Founding the Fathers. Elizabeth A. Clark
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Gieseler’s texts were used by instructors of church history.174 A list of readings for church history at Harvard dating to the 1860s reveals that in addition to Gieseler, an instructor used (among other works) Neander’s Church Histories, Milman’s Latin Christianity,175 Mosheim’s Commentaries, Joseph Bingham’s Antiquities of the Christian Church [Origines Ecclesiasticae], Hagenbach’s History of Christian Doctrines, Julius Müller’s Christian Doctrine of Sin, and Isaak Dorner’s History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ.176 The authors listed are for the most part those being read in more evangelically oriented theological institutions of the period, suggesting that Unitarian professors, like colleagues elsewhere, considered these the best works for their courses.
Ephraim Emerton, however, the first Professor of Ecclesiastical History, in the late 1880s made no mention of Neander in his class lectures.177 He rather recommended that students use Philip Smith’s Student’s Church History (as noted above, a work largely dependent on Schaff178), Schaff’s History of the Christian Church, and Fisher’s recently published History of the Christian Church. Emerton mentioned several times in his lectures that for the Roman Catholic viewpoint, students might consult “Blane’s Church History,” a work I have not been able to locate.179 Emerton’s approach on this point contrasts with that of Samuel Miller earlier in the century, who assumed it unnecessary even to explain why books by Roman Catholic authors would be inappropriate.
The professors here discussed found problematic the German historians’ lack of familiarity with Christianity in America.180 Henry Smith complained that “German divines are far better acquainted with the obscurest heresy of remote antiquity, than with the teeming life of America.”181 Smith especially faulted Gieseler for dwelling on the (to him) bizarre behavior displayed at “camp meetings” as if it characterized all American Protestantism.182 Moreover, Gieseler stressed the poor opportunities for theological education in America, mentioning only the German Lutheran and German Reformed seminaries,183 with nary a word for Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Andover—or Union.
Philip Schaff agreed with Smith that at present there existed no adequate history of the American church. German works, he thought, were “well-nigh worthless” on the topic,184 their authors either ignorant of American church history or distorting it so as to be unrecognizable. Gieseler, Schaff charged, leaves European readers with many misconceptions, for example, that “love of money, cold selfishness, hypocritical piety, overweening conceit, and contempt for everything European” were the chief attributes of the American character, especially of Yankees, New Yorkers, and Pennsylvanians! His biased view was common thirty or forty years ago on the Continent, Schaff added.185 At that time, to most German historians, “America was a terra incognita, or known only from vague and conflicting reports of travelers.” “American church history,” Schaff concluded, “remains to be written.” Is not America “the land of freedom and of the future,” where church-state separation flourishes?186
As the above summary makes evident, the professors deemed no textbook fully adequate for American Protestant students’ use. Some texts by German authors were lacking in evangelical piety; almost all were too long for beginning students. The problem of textbooks was compounded by the lack of student access to primary sources.
Primary Sources
One feature obvious to readers today is the relative lack of primary source study in nineteenth-century American classrooms. Although the professors frequently urged their students to read various early Christian writings, the class presentation did not revolve around study and discussion of the sources. When, for example, Samuel Miller wished to impress upon his students the “decline” that soon infected the early church, he exhorted them, “Read Cyprian! Read Origen! Read Eusebius!”187—but there is no suggestion that these authors were required reading for the class, nor, for that matter, that students had access to these texts.
Roswell Hitchcock taught his Union students the distinction between monumental sources and written sources.188 He offered suggestions on where to find the primary written sources—civil laws, councils, papal bulls, the monastic Rules, liturgies, hymns, catechisms and confessions, in addition to theological writings. Among secondary sources, Hitchcock listed church histories from the second century onward, biographies of and monographs on famous figures in church history, including the Acta Sanctorum, of which he owned an entire set.189 Many “auxiliary studies” should also be consulted.190 One wonders if Hitchcock’s students were discouraged by his rather comprehensive list—if they were, they give no sign of it in their notes. As Hitchcock’s recommendations show, by his time contextualization had come to be a desideratum for the student of the early church.
Despite his admonition to students to consult the sources so they might judge the impartiality of historians, Hitchcock nevertheless conceded that the use of primary sources is “absolutely indispensable” only for those who teach and write church history. Yet even these do not always ground their works in the primary sources; in Germany, as well as in (admittedly deficient) England and America, many write on the basis of secondary accounts, using “the labor of others.” Even the best writers (Mosheim, Neander, Gieseler, Baur, and Niedner) sometimes quote ancient authors without verifying the citations. No one, Hitchcock added, can feel certain, relying only on secondary sources. With the materials now available, students can at least make a beginning in primary-source study.191
Philip Schaff, for his part, urged beginning students to acquire “some knowledge of the primary sources”—an admonition that once more suggests that such study was not the task of regular coursework. He noted the Edinburgh edition by Roberts and Donaldson of the Ante-Nicene Christian Library, and its American reprint. (Schaff in the 1880s instigated the publication of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, as discussed in Chapter 1.) Yet he conceded that the sources are so vast that even the greatest historians must depend on the work of others, using collections, digests, and specialized monographs.192 One reviewer of Schaff’s History of the Christian Church, Volume 1, declared that Schaff himself “makes no pretension to an exclusive or even primary dependence upon the original sources,” although [in a concession startling to historians today] he uses them “whenever he deems it necessary.”193
By the early 1890s, the patristic works that Schaff especially recommended to divinity students were largely available in either the Ante-Nicene Fathers series or the first volumes of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: namely, the Didache, I Clement, Polycarp’s Epistle, Ignatius’ Epistles, the Epistle to Diognetus,194 Justin Martyr’s Apologies, Tertullian’s Apology, Cyprian’s Unity of the Church, Origen’s Against Celsus, Eusebius’ Church History, Augustine’s Confessions and City of God, and some of John Chrysostom’s Homilies.195 The list makes evident that the ante-Nicene Fathers were considered more essential reading for divinity students than the post-Nicene: the former were closer to the inspired source, the New Testament, and were written before the church became immersed in intricate doctrinal tangles and elaborate ritual, beholden to ecclesiastical hierarchy. Characteristically, the Protestant professors devoted little or no time to the Cappadocian Fathers, perhaps because their writings were not readily available in translation, but also because their theology and rhetoric represented a “decline” from primitive simplicity.
More Primary Sources: The Ante-Nicene Fathers Series
The publication of the American edition of the Ante-Nicene Fathers series was such a welcome event for American seminary professors and students that it deserves mention here, even though its editor, Arthur Cleveland Coxe, was not a professor but a cleric.196 Coxe’s series was largely a reprint from the Edinburgh edition of the Ante-Nicene Christian Library,197 with a different ordering of the texts.198 As Richard Pfaff notes, the neutral quality of the Edinburgh edition was “completely submerged” by Coxe’s strong theological [i.e., anti-Catholic] views,199