ture, it did gather into the Talmud the discussions and inter-
pretations of the rabbis; it developed an apologetic for deal-
ing with Islam; it reflected on the anthropomorphisms of the
Bible; and it produced great religious philosophers (e.g.,
Maimonides, d. 1204).
Christians for their part not only had inherited the Jew-
ish scriptures and the revelatory deeds that these scriptures
narrate and explain; they also found themselves confronted
with the fact of Jesus Christ. First an object of faith, this fact
became also an object of thought. It was a complex fact: a
man who is Son of God, dead yet living, weak yet Lord. It
demanded that God be seen as Father of a Son, the two of
them acting through a Holy Spirit who is at once immanent
in the “hearts” of the faithful and transcendent over them.
Help in expressing these ideas was found in the Stoicism of
the day, which was widespread even among slaves. This phi-
losophy provided the idea of a Logos and a Spirit (pneuma)
that permeated the cosmos, kept it in motion, and quickened
minds as well. On the other hand, to take this approach was
to cosmologize God and turn the Logos and Pneuma into
subordinate intermediaries between God and the things of
the world. Before the Council of Nicaea (325), even Chris-
tians who proved their fidelity by martyrdom had been influ-
enced by these ideas and had formulated their faith in an un-
satisfactory manner. Various interpretations publicly
expressed were judged to cast doubt on essential aspects of
the object of faith. The result was that an orthodoxy—true
praise, true faith—emerged and, with it, the beginnings of
a reflection on faith and in faith or, in other words, some-
thing of a theology.
Faith, which is already in the realm of thought, must
necessarily express itself in an active way. It looks for coher-
ence among many facts and elements that, however diverse,
all come from the same God who is carrying out a homoge-
neous plan. Since faith is also fidelity, and therefore ortho-
doxy, it develops in response to deviations. Since it has to
do with mysterious realities that are irreducible to the facts
grasped by our sciences and are very complex, the very assent
of faith is accompanied by the questioning that Augustine
and Thomas Aquinas call cogitatio: “Credere est cum assen-
tione cogitare” (“To believe is to assent while thinking”).
When this reflection in faith ceases to be occasional and be-
comes systematic, it is theology.
This process began in the East. Schools of higher-level
catechesis were established there; in these schools the quest
was for gnosis, that is, a deepening both of knowledge and
of Christian life. “True gnosis,” as it is called by Irenaeus
(Against Heresies 4.33.8), fights the false gnosis of Basilides
and Valentinian in the name of the authentic tradition guar-
anteed by apostolic succession. This true gnosis is in accor-
dance with reason (3.12.11). The Didaskalion, or Catecheti-
cal School, of Alexandria was headed by Clement and then
by Origen, who in his On First Principles gives the first com-
plete theological statement that is linked to a philosophical
culture. As a result, he distinguished what we now call dogma
and theology. In contrast to platonizing Alexandria, Antioch,
another great Christian metropolis, practiced a more histori-
cal and literal reading of the scriptures. At Nisibis and Edes-
sa, on the other hand, Ephraem of Syria (d. 373) theologized
in a poetical and lyrical way that was alien to Greek culture.
The second half of the fourth century and the first half
of the fifth saw in both the East and West a flowering of ge-
niuses and saints: the Fathers. These included Athanasius
(d. 373), Basil of Caesarea (d. 379), Gregory of Nazianzus
(d. 391), Gregory of Nyssa (d. 395), Chrysostom (d. 407),
and Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444), in the East; and in the
West, Hilary (d. 367), Ambrose (d. 397), Jerome (d. 420),
Augustine (d. 430), and Leo I (d. 461). These men defended
and lent luster to the Christian faith chiefly by a rational ex-
planation of scriptures that focused on the Christian mystery
and made use of typology. In Origen’s thought, and that of
some others, typology is pushed to the point of allegory.
Even at this time, however, there were signs of a difference
in the way theological activity was carried on in the Greek
East and in the Latin West, at least beginning with Augustine
in the West.
The Latin fathers (including Augustine) regarded the
literary and philosophical culture of the patristic age (Second
Sophistic, Platonic, and Stoic) to be a human formation of
the Christian although it was acquired in the pagan schools
of the time. Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Chrysostom
insisted on the value of this formation, while Julian the Apos-
tate denied Christians access to it to prevent their being
weakened by it. The Fathers engaged in argument chiefly in
order to invalidate the conclusions drawn by heretics, but
they did not use philosophical concepts and arguments in
order to develop new theses that went beyond the traditional
faith. From the philosophers, and especially from Platonism,
they borrowed certain broad ideas and expressions but little
with conceptual content new to their faith. They saw the
philosophers rather as fathers of heresies. This did not pre-
vent later philosophical borrowings by John of Damascus
(d. 749), Photios (d. about 891), Cerularios (d. 1058), and
Michael Psellus (d. 1078?). Even today, however, Orthodox
theology dutifully follows the Fathers. The nineteenth canon
of the Trullan Synod (692) says “The church’s pastors must
explain scripture in accordance with the commentaries of the
Fathers.” While the medieval and modern West has been re-
ceptive to many questions and currents of thought and has
even formulated new dogmas, thus making the proof from
tradition difficult and complicated, Eastern Christianity has
kept a kind of direct contact with its patristic tradition. It
derives its faith directly from the liturgy, in which that tradi-
tion finds expression. When the attempt was made on nu-
merous occasions to introduce into Eastern Orthodoxy a cre-
ative appeal to reason, especially because of the influence of
the West and in imitation of it, there was a reaction. Thus
there was a reaction against John Italus, who succeeded Mi-
chael Psellus as head of the University of Constantinople; the
seventh article of his condemnation in 1082 reads “CursedTHEOLOGY: CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY 9135