The Faith of the Fathers
WERE A GENUINELY DISINTERESTED SCHOLAR–or, more likely, the proverbial Martian–to arrive and contemplate the contemporary American university, among his first observations would be the absence of Christian theology. Constituting the major thread in the fabric of the Western world, and of obvious influence in current public affairs, Christianity is naturally studied by historians and social scientists. But for complex reasons, our intellectual elites no longer take seriously, or even know, the basic elements of the Christian intellectual project.
Against this self-contradiction in contemporary intellectual life, WEEKLY STANDARD contributor Robert Louis Wilken has written a magisterial study of the first centuries of Christianity, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (Yale University Press, 400 pp., $29.95). A widely acclaimed scholar at the University of Virginia–and the subject recently of the beautifully produced festschrift In Dominico Eloquio: Essays on Patristic Exegesis in Honor of Robert Louis Wilken (Eerdmans, 454 pp., $45)–Wilken is well known for his readable accounts of ancient Christianity, particularly his 1984 “The Christians As the Romans Saw Them.”
Now, in “The Spirit of Early Christian Thought,” he shows how the thinkers of the first centuries A.D. were romanced by the biblical vision of God, the world, and human destiny. The result is a book with real intellectual and practical pertinence. As Wilken insists, “the Church Fathers maintain their ground.”
They do so in part because the present age has shifted back toward them. As Wilken’s patient exposition makes clear, early Christian thinkers stood firmly upon a mass of thought and practice that postmodern intellectuals imagine they have discovered for themselves. The Church Fathers were perfectly aware of the central role of “texts” and “discourse,” focusing their work upon the Bible, which they presumed to communicate a divine discourse. They were implacable defenders of “difference”–specifically, the difference between God and everything else. Not simply theoreticians of “community,” the Church Fathers understood, defended, and extended a churchly view of reality.
And yet, the pertinence of the Fathers consists of more than their interesting convergence with postmodern preoccupations. The ancient work judges–and quite sternly, at that–the present age as well. Unlike postmodern literary professors, whose moral and metaphysical imaginations are pinched and starved, the Church Fathers did not play at interpretation and fall back on “gesture.” Rather, as Wilken demonstrates in detail, the lives of early Christian intellectuals were formed by passion for the truth and a willingness to submit to the disciplines necessary to attain it.
Passion and discipline mark the point at which Wilken shows the Church Fathers most alien to our time. The early Christian intellectuals saw that the eye must be hallowed to see the depths of truth. The discipline of desire and untiring service mark the lives of all the great Christian thinkers surveyed by Wilken. Here, the Church Fathers do not “maintain their ground.” They advance against the patent absurdity of contemporary humanistic study in which we fancifully imagine that the lust and greed and naked ambition that suffuse American university faculties have no bearing on intellectual formation.
It’s fitting that Wilken closes “The Spirit of Early Christian Thought” with Gregory the Great, the monk and pope who lived amidst the ruins of a classical culture overwhelmed by invasion and threatened by chaos. A key figure in the emergence of a distinctively Western culture after the fall of Rome, Gregory prized the beauty of truth and placed love of knowledge at the center of life and work. Would that we who live in our own troubled times might find such a humane and humanizing way forward.
–R.R. Reno
