sources. This procedure will be experimental, as “most men know very little how to go to work.” He hoped to engage the students with the primary sources rather than have them rely exclusively on “patchwork” compilations and digests.75 Although Allen’s approach may strike the modern reader as an advance beyond recitation and lecture, his “nonscientific” notions of history, lack of German education, and strong Unitarian commitments probably ruled him out of Charles Eliot’s consideration for the new Winn professorship.76
Ephraim Emerton was hired from his Ph.D. work at Leipzig to be an Instructor in History and German at Harvard College before Eliot selected him for the Professorship in Ecclesiastical History.77 He confessed that at the time he began teaching in the Divinity School, he had “only a very loose connection with a religious organization” and had made no special study of the history of doctrines or of ecclesiastical institutions.78
Both in student notes from Emerton’s class and in his own later reflections on the teaching of history, his less confessional approach is apparent. A chief satisfaction of teaching, he thought, was to see students “lose their childish faith in the printed word” and develop “a fair critical temper.” Since the (German) method of learning by research was still new in America, professors who adopt it must struggle against “the mental apathy” that other methods of teaching history have induced. Although advocating the German approach, Emerton, like an older generation of American professors, also believed that the study of history should train the mind and encourage better citizenship.79
Emerton was quick to decry the earlier neglect of historical study in America. Writing circa 1920, he cited the example of Henry Adams who, although lacking academic training in history, was appointed to an Assistant Professorship of History at Harvard in 1871. When Adams protested that he knew little history, especially of the period he was expected to teach, President Eliot rejoined that if he were aware of anyone who knew more, he would appoint him. There were then no specially trained historians in America, Emerton claimed, but that situation, he is glad to report, had now changed.80 Indeed, writing in 1883 on “The Historical Seminary in American Teaching,” Emerton had painted a picture nearly as bleak as that facing Henry Adams—but even then he was filled with enthusiasm for raising the status of history to that of a “science,” of turning at least a few of “our boys” into “manly” historians.81
Assuming the Winn Chair in 1882, Emerton titled his inaugural address “The Study of Church History.” In the past, he noted, the history of most academic subjects was sadly neglected. Even today, there are only a halfdozen colleges in America at which “any adequate provision for an independent department of history has been made.” But a new era of study based on source criticism and archival research has begun, in which men search for the truth of their subject, not touting their own biases, as do those who assume they have “missions.” America, Emerton ruefully admitted, remains very backward in this respect.82
Of various branches of history, that of the church is even farther behind in its methods and approaches. In this field, Emerton charged, scholars who readily applied new methods of research to the Ancient Near East, “shrank from the unpopular task of submitting the Christian record to similar tests”—and the scanty sources for earliest Christianity left abundant room for “devout imagination” to do its work. The farther back in time historians probe, the more they tend to adduce supernatural causes for events. Here, theology has been greatly to blame. But now, Emerton approvingly noted, historical criticism “has laid an unsparing hand upon the early records of Christianity.”83
Catalogues from the Harvard Divinity School reveal that after Emerton became Winn Professor of Ecclesiastical History in 1882 he regularly taught courses (or ones similarly titled) on “The Conflict of Christianity with Paganism to about a.d. 800,” “History of the Protestant Reformation and the Roman Catholic Reaction,” “History of Christian Doctrine,” “Medieval Church,” and “General Church History,” as well as an advanced seminar on medieval “Church-State Relations.” As noted above, in 1896 he acquired a Union-trained colleague, John Winthrop Platner, who had greater expertise in patristic literature.84 Platner, however, stayed at Harvard only a short time before moving to Andover Seminary.85
Emerton geared his class lectures in early Christianity around what he knew best: over a three-week period, he gave students 27 pages of notes on the barbarian groups, their “invasions,” and settlements (29 pages, if we count a lecture on Ulfila and his Gothic Bible)—while making one brief reference to Athanasius and skipping lightly over doctrinal developments. The Church Fathers in general, he told students, form a “curious and not uninteresting” subject—a rather cool recommendation for early church history! For Emerton, unlike the more evangelical professors, the life of Jesus did not form part of church history.86
Although he clearly lacked interest in doctrine,87 Emerton showed considerable concern for the teaching of history. He wrote little pertaining to late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, but in 1888 published an Introduction to the Study of the Middle Ages (375–814). He also contributed to a volume on Methods of Teaching History, and published several essays of methodological interest in his collection, Learning and Living (1921). As noted in Chapter 1, he published much more on the High and Late Middle Ages and early modernity in his mature years.88
Emerton was determined that under his tutelage at Harvard, ecclesiastical history would be viewed as “a department of historical rather than of theological science.” In his inaugural address, he declared that students would learn to do independent historical work, seeking to find ideas under the bare “facts.” They will, he claimed, study the church as “a great human institution”; any approach that strays beyond the realm of the human flirts with “philosophic speculation.” He will teach the history of church doctrines without regard to their truth or falsity, their orthodoxy or heterodoxy. He intends to offer a seminar in which students will learn “by practical experience something of the rules and limitations of independent historical research and criticism.” In brief, the study of church history should employ the same methods and rules of evidence that have now become the accepted norm in all other branches of historical research.89 Elsewhere, Emerton wrote that historians need “not miracles nor inspirations, nor revelations, nor the dictations of any authority whatsoever, but more documents and better authenticated ones.”90 More than the other professors here surveyed, Emerton moved the study of church history away from its confessional orientation.
Among the documents in the Harvard Divinity School archives is a list compiled by Emerton, dating to the late 1880s, of forty-six topics from which students in “History of the Early Church” might choose to write papers. The topics range from “The Roman State-religion at the time of Christ” through the Apostolic Fathers, Apologists, Montanism, Gnosticism, the persecutions, issues of canon, episcopate, and “the legend of the ‘Petrine Supremacy’,” to Constantine, Julian, and Theodosius, with around a dozen options regarding “barbarians” (Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Huns, Franks, Lombards; their migrations, religion, and settlements). Despite Emerton’s avowed lack of interest in doctrine, he offers a few options on “The Arian Controversy to the close of the Council of Nicaea,” “The Council of Chalcedon,” and “The Augustinian-pelagian controversy.”91
Also among the paper topics were “The Origin and Development of the Monastic Principle,” and “The Life and Work of Ulfilas, the Visigoth.” On these, there remain papers (43 and 45 pages, respectively) written by the student who took the one set of extant notes from Emerton’s ecclesiastical history class, Earl Morse Wilbur.92 These and other papers (“theses”) Wilbur wrote for Emerton93 show that Emerton instructed the students to preface their papers with a bibliography of relevant books and articles in several modern languages. (Wilbur included a second list of “more easily accessible” works he consulted, including a
