St Maximus the Confessor Shows Us Why We Cannot Rely Upon the Church Fathers Alone

I really like St Maximus; he is one of my favorite saints and one of my favorite patristic writers. There is much within his works that inspire me and my own theological development. Yet, he was a man of his time (the 7th century). And in this time, their understanding of human biology was woeful at best. Perhaps the best way to show this is to explore a quote of St Maximus on abortion:

Question 28 (III, 7): What is the meaning of the passage about the woman who is struck and ‘has an abortion,’ and ‘if the child comes out perfectly formed’ the law declares that the one who struck [her] must give ‘life for life.’ But if the child falls out unformed, [why] is it only an accident?

Literally, we understand the passage in this way: since the murder is of the body — for a soul, being immortal, is never murdered – for this reason ‘being not perfectly formed’ into the human form does not entail to danger but only mild damage. But if the human image is fully developed, it is reasonable to see such a person as committing the murder of a perfect human being [1].

We now know more about the biological processes going on during pregnancy. We know that human life exists at the time of conception, long before the embryo looks human. In the time of St Maximus, they did not have the means to investigate the process, and they assumed that life began when the fetus was in human form. If we find the ancients could be wrong on something so fundamental as when human life was formed in the womb, we can understand why their other opinions are not always to have a hold on us as well (something which those who quote patristic sources to make an argument against evolution fail to understand).

The Church Fathers are an important witness of the faith of the Church, but that witness must be understood within its proper context. They are not the final authority by which we know the dogmas of the faith — rather, they are a witness of our faith, and show us the difficulty we all face, in all times and places, to properly declare that faith in a way which is comprehensive and valid.

Footnotes

[1] St Maximus the Confessor, Questions and Doubts. Trans. Despina D. Prassas (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010), 57.