Founding the Fathers. Elizabeth A. Clark
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the same methods and rules of evidence that have now become the accepted norm in all other branches of historical research.89 Elsewhere, Emerton wrote that historians need “not miracles nor inspirations, nor revelations, nor the dictations of any authority whatsoever, but more documents and better authenticated ones.”90 More than the other professors here surveyed, Emerton moved the study of church history away from its confessional orientation.
Among the documents in the Harvard Divinity School archives is a list compiled by Emerton, dating to the late 1880s, of forty-six topics from which students in “History of the Early Church” might choose to write papers. The topics range from “The Roman State-religion at the time of Christ” through the Apostolic Fathers, Apologists, Montanism, Gnosticism, the persecutions, issues of canon, episcopate, and “the legend of the ‘Petrine Supremacy’,” to Constantine, Julian, and Theodosius, with around a dozen options regarding “barbarians” (Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns, Franks, Lombards; their migrations, religion, and settlements). Despite Emerton’s avowed lack of interest in doctrine, he offers a few options on “The Arian Controversy to the close of the Council of Nicaea,” “The Council of Chalcedon,” and “The Augustinian-pelagian controversy.”91
Also among the paper topics were “The Origin and Development of the Monastic Principle,” and “The Life and Work of Ulfilas, the Visigoth.” On these, there remain papers (43 and 45 pages, respectively) written by the student who took the one set of extant notes from Emerton’s ecclesiastical history class, Earl Morse Wilbur.92 These and other papers (“theses”) Wilbur wrote for Emerton93 show that Emerton instructed the students to preface their papers with a bibliography of relevant books and articles in several modern languages. (Wilbur included a second list of “more easily accessible” works he consulted, including a few in German.) Even though Wilbur listed many primary sources in his bibliography, most of his references to patristic authors are taken from such secondary works as Schaff’s Histories, a point suggesting that Emerton relegated work in the primary sources to higher-level seminars.94
In his paper on “The Life and Work of Ulfilas, the Visigoth,” Wilbur noted the paucity of sources for his topic. His bibliography cited Georg Waitz’s Über das Leben and die Lehre des Ulfilas (1840) and the later (and better, so he observed) study by W. Bessel, Über das Leben des Ulfilas (1860). Most of Wilbur’s actual references, however, were taken from works in English. Wilbur the Unitarian was not disturbed by scholars’ charge that Ulfilas’ Bible was “tainted with Arianism.” He placed Ulfilas’ contribution in the context of Germanic philology: just as scholars now study Sanskrit to probe the background of Indo-European languages, so the Gothic Bible remains a monument of Germanic literature, whose birth lay seven centuries before the Scandinavian Eddas, five centuries before the Niebelungen Lied, and three centuries before the “Paraphrase” of Caedmon.95
Despite Wilbur’s inattention to primary sources, his papers are of high quality for a first-year student in church history. It does not surprise that Wilbur later studied in Berlin (where he confessed disappointment that that the lectures were “only a review of what I had already had at Harvard”), taught courses at Meadville Seminary, and was the organizer of a new divinity school (the Pacific Unitarian School for the Ministry) at Berkeley, of which he later served as President.96 There he wrote his pamphlet, “The First Century of the Liberal Movement in American Religion.”97
From Samuel Miller’s recitation method to Emerton’s assignment of term papers, the teaching of church history in America evolved considerably in seventy-five years. The change in pedagogy reflects both the professors’ greater expertise and the availability of books. Here, as we shall shortly see, the growth of seminary library collections was key. Students by century’s end were no longer tied to one textbook, as was largely the case with Miller’s students at Princeton. In addition, the diminution of denominational polemic meant that various topics pertaining to early Christianity might be explored for their own historical interest, not primarily as weapons drawn from a textual arsenal with which to batter those whose doctrine and polity might differ.
Introducing Seminar Teaching in Church History
By the 1870s, the “seminary method” (i.e., the seminar) had been adopted in a few university history departments. As noted above, the seminar was introduced to American education by historian Charles Kendall Adams at the University of Michigan in 1869, was taken up by Henry Adams at Harvard in 1871,98 and in the later nineteenth century became especially associated with Johns Hopkins.99 Henry Adams later reflected that, ignorant of medieval history, he had introduced the seminar so that he and his students should learn together about Anglo-Saxon and medieval law; the boys, he reminisced, “worked like rabbits, and dug holes all over the field of archaic society.”100 That this method should be utilized in courses on church history was a recommendation frequently advanced by seminary professors from the 1880s onward.
For example, a handbook by Frank Hugh Foster, Professor of Church History at the Theological Seminary in Oberlin, published in 1888, illustrated how the seminar could be used in the study of church history. Foster admitted that students would need guidance in this new method, since they were accustomed to “dependent study.”101 They should learn that the study of history involves explanation, the analysis of causes and effects—not merely knowing facts. Although Foster praised Neander’s and Schaff’s volumes on ancient church history as the best of their kind, he argued that such manuals would not give students any sense of how to do history for themselves. They must work with original sources, such as are found in the volumes of Migne and Mansi, and the Ante-Nicene Fathers series.102 Although, Foster admitted, America lacks the archives necessary for original research in (for example) medieval history, the historian of Christian antiquity is in a better position since the Greek and Latin sources are available in print. Foster reported that at Oberlin, one seminar was organized around various topics pertaining to Augustine, such as “Augustine’s View of the Constitution of the Human Mind.” Other subjects Foster suggested for a “practice” seminar in early church history include “The Council of Nice” and “Hippolytus and his Conflict with the Bishops of Rome.” Foster advised professors to propose a large project, then divide the work among the students in a team effort.103
At the schools here surveyed, seminars were offered at Harvard and probably at Union. Schaff in 1886 praised the “seminary” method (i.e., seminar) as one of the most important innovations at Berlin and other German universities. German seminars, Schaff reported, cover topics in exegesis, history, and theology. Neander in his seminar would select a particular patristic work to be read and explained, for example, Origen’s Against Celsus, Tertullian’s Apology, or Augustine’s Confessions. One Privatdozent had chosen the (newly discovered) Didache. Schaff urged American theological institutions to introduce the seminar, adding that he expected to do so at Union the following winter.104 (Whether or not Schaff himself did, there is evidence for seminars offered by his successor, Arthur Cushman McGiffert.105) Schaff’s comments once more suggest that close attention to primary sources in the classroom had not been a central feature of church history courses in mid-nineteenth-century America.
Ephraim Emerton developed the seminar method for “higher instruction” in church history at Harvard. He gave due credit to Ranke, the elder and younger Droysen, and various French historians for their work in instituting the “practice-seminar.”106 German historical scholarship, Emerton remarked, broke the eighteenth-century approach to history, with its “partisan purpose” and “rhetorical elaboration.” He had nothing but scorn for the older recitation method used in American colleges: for “an educated man to listen to such repetition is an actual loss to science,” he exclaimed. Relying on a textbook does not deepen students’ mental capacities. Although the lecture method has its purposes if artfully organized, often a student can get the same information much faster from a book.107 Genuine historical scholarship requires “independent, individual effort,” and this is what seminar work teaches. The point of the seminar, Emerton asserted, is to lead students back from a completed work to the primary sources. In America, professors face a challenge in combating the “mental