Few topics are more germane to this journal than the writing of ecclesiastical history, and no figure has had greater influence on the development of this genre than the bishop and scholar, Eusebius of Caesarea. In his masterful study of Eusebius and his readers from the late ancient to the modern era, Michael Hollerich has done a great service to all historians of Christianity. A work of reception history, the book begins with a chapter on Eusebius's life and work, focusing on his Ecclesiastical History and its relation to his Chronicle as well as other historical and non-historical genres with which he engaged. Subsequent chapters examine the reception of his work in the Christian Roman Empire of late antiquity, the non-Greek East, the medieval Latin West, and Byzantium, before turning to the rediscovery of Eusebius in diverse early modern contexts and his reception in modern scholarship including the implications of his historiographical work for future historians. The essays that comprise this roundtable, followed by the author's response, continue this important conversation about Eusebius and his legacy.
While acknowledging Hollerich's extraordinarily comprehensive treatment of Eusebius's readers, the product of decades of research, six scholars representing different areas of historiographical expertise discuss and expand on his analysis. They introduce additional texts and authors, incorporate new research, offer fresh insights and explanations, and pose intriguing questions that should prompt further research, debate, and reflection. First, David DeVore carefully analyzes the reception of Eusebius already in his lifetime and the generations after his death. Contrary to our modern conception of him as the father of church history, Eusebius's earliest readers paid little attention to his Ecclesiastical History, DeVore concludes, viewing him primarily as an apologist, educator, and biblical scholar rather than a historian. The next two essays build on and further complicate Hollerich's observations about the near disappearance of Eusebian-style narrative ecclesiastical history beyond western Europe after the late sixth century. Justly praising his treatment of Eusebius in global perspective, Christopher Bonura addresses Hollerich's chapter on ecclesiastical history in the non-Greek East (Syrian, Armenian, and Coptic traditions), focusing on the Syriac sources. In a joint response on Eusebius in Byzantium, Jesse Torgerson and Olivier Gengler show how later Byzantine scholars received, developed, and negotiated Eusebius's historical work in light of his double condemnation as an Arian and an iconoclast. Both these essays discuss the merging of genres and experimentation in history writing in the East that simultaneously reflects the enduring influence of Eusebius in both genre and ideology.
Euan Cameron turns the discussion to the Latin West, addressing Hollerich's chapters on the western medieval reception of Eusebius and his “rediscovery” in early modernity. Cameron introduces additional historiographical sources from both periods. He demonstrates the diverse ways in which Lutheran and Reformed historians, despite ideological difficulties, read and used Eusebius in support of their own convictions, for example, regarding the biblical canon or the doctrinal purity of the early church. Stefania Tutino continues the focus on the early modern, highlighting features of Eusebius's work that were particularly important for historians of this era, both Catholic and Protestant, and commends Hollerich for avoiding certain postmodern and post-Enlightenment distortions in his assessment of Eusebius and his readers. Beyond the early modern, Tutino also notes Hollerich's contribution to the field of historiography more broadly; and she ends with reflections of interest to a broad spectrum of secular as much as ecclesiastical historians.
To be sure, many of the “core concerns” of Hollerich's book, with which he concludes his response to his interlocutors, remain highly significant for historians of Christianity working in all periods—whether or not they focus on the institutional church or consider themselves church, ecclesiastical, or religious historians. Among the ongoing challenges, he highlights questions of genre, the nature and relevance of Eusebius's “theo-political vision” (the interrelation of church history and secular history), and the role of historical narratives in the face of postmodern skepticism about grand narratives. Finally, as Hollerich's work on Eusebius and this roundtable discussion demonstrate, reception history reminds us that the writings of premodern authors do not merely represent ephemeral voices from the past but continue to resonate across the centuries.
Michael Hollerich has done a fantastic service in tracing the reception of Eusebius's History and his Chronicle, the text that gave Eusebius the chronology for church history.Footnote * Helpfully, Hollerich has traced authors’ use of church history as a genre, whose origins subsequent authors credited to Eusebius.
Hollerich's early chapters provide a helpfully up-to-date and evenhanded introduction to the Ecclesiastical History itself. He stresses, for example, Eusebius's representation of the Christian church as an ethnic group (genos) and Eusebius's creative reconfiguration, rather than rejection, of classical historical genres.Footnote 1 Hollerich also adroitly frames manuscripts and translations as creative monuments of reception, showing how the Greek manuscripts and late-antique Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic translations and adaptations developed Eusebius's narrative techniques.Footnote 2 Prof. Hollerich understates his achievement as laying a “baseline of understanding” of the reception of Eusebius's History.Footnote 3
Hollerich's baseline provides the foundation for my tribute to his achievement. As Hollerich points out, it was only in 402 or 403 that the first securely established successor of Eusebius, Rufinus of Aquileia, published a church history. The time between about 325—when Eusebius likely concluded the History—and 402 leaves a gap of about 77 years in which there is little reaction to Eusebius's History. Readers’ use (or disuse) of Eusebius's History in those years may raise some fruitful questions about Eusebius's ancient authority and early reactions to his vision of the church's past.
A word on calling Rufinus “the first securely established successor of Eusebius.” As Hollerich indicates, a scholarly consensus is now emerging that Gelasius, a successor of Eusebius as bishop of Caesarea, published an ecclesiastical history that began where Eusebius ended. Gelasius's History has been reconstructed from several dozen closely parallel passages shared among six fifth-century narratives and a handful of later works.Footnote 4 Testimony to Gelasius's history comes from Photius, the ninth-century patriarch and polymath, who claims to have found a continuation of Eusebius's History credited to a bishop of Caesarea.Footnote 5 Marking the consensus is a recent edition of fragments postulated for Gelasius's Ecclesiastical History, published in the Griechische Christliche Schriftsteller series.Footnote 6
I suggest, however, that scholars maintain skepticism about the reconstructed Gelasius. Photius, the first author who identifies Gelasius as a church historian, did not find the name of Gelasius in the text that, in his uncharacteristically confused and circuitous summary, he attributes to Gelasius. Moreover, alternative hypotheses are available to explain the overlap between the other parallel texts. The most recent, that of Peter Van Nuffelen, is that the history that Photius read is a pseudonymous compilation of the mid-fifth century.Footnote 7 While Hollerich justifiably accepts the current consensus around Gelasius, he rightly observes that “the consensus has not gone without significant dissent.”Footnote 8
The problem of Gelasius being unsettled, we still face “the dark history” in the reception of Eusebius's History between 325 and 402. To identify reception of Eusebius in those years, I have combed editions of ecclesiastical authors between 325 and 402. Although it is very possible that I have missed some references, this preliminary result has been surprisingly meager; while some references to Eusebius's History do surface, the History turns out not to have been the most-read work by Eusebius in the fourth century.
After Eusebius, the next generation of Greek-speaking intellectuals was active from roughly the 330s to the 360s. This generation grappled with the trinitarian controversy sparked by Arius, Constantine's and Constantius II's integration of the “catholic” church into the Roman elite, and the brief reinvigoration of paganism by Julian. Since Eusebius's History accumulates descriptions of “heretics” and chronicles relations between Christians and the Roman state,Footnote 9 we might expect the History to have engaged the first post-Constantinian generation.
A search for readers of the History in this generation, however, comes up empty. Exemplifying this absence are the voluminous surviving works of two eastern-Mediterranean prominent bishops, Athanasius of Alexandria and Cyril of Jerusalem. While Athanasius knew Eusebius's works and shared in the Alexandrian intellectual heritage of Origen with Eusebius, to my knowledge not one scholar has identified a citation of the History in Athanasius's works. Meanwhile, Cyril, the bishop of Jerusalem from about 348 to about 387, left numerous writings; yet scholars have demonstrated no borrowing from Eusebius's History.Footnote 10
The most likely reader of Eusebius's History in the next generation, however, was his namesake and student, Eusebius of Emesa. According to Socrates’ Ecclesiastical History (2.9), Eusebius of Emesa hailed from Edessa in northeastern Syria and came to Palestine to study with Eusebius of Caesarea. After relocating north to Antioch, this Eusebius became bishop of Emesa in Syria. About thirty homilies by Eusebius of Emesa survive, most in Latin translation, with other fragments.Footnote 11
Eusebius of Emesa's sixth Homily expounds a martyr narrative that appeared first in the earlier Eusebius's History (8.12.3–4). Set during Diocletian's persecution, Eusebius of Caesarea's original narrative had, in a single sentence of 164 words, followed a Christian matron from Antioch who fled Diocletian's persecution with her two young daughters. After soldiers apprehended the three women, the matron, fearing the rape of her daughters and proclaiming that death is preferable to submission, plunges with her daughters into a river. The story drew wide interest, as even after Eusebius of Emesa two further versions appeared later in the fourth century. One comes at the end of Ambrose of Milan's 370 treatise On Virgins, while a second occupies a sermon by John Chrysostom delivered in the 380s or 390s.Footnote 12
The intertextuality between these versions of the martyrdom deserves a more detailed study than I can provide here.Footnote 13 Some preliminary considerations are offered.
To start, different versions of the martyrdom than Eusebius's clearly circulated. To be sure, the basic outline of all four versions is the same: the mother removes her daughters from Antioch; soldiers apprehend the three women and escort them back; the matron gives a speech encouraging her daughters to kill themselves rather than be deflowered; and together the trio descend into a nearby river. But Chrysostom's homily adds factual recollections absent from Eusebius: the city the women fled to was Edessa; they were near Hierapolis in Syria when they plunged to their death; and tellingly, whereas in Eusebius “envy” (phthonos) motivates the soldiers’ hunt for the women, Chrysostom reports that the matron's husband initiated the search. Eusebius appears to have obscured the husband, revealed in Chrysostom's version, by abstracting him into a personified emotion.Footnote 14
Chrysostom, active in the matron's home city of Antioch and surely knowing local traditions independent of Eusebius,Footnote 15 must relay traditions that were surely also available to Eusebius of Emesa, who, as Socrates reports (Ecclesiastical History 2.9.4–6), had resided in Antioch. And since Eusebius of Emesa predates Ambrose, the latter could also have come across a version of the martyrdom independent of Eusebius of Caesarea.
