Spiritual fatherhood in the Scriptures and early Christian tradition
In both the prophetic and sapiential traditions of Israel, the relationship between master and disciple is presented under the metaphor of father and son. Since both prophecy and wisdom had roots in the culture of the ancient Near East, this metaphor extends far back into history.8
It is the role of a father not only to beget children but also to educate them. Consequently, the activity of teaching was seen as the work of the father, and one who performed it could be called “father.” The ancient wisdom literature of both Egypt and Mesopotamia is often presented in the form of a father’s instructions to his son: not only is the content the traditional paternal advice that was handed down to successive generations, but the form is a paternal monologue that frequently contains the direct address “my son” or “my sons.”9 The frequent use of this literary form in Proverbs and other Old Testament wisdom literature shows Israel’s dependence upon the prevailing cultural patterns.10
In the ancient world the parents were the principal teachers of their children; scribal schools educated only a small minority chiefly destined for government service.11 Normally the son learned his father’s trade by a kind of apprenticeship, and the daughter learned the domestic arts from her mother.12 More important than this, however, was the communication of the parents’ sense of values, their convictions about the meaning of life and how it was to be lived in practice. For Israel this involved a sense of identification with the people of God and the acceptance of faith in Yahweh, which informed the whole of life. The Old Testament is filled with the idea of the transmission from father to son of the religious heritage of Israel; this is particularly stressed not only by the wisdom tradition but also by the Deuteronomic literature (Deut 6:7,20-23; 32:7,45-47; Josh 4:21-22; Exod 13:8).
Teaching how to live, communicating the fruits of one’s own experience, is a continuation of the transmission of life proper to fatherhood. The wisdom handed on by the sage was a gift of life: “The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life, that one may avoid the snares of death” (Prov 13:14). In Israel, wisdom was progressively seen as a gift of God, and finally identified with the Mosaic law, itself considered by the Deuteronomist as “your very life” (Deut 32:47; see Sir 24:23).
The metaphor of the father-son relationship appears also among the prophets and their disciples. While the term “sons of the prophets” probably does not have the connotation of spiritual sonship, but simply means “guild” or “brotherhood” of prophets, we find Elisha addressing his master Elijah as “my father” at the moment of the latter’s disappearance (2 Kgs 2:12). Elisha had asked for a double share of the master’s inheritance, which by right belonged to the eldest son. His sonship is based upon the transmission of the “spirit” that made him a new Elijah. In similar fashion the king of Israel, who sought advice from Elisha, calls him “my father” (2 Kgs 6:21; 13:14). Here, as in the circles of the sages, it is the transmission of teaching that constitutes the father-son relationship.
For the Old Testament, then, instruction is an exercise of fatherhood, especially when it concerns the total formation of a person. To develop his personality and the very life he has received from his parents, every man needs the help of others. To benefit another in this way is to exercise the function of fatherhood on his behalf, to show him “the way of life.” That these ideas were current at the time of the New Testament is clear from their appearance in the Qumran literature and in Philo. The metaphor of sonship applied to disciples is also found in Hellenistic literature. But it is principally the religious tradition of the Old Testament that prepared the way for St. Paul, who, however, developed it in a unique fashion.
In his very first epistle Paul compared his behavior at Thessalonica to the way in which a father deals with his children: “You know how, like a father with his children, we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to lead a life worthy of God” (1 Thess 2:11-12). From metaphor, however, he advanced to an affirmation of real fatherhood when addressing the Corinthians: “Even if you have ten thousand guardians in Christ, yet you do not have many fathers, for I begot you in Christ Jesus by means of the Gospel. Therefore I urge you, be imitators of me” (1 Cor 4:15-16). Here we have more than a simple comparison. Paul is affirming that the relationship which unites him to the Christians of Corinth is a genuine fatherhood, to be understood by analogy with physical fatherhood.
