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The Philosophy of the Church Fathers1
By Harry Austryn Wolfson: A Review Article
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
Extract
Harry Austryn Wolfson declared in an earlier volume that it was the purpose of Philo “not to teach true philosophy to students of Scripture, but to show the truth of Scripture to students of philosophy.” Wolfson, in his comprehensive series of which the present study is an integral part, likewise seeks to show, if not the truth, at least the comprehensiveness, of “scriptural philosophy” to contemporary students of philosophy.
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- Copyright © American Society of Church History 1957
References
2. We have a foretaste of Wolfson's projected unit on the persistence of pagan, philonic, and now also patristic philosophical motifs in Muslim philosophy in his recent “The Muslim Attributes and the Christian Trinity,” The Harvard Theological Review, XLIX (1956), pp. 1–18.Google Scholar
3. To be sure, the present study does not take up all doctrines. For example, it omits some of the heretical formulations connected with the Holy Spirit and the resurrection body of Christ; Macedonianism, Wolfson says discreetly, is philosophically only another form of the problem of Creationalism and Modalism, while the problem of the resurrection flesh is assimilable to the broader problem of resurrection to be treated in Volume II. A condensed form of Wolfson's interpretation of the patristic views of resurrection and immortality is presented in the Ingersoll Lecture of 1956. Harvard Divinity School Buletin, No. 22.
4. In discussing with this reviewer this crucial link in his demonstration, Professor Wolfson drew from his overflowing files of material not incorporated in the book the following supplementation which could well be inserted in the argument on p. 184 at the end of line 19: Corroborative evidence that Ignatius identified the Logos with the Holy Spirit is to be found in the fact that while in the passage quoted (Ad Magn., viii, 2) he speaks of “Jesus Christ His Son, who is the Logos,” in another passage he speaks of an “inseparable Spirit, which (hos) is Jesus Christ” (Ibid., v). Indirect evidence that “Son” in the trinitarian formula “in Son and Father and in Spirit” (Ibid., iii, 1) refers to the born Christ is to be found in the trinitarian formula implied in a passage in which Ignatius speaks of man's being hoisted up to “God the Father” by “the hoisting-machine of Jesus Christ, which is the cross” and by the use of “the Holy Spirit as a rope” (Ad Ephes., ix, 1). In his interpretation of the masculine relative pronoun hos (Ad Magn., XV) as referring to pneuma, Wolfson agrees with Harnack, (DG I, 4, p. 214Google Scholar, n. 1) over against Lightfoot. In the masculine ie here, Ignatius follows Gal. 3:16.
5. On this Prof. wrote, Wolfson in Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, XX (1951), pp. 72–81.Google Scholar
6. Wolfson proposes to show in Volume II that free will was the basic patristic position as against the emphasis of Augustine.
7. In an important paper delivered at the Dumbarton Oaks Symposium (May, 1956) the anthropology and Christology of the two have been illuminatingly juxtaposed. Dumbarton Oaks Papers (Harvard University Press, 1957).Google Scholar
8. The reviewer has expressed more personal remarks on the historical significance of the book in an interfaith salute to Professor Wolfson on the occasion of his seventieth birthday and the completion of the galleys. Harvard Divinity School Bulletin, No. 21 (1955–1956), pp. 81–91.Google Scholar Professor Wolfson's reply is printed Ibid., pp. 94–100.