Chapter IV — Ecclesiastical Tradition

Origin and Growth of Ecclesiastical Tradition

I. Ecclesiastical Tradition differs essentially from human tradition, whether popular or scientific. Human tradition can produce only human certitude; it increases or decreases with time, and may ultimately fail altogether. Ecclesiastical Tradition, too, is human, inasmuch as it lies in the hands of men, and may itself be popular or scientific, historical or exegetical in character. But it is also something far higher: its organs are the members of Christ’s Church, forming one body fashioned by God Himself, animated and directed by His Holy Spirit. Their testimony, accordingly, is not merely the testimony of men but the testimony of the Holy Ghost; its value depends not on the number of witnesses or their learning, but on their rank in the Church and the assistance of the Holy Ghost — and the authenticity of that testimony remains constant at every point along the stream of Tradition.

II. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that the human element modifies the perfection of Tradition. There may be a break in its continuity and universality; a temporary and partial eclipse of some truth is possible, as are further developments — a portion of the Deposit may, for a time, go unknown or unacknowledged by the whole Church, or fail to be expressly and distinctly attested by the Apostolate’s leading organs. We may accordingly assert that the essential integrity, continuity, and universality of Oral Tradition — required by the Church’s infallibility and indefectibility, yet modified by the imperfections of the human element — are subject to the following laws:

1. Nothing can be proposed as Apostolic Tradition that is not actually Apostolic Tradition, or that opposes it; and no truth handed down by the Apostles can ever be altogether lost.
2. The most essential and necessary truths must always be expressly taught, admitted, and handed down in the Church — if not by every individual teacher or hearer, then at least by the Body as a whole. Truths belonging to the Apostolic Deposit that have become so obscured as not to be known and professed by every member of the Church — even rejected by some, or not distinctly enforced by others — must nonetheless be attested and transmitted at least implicitly: that is, the truths that are clearly expressed and distinctly professed must contain the obscured ones in such a way that, through careful reflection and the Holy Ghost’s assistance, these obscured truths can be drawn out and proposed for universal acceptance. There are several ways in which one truth may be implied in another: general truths contain particular truths; principles imply their consequences; complex statements involve simpler ones, whether as constituent parts or as conditions; and practical truths presuppose theoretical principles, and conversely. The dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and of Papal Infallibility, for instance, are each implied in other dogmas in all four of these ways.

Only the actual, express Tradition of a truth can be appealed to as proof that it is a matter of Faith. If we can show that, at some given time, the Tradition was universal, this alone suffices — unbroken continuity is not, strictly, necessary. Except in cases of a formal authoritative definition, however, Tradition ordinarily requires a long time to become universal; and even when such a definition is given, it always rests on the fact that the Tradition in question had already been universal for a considerable period. The duration of the Tradition, over a more or less extended time, should accordingly be established.

The Various Modes in Which Traditional Testimony Is Given in the Church

The modes or forms in which the infallible testimony of the Holy Ghost is given are as manifold as the forms of the Church’s own living organism. For our present purpose we may distinguish them according to the rank of the witnesses.

I. The most adequate testimony exists when the entire Body of the Church, Head and members alike, profess, teach, and act upon a given doctrine together.¹ This unanimity is expressed and maintained by professions of Faith universally admitted, by catechisms in general use, and by the general practice of the Church in her liturgy, discipline, or morals, so far as that practice presupposes and includes Faith in particular doctrines — hence the old rule quoted against the Pelagians, “let the law of prayer establish the law of belief” (legem credendi statuat lex supplicandi).

II. Next in extent, though considerably lower in rank, is what is called the sensus fidelium — the distinct, universal, and constant profession of a doctrine by the whole body of the simple faithful. As already shown (§ 11 above), this sensus fidelium involves a relatively independent and immediate testimony of the Holy Ghost; although only an echo of the Teaching Apostolate’s authentic testimony, the universal belief of the faithful carries great weight — at times when its own unity and clarity are more apparent than the Apostolate’s teaching itself, when part of the Teaching Body has been unfaithful to its duty, or when the Teaching Body, about to define a doctrine that had for a time been obscured, appeals to every manifestation of the Holy Ghost’s favour toward it. Thus, during the Arian troubles, St. Hilary could say: “the faithful ears of the people are holier than the lips of the priests.” And before the definition of the Immaculate Conception, the profession and practice of the faithful were themselves appealed to in support of the definition (cf. Franzelin, De Traditione, th. xii, p. 112; Cardinal Newman, The Arians of the Fourth Century, pp. 464, 467; Ward, Essays on the Church’s Doctrinal Authority, p. 70). As one theologian memorably put it: “as the blood flows from the heart to the body through the arteries; as the vital sap insinuates itself into the whole tree, into each bough, and leaf, and fibre; as water descends through a thousand channels from the mountain-top to the plain; so is Christ’s pure and life-giving doctrine diffused, flowing into the whole body through a thousand organs from the Church Teaching” (Murray, De Ecclesia, disp. x, n. 15).

