The Fathers Refounded, Elizabeth Clark's magnificent sequel to Founding the Fathers, describes in abundant detail how the overlapping disciplines of early church history and patristics became established in several American universities. It examines the work of three historians of early Christianity and their accomplishments and difficulties—and along the way it reminds its readers more than once that historical investigation poses a danger to the security of religious dogmatists. Take, for instance, the work of George LaPiana: As an Italian exile and historical scholar whose investigations of early Christian associations in Rome undermined the accustomed Roman Catholic story of apostolic succession and episcopal authority, his work could be ignored during his lifetime by the triumphalist representatives of seemingly unquestioned dogma. An example is the work of LaPiana's American contemporary, Monsignor Joseph (“Butch”) Fenton, writing only a few years before the Second Vatican Council would vindicate the historical approach when it endorsed patristic theology as an inspiration for aggiornamento, the “updating” of Catholic thought.

In a footnote to his 1960 article, “Sacrorum Antistitum and the Background of the Oath Against Modernism,” Monsignor Fenton, Ordinary professor of fundamental Dogmatic Theology at The Catholic University of America (CUA), celebrated the golden anniversary of that motu proprio. He echoed its pre-Christian, Roman imperial description of opposition to authority not just as treason but as fatal contagion. According to the Roman pontiff whom Fenton quoted, modernism was a plague:

Diabolical infection was a trope familiar to Catholic thinkers sympathetic to modernism, especially if they were historians. George LaPiana, the second of the three church historians considered in Elizabeth Clark's The Fathers Refounded, surely had read the very same motu proprio from which Fenton—student of Garrigou-Lagrange and right-hand man of the ultraconservative cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani at the Second Vatican Council—quoted approvingly in his role as defender of papal authority. And in the same years that Fenton marched with his students into the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception beside the CUA campus to lead them in reciting the oath against modernism, LaPiana was at Harvard, teaching and writing. He wrote first on the development of early Christianity in Rome and then turned to the modern period, writing against the Fascist movement in Italy with which his church unfortunately cooperated. Fenton was secure. Modernism lay defeated. The conservative ressourcement theologians would not be vindicated until the Second Vatican Council effectively blessed their work and obviated the hostile term “nouvelle theologie.” Meanwhile, the anti-historical attitude of Catholic clergy and faculty held firm, while the ecclesiastical institution itself was at its height of acceptance and power in the United States in the years of World War II and the two following decades. The Modernist contagion seemed contained, and until the late 1960s, Catholic educational institutions often did not welcome the application of critical historical scholarship to its pasts.

The Fathers Refounded places LaPiana last in the order of its examination of the second generation of American historians of early Christianity; and he was in every respect an outlier. Doubly an exile—from Catholic institutions and from his native Italy, spurned by both church institutions and Fascist government—in the United States he could not have taught in the church institutions for which his seminary education had prepared him. His move saved him from the opprobrium endured by his hero, the Modernist and ultimately excommunicated Ernesto Buonaiuti, but it also put him at odds with other scholars in America who studied the history of earliest Christianity. He disagreed with the industrious liberal scholars also discussed in The Fathers Refounded, like A. C. McGiffert at Union and Shirley Jackson Case at Chicago. Those two, he thought, did not recognize their own Protestant individualism and failed to see the centrality of “associative religion” manifested in the early church of Rome as a reasonable and humane substitute for the non-happening of the Parousia (a word I first learned in 1970 from Liz herself!). Possibly their evolved Biblicism and textual confidence also struck him as naive. But his views, formed in Italy and evolving during his years at Harvard, also put him at odds with the few American Catholics who knew of him—and put him out of touch with the Continental scholars who wrote Modernist tracts, like Tyrrell and Loisy, who as Catholics reached modernity not via the Bible but via mystagogy—also often suspect, in the eyes of bishops.

