by Joshua Shaw
Editorial Note: Joshua Shaw is a graduate in Classics from Hillsdale College (B.A) and Bryn Mawr (M.A.). While pursuing a PhD in Theology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, he is currently writing a historical, theological, and philological commentary on Books XIII-XIV of Eusebius’s Praeparatio Evangelica, in which are treated the various mutual relations of Plato(nism) and Christianity. His interests, however, range widely: some particular interests being Homer’s Epics, Plato’s Dialogues, St. Augustine, John Calvin, and NT Textual Criticism. Writing intermediate commentaries on Greek and Latin texts has recently become a favorite hobby—helping students of history return ‘ad fontes.’ He will be contributing a series of essays on Eusebius of Caesarea’s use of sources in his great apologetic work, The Gospel Preparation (or Preparation for the Gospel). Readers are invited to contact him at joshaw94@gmaill.com.
This series will deal with the relationship of Christianity to education and the ancient philosophical tradition. For more about this and related topics at the Regensburg Forum, see the following links: here, here, here, here, etc.
In Surprised by Joy C. S. Lewis describes his father with incisive candour as a man with a “a streak of genius in him” who had “at the same time … more power of confusing an issue or taking up a fact wrongly than any man [he] ha[d] ever known” (Mariner Books ed. 2012, p. 120). Neither Lewis nor his brother could communicate to their father the things he wanted to know, because “having earnestly asked, he did not ‘stay for an answer’ or forgot it the moment it was uttered. … For his own version, once adopted, was indelible. … Sometimes, indeed, he took in the facts you had stated; but truth fared none the better for that. What are facts without interpretation? It was axiomatic that nothing was said or done from an obvious motive. Hence he who in his real life was the most honorable of men became a positive Machiavel when he applied to the behavior of people he had never seen the spectral and labyrinthine operation which he called ‘reading between the lines…’ (ibid., 121-2).
This character sketch of Lewis’ father is, I think, a useful way of conceiving of Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339), especially when we consider how he makes use of sources. This major church historian of the fourth century often reads his own ideas and oversubtle nuances into his documents. Like Lewis’ father it seems that for Eusebius it was “axiomatic that nothing was said or done from an obvious motive” and that the “labyrinthine operation” of “reading between the lines” was needed to draw out the real meaning. He clearly “took in the facts” in front of him: indeed, had he not preserved his ‘proofs’ for our perusal, we could not convict him of misreading. He might even be called the greatest collector of facts in the early church. Yet the “truth [often] fared none the better” for all that. But to call Eusebius the “first thoroughly dishonest historian of antiquity” (Jacob Burckhardt) is to inflict upon Eusebius the same “spectral operation” he inflicted on his documents. The motives of other humans are always more or less opaque to us “who look on the outward appearance”: if this is true for daily life, how much more so when reading an author so far removed in space and time?
His capacity of mind in any case should not be underestimated, and, as Lewis his father, I would not want to “as historian, reduce a complex character to a false simplicity. The man who, in his armchair, sometimes appeared not so much incapable of understanding anything as determined to misunderstand everything, was formidable in the police court and, I presume, efficient in his office. He was a humorist, even on occasion, a wit” (ibid., 123). Likewise Eusebius was a man of immense learning, a very capable rhetor (judging from the evidence of success), and in all an eminent figure in the development of Christian doctrine. His significance for our knowledge of the early days of the church as well as his influence on subsequent theologians (Basil, the Gregorys, Athanasius, Theodoret) can hardly be overstated, and thus for these reasons and more he deserves the respect and careful attention of any student of early Christian history. The great English bishop and historian John B. Lightfoot gave a very balanced account of his epoch-making Church History, which we may take as broadly applicable to his methods everywhere:
It must be confessed that the execution of his [Church History] falls far short of [Eusebius’] conception. The faults indeed are patent and tend to obscure the merits, so that an unjust depreciation of the work has too commonly been the consequence. Yet, with all allowance made for these, it is a noble monument of literary labour. He himself, as we have seen, pleads for indulgence, as one who is setting foot upon new ground, “nullius ante trita solo” [on soil tread by none before]. As he had no predecessor, so also he had no successor. Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, all commenced their work where he had ended. None ventured to go over the same ground again, but left him sole possessor of the field which he held by right of discovery and of conquest (324-5).
