Abstract
By the the turn of the millennium, when he was eighty, Henry Chadwick’s voice, ravaged by asthma, sounded like a whistle. In his forties it had been as powerful and expressive as the dramatic personality that commanded it. When it fell to him to read the lesson from Revelation 7 on All Saints’ Day, the angel’s cry ‘Hurt not the earth!’ would shake the windows of the Cathedral. Like the voice, each aspect of his physical presence seemed to be on an enlarged scale: the eyebrow rising in response to what he heard, the corner of the mouth twitching, the watchful eyes surveying, the shoulders modestly stooped, the pianist’s hand stretched out in greeting, the long stride. A nervous new bishop who hoped to slip in down the side-aisle before his first ordination could be frozen in his tracks by the Dean’s cry of welcome, cutting through the chatter of the gathering congregation and addressing him as ‘My Lord!’ The conversation was sparkling; the habitual irony, instilling terror in the unlearned, could also express perfect courtesy and affectionate interest. ‘I hope it may not distress you too much to learn,’ as he declared to a very young scholar who had written a pamphlet, ‘that I agree with every word you have written.’ Observers would refer to Dr. Chadwick as ‘theatrical’—but always respectfully, without any suggestion of over-acting.
But in these essays and lectures collected from a variety of sources by William Rusch the voice that speaks is measured and cool. Historical scholarship was a sphere in which he would have counted it profanity to be theatrical. And that was an ingredient in the great reputation Henry Chadwick enjoyed at the height of his career. The theological world of the day had had its fill of religious historians who, like conjurors, made solid things disappear. The generation of students introduced to patristic history through Chadwick’s popular Penguin on The Early Church were grateful to be anchored by the strongest of chains to the great central tradition of patristic scholarship. A Chadwick verdict on a contested question would be secure, profoundly informed, carefully weighed, and serve no programmatic agenda whatever. In contrast to his equally-famed elder brother Owen, who was master of a storytelling style, Henry Chadwick was a historian deeply in love with detail. He delighted in the intractable, or ‘nubbly’ text that could be brought to sense and order only by endless patience. What precisely was the heresy for which Priscillian of Avila was condemned in the fourth century? How did Boethius connect music to mathematics? Books devoted to those topics, hammered out in the small hours of the night, before daylight could impose its unwelcome burdens, were written in the knowledge that they would be far from popular, and that those who would follow their arguments would be remarkably few. Even in surveying a wider theme he preferred to compose his picture in a pointillist fashion out of many detailed observations rather than draw a large linear outline.
A footnote observes regretfully of a text of a Hamburg publication of 1941 that it ‘is a book as rare as the gold of Ophir and not accessible to me.’ Chadwick was insatiably hungry for printed scholarship, and his private collection of books was said to have alarmed the structural engineers over the stability of his Oxford house. He could call on vast bibliographical information at the prompting of a moment. Visiting John-Paul II, recently elected, to prepare for a visit of the Archbishop of Canterbury, he was asked by the Pope, who knew nothing of England but was looking for some scholarly small-talk, whether anyone in England still studied Anselm of Canterbury. The answer he received was longer than he had expected. To talk with Chadwick unscripted for half an hour was to receive a bibliographical training that a University might fail to impart in three years. From Mani to Benjamin Bickley Warfield he could tell you just what was important to read, sweetening his advice with liberal doses of flattery: ‘You may not find anything in there that you haven’t thought of yourself….’ Like the theatrics, the bibliography was not put on display in his writing. He expected as a matter of course to have read everything that concerned what he wrote, and footnoted only what he thought of as really important—‘there is no point mentioning it if it isn’t fun!’ Footnotes to his essays, then, are not long, but are always weight-bearing.
The theatrical personality and the sober learning was an enchanting and sometimes unmanageable combination of opposites, bound to cause difficulties. When someone fits a role iconically, the world wants him to be what he is not, as well as what he is. Coping with expectations was a major burden of Chadwick’s life, about which he liked to quote Augustine’s complaint of aliena negotia, ‘other people’s business’. Those features of his career that suggest The Guinness Book of Records—he was the only person to have been a Regius Professor both in Oxford and Cambridge, the only person for three centuries to be a Head of House in both ancient Universities, etc.—bear witness to a measure of personal irresolution. How was a large personality, a priest and a major historian, to distribute his energies between the claims of vita activa and vita contemplativa? ‘You see me here,’ he would sometimes declare sadly, ‘a man in an iron mask!’ Being head of a complex institution was not, in fact, what he was good at. He lacked the ability to go to bed and sleep for six hours each night, regardless of what happened the previous day and of what was to happen the next.
The colleges and chairs shaped Chadwick less profoundly than two other institutions with which he was associated. One was the Journal of Theological Studies, which he edited for thirty-two years and for which, in the days before peer-monitoring, he maintained exacting standards. A Professor who objected to receiving a rejection slip that he thought the holder of the chair of X at Y had a right to command the Journal’s pages, was told that the Editor had to be mindful of the Journal’s reputation, and was incidentally not unmindful of the reputation of the chair of X at Y. A number of pieces in this collection began life in the Journal. Two in particular represent his desire to use its pages to keep English-speaking readers abreast of important developments in European scholarship of which they might be unaware: in 1983 and 1996 we find him reporting on startling discoveries of twenty-seven unknown letters and twenty-six unknown sermons by Augustine of Hippo. These two lengthy articles, communicating the research of Divjak and Dolbeau, remain the best introductions to these primary materials for English-speaking students, and are a sign of the great respect in which he held the great but uncelebrated scholars who devoted their brilliant minds to forgotten manuscripts.
