Date of Award
Summer 2007
Document Type
Dissertation - Restricted
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Theology
First Advisor
Hills, Julian V.
Second Advisor
Golitzin, Alexander G.
Third Advisor
Dempsey, Deirdre A.
Abstract
This study starts with Clement of Alexandria, and is largely focused on certain aspects of his theological thought. Yet Clement was chronologically the last stop on my very meandering via inventionis. In fact I have always found this writer to be rather prolix and, to be blunt, rather boring; never would I have considered writing an article, much less a doctoral dissertation about Clement. When I came to Marquette I was determined to focus my research on Irenaeus of Lyon; I gave up the project very soon after my arrival, discouraged because all the issues I had had in mind had already been raised and solved in the scholarship of the past five or six decades. (My main scholarly landmarks in studying Irenaeus in Romania were Harnack, Loofs, and Vernet; the most recent book I managed to find was from 1956!) I moved to earlier writings, especially the Shepherd of Hennas; here, I discovered with delight that the questions I brought to the text were still valid, because, as one scholar wrote a few years ago, "there are many puzzles in this puzzling little book." One of the persistent puzzles is this book, whose theological views appear so strange to modern scholarship, fared so well in the early Church. Both Irenaeus and Cement, for instance, treat it with the utmost respect; Cement especially is most enthusiastic about the Shepherd. My own solution to the Christological and pneumatological puzzles in the Shepherd came after reading John Levison's work on "angelic Spirit in early Judaism" and Philippe Henne's literary analysis of the Similitudes. By the end of 2001 I had arrived at the understanding of the Shepherd that I have now set forth in my dissertation. The problem was to document the existence of similar views in other early Christian writings...