III. The universal teaching of the Bishops and priests is a further mode of ecclesiastical testimony to revealed truth. The testimony of all the Bishops together is in itself infallible, independently of the teaching of the inferior clergy and the belief of the faithful, since the Episcopate is the chief organ of infallibility in the Church, and is infallible at every moment of its duration (“I am with you all days”). This mode of testimony is sometimes called the testimony of the Particular Churches, since each Bishop’s teaching is reflected and repeated by the clergy and faithful of his own diocese; the testimony of priests and of theological schools, subordinate as they are to the Bishop, thus holds a kind of intermediate position and value between the sensus fidelium and the testimony of the Episcopate proper.

IV. The central, perfect, and juridical representative of Tradition is the Apostolic See. From the earliest times it has been customary to treat the formula “the Roman Church, or Apostolic See, hath held and doth hold” as equivalent to “the Catholic Church hath held and doth hold” — since the universal Church must hold, at least implicitly, whatever the Holy See teaches. When the Pope pronounces a judicial sentence, he can bind the whole Church, teachers and taught alike, and the authority of his decisions is not impaired even by opposition within the Teaching Body itself. Moreover, as a consequence of the connection between the Head of the Church and the Roman See, there exists in the local Roman Church, apart from the Pope’s formal authoritative decisions, a certain actual and normal testimony that must itself be considered an expression of the Holy See’s habitual teaching — arising from the fact that the Faith professed in the Roman Church is the fruit of the Popes’ own constant teaching, accepted by the laity and taught by the clergy, above all by the College of Cardinals who share in the general government of the Church.

V. Besides the Apostolic See and the ordinary Apostolate, God has provided auxiliary channels of Ecclesiastical Tradition in the persons of the extraordinary auxiliary members already described (§ 10 above). Their position and importance were established by St. Augustine (Contra Julianum, I–II, esp. II, c. 37) and by St. Vincent of Lérins, who comments on Augustine’s own text (Commonitorium, c. 28ff., and the opening of the second Commonitorium). In the early Church, when teaching functions were exercised almost exclusively by the Bishops, the extraordinary representatives of Apostolic Tradition were usually eminent members of the episcopate. They received the name “Fathers,” the title commonly given to Bishops by their own subjects and successors — and are called “Fathers of the Church” because, living as they did in the Church’s own infancy, when extraordinary means were needed for her preservation, they received a more abundant outpouring of the Holy Ghost’s gifts, so that their doctrine represents His teaching in an eminent degree. Their special function, moreover, was to fix the substance of the Apostolic Deposit, so that their writings naturally became the very basis of doctrine’s further development, ranked alongside Scripture itself as channels of apostolic doctrine — Fathers, in this sense, not only of the Church in their own day but of every subsequent age. Compared with them, later writers are regarded as “Sons of the Fathers,” and sometimes as “pedagogues,” in reference to St. Paul’s words: “if you have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet not many fathers” (1 Cor. 4:15). Not all these “Sons of the Fathers” were bishops — many were priests, members of Religious Orders, or masters of theological schools, representing the mind (sensus) of the Catholic schools and of the faithful, distinguished for human learning and industry applied to the development and fuller comprehension of doctrine rather than to fixing its substance. Hence their name, “Doctors” or “Theologians.”

Documentary Tradition, the Expression of the Living Tradition

I. Ecclesiastical Tradition is, by its very nature, oral; writings and documents are not strictly needed for its transmission, but are nonetheless useful for fixing it in place and remedying the imperfections of the human element. It follows that the Holy Ghost, who watches over the living Tradition, must also assist in the production and preservation of such documents, so that they present, if not an adequate, then at least a more or less faithful exposition of the prior Tradition.

