa, praxis and Graeco-Roman Religious Thinking’, in Paget, James Carleton, Gathercole, Simon and Lieu, Judith, eds, Christianity in the Second Century: Themes and Developments (Cambridge, 2017), 200–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John Wynne, Cicero on the Philosophy of Religion: On the Nature of the Gods and On Divination (Cambridge, 2019), 50–82.
11 Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 10.60–1, 63. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
12 For example, Epictetus, Discourses 2.14.11–14; cf. Maximus of Tyre, Oration 27.7b–9d; Alcinous, Introduction to Plato 28.3–4.
13 For this view Christians adduce the this-worldly evidence of prophecy: Athenagoras, Apology 7.28–9.
14 Origen, Against Celsus 1.9.
15 Plutarch, Moralia 404b; Josephus, Against Apion 2.256.4; Anonymous Commentary on Plato's Theaetetus, 2.52, 3.14, 3.16, 15.9; cf. Plutarch, Moralia 333b, 379b–c; Dillon, John M., ‘“Orthodoxy” and “Eclecticism”: Middle Platonists and Neo-Pythagoreans’, in idem and Long, A. A., eds, The Question of Eclecticism: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy (Berkeley, CA, 1988), 103–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
16 See especially Osborn, Eric, ‘Arguments for Faith in Clement of Alexandria’, Vigiliae Christianae 48 (1994), 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lilla, Salvatore R. C., Clement of Alexandria: A Study in Christian Platonism and Gnosticism (Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar, Section 3.
17 Clement, Stromateis 1.6.27, 2.9.45, 2.12.55. For Clement faith is always a free choice: e.g. ibid. 2.2.9, 2.4.12.
18 Ibid. 2.3.13.
19 Ibid. 2.11.48–9, 5.1.5–6.
20 Ibid. 1.7.38, 2.4.48.
21 Ibid. 2.2, 2.9–12, 2.4.14–15, 5.1.
22 Ibid. 7.10.55, 57, 2.22.126.
23 Ibid. 1.10.2–3.
24 Elsewhere, Origen does not match Clement's interest in pistis, but focuses more on the importance of knowledge (in which he is followed, notably, by the Cappadocians).
25 Teresa Morgan, ‘Origen's Celsus and Imperial Greek Religiosity’, in James Carleton Paget and Simon Gathercole, eds, Celsus in his World (Cambridge, forthcoming).
26 He assumes that even the uneducated hold trust-based beliefs: Gunnar af Hällström, Fides Simpliciorum according to Origen of Alexandria (Helsinki, 1984), 20–42.
27 The idea that trust is a rational risk is now a commonplace of trust theory in the social sciences, but this passage is highly unusual among ancient writings (cf. Arnobius, Adversus nationes 2.8), although his point, that we plant in the belief that we will reap, etc., casts trust as justified (experience-based) belief, not rational risk.
28 As opposed to idol-worship or incest, for example, which Paul already thinks are grounds for expulsion in 1 Cor. 10: 21 and 5: 4–5 respectively.
29 Writing several decades later: Tertullian, On the Prescription of Heretics 30.2. Judith Lieu observes that even in the mid-second century, claims of excommunications are anachronistic: Marcion and the Making of a Heretic (Cambridge, 2015), 396.
30 Osborn, Eric, Tertullian, First Theologian of the West (Cambridge, 1997), 48–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf., probably a little later, Novatian, On the Trinity 1, 11, emphasizing the importance of fides and credere in the truth (as opposed to heresy). Irenaeus, Against Heresies, occasionally clearly uses the ‘belief’ register of pistis / pisteuein (e.g. 5.20.1, fragment 36), but often refers to (for example) the ‘kērygma and pistis’ (e.g. 1.3.1) received, distinguishing the content of preaching (or ‘preaching of the truth’, e.g. 1.3.2, cf. 1.9.4) from pistis in it. The slightly later Refutation of All Heresies still prefers homologein, alētheia or alēthēs logos, for example, when speaking of what the faithful believe.
31 Apostolic Tradition 21.11–18; on reconstructions of the text, see Wolfram Kinzig, Christoph Markschies and Markus Vinzent, Tauffragen und Bekenntnis. Studien zur sogenannten ‘Traditio Apostolica’, zu den ‘Interrogationes de fide’ und zum ‘Römischen Glaubensbekenntnis’ (Berlin, 1999); Wolfram Kinzig, ed., Faith in Formulae: A Collection of Early Christian Creeds and Creed-Related Texts, 4 vols (Oxford, 2017), 1: 153–61. All surviving versions of the earliest baptismal formulae use pisteuein / credere language.
