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Kairos and Cosmic Sympathy in the Church Historian Socrates Scholasticus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Glenn F. Chesnut
Glenn F. Chesnut
Affiliation:
Mr. Chesnut is associate professor of history in Indiana University, South Bend.
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Extract

The concept of Fortune (Tychē) had lain at the very center of traditional pagan thought about history. Herodotus thought that the gods intervened in history to control the course of men's fortunes. His successor Thucydides completely rejected any notion of divine intervention in history, but nevertheless used the word tychē twenty-eight times in his speeches, and eleven times in his narrative sections. He did not imply anything which we today would call supernatural by his use of the word, simply unforeseen chance occurrences which disrupted human plans. Polybius' use of the concept of Fortune was particularly notorious, and a vast literature exists on the question of what this historian in fact meant by the term, and whether he thought of Fortune in different ways at different stages in his own intellectual development.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , June 1975 , pp. 161 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1975

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References

1. This article was read originally as a paper at a meeting of the Midwest Patristics Seminar in Chicago on February 10, 1973.

2. Hdt. 1.124.

3. Plus one use in a treaty (4.118.11). See von Essen, M. H. N., Index Thucydideus (Darmstadt, 1964).Google Scholar

4. See, for example, Walbank, F. W., Historical Commentary on Polybius (Oxford, 1957), 1:23 and 25–26Google Scholar; Bury, J. B., The Ancient Greek Historians (London, 1909), pp. 200–201, 203Google Scholar.

5. Sall. Cat. 51.25. Compare Iug. 102.9, Cat. 8.1, and so forth.

6. Dio Cass. 73(72).23.2–4, trans. by Earnest Cary, LCL edition.

7. There has been a good deal of scholarly discussion as to whether the early Byzantine historian Procopius was a pagan who believed in Fortune or a Christian who believed in a God of providence. See Cameron, Averil M., “The ‘Scepticism’ of Procopius,” Historia 15 (1966): 466–482Google Scholar, and Agathias (Oxford, 1970)Google Scholar; Averil, and Cameron, Alan, “Christianity and Tradition in the Historiography of the Late Empire,” Classical Quarterly, n.s., 14 (1964): 316–328CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Evans, J. A. S., “Christianity and Paganism, in Procopius of Caesarea,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 12 (1971): 81–100Google Scholar; Downey, G., “Paganism and Christianity in Procopius,” Church History 18 (1949): 89–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The missing link in these discussions is, I believe, provided by the fourth and early fifth-century Christian historians, who have not been investigated adequately up to this point. (In the present article and that an Eusebius in Church History 42 (1973): 165–182Google Scholar, I hope partially to remedy this and to fill in some portions of this missing stage of development.) The transition from the pagan concept of Fortune found in pre-Constantinian secular history to the mixed pagan-Christian literary language of the sixth-century secular historian Procopius takes place through the intermediary of the non-secular, completely ecclesiastical historians of the fourth and early fifth centuries, who first combined Fortune motifs with Christian interpretations of history. They did this in ways which avoided the actual word tychē, but which in fact incorporated the concept of the fortuitous in terms readily recognizable as such to an ancient man.

8. See Chesnut, G. F., “Fate, Fortune, Free Will and Nature in Eusebius of Caesarea,” Church History 42 (1973): 165–182CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Chesnut, , “The Pattern of the Past, Augustine's Debate with Eusebius and Sallust,” in Deschner, J., Howe, L. T. and Penzel, K., eds., Our Common History as Christians: Essup in Honor of Albert C. Outler (New York, 1975), pp. 69–95Google Scholar.

9. Socr. H.E. 4.1, 5.25, 7.23. Text edited by W. Bright (Oxford, 1878).

10. Socr. H.E. 3.11.

11. Socr. H.E. 1.6, 2.2, 2.16–17 twice, 2.25–26 twice, 3.20. 4.14, 4.37, 5. introd., 6.6 three times.

12. Evagr. H.E. 3.26 (trans. from Bagster edition London, 1846), compare 6:12.

13. Socr. H.E. 2.2, 3.20, 4.14.

14. Socr. H.E. 5. introd. —mē ek tinos syntychias … all' ek tōn hēmeterōn plēmmelēmatōn, “not arising out of some Tychē-like chance, but from our sins.”

15. Socr. H.E. 2.25–26, 6.6, 2.10, 4.3–4.

16. Socr. H.E. 5. introd. quoted above in text; see also 2.25–26 and 6.6.

17. As illustrated, for example, in Socr. H.E. 3–4—earthquake, sinking and rising of land from the sea. Compare 4.11.

18. Sozomen H. E. 8.25.

19. For example, in Socr. H. E. 2.10 we are asked to connect (1) the Council of the Dedication, which took place at Antioch in 341 and tried to put up the first counter-creed to the Nicone declaration, (2) raids by the Franks into Gaul, and (3) earthquakes in the East.

20. Socr. H.E. 5. introd.— hōs ek tinos sympatheias.

21. Sambursky, S., Physics of the Stoics (London, 1959), pp. 9, 41–42, 11Google Scholar.

22. Plotinus, Enn. 2.3.7, 4.4.40.

23. Thuc. 1.23.1–3, trans. by Smith, C. F., LCL edition. Cornford, R. M., Thucydides Mythistoricus (London, 1907), p. 102–103Google Scholar, Comnents on this passage: “Thucydides will not worship the inscrutable agencies respousible for convulsions of Nature; but he cannot rule out the hypothesis that such agencies exist and may ‘acquire power’ to produce the convulsions coincidently with a war in Greece.” “…he shows a completely scientific spirit, and also an equally complete destitution of a scientific view of nature.”

24. Based on Gwatkin, Henry Melvill, Studies of Arianism, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1900)Google Scholar. Compare Gwatkin, , The Arian Controversy (London, 1889)Google Scholar.

25. Socr. H.E. 2.26, trans. by A. C. Zenos, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers.