THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader The Faith of the Fathers Were a genuinely disinterested scholar—or, more likely, the proverbial Martian—to arrive and contemplate the contemporary American university, among...
...The early Christian intellectuals saw that the eye must be hallowed to see the depths of truth...
...Unlike postmodern literary professors, whose moral and metaphysical imaginations are pinched and starved, the Church Fathers did not play at interpretation and fall back on "gesture...
...Here, the Church Fathers do not "maintain their ground...
...Rather, as Wilken demonstrates in detail, the lives of early Christian intellectuals were formed by passion for the truth and a willingness to submit to the disciplines necessary to attain it...
...Now, in The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, he shows how the thinkers of the first centuries a.d...
...And yet, the pertinence of the Fathers consists of more than their interesting convergence with postmodern preoccupations...
...But for complex reasons, our intellectual elites no longer take seriously, or even know, the basic elements of the Christian intellectual project...
...They were implacable defenders of "difference"—specifically, the difference between God and everything else...
...As Wilken insists, "the Church Fathers maintain their ground...
...A key figure in the emergence of a distinctively Western culture after the fall of Rome, Gregory prized the beauty of truth and placed love of knowledge at the center of life and work...
...The Standard Reader The Faith of the Fathers Were a genuinely disinterested scholar—or, more likely, the proverbial Martian—to arrive and contemplate the contemporary American university, among his first observations would be the absence of Christian theology...
...The ancient work judges—and quite sternly, at that—the present age as well...
...The discipline of desire and untiring service mark the lives of all the great Christian thinkers surveyed by Wilken...
...were romanced by the biblical vision of God, the world, and human destiny...
...It's fitting that Wilken closes The Spirit of Early Christian Thought with Gregory the Great, the monk and pope who lived amidst the ruins of a classical culture overwhelmed by invasion and threatened by chaos...
...Against this self-contradiction in contemporary intellectual life, WEEKLY STANDARD contributor Robert Louis Wilken has written a magisterial study of the first centuries of Christianity, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (Yale University Press, 400 pp., $29.95...
...As Wilken's patient exposition makes clear, early Christian thinkers stood firmly upon a mass of thought and practice that postmodern intellectuals imagine they have discovered for themselves...
...Constituting the major thread in the fabric of the Western world, and of obvious influence in current public affairs, Christianity is naturally studied by historians and social scientists...
...Reno...
...Passion and discipline mark the point at which Wilken shows the Church Fathers most alien to our time...
...A widely acclaimed scholar at the University of Virginia—and the subject recently of the beautifully produced festschrift In Dominico Eloquio: Essays on Patristic Exegesis in Honor of Robert Louis Wilken (Eerdmans, 454 pp., $45)—Wilken is well known for his readable accounts of ancient Christianity, particularly his 1984 The Christians As the Romans Saw Them...
...R.R...
...The result is a book with real intellectual and practical pertinence...
...Not simply theoreticians of "community," the Church Fathers understood, defended, and extended a churchly view of reality...
...They advance against the patent absurdity of contemporary humanistic study in which we fancifully imagine that the lust and greed and naked ambition that suffuse American university faculties have no bearing on intellectual formation...
...Would that we who live in our own troubled times might find such a humane and humanizing way forward...
...They do so in part because the present age has shifted back toward them...
...The Church Fathers were perfectly aware of the central role of "texts" and "discourse," focusing their work upon the Bible, which they presumed to communicate a divine discourse...
Vol. 8 • March 2003 • No. 26
