3. Reformation as Personal Reform. During the
patristic period of the Christian era reformation
referred predominantly to individual reform or per-
sonal renewal. Reformation in the strictest sense of the
word meant the return to a previously established
norm, looking backward to something given rather
than forward to a goal still awaited. The norm in a
Christian context was a religious norm, the restoration
in sinful man of the original image of God, and
specifically the conforming to the likeness of Christ.
Through spiritual regeneration and growth in sanctifi-
cation and holiness of life, the individual Christian is
restored in part to that original image and similitude
of God which had been bestowed upon man, but which
had been lost by the fall of man into sin. Genesis
1:26-27 reads: “Then God said, 'Let us make man in
our image, after our likeness....'” Genesis 3:1-24
records the fall of man. The restoration of the image
of God in the new dispensation was given a concrete
and more tangible definition as the restoration of the
image of Christ. Through baptism, faith, and growth
in sanctification or holiness of life man is reformed after
the likeness of Christ, God-incarnate, the first-born
among the sons of God. The imitation of Christ entails
patterning the new man after the person of Christ, who
was in every respect perfect, loving, forgiving, and
gracious. The reformation of the individual in the
likeness of Christ remains partial and imperfect in this
present time, but will be consummated in the world
to come.
Two Scripture passages from the writings of Saint
Paul will serve to illustrate this conception of personal
reformation and renewal patterned after Christ. I
Corinthians 3:18 reads: “And we all, with unveiled
face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being
changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to
another; for this comes from the Lord who is the
Spirit.” Philippians 3:20-21 reads: “But our common-
wealth is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior,
the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body
to be like his glorious body, by the power which ena-
bles him even to subject all things to himself.” The
concept of reformation as a willed and intentional
return of the individual to the perfect norm, the image
of God and likeness of Christ, is amalgamated with
the idea of the spiritual renewal effected by the Spirit
on the divine initiative. Reformation is partial and
relative here in time and is perfected only in eternity.
The Greek and Latin patristic writers derived their
concept of reformation directly from the New Testa-
ment, but they developed the idea with slight varia-
tions in emphasis.
The Greek church fathers cultivated the idea of
personal reformation as a restoration of the image of
God and likeness of Christ. With a strong emphasis
upon the centrality of the incarnation the imagery of
the recovery of man's primal condition through the
spiritualization of man by faith in Christ was strongly
emphasized. Together with the recovery of the primal
condition imagery, the Greek fathers cultivated also
the notion of a return to paradise, man's first estate
before the fall. Man's final return to the paradise of
heaven could be anticipated by mystical participation
in the here and now. They also viewed the repre-
sentational embodiment of the kingdom of God on
earth in the Church, the mystical body of Christ, as
an ongoing reformation of the world. This conception
was more meliorist than optimist, for the prayer that
the Lord's kingdom should come implied an ongoing
process of becoming until the Parousia at the end of
time. The Christian emperor and the monastic groups
were chief guardians and most dedicated promoters
of the kingdom ideal.
While the creational and incarnational emphases of
Eastern thought are not absent from the Latin patristic
writings, a greater stress upon reformation in terms
of restoration understood morally and legally is appar-
ent. The shift in emphasis is evident in their very
vocabulary. Tertullian (ca. 155-220), for example, used
the word reformare to designate a return to a previous
condition, applying the term also to the general repe-
titiousness of the universe. He was possibly the first
to use the phrase in melius reformare, to reform for
the better. Cyprian, Arnobius, and Lactantius, a
fourth-century Christian poet who wrote on the dignity
of man, conceived of personal moral meliorism as
reform. Lactantius, fond of phoenix imagery, tied in
the idea of reformation with his notion of a coming
golden age and a glorious millennium at the end of
time. Thus, just as in the early phase of the eighteenth-
century romantic movement, restoration, through re-
form, of a golden age in the past was seen as a move
toward a more perfect condition yet to be realized
(Ladner, 1959).
Two heretical movements in Western Christendom
made substantial contributions to the concept of refor-
mation. The Donatists insisted that the validity of the
sacrament was affected by the administrant's state of
grace and opposed the readmission to the Church of
the lapsi or fallen, those who had denied their faith
in times of persecution. The Donatists were arch-
Puritans or purists who held up absolute ideals of
conduct and insisted that the entire Church had to be
reformed from top to bottom. The Pelagians undertook
a reformation within the Church and stressed the pos-
sibility for an individual Christian to will his own moral
reform and for groups of Christians to order social life
according to Christian moral law. Erasmus, and before
him Lorenzo Valla, learned from Jerome to pay tribute
to the contribution of heretics to Christian thought.
Not least of their contributions was the negative stim-
ulation they gave to Saint Augustine. As Robert of
Melun observed in the twelfth century, what the holy
fathers did not find controverted they did not defend.
In Augustine the orthodox idea of reformation found
an articulate spokesman. For him the reformation of
man meant a great deal more than the return of an
individual to the creational integrity of Adam, first man
in paradise. All historical reformations are related to
a creational process of formation which includes the
nontemporal act of conversion to God. Augustine, of
course, referred often to the restoration of the individ-
ual to the image of God or likeness of Christ. He
speculated upon the nature of time and the role of
numbers in leading man back to God. But above all
the idea of reformation in Augustine was given a dy-
namic character by its association with his grand the-
ology of history. The two kingdoms theory of his City
of God, in which the “two churches” of Cain and Abel
and their followers served as the matrix for his idea
of reformation and provided the prevailing medieval
context for the concept, proved to be one of the great
formative forces in Western intellectual history. In the
final stages of Augustine's writings, stimulated by the
Pelagian controversy from A.D. 412 on, he developed
a grand scheme of double succession, one line derived
from Cain and another from Abel. Reformation in this
scheme, whether of a single person or of the collective,
meant rejecting Cain and returning to Abel. Reforma-
tion is conservative and even antirevolutionary, for
Augustine saw it as a conservation and renovation, a
return to that God-given and God-pleasing state of man
and order of society which in history has been con-
stantly threatened by the city of man, but never wholly
lost. A subtle change in the idea of reformation is
introduced by Augustine sufficiently significant for later
history to merit notice. His fixation on the virtue of
monastic life as a superior Christian way prompted him
to speak of reform in terms not only of the indwelling
Christ and of the imitation of Christ's person, but in
terms of obedience to “the law of Christ.”
Augustine's association of the Church with the city
of God, the two never being coterminous, pointed up
the Church's role as a carrier of permanent reform.
The Missale Romanum conveyed the message of God's
reforming activity not only into every cathedral but
into every village chapel in Christendom. The priest
at the preparation of the cup for Mass recited the
words: “God who has marvelously created the dignity
of human substance and has more wondrously reformed
it.” Not only did the idea of renewal and reform play
an important part in sacramental theology, but also
in restoring ecclesiastical order through periodic re-
forms of canon law. The revision of older conciliar
canons by later councils became a regular reformatory
procedure. But the predominant and most charac-
teristic expression of the idea of reformation during
the medieval period was in the constantly recurring
monastic reform movements.
