Introduction, with Highlights in the History of Australian Patristic Studies

The core focus of the study of Patristics (generally also called Patrology) has been the teachings and practices of the so-called Fathers and Mothers of the early Christian Church (or the leading exponents of the Christian Faith, primarily from after the times of Jesus of Nazareth and the writings of the New Testament to the so-called Early Middle Ages (or the emergence of Islam) (e.g., Louth 2023; cf. Fessler [1850–1851] 1890–1896; Tixeront [1905–1912] 1928–1931; Quasten 1950–1986). Over and above the intricate yet humdrum history of the preserving, copying, and correcting of manuscripts through medieval times, there were milestones in the early development of Patristic study. These included the collecting of discarded or marginalized Christian and classical writings extracted by Photius (ca. 810–895), Patriarch of Constantinople, in his Bibliotheca; the critical techniques from the Italian Renaissance (ca. 1400–1520s) to isolate the best manuscripts, favour preserved Greek texts over Latin translations, and detect forgeries and spurious ascriptions (e.g., Lorenzo Valla, De Falso credita [1440]); to develop printing houses for Oriental languages (e.g., the Maronites from 1610); and especially the organized amassing of theological, historical, and hagiographical writings by Protestant and Catholic scholars in modern times, to shore up their doctrinal defences during and after the Reformation (see Fraenkel 1961, esp. pp. 255–59 on Trimethius, Melanchthon, Bellarmine). The Elizabethan Anglican bishop John Jewel (1522–1571) defined the crucial period of study to be the five hundred years after the primitive church (Works [1845 edn.] vol. 1, p. 20; Haugaard 1979, p. 37), pre-empting the late critical humanist work of Georg Calixtus (1586–1656) to arrive at a Catholic–Protestant consensus about the matter in early modern days (Discurs [1652], esp. sect. 90–96; cf. Callisen 2010, pp. 61–67). Lutheran Johann Gerhard (1582–1637) penned the first monograph entitled Patrologia (post. pub. 1653) in his accounts of the lives and thoughts of many doctors of the Church, patriotically celebrating German figures. This was while the Jesuit Bollandist school started the huge Catholic work on the lives of the Saints, from 1643, and was well before the publication of the huge, ostensibly “complete” corpus of Patrologiae of Latin and Greek Fathers and Mothers of the Church was made accessible from the mid-nineteenth century, mainly under the direction of Catholic priest Jacques Paul Migne (1800–1875) (see Migne 1844–1891, 1857–1891). Around the turn of the twentieth century, other landmark monographs of Patrology appeared (e.g., from Protestant von Harnack (1885–1890) to Catholics Bardenhewer [1894] 1906) and Tixeront (1918), and there were further Patrological series (Harnack’s Griechischen Christlichen Schrifsteller (GCS) 1891-, Patrologiae Syriaca and Orientalis [eds. Graffin 1894–1926, 1904–2002], respectively; cf. also Urbina 1958), collected volumes of translations, followed by collections of critical editions of Patristic writings that have been inspired by this rich and long inheritance up to this day.

Indeed, modern Patristics is grounded in establishing, critically editing, and better comprehending an enormous received body of texts, and those involved in it have wrestled with a variety of awkward issues over the years. Perhaps the most sensitive questions faced through the centuries concerned variations in transmitted Biblical texts (see Metzger and Editorial Committee 1971). However, all sorts of critical issues were also to arise about the inherited works and ploys of the Fathers. Scholars have had to ask, for some pertinent examples, whether newly converted Lactantius, tutor to Constantine’s son Crispus, deliberately misquoted the pagan classics (Antonio da Rho, Dialogi tres in Lactantium [1445]); whether the famous “comma” referring to the Father, Word, and Holy Spirit “three in one” is authentic to 1 John 5:8, and thus putting the Trinity in the New Testament (early questioned, e.g., by Isaac Newton’s Two Letters [pub. 1754] to John Locke); whether cosmologically oriented theologian Origen really authored the intriguing Adamantius dialogue that, for centuries, had been incautiously placed among his works (Hort 1877, p. 41); whether pioneer church historian Eusebius used already ‘doctored’ texts when relaying Josephus’s account of Jesus or the Edessan archival record of Armenia’s Abgar V’s letter to Jesus (Pines 1971; Trompf 2023, p. 6); and so on. Commentators have had the embarrassing task of distinguishing theological parties but putting late names on them: of around ten positions adopted by followers of the di-theistic-looking ‘heretical’ teachings of Arius (flor. 310s); for instance, the epithet ‘semi-Arians’ was imposed by their contemporary critics, and ‘neo-Arians’ only by moderns (cf. Hanson 2005). Only in recent times, moreover, have scholars and clerics had to derive the special nomenclature Miaphysitism from seventh-century Syrian theology, found nowhere in virtually all prior Patristic studies, to distinguish groups once said to be Monophysite when they did not really teach the hard-line Christological definition (promulgated by alleged heresiarch Eutyches of Constantinople [flor. 440s) that Christ had only a divine nature (e.g., Wood 2010, p. 18; Michelson 2014; Hainthaler 2015). Pace all these kinds of nettles, over the centuries studying the Church Fathers and Mothers was overwhelmingly carried out in sacral and ecclesial ambiences, especially in seminaries and monasteries, with those involved cherishing and defending holy truths, upholding Church dogmas (some formulated in creed and liturgy) that led to anathemas and statements of schism or special inter-church relationships. Eventually, by the nineteenth century, histories tried encapsulating the whole process for wider audiences, from the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Newman [1845] 1960) by Oxonian late-Catholic John Henry Newman to the tracings by Norwegian Anathon Aall of the “Logos idea” (Aall 1896–1899), i.e., that cosmic ordering principle important for both philosophers and theologians (with the latter acknowledging Christ as the personal Logos/Word, as well the subject of the Gospel [John 1:1; Col. 1:5, 25, etc.]).

By now, certainly, Patristics has been opened up as a discipline that can be engaged with in the worldwide forum of scholarship, after a lengthy story of entanglements. The general shift was probably first initiated by pressure during the Reformation to consider church history as but a part of general history (Philipp Melanchthon) (Klempt 1960, esp. pp. 5–88). While veneration of holy relics continued in Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches, the sense of significance in what had been forgotten as “Christian Antiquities” grew, triggered in the West especially by Antonio Bosio’s exploration of the Roman catacombs (cf. Roma sotterranea, 1632), beginning a process that has since resulted in great museum displays of these antiquities (e.g., Smith and Cheetham 1875; British Museum [1903] 1921, pp. 24–39, 56–144) and a myriad of exhibitions in significant churches and other spaces around the globe (cf. Caraher and Pettegrew 2019). Thus, Patristics slowly became more distinctly part of wider ancient history awaiting critical study. Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) was central to this transition, with his “quite Roman” as well as Enlightenment attitudes, implying that the Christian “religion” and the Gothic “barbarians”, whose leadership was inspired by Arian missionaries, were key culprits in the downfall of the old Western Roman Empire (by 476) (Maas 2012, p. 70; cf. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall [1776], chs, 21, 26, 71). Prolonged wrangling has followed his arguments, and still today, we see tension between those extolling past ancient imperial glories and those happy to see them ‘dead and buried’, with the Roman Pax even denigrated as an excuse for genocide (e.g., Holland 2023). Differing opinions, growing interactions between Patristic scholars and ancient historians (most often Byzantinists) kept increasing, and the debates laid the basis for pressures to include keen awareness of ancient Christian bodies of knowledge in the study of Late Antiquity, Byzantium, and early medieval times, and for research into the Fathers and Mothers of the Church to be sensibly contextualized in pre-modern societies. Meanwhile, scholars desiring so are free to advocate for the Fathers’ ancient theological insights, and to demonstrate how relevant they can be to modern survival and clarity of purpose. A leading Australian Patristics scholar Ken(neth) Parry (2019, pp. vii-ix, 3–12) (flor. 1990–2020s), in his edited Wiley-Blackwell Handbook to Patristic Studies, has preserved the centrality for Patrology of ancient Christian authoritative voices (from Irenaeus to John Damascene and beyond), and of studying them within the diverse contexts of Church life and practice (asceticism, readiness of martyrdom, celebration of the Saints, liturgies, setting Easter and feast days, hymns, poetry, etc.) up to our time. But, as an ancient historian, he shows how Patristics spills over into the study of Late Antique philosophies (e.g., Anagnostou-Laoutides and Parry 2022), art (Parry 1996), diverse cultures (2010), and dynastic histories (Dzino and Parry 2014). By knowing controversies from the distant past, moreover, work could be performed to help in inter-church relations to pass beyond earlier misunderstandings and iron out their differences (see below on Stormon; cf. Gribben 2002), and to explore possibilities for up-to-date and more relevant styles on engaging in Patristics (following, e.g., “Neo-Patristics”, Metaphysical Patristics, etc. (Gallaher 2011; Adrahtas 2024) and relevant interdisciplinary work (e.g., Costache 2013).

