Reading Patristic Texts on Social Ethics: Issues and Challenges for the Twenty-First Century

5. The Audience(s) for Patristic Social Teaching: A Case Study

85 Wendy Mayer 5. The Audience(s) for Patristic Social Teaching A Case Study When we reflect on the audience of social teaching by the Fathers of the Church, it is not unnatural to look first to the most overt of patristic media for the delivery of moral instruction—the sermon. In a book titled The Media Revolution of Early Christianity, however, the author, Doron Mendels, challenges us to broaden our perspective. He proposes that Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History, an overtly nonethical text, nonetheless has at its core the message that the Catholic Church represents the right order in society. This message, he argues , permeates the stories recorded, and is demonstrated “in many ways, such as helping the sick and setting a moral example by maintaining purity within family life . . . and in embodying such virtues as honesty, peace, simplicity, love of neighbor, and love of God.”1 By emphasizing that “in many fields of life Christians . . . provided an outstanding moral example,” Eusebius, he contends , shows how they “contributed by their pure behaviour to the welfare of society.”2 Mendels identifies the audience at which this message is aimed as the broader gentile Graeco-Roman community, rather than Jews, reasoning that 1. D.Mendels, The Media Revolution of Early Christianity: An Essay on Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1999), 208–9. Mendels does not argue that this is the only message at the core of the Historia ecclesiastica, viewing it rather within the framework of mission. 2. Mendels, Media Revolution, 211. 86 Wendy Mayer the latter would have been uninterested, since they adhered to the same moral values.3 Similarly, Richard Finn, in his study of almsgiving in the later Roman empire, shows how not just sermons but texts such as the Acts of Peter and the Acts of Thomas give prominence to the practice of almsgiving, in this instance using it “as a marker of the doctrinal orthodoxy recognized by their authors and redactors.”4 The Apostolic Constitutions is yet another type of nonhomiletic text that constitutes a source of instruction concerning good ecclesiastical and social order.5 Like the apocryphal Acts just mentioned, this too has its own peculiar audience. It was compiled in the Syrian milieu as an alternative body of canonico-institutional material with its own (apostolic) claim to orthodoxy . Joseph Mueller, who has recently produced a monumental study of its Old Testament ecclesiology, proposes that the Apostolic Constitutions is not just a compilation of earlier sources, but has its own literary integrity and that it emerges in opposition to the pro-Nicene canonical material that was assembled by Meletius, bishop of Antioch, and promoted by the emperor Theodosius I. It is this anti-imperial and anti-Nicene stance, and its rapport with Bible and tradition, Mueller argues, that explains the text’s particular reading of the Old Testament. It also explains why citations of the Old Testament are more frequent in the Apostolic Constitutions than in its sources.6 The point to be made here, firstly, is that not just sermons, but a wide variety of media were utilized by the early Christians to convey social ethical teaching. A second, more important point is that each medium and each text within that medium had their own specific interests in promoting social teaching, and that those interests were intimately connected both with the community within which it was produced and with its target audience. 3. Ibid., 210. 4. R.Finn, Almsgiving in the Later Roman Empire: Christian Promotion and Practice (313–450) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 130. 5. Const. ap. 4.1–2, in particular deals with helping others in need, giving, the proper use of money and other social teachings. On the moral instruction contained in church orders in general see Finn, Almsgiving, 126. 6. J.G.Mueller, L’Ancien Testament dans l’ecclésiologie des pères. Une lecture des Constitutions Apostoliques (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), esp. 121–26. For a discussion of the relationship of Const. ap. to other “church orders” produced within the first four centuries of Christianity, see J.G.Mueller, “The Ancient Church Order Literature: Genre or Tradition?” Journal of Early Christian Studies 15 (2007): 337–80; and P.Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship (London: SPCK, 1992), 80–110. Finn, Almsgiving , 126, argues that Const. ap. and the sources on which it draws were directed towards a limited clerical audience. Patristic Social...