Patristics after Foucault: Genealogy, History and the Question of Justice

This article responds to David Newheiser’s contribution, ‘Foucault and the Practice of Patristics’, Rick Elgendy’s ‘Practices of the Self, Reading Across Divides: What Michel Foucault Could Have Said about Gregory of Nyssa’ and Devin Singh’s ‘Disciplining Eusebius: Discursive Power and Representation of the Court Theologian’. It discusses two key distinctions within Foucault’s work: that between genealogy and archaeology, and that between genealogy and pedigree, arguing that while patristics is always an analysis and practice of power, it has a complex relationship to the role of history as a source of authority. It discusses the way that Foucault’s work highlights the complex relationship between past and present within patristics, which uses the past to change the present yet draws on the present to rewrite the past and, suggests that the question of the relationship between power, oppression and justice points towards the limitations of Foucault’s thought as an approach to the study of patristics.