9 October – Feast of St. Abraham, Old Testament Patriarch – WDTPRS: Roman Martyrology

Today, 9 October is the feast of St. Abraham, Patriarch of the Old Testament.

Here is the entry in the newest edition of the Martyrologium Romanum with a translation:

3. Commemoratio sancti Abrahae, patriarchae et omnium credentium patris, qui, Domino vocante, ab urbe Ur Chaldaeorum, patria sua, egressus est et per terram erravit eidem et semini eius a Deo promissam.  Item totam fidem suam in Deo manifestavit, cvm, sperans contra spem, unigenitum Isaac ei iam seni a Domino datum ex uxore sterili in sacrificum offerre non renuit.  …

The commemoration of Saint Abraham, patriarch and father of all believers, who, since the Lord was calling him, went froth from the city of Ur of the Chaldeans, his home land, and wandered through the land promised by God to him and to his seed.  He manifested his complete faith in God when, hoping against hope, he did not refrain from offering in sacrifice his only-begotten son Isaac, given by the Lord to him, an old man, from his sterile wife.

Nothing is impossible with God.

The Martyrologium Romanum commemorates this day the living prototype of the believer who trusts when sight fails.

The Fathers of the Church, meditating on the figure of Abraham, found in him the matrix of the entire spiritual life: obedience, detachment, hope, prayer, and the prophetic anticipation of Christ.

St. Irenaeus of Lyons, that earliest heir of apostolic tradition, sees Abraham as the first man who “by faith received the covenant” (Adv. Haer. IV.21.3). For Irenaeus, the patriarch’s life is a pre-gospel. The promise that “in thy seed shall all nations be blessed” already contains the mystery of Christ:

“In the faith of Abraham the Incarnation was prefigured, for his seed is Christ, by whom the blessing comes upon the nations.”

Thus the Old and New Covenants are not opposed but organically one: the faith of the Patriarch flowering in the faith of the Church. The ancient journey from Ur to Canaan prefigures the Church’s pilgrimage from the world to the heavenly Jerusalem.

Ambrose, writing two centuries later, reads that same journey as the itinerary of every Christian soul. In De Abraham (I.5) he comments:

“Voca te Deus ut exeas de terra tua, hoc est de corpore tuo.”

God calls you, he says, to go forth from your own land—that is, from the body and from earthly desires. The geographical exodus becomes an interior migration. For Ambrose, Ur signifies the darkness of ignorance and sensuality, while Canaan, “the land which I will show thee,” is the contemplation of divine things. The Christian must leave behind his “kindred,” that is, worldly attachments, to enter the promised rest of charity. Abraham is thus the archetype of the monk and of every soul who departs from the familiar in search of the invisible.

St. Jerome, his contemporary, adopts the same spiritual reading. Commenting on Genesis 12, he sees in the command egredere an ascetical principle: to “go forth” is to transcend the passions and climb the ladder of virtues. He insists that Abraham obeyed nuda fide—with naked faith—since he did not know where he was going. In that ignorance, Jerome finds a sign of perfect trust:

“He believed, not because he saw, but because he heard.”

The life of faith, for Jerome, begins when one surrenders the map and lets God direct the steps.

Origen, in his Homilies on Genesis, discerns in Abraham’s offering of Isaac a revelation of resurrection faith. The text of Genesis says that Abraham set out “on the third day.” For Origen, this is no accident: the third day announces the Resurrection. “Abraham knew,” he writes,

“that God was able to raise his son from the dead; therefore he offered him, and received him back as a figure.”

The knife raised over Isaac is the shadow of Calvary; the ram caught by its horns in the thicket is the humanity of Christ entangled in the thorns of mortality. Origen’s Abraham is the first believer in Easter. His faith does not end in the renunciation of the beloved but in the hope of restoration beyond death.