The existence of independent versions explains several conspicuous deviations by the other three authors from Eusebius of Caesarea's version of the martyrdom. One deviation is the content of the matron's speech encouraging the familial suicide. Lamenting fornication and slavery to demons as worse than death, Eusebius's matron characterizes the river plunge as taking refuge (kataphugē, History 8.12.3). Fornication, demonic slavery, and refuge are entirely absent from Eusebius of Emesa's, Ambrose's, and Chrysostom's versions of the matron's speech. Another deviation is that, whereas in Eusebius envy (phthonos) is the women's antagonist, none of the other three narrators invoke envy. Meanwhile, the other three narrators converge against Eusebius's narrative on several points. Notably, Eusebius of Emesa, Ambrose, and Chrysostom all interpret the women's plunge into the river as having baptismal significance, and all employ sacrificial metaphors to characterize the women's deaths. Baptismal and sacrificial symbolism appear nowhere in Eusebius of Caesarea.
In all, not only Eusebius's own student Eusebius of Emesa but also Ambrose and Chrysostom neglect his account of the Antiochene matron's and her two daughters’ martyrdom.Footnote 16 Reception of Eusebius's History had to wait for later generations than his star student.
The earliest securely datable uses of Eusebius's History come in two texts from the 370s. In this moment, Julian's pagan restoration had come and gone; trinitarian divisions had hardened; and Christians were consolidating church norms, boundaries, and memories as the generation that recalled persecution passed on.
The most prolific authors of this period rarely if ever consulted Eusebius's History. I have, for example, found no reference to the History by the famed Cappadocian intellectuals Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, or Basil of Caesarea, or by the prolific Latin-speaking bishop Hilary of Poitiers. But we do see the first two authors who clearly used Eusebius's History. The first was a pseudepigrapher who reworked Josephus’s Jewish War, and the second is the famous heresiologist Epiphanius of Salamis.
Around 370, a Latin narrative attributed to the second-century traveler Hegesippus, called On the Fall of Jerusalem, rewrote Josephus’s account of the Jewish revolt against Rome from a Christian perspective. Playing out Eusebius's thesis that a generation of Jews suffered for killing Christ,Footnote 17 Pseudo-Hegesippus's narrative draws repeatedly on Eusebius's History. I summarize one example.Footnote 18 In book 2, Pseudo-Hegesippus paraphrases the Testimonium Flavianum, the infamous reference to Jesus in the manuscripts of Josephus. Then, abruptly, the narrator notes the execution of John the Baptist. As Agnès Molinier-Arbo has noted, while these narratives both come from book 18 of Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, they lie several pages apart in Josephus, and Pseudo-Hegesippus makes little use anyway of the Antiquities.Footnote 19 Since the only previous text to juxtapose those events is Eusebius's History,Footnote 20 Pseudo-Hegesippus must have cribbed the passages from Eusebius.
Also reading Eusebius's History was Epiphanius of Salamis, who between 374 and 378 used Eusebius for his anti-heretical encyclopedia, the Panarion. Eusebius is cited by name for a legend that James the brother of Jesus acted as a Jewish high priest,Footnote 21 and Epiphanius echoes Eusebius's History in several other passages, most obviously on the famous self-castration of the Christian philosopher Origen.Footnote 22
Notably, all of Epiphanius's allusions to the History represent Eusebius as one of multiple sources. The same allusive usage governs Pseudo-Hegesippus's borrowings from Eusebius. Eusebius was an important source but not a model par excellence for writing church history. By the time authors who remembered Eusebius were passing on, then, Eusebius's History was a useful reference but had not gained authoritative status.
Only in the 390s—when Nicene Christianity became Rome's official, state-supported religion, Christians systematically repressed pagan worship and non-catholic Christianities, and the third generation after Eusebius came to prominence—did the first real adaptation of Eusebius's History emerge. In 392, Jerome, who had translated Eusebius's Chronicle earlier, published de Viris Illustribus, a series of 135 short biographies of Christian authors. In the text's preface, Jerome names as his literary models several renowned Latin literary biographers, including Varro, Cornelius Nepos, and Suetonius. After bemoaning the dearth of Christian biographers, Jerome quickly adds that “Eusebius son of Pamphilus served as an immense aid to me through the ten books of the Ecclesiastical History.”Footnote 23
This statement underplays Jerome's debt to Eusebius. One editor of Jerome's Viris Illustribus has estimated that seven-tenths of Jerome's text derives from Eusebius's History.Footnote 24 Moreover, Eusebius provided an uncredited model for Jerome's literary biography: the History includes more than forty catalogues of Christians’ textual output. As Michael Hollerich notes, scholars are now coming to appreciate Eusebius as a biographer of Christian intellectuals;Footnote 25 Jerome had already, in typically backhanded fashion, done the same.Footnote 26
Jerome's all but copying Eusebius's form and content reflects not just increasing attention, as of the 390s, to Eusebius's History; it also is the first surviving acknowledgment of Eusebius's achievement of early Christian leaders. By the 390s, then, when Christians were looking to rewrite and reframe the Christian heritage, Eusebius's History was no longer one source among many but the authoritative narrative of early Christianity.Footnote 27
This quick and selective survey has shown that Eusebius's History was no instant bestseller. It only became a monumental, indispensable historical narrative in the third generation after its composition.
A telling contrast confirms the unimportance of the History for Eusebius's immediate successors. The most-read historical work of Eusebius in the fourth century was not the Ecclesiastical History but rather his Gospel Preparation and Demonstration, a daunting 35-book introduction to Christianity as an intellectual system. While, as with the History, there is little study of the reception of the Gospel Preparation and Demonstration, preliminary research suggests earlier and more frequent use of these two texts compared to the History. As examples, I refer to several prominent authors mentioned above:
• Athanasius used Eusebius's Gospel Preparation and engaged with arguments from the Gospel Demonstration repeatedly across multiple decades.Footnote 28
• The emperor Julian, critiquing Christianity in early 363, mocks Eusebius by name in his polemic Against the Galileans and rebuts Eusebius's arguments in the Preparation and Demonstration.Footnote 29
• The Cappadocian intellectuals Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa used Eusebius's Gospel Preparation as a compendium of Greek philosophy from the 370s to the 390s.Footnote 30
• John Chrysostom's works drew on both the Preparation and the Demonstration, as recent work has shown.Footnote 31
If this sample is representative, the History was not the work that fourth-century Christians recalled first when Eusebius's oeuvre came to mind. In the shorter and medium term, Eusebius was more an apologist and an educator than a historian.
This very preliminary survey of the fourth-century reception of Eusebius's History suggests a muted result. The History was read in the fourth century, and read more as the century wore on, but not as much as Eusebius's later reputation would project. For over 75 years, the Caesarean scholar's most influential work was almost certainly the Gospel Demonstration and Preparation.
I tentatively suggest that, if Eusebius's History proved to be his most-read and most-influential work, most of his earliest readers saw him predominantly not as a historical narrator but as a public intellectual and an educator, as well as a biblical scholar. This should not surprise us. Best known today as a church historian, Eusebius wrote polemics, biblical commentaries, textual editions, introductions to reading practice, oratory, and biography, along with history. He was not first and foremost a historian. Where we tend to see a curator of the Christian past, contemporaries saw a guide for their present Christian practice and defense.
Among the many achievements of Michael Hollerich's Making Christian History is its global approach to the reception of Eusebius of Caesarea's Ecclesiastical History. Hollerich could have been content focusing on Eusebius's reception in Western Europe, but in incorporating the Byzantine and the “non-Greek East” (Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic authors) Hollerich tells a fuller and more interesting story. At a time when concepts such as the “Global Middle Ages” are increasingly ascendant, Hollerich provides a model of history with a tight focus but a global perspective.
One issue that serves as a throughline connecting Hollerich's excellent chapter on Eusebius in the “non-Greek East” (chapter 3) with the previous chapter on Eusebius in late antiquity (chapter 2) and with the later chapter on “Eusebius in Byzantium” (chapter 5) is the near disappearance of ecclesiastical histories in the mold of Eusebius's at the twilight of late antiquity and the continued absence of such works through much of the Middle Ages outside of Western Europe. As Hollerich notes, in the Greek tradition there are no works entitled Ecclesiastical History between that of Evagrius in the sixth century and that of Nikephoros Xanthopolos in the fourteenth.Footnote 32 Similarly, in the Syriac literary tradition, a sixth-century boom is followed by the near disappearance of the genre.Footnote 33 Why did ecclesiastical history (that is, narrative histories of the church modelled on Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History) go into a long abeyance around the end of the sixth century? And why did new ways of making Christian history take its place? Hollerich points to some possible answers,Footnote 34 but he does not offer broad conclusions; he describes the problem while leaving interpretation and explanation to his readers. Jesse Torgerson, Oliver Gengler, and I have endeavored in our responses to build on Hollerich's suggestions to address this problem. I leave the material in Hollerich's chapter on “Eusebius in Byzantium” to Torgerson and Gengler, while I will address here the Syriac sources that Hollerich deals with in his chapter on the “non-Greek East.” I will attempt to articulate some broader conclusions from Hollerich's fascinating narrative, while also complicating the picture somewhat by considering some Syriac sources that Hollerich did not have time to explore in depth.