By feat of increasing attitudinal flexibilities, and with the questioning of old dogmas and the openly ‘secular scrutiny of the sacred’, Patrology might seem to be wrested out of its ecclesial closets and uncomfortably exposed to new styles of criticism. Women, for example, might well be irritated by its very top-heavy concern with male minds (cf., e.g., Neil and Garland 2013; Mayer and Elmer 2014), queer theorists suspicious about its degrees of tolerance toward sexual diversity (e.g., Boswell 1980), pacifistic souls abhorred by episodes of “mad monks” behaving violently (see Gaddis 2005, pp. 151–207), social critics pointing out diatribes against the Jews (e.g., Garroway 2022), with critical theorists alleging its protagonists have been bastions of pastoral (typically episcopal) power (Foucault 1980), etc. Paradoxically, however, although they wanted a unifying orthodoxy (right opinion), various Fathers were so well informed about religious diversities that they laid the long-term basis for the sociology of new religious movements (Trompf 1987, pp. 96–98), and when the Reformation fractured Western Europe, the beginning of modern studies of the history of heresies (other opinions) saw mystic Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714) dare to contend there was some grain of truth in all deviations from the mainstream Faith (Unpartheyische … Ketzer-Historie 1699), opening up the possibility, as we see it today, of a tolerated religious plurality as well as the study of all religions with greater equanimity. And, at this point in time, moreover, Patristics has never been more welcoming to active engagement among contesting, scientismic, non-religious, or non-Christian souls. These are interesting times, in which the very wellsprings of nations and cultures once deeply affected by the Christian faith have been neglected, and need re-examining to see how much current ideal standards of social life still owe themselves to the Church Fathers and Mothers, and how an osmotic process of forgetfulness buries them in collective memories, because they are seriously ‘religious’ in a changing world distancing itself from institutional religiosities. The authors of this book reflect a diversity of world-views found in that island-like southern Continent, Australia, which has experienced many of the recently felt disinclinations to spend time on apparently decrepit “elders”, who laboured on a multitude of obscure texts long after the 33-year old Great One died on a cross. Indeed, Australia’s scattered inhabitants have a reputation (if over-exaggerated) for a blunt “godlessness” (Breward 1988). Still, in current global affairs, Australians possess an internationally enviable tradition of social justice and egalitarian suspicion of misused power, as if old desert ascetics and voices raised for high and pure ideals amid ancient urban dust have still been producing very long-term effects.

And so, we come to consider Patristics in Australia, preparing readers for the Australian contributions to the discipline that fill the pages which follow. To set the stage, in this introductory piece, I will explore the foundations of the discipline in the great Southern Continent, and then briefly assess the ‘state of play’ at the turn of the third millennium, as the authors are introduced.

1. The Foundations of Patristics in Australia (to AD 2000)

Modern Australia began through British colonization, thus first inheriting connections with Western Catholic, Protestant, and Enlightenment strands of scholarship. In the earlier days of penal colonies and pioneering attempts at public education (to ca. 1840), expectedly, there was little room for scholarly writing and researching ancient texts. Change came slowly as far as probing early Church Fathers and Mothers was concerned. Who, at least, brought potential for studying them? Why, monks, of course, and the myriad voices ‘still speaking’ in the books of the libraries they brought with them. After decades of official anti-Catholic strategies during the convict years, a breakthrough came when, to end 50 years in the wilderness, Australian Catholics had their first Bishop, in 1835: John Bede Polding (1794–1877), and he was an English Benedictine (soon to be continent-wide Archbishop and Metropolitan). His vision for the Catholics was one combining mission with learning, and since this was too idealistic for the general circumstances (and eventually unpopular, especially among a large and growing Irish constituency), Polding had to sadly face the reality that old-style (sixth-century!) “Benedictinism neither produced a crop of eminent theologians … nor encouraged a broad education for teachers of Catholic children” (Nairn 1967, p. 344). And he had tried so hard to recruit monks for Australia, even from the European Continent (e.g., Kavenagh 1974, 2005). The library in the monastic ‘seminary’ next to St. Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, however, slowly laid the basis (from 1837 to 1857) of a key resource for Patristics for eastern Australia (Murphy 1921, p. 50). In the West of the continent, an extraordinary monastic library was built up much more rapidly (from 1846), due to connections with Spain under Benedictine missioner (later Bishop) Rosendo Salvado (1814–1900), and this collection remains, if isolated and 131 km away from Perth, a treasure trove for the history of Patristics to this day (McPhee 1979). Why, Patristics in Australia could have had Aboriginal beginnings, since Salvado sent four young indigenous novices to train for the priesthood in Europe. One, Francis Xavier Conaci (d. 1853), received a silver medal for success in seminary examinations and was a most promising scholar; Pope Pius IX, when ordaining him, expressed hopes for Conaci as a new “Xavier of Australia.” Alas, none of these monks returned to New Norcia to work, but all fell ill and died (Salvado [1851] 1977, pp. 90, 98, 123–24, 237–88; Pattel-Gray and Trompf 1993, p. 173).

The Benedictine heritage took a long time to have its effect on local Patristic scholarship. The original Sydney seminary collection was moved into the grand St. Patrick’s College overlooking Manly, Sydney, in 1889 (Fletcher 1980), and the Benedictines eventually produced an important pertinent periodical, Tjurunga (from 1971, using a desert Aboriginal name for sacra). Its editing was shared between Sydney and Melbourne, and not a few monks displayed their flair for Patristics (with, e.g., Cistercian Michael Casey, New Norcia Benedictine David Barry, Sylvestrine Michael Kelly and, of late, Good Samaritan sister Carmel Posa impressive among them); and in Western Australia, New Norcia Studies began in 1993. The following year saw an Ecumenical Conference in Rome on the fifth-century Father John Cassian, jointly initiated by Sydney Benedictines and Methodists (pub. Bondi et al. 1995–1996).