Augustine, gathering these strands, makes Abraham the type of both priest and victim. In City of God (XVI.32) he observes that “Isaac, carrying the wood for the sacrifice, was a figure of Christ bearing His Cross.” The two “walked together” (ambulabant pariter), signifying not “synodality” but the unity of will between Father and Son in the mystery of redemption. For Augustine, every detail of the Genesis narrative is prophetic: the mountain signifies the height of divine love, the altar the Cross, the fire the Holy Spirit, the obedient son the incarnate Word. Abraham’s sacrifice thus contains in embryo the whole Triduum. In another place he remarks that Abraham

“offered in figure what God would truly perform,”

since the Father would not spare His own Son but deliver Him up for us all.

St. John Chrysostom, preaching in Antioch, contemplates the same scene with moral fervor. He calls Abraham “the father of faith and the master of obedience.” What moved God, he says, was not the knife but the heart:

“He raised the blade, yet the sacrifice was complete already in his mind.”

Chrysostom insists that such faith is the root of all Christian virtue, since it trusts the divine command even when reason cannot see the purpose. The patriarch becomes, in his words, “the first fruits of the faithful.” Isaac’s silence and consent make him a type of Christ’s meekness; Abraham’s readiness prefigures the priesthood of believers who offer their lives as a living sacrifice.

For the Alexandrian Fathers, the story of Mamre, the hospitality of Abraham to the three mysterious visitors, was no mere moral tale but a theophany. St. Basil the Great, in De Spiritu Sancto (IX.22), writes that Abraham

“adored one and welcomed three,”

discerning dimly the mystery of the Trinity. His table beneath the oak of Mamre foreshadows the Eucharistic table of the Church, where God sits with His friends. In the tent of the patriarch, the invisible God begins to be seen; in his hospitality the image of divine communion is revealed.

Gregory of Nyssa, brother of Basil, deepens this mystical sense. In his Life of Moses (II.29), he compares Abraham’s faith to the soul’s epektasis, the perpetual stretching forth toward what lies beyond.

“He goes out, not knowing whither he goes because the good which he seeks has no limit.”

Faith for Gregory is not static possession but endless movement toward the Infinite. Abraham’s pilgrimage is the emblem of the soul’s unending ascent into God.

The image of the sinus Abrahae, the “bosom of Abraham,” provided another field of reflection. Tertullian, in De Anima (55), imagined it as a place of rest and refreshment for the righteous dead, a kind of vestibule of paradise awaiting the Redeemer. Ambrose later ennobled the image in De obitu Valent. 72:

“Sinus Abrahae requies aeternae pacis… the bosom of Abraham is the repose of eternal peace.”

Augustine, commenting on the parable of Lazarus, identified it with the hidden life of the Church, where the faithful departed rest in the promise of resurrection. Thus Abraham remains father not only of the living but of those who sleep in hope.

Throughout patristic literature, Abraham’s greatness is never detached from humility. St. Gregory the Great, reflecting in Moralia in Iob 5.3.6 on his intercession for Sodom, marvels that

“he who was a friend of God called himself dust and ashes”

Faith and humility, for Gregory, are inseparable: to believe is to acknowledge one’s nothingness before the Almighty. The same Abraham who converses familiarly with God bows to the earth in reverence. His confidence is born not of presumption but of trust in divine mercy.

Thus, from Irenaeus to Gregory, Abraham stands as the common ancestor of all theology.

He is the first contemplative, the first missionary, the first intercessor, the first pilgrim of faith. His life forms the grammar of revelation: calling, promise, testing, and blessing. In him the Fathers discern the whole outline of salvation history already traced in miniature. He believed, and it was counted to him as righteousness; he obeyed, and the nations were blessed through him.

The Church, reading Genesis in the light of Christ, sees in Abraham the mirror of her own faith, walking through this world as a stranger, building altars on the way, awaiting the city whose builder and maker is God.

In fact, speaking of altars, the Roman liturgy invokes Abraham as both witness and intercessor.

In the Roman Canon the priest prays:

“Supra quae propitio ac sereno vultu respicere digneris, et accepta habere, sicut accepta habere dignatus es munera pueri tui iusti Abel, et sacrificium patriarchae nostri Abrahae, et quod tibi obtulit summus sacerdos tuus Melchisedech.”

Here Abraham stands between Abel and Melchisedech as the perfect figure of priestly faith: he offers not the fruits of the earth but the beloved son, prefiguring the Eucharistic oblation of Christ Himself.