In Syriac literature, as in many other medieval contexts, the disappearance of ecclesiastical histories proper is closely linked to the rise of universal chronicles as a distinct genre. The chronicle tradition had been Christianized by Julius Africanus in the early third century, but it was truly refined by Eusebius himself. Eusebius's Chronological Canons, one of the two parts of his Chronicle, provided a revolutionary system of mapping historical events in chronological order within parallel columns, with each column reserved for a specific dynasty or nation or people.Footnote 35 Notably, the columns gradually drop away and consolidate, until only the Roman column remains. Eusebius's Chronicle, then, crafted a universal vision of world history that also implicitly suggested a narrative of Roman triumphalism. Eusebius began his chronicle with Abraham, but later chroniclers increasingly began from the beginning of time, with creation and Adam and Eve.Footnote 36
The long disappearance of ecclesiastical histories can be partly attributed to the merging of narrative histories of the church with other genres of history writing. This is already evident, for example, in the sixth-century Greek historiographical project attributed to John “Malalas” (addressed in detail by Gengler and Torgerson in their response). Malalas's project provided a history from Adam and Eve to his own day (in the reign of Emperor Justinian I) that has much in common with a chronicle (Malalas's project is often—controversially—called a “chronicle”), but he structured it around 18 narrative books, each with a thematic focus, rather than arranging events in parallel columns as Eusebius had done.
If we move to the Syriac tradition (with which Malalas likely was familiar), we find similar experimentation. In the West Syrian (i.e., Syriac Orthodox) tradition, Syriac ecclesiastical histories gave way to universal chronicles by the end of the sixth century. Hollerich lays out a rough chronology, influenced by Witold Witakowski and Dorothea Weltecke, of how the West Syrian tradition of chronicles developed.Footnote 37 In the sixth and seventh centuries, short, laconic universal chronicles lacking Eusebius's parallel columns were produced. Jacob of Edessa's early eighth-century chronicle was a watershed because it brought back Eusebius's parallel columns: columns for the rulers of the Romans, Persians, and Arabs (allowing the reigns of the monarchs to be synchronized) and, on the margins of these, a column with ecclesiastical events on the right and a column with secular events to the left. From the ninth century, long and more narrative universal chronicles became increasingly common. Dionysius of Tel-Mahre's ninth-century chronicle furnished much more detail in its separate columns of secular history and of ecclesiastical history. Michael the Syrian's twelfth-century chronicle also used the two columns—plus a third “miscellaneous” column.Footnote 38
I would, therefore, suggest a theory that Hollerich implies without stating outright: that while ecclesiastical histories entered a long dormancy, West Syrian historians never really stopped doing ecclesiastical history. They wedded it to new forms, especially universal chronicles. The column of ecclesiastical history found in West Syrian chronicles from the time Jacob of Edessa onward provided a new format for writing the history of the church. Indeed, Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286) took the step of producing stand-alone chronicles of secular and ecclesiastical history, and titled the latter ‘eqlesiasṭiqi (ܐܩܠܝܣܝܣܬܝܩܝ), “ecclesiastical history.”Footnote 39 Ecclesiastical history had reemerged, though in the form of a chronicle.
However, this narrative of the development of West Syrian chronicles is perhaps too tidy, and we should keep in mind that the concept of ecclesiastical history, and Eusebius himself, had a major impact on West Syrian historiography even before the practice of reserving a column for ecclesiastical history in chronicles became widespread. One source that illustrates the sort of experimentation undertaken by Syriac chroniclers is the Zuqnin Chronicle, a late eighth-century West Syrian universal chronicle, composed at the monastery of Zuqnin on the Tigris River outside Amida. The Zuqnin Chronicle's context was provincial, and yet its author had access—possibly direct access—to a Syriac version of both Eusebius's Chronological Canons and Ecclesiastical History.Footnote 40 The chronicler does not use Eusebius's parallel columns but prefers one continuous narrative chronicle. The earlier parts of the Zuqnin Chronicle are deeply reliant on Eusebius's short chronological entries, but later the yearly entries become much longer and more detailed, especially as they approach the author's lifetime, until they become almost a narrative local ecclesiastical history of Christians in the eighth-century caliphate. Hollerich surely spared little attention to the Chronicle of Zuqnin due to the constraints of time and space, but if we give it a more prominent place in the narrative of the development of the West Syrian historical tradition, its deep interest in Eusebian chronology and strong narrative elements certainly clash with the characterization of Syriac chronicles before the ninth century as short, undeveloped, and devoid of any parallels with narrative ecclesiastical history.
Hollerich also examines Eusebius's legacy in the East Syrian (Church of the East) tradition. Among East Syrians, ecclesiastical histories also disappeared by the end of the sixth century, replaced by chronicles, and, more so, by biographical collections of the lives of the catholicoi (patriarchs), abbots, and other religious leaders.Footnote 41 Hollerich addresses the claim that, as a result of this prosopographical method of history, it was “impossible for it [the Church of the East] to write its history according to the Eusebian models.”Footnote 42 Hollerich rightfully complicates—and subtly challenges—this claim by looking at two eleventh-century East Syrian chronicles: the bilingual Syriac-Arabic Chronicle of Elias of Nisibis, an East Syrian world chronicle with parallel columns, and the Arabic Chronicle of Seert, which was organized largely around the lives of catholicoi but maintained broad horizons and a very Eusebian perspective.Footnote 43
Eusebian-style chronicles were less popular in the East Syrian tradition, but Eusebius remained an influence as East Syrians experimented with other ways of documenting history. A useful example is another source, which Hollerich only briefly considers but which deserves more attention for the insight it provides on East Syrian history: John bar Penkaye's Book of Main Points, written in the late 680s at a remote monastery east of the Tigris in lands that, until the Arab conquests, had been integral to the Sasanian Persian Empire.Footnote 44 John's Book of Main Points is now used almost exclusively for its final book dealing with the coming of Islam and late seventh-century events for which John was an eyewitness, but when the whole of his work is considered, it is difficult to dismiss the strong influence of Eusebius in John's novel approach to history writing.Footnote 45 John bar Penkaye adopts the scope of a universal chronicle beginning with Adam and Eve (clearly, the fascination with universal history was not simply a West-Syrian phenomenon), but follows a narrative format divided among 15 thematic books organized in roughly chronological order (hence John's “Main Points” probably refer to the major events or themes upon which he focuses)—very similar to the format that had been adopted by Malalas. Like the Zuqnin chronicler, John used both Eusebius's Chronological Canons and the Ecclesiastical History: the former provided him his lists of Assyrian, Babylonian, and Hellenistic kings, and he quotes from the latter in his fourteenth book for details about persecutions of church and the halting of such persecution by Constantine.Footnote 46 John produced a history very different from both Eusebius's Chronicle and Ecclesiastical History, but one that combined some elements of both.
John bar Penkaye's history may be considered unusual, and it is true that East Syrian histories tended to be organized around the catholicoi and other remarkable individuals, but is it fair to say that such histories are not “Eusebian”? Lest we forget, among the works of Eusebius's translated into Syriac was the History of the Martyrs of Palestine, a collection of biographies of holy men.Footnote 47 Moreover, if our object is the fate of ecclesiastical history, the East Syrian prosopographical histories may have more in common with Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History than is assumed. Many were titled, like Eusebius's history, ‘eqlesiasṭiqi (ܐܩܠܝܣܝܣܬܝܩܝ), “ecclesiastical history.” Hollerich rightly points out that these are very different from the ecclesiastical histories written by Eusebius and his late antique continuators—in late antiquity, ecclesiastical histories and histories of holy men were treated as two different genres.Footnote 48 Nonetheless, Eusebius organized his Ecclesiastical History around the succession of bishops and other leaders of the church and made his historical subject their struggle against heresy and persecution. So, can we not detect Eusebius in the DNA of a historical tradition that framed history around the lives of religious leaders like the catholicoi who battled heresy and persecution?
There is another question relevant to the persistence of “Eusebian models” in the Church of the East: how did East Syrians, whose church grew up within the Sasanian Persian Empire and eventually came under the rule of Arab Muslims, deal with Eusebius's “political theology”—especially with Eusebius's fundamental assumptions that a ruler like Constantine could act as a holy protector of the church and that history has been moving inexorably toward the triumph of Roman rule? This is a question that Hollerich does not fully pursue. More research is needed in this area, but East Syrian authors seem to have offered a range of responses. John bar Penkaye, for example, made a case about church-state relations that appears to turn the tables on Eusebius. The church in Persia was special, according to John, precisely because it did not exist under a Christian ruler, because it had no Constantine. Whereas under Christian regimes the weak-willed and corrupt joined the Christian church out of greed and ambition, in Sasanian Persia, ruled as it was by Zoroastrians, only the committed remained in the church, and persecutions purified the church of its weakest elements.Footnote 49 Conversely, an anonymous East Syrian author, probably writing a few decades after John in the early eighth century, provides an altogether different view: the Roman Empire was destined to rule the earth until the end of time, and it possessed a universal kingship—first bestowed by God upon the first king—that had passed through the hands of various rulers and empires. The author attributes some of these ideas to the popular Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius (somewhat garbling its name), but the author also cites here the “book of Lord (Mar) Eusebius of Caesarea” (ܟܬܒܐ ܕܡܪܝ ܐܘܣܒܝܣ ܩܣܪܝܐ).Footnote 50 Eusebius's theo-political vision does not seem to have dissuaded Syriac authors from enthusiastically embracing Eusebius, though it is possible that Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History appealed more to East Syrians than his Chronicle for the very reason that the latter treated the dominance of Rome as the culmination of history, making its use by a Christian community that had always existed outside of Rome's empire a bit awkward.
In sum, while ecclesiastical histories proper disappear after the sixth century, Syriac historians used Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History both as a source and as a model for writing history, incorporating it into new kinds of history writing. Medieval Syriac historians did not write new ecclesiastical histories proper but instead experimented widely as they adapted ecclesiastical history to new, hybrid forms. Among West Syrians, the specialized history of the church (as distinct from other subjects of history) that Eusebius had invented emerged again within universal chronicles, now in the form of a vertical column of the sort that Eusebius had also invented (albeit for a very different purpose). East Syrians, in contrast, produced fewer such columned universal chronicles (that of Elias of Nisibis is the only one extant), but they knew Eusebius's work. Histories of the Church of the East became more biographical, fusing the sort of history of holy men exemplified by Eusebius's History of the Martyrs of Palestine or Theodoret's fifth-century History of the Monks of Syria with the model of Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History. In short, the influence of Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History endured among both West and East Syrians, even as frameworks and genres differed and changed.