The earliest paper in the collection, inaugurating his editorship in 1957, is of a similar kind. ‘St Peter and St Paul in Rome’ reviews the questions and answers provoked by the published reports and interpretations of the Vatican excavations on the purported sites of the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul. Here, however, his own voice is inserted into the conversation, and in a somewhat sceptical tone that was not in general typical of him. Though the apostles’ deaths in Rome were too widely and early attested to allow reasonable doubt, the contribution of the excavations to our knowledge of the whereabouts was nil. We may assert only that in the mid-third century there were conflicting and irreconcilable accounts in currency, which the authorities tried to tidy up. To accompany this fascinating paper we have his inaugural lecture in Oxford from two years later, ‘The Circle and the Ellipse’, which takes a broader brush to the emergence of the see of Rome in the patristic church.
Which points to the second institution that was to prove of deep importance in shaping his mind, the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, on the first and second versions of which he served throughout the seventies and eighties. Here he found an ecclesiastical object to which he could give himself heart and soul. If Chadwick was not the driving force in those profoundly influential early conversations, a role that fell to Fr. Jean-Marie Tillard OP, his contribution was none the less irreplaceable, not only as a peerless patrologist but as an element of cohesion in the Anglican lineup. His authority lent confidence and security to the First ARCIC’s most adventurous moves. A number of the papers in this collection display the influence of this ecumenical venture, and I rather suspect that one of them, ‘Ministry and Tradition’, originated as a working paper for the Commission, though it is assigned a later date and a different source by the editor. Work on the Commission undoubtedly lay behind ‘Episcopacy in the New Testament and Early Church’, a careful and judicious contribution to the 1978 Lambeth Conference, which had an ongoing influence in Anglican reflections on episcopacy in the stormy decades that followed.
While these two essays witness to his constructive contribution to ecclesiology, other treatments of ecclesiological themes have more purely historical aims, though the question of tensions and how they are overcome is never far away. ‘The Role of the Bishop in Ancient Society’ (1979) focuses on the secular functions of the bishop as a civic and quasi-legal official, while the late paper (1993) ‘Bishops & Monks’ explores one of the less notorious but always persistent causes of tension in the early church. Tensions within the monastic communities themselves are the object of ‘Pachomios and the Ideal of Sanctity’ (1981).
Chadwick established an early interest in the circumstances and proceedings of the Nicene Council. Three essays are concerned with that topic, two of which made important contributions that have stood the test of time. The earliest contribution on the theme, a 1958 article in the Journal of Theological Studies, was perhaps the most ground-breaking: ‘Ossius of Cordova and the Presidency of the Council of Antioch, 325’ modestly announces Chadwick’s discovery of a Syriac manuscript demonstrating the managerial role played by that hitherto little-noticed Western bishop at the council Constantine designed to prepare the ground for Nicaea. Another extended and important essay from 1960, ‘Faith and Order at the Council of Nicaea’, explores the motivation and implementation, as well as the correct version of the text, of the Sixth Canon, which sought to establish a pattern of metropolitan authority to bring the Arian bishops of Libya under Alexandrian control. These are complemented by a background piece from 1972 on ‘The Origin of the Title “Oecumenical Council”’, a term that turns out to mean rather less than came later to be attached to it. The Council of Chalcedon is the subject of one essay from 1983, a review of the doctrinal forces that produced the crisis and its (partial) resolution.
Later in his career Henry Chadwick immersed himself deeply in Augustine, on whom he produced for Oxford University Press a volume for the Past Masters series, a popular translation of the Confessions, and (published posthumously) a short Life. Besides the two reports on the discoveries of letters and sermons this collection contains four interpretative articles on that writer. ‘Re-reading the Confessions’ (1994), looking as though it was spun out of the Introduction to the translation, attends especially to what we may learn about Augustine’s understanding of his ordination to the priesthood and episcopate. The slightly earlier ‘Providence and the Problem of Evil’ (1987) and ‘the Attractions of Mani’ (1990) explore how Augustine fell under the sway of, and then defined himself against, the doctrines of Manichaeism, offering a rather more sympathetic account of his youthful attraction than the later Augustine himself would give. ‘Augustine’s Ethics’ is an occasional lecture from late in his career, giving a short and rather fragmented view of its topic, but, as always, fascinating in its detailed observations.
Chadwick began his career with a translation of the Contra Celsum of Origen, which, together with an early monograph on the early Alexandrian fathers, defined his close interest in the interactions of Christianity and paganism. This interest emerges again in a wide-ranging lecture from 1990 on how original Christian ethics was within the pagan world, and again in an important article of 1993, asking how Constantine and his successors adapted the Roman ideology of comprehensiveness to accommodate the sharp Christian condemnation of paganism. The cultural stand-off of the fourth century is again the focus of a 1984 lecture which compares Christian and pagan expectations of the end of civilisation.
To complete the tally there remains only a stand-alone lecture from 1995 reflecting on the power of music, the only piece not directly about church history, reminding us not only that Chadwick had been a gifted amateur musician, but that his book on Boethius contributed importantly to the mysterious topic of musical theory in antiquity.
During Chadwick’s lifetime three collections of his essays appeared under the aegis of the ‘Variorum Reprints’, i.e., as volumes of photocopies from journals, without consistent pagination or typeface. I have not been able to establish precisely how many of the essays in this new volume appeared in that format, but there is certainly significant overlap. For those who cannot lay hold on those volumes—and the gold of Ophir may again be relevant—the twenty-one articles and lectures gathered here give as good an overview of his career and interests as could be wished for. Some stake out new positions; others survey ground long acquired. Both types read very easily. And from time to time the reader can still, at this distance, share in moments of great excitement and important discovery.