Eusebius of Caesarea

Eusebius of Caesarea (flourished 4th century, Caesarea Palestinae, Palestine) was a bishop, exegete, polemicist, and historian whose account of the first centuries of Christianity, in his Ecclesiastical History, is a landmark in Christian historiography.

Eusebius was baptized and ordained at Caesarea, where he was taught by the learned presbyter Pamphilus, to whom he was bound by ties of respect and affection and from whom he derived the name Eusebius Pamphili (“the son or servant of Pamphilus”). Pamphilus came to be persecuted by the Romans for his beliefs and died in martyrdom in 310. After the death of Pamphilus, Eusebius withdrew to Tyre and later, while the Diocletian persecution was still raging, went to Egypt, where he seems to have been imprisoned but soon released.

The work of the scholars of the Christian school at Caesarea extended into all fields of Christian writing. Eusebius himself wrote voluminously as an Apologist, a chronographer, a historian, an exegete, and a controversialist, but his vast erudition is not matched by clarity of thought or attractiveness of presentation. His fame rests on his Ecclesiastical History, which he probably began to write during the Roman persecutions and revised several times between 312 and 324. In this work Eusebius produced what may be called, at best, a fully documented history of the Christian church and, at worst, collections of passages from his sources. In the Ecclesiastical History Eusebius constantly quotes or paraphrases his sources, and he thus preserved portions of earlier works that are no longer extant. He had already compiled his Chronicle, which was an outline of world history, and he carried this annalistic method over into his Ecclesiastical History, constantly interrupting his narrative of the church’s history to insert the accession of Roman emperors and of the bishops of the four great sees (Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Rome). He enlarged his work in successive editions to cover events down to 324, the year before the Council of Nicaea. Eusebius, however, was not a great historian. His treatment of heresy, for example, is inadequate, and he knew next to nothing about the Western church. His historical works are really apologetics, showing by facts how the church had vindicated itself against heretics and heathens.

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Eusebius became bishop of Caesarea (in Palestine) about 313. When about 318 the theological views of Arius, a priest of Alexandria, became the subject of controversy because he taught the subordination of the Son to the Father (see Arianism), Eusebius was soon involved. Expelled from Alexandria for heresy, Arius sought and found sympathy at Caesarea, and, in fact, he proclaimed Eusebius as a leading supporter. Eusebius did not fully support either Arius or Alexander, bishop of Alexandria from 313 to 328, whose views appeared to tend toward Sabellianism (a heresy that taught that God was manifested in progressive modes). Eusebius wrote to Alexander, claiming that Arius had been misrepresented, and he also urged Arius to return to communion with his bishop. But events were moving fast, and, at a strongly anti-Arian synod at Antioch, about January 325, Eusebius and two of his allies, Theodotus of Laodicea and Narcissus of Neronias in Cilicia, were provisionally excommunicated for Arian views. When the Council of Nicaea, called by the Roman emperor Constantine I, met later in the year, Eusebius had to explain himself and was exonerated with the explicit approval of the emperor.

In the years following the Council of Nicaea, the emperor was bent on achieving unity within the church, and so the supporters of the Nicene Creed in its extreme form soon found themselves forced into the position of dissidents. Eusebius took part in the expulsion of St. Athanasius of Alexandria (335), Marcellus of Ancyra (c. 336), and St. Eustathius of Antioch (c. 337). Eusebius remained in the emperor’s favour, and, after Constantine’s death in 337, he wrote his Life of Constantine, a panegyric that possesses some historical value, chiefly because of its use of primary sources. Throughout his life Eusebius also wrote apologetic works, commentaries on the Bible, and works explaining the parallels and discrepancies in the Gospels.