II. When the writings of the Fathers reproduce the authentic teaching of the Church, they constitute a Written Tradition, equal in authority to the Oral Tradition that follows it, and stand, like Holy Scripture itself, as an objective and remote Rule of Faith running alongside Oral Tradition. Even so, they are not, taken alone, a complete and independent Source and Rule of Faith — like Scripture, they too remain in the Church’s custody and subject to her interpretation. There can be no genuine contradiction between the Fathers’ teaching and the Church’s own doctrine; apparent contradictions arise either from spurious or doubtfully authentic documents, or from a mistaken interpretation of authentic ones.

III. The writings and documents constituting Written Tradition fall into two classes. The first comprises those emanating from the official organs of Ecclesiastical Tradition in the actual exercise of their functions, and belonging by their very nature to Written Tradition — the decisions of Popes and Councils; liturgical documents and monuments, such as liturgies, sacramentaries, the Ordines Romani, pictures, symbols, inscriptions, and vessels connected with public worship; and the writings of the Fathers and approved theologians, so far as they contain distinct statements on the truths of Tradition. These documents and monuments carry more than mere historical value — they all participate, to some degree, in the supernatural character of the living Tradition from which they emanate and which they express, and even where their traditional attribution is doubtful, they may still carry great weight. The second class comprises documents that, independently of their author’s ecclesiastical rank or of the Church’s own authority, still contribute to the history or fuller scientific knowledge of Tradition — this class may include the writings of doubtful Catholics, and even of heretics and pagans. The two classes are not mutually exclusive; many documents belong to both, considered under different aspects. The Roman Catacombs, in particular, have lately gained great importance as monuments of the earliest Tradition (see Northcote and Brownlow, Roma Sotterranea).

Rules for Demonstrating Revealed Truth from Ecclesiastical Tradition

The rules for applying the laws set out above may themselves be gathered from those laws. Catholics, believing as they do in the divine authority of Tradition, will naturally reach different conclusions from Protestants, who acknowledge only its historical value; and Catholics, too, will apply these rules differently according to whether their object is to establish, with infallible certitude, the apostolicity of a truth, or simply to expound and defend it scientifically.

I. For the Catholic it is not necessary to demonstrate positively, from documents contemporary with the Apostles, that the Church has always borne actual witness to a given doctrine — the scantiness of surviving documents, especially from the sub-apostolic age, makes this all but impossible in any case. The present Tradition, especially where confirmed by an authoritative definition, is quite sufficient to prove that the same Tradition existed formerly, even if only in a latent state; any further knowledge of its earlier history is then merely of scientific interest. Where the present Ecclesiastical Tradition is not itself publicly manifest, however, and the judges of the Faith must decide some controverted question, they must investigate the Tradition of the past — must, as St. Vincent of Lérins puts it, appeal to antiquity. It is not necessary to reach back to some absolute point of origin; it suffices to find some period when the Tradition was already undoubted — the Council of Ephesus (A.D. 431), for instance, based its decisions on the testimony of the Fathers of the fourth century. Where the Tradition is manifest in neither the present nor the discoverable past, recourse may sometimes be had to the consent of noted Fathers and theologians. A temporary uncertainty, or even a partial denial, of some doctrine within the Church is not, of itself, a conclusive argument against its traditional character — such opposition can generally be shown to be purely human in origin, and can often be turned to good account, since its origin can sometimes be traced and the Church’s own resistance to it demonstrated; the difficulty sometimes arises from an appeal to merely local traditions, or the opposition itself proves inconsistent, shifting, vaguely defined, or mixed with opinions plainly heretical or destructive of Catholic life and thought — marks easily shown, for instance, in the Gallican opposition to Papal Infallibility. Even where an investigation of antiquity falls short of absolute certitude, it may still produce a genuine moral conviction, such that denial of the doctrine in question would be rash.

II. Once the Tradition of a given truth is established, a Catholic has no further stake in investigating its continuity, except for purposes of scholarship and apologetics. Heretics, moreover, have no right to demand direct proof of a doctrine’s antiquity from Catholics; we may indeed answer their arguments from Tradition and lay before them its traces across the ages, but it is generally better still to establish for them the Catholic principle of Tradition as such, for which abundant historical evidence exists.

