Christian asked:

What are three characteristics of the Patristic period?

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I take it that you mean the characteristics of the thoughtof the patristic period. There are lots of
characteristics. I will give you here the three most general and most underlying.

1. Absolute spirit

Looking at Christian religion philosophically, Christianism is the ism of the absolute universal spirit.
The 'holy spirit' is the Spirit that created all that is in the beginning with God, it isGod this period said.
The spirit governs the universe and time, and 'lives' in history through the concrete acts of men and
women. The thought of the absolute universal spirit is the first moment of the thought of this period.

2. Athens and Jerusalem.

Tertullian (160-220) asked the rhetorical question, 'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?' at the
outset of the period in question. By it he meant, What have the false Greek gods to do with the living
God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob? What has polytheism to do with monotheism? What has
superstition to do with truth? What has the wisdom of the world to do with the wisdom of God (cf. 1.
Cor. 1)? and so on... Athens and Jerusalem are to be understood symbolically as Greek and Jew.
Unfortunately for Tertullian, the patristic period is one in which the two had everythingto do with one
another, in which they met and married, in which the semitic root religion really became embroiled in
the thought of the world and changed that thought forever. This marks the Patristic period, hence the
talk from Western commentators down the centuries about 'Platonism' in Christianity, as if this were
an agenda or a corruption; it is merely the effect of 'Athens' having so much to do with 'Jerusalem'.

3. Church and State.

"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's" Jesus had
said. This reflects the difference between the Kingdom of David and the Kingdoms of the world,
sacred and profane, divine and secular. Church and state can be taken in the concrete sense as
characteristic of the thought of the period, or as ciphers for the origin of the whole problem of
universals. Anything less than what is ultimate (for which G-d is the signifier, but not the word) is an
idol unworthy of ruling and not universal. It is relative, but that which is 'rendered to God' is the whole
self (Shema Israel!Deut.6:4f) which is universal. The question of universals got philosophically
trivialised and lost under the thumb of Scholasticism.

None of these three moments of thought have been overcome. They persist today.

Matthew Del Nevo

http://www.sicetnon.com