Why did West Syrians and East Syrians tend toward their different ways of writing the history of their churches? In the Church of the East, which had always been under the rule of non-Christian rulers, ecclesiastical leadership was especially important. Indeed, with the division of the universal church into smaller churches—a development Hollerich documents well—the biographical collection makes more sense as a way of documenting the history of churches in which a patriarch or other leader acts as a central figure. There are clear parallels with the Arabic History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, compiled on the leaders of the Coptic Church, and with the Western collection of papal biographies known as the Liber Pontificalis (works within traditions in which the influence of Eusebius is undeniable). Amongst West Syrians, universal chronicles may have arisen as the concept of ecclesiastical history was subsumed into a growing sense that the history of the church was in fact the history of the world. As Hollerich shows, Eusebius himself made a strong case for the conception of Christianity as the religion practiced at the beginning of humanity.Footnote 51 Such a view of Christian antiquity would have become all the more important with the advent of Islam, a religion whose practitioners often understood their faith as the Ur-religion that God had revealed to humanity from the beginning of time. Might we consider the universal chronicle, then, as the mode of history-writing adopted by those who took seriously Eusebius's implication that the history of the church was the central drama of all history, from history's very beginning to its final consummation? If so, perhaps universal chronicles came to serve as a method for doing ecclesiastical history when one accepted the premise that all history is church history.
An important shared question was introduced in Christopher Bonura's reflections on Chapter 3 of Michael Hollerich's Making Christian History and returns here as a throughline in our response to Chapter 5, “Eusebius in Byzantium.” Did Eusebius's great generic invention of ecclesiastical history disappear as a genre during the Byzantine period? As Bonura has pointed out, Hollerich's starting point in his chapter on Byzantium is the absence of works entitled Ecclesiastical History between the sixth and fourteenth century.Footnote 52 While this is a tantalizing hook to the investigation, it turns out that isolated generic histories are not an accurate means of tracking the reception of Eusebius in the East Roman Empire. If ecclesiastical history as a distinct genre at first glance seems to have gone into hibernation after late antiquity, a slower examination finds that it was incorporated into new ways of making a common or universal history. Our conversation with Hollerich's study will ask: to what extent did these new histories continue to draw upon the oeuvre of Eusebius of Caesarea?
Eusebius was of course not only the author of an Ecclesiastical History but also of the Chronicle—often called a “universal chronicle” but perhaps better discussed as a “chronography” since Eusebius wrote (ἔγραψɛ, egrapse) his own historical time (χρόνος, chronos). Appropriately, Hollerich's discussion of how Eusebius made Christian History is therefore concerned with not only the Ecclesiastical History but also the Chronicle, the reception of which is given a prominent place throughout the book.
What we might call a “Christian Time” had been incorporated into the long-standing Hellenistic chronicle tradition by Julius Africanus in the early third century. Eusebius built on Julius Africanus's work not only by re-writing his chronology but by re-inventing the appearance of the resultant chronography. Eusebius's chronography displayed (rather than narrated) chronological synchronizations in a format quite likely derived from Origen's third-century Hexapla—which presented the Hebrew scriptures in parallel columns with a Greek transliteration and four distinct Greek translations.Footnote 53 We find this display of Eusebius's new historical time in the second part of his Chronicle (known as the Chronological Canons or simply Canons) where different successions of rulers are displayed in the same way Origen had laid out different texts to be compared: distinct dynastic successions of the historical kingdoms of the known world, presented in descending parallel columns across facing pages.
Eusebius began this second part of the Chronicle not with the Creation (or Adam and Eve) but with what he held to be the first event in comparative chronology, the first historical figure he believed could be securely synchronized across multiple historical traditions: Abraham. Later chronographers would not follow this philosophical premise, insisting instead on beginning chronology with time itself, with planetary motion and the creation of the first humans. There was a narrative at stake in this debate over chronological premises: Eusebius's Canons emplotted the passage of time with a story about the kingdoms of the world. As its chronology progressed through the years of human time, the columns of the Canons gradually consolidated until only the single column for Rome remained. Eusebius timed this consonance of providence and empire to the Incarnation of the Christ. With this overview in mind, it is possible to recognize how closely the project of the Chronological Canons in Eusebius's Chronicle was connected to the project of his Ecclesiastical History. The Canons crafted a historical time that defined ultimate chronological universality as submission to Roman dominance, even as it subsumed the time of Imperium Romanorum into the narrative of Ekklesia.
From this perspective, one could argue it was Eusebius himself who set the terms for the eventual (and sustained) disappearance of ecclesiastical histories as a distinct genre by merging the narratives of the church (“ecclesiastical histories”) and the ultimate empire (“universal chronicles”). This is evident, for example, in the first Greek historical project (some would call it a chronicle, but that terminology is debatedFootnote 54) discussed by Hollerich under the topic of “Eusebius in Byzantium.” This was a historical project attributed to John Malalas or John “the rhetor,” as Evagrius seems to know him (the authorship of the transmitted text is uncertain, but we will use the name Malalas here for convenience). Hollerich perfectly grasps the specific structure of Malalas's project, where predominantly thematic books are arranged in a roughly chronological order until the coming of the Christ and the beginning of the Roman Empire—a very different kind of narrative in comparison to the Eusebian columnal system, but a similar view of the evolution of world history. That is to say, while this text presents striking differences with Eusebius's chronographic works in terms of the scope, narrative technique, and overall design, there are some clear elements pointing toward the intention of its author to follow a Eusebian tradition, not the least being the inclusion of Eusebius as the second authority named in the introduction just after Julius Africanus.Footnote 55
But when Malalas referred to Eusebius, to which Eusebius did Malalas refer? As Hollerich rightly points out, it is doubtful that Malalas had a complete text of Eusebius's history and his chronicle.Footnote 56 We cannot make a clear identification of the different steps of transmission and reception that would have connected Eusebius's works to Malalas's since numerous of the other historical authorities named by the latter are merely names for us. It is, however, very probable that the Eusebian inheritance reached Malalas in an already altered form, although still associated with Eusebius's name: Eusebius's reception in sixth-century Constantinople must undoubtedly be considered from a cumulative point of view, with many relays and small changes along the way. Due to the happenstance of historical survival, some of these stages may have paralleled what we know to have occurred in the more clearly discernable Latin reception of Eusebius, such as in the translation, slight adaptation, and continuation of Eusebius's Canons by Jerome under the title Chronica. At the same time, Malalas criticized Eusebius even as he clearly drew on him (whether directly or indirectly). For instance, in the transmitted version of Book X chapter 2 of Malalas's chronicle, Eusebius seems to play the role of a straw man for speculations connected to Christ's birth in the year 5500 after Adam, opposed to the consensus view of “Clemens, Theophilus and Timotheus” that Christ was born in the year 6000.Footnote 57 Considered from the perspective of the reception of Eusebius’ works, what Malalas's work reveals to us about changes in historical writing is how, within two centuries, the desire to reconcile profane time and Christian time in a unified narrative had evolved.
Interestingly, most of the references to Eusebius in Malalas's chronicle are not related to chronology and, when they can be traced, concern the Church History or exegetical works.Footnote 58 Eusebius's works also appear in palimpsest, in the background of narratives where he is not explicitly mentioned. The story of Veronica analyzed by Hollerich is a remarkable example.Footnote 59 Although both texts retell similar stories, there are considerable dissimilarities between Eusebius's and Malalas's versions, the latter being more developed and giving the name of Veronica for the first time, as Hollerich rightly underlines. For other details, Malalas seems to tacitly update and complete Eusebius's account, while using similar literary devices to build the authority of their testimony (autopsy, and reference to the present).
Drawing on Eusebius for the purpose of critique and then replacement is explicitly the goal of the ninth-century Chronographia of George the Synkellos and Theophanes the Confessor (called the Chronographia here to distinguish it from Eusebius's similarly named Chronicle).Footnote 60 George and Theophanes sought to carry Eusebius's linkage of church and empire into their own day and beyond, and to do so they had to reckon with the crisis (and opportunity!) of a new condemnation of Eusebius at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787—on the basis of an inauthentic letter—as an iconoclast heretic. Hollerich briefly touches on this condemnation,Footnote 61 but here we will consider what happens if we read George and Theophanes's engagement with Eusebian histories, as contextualized above all by the rhetorical opportunities afforded by Eusebius’ new condemnation.
Let us start with George, who composed the universal chronicle from Adam to the reign of Diocletian. Hollerich mentions George's dismissal of Eusebius's Chronicle—though the work was truly essential to George's project. When assessing the dates Eusebius assigns to the life of Moses, George takes the opportunity to call him not only wrong but “deranged.”Footnote 62 Now, consider how foregrounding Eusebius's new identity as an iconoclast changes how we read George's stunningly critical comments. As Hollerich shows, authors in many diverse contexts, including in the East Roman Empire, had to come to terms with Eusebius's association with Arianism—but since Eusebius was also now an iconoclast, George needed to devise new means of convincing his readers that they were reading a fully non-Eusebian chronography, even as Eusebius continued to be recognized as the author of the still-standard chronography. This explains another of Hollerich's examples. George used direct and extended citations of Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History to make his ninth-century readers choose between two figures—Origen and Dionysius of Alexandria—both of whom Eusebius had happily praised.Footnote 63 In this light, the central issue is not so much how George read Eusebius as his need to translate Eusebian content into a new rhetorical and polemical context.
Similarly, we enthusiastically emphasize Hollerich's point that Theophanes’ portion of the Chronographia (from Diocletian's reign up to the year 813) developed Eusebius's work to make the reign of Constantine I an epochal moment in the Roman imperium.Footnote 64 Hollerich's key example of this point in fact shows this was true not only for the authors of the Chronographia but also for their contemporary readers.Footnote 65 Hollerich quotes an extended aside on whether Constantine was baptized on his deathbed by the bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, or whether this had occurred decades earlier in Rome by Pope Silvester. This passage discreetly implies Eusebius held the former opinion (whereby the emperor was baptized an Arian heretic), while the Chronographia authorized the Silvestrian baptism. Consider now that this explicit engagement with Eusebius's work is in fact a later addition, a scholion.Footnote 66 In other words, not only can we see George and Theophanes wrestling with how to update the reception of Eusebius, a now doubly condemned heretic, but their later readers—asked to help with George's task of “completing what was missing” in the Chronographia Footnote 67—were still turning to Eusebius's extant texts as authoritative enough that even when they believed he was wrong, he could not simply be ignored but needed to be cited and either disputed, corrected, or refuted.