32 This is also a meaning of pistis / fides. Symbola are used as tokens of membership in some mystery cults: Kinzig, Formulae, 1: 6, 61–144; Plutarch, Moralia 611d; Apuleius, Apology 56; Origen, Against Celsus 6.22.
33 Westra, Liuwe H., The Apostles’ Creed: Origin, History, and some Early Commentaries (Turnhout, 2002), 71–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 Aeschylus, Agamemnon 174–5.
35 Deut. 6: 4.
36 Acts 19: 28.
37 Poimandres of Hermes Trismegistus, libellus 1.31.
38 T. Klauser, ‘Akklamation’, Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum 1 (Stuttgart, 1950), 213–33; Roueché, Charlotte, ‘Acclamations in the Later Roman Empire: New Evidence from Aphrodisias’, Journal of Roman Studies 74 (1984), 181–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 Livy, 1.38.1–2, cf. Polybius, 36.4.2, Plautus, Amphitruo 258–9; see Morgan, Roman Faith, 98–9. On the role of question and answer in admission to Roman Jewish communities, see Michel Dujarier, Le Parrainage des adultes aux trois premiers siècles de l’église (Paris, 1962), 82–9.
40 Deut. 26: 1–11. Kinzig suggests that Deut. 6: 4 and this passage are the nearest ancestors in the Hebrew Bible to Christian creeds: Formulae, 33–4.
41 Frances Young, The Making of the Creeds (London, 1991), 4.
42 Finn, Thomas M., Early Christian Baptism and the Catechumenate: West and East Syria (Collegeville, MN, 1992), 3–5Google Scholar; Harmless, William, Augustine and the Catechumenate, rev. edn (Collegeville, MN, 2014), 35–130Google Scholar.
43 Accounts of the evolution of orthodoxy and of creeds still typically assume that belief and specific beliefs were crucial to Christians from the earliest formation of churches, but this overlooks the dominance of trust / faithfulness meanings of pistis / fides language in early writings, such as recently Wolfram Kinzig, ‘From the Letter to the Spirit to the Letter: The Faith as Written Creed’, in idem, Neue Texte und Studien zu den antiken und frühmittelalterlichen Glaubensbekenntnissen (Berlin, 2017), 293–310.
44 For example, Gal. 2: 16, Rom. 3: 21–6.
45 Matt. 21: 21 = Mark 11: 23, cf. 1 Cor. 13: 2.
46 The apparent exception is Heb. 11: 1, but this is a description of how pistis works rather than a formal definition.
47 What follows focuses on images which appear multiple times in multiple (at least three and often a dozen or more) authors; these have the best claim to represent not just one author's idea but ideas that were widely shared and formed part of Christian mentalité.
48 Peter Chrysologus, Sermons 57.1 (faith is like a flaming coal taken from the altar to purify our lips).
49 Augustine, Letters 143.1, cf. John Chrysostom, Homilies on John 33.1; Paulinus of Nola, Poems 19.200–5.
50 John Chrysostom, Homilies on John 54.1.
51 Ambrose, Letters 7, to Iustus 2.
52 Morgan, Roman Faith, 220–2, 314–15, 336–8.
53 Vatican Coptic Papyrus 1.53, ET in Marvin W. Meyer and Richard Smith, Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power (Princeton, NJ, 1999), 253.
54 Vision 1, 2.1; 3, 2.4–5.
55 Cf. John Chrysostom, Catechetical Oration 1.19 (faith is the foundation on which everything else is built).
56 For example, Ephrem, Hymn on Faith 2.6, 49.6, 69.6; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses 5.7; Ambrose, On Faith 1.45–6.
57 We are used to the image of heaven as a palace, city or kingdom, but in these images it is always the harbour, surely reflecting that the most potent everyday Mediterranean experience of safety was of reaching harbour after a sea journey.
58 John Chrysostom, Homilies on John 33.1, cf. Augustine, Sermons on Matthew 75.2.
59 For example, Oxyrhynchus Papyri 18.430; Ambrose, Hymns 4.25–8.
60 Paulinus of Nola, Poems 26.99–103.
61 Cf. Prudentius, Against Symmachus 2.91–3; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses 4.6; Ephrem, Hymns on Faith 80.9.
62 W. Wischmeyer, ‘Die Aberkiosinschrift als Grabepigramm’, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 23 (1980), 22–47, at 24–6; ET in Peter Thonemann, ‘Abercius of Hierapolis’, in Beate Dignas and R. R. R. Smith, eds, Historical and Religious Memory in the Ancient World (Oxford, 2012), 257–79, at 259.
