PATRISTICS

PATRISTICS. “Patristics” or “patrology,” as a separate discipline in academic theology (q.v.), dates from the 17th c. Today it signifies the systematic study of the Church Fathers (q.v.), i.e., the elucidation of their lives and thought in light of the information available about their social, political, and intellectual environments. Thus, modern patristics is vitally concerned with the investigation of the culture and society of late antiquity, the latter covering the Roman/Byzantine Empire (qq.v.) from ca. 100 to ca. 800. The rise of Islam in the south and of the Carolingians (qq.v.) in the West are usually employed to set rough limits to the “age of the fathers.” For the Orthodox Church limiting the “patristic age” to any one period, even if of several centuries, is foreign and artificial. Patristic studies in the West did, however, lend great assistance to the rediscovery of the sources of Eastern tradition. And 19th-c. Russia continued this rediscovery, which has subsequently spread to other nations in the Orthodox oikoumene (q.v.).