Eminent scholar, emeritus professor and member of the North American Patristics Society for over twenty years, Philip Henry Rousseau died recently in Washington, D.C. His wife Thérèse survives him, along with their three daughters and their families.
Philip Rousseau was the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of Early Christian Studies Emeritus at the Catholic University of America. A native of Devonshire, England, he was born in 1939 and as a child had lived in the United States and Sri Lanka, where his father was stationed with the Royal Navy. In 1957, he joined the Society of Jesus and earned advanced degrees at the Society’s schools before becoming a lay missionary and teaching at a women’s high school in Zambia. In 1972 he received his doctorate from Wolfson College, Oxford; his thesis was directed by Peter Brown. From 1972 to 1978, he taught at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
As a scholar, Professor Rousseau concentrated upon expressions of asceticism in late antiquity. In 1978, he published Ascetics, Authority and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian); Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt (1985); Basil of Caesarea (1994); and edited A Companion to Late Antiquity (2009). He co-edited three volumes of collected essays and wrote over 100 book chapters, articles and book reviews. In 2013, he received a festschrift in his honor: Ascetic Culture, edited by Blake Leyerle and Robin Darling Young.
As a professor at CUA, Philip taught both graduate and undergraduate students and directed numerous dissertations at Catholic University; he also directed the Center for the Study of Early Christiaity from 2001 to 2015; edited the Patristic Mongraph Series and founded the CUA Studies in Early Christianity published by CUA press. He had held numerous fellowships.
Philip’s colleagues and students remember him as a generous, curious and humorous colleague and an attentive teacher, and his annual Mellon Lecture drew a large and appreciative audience.
Philip Rousseau will be buried in the Cool Spring cemetery at the Holy Cross Cistercian Abbey in Berryville, Virginia, when circumstances permit. Soon an online celebration of his life will be announced through the University’s Center for the Study of Early Christianity (https://arts-sciences.catholic.edu/academics/interdisciplinary/early-christianity).
Our sympathies are extended to his family.
Robin Darling Young, Ph.D.
President, NAPS