The father is concerned solely with the welfare of his children, for it is he who has given them life. In this sense he is to be contrasted with the “guardian” or “pedagogue,” a slave who conducted the child to and from school and often meted out harsh discipline to him. No one else—not even ten thousand such slaves—can replace the role of the father. For it is he who has begotten the child. In the natural order, to beget is to transmit life, to share in the creative process itself. The New Testament often uses the language of physical generation and birth to express the reality of the new divine life conferred upon us in the Christian economy. For St. John, to be a Christian means to enter into this new life, to be born again, from above, of water and the Spirit; this is a gift of God that makes a person the child of God and assimilates him to his only-begotten Son, placing him permanently in the state of adoptive divine sonship (see John 1:12-13; 3:3-8; 1 John 2:29; 3:1-2,9; 5:1,11-12).
Paul speaks of this same reality in a different way. That he is not speaking of sacramental regeneration in baptism, as is St. John, is clear from his explicit exclusion of baptizing from his apostolic role at Corinth (1 Cor 1:13-17). He is father not through baptism but “by means of the Gospel.” For Paul, however, word and sacrament are inseparably united. The same transcendent reality is approached from a different aspect than in the Johannine literature.
In this concept of “begetting by means of the Gospel,” the Word of God that is proclaimed is the seed that transmits life.13 The idea is not original in Paul: it appears elsewhere in the New Testament14 and is related to the metaphorical usage of the image of seed in pagan and Jewish writers (see Plato phaed. 248d; 249a; 276e; Phil. cher. 43-44), as well as to the Old Testament idea of the efficacy of the Word of God.15
The Old Testament does not use the image of the Word as a seed, but it appears to have become quite common in the early Church. James writes: “He brought us forth by the word of truth, that we should be, as it were, the first-fruits of his creation” (Jas 1:18). Peter is even more explicit: “You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable seed, through the living and abiding word of God.” He then quotes Deutero-Isaiah: “the word of the Lord abides forever,” and adds, “That word is the Good News which was preached to you” (1 Pet 1:23-25, citing Isa 40:6-8). Very likely St. John also has the image of the word in mind when he says, “No one born of God commits sin, for God’s seed abides in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God” (1 John 3:9).
The Good News, then, is the seed that brings forth new life in the Christian, the very life of God because the seed is God’s word. Just as in the natural order a man becomes a father by contributing the seed that transmits life, so in the supernatural order the apostle who imparts the life-giving word is rightly said to have brought forth the life of grace in the hearer, and the latter is rightly called his son. Such is the reasoning of Paul. All life is a gift of God, but the man who confers life by means of his seed is really a father, and the same is true of the spiritual father who transmits the seed of his word. The Word of God is powerful and active, a fertile principle of salvation implanted in a man’s heart, where it engenders life like the virile seed in the womb; it is the power of God unto salvation for everyone who has faith, the word of life that makes its recipients children of God (1 Thess 1:5; Rom 1:16; Phil 2:15-16).
In this transmission of life, the apostle is the indispensable instrument of God. The divine initiative has selected men, as it did in the Old Testament, to proclaim the living word: they are God’s representatives or ambassadors
, who speak not their own message but that of God (2 Cor 2:17; 5:20; 1 Thess 2:13). Therefore, Paul can rightly claim the Gospel as his own (Gal 1:11-12) while still claiming that it is God’s word. And he can attribute to his own ministry the fertility and efficacy of the word he preaches (1 Cor 2:4-5; 2 Cor 4:7). It is a case of the mysterious cooperation between grace and nature: the apostle is a co-worker with God (1 Cor 3:9; 2 Cor 6:1). Accordingly, the preacher of the word is God’s instrument in communicating the new life, just as is the minister who confers baptism, the rebirth, and can equally be designated as spiritual father.
Paul understands this in a very realistic fashion. As in natural fatherhood, the act of begetting sets up an enduring relationship with the children. The apostle himself becomes the instrument of salvation for them: he is a “sacrament” and his whole person becomes a source of life. He represents the heavenly Father to his children: his whole life is a means of preaching the life-giving word to them. Therefore Paul can urge them to be “imitators of me” (1 Cor 4:16; 11:1), just as he speaks of their imitating Christ or God (1 Thess 1:6; Eph 5:1). As a natural father remains with his children to teach them by both word and example and thus continues the work of giving life that was begun when he begot them, so the spiritual father continues to confer life by the ongoing proclamation of both his teaching and his life, until his children are fully formed. To this must be added the duty of correcting their errors and failures, and offering comfort, support and encouragement, in the manner of a father who unselfishly has their welfare at heart (see 1 Cor 4:14; 2 Cor 1:3-7).