Of the thousands of priests graduating from Manly (which was Australia’s “central national seminary” until 1922 [Livingston 1977, p. 254]), all would have been exposed to some class in Patristics, especially considering the stimulus to study the Fathers by Pius XII’s wartime Encyclical Divino affluente Spiritu (1943) (Pollard 1960, p. 138). In the 1950s, Patrology I and II, followed by History of Dogmas, were required courses in a three-year sequence to attain a Baccalaureate and then Licentiate in Theology (using the Latin handbook Enchiridion Patristicum by Jesuit Rouet de Journel [1922] 1953), with the Doctorate in Theology (authorized in 1958) requiring close study of a Patristic text in its original language (Crittenden 2024). Yet, theses were not expected to be substantial and, in any case, no one emerged a notable Patrologist. Admittedly, Alberico Jacovone (1936- ) and David Walker (1938- ) were insightful enough expositors, the former on Pope Leo the Great’s sacramental thought (in Italian, Jacovone 1966), and the latter on Cassian’s moral theology (Walker 1966), but their careers were constrained by humdrum institutional service, with Jacovone training teachers and Walker rising to an episcopate. Prof. David Coffey (1938- ) was perhaps the exception, earning an impressive St. Patrick’s doctorate on ‘proto-philosophical’ issues in John the Evangelist (Coffey 1960; cf. Walsh 1998, p. 261); he later studied under the renowned theologian Karl Rahner in Germany, and was required to probe a whole range of Patristic views in trying to apprehend the Trinity (Coffey 1999, esp. pp. 33–45; cf. Ormerod 1988; Crittenden 2020).

Over a century had passed, and the field of study we are interested in here barely left a footprint in Australian Catholic thought, probably because the Fathers were assumed to be an “auxiliary” building-block for Dogmatic Theology or Church History (Crittenden 2008, pp. 126–29). In the Protestant story, the general dearth was comparable and the reasons more that the controversies of the early churches were covered in Church History (e.g., by the widely read Lietzmann [1932] 1961). But two interesting figures on the Australian scene deserve comment. Ulster-Scot-born Samuel Angus (1881–1943), for nearly 30 years Professor of New Testament and Historical Theology at St. Andrews [Presbyterian] College at the University of Sydney (USyd), could not have written those famous books on The Mystery Religions and Christianity (Angus 1925) and The Religious Quests of the Graeco-Roman World (Angus 1929) without a wide-ranging knowledge the Fathers, who reported on various Mediterranean cults and Gnostics, and engaged with Late Antique philosophers. A Christian Platonist, committed to “a Jesus stripped of Christological speculation and mythology” (expressed in German higher criticism and the History of Religions school he favoured), Angus successfully defended himself from heresy charges in the 1930s using copious quotations from the Fathers, especially in Latin (Emilsen 1991, pp. 61, 212–29, 240–45 and ns.). Whatever one makes of the fuss, Angus single-handedly put the reality and potential of Australian contributions to Patristic Studies on the world map, even though his stance linked back more to Gottfried Arnold’s fair-minded approach to heresies than to Patrology more classically defined (Trompf 2019, p. 31).

Angus’s doctorate was taken at Princeton—on Latin sources of Augustine’s City of God (Angus 1906), a decisively Patristic topic—and his major inspirations were strikingly German (especially from Adolf Deissmann); but after the Second World War, another (somewhat forgotten) figure sign-posted what were to become ‘Oxbridge’ links to motivate most Australians’ aspirants to engage fully and publish in the field. This was English-born Robert Pretty (1904–1985), a young Congregationalist lay minister sent westward from Tasmania, who took an honours Arts degree at the University of Western Australia in the early 1940s. Returning to the east, by 1964, he had been awarded a DD from the prestigious Melbourne College of Divinity (see below), and had achieved membership of the same United Faculty of Theology or inter-denominational Protestant Theological Hall, with its precious Gillespie Library, where Angus had worked during the war years. In that circle, Pretty held the Lecturership in Ecclesiastical History, School of Divinity, USyd (from 1962) (Barnes 1997, pp. xi–xiii), Such a School, as one also did in the University of Queensland (UQld), allowed Divinity to be taken by way of ‘professional’ degrees outside of the mainstream educational profile before the year 2000 cf., e.g., (Turney et al. 1991–1995, vol. 1, p. 520; vol. 2, p. 170; University of Queensland 1968, p. 2). Significantly, Pretty appears to have written the first truly ‘home-grown’ Patristics doctorate in Australia, a translation and editing of the Adamantius Dialogue (GCS 1; see above), which he convincingly ascribed to Methodius of Olympus (to ca. 300) instead of to Origen. The dissertation was examined by none other than Frank Leslie Cross (1900–1968), the actual founder of the famed International Oxford Conferences on Patristic Studies (from 1951 on), and by this stamp of approval, Pretty heralded an intellectual connection that was crucial for the flourishing of Australian Patristics in our generation. Lost when first submitted to an American publisher, this author found Pretty’s thesis wilting away in a dingy, dusty corner of the Methodists’ Leigh College Library, and brought it out into the light of day (Pretty 1997).

Meanwhile, with the thawing of Catholic–Protestant relations (from the early 1950s) and the onset of the Second Vatican Council (in the 1960s), cross-traditional interactions were going to enhance possibilities for Patristics research. As soon as Manly ceased to be Australia-wide (1922), Dr Daniel Mannix (1864–1963), controversial Irish-born Archbishop of Melbourne for over 40 years, promptly placed seminary training there under the guidance of the already well-established Jesuits (an Order revered for its high standards of learning, with Victoria being the seat of the Australian Province for the Society of Jesus since 1860) (Murphy 1948, pp. 128–29; Bygott 1980, pp. 21–23, 308–9). In time, the 1960s saw increasing teaching collaboration between Jesuit and mainline Protestant theological halls, and the United Faculty of Theology (UFT) was born in 1969, with a sharing of resources within the impressive Dalton-McCaughey Library, Ormond College, bordering the University of Melbourne, in 1971 (Breward 1999). Out of this productive relationship, the University of Divinity was to be ratified by the Victorian Parliament, much later, in 2016, though in fact its foundations lie in that venerable Protestant, officially accredited degree-granting institution called the Melbourne College of Divinity (MCD), inaugurated in 1910 (Sherlock 2016). The UFT had become increasingly ecumenical, having its first Catholic President by 1976. Catholic Orders, collaborating in a fruitful educational programme of the Yarra Theological Union from 1972, readily joined the UFT and became a college of the new university after that.

It might seem in these transitions, Catholic scholarly attention to the Fathers would outshine Protestant work, were it not for the fact the first genuine doyen of Australian Patristics turns out to be a Methodist! We refer to Eric Osborn (1922–2007), Professor of New Testament and Early Church History at Queen’s College, University of Melbourne, a very learned (if somewhat fractious) exemplar giving promise of high standards during the negotiations for the UFT (cf. Trompf 2016, p. 235). At this point, we should clarify that the overwhelming focus of Protestant church scholars of the ancient materials was always the New Testament (within Biblical Studies), and that tendency, upon the impact of Vatican II, was also significantly showing up in the balance of Catholic interests. Conservative, Evangelical, and ‘sectarian’ Protestants always remained strongly Bible-focused (the Baptists and Restorationists, for indicative examples, not setting traditional store by the early Ecumenical Councils of the Church and their Creeds, and showing little interest in the Patristic period apart from Donatism (e.g., Littell 1964, pp. 55–75).1 Why also, in South Australia, at the Australian Lutheran Theological College—the obvious place, given so many German immigrés, for such an institution to be (from 1921)—the dogmatic textbook chiefly used begins with New Testament Theology and then all-too suddenly jumps past the Fathers and Mothers into systematized statements of doctrine formulated by the milestone 1847 Missouri Synod (Mueller [1934] 1955). And so, when it first made its appearance in Melbourne, Eric Osborn’s The Philosophy of Clement of Alexandria (Osborn 1957) stood out like a strange nine-pin. ‘Bible Christians’ at the time would not know what to make of it, Clement sometimes looking like a pagan philosopher and a Gnostic heretic. Osborn’s was the first monograph on a Christian Father to be penned by an Australian, if basically the product of a doctorate in Cambridge (UK), under Henry Chadwick (1920–2008), the very man who was to succeed Frank Cross as host of the Oxford Conferences (from 1967). Osborn’s study was too ahead of its time for one to know how it could be used for southern hemispheric tertiary studies, at least in the Protestant circles dominant in Australia. Over the next 50 years, though, he established himself as one of the most consistent producers of monographs on Patristics anywhere in the world (e.g., Osborn 1973, 1981, 1997, 2001).

