On Shoulders of Giants...

I was touched and honoured to represent the diocese yesterday at a very special moment — Henry Chadwick’s memorial service in our Cathedral, of which he had been dean from 1969-79. The Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster led the prayers, honouring a key ecumenist. Professor Chadwick was a masively learned and perceptive historian, who knew from his Evangelical roots how discipleship feels from the inside, and laboured to develop an honest historical basis upon which Christians could understand their origins, and use this understanding to grow together in love.

Like other students of my generation, my view of early Christian history was based largely on Chadwick’s scholarship — glancing along my shelves I see the short Penguin History that first kindled my awareness of the subtlety and complexity of early Christianity. Just along I find his Contra Celsum translation that still commands its field after fifty years, an immaculate study of Boethius, and the fruit of his mature reflection — a wonderfully comprehensive History of the Church from Gallilee to Gregory the Great and East and West: the making of a rift in the Church.

One highlight of the service for me was a quote from John Donne’s Meditations that Professor Chadwick loved:

The Church is Catholic, universal. So are all her actions. All that she does belongs to all. When she buries a man that action concerns me. All mankind is of one author and is one volume. When one man dies one chapter is not torn out of the book but translated into a better language, and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators. Some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation. And his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another...