Jaroslav Pelikan (1923 - 2006)

A commenter at Adam Kotsko's The Weblog reports that Yale's Jaroslav Pelikan died yesterday of cancer. I haven't been able to confirm that with the usual obituaries, but I have no other reason to doubt the report. Professor Pelikan has undoubtedly been the most important church historian of the last half century and one of the greatest church historians of all time. His five volume The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (1971-1989) is a masterpiece in western intellectual history. In 1993/94, his Gifford Lectures reassessed Christianity and Classical Culture and were, I suspect, a step in his decision in 1998 to leave the Lutheran Church, in which he grew up, to become an Eastern Orthodox communicant. He was recently the president of the the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, with Paul Ricoeur in 2004, the recipient of the John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences.

Pelikan was a man of enormous erudition – one of those rare scholars whose breadth of knowledge was already legendary at the outset of his career. When I graduated from seminary 40 years ago, I heard and passed along the story about Pelikan's final oral examination at Chicago. A member of his examination committee thought to stump the young historian with a difficult question about an obscure Polish reformer. Not only did Pelikan answer the question, the story went, but he answered it in Polish. Rest in peace.