The early Church took up Paul’s teaching about spiritual fatherhood and developed it in the two directions already indicated by the New Testament: the sacramental and the prophetic. We find the fatherhood of the bishop affirmed already, at least in an equivalent way, in the apostolic fathers. Ignatius says “all should respect the deacons as Jesus Christ, even as the bishop is a type of the Father, and the presbyters as the council of God and the college of apostles” (Ign. Trall. 3,1). Elsewhere he commands, “All of you follow the bishop, as Jesus Christ [follows] the Father” (Ign. Smyr. 8,1). For Ignatius, the bishop is clearly the visible representative of God the Father: when the presbyters defer to him, it is really “not to him, but to the Father of Jesus Christ, the bishop of all. . . . It is right that we offer obedience without hypocrisy, for one does not merely deceive this bishop who is seen, but wrongs the Unseen One” (Ign. Magn. 3,1-2).
The fatherhood of the bishop is more explicitly developed in the Church orders. Thus the Didascalia Apostolorum, probably an early third-century document, refers to the bishop not only as shepherd and physician but also as father: “Let the bishop love the laity as his children. . . . He is the teacher of piety and, next after God, he is your father, who has begotten you again to the adoption of sons by water and the Spirit” (Didasc.apost. 2,20-26). The bishop’s role as father, however, is related not only to his administration of the sacraments, as in the preceding text, but also to his proclaiming the word and teaching doctrine. Commenting on the Old Testament command to honor father and mother, the author says: “How much more should the word exhort you to honor your spiritual parents, and to love them as your benefactors and ambassadors with God, who have regenerated you with water, and endued you with the fullness of the Holy Spirit, who have fed you with the word as with milk, who have nourished you with doctrine, who have confirmed you by their admonitions. . . .” (Didasc.apost. 2,33).16
The Fathers also pursued the biblical idea of the generation of children through handing on the word. Irenaeus states clearly the principle that one becomes a son by receiving the teaching of another: “‘Son’ has a twofold meaning: . . . one is a son in the natural order because he was born a son; . . . the second is made so . . . by the teaching of doctrine. For when any person has been taught from the mouth of another, he is called the son of the one who instructs him, and the latter is called his father” (Iren. adv.haer. 4,41,2).
It is especially in the Alexandrian school, however, that the fatherhood of the teacher and preacher of the word is developed. Given the emphasis of the Alexandrian Fathers upon the Logos, the word of Scripture and the teacher in the Christian community, the development is not surprising. Typically, Clement derives the idea both from Plato and from St. Paul: “As he [Socrates] says in the Theaetetus, ‘He [the virtuous man] will beget and train men; for some procreate by the body, others by the soul.’ For among the barbarian philosophers to teach and to enlighten is also called begetting, just as the Apostle says, ‘I have begotten you in Jesus Christ’” (Clem. strom. 5,2).
Elsewhere Clement elaborates further, explaining that the word is the seed through which the begetting takes place: “It is a good thing to leave good children to posterity: such is the case with children of our bodies. But words are the progeny of the soul; thus we call those who have taught us ‘fathers.’ . . . The word that is sown is hidden in the soul of the learner, as in the earth, and this is spiritual planting. . . . I believe that soul united to soul and spirit to spirit in the sowing of the word will make what is sown germinate and grow. And everyone who is instructed is, from the viewpoint of dependence, the son of his teacher. ‘Son,’ says he [Solomon], ‘do not forget my precepts’” (Clem. strom. 1,1, citing Prov 3:1; see also Clem. strom. 3,15).17
There can be little doubt that these concepts developed out of the important place occupied by prophecy and teaching in the early Church. Prophets and teachers are mentioned frequently in the New Testament; while their precise functions in the early Christian community are subject to dispute, they were certainly both concerned with the ministry of the word.18 The teacher’s role was probably to expound the Christian faith to those who had received baptism but needed further instruction (didachē), and the instruction, especially in Jewish-Christian communities, must have consisted largely in the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament.
