The Holy Fire: The Story of the Fathers of the Eastern Church

If you have a curiosity about how churches and their creeds evolved, you should find this book a fascinating read. It contains a lot of information most churches would rather we not know about the origins of Christian teachings, how which "books" were chosen to be included in the Bible, as well as the politics surrounding what happened at the Council of Nicea.

"O sages standing in God's holy fire. As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul." William Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium The Holy Fire: In the fire of the Holy Spirit, Christians were baptized, according to John the Baptist's declaration, "he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire" Matt 3:11. The Holy Fire refers also to a miraculous happening, confined to Eastern Orthodox Easter evening, witnessed every year in the church of Holy Sepulchre, in Jerusalem. But the learned author of the Holy Fire, refers to the spiritual fire, which spread Christianity as 'a prairie fire.' Described by Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite, a Syrian mystic in the sixth century whose apophatic writings, that defined the mystical theology of the Eastern Church, in a quotation of whose 'Celestial Hyrarchy,' Payne posted. Fathers of the Church: Early Church Father came to be applied gradually to earlier Christian leaders who acquired basic character of holiness and orthodoxy, and gained Church recognition in East and West. They are the influential thinkers, writers, and 'theologians' in the early Christian communities (Church,) particularly those of the first five centuries of Christian history. The title 'Father' was applied to the principal teacher of early Christian communities, its bishop, but, great many of the most outstanding Christian teachers were laymen, as Clement of Alexandria, and Justin martyr, also deacons, and priests. A better definition of "Church Father" was provided by Clement of Alexandria: "Words are the progeny of the soul. Hence we call those that instructed us fathers" (Stromateis) Eastern Fathers: Eastern Church Fathers wrote in Greek, the philosophical language of the East Mediterranean. more famous of them are the Apostolic Ignatius of Antioch, and Irenaeus of Lyons, Fathers of the Church of Alexandria, Clement, Origen, Athanasius, and Cyril, the Three Cappadocian Fathers, and John Chrysostom, the great Antiochene orator. The Desert Fathers, of the Church were early monastics inhabiting the Egyptian deserts; who did not write as much, but their influence was dramatically great. Among them are St. Anthony the Great St. Macarius of Egypt, and Pachomius. A great number of their oral teachings, usually as wisdom sayings, are collected in the Monastic Garden, in Greek: Apophthegmata Patrum. Those fathers of the Western Church are called the Latin (Church) Fathers, encountered by Robert Payne, six years earlier. Debated Issues: The historical value of Payne's editorial work is basic, while his deduction from the Gnostic writings are superceded, he intended to highlight the Holy Fire in their writings compared to the mainstream orthodoxy. He contrasted some Eastern concepts, including the salvific work of Christ, with later scholastic legalistic Atonement theologies. On his

"The Eastern Cross still stands on our altars, though we do not see it with our eyes" (xxi). Robert Payne's _The Holy Fire: The Story of the Fathers of the Eastern Church_ (also subtitled _The Story of the Early Centuries of the Christian Church in the Near East_) is a droll and quaint read on the early Fathers. Payne does an excellent job showing the human faces behind the icons of Christianity's greatest theologians and hierarchs. The book is published by St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, connected to the Orthodox Church in America, which prints many books by non-Orthodox authors. The preface is written by Fr. Thomas Hopko, dean of St. Vladimir's. Hopko points out the discrepancies between Payne's viewpoint and the official line of the Orthodox Church. Payne's work has a number of historical flukes and inconsistencies and his adulation of Origen and the Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt is questionable by Orthodox standards. However, as Hopko notes, it is the spirit of Payne's work that makes it a worthwhile read. _The Holy Fire_ consists of brief narrative biographies of ten Fathers: Clement of Alexandria, Origen, St. Athanasius, St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. John Chrysostom, St. Dionysius the Areopagite, St. John (Mansur) Damascene and St. Gregory Palamas. As another reviewer notes, the book should have also included a chapter on St. Maximus the Confessor to make the topic whole. However, a book like this simply cannot in depth cover such a vast historical and theological span of time (1000 years) in the space of only three hundred pages. Payne wavers back and forth in his presentation of the Fathers: they are often idealized and glamorized while at the same time Payne highlights many of the less than ideal aspects of these men. Many of them were involved in political and ecclesiastical strife. The most mysterious of them all is St. "Dionysius," a totally anonymous mystic of the fifth century who wrote texts on apophatic (defining God by what He is not) theology and celestial hierarchies of angels. His theology of "the cloud of unknowing" had a huge influence on subsequent mystics, both of the East and West. The Fathers' teachings and ways of contemplating God and Christ are described in great detail and crafty language. Payne notes well that the faith of the Eastern Fathers is not exactly the same as that of the West, although all of the fundamental doctrines and dogmas of Christianity anywhere and in whatever church were shaped by these Greek mystics of the late Roman Empire. "We shall not understand the Eastern Christians unless we see them as they saw themselves, in the light of the Apocalypse or the blaze of the Transfiguration..... And they did not dwell very much on the Crucifixion or on the youthful Christ who walked in the cornfields: the Christ who haunted their dreams neither suffered excruciating pain nor gathered the husks in His hands. For them the lightning