The only Catholic scholar comparable to Osborn in his emergence was the West Australian Jesuit Edward J. Stormon (1912–1992), who returned home with an unfinished doctoral thesis from Oxford (1953, on ideas of spiritual renewal in the Middle English text The Pearl and in Shakespeare, under the great J.R.R. Tolkien), and was immediately sent back to keep serving in secondary school! (Catholic Weekly 26 February 1953, p. 2). Fortunately he was soon invited to join the Jesuit Theological College in Melbourne, since he had earlier taken a Master’s degree (on English mystic Richard Rolle) at the University there. By the late 1960s, Stormon was turning attention to the major interest of his career, concerning the tail-end of Byzantine Studies, perhaps even of Patristics, on how to heal the Eastern/Western Church differences working through traditional credal and dogmatic differences (e.g., Stormon 1977, 1981, 1985, 1987; cf. Strong 2016, p. 445). At one point or another, this author enjoyed being taught by both Osborn and Stormon as an undergraduate; although it should be clarified again that neither of these eminents were, for most of their lifetimes, established academics teaching about religion within secular university departments. They worked from residential colleges on the margins: teaching religion at the University of Melbourne (UMelb) was debarred by parliamentary act, and only in later years could these two really feel they had achieved parity with the mainstream academic community. Indeed, as far as one can tell, the first course in a plainly secular Australian university setting which had Patristic Studies in its title (‘Biblical and Patristic Studies’) was conducted in the Classics Department in 1969 at the University of Western Australia (UWA), the nation’s first “free university” that Pretty also cherished (Barnes 1997, p. xi). The course was put up at the behest of Prof. Melvyn Austin, being cooperatively taught by Stormon—returned from Melbourne to be Head of St Thomas More (residential] College, UWA, and soon to start translating the Salvado memoirs (see St. Thomas More College 2012, p. 10; cf. Salvado [1851] 1977)—and by the present author (fresh back from Oxford after studying under Chadwick, Cross and the Jesuits!).

However, to say that the Patristic period was not studied under the secular rules of UMelb is not completely true. In 1959, Scottish-born John Bowman (1916–2006), an accomplished New Testament scholar (D.Phil. [Oxon.]), was appointed to the Chair of Semitic Studies within the Department of Middle Eastern Studies, and by the mid-sixties he had modified the previous curriculum focus on languages by introducing courses with content both cultural and archeological. In his first year, he had founded Abr-Nahrain (now Ancient Near Eastern Studies), the first periodical (with supplementary volumes) admitting Patristic scholarship to be published overseas under Australian auspices (by Brill, Leiden; then Peeters, Louvain); and by 1961 came a likewise welcoming local departmental annual Milla wa-Milla (Sagona 2006, p. 62). One departmental course was on Christianity, particularly “the development of Eastern Christianity”, and one teacher, Edinburgh-educated Baptist George Bolster (d. 1970), taught a class on early Patristic testimonia to the New Testament texts (which this author attended in 1962), and Bolster was apparently the first to be called “Lecturer in Comparative Religion” in Australia (from 1963) (cf. Victorian Baptist Witness 5 July 1962, p. 11; University of Melbourne 1964a, p. 57, 1964b, p. 194). Both adept at Syriaca and Judaica, Bowman and Bolster cultivated significant doctorates on ‘Eastern Christian’ Patristic topics, a pioneering one by Brian Colless (1936- ), down from Sydney, on John Saba, an eighth-century Syrian mystic (1969); and another by (adventurous Lutheran farmer!) Carl Loeliger (1935–2023), a mammoth dissertation (Loeliger 1970) on key theological terms used in the Peshitta (fourth-century Syriac Bible) in translating the Pauline Epistles, with copious references to Ephrem of Nisibis (flor. 350s). Colless cut his teeth publishing in Australia (cf. Colless 1968, p. 83), yet by 1970 was ensconced at Massey University, and thereupon plied his rigorous Eastern-oriented Patristic Studies in New Zealand. Loeliger, for his effort, was appointed as one of the two first Lecturers in Religious Studies in the country (1971), though offshore in pre-independent Papua/New Guinea, where he served sixteen years and then returned permanently to the family farm. Back in Melbourne, Bowman was working prodigiously to endow the Baillieu (UMelb) Library with rare works to do with Eastern Christianity (see Bowman 1976, p. 5), helping to match the treasures in the nation’s first great open collection at the Public Library of Victoria, Melbourne city (founded 1853), rich in Aegyptaica and Byzantina (hard copies of the whole massive Corpus scriptorum historiae Byzantinae for example, only available there). At Melbourne’s Anglican Evangelical Ridley College (close to UMelb), one could also goggle at the home of Bible translator Vice-Principal Francis Andersen (1923–2020), wall-to-wall full of books, and find at least one academic who could start teaching you Church Slavonic and probe the fate of Hebrew Biblical texts down to Origen’s Hexapla, before he took off to Berkeley and later returned to take the Foundation Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Queensland (1981–1988) in the state of his birth (cf. Conrad and Newing 1987).

Our allusion to the sources of Byzantium’s history reminds one that the seeds of Australian Byzantine Studies were first sewn in the Classics Department at Melbourne, with the enthusiasms of Roger Scott (1938- ) and encouraged by incoming Professor (New Zealand-born) Graeme Clarke (1934–2023) from 1969 (Moffatt 2006, p. xv; cf. Jackson et al. 2023). These two colleagues have been twin giants in Patristic and Byzantine research to our day, Scott especially on the sixth century chronicler John Malalas (e.g., Jeffreys et al. 1986) and Clarke on the Letters of the St. Cyprian, third-century bishop of Carthage (e.g., Clarke 1984–1989). Yet, we are not to forget a younger, equally inspired female party, Ann Moffatt (1941- ) who, like Clarke, transferred from Melbourne to the Classics Department at the Australian National University (ANU) and played a crucial role in establishing the Australian Association for Byzantine Studies (AABS) and its first Conference in 1978 (from which moot the still-continuing monograph series Byzantina Australiensia was born (Jeffreys et al. 1981) (remembering here, of course, that Byzantine history goes well beyond 800 CE, as one possible cut-off point for the Patristic period). With reference to ANU again, where Clarke coordinated important Australian work on Patristic historiography from the Humanities Research Centre (Clarke et al. 1990), one also recalls his co-worker in Classics Revd Dr Evan Burge (1933–2003), who edited works (Burge et al. 1971) by Martianus Capella (a founder of the early Western university system of learning [flor. 480s]), and then that brilliant, if diffident product of Classics at the University of Queensland, Robert Barnes (1947- ), whom the present author found assiduously reading Gibbon on board ship in preparation to read Theology at Oxford in 1965. If he later fell dejected when undertaking doctoral work at Harvard, involving a soulless, computerized lexicon of Clement of Alexandria, Barnes returned to settle down to in Canberra (Classics, ANU). Teaching inter alia Elizabeth Minchin (1943- ), and being a valued colleague of Clarke’s (Professor 1982–1992)—a duo of outstanding leaders in the Australian Academy of Humanities and strong sponsors of studies in ancient Christianity—Barnes eventually bequeathed an extraordinary Patristics collection to ANU’s Chifley Library valued at millions of dollars (e.g., Minchin 2022; cf. Minchin and Jackson 2017). Personally reflecting, this author was familiar with almost all of the people in Melbourne, Perth, and Canberra who formed part of the disparate foundation period of Australian Patristics described here, and my own 1974 ANU doctoral thesis in the History of Ideas, which had not a little Classical and Patristic material in it (Trompf 1979), benefited greatly from the standards of scholarship set at Canberra.

