Doctors of the Church

We normally associate the title Doctor with medical doctors today, but the title precedes the institution of the science of medicine and recalls a day when the pursuit of wisdom or philosophy was treated with more respect and the associated pursuit of divine wisdom or theology was called the queen and even mother of all science. In those days, the term 'science' itself was more broadly defined than today's emphasis on the science of the natural world or the natural sciences. A doctor is a teacher before he is a practitioner, having achieved a certain level of scholarship in his particular science as to be judged capable of teaching it to novices.

So there is a science, and there is a regulating body that determines that a particular proficient may be permitted to teach that science to others. And thus we come to the science of theology and the Christian life, and the role of the Church in putting before us certain men and women who she judges worthy not only of example and emulation (for they are all canonised Saints also) but able to teach us something of the nature of God, the nature of the Church, and the life of the Christian soul in God. These men and women we call Doctors of the Church, and they are relatively few when placed against the panoply of Saints.

I recently started to read a book that draws together into an anthology several instructional sermons given by the Holy Father Benedict XVI on the Doctors of the Church, during his Wednesday audiences. They treat all but one Doctor (Saint Peter Chrysologus), and provide short introductions to these Saints and their contributions to the intellectual and spiritual life of the Church. I thought I'd fill out a list of the Doctors, based on this book, and I shall place it on a separate page on this blog. You'll find the page in the list on the sidebar to the right. It should fill out gradually, as I get through the book. And I (and perhaps you) get to discover something new about the Saints whose names flit through our consciousness if and when we run through the liturgical calendar of the Church.

We start with Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, the great patriarch of the Coptic church of Alexandria, whose feast day we celebrated a week ago, on the 2nd day of May.