I certainly have no desire to write this notice, and it is painful even to search for the words. A friend of many years, whose books and articles are no doubt known to the majority of the readers here, has passed away.
Robert Wilken was, of course, one of America’s most distinguished historians of Christianity, with a special but by no means exclusive emphasis on late antique Judaism, the early church, and the patristic age. He was a linguist of enormous range, a scholar of the most rigorous kind, and—to him, the most important matter—a man of prayer.
He was also a boundlessly generous friend to me and to many others. He, in fact, saw me through some very dark periods of my life, when I was suffering debilitating illness; and, while I was never one of his students in my graduate studies (he was the head of a different disciplinary division in the Religious Studies department of UVA), and only briefly one of his junior colleagues, no one on any faculty with which I was ever associated treated me with greater or more indefatigable kindness.
He was also a man of genuine culture, one who had the good taste and chronic sanity never to talk shop when he did not have to. A son of New Orleans, he was always happy to discuss music and cuisine, but also literature, all the arts, other cultures, ice-fishing, and baseball (in his retirement, he adopted the Nationals as his team, and lived within walking distance of the new stadium in DC). It made his company a pleasure on every occasion.
He would have been 90 this coming November, so it will one day be comforting to reflect that he lived a long and full life before the cancer with which he had been struggling for some years took him away. Right now, I am conscious only of the grief of knowing that he has departed.
He loved you like a son, David.
I asked him once when he first met you. He said, gesturing a bit wildly with his arms, “David, just… appeared!”