Back in Sydney, one impressive way to avoid the secular cramp that inhibited Patristics was to create a university and, in particular, a department, that freed itself from religious restrictions. I refer to Macquarie University (founded in 1964), and its Department of Ancient History, perhaps for a time the biggest of its kind anywhere and unique in the wide scope of its subject matter, and developed above all under its New-Zealand-born Foundation Professor Edwin Arthur Judge (1928- ) from its virtual inception in 1969 (cf. Hillard et al. 1998) to its unfortunate devolvement into the general History Department in 2020. Although Judge was more interested in New Testament times, his pioneering study of the social configuration of early Christians (Judge 1960) and papers on the Jewish/Greek (Jerusalem/Athens) divide in early Christianity (and in Western culture) (Judge 2023, pp. 105–15) fed into the Patristic arena, indeed Judge penned a well-known paper (Judge 1977) on the earliest known archaeological reference to a (Christian) monk (Grk. monachos) in a papyrus letter from Egypt dated 324. His tireless sponsorship of early Christian Studies (courses taking in the Christianity in Late Antiquity, early Christian varieties and ‘heresies’, etc.), his advocacies of the Society for the Study of early Christianity (SSEC) with its Newsletter (1970- ) and of the collection of early Christian objects and papyri at Macquarie’s Ancient History Documentary Research Centre (AHDRC) (later part of the university History Museum), were simply extraordinary (cf. Judge 2023).

Judge had a talent for engaging a diversity of voices in the study of early Christianity. Earlier at Sydney, as one of the founders of the (by-now famous) Journal of Religious History (1960- ), he was quick to help solicit important papers on Patristic topics from around the nation: from Davis McCaughey, at Victoria’s Ormond College, for example, early as an Australian scholar to assess the importance of the Nag Hammadi discoveries for studying Gnosticism (McCaughey 1960); and Ian Gilman (UQld) on Church triumphalism under Constantine (Gilman 1961). A similar facility and body of concerns reflect in work by two of Judge’s supportive co-lecturers from 1970: Bruce Harris (1921–2022), the first person earning a classics doctorate from a New Zealand university, who became Foundation President of the SSEC (Harris and Hutchinson 1990; Judge 2020), and Alanna Emmett [-Nobbs]s (1944- ) papyrus scholar (e.g., Emmett 1985) and pace-setter in studies of Patristic historiography, who also benefited from working with associate (and Catholic) researcher Brian Croke (1951- ) (Croke and Emmett 1983). Raoul Mortley, arriving not long thereafter, truly consolidated the foundation group (see below), but other relevant figures (among an impressive cluster of ancient historians) at Macquarie can hardly go unmentioned: founding Editor of AHDRC’s New Documents Illustrating Early Christianity (1981- ) Greg Horsley (1951- ), for one, who later transferred his Macquarie legacy to the University of New England (UNE, 1995 on), and Samuel Lieu (1950- ), for another, who took Judge’s chair in 1996 and, in the same year, co-directed the UNESCO-sponsored Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum, for publishing primary texts of and studies on the most widespread alternative faith that challenged that of the early Fathers.

Judge always has been, mind you, a deeply Evangelical soul, and more focused on social and moral history than on philosophy. Yet, for a fair time (1973–1986), Macquarie enjoyed the appointment of a more philosophically minded scholar of early Christianity and Late Antiquity. Now, if you were performing your fieldwork at the Oxford Conferences in the 1970s and 1980s, as soon as it was clear you were an Australian, Asian scholars would make a particular point of naming Patristics stars from the Antipodes whom they most venerated. For the first decade, it was Osborn; for the second, it was Sydney-born Raoul Mortley (1944- ). Behold, like Osborn, Mortley also wrote his 1971 doctorate on Clement of Alexandria, but the differences were that he took his degree from the University of Strasbourg, wrote it in French, and concentrated on the issue of “religious knowledge” (connaissance religieuse) (Mortley 1973). In the early 1980s, Mortley was already writing in both English and French about negative or apophatic theology, beginning in 1981, when he dialogued with Osborn, Stormon, and visiting Jarislav Pelikan (1923–2006), the last a renowned (Slavo-)American patrologist and expositor of the Christian Tradition (Pelikan 1971–1989) (Dockrill and Mortley 1981, pp. 5–12, 49–78, 211; cf. Mortley 1982, 1986]). And Mortley expanded his interests both to the Platonic tradition (Mortley 1988), and also to Gnosticism (e.g., Mortley 1981) in a manner shared by the present author (e.g., Trompf 1989). His approach combines the History of Ideas with consideration of philosophical and theological viability of non-Christian Greek-writing thinkers (such as Plotinus), who had a striking influence on various Fathers (including on Augustine in the Latin West). Mortley’s working contacts in France with scholars researching on Neoplatonism and the Hermetic corpus were impeccable, and through 1986, he served as Research Director in Philosophy at the grand Centre Nationale de Recherché Scientifique in Paris. In Australia, interestingly, his most important contacts for Patristics study were found at the University of Newcastle (160 km north of Sydney).

In Newcastle lay the twin ‘power-houses’ behind the noted Supplementary Numbers to the Australasian classics journal Prudentia (founded 1969, focusing on Graeco-Roman “intellectual history”). These two protagonists were classicist Professor Godfrey Tanner (1927–2002) and philosopher Dr David Dockrill (1936–2018), who ensured that separately edited supplements to Prudentia encouraged Patristics and studies of Hellenistic philosophical influences on Christianity, inter alia providing an important forum for the historical philosophy Mortley cultivated (thus with Dockrill 1981) and a mental seedbed for the younger (English-born) Harold Tarrant (1946- ) as pursuer of comparable interests (e.g., Tarrant 1988). Indeed, Tanner’s tradition in Classics (Lee et al. 1993; Lee 2002) helped attract both Mortley and Tanner to Newcastle (both in 1993, the former as Vice Chancellor). As for Prudentia, its indicative importance as an institution truly showed in the next decade with a Greek (and Greek Orthodox) contribution on “an old faith” in a new land (Chryssavgis 1994). And why not now consider the Greeks? They seem best coming next in our tour d’horizon.

Another way to avert Australian secular and create space for Patrology in the Antipodes was through the vitality of ethno-religious scholarly life borne from afar. The Greeks are of overwhelming significance in Australia, since Melbourne is putatively the third-largest Greek city in the world! However, Sydney remains a key focal point, and the choice was made to found an Orthodox seminary there, rather than in Victoria (proposed in 1981 and founded in 1986), as St Andrew’s Greek Orthodox Theological College. The Dean of this establishment, from its beginnings to his death, was Stylianos Harkianakis (1935–2019), who had been appointed Archbishop of the Greek Orthodox Church of Australia in 1975, and who came directly from the Holy Patriarchal Monastery of Vlatadon, where he held ecclesiastical authority over the affairs of the Holy Mountain of Athos. Now, the manuscript holdings and libraries of Mount Athos are among the richest for Patristic Studies anywhere in the world, and Stylianos had been co-founder and later President of the Patriarchal Institute for Patristic Studies at Vlatadon, and was instrumental in the digitization of the Athos collections for public research from Thessaloniki, thus forging a ‘prize pathway’ for Australians researching the field (now online: https://ror.org/000ffa622 (accessed on 31 January 2024); cf. also Adrahtas et al. 2020).

We should not exaggerate the leg-work the Archbishop put into the cultivation of Patristic study as a figurehead (Stylianos 2007, pp. 6–36); for much was left to his at-times reluctant personal assistant Adelaide-born Revd Deacon Dr John Chryssavgis (1958- ), who had taken a degree in Theology at the University of Athens and a coveted DPhil in Patristics at Oxford (Chryssavgis 1983, the first Greek-Australian and apparently the first Australian male to do so [cf. below]). Joined by a few doughty teaching supporters (especially [English-born] Drs. Guy Freeland and Harry Simmons), they constructed and taught a viable seminary programme, negotiated for degree accreditation though securing membership of the interdenominational consortium the Sydney College of Divinity (SCD. founded 1983), built up the St Andrew’s library, started the significant college journal Phronema (edited first by Freeland from 1986), and all the while confirmed the importance of Patristics and early Church History in their curriculum (Chryssavgis and Chryssavgis 1985). Early in his immense output of publications, John Chryssavgis was developing connections between monastic and Australian desert spirituality (Ferguson and Chryssavgis 1990, pp. 52–62, 109–19; cf. 1983). He daringly expounded Orthodoxy outside in-house periodical literature (e.g., Chryssavgis 1988a, 1988b, 1994), and taught Studies in Religion at USyd, not only Divinity. His interest in translating the Greek Fathers inspired New Zealander-cum-Australian Roman Catholic Robert Charles Hill (1931–2007) to re-publish and publish much of his extraordinary output of more than 30 translations (earlier, e.g., Hill 1986–1992), this time at Holy Cross Orthodox [College] Press, Boston (Pearse 2015, pp. 1–3), where Chryssavgis became Professor of Theology (esp. 1995–2002).

The figure of Charles Hill (1931–2007), one the great Western Catholic translators of the Fathers (and also commentator), should remind us that one other key way to create a space for Patristics in the over-secularized tertiary sector was to create a religion-based, indeed Christian University, which was achieved in 1991, with the amalgamation of four Catholic teachers colleges of Eastern Australia into the Australian Catholic University (ACU, now with nine campuses). Hill was already lecturing on New Testament and Patristic subjects in the Catholic College of Education in New South Wales by 1980, having earned degrees, including a doctorate at the Angelicum in Rome during the 1960s (pub. Hill 1981) when he was a Christian Brother) (Sydney Morning Herald 15 May, 2007). Hill, co-founder of the ACU’s Centre for Early Christian Studies (1991) helped put Australian Patristics on the map internationally not only by his contribution to the Oxford conferences (see above), but as well to the American (if more atmospherically Catholic) equivalent North American Patristics Society (NAPS, 1974- ) conferences, held annually at Loyola University, Chicago (Pearse 2015, p. 2). Against this background, a still more accredited Catholic University scholar was to begin making her mark.

Pauline Allen (1948- ), born in Brisbane, and, after undergraduate studies at UQld, Classics Honours and a Master’s at UNE, completed a crucial Oxford DPhil in Patristics—apparently the first Australian to achieve this, and significantly as a woman—written on the sixth-century church historian Evagrius Scholasticus at Oxford (in 1977), under Chadwick and Peter Brown. She revised and published her thesis as a post-doctoral student from an institution quite unusual for a young Australian female scholar: the celebrated Catholic University of Leuven/Louvain, Belgium (Allen 1981). That set the tone for her extraordinary career, for, after lecturing in Amsterdam and enjoying Humboldt Fellowships in Frankfurt, she returned to Australia in 1986, to Queensland’s Catholic McCauley College, and soon became Head of the then Department of Religion and Philosophy at the new ACU, Brisbane campus, from 1992. Allen co-founded the Centre of Early Christian Studies the year before (with Hill and Raymond Canning [1947- ], the last an Augustinian scholar [esp. Canning 1993] also at ACU’s Brisbane campus), and she went on to guide the Centre’s important book series. Already in the 1980s and 1990s, she was consolidating her work on late Antique Christian historiography (e.g., Allen 1987), and set the agendas most prominent in her research output to come: Patristic pastoral leadership and homiletics (Datema and Allen 1981) and gender issues, first arising from her study of the Byzantine empire under Justinian and Theodora (Garlick et al. 1992, pp. 85–104). By the early 1990s, and under Allen’s direction as an Adjunct to UQld, the budding classicist (and Lutheran) Wendy Mayer (1960- ) was starting her research in comparable arenas at UQld (Mayer 1996, and leading to Allen and Mayer 1997). Mayer had been Andersen’s Research Assistant in the 1980s, and one of the few undergraduates ever to take a double, two-year Honours degree in ancient Latin and Greek; Geoffrey Dunn and Bronwen Neil followed in her footsteps (see below), with Neil taking an ACU doctorate under Allen on Maximus the Confessor (cf. ACU Chronicle 4, 5, July 1995, p. 14; and see Allen and Neil 1999). In this momentous cluster of female scholars at Brisbane we should also honour ancient and medieval historian Lynda Garland (1955- ), who moved for a long time south to UNE (before Horsley, and joining Anna Silvas (1999)), and edited a collection first approximating to an ‘Essays on Patristics in Australia’ volume (Garland 1997) from an AABS conference at Armidale in 1993. And, we can hardly forget Majella Franzmann (1952- ), for, although completing her doctorate on a pre-Patristic Text (The Odes of Solomon, a text adapted by early Gnostics, and already being researched by UQld’s eminent Michael Lattke [1942–2023] from 1979 in his German days), Franzmann became absorbed in Gnosticism generally, and was earliest among Australian scholars to tackle Mandaism (Franzmann 1989).

Before the millennium’s end, the last feature in the foundation period of Australian Patristics was looming: the presence of researchers and publications from the Eastern (more obviously Eastern Orthodox) Churches alongside the growing multiculturalism of Australian scholarship. A good indicator is the appointment of the eminent Copt and Foundation Professor of Semitic Studies, USyd (in 1979), Rifaat Ebied (1938- ), who had graduated from Cairo University, but worked for ten years at the University of Leeds before coming to Australia for the rest of his career. He had already collaborated with the English Arabist Michael Young (for a time at Melbourne’s Middle Eastern Studies department) in translating some Patristic materials from Arabic (e.g., Ebied and Young 1973). Commanding over four classical Semitic languages, at Sydney, he gamely stressed Christian Syriac influence on Arabic before the Umayyad period (Ebied 1983), and cooperated in translation work on the sixth-century Patriarch of Callinicum (Ebied et al. 1981; Ebied et al. 1996). Ebied took his Professorship to “provide a service to the ethnic communities of Sydney” (Connell et al. 1995, p. 156), and his ready linguistic engagement has helped bring leaders of Eastern churches and other traditions in Australia into the ambit of Patristic study. Furthermore, his involvement with the Oxford-based ARAM Society of Syro-Mesopotamian Studies has facilitated publication of Australian scholarship in its journal (begun 1989).