In sum, Eusebius's surprising eighth-century condemnation as an iconoclast heretic makes it necessary to be particularly nuanced in tracking his reception into ninth-century Byzantine historiography and beyond. Eusebius's transformation into a double outsider to the very communities that he helped to define and make possible—the Christian ecclesia and the Roman oikumene—meant that subsequent authors not only could but actually needed to set their works in some opposition to his own. Relying directly upon previous scholarship, which one nevertheless also feels bound to criticize, is of course a dramatic irony with which all of us academics are profoundly familiar.
We conclude our comments on the evidence from the Byzantine period with an example of reality not being as simple as the absence of ecclesiastical history in the East Roman Empire would suggest. Circa 870 Anastasius Bibliothecarius—envoy for Louis II to the Council of Constantinople—used some of his time in the capitol to excise and translate George and Theophanes’ Chronographia into Latin. He entitled his translation not Chronica but Historia Tripartita, a clear reference to the sixth-century Latin translation of the ecclesiastical histories of Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret by Cassiodorus—to whom Anastasius seemed to see himself as a successor. In other words, when Anastasius considered how to translate the Chronographia of George and Theophanes into Latin, he did not frame the work as the successor to imperial Latin chronicles but to the great ecclesiastical histories of the fourth centuries. Curious. It would seem that into the ninth century sufficient generic fluidity existed between ecclesiastical histories and chronicles to allow structures and contents to be blended and re-mixed, depending on specific contexts and contemporary concerns.
As Bonura has pointed out already, the perspective Hollerich takes in his work allows us to note an important point about change over time in historical genres: even in the absence of works in an explicit “ecclesiastical history” tradition, authors in the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East interwove histories of their churches into their chronicles and chronographies. We affirm this point and would use it as a premise to make a few observations that might initiate further studies. In future investigations on the reception of Eusebius in the Greek speaking societies of the Middle Ages, it will surely be productive to continue to intertwine reflections on Eusebius's own changing status vis-à-vis new orthodoxies with the use (both explicit and implicit) of his works and ideas. In addition, more overarching studies will find points such as those made by Gilbert Dagron decades ago in Emperor and Priest essential, intertwining shifts in imperial ideology with reflections on shifts in genre.Footnote 68 The sixth through ninth centuries in the East Roman empire saw conceptual, ideological developments in imperium and ecclesia such that we must think of them not as distinct polities but as inseparable aspects of the Greek-speaking Roman oikumene. We can see parallels to this social and cultural development in shifting historical genres of the same era. Making Christian History has thus given readers a number of carefully researched and articulated starting points to pursue these and many other ideas back into the surviving materials; and so we celebrate the accomplishment while awaiting the productive critiques and expansions that these ideas will go on to generate.
Michael Hollerich's Making Christian History: Eusebius of Caesarea and his Readers builds on more than two decades of research by its author, beginning with his study of Eusebius's commentary on Isaiah, published in 1999.Footnote 69 This latest work belongs to the genre of reception history. It is above all a study of how Eusebius, and especially the Ecclesiastical History, was read, used, imitated, continued, and dissented from in the centuries since its compilation up to modernity and postmodernity.
This approach makes heavy demands of its author. It requires one to become at least something of an expert in every era of Christian history and historiography in order to identify the place of Eusebius's work in those stories. Here, the net is cast even wider than is usually the case, including reception in the non-Greek East as well as in Greek and Latin antiquity, in Byzantine culture, and in the West from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance and onwards. Quite a lot of the work consists of attentive and faithful summaries of well-chosen secondary scholarly sources, which, given the breadth of coverage, seems entirely justifiable. The language ability manifested in the references, both in ancient and in modern languages, is most impressive.
This response will focus on the Western Middle Ages and the Reformation period. Let me say at the outset that there is very little indeed in Michael Hollerich's arguments about these periods to quibble at. Allow me, very quickly, to sketch out the structure of what is presented in chapter 4, on the post-antique medieval West, and chapter 6, on the early modern period.
The fourth chapter charts the way in which the history of Christianity, insofar as it was practiced in a form recognizable to Eusebius, tended to be written in the early medieval west in quasi-national or ethnic terms rather than as universal history. So, there are religious histories of the Goths, the Franks, the Anglo-Saxons, or the Lombards. The high Middle Ages are represented by Orderic Vitalis, Adam of Bremen, William of Malmesbury, Otto of Freising, and the Golden Legend. There are good reasons why the Ecclesiastical History tends to figure less prominently than Eusebius's Chronicle.
Chapter 6 begins with the Renaissance “rediscovery” of Eusebius, in the sense that the original Greek text resurfaced for a readership in the West that was increasingly able to read it.Footnote 70 We move rapidly to the age of post-Reformation confessional allegiances. Then, history was, in the modern expression, “weaponized” to support the claims of Protestants or Catholics. Here, I agree entirely with Hollerich's argument, though I might urge the role of historical thought in the Reformation even more strongly than he does. Two Protestant historical works receive special attention: John Foxe's Actes and Monuments and the Magdeburg Centuries, compiled by a team led by Matthias Flacius Illyricus. These works constructed, independently but possibly in mutual awareness, a historical schema where the visible Church began in purity but then degraded over time until it first became a mixture of pure and corrupt elements—and then, by the High Middle Ages, was entirely captured by the Antichrist, or the “unbound Satan” of Revelation 20. Meanwhile, the true church survived, barely visible in the movements of protest, dissent, and “heresy” that pepper the records of Western medieval Christianity.Footnote 71
The latter part of the chapter identifies a distinct period in early modernity when the “republic of letters” pursued technical learning—including chronology—with a passion, which, the argument goes, by-passed some of the confessional animosities of an earlier generation. I confess to being a little wary of this periodization: it seems to me that much of the historical scholarship of the seventeenth century, from Jakob Gretser to Jacques Bossuet and their Protestant counterparts, was still exploited to score confessional points. That remained the case in the debates over medieval heresy between Catholic and Protestant historians. Gottfried Arnold, the controversial Lutheran Pietist who concludes the chapter, rather anticipated Enlightenment attitudes by denouncing the uncharitable obsession with dogmatic rectitude in the early church. Arnold, however, was an outlier, and did not necessarily win the argument in his own time. His confessional-orthodox opponents such as Ernst Salomo Cyprian were probably more numerous than his supporters.Footnote 72
For the rest of this presentation, I propose to explore other histories from the medieval and Reformation periods, against which Hollerich's selections may be compared. No single book, let alone one of the very broad remit of Making Christian History, can cover even a tiny proportion of the medieval and early modern histories that in some way addressed church history. Any essay of this kind must be a sampling exercise. Therefore, if I choose to explore some different texts from those which Michael Hollerich chose for his study, no criticism is implied by my doing so.
Tracing the influence of Eusebius's work in medieval chronicles can be challenging, before the era when adding references was standard. However, certain approaches and interpretations can with reasonable confidence be traced back to Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History.
First, Eusebius proposed to reconcile the chronologies of the Gospels of John and the Synoptics by suggesting that the early narratives in John's Gospel described the years of Christ's ministry before John the Baptist was imprisoned (HE III:24). This interpretation was used by Peter Comestor to create a single narrative from the Gospels in his Historia Scholastica,Footnote 73 among others, and became mainstream.
Secondly, Eusebius listed the persecutions of the Church in association with the names of specific Roman emperors. That was despite the fact that, in the view of modern historians, and to a certain degree of Eusebius himself,Footnote 74 there was no imperially mandated general persecution before the middle of the third century. A century later, Augustine took over the Eusebian approach, creating a numbered list of ten persecutions in City of God.Footnote 75 Many chronicles, from the Middle Ages onwards, adopted this method of dating the phases of persecution and listed the persecutions in a numbered series.
Some medieval chroniclers were aware of the issues over Eusebius's theological orthodoxy, but acknowledged his usefulness as a source. In a bibliographical essay in Speculum Historiale 1:13, Vincent de Beauvais remarked that “Eusebius's Chronicle and his Ecclesiastical History we do not think should be entirely renounced, even though he wrote tepidly in the first book of his narrative, and afterwards wrote a book in praise and exculpation of Origen to the schismatics, because of the unique information which belongs to instruction.”Footnote 76
As Michael Hollerich rightly observes, Eusebius's Chronicle, or more precisely his chronological tables in the Canons, the second part of the Chronicle, which was available in Jerome's translation, had a more persistent and profound influence in the medieval Latin West than the Ecclesiastical History. Medieval authors of histories favored the genre of the annalistic world-chronicle, listing events by the successions of regimes and the parallel sequences of dynasties, whether secular or ecclesiastical. There were exceptions: Otto of Freising's world history stood out for its more discursive narrative approach and its greater interest in the meaning of history. However, Otto was unusual. Eusebius's Canons were not only helpful in terms of genre: they also covered a much greater expanse of time than the Ecclesiastical History.
Tracing the influence of the Canons is not entirely easy since chronology was generally approached pragmatically, without citing predecessors. Eusebian influence can be detected in at least two areas. First, there was the layout of the Canons themselves, as a tabular arrangement of vertical time-lines associated with parallel columns of regimes. Tabular approaches of this sort were enormously popular in medieval annals. The most obvious imitator of Eusebius was Burchard of Ursberg, who for much of his chronicle tried to construct parallel-column lists; but most medieval annalists used this approach to a greater or lesser degree.