The Writings of the Fathers

I. The “Fathers” are those representatives of Tradition recognized by the Church as excelling in sanctity and in natural and supernatural gifts, belonging to the early Church. This last mark distinguishes them from the doctors of more recent times, though it carries only a secondary influence on their authority — the Council of Ephesus and the older theologians attached no great significance to the mere antiquity of the Fathers as such. The Church herself has bestowed the title “Doctor of the Church,” by which she honours her most illustrious Fathers in the Liturgy, on many saints of later date as well, placing them thereby on the same level; we might even say that the canonization of a theological writer raises him, in some measure, to the dignity of a “Father.” Still, the mark of antiquity is not without its own importance, as already explained.

II. The domain of doctrine covered by the Fathers’ authority and infallibility is co-extensive with that of the Church, whose mouthpiece they are — it does not, accordingly, embrace truths of a purely natural, philosophical character, or truths revealed only incidentally, since these fall outside the Church’s public teaching proper. On the other hand, their authority is not confined to their testimony on truths expressly and formally revealed, but extends to the whole dogmatico-theological interpretation of the Deposit of Revelation. The material and formal authority of the Fathers — the subject-matter they treat, and the ecclesiastical use made of their writings — is beautifully expressed by St. Vincent of Lérins, speaking of the Fathers cited at the Council of Ephesus: “only these ten, the sacred number of the commandments, were brought forward at Ephesus as teachers, counsellors, witnesses, and judges; [and the Council,] holding their doctrine, following their advice, believing their testimony, and obeying their decision… passed judgment concerning the rules of Faith” (Commonitorium, n. 30) — a passage that could scarcely better refute the modern view reducing the Fathers’ authority to that of mere historical witnesses.

III. We must carefully distinguish the authority of one Father, or of a certain limited number of them, from the consentient testimony of all together. The former is plainly not infallible, since the Church’s approbation of a Father’s writings is not meant to guarantee the truth of everything he teaches — though certain particular works, St. Cyril’s Anathemas among them, have received precisely this guarantee. The Church’s approbation implies: (1) that the approved writings were not opposed to any doctrine publicly held by the Church in the author’s own time, and so incurred no censure; (2) that the doctrines for which the Father was renowned, and on which he most insisted, are positively probable; (3) a strong presumption that his more doubtful expressions should be interpreted in accordance with commonly received doctrine, admitting no real discrepancy among the Fathers except on the strongest grounds; and (4) under extraordinary circumstances, it may even give moral certainty of some doctrine — as when, for instance, some illustrious Father, uncontradicted by the Church, has openly enforced a doctrine as Catholic, treating those who deny it as heretics. When all the Fathers agree, however, their authority reaches its full perfection; the consent of the Fathers has always been regarded as equal in authority to the teaching of the whole Church, or to the definitions of Popes and Councils. Since it is hardly possible to ascertain every Father’s opinion on every point of doctrine, and since the Holy Ghost prevents the Church from ever ascribing to the whole body of the Fathers a doctrine they did not, in fact, hold, it follows that their consent must be regarded as fully established whenever those Fathers whose writings actually treat a given doctrine agree, absolutely or morally, provided they are sufficiently numerous and drawn from different countries and times. The number required varies with the nature of the doctrine — whether public, a matter of daily practice and great importance, or, by contrast, abstract, speculative, and comparatively unimportant — and with the personal authority of the Fathers involved, their standing in the Church, the degree of any opposition to the doctrine, and many further circumstances.

The consent of the Fathers does not always prove a doctrine’s Catholic character in exactly the same way. If they distinctly state that some doctrine is a public dogma of the Church, it must be accepted at once as such; if they merely state that the doctrine is true and taught by the Church, without formally calling it a dogma, this testimony carries considerably less weight, and the doctrine so attested cannot, on that ground alone, be treated as a dogma — though it remains, at the least, a Catholic truth, morally certain, whose denial would deserve censure as rash or erroneous.