2. The State of Australian Patristics at the Turn of the New Millennium, and an Introduction to Our Authors’ Contributions

The state of Patristics studies in the early decades of the twenty-first century has already been treated well enough elsewhere (Neil 2015; Costache 2025). By around 2010, virtually all of the sectors contributing to the founding of Australian Patristics were alive and well. Benedictines were still involved (e.g., Kelly 2004), the St. Patrick’s heritage was occasionally instantiated and recognized (e.g., Coffey 1999; cf. Ormerod 2005, esp. pp. 133–43), and various Catholic clerical contributions show up (e.g., Hackett 2011, pp. 40–65). In Melbourne, Middle Eastern Studies at UMelb had devolved into other departments, but Roger Scott has held the flag high in Classics with important work on earlier Byzantine chronicles (e.g., Scott 2018; cf. Burke 2006), and is still active on Late Antique recorders (collaborating with UMelb’s John Burke and Paul Tuffin at the University of Adelaide). One might say Victorian-raised classicist David Runia (1951- ) (an Alexandrian philosophy and Philo specialist, and leading editor of the Studia Philonica Annual) helped carry on Osborn’s legacy at Queen’s College (UMelb), when arriving from a prestigious Professorship at Leiden to take up the college Mastership in 2001 (cf. Runia 2007). The arrival from Britain of classics Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides to Monash University (2006–2017) filled out this impression, since she wrote extensively on Clement of Alexandria (e.g., Anagnostou-Laoutides 2022). The University of Divinity (UDiv) formed in 2016, and came to engage such Patristic experts as Wendy Mayer (e.g., Mayer and Elmer 2014), Lisa Agaiby (e.g., Agaiby and Vivian 2021),2 and Adam Cooper (2005) in a multi-campus, Australia-wide (but largely Victoria-based) institution. The Melbourne-to-Canberra Classics transplant discussed earlier also truly blossomed at the ANU, especially with the assessment of third century Christianity for the re-edited Cambridge Ancient History by Graeme Clarke and his masterful study of Roman African Christianity (Clarke 2005, 2014).

In New South Wales, Parry had been steadily taking over the role of leading general Patrologist at Macquarie (e.g., Parry et al. 1999; Parry 2007; and see above), and by 2014 had been appointed editor of the new Brill series Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity (Neil 2015, p. 156). In the spirit of Melbourne’s Bowman, Macquarie’s Sam Lieu floated a local series, Studia Antiqua Australiensia, as an organ of the AHDRC, yet with an overseas publisher (Brepols, at Turnhout), a real signal to the international importance of Australian Patristics, with Choat (2006) and Neil (2006) from the same intellectual hotspot authoring the first volumes. Lieu expanded Ancient History staff, including ‘Manichaeist’ Gunner Mikkelsen (see Lieu and Mikkelsen 2016) and epigrapher Paul McKechnie (from Auckland, New Zealand) (e.g., McKechnie 2019), and played a focusing role with the Fontes Manichaeorum and related Silk Road archeology for researchers in other universities (Mikkelsen and Parry 2022). Such included Iain Gardner, who brought his budding Manichaean studies from Manchester first to Edith Cowan University, Western Australia; and then to Studies in Religion at USyd (e.g., Gardner 1995; Gardner and Lieuand 2004), and Majella Franzmann, especially at UQld, Curtin University (again in the West) and, at last, at USyd also (e.g., Franzmann 2003; Scopello and Franzmann [2014] 2022). At Sydney again, the present author completed his volume on the retributive mentalities of early Christian historians (Trompf 2000), later collaborating with Macquarie’s Mikkelsen to produce The Gnostic World (Trompf et al. 2019), Mikkelsen’s editing role crucial for the first third of the volume, on the Patristic period. And, we are not to forget other incursions at Sydney, with Macquarie-connected Catholic Education Commissioner Brian Croke still considered a leading figure on Late Antique historiography (Croke 2007), and with others at work in USyd (cf. Cusack 1998; Sharpe 2014, pp. 40–47).

As for the Greek Orthodox St Andrews faculty, Chryssavgis had left Australia from 1995, and wrote voluminously outside the country, but others relevant scholars emerged who were connected to the college, including Prof. Vrasidas Karalis (e.g., Karalis 2012) and Dr Vassilios Adrahtas (e.g., Adrahtas 2020), two important heads of Greek cultural studies in Australia, the former long at USyd, the latter more recently at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), along with Andrew Mellas (e.g., Mellas and Gador-Whyte 2020 [see below]), Dimitri Kepreotes, Philip Karialtis, and Bernard Doherty (the last only as a student before a promising academic career elsewhere). From this same stable emerged the scholar pre-eminent today among Australia’s Orthodox Patrologists, the Very Rev. Dr (Romanian Orthodox) Protopresbyter and SCD Associate Professor Doru Costache, working in the Antipodes from 2005. Costache is held in high honour for organizing cross-confessional Patristic conferences at St Andrews during the 2010s (Cooper 2016), assisted by emergent scholars Chris and Mario Baghos (e.g., Costache and Baghos 2017), and he remains of great significance for his brilliant studies into Patristic theologies of Creation (Costache 2021); for his bold stamp of institutional independence in setting up the Australian Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies (AIOCS); and for researching as the first Selby Old Fellow of the Religious History of the Orthodox Christian Faith at the University of Sydney. Two significant younger products of St Andrews also showed an independent spirit, and are currently Associate Professors. Doherty took a 2012 Macquarie doctorate on Montanism (under McKechnie) (Doherty 2012), and secured an appointment at Sturt University (Canberra campus); while Mario Baghos, who earned his 2014 PhD at USyd on Byzantine city symbolism (under Cusack, pub. Baghos 2021), has recently moved to University of Notre Dame (UND, Sydney) where, inter alia, there has also appeared Kevin Wagner (e.g., Neil et al. 2019), an unusual representative of the Theophaneia school of Patristics, stressing Hebraic over Greek roots of ancient Christian theology (à la Alexander Golitzin; see Orlov 2020). Among the Copts, if Dean Susan Agaiby (of St Athanasius College) has given noticeable representation in Melbourne’s UDiv, Dr Wagdy Samir (2022) is an emerging figure at Sydney, now co-directing AIOCS, after securing a prize-winning SCD doctorate under Costache and in part by Ebied (who are both teachers at St Cyril’s Coptic Orthodox Theological College). From 2022, also note that the Byzantine Music School of Australia (BMSA, started in Melbourne) has had its most active published scholars (such as Vasilios Psilacos) connected to St Andrews in Sydney.

To the north, both Mortley and Tarrant proved themselves as world-leading authorities on the Hellenistic philosophers most influential on Christian theology, Mortley on Plotinus (e.g., Mortley 2013) and Tarrant on Proclus (e.g., Tarrant 2006), at Bond University, southern Queensland, and at Newcastle, respectively. The Newcastle connection with Prudentia faded, perhaps, but Colloquium, another ‘trans-Tasman’ journal founded in Auckland two years after it in 1971, increasingly took aboard authors in Australian Patristics. Further north at ACU in Queensland, flying exceptionally high, Pauline Allen established herself as the veritable doyenne of Patristics in Australia. By the late 2010s, she had “produced 33 books—variously sole-authored, critical editions of ancient texts, translations…edited volumes”, etc., in the field. For 2003–2007, she was President of the Association International d’Études Patristiques, the first woman, “the first Australian ever to achieve that distinction, and in fact the first ever non-European to be elected even to the Executive”; and by 2016, she sat among the handful of Australian scholars ever to become Corresponding Fellows of the British Academy (University of New England 2017, p. 2). A great inspirer of Patristic research (Dunn and Mayer 2015), an important cluster of Australian Patristic researchers either worked with Allen in Brisbane or joined ACU’s Biblical and Early Christian Studies (ECS) Research Team. All Patrologists in their own right, inter alia they included in Queensland Bronwen Neil (e.g., Neil and Allen 2015), David Sim (Sim and Allen 2012), Lawrence Cross (Mayer et al. 2006), Geoffrey Dunn (e.g., Dunn 2007, before emigrating to Durham), Raymond Laird [2008] 2017, and, of course, Wendy Mayer (see above sect., 1); and in Melbourne, Stephen Carlson (2021), Michael Champion, Max Crawford, Sarah Gador-Whyte, and (Redemptorist) Michael Kelly. Among the prestigious women involved, Allen was to become Research Professor in Early Christian Studies in the Institute for Religion and Critical Enquiry (from 2014), though ACU restructuring affected her projects very adversely and the ECS monograph series has been recently transferred to SCD. Mayer was appointed to UDiv (but based in Adelaide), and has elevated the institution’s level of Patristics research greatly since 2017. Neil left to hold the Chair of Ancient History at Macquarie (from 2017), and is the current President of AABS and editor of Byzantina Australiensia, with Anagnostou leaving Monash also for Macquarie in the same year. Garland returned from UNE (leaving the learned company of Horsley (2017) and Silvas (2005)) back to UQld, in the School of Historical and Philosophical Enquiry (an institute housing scholars (Philip Almond and Peter Harrison) who had shown interest in early modern British explorations of the Fathers, especially by Cambridge Platonists.