The informal return to anti-Modernism among some present right-wing Catholic factions signals the keenness of Clark's insight into the thought of LaPiana for he surpassed the Modernists: he agreed with biblical criticism and historicism; understood the church as an evolutionary, bottom-up social organization only later developing the Petrine office; and he rejected both Vatican politics and the mystical reaction against those ecclesiastical schemes, a reaction that some of the disappointed call “the inner migration.” As Clark observed in a 2014 article anticipating these three chapters on LaPiana: “His rejection of ‘essences’ and of traditional grand narratives of Christianity, his suspicion of the category of ‘experience,’ his emphasis on praxis, and his willingness to reconfigure the building blocks of an older formation to design a new structure, all suggest that he had one foot in the camp of the post-modern.”Footnote ¹⁸

For all his foot-dragging and dithering, LaPiana is the most lively and sympathetic character in The Fathers Refounded, even if McGiffert was the most well-trained and industrious and Case the scholar whose efforts helped the discipline benefit from inclusion in a major university (McGiffert having taught in a then-freestanding school, Union Theological Seminary). Portraits of the lives of these three, and their training, scholarship, and teaching, allow the reader to understand the second “founding” of the scholarly study of early church history in the United States. But their portraits, and the book for which The Fathers Refounded is a companion, grow out of Clark's long and productive engagement with cultural theory. As her work since the late 1980s demonstrates, critical theory has taught those who work in the area known variously as early Christianity, patristics, or religion in late antiquity that the texts we read as historical “sources” speak not for a discoverable social world, and not just for their authors’ minds, but for clusters of more or less obscure conversations. Medieval librarians, often monks, were the interested parties; they recopied and saved these texts for their own curricula, in a pedagogy far from critical even in the eighteenth-century sense.

Clark's intellectual journey prepared her for this insight. According to her own written account in Journeys in Church History: Essays from the “Catholic Historical Review,” Clark began to understand the intellectual movement of literary theory in a particular location, or even by a geospatial and intellectual transfer, when she moved from Mary Washington College to Duke University at the crest of the American academic engagement with critical theory/cultural theory. She took with her all the skills she had gained from college at Vassar and graduate school at Columbia University and Union Theological Seminary. She had also gained historical perspective at Mary Washington College, where she taught undergraduates and became intensely involved in the social movements of the seventies, especially second-wave feminism.Footnote ¹⁹ Like the social networks she would study in her first large-scale historical-interpretive works The Origenist Controversy and its sequel Reading Renunciation,Footnote ²⁰ the intensely engaged circles of humanists at Duke—no doubt along with her discussions with scholars of early Christianity, whether liberal or conservative—now had the effect of directing and focusing her investigations on the field itself, in addition to the texts she was studying with increasing theoretical scope.

In one sense, it was natural for a scholar gaining range and momentum to ask whence and by whom she had come and what prospect for further investigation was offered by an academic discipline that had begun in a seminary, an institution created by a sixteenth-century Catholic church determined to win back its territory from energized and persuasive Protestants. Clark's skills of decoding both a text and its de-authorized contextualization began to serve the reevaluation of historical writing in a field that had—largely successfully—hidden from theoretical discussions going on among historians and scholars of literature, first in France and then in the United States.

Church history in the post-Gutenberg world was very much a church operation. Originally a product of a chancery or monastery, church history lay for 350 years in the province of the seminary, an institution begun in the Catholic reforms at the Council of Trent and then reproduced for the education of clergy by dioceses and religious orders and then by the churches of the magisterial reformation. Partisan since Eusebius, church history became a multiplied discipline thanks to the rise of separated and rival churches in Europe, and later in the formerly colonial worlds, with rival versions often serving as tools for defensive apology. Finally, the secularization of all formerly ecclesiastical disciplines in the late twentieth century yielded diverse practices and formulations of church history—indicated plainly, in this case, by the renaming of church history as “history of Christianity in late antiquity” or even “late ancient religion.”

If Clark's History, Theory, Text described and recommended the perspectives and procedures of cultural theory to her colleagues in early Christianity, the better to understand our library of monastically transmitted high literary texts produced by the “fathers,” Founding the Fathers as its chronological sequel traveled farther back, to the Enlightened, post-Rankean professors of the new seminaries of the United States.Footnote ²¹The Fathers Refounded resumes that story in the third generation of seminary-based church historians, and at the institutions where she entered the field as a graduate student—Union and Columbia—after the developments that she traces in these two books, the second of which we celebrate in this forum. Clark encountered church history in the early sixties, when both American liberalism and its mobilizations and—in churches and seminaries—Christian ecumenism allowed for perspectives and conversations that set church historians in dialogue with those from opposing camps. It seemed sure that the field of church history would be carried forward, by its own momentum and a sense of inevitability and relief, to a future enterprise that would be both continuous with its own past and open and dialogic at the same time. Clark's work on female authors in early Christianity, and on the testimonies about women, were an expression of new horizons accompanied by the entry of women into a field formerly reserved for ecclesiastical or at least churchy men.

