Who would have thought that, in the early years of the twenty-first century, the most vibrant and serious field of Christian study would be the Church Fathers? But it is true. They are returning.
We certainly need their help. I teach at a Catholic university that employs hundreds of professors, and the evidence is plain to see. Only two or three scientists seem willing or able to speak about the relation between the truths of faith and the hypotheses of science. Nobody studies or teaches Dante. The extensive modern tradition of Catholic social teaching has no role to play in political science. The history department employs no one to teach the Middle Ages. Administrative initiatives consistently emphasize â??diversity,â?? and the practical effect, whether intended or not, is a slow reorientation of faculty and curriculum away from a collective focus on the Western Christian intellectual tradition. The retiring professor who specialized in Dryden and Pope is replaced by a young Ph.D. whose interests run to gender studies and postcolonial theory.
If this is happening at a self-consciously Catholic university, imagine what the situation is like at Yale and UCLA. Intellectual life is now dominated by the first truly post-Christian generation. A friend of mine at Yale two decades ago wrote his senior paper on James Joyce. He was fascinated by Joyceâ??s use of trinitarian language. Ignorant of Christian doctrine, he set out to find a faculty member who might provide guidance. I remember his dismay when he told me that he could not find anyone who could explain to him the classical Christian doctrine of the Trinity.
The situation has only gotten worse in the intervening years. A student at Princeton and Harvardâ??or Georgetown and Boston College, for that matterâ??now studies with teachers who have no knowledge of Christianity other than the crude caricatures long retailed by progressive illuminati. Christianity no longer exists as an integrated worldview that shapes the education and mental habits of modern people in the West. The loss is significant: None of us can reinvent a Christian literary imagination, political theory, scientific culture, or systematic theology on our own, because a Christian intellectual culture is a collective, multigenerational project.
It is not the case, however, that we must live alone in the ruins of Christendom. The poverty of the present need not cut us off from the wealth of the past. One of the most important new facts about Christian theology in North America is the sudden popularity of the theologians and pastors, monks and bishops, martyrs and missionaries, who first fashioned a Christian culture nearly two thousand years ago. The Church Fathers are returning as agents of renewal, guiding us toward the biblical source of a truly Christian culture.
R.R. Reno The Return of the Fathers
