Cloud of Witnesses: Doctors of the Church

For the past seven hundred years the Roman Catholic Church has recognised the distinctive contributions that a small number of men and women have made to Christian theology across the ages. Honoured as Doctors of the Church, there have been 37 of them to date, all of whom have also been canonised as saints. Among them are four women: St Catherine of Siena, St Theresa of Avila, St Therèse of Lisieux and St Hildegaard of Bingen. Fourteen of the 37 Doctors are depicted in the cloister windows of Chester Cathedral, including St Catherine. Although the formal canonisation of saints has never been part of the Protestant tradition, many saints are commemorated in the Calendar of the Church of England, and Christians of all denominations can rightly respect the huge contributions that the Doctors of the Church have made to the Christian story.

Among the first to be honoured in this way were St Ambrose, St Augustine of Hippo and St Jerome. All three are in the cloister windows. Known as The Great Latin Fathers, they were close contemporaries, having being born in the middle years of the 4^th century. It was an important time in the early history of Christianity: the conversion of Constantine in 313 had paved the way for it to become the accepted religion of the Roman Empire, and the Council of Nicaea in 325 had begun to compose the defining creed of the faith. The canon of the New Testament had more or less been settled by 367. These were the foundations on which Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome were able to build.

Ambrose was born in Trier and brought up in Rome, but in 374, while still in his mid-thirties, he was elected bishop of Milan where he was serving as a Roman provincial governor. Once in episcopal office he became a stern critic of the imperial court in Milan, challenging the official tolerance of paganism and rebuking the emperor Theodosius for his errors. At the same time, Ambrose was diligent and resourceful in nurturing the Christians in the city. He was particularly noted for his carefully crafted sermons, weaving together biblical and philosophical themes. Such was their power that a sceptical teacher of rhetoric in Milan, Augustine, was converted to the faith by Ambrose’s preaching. 

Augustine was born in what is now Tunisia and taught for a while in the imperial court of Milan where he was baptised by bishop Ambrose. Augustine soon returned to north Africa, and in 391 he became the bishop of Hippo in Algeria. For the next thirty-nine years, while living a simple life of service and devotion, he was an influential preacher and a giant among the shapers of early Christian doctrine. In his great work The City of God, completed just before his death in 430, Augustine laid out a theology of salvation that dominated the thinking of the western church for centuries. At the heart of his schema was the belief that people were so inextricably mired in sin that they could do nothing to aid their own salvation. Only the unmerited gift of God’s grace could save them from perdition, and God alone determined who would be saved and who would not. It was an early formulation of the doctrine of predestination - Calvinism before Calvin, we might say.

St Jerome, the last of this trio of Doctors, ranks alongside Augustine as among the most important scholars of the early church. As a young man he lived the life of a desert hermit, but in 376 he went to Antioch, an important centre of early Christianity, where he was ordained priest. Eight years later he travelled to the Holy Land, living in Bethlehem until his death in 420. Jerome’s monumental life work was the translation of the Bible into Latin, commonly known as the Vulgate. Even today it is difficult to grasp the enormity of his achievement in translating three-quarters of a million words from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. 

Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome were intellectual giants whose work has had a profound influence on human culture and Christian history for sixteen centuries. As we look at their images in the cloister windows, we might perhaps remember that great wisdom and meticulous scholarship can still be valued in a world that, in our more pessimistic moments, we might see as intellectually shallow and culturally ephemeral. So, as you pass by these three Doctors of the Church in their cloister windows, thank God that they are here and honour their legacies.