63 Françoise Descombes, Recueil des inscriptions chrétiennes de la Gaule antérieures à la Renaissance carolingienne, 15: Viennoise du Nord (Paris, 1985), 95, cf. 39.
64 Ambrose, Hymns 2.21–4.
65 Peter Chrysologus, Sermons 135; ET in St Peter Chrysologus, Selected Sermons; and St Valerian: Homilies, transl. George E. Ganss, Fathers of the Church 17 (Washington DC, 1953), 224. In the last sentence, quia fidelem tenebat promittentem, ‘because it was keeping faithful the one making promises’, is surely wrong, since God does not need to be kept faithful, while it would be odd to describe Laurence as making promises at the point of death.
66 Prudentius, Harmatogenia 852–5. Cana fides is another phrase with Roman origins.
67 Cf. Tertullian, On the Games 29; Gregory of Nyssa, Letter to Ablabius, lines 1–12, in Ekkehardus Mühlenberg and Giulio Maspero, eds, Gregorii Nysseni Opera, 5: Ad Ablabium, Quod non sint tres dei (Leiden, 2010), 37; John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 46.2; Paulinus of Nola, Poems 15.145–52. The idea also has abundant parallels in Fides, the divine hypostasis of Jupiter, and other personified qualities which help, and sometimes fight for, human beings in Greek and Roman cult, myth and literature. Christian personification also owes something to the biblical personification of wisdom, although Jewish personification of wisdom seems to fall away in this period: Peter Schäfer, Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbalah (Princeton, NJ, 2002), 79–117.
68 Cyril, Commentary on John 2.182 (on John 1.32–3); Ambrose, Hymns 10.25 (on the martyrs of Milan); cf. Jennifer R. Strawbridge, The Pauline Effect: The Use of the Pauline Epistles by Early Christian Writers (Berlin, 2015), 57–73.
69 Prudentius, Psychomachia 21–33.
70 See especially Macklin Smith, Prudentius’ Psychomachia (Princeton, NJ, 1976); Brenda Machosky, ‘The Face that is not a Face: The Phenomenology of the Soul in the Allegory of the Psychomachia’, Exemplaria 15 (2003), 1–38; Marc Mastrangelo, The Roman Self in Late Antiquity (Baltimore, MD, 2008); Ad Putter, ‘Prudentius and the Late Classical Biblical Epics of Juvencus, Proba, Sedulius, Arator, and Avitus’, in Rita Copeland, ed., The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, 1: 800–1558 (Oxford, 2016), 351–70.
71 Cf. Prudentius, Psychomachia 5–6 (gift from God), 868–74 (faith of the faithful), 29–39 (‘the faith’), 726–827 (the true faith).
72 In the Psychomachia an unusually large number of qualities are personified and portrayed as crucial to Christian life. Elsewhere, after faith, wisdom, truth, hope and love are the qualities most often personified. Logos is invariably identified with Christ and as such operates differently from other personifications.
73 For example, Smith, Psychomachia, 126–31; Kenneth R. Haworth, Deified Virtues, Demonic Vices, and Descriptive Allegory in Prudentius’ Psychomachia (Amsterdam, 1980); James J. Paxson, The Poetics of Personification (Cambridge, 1994), 66–7.
74 Smith argues that mens, anima and spiritus are not exact equivalents but are often hard to differentiate: Psychomachia, 141–59. Many Latin writers use them in ways which are difficult, if not impossible to distinguish: Morgan, Roman Faith, 447–50.
75 This idea may be another with a Pauline origin, if Prudentius had in mind Gal. 2: 20.
76 The study of patristic psychology in general would benefit from more attention to its scriptural and early Christian roots.
77 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 5.123, 42; 8.7.2; The Martyrdom of Perpetua 18.2; The Martyrdom of Pionius 22.4.
78 In the event, Felix is not not martyred on this occasion, as Paulinus goes on to tell.
79 Crowns of Martyrdom 2.2.17–20.
80 Noted by Smith, Psychomachia, 158–9, but without connecting the point with earlier Christian thinking. This idea is probably not confined to personifications: it makes explicit an idea which is implicit in the imagery of medicine, teaching and guidance.
81 Pseudo-Severian of Gabbala, in a sermon on faith, describes pistis as ‘to be honoured and bowed down to in silence’, in terms (timōmenon, proskynoumenon) which can be used of worship, but may not be intended so strongly here: Kinzig, Formulae, 2: 22–4. St Faith originates as a human martyr of the late third or early fourth century, although later she is sometimes confused with personified Faith.