Black Marks on the Communities' Manuscripts

Next year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the North American Patristic Society's birth; we will celebrate it in Oxford. Twenty-five years ago Michael McHugh and Robert Sider planned the first NAPS conference which was held in New York at the December, 1970 national meeting of the American Philological Society. Bruce Metzger, Luitpold Wallach and Louis Swift were added to the steering committee at that meeting.² Swift, during 1972, began to publish a newsletter called Patristics which kept the circle of nearly two hundred in contact with each other's research. In 1981 at the suggestion of Joseph Kelly the newsletter emerged as a review which concentrated on longer notices of important books. That same year our first independent international meeting was held here at Loyola University of Chicago. During 1986 the "Patristic Monograph Series," formerly supported by the Philadelphia Patristic Foundation, became an organ of our society. Published by Mercer University Press, it offers typeset, hardbound technical studies for a reasonable price. Joseph Lienhard now serves as its editor. The first edition of the Encyclopedia of Early Christianity appeared in 1990, commended by this society and the American Society of Church History, and written primarily by our members. A second edition is scheduled for 1995. Less than two years ago the work of many, but particularly of Elizabeth Clark, Everett Ferguson and Patout Burns, led to the Journal of Early Christian Studies which has absorbed the book review function of Patristics and continues the efforts of Second Century. The journal has over eleven hundred subscribers, the society nearly five hundred fifty members. According to guild standards, we have matured. That maturing has brought lively debates about who we are and what we shall become.

There have been changes. Some things we and colleagues in our fields of inquiry have been we no longer can be. In the 1970s when NAPS was imbedded within an historical philological society, the Rankian ideal was still in vogue. The goal was to describe what had actually happened, to let the text and its author speak unencumbered by our concerns. That was the way we had been educated. We were not alone. Averil Cameron rightly claims that this type of historicism has dominanted the field of ancient history up through the 1980s.³ A survey of the research projects mentioned in Patristics during the 1970s or the reviews of the 1980s would not controvert her opinion. Few of us understood how much the land had shifted or consistently articulated the lessons of caution we had learned.

Today we seldom defend our work as neutral or totally objective. Philosophically, the distanced, dispassionate study of texts has been an ideal, but it is a battered one. Well before 1970 Ludwig Wittgenstein had made his dramatic shift away from the Tractatus, so admired by the Vienna circle of logical positivists, and gave us the remarkable later writings that explore meaning as use and the practice of language games.⁴ Opponents of logical positivism had warned that the major definition of the school could not pass its own test. The statement that only tautologies and sentences subject to empirical verification have meaning is on that very ground meaningless because it is neither a tautology nor an empirically testable claim. The invigorating dream of doing away with aesthetics, ethics, religion and other realms of discourse as utter nonsense was fading. In writing his history of philosophy, A. J. Ayer, positivism's most brilliant English-speaking advocate, himself noted that the effort had failed.⁵ Members of this society may have felt or even now feel the loss of older historicism's philosophical underpinnings as either freeing or threatening. But both Cartesian and Kantian foundationalism are gone.₆

Part of the broader philosophical shift is reflected even in mathematics. Nearly fifteen years ago Morris Kline, the renowned historian, wrote Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty⁷ in which he demonstrated that the one science which has been the model of concrete objectivity itself includes important uncertainties. Mathematics is wonderfully precise in some areas and does allow physicists, among others, to think...