“Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”
—Acts 16:30
How should we answer this question? Is not this the reason we reach for the church fathers? Yet, what can writers who lived some eighteen centuries ago really tell us? Tertullian, Justin, Clement, Theophilus, Hippolytus—the very names have about them a musty scent of bygone times. So why do we read them? They are not considered to be geniuses and history textbooks silently bypass their doctrines. The argument that a post-Enlightenment blindness has affected everybody is an oversimplification. When we read the fathers we go through piles of commentaries, we shut our eyes to odd rhetorical flourishes, erudite displays, and unbearably redundant styles, in order to find diamonds from time to time. As Heraclitus used to say, one must dig through a lot of dirt in order to find a bit of gold; this applies to only a small patch of this sort of reading. At first we encounter only dirt. Only later do we get some dirt mixed with gold—a lot of gold.
The fathers are now undone by what used to be their strength. Even though they looked to the heavens, they were firmly planted on the earth. They were not in danger of falling into a cistern like stargazing Thales. They lived in their own here and now. They knew what was en vogue. They not only knew the invaluable classics, but also the most fashionable trash—fashionable writers and fashionable barbers, self-proclaimed spiritual gurus, respected authorities, and specialists in self-salvation. There is nothing of the classicist streak in them. They valued the concrete and felt the pulse of their epoch. Even in moments when they ceased to appreciate their own epoch, they never ceased to understand it. Their writing is a conversation, never a lecture; it is a dialogue with a public that must be engaged, convinced, and fortified, a public they belonged to and loved. They do not make ex cathedra pronouncements. They engage in a conversation with changing conversation partners, changing contexts, changing diction, changing urgency, but the topic never changes. This conversation is always concerned with just one thing: Christ, that is, what must be done in order to be saved.
The public they addressed no longer exists. The fashionable problems and outfits also have changed. The writings of the fathers have become one source of knowledge about a forgotten world for those studying their writings in the academy. However, their writings are more important than today’s newspapers. Their subjects and stances are still of lasting import. They know our poverty, hunger for the truth, and desire for transformation. These cannot be satisfied by the catacombs of so-called “religious experience,” in the quiet of our privacy, or in passing spiritual moods. Their conversions were either all-embracing, or not at all. The effects of these conversions also touched the family, forum, theater, market, and school. The conversions, obviously, could not ignore philosophy, whose masters—like Plato in Raphael’s fresco or Jacques-Louis David’s monumental Socrates—pointed toward the heavens, toward one’s spiritual homeland, thereby calling for conversion and taking up the difficulties of spiritual pilgrimage. But do the philosophers and the prophets direct our gaze toward the same goal? Does philosophy at least lead us partially along the way? Are we nowadays concerned with the same type of conversion, the same type of heaven? What should we do with our philosophical heritage? Should we accept it, reject it, or modify it? What is the role of reason? How is reason related to faith? And what about the relation of revelation to nature? Careful(!), the answer must be clear and concrete, like a chapter from a travel guide (to this world). It should serve salvation. The question is not academic at all! It cannot be an inconsequential and painless theory spawned in the bosom of a long gone Christendom, rather it should address questions posed by everyday life in our pagan, sometimes hostile, and not infrequently dangerous environment.
The preceding list of questions not only grew out of my curiosity about how to answer them, but also from my curiosity about how to ask them. My curiosity was increased by the fact that the fathers lived in times when Christianity, much like today, was not the spiritual center of culture. Is this not one of the main reasons why we are so curious about the experience of Christians from Pre-Constantinian times? Is the present renaissance in patristics not buoyed by the belief that there is an overlap of experience between these two periods? There seems to be a common fate that builds a bridge between them and over those centuries dominated by what used to be Christendom. We want to imbibe the spirit of the origins. We want to look at things from a different perspective by momentarily bracketing-off categories that seem to be necessary only because they are venerable. Yet, to free oneself from the dictates of subsequent opinions is a great temptation, which might actually constrict us and stand in the way of describing the present situation accurately. Yet, we want to listen to people (the great minds!) who had more time to think about how to combine universalism with particularism, who could distinguish the ability to communicate something difficult from speaking in a totally foreign (philosophical) language, and who understood how the necessity of maintaining a specific identity should not be confused with condemning the world. These are the reasons why we return to the fathers today. If nothing else, we want to at least listen to the voices—as authentic as possible, not disfigured—of those who daily faced problems similar to ours. We come back to them in order to listen to them, so that we can at least say whether their work was worth the effort.
I would like to express my gratitude to three outstanding scholars who went through the trouble of reading earlier drafts of this work: Dobrochna Dembińska-Siury, Fr. Wincenty Myszor, and Fr. Tomasz Stępień. Their expert advice is greatly appreciated, and I take responsibility for all the shortcomings of the present work.
I would like to explain one more thing. As you can probably tell, despite the title, this is not a book about Socrates. This book will also not deal with Erasmus, despite the fact that the scholar from Rotterdam coined the phrase “Saint Socrates” in his Convivium Religiosum. The topic of this book owes a great deal to an interview I conducted with Juliusz Domański in the Polish monthly Znak. This book actually owes much more to Domański’s work than what the reader can glean from the bibliography. I would like to thank him for not only giving me the idea for this book’s title during our interview, but also for hundreds of conversations in which he generously shared with me with not only his immense knowledge, but also his encouragement and attention. By dedicating this modest little book to him I wholeheartedly thank him for his unswerving generosity and understanding.