Eusebius

• 1. Introduction

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  Eusebius of Caesarea died on the 30th of May AD 339, and what he chose not to write may matter as much as what he did. In one of his own works he warns that he will relate nothing about the martyrs of his time except the things in which he can vindicate the Divine judgment. He says plainly that he will introduce only those events useful first to himself and afterwards to posterity. A historian announcing in advance what he intends to leave out is an unusual figure. Yet this same man earned the title Father of Church History. He was born around AD 260 in the Roman province of Syria Palaestina, baptized in Caesarea, and remembered as one of the most learned Christians of late antiquity. How does a writer become both indispensable and, to some readers, the first thoroughly dishonest historian of antiquity? Who taught him, what emperor protected him, and why do so many lost books survive only because Eusebius copied them down? Those questions run through everything that follows.

• 2. A Master And A Library

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  Pamphilus settled in Caesarea around the 280s and soon began teaching Eusebius, who was then between twenty and twenty-five. The bond was so close that Eusebius came to be called Eusebius Pamphili, meaning Eusebius, son of Pamphilus. The name may also signal that Eusebius was made his teacher's heir. Pamphilus gave his pupil a lasting admiration for the thought of Origen.

  Origen, who lived from about 185 or 186 to 254, had on his deathbed left his private library to the Christian community in Caesarea. Combined with the books of his patron Ambrosius, that collection became the core of what Pamphilus assembled. Pamphilus gathered Bibles from all parts of the world, and for this he was compared to Demetrius of Phalerum and to a scholar named Pisistratus.

  The library's holdings were remarkable. It contained Origen's Hexapla and Tetrapla, a copy of the original Aramaic version of the Gospel of Matthew, and many of Origen's own writings. Marginal notes in surviving manuscripts record that Pamphilus and his pupils, Eusebius among them, corrected and revised much of the biblical text held there. Their work made the hexaplaric Septuagint text increasingly popular across Syria and Palestine. Neither Pamphilus nor Eusebius had ever met Origen in person; Pamphilus absorbed Origenist ideas while studying under Pierius in Alexandria, a teacher nicknamed Origen Junior.

• 3. Histories Of Church And World

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  In the 290s Eusebius began the Ecclesiastical History, a narrative of the Church from the Apostolic Age to his own time. Around the same period he worked on the Chronicle, a universal calendar of events reaching from the Creation forward. He finished the first editions of both works before the year 300.

  The Chronicle was built in two parts. The Chronography offered an epitome of universal history arranged according to nations. The Canons supplied a synchronism of that material in parallel columns, the equivalent of a parallel timeline. The original Greek of the whole work is lost. The tables of the second part survive complete in a Latin translation by Jerome, and both parts endure in an Armenian translation, which gives the Armenian version special importance. As preserved, the Chronicle extends to the year 325.

  The Church History correlated its time scheme with the reigns of the Roman emperors. It took in the bishops and teachers of the Church, Christian relations with Jews and with those deemed heretical, and the Christian martyrs through the year 324. Its accuracy and biases have been questioned, yet it remains a key source on the early Church because Eusebius could draw on materials now lost. To make the four Evangelists easier to compare, he divided his edition of the New Testament into paragraphs and added a synoptical table. These Eusebian canons stayed in use throughout the Middle Ages, and their illuminated versions are among the most elaborately decorated pages in many Gospel books.

• 4. The Emperor's Bishop

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  Eusebius succeeded Agapius as Bishop of Caesarea soon after 313. Almost at once he was drawn into conflict, called on by Arius after the priest had been excommunicated by his bishop, Alexander of Alexandria. An episcopal council in Caesarea pronounced Arius blameless.

  Constantine's favor shaped Eusebius's standing for the rest of his life. He was asked to present the creed of his own church to the 318 attendees of the Council of Nicaea in 325, though the anti-Arian creed from Palestine prevailed and became the basis of the Nicene Creed. The teaching of Arius, which held the Son to be subordinate to the Father, kept generating controversy. Eustathius of Antioch attacked Origen's theology as the root of Arianism and reproached Eusebius, an admirer of Origen, for straying from the Nicene faith. Eusebius prevailed, and Eustathius was deposed at a synod in Antioch.

  Athanasius of Alexandria proved a tougher rival. In 334 he was summoned before a synod in Caesarea, which he refused to attend. The next year he was summoned again, this time to a synod in Tyre over which Eusebius presided. Foreseeing the verdict, Athanasius went to Constantinople to plead before the emperor, who called the bishops to his court, Eusebius among them. Athanasius was condemned and exiled at the end of 335. Eusebius stayed in the emperor's favor and was more than once exonerated with Constantine's explicit approval.

• 5. The Vision In The Sky

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  Writing after Constantine had died, Eusebius reported that the emperor himself had described a vision. Sometime between the death of his father, the augustus Constantius, and his final battle against Maxentius in the West, Constantine and his soldiers saw a cross-shaped trophy formed from light above the sun at midday. Attached to it was the phrase by this conquer, often rendered in Latin as in hoc signo vinces. That night, Eusebius wrote, the Christ of God appeared to Constantine with the same sign and urged him to make a copy of it as a protection against his enemies.