IV. The Church holds the Fathers’ authority in the highest esteem for the interpretation of Scripture. They made the Bible their special study, in a way later writers generally have not, and later writers who have treated of it have generally followed the Fathers’ lead. The consent of the Fathers is a positive, not an exclusive, rule of interpretation — that is, where it exists, interpretation must accord with it, but where it does not exist, we may lawfully interpret a text even against the opinion of some individual Fathers. This consent must be gathered from the whole of their writings, not merely from their formal commentaries, since in commentaries they often have in view particular points of practical or ascetic doctrine, whereas in their other writings they are more directly engaged in expounding Catholic dogma as such; and even across both kinds of writing, a complete, scientific exposition of any given text is rarely to be found, since the Fathers, as a rule, have some particular doctrine in hand which they endeavour to draw from, and ground in, the text before them — hence the many apparent divergences in their exegesis, generally resolved easily enough once the various relevant passages are properly compared.

The Writings of Theologians

I. By “Theologians” we mean men learned in Theology who, as members or masters of the theological schools that arose after the patristic era, taught and handed down Catholic doctrine on strictly scientific lines, in obedience to and under the supervision of the Bishops. The title belongs, first of all, to the medieval Schoolmen — the Scholastic Theologians properly so called — then to all who have followed the methods of the Schools over the last three centuries, and, in general, to every distinguished and approved writer on theology, whether or not he has adhered strictly to scholastic method. Only in exceptional cases does the Church give public approbation to an individual theologian, whether through canonization or through the still greater honour of conferring the title “Doctor of the Church.” When we speak of an “approved author,” we mean simply one held in general esteem for his learning and for the Catholic spirit of his teaching — some approved authors carry acknowledged weight, others only minor importance, and what follows concerning theologians’ authority applies only to such weighty, approved authors (auctores probati et graves), not indiscriminately to every Catholic writer whatsoever.

II. The authority of theologians, like that of the Fathers, may be considered either individually or collectively, as a body. As a rule, the authority of a single theologian — canonized Saints and perhaps a very few authors of the greatest weight excepted — creates no presumption that no point of his teaching ever opposed the common doctrine of the Church in his day, still less that his whole doctrine is positively probable simply on the strength of his personal authority, apart from his actual arguments. When, however, the majority of approved and weighty theologians agree, it must be presumed that their teaching does not oppose the Church’s own; and where their doctrine, moreover, rests on sound arguments, proposed without prejudice and not decisively contradicted, its positive probability must be presumed as well. No more than this degree of probability, however, can be produced by the consent even of many, or all, theologians when they state a doctrine merely as a common opinion (opinio communis) rather than as a common conviction (sententia communis) — questions treated at great length by moral theologians in the historic controversy over Probabilism (see Lacroix, Theologia Moralis, I, tr. i, c. 2).

The consent of theologians produces genuine certainty that a doctrine is Catholic truth only where the doctrine is proposed as absolutely certain, and the consent itself is universal and constant — not merely a shared opinion, but a firm and settled conviction. If all agree that some particular doctrine is a Catholic dogma, and that to deny it is heresy, that doctrine is certainly a dogma; if they agree only that a doctrine cannot be denied without injury to Catholic truth, and that such denial deserves censure, this too is a sure proof that the doctrine is, in some sense, Catholic doctrine; and if they merely agree in declaring a doctrine sufficiently certain and well demonstrated, their consent, while not a formal proof of its Catholic character, still shows that the doctrine belongs to the mind of the Church (catholicus intellectus), so that its denial would incur, at the least, a censure of rashness.

These principles concerning the authority of theologians were strongly insisted on by Pius IX in the Brief Gravissimas Inter (cf. § 25 below), and follow as evident consequences of the Catholic doctrine of Tradition itself. Although the Holy Ghost’s assistance is not directly promised to theologians as individuals, the assistance promised to the Church as a whole requires that He prevent them, as a body, from falling into error — otherwise the faithful who follow their guidance would all be led astray together. The consent of theologians, moreover, implies the consent of the Episcopate, according to St. Augustine’s own dictum: “an error not resisted is thereby approved; a truth not defended is thereby suppressed.”² And natural reason itself assures us that such consent is a genuine guarantee of truth: “whatever is found to be one and the same among many independent persons is not an error, but a tradition” (Tertullian, as already quoted above).

The Church holds the medieval Doctors in almost the same esteem as the Fathers themselves; the substance of the Schoolmen’s teaching, and their characteristic method of treatment, have both received the Church’s strong approval (cf. Syllabus, prop. xiii, and Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris on the study of St. Thomas).