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103 Susan R.Holman 6. Out of the Fitting Room Rethinking Patristic Social Texts on “The Common Good” Introduction: Garbing the Fathers The Leuven Expert Seminar dialogue on “The Church Fathers and Catholic Social Thought” offered an extraordinary opportunity to explore what patristic sources might offer in the ongoing construction of modern Catholic social thought, and particularly how they might encourage religious dialogue for justice and goodness internationally. In this chapter, I apply this challenge to explore the use of patristic ideas as they relate specifically to the ethical rhetoric of “the common good.” Unlike the heterogeneity of Protestant social action rhetoric and the intentional mystery of Orthodox theologies, Catholic social teaching is very systematic .It may not be amiss, therefore, in light of the ecumenical potential of the topic, to introduce a creative metaphor with which to address patristic ideas of the “common good” with their concerns for the quality of the human image. Thus in this essay, I invite the reader to think through this process Earlier versions of several sections of this paper were presented at the Research Group on Piety and Charity at the Institute of Advanced Study, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in February, 2007, and at the Fifteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies, Oxford, U.K., in August, 2007. I am grateful to the organizers of these conferences and to those who participated in the discussions, especially Amitai Spitzer in Jerusalem and Richard Finn, O.P., at Oxford. The final text benefits from further conversations at both the Leuven expert seminar and Patristica Bostoniensia. 104 Susan R. Holman with me by envisioning as a somewhat playful analogy the image of the fitting room, that space in a shop where we try on a new suit or coat before deciding on its purchase. In trying on ethical ideas that might have practical relevance today, the historian or theologian may be tempted to take ancient texts and cut and tuck them to make them fit our very differently shaped culture, dressing them up with current fashions into recognizably modern forms. Some will fit into street clothes; others clearly may not. There may be nothing wrong with either the fashion or the shape of the body that wears it—that is, neither our modern ideas nor our historical texts—but it should not surprise us if we face difficulties in trying to fit one to the other. There will always be some discrepancies between ancient and modern shapes of Christian ethics, discrepancies that challenge easy application and tempt us to pin down, trim off, and toss out what we don’t think fits. Indeed, the Leuven project’s first study—reviewing how official Catholic social teaching documents used ancient sources—revealed how this is commonly done—not that Catholic social teaching documents have intentionally warped the patristic fabric they use, but rather that they have occasionally assumed it must fit, uncritically taking just those bits that usefully applied to certain gaps.1 This study and others emphasize that patristic contributions to present ethical dialogue have historical integrity only when their texts are used in a way that respects or at least respectfully recognizes the original context.2 The patristic authors are not fabric that we may cut and stitch to fit, but rather are part of a vibrant living body, the body of Christian tradition itself. Further, they offer us not one monolithic model, but a community of diverse voices. In 1. Brian Matz, “Patristic Sources and Catholic Social Teaching, a Forgotten Dimension: A Textual, Historical, and Rhetorical Analysis of Patristic Source Citations in the Church’s Social Documents,” in Annua Nuntia Lovaniensia 59 (Leuven: Peeters, 2008), cited in Brian Matz with Johan Leemans and Johan Verstraeten, “Position Paper: The Church Fathers and Catholic Social Thought with a Case Study of Private Property” (predistributed seminar paper, 2007), 5–9. 2. I have discussed this elsewhere; see, e.g., Susan R.Holman, “The Entitled Poor: Human Rights Language in the Cappadocians,” ProEcclesia 9 (2000): 476–89; Holman, “Healing the World with Righteousness ? The Language of Social Justice in Early Christian Homilies,” in Charity and Giving in Monotheistic Religions, Studien zur Geschichte und Kultur des islamischen Orients, ed. Miriam Frenkel and Yaacov Lev (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 89–110. On context, see also Holman, “God and the Poor in Early Christian Thought,” in God in Early Christian Thought: Essays in Memory of Lloyd G.Patterson, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 94, ed. Andrew B.McGowan, Brian E.Daley, S.J., and Timothy...

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