Second, Eusebius cast a long shadow over the interpretation of the prophecy of the “seventy weeks” in Daniel 9:24–27, a biblical passage that commanded astonishing attention from chronographers from antiquity to the early modern period. Julius Africanus, writing in the early third century, read the prophecy as a foretelling of the coming of Jesus Christ, and was followed by most later Protestant world historians (including Joseph Scaliger). Eusebius, on the other hand, interpreted the “weeks” as foretelling the time from the building of the second temple after the exile, to the end of the hereditary high priesthood of the Hasmoneans.Footnote 77 Eusebius's interpretation was followed by several medieval chronicles, notably those of Marianus Scotus, Burchard of Ursberg, and Vincent de Beauvais (the latter simply quoting Eusebius).Footnote 78
This reflection brings us to the early modern period and the Reformation in particular. It is tempting to suppose that the shift from medieval chronicles to polemically confession-driven church histories would have created a marked discontinuity in historical publishing. In fact, the major medieval world chronicles enjoyed something of a publishing boom in the first century of printing, both as Latin originals and as translations, especially into German. Otto of Freising's history received its editio princeps from the hands of the German humanist scholar Johannes Cuspinian in 1515.Footnote 79
The translator-editor most closely involved in disseminating ancient and medieval histories in German was the Strasbourg preacher and reforming theologian Caspar Heyd, usually known as Hedio (1494–1552). Hedio translated a compilation of church histories, including the works of Eusebius, Rufinus, Sozomen, Theodoret, and others, which appeared in 1530 and again in 1545.Footnote 80 His translation of the complete known works of Josephus appeared in a massive volume in 1531.Footnote 81 It was followed in 1532 by a German translation of the description of the destruction of Jerusalem, then attributed to the second-century Christian historian Hegesippus, but possibly adapted from the work of Josephus, or possibly anonymous.Footnote 82 Hedio then issued a German translation of the chronicle attributed to Burchard of Ursberg, which was published in 1537 at Strasbourg.Footnote 83
One might have expected Eusebius to be a problematic author for Protestant historians. In the Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius did not write a history of doctrine so much as a history of the succession of authoritative leaders of the Church, and of their struggles against pagan persecutors on one hand and heretics on the other. Yet for historians such as Flacius Illyricus, as Hollerich rightly points out, Christian history was pre-eminently the history of doctrine.
However, notwithstanding any ideological difficulties, one finds Protestant theologians, from both the Reformed and the Lutheran confessions, making appropriate and discreet use of Eusebius. Taking an example from the Reformed tradition, in the Basel theologian Joannes Oecolampadius's commentary on Daniel from 1530, one finds fairly abundant references to, and use of, Eusebius. Oecolampadius cited the HE, the Chronicle, the Praeparatio Evangelica, and the Demonstratio Evangelica, including a quotation of the surviving fragment of the otherwise lost book XV of the latter work.Footnote 84 One intriguing aspect is that Oecolampadius rendered Eusebius in the original Greek. That is not surprising for Oecolampadius, who seemed to enjoy demonstrating his virtuoso command of ancient languages: but it shows that Greek copies of Eusebius were current by this date, even before the major Estienne editions of 1544–1545.Footnote 85 Oecolampadius showed a certain wariness about Eusebius's chronology, which in several instances he regarded as suspect. However, he could also praise Eusebius, saying that “you will not easily find another who is more diligent in calculating times according to the canonical scriptures.”Footnote 86
The same awareness of the Greek literary qualities of Eusebius is found in Oecolampadius's Zürich colleague Heinrich Bullinger. In his commentary on Paul's epistles, Bullinger referred to Eusebius's compliments to Paul's style in written Greek: “Eusebius bishop of Caesarea, a man most praiseworthy in holy and secular literature, ascribes to Paul exceptional eloquence of speech; and since he was a Greek, [Eusebius] could judge very ably about elegance of speech in the Greek language.”Footnote 87
Turning to the Lutheran confessional-orthodox church historians, something interesting happened in the way that Lutheran orthodox theology was understood in the later sixteenth century, which contributed to rehabilitating the use of the Ecclesiastical History. Lutheran orthodoxy established that there was a “correct” Christian doctrine, which was believed to have been taught in the early Church, and then restored under Luther and the reformers. It then became easier to use Eusebius not just as a source for events but as a pattern for how to tell the Church's story. Once again, true doctrine was always the same but assailed by heresy. For these writers, the papal monarchy in Rome and its practices became just another in the series of “heresies” assaulting true Christianity.
In that context, one observes a more confident use of Eusebius. Johann Pappus (1549–1610), the staunchly Lutheran preacher in Lutheranized Strasbourg, made frequent reference to Eusebius in the early sections of his Epitome. He quoted HE III:32, quite accurately, as evidence of the purity of doctrine in the early Church, before the rise of “heresies”: since the early missionaries of the Gospel had faithfully replicated the message of the apostles, they could not (obviously) have spread the ideas associated with later Catholicism.Footnote 88 He went on to cite HE III:37 about the spread of the Church through evangelization.Footnote 89 He then paraphrased HE IV:8 for instances where pagan emperors were not entirely hostile to Christianity.Footnote 90 In general, Pappus readily cited the traditional sequence of church historians after Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, for the centuries that they covered.
A more complex and interesting relationship to Eusebius emerges in the works of another ultra-Lutheran, Lucas Osiander the Elder (1534–1604). A sceptic about the Church's traditions, Osiander several times warned about the stories handed down by “ecclesiastical writers.” So, for example, Eusebius came in for implicit criticism for transcribing the correspondence between Jesus and King Abgar of Edessa in HE I:13, which Osiander rightly believed was a forgery.Footnote 91 Osiander was even more distrustful of the post-scriptural traditions of the lives of the apostles: here, he probably had authors such as “Abdias of Babylon” in mind, more than Eusebius.Footnote 92 He queried the widely held view that the apostle John ended his ministry at Ephesus, since the canonical letter to the Ephesians made no mention of him.Footnote 93
Osiander also challenged the tradition, which Eusebius quoted from Papias in HE III:39 and from Irenaeus in HE V:8, 10, that Matthew composed his Gospel first in Hebrew. If so, said Osiander, why did Matthew quote the Hebrew Scriptures according to the Septuagint version? In any case, if he had used anything other than Greek, Matthew would surely have written in the currently spoken Aramaic (which he referred to as “Syriac”).Footnote 94 Modern scholars could hardly improve on these arguments.
Yet Osiander was no idolater of the received Scriptural text. Osiander rather followed Eusebius in his scepticism about the canonicity of certain books of the Bible. He queried the authenticity of the second and third letters of John on stylistic grounds. Then, with explicit reference to Eusebius's similar verdict in HE III:25, he doubted the canonicity of the Book of Revelation, as Luther had done in 1522.Footnote 95
Overall, Eusebius could be and was used in a variety of ways by the Reformers. His somewhat pre-Catholic attitude to the biblical canon, and his belief in the ancient purity of the primitive Church, resonated well with the convictions of sixteenth-century Protestants. At the same time, he served as a vehicle for some, though not all, of the post-scriptural traditions cherished by the Church. In this respect, the sixteenth century, in both its confessional and its scholarly critical dimensions, thrust Eusebius under the critical spotlight as the Middle Ages had not done. Not every part of his work could come out of such scrutiny unscathed.
I am very grateful for the opportunity to participate to this discussion on Michael Hollerich's important work. This book is a veritable scholarly tour de force into the history of the reception of Eusebius's Historia Ecclesiastica (examined in relation to Eusebius's other historical works), and it is absolutely impressive for both breadth and depth. Thanks to this book, we get to travel across space and time, from the late antiquity to the modern times and from the East to the West. As my colleagues explain in greater depth, rarely has a study connected Eusebius's texts with such a wide and deep network that includes not only Latin and Greek-speaking territories, but also Syrian, Armenian, and Coptic communities, among others.
As we follow the story of the reception of Eusebius's work, we learn a great deal about its significance both in the context of Eusebius's own times and in the context of the genre of “ecclesiastical history.” We also learn a great deal about Eusebius's readers, continuators, translators; those who quoted him and those who did not; those who imitated him and those who consciously departed from his model; those who admired him, those who criticized him, and those who did both at the same time—this latter group included a surprising high number of people, as it turns out, across various geographical, cultural, political, and confessional boundaries.
This ability to move back and forth from the text to its readership is a quite extraordinary achievement. To take just one example that shows Hollerich's ability to move beyond the “usual” themes in which the reception of Eusebius has been considered, I will refer to his discussion in chapter 6 of how early modern Gallicans read and used Eusebius. In that learned and acute section, Hollerich allows us not only to understand the place of Eusebius's work within this specific theological and political context, but also to understand better how French Gallican historians understood the relationship between theology and politics.
Hollerich's book shows a masterful knowledge of a huge variety of people, debates, and institutions, which I certainly cannot match. Thus, for the rest of my remarks, I will concentrate simply on the parts of his book that most closely refer to my area of expertise, which is the early modern period.
From Hollerich's book, three features of Eusebius emerge as particularly important in early modern times (both pre- and especially post-Reformation), and, as Hollerich shows, recognizing these “Eusebian” moments in early modern historiography helps us understand better not just Eusebius but also his early modern colleagues.
