‘La patristique, c’est autre chose’: André Mandouze, Peter Brown, and the Avocations of Patristics as a Philological Science

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Patristics, being defined by writings attributable to Church Fathers, has in recent times been pursued as a philological science. Philology, however, is a divided house and its divisions are writ large in patristic and para-patristic scholarship. Whereas philology always deals with written ‘texts’ in the broad sense of that word, some of those texts prove in practice more ‘literary’ (hence, even, more ‘textual’), others more ‘documentary’. Seventy years ago, the most lucid methodological reflection on patristics as a discipline left its fate suspended between literary and theological vocations. While that dilemma is long past, the ambivalence of patristics between literary/textual and historical/documentary regimes of philology continues to be felt. The works of two exemplary scholars who intervened in the Oxford patristic conferences of 1959 and 1963 offer insights into the methodological problem and, between them, a vantage-point from which we might yet respond to it.