Saturday, October 30, 2021

Georges Florovsky on the Regula Fidei in the Early Church

  

The Regula Fidei

 

Tradition was in the Early Church, first of all, an hermeneutical principle and method. Scripture could be rightly and fully assessed and understood only in the light and in the context of the living Apostolic Tradition, which was an integral factor of Christian existence. It was so, of course, not because Tradition could add anything to what has been manifested in the Scripture, but because it provided that living context, the comprehensive perspective, in which only the true “intention” and total “design” of the Holy Writ of Divine Revelation itself, could be detected and grasped. The truth was, according to St. Irenaeus, a “well-grounded system,” a corpus (adv. haeres. II. 27. 1—veritatis corpus), a “harmonious melody” (II, 38. 3). But it was precisely this “harmony” which could be grasped only by the insight of faith. Indeed, Tradition was not just a transmission of inherited doctrines, in a “Judaic manner,” but rather the continuous life of the truth (5Cf. Dom Odo Casel, O.S.B., Benedict von Nursia als Pneumatiker, in "Heilige Überlieferung" (Münster, 1938), ss. 100-101). It was not a fixed core or complex of binding propositions, but rather an insight into the meaning and impact of the revelatory events, of this revelation of the “God who acts.” And this was determinative in the field of Biblical exegesis. G. L. Prestige has well put it: “The voice of the Bible could be plainly heard only if its text were interpreted broadly and rationally, in accordance with the apostolic creed and the evidence of the historical practice of Christendom. It was the heretics that relied on isolated texts, and the Catholics who paid more attention on the whole to scriptural principles” (Fathers and Heretics, p. 43). Summarizing her careful analysis of the use of Tradition in the Early Church, Dr. Ellen Flesseman-van-Leer has written: “Scripture without interpretation is not Scripture at all; the moment it is used and becomes alive it is always interpreted Scripture.” Now Scripture must be interpreted “according to its own basic purport,” which is disclosed in the regula fidei. Thus, this regula becomes, as it were, the controlling instance in the exegesis. “Real interpretation of Scripture is Church preaching, is tradition” (Tradition and Scripture in the Early Church, pp. 92-96). (Georges Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition: An Eastern Orthodox View [Belmont, Mass.: Nordland Publishing Company, 1972], 79-80)