SCHAFF AND THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CHURCH HISTORY
The American Society of Church History was founded on March 23, 1888 in Schaff’s home. He was elected the Society’s first President, serving until his death in 1893. Addressing the first general meeting of the Society on December 28, 1888, Schaff declared that ASCH was formed “for the purpose of cultivating church history as a science.” He hoped that the Society would be “catholic and irenical,” bringing together scholars who would aid “the cause of Christian union.”246 “The Society,” he wrote (prophetically) to his son after the meeting, “may become an important training school for rising historians.”247 On learning of the Society’s founding, Adolf von Harnack claimed that “America has put us in Europe to shame.”248 ASCH established a prize essay in Schaff’s honor (“The Schaff Prize in Church History”),249 and in December 1892 formally feted Schaff as the one to whom the Society owed its existence.250
An experimental union of ASCH in its early years with the American Historical Association was short-lived.251 J. Franklin Jameson later explained one reason for the failed merger: the Smithsonian, linked to the AHA, feared that Congress would not publish the Annual Reports of the AHA (what would become the Journal of the American Historical Association) at government expense if Christian theological materials were included.252 Church historians, one suspects, were too confessional for historians at colleges and universities who were struggling to establish their discipline in the academy as a science. In any event, the two societies broke official ties in 1906, and ASCH was reconstituted as an independent organization.253
SCHAFF AND THE NICENE AND POST-NICENE FATHERS SERIES
In the 1880s, Schaff undertook to organize and edit two series of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Schaff planned to bring out about twenty-five volumes with the Christian Literature Company of Buffalo, the company that had earlier published the Ante-Nicene Fathers series edited by Arthur Cleveland Coxe.254 Schaff hoped to use some translations from the Tractarians’ Oxford Library of the Fathers, although he also solicited many new translations. Schaff himself was actively involved in Series 2 of NPNF only through Volume 2.255
The object of the series, Schaff wrote, “is historical, without any sectarian or partisan aim”256—unlike the Oxford Library, which had “an apologetic and dogmatic purpose” (namely, “to furnish authentic proof for the supposed or real agreement of the Anglo-Catholic school with the faith and practice of the ancient church before the Greek schism”257). In the promotional advertisement for the series, Schaff stated that the volumes would sell for $3.00 apiece.258
In 1885, Schaff solicited British and American contributors259 and devised a “Preliminary Prospectus.” He asked potential contributors to declare which patristic texts they proposed to translate afresh or to rework from earlier translations. Schaff allowed five years for the contributors to complete their tasks, but hoped for an earlier publication date. With the “Prospectus,” he enclosed a letter from the Christian Literature Company stating financial arrangements for the contributors.260 The “Prospectus” reveals that several patristic writers that Schaff had intended to include never made the Series (e.g., Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus Confessor, and Photius).261
Schaff originally hoped that (for example) Arthur Cleveland Coxe would take the Canons of the Ecumenical Councils and Vincent of Lerins’s Commonitorium; Benjamin B. Warfield would tackle Theodore of Mopsuestia; William Sanday, Hilary and Lucifer of Cagliari; and H. B. Swete, some of the Cappadocians’ treatises and John of Damascus’ 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