The prophet was no doubt so called because he was seen to be in continuity with Old Testament prophecy; therefore he was a charismatic who was moved by the Spirit to utter the word of God, and prophecy was a sign of the Spirit’s presence in the Church. Paul ranks prophecy, followed immediately by teaching, directly after apostleship in the hierarchy of ministries (1 Cor 12:28) and says that its purpose is to build up, encourage and console the Church (1 Cor 13:3). It seems that there was a certain institutionalizing of the charism: the prophet was seen as holding an office in the community, though his precise function in the liturgical assembly is not known.
Prophecy was obviously subject to abuse and self-deception, as in the Old Testament, and there were false prophets who posed a threat to the communities. We find a number of references to them in the New Testament (Matt 7:15; 24:11,24; Mark 13:22; 2 Pet 2:1; 1 John 4:1). It thus seems likely that prophets were numerous in the early Church: we find them mentioned frequently in the Didache, together with teachers, and by Justin Martyr (Didache 11 and 13; prophets in Didache 10 and Iust. dial. 82). The excesses of Montanism in the second and third centuries may have brought charismatic gifts into some disrepute, but the functions of the New Testament prophets and teachers nevertheless continued in the ministry of the word exercised in the community: the didascalia.
It is probably out of this background that the emergence of the abba or charismatic elder, the bearer of the inspired word, in the Egyptian monastic circles of the fourth century should be understood.19 On the one hand, the desert elder exercised the charismatic functions of word-bearer much as the prophets and didaskaloi did in the early Church. On the other hand, he is called abba, whereas throughout the early Church there is a constant tradition of spiritual fatherhood attributed not only to sacramental and hierarchical ministers but also to those who generate life in the spiritual order by transmission of the word. There is no evidence in the texts that the name was given because of such a theology of spiritual fatherhood or that the Egyptian elder is a lineal descendant of the early Christian prophet. But both may be deemed highly probable.
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The abba in the Egyptian desert
The life of the semi-anchorites in the deserts of Nitria and Scete is known chiefly through the Apophthegmata Patrum, together with information provided by Palladius, Cassian and the Historia monachorum. Nitria was founded around 330 by Amoun, and Scete about the same time by Macarius the Egyptian, and they flourished throughout the fourth century. The life was rather unstructured and could range from total solitude to a fair degree of common interaction. Similar forms of monastic life existed in the Fayyum, the Thebaid, the eastern desert, and the Delta area. What was characteristic of it and essential to its functioning was the role of the gerōn or ‘elder.’20
While the elder, who was called abba, was often a man well advanced in years, the determining factor was not chronological age but wisdom born of experience. The chief requisite for the exercise of spiritual fatherhood was that the man be himself spiritual. Spirituality was never considered an intellectual achievement; it could be acquired only by practice. A spiritual man was one who had himself lived the monastic life, come to know himself, struggled against his passions and the onslaughts of the demons, and allowed the power of grace to triumph in him. He had a doctrine, but it was not learned by study; it was the type of wisdom possessed by those who live rightly and learn from life itself. Such persons are able to advise others on the basis of their own experience.
The abba, then, was an experienced monk who knew the life from living it himself. He was a holy man, for he had achieved a measure of success in his personal struggle. He was able to be a spiritual father, patēr pneumatikos, to beget sons in his own image. He was considered to be a bearer of the Spirit, pneumatophoros, because holiness was no personal achievement, but the gift of the Spirit of God who dwells in us.21 The holy monk was filled with the Spirit because the Spirit’s dwelling place in him had been swept clean by the monk’s asceticism. He was, then, a true charismatic, a man in whom the Spirit dwelt and who was entirely subject to, and directed by, the Holy Spirit. To father sons, then, meant to communicate the Spirit to others so that they might also open their hearts to his indwelling.
RB 1980- The Rule Of St Benedict Page 48