Ascetic Culture: Essays in Honor of Philip Rousseau

Chapter 14: Adolf Harnack and the Paleontological Layer of Church History

C h a p t e r F o u r t e e n Adolf Harnack and the Paleontological Layer of Church History CLAudiA RAPP T he nineteenth century was an exciting period for the study of antiquity in Germany. Karl Lachmann (1793–1851) had recently pioneered the modern philological method of textual analysis that aimed to establish the “urtext” by peeling away the layers that had accumulated and obscured it in the process of textual transmission—a method that he applied to the iliad as much as to the New Testament. The Monumenta Germaniae Historica series for the edition of all kinds of sources relevant to the late antique and medieval history of Germany was founded in 1819; late antique texts were added in the Auctores Antiquissimi subseries in 1876.1 The Corpus Scriptorum Historiae Byzantinae was started in 1828. The first volume of the Realencyclop ädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft was published by August Pauly in 1839, based on the recognition that material artifacts are as 295 296 Claudia Rapp relevant to the study of antiquity as the classical authors. Schliemann “discovered ” Troy in 1871, the German Archaeological institute in Athens was established in 1874, and excavations began in Pergamon in 1878. The Academy of Sciences in Berlin became home to large-scale collaborative projects: the Prosopographia Imperii Romani; the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (a joint project of several academies), the Corpus Nummorum of Roman coins, and the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum—all thanks to the initiative of Theodor Mommsen, who also edited, together with Paul Krüger, Justinian’s Digest (1868–172) and the Codex Theodosianus (published 1905, two years after Mommsen’s death).2 These scholarly endeavors were riding on the tide of a new impetus to invigorate education at schools and universities proposed by intellectuals and politicians in the Kingdom of Prussia.3 The study of Latin and classical Greek became the centerpiece of the “humanistisches Gymnasium” in the expectation that the mastery of the ancient languages, especially of Greek, would shape the mental faculties of the future German elite and that familiarity with classical culture and history would equip them with a moral compass and cultivate their aesthetic senses. Education, or better, formation in the classics became the pedagogical ideal for a fully realized humanity and thus acquired quasi-religious status, a “neuhumanistische Bildungsreligion ,” in the apt phrase coined by the German social historian Hansulrich Wehler.4 The Friedrich-Wilhelms-universität (now Humboldtuniversit ät) in Berlin was founded in 1809, and instruction began in the following year in the four divisions (Fakultäten) of law, medicine, philosophy , and theology. Through all these initiatives, the methodological triad of philology, archaeology, and history was established as the key for gaining a detailed and complete knowledge of the ancient world. The focus of this enterprise was, first and foremost, classical Athens—the seminal period that had been the inspiration for generations of Germans and the object of the romantic longings of the German Bildungbürgertum ever since the days of Goethe and Schiller, reinforced by the educational ideal of Wilhelm von Humboldt.5 Roman history, if it was the object of academic study at all, was entirely focused on the republican period as a model for a structured and balanced society. in all these pioneering efforts, one phenomenon was awkwardly out of place: the Christian religion, the way it gained a stronghold in (some might even say a stranglehold on) the society of the Later Roman Empire and its rapid permeation of Greek and Latin literary production. in the following, i wish to explore how one eminent German scholar, Adolf von Harnack, approached the methodological challenge posed by the study of Christianity. His historical vision of its development led him to emphasize the importance of the third century, which he labeled the “paleontological” layer. This choice of terminology, as i shall argue, not only points to the degree to which recent scientific discoveries in geology and biology shaped the language of the “soft” sciences but also shows that Harnack’s scholarship evolved in close dialogue with colleagues abroad, especially Edwin Hatch in Oxford. Adolf Harnack (1851–1930) may with some justification be called the father of patristic scholarship in Germany.6 He was professor of church history in Berlin from 1888 to 1921 and creator of the series die Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller (GCS) of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, which will concern us...