The injection of Middle Eastern cultural riches facilitated by Copt Rif Ebied at USyd was epitomized by both his own widening body of writings and translations of Syriac texts (e.g., Ebied and Teule 2004; cf. Hunter 2023), and cooperation with Syriac Orthodox Antiochene Patriarchal-Vicar Mor Malatius Malki Malki (Ebied et al. 2020); and also by the large opus of authoritative Mandaean scholar Prof. Brikha Nasoraia (esp. Nasoraia 2023) who started in Australia under Ebied’s supervision, allowing the prospective foundation of a Fontes Mandaeorum series. Copts Agaiby, Seumas Macdonald (2016), Mina Sami, and more recently Samir, with Lebanese Maronites Yuhanna Azize (2017, esp. pp. 147–94) and Peter El Khouri (2017), have also caused notice. Participation of still broader ethnicities involve ANU’s Korean David Kim (e.g., Kim 2016), Filipino-Australian, Cambridge-trained Alexander Abecina (2023) (e.g., working in a Secondary School setting), let alone Eastern European scholars such as Russian Catholic Lawrence Cross and Doru Costache.

We look forward to Ken Parry’s deeper surveying of this cultural panorama. And, if there is still relatively little interest in Patristics among conservative or sectarian Protestants, a clustering of figures has emerged at last, mostly writing on predictable subjects. Baptist Edwina Murphy (who firms up Patristics at the Australian College of Theology), and continuing Presbyterian Ruth Sutcliffe both work on Donatist North Africa (Murphy 2018; Sutcliffe 2022), while among Restorationists William Tabbernee (2009) handle Montanism and Keith Thompson (2019) the Trinity.3

The contributions to this Special Issue all reflect different aspects of the aforegoing history of developing Patristic Studies in Australia. Intriguingly, it has turned out that most of the authors are from New South Wales. Over the last twenty years, the centre of gravity in Patristic study has shifted from Queensland to Victoria, and now northward again so there is presently a real hive of activity in and around Sydney at this point, and this collection has picked up on the impetus of the moment. While there was no lack of interest from scholars around Australia to join in, different pressures have strangely prevented a wider continental involvement; although the ethnic diversity of the authors is truly marked and indicative of the cultural riches of Sydney’s current intellectual vibrancy.

The order of the articles has something of a logical progression about it. Most of the cast have already been ‘placed’ in my Introduction, and it will be fairly easy to gauge their significance. Their topics, addressing matters listed in a nutshell in the Table of Contents, are all highly pertinent to the field. To start, on the basis of their previous writings, experienced Patrologist and Greek-Australian social theorist Vassilios Adrahtas (mainly UNSW), considers a fundamental matter of Patristic Philosophy, unravelling the arguments of John Damascene (d. 749) for the existence of God. A rising star in the field and daring explorer of the science/theology interface, Romanian-Australian Doru Costache (SCD) handles Patristic (and also medieval) Cosmology or theologies of Creation, predominantly focused on Genesis passages from the beginning of in the Old Testament, which still have implications for modern approaches to Nature. New Zealand-born Keith Thompson (UND) enters the field laterally, as an eminent Professor of Law, valiantly researches a hoary matter of classic Christian Doctrine, tracing the early development of the Patristic formulations of the Trinity. Next in line are two Macquarie University ancient historians breaking new ground in exploring the socio-political dimensions of Patristic study. Im/Piety (or the key issue of whether religion upholds or threatens preconceived social life) is tackled by Greek-Australian Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides on Clement of Alexandria’s defence of Christianity as the best basis for social order, even preferred over Plato. And Bronwen Neil, in her new senior Professorial role, addresses ancient religion and Politics, showing how dreams legitimated both pagan and Christian emperors in the immediate post-Constantinian period. Testy questions of Authorship, in the chosen case of one so-called Celsus, who is challenged by Origen in his famed apologetic tract, have British-born specialist in ancient philosophy Harold Tarrant (UNewcastle) play cunning detective over whom, in the complex Late Antique world of competing worldviews and artful pseudonyms, this Celsus might be. The crucial importance of Translation in context of Patristic theological divisions is well illustrated by Copt and wide-ranging Semitic scholar Rifaat Ebied (Usyd) in displaying what happens when major Greek-writing Fathers are quoted in Syriac, so that we revisit them afresh in old controversies, as well as see how their thoughts were re-deployed in the Tritheist controversy of the sixth century. Bernard Doherty, directing a School of Theology (SturtU[Canberra]), provides the paper most concentrated on Archeology and epigraphy, testing the so-called Eumenian formula of funerary imprecations in late antique Phrygia as signs of popular Christianity and acculturative processes. Korean-born David Kim (ANU), an authority on the Gospel of Thomas from the Nag Hammadi finds in Egypt, deftly probes signs of the early community of James mediated through the text called the Apocryphon of James, two Coptic versions of which are clear enough products of so-named ‘Gnosticism’ or Gnostic heresies; whereas Iraqi-born Brikha Nasoraia, actually the first Head of a world religion residing in Australia, that of Mandaeism, explores the early ongoing group interactions between the followers of John the Baptist (Mandaeans or Sabians), and those of Jesus and Mani. Joseph (Yuhanna) Azize, priest and ecclesial expositor in the Maronite Eparchy of Australia, stresses Monasticism or Near Eastern monastic lineages in his brave reconstruction of Maronite history during the early centuries; while Metropolitan Malatius Malki Malki, Patriarchal Vicar of the Syrian Orthodox Church of Australia, offers the most detailed account yet of (the non-monastic ascetic) Orders of the ‘Sons and Daughters of the Covenant’ in the Antiochene tradition (especially in the fourth century). Carole Cusack (USyd) handles the issue of early Christian Mission, by a skilful re-assessment of Wulfila, ‘apostle’ to the Goths, and of the controversies about his labours among ‘barbarians’. And, to help round out matters we find two Greek Australians and an Egypian-Australian on contemporary issues, Dimitri Kepreotes (StAndrewsTC), scholar of Greek educational history, considers Pedagogy, or the struggles of teaching the field in the Antipodes. Mario Baghos (UNotreDame[Syd]) and Wagdy Samir (AIOCS) tackle issues more at the ‘tail-end’ of Patrology. The former examiners Confessionalism, or the consequence of long-term separation between large church traditions because, after the Fall of Byzantium, the East/West schism could not be healed, and Reformed Protestant/Orthodox dialogue stalled. The latter considers Modernity, comparing ancient with twentieth-century Coptic commentary on a canonical Gospel. Altogether we have in what follows a fitting display of great interest, variety, intellectual power, and multicultural cooperation to introduce Patristics in Australia.