The first one is, for lack of a better word, the “technical” aspect of Eusebius's ecclesiastical history. As Arnaldo Momigliano first, and other scholars later, noted, Eusebius's method was characterized by a few aspects that early modern scholars found increasingly more important for their own works. Eusebius's history was ample and supple, almost Herodotean in its embrace of topics that today we would file under the rubric of intellectual and cultural history. It was also self-consciously relying on documents and source-criticism rather than harangues. (The fact that Eusebius was not always successful and correct in evaluating his sources does not detract from the importance that he put on this aspect of the historian's craft). In this respect, as early modern historians moved away (sometimes polemically) from the Humanist genre of the ars historiae, Eusebius's documentary-based history became a model for them. A corollary of this documentary orientation is the collaborative aspect, which will become a cornerstone of both the Magdeburg Centuries and Baronio's Annales. Last but definitely not least, as Tony Grafton has shown, Eusebius's way of integrating chronology and narrative proved very useful in early modern times, when ecclesiastical (and even secular) historians discovered (or rediscovered) the centrality of chronology, and as they sought to find a middle ground between two extremes: the Humanist “narrativist” example on the one side, and the medieval chronicles on the other.Footnote 96
The second aspect of Eusebius's work that left an important mark on early modern history-writing lies at the very core of the Historia Ecclesiastica: the very aim of providentializing and clericalizing, as it were, history. Eusebius did not simply think that it was possible or useful or important or meritorious to write the history of the church, but also that the history of the church has some kind of primacy over secular history, to the extent that, for Eusebius, the history of the church encompasses secular history. Early modern confessional historians, both Protestants and Catholics, agreed with Eusebius on this point: writing ecclesiastical history meant writing history proper, and history with the capital “H.” This is relevant not only in the confessional arena in which tracing the history of one's church was not just a tool in the apologetic arsenal but also an existential question for both the Protestants and the Catholics. This is also relevant for the interconnections between confessionalism and the development of modern criticism—from this perspective, I think it is fair to say that not just Baronio or Flacius Illyricus but even Mabillon and his approach to source-authentication owed a great debt to Eusebius.
The third and final aspect of Eusebius's work that was deeply influential for early modern ecclesiastical historians is what Hollerich calls the “theo-political” vision underpinning Eusebius's history, which means its imperial character and “Constantinian” bent. This proved very malleable and adaptable in an age of growing state-power and in which territorial sovereignty was consolidating its hold in step with the confessional developments. As Hollerich shows, several early modern historians across the confessional spectrum used Eusebius's Constantine as the ideal model of alliance between political and religious authority. It is true that, in the process, some elements of Eusebius's Constantine were distorted or changed, but that does not cancel the fact that such Constantinian flavor was important for early modern historians. Indeed, following the Constantinian thread in early modern history-writing allows us to understand better the political implications of early modern historiography.
Hollerich's analysis of how those three features of Eusebius's ecclesiastical history made it into early modern times and profoundly influenced early modern historiography is a remarkable scholarly result. This is because in order to do that, Hollerich has corrected two kinds of distortions. The first is the distortion of postmodernity, so to speak, by which I mean the various (and in some cases interesting and thought-provoking) attempts to read Eusebius through the lens of various structuralist and post-structuralist theories. Hollerich does not deny that such readings are insightful insofar as they shed lights on important characteristics of Eusebius's work, such as the logic and anxieties of colonization and the root of imperial anti-Semitism. At the same time, as he puts it on p. 38, it is also crucial to focus on the “‘real’ Eusebius, the architect of a theo-political vision that will become inseparably associated with his books,” which is “the Eusebius whom future readers will expect to find.” In addition to this very acute historical point, I would add that distinguishing the Eusebius that we need today from the Eusebius that his pre-modern readers got is important because doing otherwise would be tantamount to losing sight of the basic but important fact that the past is different from the present.
The second kind of distortion affecting our understanding of Eusebius that this book dispels comes not from postmodernity but from modernity, and more specifically with the all-modern post-Enlightenment obsession or chimera or ideological dictate (or all of the above) that sees objectivity and impartiality as the meter not just of history, but of all the “social sciences.” If we think that historians should be photographers (as if photographers were in fact impartial observers) and works of history should be time machines able to transport us into the past as it really happened (as if such time machines were useful, let alone possible), then of course Eusebius's work falls very much short of that standard. But this standard is not absolute and is rather the historicized version of a time- and context-specific way of looking at things. What is more, this is not the standard that early modern readers of Eusebius had, and thus if we want to learn how they read Eusebius's work, we need to let go of this standard as some kind of Kantian regulative principle of pure reason. To be sure, this does not mean, once again, that either Eusebius or his early modern colleagues did not understand the difference between authenticity and forgery, or between facts and interpretation. In fact, Baronio himself had quite a critical relationship, at times, with the Eusebian narrative, motivated both by doctrinal and apologetical concerns but also by issues of documentary sources. It does mean that authenticity was not the same as truth, however, and if we do not understand this, we do not understand not just premodern ecclesiastical history but the premodern world more generally.
As I hope I have made clear with these remarks, this book makes several important interventions not only in the study of early modern history-writing but also in the field of historiography more generally. This is because in the process of analyzing the history of the reception of Eusebius's work, Hollerich has insightful things to say about not just the past but also the future of ecclesiastical history in general. Naturally, he recognizes that some of the issues that lie at the core of Eusebius's history are no longer relevant for us or are outright problematic, to the point that rejecting them is not only a moral imperative but also a historical necessity. An example of these issues would be Eusebius's anti-Semitism, of course, which we should not only, and obviously, condemn, but which we should also consider as a distinctive manifestation of the Christian doctrinal corpus and historical trajectory with which we must come to terms—and in this respect the recent unsealing of the Vatican documents concerning the pontificate of Pius XII and the works that have already come out and will come out from those sources are an important step in this process. Another aspect of Eusebius's view of history that appears to be dead, to paraphrase Benedetto Croce, is his Constantinianism, for obvious historical, and not just ideological, reasons.
Yet there are many concerns that were central to Eusebius's work and that are still central for us today. One is the role of political theology—and Hollerich's discussion of both Carl Schmitt's concept and its implications in terms of the relationship between theology, spirituality, and ecclesiology is both scholarly insightful and philosophically acute. Aside from the specific political and ideological choices that Schmitt made and the role that Eusebius played for Schmitt as he tried to justify those, Hollerich reminds us that the problem that Schmitt was trying to work out through Eusebius is just as important and difficult for us as it was for him: What kind of relationship exists between heaven and earth? What are the costs and the benefits of a political system that severs all ties with the transcendent dimension or, to say it with Paolo Prodi, that no longer recognizes the sacrality of oaths? and what is the historical and political role of the human conscience? “How should we read the signs of our times?” (265). Another important set of reflections that stems from Eusebius's work is the role of ecclesiastical history not simply in the context of a secularized society (and a secularized academia) but also in the context of the future of the Catholic church itself—but a similar discussion could be made for the Protestant churches.
In addition to those reflections, I would like to add two more that were prompted by this book. The first is the issue of the “grand narratives.” Of course, Eusebius had one, and in fact his Historia Ecclesiastica is probably the most impressive example of a Christian grand narrative insofar as it was a “biblically inspired comprehensive vision that virtually equates history as such with salvation history,” as Hollerich states (270). Surely from the vantage point of the present, Eusebius's grand narrative had obvious shortcomings, but I wonder the extent to which this means that grand narratives cannot coexist with historical writing tout-court. This is the position of most postmodern scholars of historiography, who, despite their respective differences, all have in common a rejection of grand narratives, which they think prevent us from seeing the past as a network of ideologically constructed discourses. Aside from the important insight that postmodern theories have provided on Eusebius, which Hollerich does not minimize, isn't this denial of grand narrative also a form of grand narrative? So maybe we need narratives (which at their most basic are nothing more and nothing less than ways to organize facts and make them meaningful), but perhaps they do not need to be either teleological or “grand”? As I said before, the past is definitely different from the present, but it is also true that the present is alive, and the past is dead, so this relationship is naturally asymmetrical. Are historical “narratives” (grand or small) then necessary consequences of, and tools to make sense of, this asymmetry? Can we truly do without them?
The second question that this book prompted for me concerns the relationship between ecclesiastical history, church history, and religious history. Do we think they are synonyms? If not (and I personally do not think they are), what is the difference between them? Are they equally useful, or necessary, or legitimate as categories of analysis today? I think confronting this question is important. First, understanding better what we mean by those terms is helpful from the point of view of hermeneutics insofar as it helps us define both the object of our study and the role of our scholars. These kinds of questions are also specifically helpful right now, as ecclesiastical and secular historians alike face the challenges posed by a society that is not just secularized but in fact increasingly resistant to and suspicious of humanistic disciplines and seems more and more interested in mobilizing the study of the past simply as a polemical tool for the present.
As I am thinking about those questions for myself, I find myself, once again, very grateful to have the opportunity to discuss this book with my fellow panelists and readers. There aren't many books that take us through centuries of history and aren't afraid to miss the occasional tree for the sake of seeing the forest. There are not many books that, in the process of examining the past, do not shy from asking big questions about the future. Michael Hollerich's book is definitely one of those.
ResponseFootnote 97
I express my warm thanks to the respondents for generously sharing their time and expertise, and to the journal for publishing the exchange.
I.
When I planned the book, I took it as a testimony to Eusebius's influence that there were translations of his history into Latin, Syriac, and Armenian within a century of his death in 339. David DeVore has turned that assumption on its head. He asks why it took so long for evidence to show up that his history was being used at all. He has therefore focused on what one might call “the dark history” of Eusebius's reception, the half century between Eusebius's death and Jerome's vigorous, if inadequately acknowledged, engagement with his works, by continuing the Chronicle up to 378 and pillaging the History for his De viris illustribus.
Maybe we shouldn't be surprised. The Life of Constantine never found real acceptance and wasn't translated into Latin until the Renaissance. There are plausible reasons for that occlusion, chiefly the tradition of a death-bed conversion of the first Christian emperor by a bishop who was a known sympathizer of Arius. But that objection cannot apply to the History. DeVore offers evidence that Eusebius the biblical scholar, educator, and apologist mattered more to the first generations after his death than Eusebius the historian.
Among the first direct uses of the Ecclesiastical History that he cites is the late fourth-century text known as De excidio Hierosolymitano (“On the Fall of Jerusalem”), an anonymous Christian adaptation of Josephus's On the Jewish War that was wrongly attributed to the second-century Christian writer Hegesippus. Carson Bay has recently argued that “Pseudo-Hegesippus” represents a third form of Christian historiography in addition to chronicles and ecclesiastical history and is really a continuation by a Christian writer of classical war historiography.Footnote 98 Be that as it may, Ps.-Hegesippus did not inspire numerous imitators, though it was popular in medieval libraries.Footnote 99 An earlier paper of David DeVore's that I cite in my book argued that the Ecclesiastical History itself contains elements of war historiography, though in the form of the non-violent resistance of the martyrs.
