L’Archivio “Erik Peterson” all’Università di Torino. Saggi critici e Inventario (review)

In the English-speaking world, the German patristics scholar, exegete, and theologian Erik Peterson (1890–1960) is known principally to specialists in the study of early Christianity and ancient religion, particularly to those with interests in liturgy, asceticism, martyrdom, and apocryphal literature. Some of his most important contributions were reprinted a year before his death, under the title Frühkirche, Judentum und Gnosis (Freiburg, 1959). More recently he has become somewhat familiar to writers on political theology, thanks to his classic monograph Monotheismus als politisches Problem (Leipzig, 1935), which notoriously denied the possibility of any such thing as a Christian political theology, and that on the basis of the orthodox Nicene doctrine of the Trinity and of St. Augustine’s eschatological desacralization of empire. His intimate friendship with the controversial Catholic legal scholar (and sometime National Socialist) Carl Schmitt has also brought his name and work into wider circulation.

Superbly trained in the historical methods that dominated German Protestant scholarship in the teens and twenties, Peterson nevertheless cultivated a stiffly independent theological consciousness that eventually drove him out of the Protestant world altogether. His conversion to Catholicism in 1930 led him to resign his professorship at Bonn and to move to Rome, where he married, raised a large family in near penury, and searched vainly for a suitable academic appointment in Rome and elsewhere (including an offer in 1942 of a new chair in patristics at The Catholic University of America—which he turned down, to his regret, and which was then offered to Johannes Quasten). His intensely eschatological Christianity, his austere reluctance to write “big-picture” history or systematic theology, his rather angular personality, and his anomalous status as a historically-minded lay theologian in a Catholic church that still regarded theology as a neo-Scholastic and clerical enterprise ensured he would remain the “stranger in the world” that he believed was the authentic Christian condition in via.

After his death, Peterson’s papers, including his near-legendary card index of hundreds of thousands of notes from a lifetime of reading ancient sources, came into the possession of the University of Turin, thanks especially to the efforts of the late Franco Bolgiani. The present volume from the university’s Center for Religious Studies presents the learned world with a thorough inventory of Peterson’s Nachlass. Of special interest will be his correspondence with a who’s who of European theological and scholarly life over nearly half a century, including Karl Barth and Adolf von Harnack, as well as notables from the Catholic world such as Jacques Maritain; Cardinal Yves Congar, O.P.; Cardinal Henri de Lubac, S.J.; Cardinal Jean Daniélou, S.J.; and Hans Urs von Balthasar.

The book includes essays introducing Peterson and explaining the tortuous history of the Peterson archive. Most noteworthy is the contribution of the indefatigable Barbara Nichtweiß, who, in the two decades since she published her massive intellectual biography of Peterson (Erik Peterson: Neue Sicht auf Leben und Werk [Freiburg, 1992]), has done so much to rescue his legacy from obscurity. Her realization of the extent of Peterson’s unpublished lectures, conferences, and letters prompted her to revise drastically the limited scope of her initial research project (p. 37). Along with the help of an ecumenical and interdisciplinary team of scholars, she has supervised the publication of a new edition of Peterson’s works that reprints older publications but also includes much newly edited material from the archives. Erik Peterson: Ausgewählte Schriften (Würzburg, 1994–) now comprises thirteen volumes either already published or in preparation. Her paper in the present volume has an instructive review of Peterson’s relation to the cultural and religious world of his time, along with insightful suggestions about the ongoing reception of his work, whose relevance lies not in spite of, but precisely because of, its...