Founding the Fathers and The Fathers Refounded, then, are a two-volume account of the growth of early church history in the American academy as a discipline within its ecclesiastical home—but a discipline that outgrew its home. The cause of this growth was twofold: first, the impact of the new educational dynamo of Germany—though geographically remote, closer to the discipline's original home in light of the needs of students training for the Protestant clergy to engage both the discoveries of Darwin and the expansion of overseas missions—and second, the discipline of church history founded in Germany by Harnack and Ritschl. German Wissenschaft formed the backgrounds of almost all of the six men profiled in the first book, and it created a lasting impact on the field of church history through the German education of the first man profiled in the second volume, Arthur C. McGiffert. Founding the Fathers showed how, while seeing German methods at a kind of distance, American church historians founded their field at specific American institutions: Princeton, Union, Yale, and Harvard. (Clark sums up their work as “apologetic, confessional, and moralizing.”Footnote ²²) Church history remained, then, into the nineteenth century, dynastic, hoarding, self-protective, and insulated from the intellectual turmoil of the Continent.

Events detailed in the second book in this set witness a significant change. Now, along with his re-founding of the discipline according to German methods and permanent institutions—perhaps best exemplified in his translation and annotation of the Church History of Eusebius—McGiffert set Protestant church history on the course still recognizable when I encountered it in the University of Chicago Divinity School of the mid-1970s. His indefatigable lecturing and publication and his formation of new generations of ministers well educated in the social development of early Christianity made it possible to conceive of a Christian historical continuity until the late 1980s—a kind of reformed Eusebian approach prescinding from continuity with the New Testament world. Yet these are still men of a certain disciplinary isolation, which we can realize by comparing McGiffert's work and horizon with his contemporary Edith Wharton or his correspondent John Dewey; George LaPiana, the migrant and son of a Greek family in the Sicilian diaspora, with his nearly contemporary correspondent and fellow-immigrant Felix Frankfurter; and Shirley Jackson Case with his fellow Chicagoan and fellow Floridian retiree Al Capone, both of whom died in 1947.

LaPiana, an exiled Catholic Modernist who felt the full ecclesiastical brunt of his embrace of Modernism before its time, and Shirley Jackson Case, a mathematician and later early church historian who built up the University of Chicago Divinity School (from the beginning a liberal institution), both also focused on the social aspects of early Christianity, dividing church history from theology. While this perspective was liberating in the first instance, it turned out to be a distinction that may be (as Clark has shown) unsustainable. Without apologetics, there might be no church history.

This final book, in what I have described as a trilogy, is a triplet of portraits of these men, built up through Clark's assiduous and perspicacious scrutiny of their archival remains, mostly in the schools where they taught. She shows McGiffert, the industrious son of Germany; LaPiana, the distractible scholar who turned away from early Christianity under the pressure of his own urgent concern with Fascism; and finally Case, who steered the University of Chicago Divinity School away from its theological origins toward a post-religious yet theologically determined sociology of which no better sign could be given than the change of the name of the Journal of Theology to Journal of Religion.

Finally, it is interesting to ask how these two books came to follow History, Theory, Text. The latter Clark issued as an invitation toward late ancient historians of Christianity, and its two successors were an excavation and explanation of caches of documents in amounts far beyond the dreams of anyone who sticks in antiquity. But there is a connection among all three: this most recent book is written in the aftermath of the theory's chastening effect. It recalls the work of Michel de Certeau and his intense attention to everyday life. Here readers have been given the everyday lives of three scholars and founders, with their intellectual equipment and their viewpoints, their domestic and work lives, and their ambitions and failures. The two Protestants and one Catholic manifest the expanding energy and the contracting self-protectiveness (respectively) of their Weltanschauungen. Clark allows her readers to see them at work and to know both the ingredients and the omissions. Vigorously and industriously rebuilding American institutions with rigorous Wissenschaft, these men (with the exception of the frustrated LaPiana) still looked over their shoulders to the European institutions that bred them. Seeing their limitations and circumstances, we can see why their disciplines have begun to dissolve. We are in the author's debt for showing us not only what has passed but, in rich and illuminating detail, how.