What about the theory that Eusebius's first continuator was a history written by Gelasius of Caesarea? Peter Van Nuffelen a few years ago published a trenchant denial that it ever existed. DeVore shares his skepticism. Now we have a reconstruction of Gelasius's history by a team working under Martin Wallraff in Basel.Footnote 100 The confused statements in Photius suggest to me that something like it must have once existed. But what we have does not seem that enticing, and its eventual disappearance may not be entirely a mystery.
II.
The complementary specializations of Christopher Bonura (Syriac Christianity) and Jesse Torgerson and Olivier Gengler (the Byzantine chronographic tradition) show how artificial are some of the boundaries separating chapters 2, 3, and 5, which cover the Greek and the non-Greek speaking East over almost a thousand years, during which regimes changed, Christian churches split, and Islam became the dominant religion—while Byzantium persisted in its hegemonic claims from within a shrinking perimeter. I am pleased to have them recognize the book's inclusive perspective “at a time when concepts like ‘the Global Middle Ages’ are in the ascendant.” Both sets of responses recognize that late ancient Greek and Syriac sources sought to construct church history in sync with world history “to reconcile profane time and Christian time in a unified narrative,” as Torgerson and Gengler put it. That may explain, they all suggest, the eclipse of ecclesiastical history as a genre, since its goal was best met by merging it with the genre of universal chronicles.
I will reply to Bonura and then to Torgerson and Gengler.
First, he complicates the literary typology for Syriac historiography that I borrowed from Witold Witakowski and Dorothea Weltecke. He points out that the late eighth-century Chronicle of Zuqnin incorporates the annalistic style of Eusebius's Chronicle with more detailed narratives from the Ecclesiastical History a full century before the ninth-century West Syrian patriarch and historian Dionysius of Tel-Maḥre. I have the Chronicle in my bibliography but failed to exploit it.
Second, he questions the distinction between ecclesiastical history and collective biography that Muriel Debié made in her study of the historiography of East Syrian Christians, the Church of the East or “Nestorians.” She thought their reliance on biographies collapsed a traditional literary distinction between collective biography and history. Theodoret of Cyrrhus and John of Ephesus, for example, composed works in both genres. I thought Debié's point was confirmed in a work like that of the sixth-century East Syrian historian Barḥadbešabba of Beth Arbaye in northern Mesopotamia. It consists of 32 biographical entries not organized geographically or chronologically and with few dates. But I acknowledge that blended works such as the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria and the Liber Pontificalis do blur the distinction. The whole topic is currently on the scholarly agenda: a conference on “collective biographies in antiquity” has recently been held at KU-Leuven and a book of proceedings should appear.
Finally, I must thank Bonura for further insights into East Syrian historiography, such as the late seventh-century East Syrian apocalyptic writer John bar Penkaye's defense of the non-established Christianity of the Church of the East in Sasanian Persia. He contrasted Persian Christian commitment in the face of persecution with the greed and ambition that he claimed motivated conversion in the Christianized Roman Empire. It is a fascinating surprise, on the other hand, to learn that an anonymous East Syrian writer, commenting on the celebrated Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, said that universal kingship was to belong to the Roman empire until the end of time—for which opinion the writer cited “the book of Mar Eusebius of Caesarea.”
Jesse Torgerson and Olivier Gengler deal with Eusebius's reception in different sectors of the Byzantine chronographic tradition. Gengler draws on recent work on the sixth-century historian John Malalas to specify further how, within two centuries from Eusebius's time, the desire to reconcile profane time and Christian time in a unified narrative had evolved. Eusebius survives as a “palimpsest” in Malalas even when he is not explicitly quoted. In what I take to be Jesse Torgerson's contribution, I welcome the stress on how Eusebius's alleged iconoclasm, condemned at the ecumenical council of Nicaea in 787, compounded the ambivalence that was already attached to his name for defending Constantine's death-bed baptism by an Arian bishop. In Byzantine chronography as preserved in the works of George Syncellus and his successor Theophanes, Eusebius was “transformed into a double outsider. . .[they] not only could but actually needed to set their works in some opposition to his own.”
Torgerson and Gengler are right to point out my omission of the ninth-century Latin writer Anastasius the Librarian in the chapter on Byzantium. When Anastasius translated Syncellus and Theophanes into Latin, he entitled his translation Historia Tripartita, evoking the sixth-century Latin translation and synthesis commissioned by Cassiodorus, and thus reconnecting Latin ecclesiastical history with the Greek ecclesiastical historians of the fourth and fifth centuries. I may redress this omission in later work.
Finally, I welcome their concluding observation that in view of ideological developments in Byzantium regarding church and empire between the sixth and ninth centuries, “we must think of them not as distinct polities but as inseparable aspects of the Greek-speaking Roman oikumene.”
III.
Euan Cameron's paper in the 2012 van Liere-Ditchfield-Louthan collection on Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World was my first orientation to Protestant historiography during the Reformation.Footnote 101 So, it is a compliment now to be reviewed by a master of the subject.
I note the following as my takeaways from his remarks.
First, he expresses reservations about the way I characterized the “Republic of Letters,” the seventeenth-century explosion of scholarship, correspondence, and learned associations that contemporaries called a respublica literaria. He is more skeptical of the irenic potentialities of the Republic to mitigate confessional hostility and suspicion. “Much of the historical scholarship of the 17th century,” he says, “was still [being] exploited to score confessional points.” He is hardly alone in that realism, which I also met in the work of Jean-Louis Quantin. My early reading in the secondary literature may have nudged me toward some wishful thinking. I did try to incorporate some of the current work on “confessionalization” represented by the new collection of Nicholas Hardy and Dmitri Levitin, Confessionalization and Erudition in Early Modern Europe.Footnote 102
Second, commenting on chapter 4 on the medieval Latin west, Cameron notes specific areas where Eusebius's influence left its mark, such as his thesis about the gospel of John's three-year public ministry of Jesus or the practice of correlating the several persecutions with specific Roman emperors. He points to the superior influence of Eusebius's Chronicle to that of the Ecclesiastical History. The popularity of medieval annalistic chronicles, in the tabular format, continued uninterrupted into the Reformation period. It was an unsettling discovery early on in my research that I could not write about the one without also, however inadequately, writing about the other, for they were already inseparably joined in Eusebius's own mind.
Third, in the section on the Reformation in chapter 6, he has greatly expanded the horizon of my primary sources. Selection was obviously a challenge at every point in this book and perhaps nowhere more than in the fierce and fertile authorship produced by the Reformation. I concentrated on standard authorities such as John Foxe, the Magdeburg Centuriators, and Cesare Baronio. I am grateful to have this more differentiated sketch of Eusebius's reception among the Reformers. He was read more widely and also more critically than I was aware—Osiander's sharp observations were especially striking.
At the same time, Eusebius offered certain advantages to orthodox Lutheran historiography of early Christianity. When I began my research, I expected to find his institutional focus on bishops problematic for Protestant historiography. That was correct up to a point and may have played a role in the Centuriators’ choice of an annalistic rather than a narrative approach. Protestant historiography focused on doctrine rather than office and defined “apostolicity” in terms of purity of doctrine. Eusebius proved valuable, Cameron points out, for his testimony that apostolic purity of doctrine preceded its corruption by heresy. I anticipated when I began that Eusebius's treatment of contingency in the formation of the biblical canon (cf. esp. Eccl. Hist. 3.24-25) would also be a problem—less so than one may think, he says, if one looks at his “somewhat pre-Catholic” view of the canon. Eusebius's endorsement of Constantine similarly offered benefits to Reformers in need of royal patrons.
IV.
Stefania Tutino addressed most directly the core concerns of this book. I was well launched on the writing before I realized clearly that I was pursuing two distinct questions. One was the literary genre of “ecclesiastical history.”Footnote 103 The other was the ideological coherence underlying that history, what I called Eusebius's theo-political vision. I wanted to tease out the interplay of the literary and the ideological in the works of his successors, imitators, and rivals. She singled out three distinctive Eusebian features: the “technical” aspects of his achievement as the progenitor of ecclesiastical history; his “providentializing” and clericalizing of history such that church history embraces secular history; and his “Constantinian” reconciliation with the state. This is a better way of expressing what I have thought of as a dual theme of genre and ideology. The original inspiration to do my book was Eduard Schwartz's statement, in the introduction to his great critical edition of Eusebius, that it was a Gallican bishop, Charles de Montchal, who had engaged Henri de Valois to undertake what until Schwartz was the landmark edition of the Ecclesiastical History. I became curious about a possible affinity between French Gallicanism and Eusebius's clericalist royalism.
Behind that curiosity is a lifelong interest in the interactions between church and state, a natural thing for someone raised as a Catholic in the liberal democratic polity of the United States. I am also a child of the Second Vatican Council, which sought to rethink and rebuild the relationship between Catholicism and modernity. The Council called Catholics to read “the signs of the times” in order to keep the Church from being sidelined from the thrust of world history. I do not think it is anachronistic to see Eusebius’ project as driven by a similar motive.
Tutino's closing remarks describe both the inevitability of some sort of historical narrative, in contrast to post-modern skepticism about grand narratives; and the modernist fiction of a presuppositionless objectivity. That is a helpful way to frame my argument for the enduring relevance of Eusebius's project. Eusebius wrote about the history of the church as the nucleus of a reborn humanity, while simultaneously wanting to claim all of history, and worldly government in particular, as part of God's design. His spectacular failures to realize such an ambition do not free his Christian successors from the obligation to do the same thing—to see themselves as the body of Christ and the well-being and destiny of the planet as part of a unified story. That is why a book that began with Eusebius and his world ended up with Erik Peterson, Carl Schmitt, and the rebirth of political theology. I want to thank her for recognizing that as my effort to deal with the “so what?” question that all of us must answer at some point, in our own minds and to our readers.
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