  The surrounding evidence complicates the account. An earlier work, the Latin De mortibus persecutorum by Lactantius, written probably in 313, describes the 28th of October 312 Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Lactantius mentions no vision in the sky, only a revelatory dream on the eve of battle. Eusebius's own Church History from that period makes no mention of the vision either. The Arch of Constantine, built in AD 315, depicts neither a vision nor any Christian insignia in its scene of the battle.

  Eusebius's account is also strikingly vague about timing. He says the events happened on a campaign Constantine was conducting somewhere. He does not date them to October 312, and he does not connect the vision and the dream with the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. It is even unclear from his words whether the shields were marked with a Christian cross, a chi-rho, a staurogram, or some other similar symbol.

• 6. The Archive Of Lost Voices

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  Posterity suspected Eusebius of Arianism, yet his method of authorship made him impossible to discard. He excerpted original sources so comprehensively and so carefully that his successors were spared the labor of original research. Much that would otherwise have vanished survives only because Eusebius quoted it.

  The Preparation for the Gospel is the clearest example. Eusebius meant its fifteen books, all preserved, as an introduction to Christianity for pagans, arguing the superiority of Christianity over every pagan religion and philosophy. Its lasting value for many readers lies elsewhere, in the lively fragments it carries from historians and philosophers found nowhere else. Here alone survives Pyrrho's rendering of the Buddhist three marks of existence, on which Pyrrho based Pyrrhonism. Here alone is a summary of the writings of the Phoenician priest Sanchuniathon, whose accuracy the Ugaritic tablets later confirmed. Here too is Diodorus Siculus's account of Euhemerus and his voyage to the island of Panchaea, and much of the neo-Platonist philosopher Atticus.

  The pattern reaches into other works. The companion Demonstration of the Gospel originally ran to twenty books, of which ten survive complete along with a fragment of the fifteenth. The Onomasticon stands as an early geographical lexicon of biblical places in the Holy Land. Even the Life of Pamphilus and the early collection of martyrdoms, which once held an account of the martyrdom of Polycarp from the congregation of Smyrna, survive only in fragments.

• 7. The Honest Liar Debate

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  Jacob Burckhardt, the nineteenth-century cultural historian, dismissed Eusebius as the first thoroughly dishonest historian of antiquity. Edward Gibbon was nearly as harsh, distrusting Eusebius on the number of martyrs and pointing to a chapter heading in the Preparation for the Gospel where Eusebius represents Plato as saying it will sometimes be necessary to use falsehood as a remedy for those who require such treatment. Gibbon still called Eusebius the gravest of the ecclesiastical historians, even while suggesting he cared more for the politics of his day than for his duty as a reliable historian.

  The defense is just as pointed. Joseph Barber Lightfoot, the theologian and former Bishop of Durham, argued that Eusebius's openness about what he would not discuss is itself a sign of honesty. The way Eusebius handles his many quotations elsewhere, where his accuracy can be tested, Lightfoot wrote, is a sufficient vindication against the charge of dishonesty. Even so, Lightfoot conceded that Eusebius is not always to be trusted, faulting the loose and uncritical spirit with which he sometimes treats his materials.

  Later scholars reframed the quarrel entirely. Averil Cameron and Stuart Hall noted that writers like Burckhardt attacked Eusebius partly to undermine the ideological legitimacy of the Habsburg empire, which traced its idea of Christian empire back to Constantine. Michael J. Hollerich concluded that the standard assessment exaggerated political motives in Eusebius's life and failed to do him justice as a churchman and a scholar. The most controversial letter in the Life of Constantine, long doubted, has since turned up among the papyri of Egypt.

• 8. Saint Or Writer

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  The earliest recorded feast day of Eusebius appears in the oldest known Syrian Martyrology, dated to the year 411 and translated by William Wright, which lists his commemoration on the 30th of May. The modern Syrian Orthodox Church still venerates him as a saint, assigning him a feast day on the 29th of February in the calendar created by Corbishop Rajan Achen.

  In the Catholic tradition his standing is far less settled. The Sacrae theologiae summa lists Eusebius expressly as an ecclesiastical writer, a category defined against the Church Fathers as covering writers found to have orthodoxy recognized by the Church but no holiness or antiquity. Lightfoot recorded that Eusebius held his place in the Martyrologium Romanum for centuries and was commemorated as a saint in Gallican service-books. Under the revision of that martyrology by Gregory XIII his name was struck out and Eusebius of Samosata substituted in his place.

  The physical traces of his memory persist nonetheless. Henri Valois gathered testimonies for and against Eusebius and noted that authorities such as Usuardus and Notker listed his feast on the 21st of June in the Roman Martyrology. A bone fragment relic of Eusebius, still within its original reliquary, is on display today at the Shrine of All Saints inside St. Martha's Catholic Church in Morton Grove, Illinois.