On the shoulders of giants in replay – Orthodoxy

Translating the Fathers of the Church is a responsibility that cannot be delegated: making accessible, in the language of Montaigne, the thoughts of John Chrysostom, Basil the Great, Maximus the Confessor. Men and women devoted their lives to this work, century after century, so that the voices of the early Church would not be extinguished. This documentary recounts this transmission.

It all began in the 17th century, in the solitude of the abbey of Port-Royal des Champs. The “Solitaires”, these scholars withdrawn from the world, undertook a translation of the Fathers with unprecedented rigor and spiritual demands for the time. Michel Stavrou, Orthodox theologian and professor, guides us to these places: the spirit of Port-Royal is not unrelated to the Orthodox approach, which is surprising, and deserves our attention.

In the 19th century, Abbot Migne launched a crazy bet: to publish hundreds of volumes of Greek and Latin patrology, to make all the texts of the Fathers available to the Christian world. Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, director of the Fathers in the Faith collection, retraces this editorial adventure, and shows how these volumes, originating in the West, nourished the patristic renaissance in Russia and throughout the Orthodox world in the following century.

In Lyon, in the premises of Sources Chrétiennes, Guillaume Bady opens the doors of the workshop. Ancient manuscripts, critical editions, facing Greek and French texts, apparatus of notes: we see, concretely, how a text sixteen centuries old becomes a rigorous and faithful printed page.

But what is a Father of the Church? What distinguishes a Father from a simple Christian author? Father Marc-Antoine Costa de Beauregard answers this question. Reading the Fathers, he reminds us, is not a matter of scholarship: it is a practice which presupposes prayer, the sacraments, a Tradition that we receive alive, not preserved under glass.

Documentary produced by Father Jivko Panev