On the Orthodox Faith.262 Schaff asked John Henry Newman to revise and edit his translation of Athanasius for the American series; Newman responded that his failing eyesight would not permit his participation.263 In the end, new contributors had to be solicited, as some of those whom Schaff had originally approached either declined or failed to fulfill their obligations.
The first series, featuring works by Augustine and Chrysostom, appeared between late 1886 and 1889 in 14 volumes.264 Schaff himself wrote the “Prolegomena” to Augustine and to Chrysostom.265 Although he used some of the Oxford Library of the Fathers’ translations of Chrysostom’s writings,266 he solicited new translations of Chrysostom’s On the Priesthood, The Fallen Theodore, and Letters, Tracts, and Special Homilies.267 Schaff also paid his son Anselm, who apparently lacked other remunerative employment, to read proof in 1887—the “best work I can provide for him,” Schaff wrote to his more scholarly son, David.268
The second series followed, with Schaff’s pupil (and soon-to-be successor) Arthur Cushman McGiffert contributing the first volume on Eusebius.269 Schaff confided to McGiffert that he had taken on “this elephant” in part as a way “to give some of our most promising students useful work and a chance to build up a literary reputation and to get an historical professorship”270: Schaff here covertly signaled McGiffert himself.
On leave in Europe in 1890, Schaff kept abreast of publication details.271 By 1892, he reported, the first series was now complete, and four volumes of the second series published.272 In the end, the publisher would not let Schaff have the fifteen volumes he wanted for the second series, but only thirteen.273
Along the way, the project encountered financial problems. In 1888, Schaff feared that the publisher would “break down,” having spent “$100,000 with little prospect of a speedy return.”274 The next year saw Schaff asking colleagues to invest in the Christian Literature Company (his requests apparently produced few or no results).275 In June 1889, Schaff decided that he himself should “give pecuniary aid to the publisher to enable him at least to publish the Greek historians.”276 He contributed $5000 of his own money for the series—a large sum for a professor at that time—so as not to “disappoint or break faith with the contributors.”277 Whatever Schaff’s deficiencies as a creative scholar, his service to the field was remarkable.
Volumes of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series were widely hailed in the press. To give just one example: the reviewer for the Boston Zion’s Herald, commenting on the volume containing Augustine’s Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homilies on I John, and the Soliloquies, wrote, “The American Church can never discharge its obligation to Philip Schaff for the work of authorship which he has wrought, inspired, and edited.” His erudition is especially valuable, the reviewer continued, in that “he has no tendency either to ecclesiastical narrowness or theological hobbies.”278
SCHAFF EULOGIZED
After Schaff’s death in 1893, George Park Fisher of Yale recalled his “unfailing vivacity, his amiable temper, his generous recognition of contemporary scholars in the same field with himself, and his loyal friendship.” Schaff was “a living, visible link, binding us to Germany, the land of scholars, the country which to many of us is an intellectual fatherland.” Fisher praised Schaff for his catholic spirit—and for remaining “an historian, not an antiquary.” Noting Schaff’s willingness to take on large projects even later in life (including the NPNF series), Fisher predicted that Schaff’s History of the Church would stand as “the most lasting monument of a scholar who served his generation in the use of remarkable powers and with unwearied industry.”279
Schaff’s Union colleague Marvin Vincent eulogized Schaff in a talk at the Century Club in New York—the locale itself an indicator of Schaff’s prestige among wealthy and influential New Yorkers. Vincent claimed that it was due to Schaff that “a broader learning and a bolder and more independent thinking are fast becoming at home amid conditions where they originally appeared as dangerous novelties, were eyed with suspicion, or fought with dogged persistence of ignorance.”
At the time of Schaff’s arrival in the United States, Vincent continued, the influence of the German school was scarcely felt here—but men like Schaff and Henry Smith, German-trained, kept “steady hands on the floodgates through which, a little later, the tide of German thought came pouring into the square enclosures of New England metaphysics and theology.”280 In other words, Schaff and Smith moderated the entrance of contemporary German thought into American intellectual life so as to preserve traditional Christian interests.281
At the December 27, 1893 meeting of the American Society of Church History, representatives from various confessions (including the Roman Catholic282) praised Schaff’s accomplishments. Methodist Bishop John Fletcher Hurst compared Schaff’s efforts to unite Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon theology to Jerome’s linking of East and West and to Origen’s union of three continents (Schaff however, unlike Origen, mercifully had “no touch of Oriental fancy”). Schaff, Hurst proclaimed, will be remembered as “the first to bring to the Anglo-Saxon mind the treasures of the Fatherland.”283
George Park Fisher (1827–1909)
George Fisher—whom historian Roland Bainton describes as a “mellowed Puritan”284—was born in Massachusetts in 1827, graduating from Brown in 1847. At Brown he was introduced to historical studies by Professor William Gammell, under whose tutelage he wrote a paper on Roger Williams, based on manuscripts of Williams’s correspondence that had recently come to the Rhode Island Historical Society.285 After one year in the Yale Theological Department, he decamped to Andover Seminary, graduating in 1851. He then went to Germany, studying at Halle in 1852–1853. From Germany, he was called back to a position at Yale.286 His entire subsequent career was spent at New Haven.
Fisher kept a travel diary (now in the Yale Divinity School archives) detailing his year in Europe. Arriving in Halle in June 1852, he learned that the university had only recently “recovered” from the prevailing Rationalism of German universities. Earlier, anyone who showed a leaning toward Christianity, he was told, had been deemed a fanatic.287
Fisher began attending lectures at Halle a few days after his arrival. He confessed in his diary that he “understood precious little”—but within a week or so, he was able to catch an idea here or there.288 He steadily improved in the coming months, eventually translating German texts for American audiences. One example is his translation of an article by August Neander (“The Relation of the Grecian to Christian Ethics”), prefaced by a long introduction that Fisher offered as “a contribution to Christian evidences.”289 After Fisher assumed the chair of Ecclesiastical History at Yale, the number of books by German scholars that students in the Theological Department checked out from the library increased significantly.290
Many aspects of German university education—for example, the lack of examinations—required adjustment on Fisher’s part.291 Several professors at Halle, however, befriended him and helped him to understand the German system. One of these, Heinrich Leo, liked to discuss all things American with him,292 while August Tholuck, as was his custom with American students, went on walks during which he explained the mysteries of theological parties in Germany.293 In 1853, Tholuck gave Fisher letters of introduction to professors in Rome, Basel, Bern, Heidelberg, and Bonn.294 In Germany, Fisher, like other American evangelical students, developed a suspicion of “Pantheism” and the Tübingen School that remained with him in later years, as did a general distaste for radical biblical criticism.
In December 1853, President Theodore Dwight Woolsey of Yale invited Fisher to accept a position in theology.