We will return to Bishop Lightfoot again at the end of the series, but what we have just quoted suffices as we begin our long descent into the material.
Descending from lofty claims, the issue deserves stating plainly: anyone who reads Eusebius of Caesarea is confronted by “what has been taken as his inability to control his sources” (Aaron Johnson, Tradition and Innovations in Eusebius of Caesarea, 2014, 2). Aaron Johnson, a leader of Eusebian scholarship in English, has grappled seriously with this problem in his many works on Eusebius, encouraging readers of Eusebius not to underestimate his abilities as historian, theologian, apologist, and especially, to give Johnson’s emphasis, as a literary author. Not content with a statement of the facts, Johnson wants to find deeper reasons for Eusebius’ very peculiar use of sources (he refers to the oft-cited fact that the Praeparatio Evangelica is 71% quotation (!)). To solve this difficulty, he proposes a number of possible solutions, laying the heaviest weight on these two: 1) what he calls a “cumulative aesthetic” which we see in other works of period, most exemplary of all being the Arch of Constantine, and 2) a value of pluralism and dissent (ibid., 2-7). The former answers the question oft-posed by readers: “Why so many quotations?”; while the second answers the question: “Why does he preserve texts for us that prove his false or at least misguided interpretation of them?” Johnson’s efforts to re-evaluate Eusebius in less negative terms are admirable, yet I find these two suggestions unconvincing. The former because of the inability to apply such an aesthetic in detail (‘why use this source here’) and the latter because, in my view, it foists a serious anachronism on Eusebius which he would himself surely reject. As we work through the sources, we shall perhaps stumble upon new lines of inquiry, that is, other constructive ways to understand Eusebius’ project, which may offer a charitable appreciation of his intentions without explaining away the real difficulties or modernizing Eusebius.
In this first installment we only have space left to lay the groundwork for the analysis of individual passages to follow in coming weeks. We will on the one hand observe Eusebius’ treatment of Plato in the Praeparatio Evangelica (Preparation for the Proof of the Gospel) and on the other hand his treatment of Marcellus of Ancyra in the oft-paired contra Marcellum/Ecclesiastica Theologia which will grant the reader a wide view of his method together with a small focus of genre. The PE and Contra Marcellum are apologetic works, directed on the one hand against the pagan par excellence, Plato, and on the other the heretic (Sabellianism) par excellence, Marcellus. In addition to broadening our understanding of Eusebius’ use of sources within a genre (apologetics), it will also allow us to see a common thread of Eusebius’ writings, the analogy of Platonism to Christianity both in its orthodoxy and heterodoxy.
Brief Biography
Eusebius was born around the year 260 AD: a date possible to infer from his characteristic use of the turn of phrase “in our time” (καθ’ ἡμᾶς). I mention this detail because Eusebius almost never makes mention of himself: the details of his life and dates of his works from before 306 AD are recoverable only by implication from off-hand notices, e.g., “I personally knew such and such a presbyter to be eloquent, erudite, etc.” and from complex chains of reasoning dependent on these hints (such as the debates around the dating of the various ‘editions’ of his Church History). He lived during the so-called “Constantinian Turn” or “Shift” to just a few years after the death of Constantine himself (c. 340). Of his massive literary output, nothing can be securely dated before 306 (Chronici Historiae), though he doubtless had begun significant drafts of a number of his larger works in the years prior to this.
His Works
In short, Eusebius’s works are extensive. To name just a few, they range from theological (Evangelicae Quaestiones, Demonstratio Evangelica, Theologia Ecclesia), to exegetical (Commentaria in Psalmos, in Lucam, in Jesaiam), to historical (Historia Ecclesia, Chronici), to the explicitly apologetic (Praeparatio Evangelica (PE), Contra Marcellum), to the plainly pedagogical (The General Introduction). However, as some scholars have recently noted, hard and fast divisions between his works do not really work, since Eusebius was thoroughly apologetic in nearly all his writings with the possible exception of the Commentaria, which nevertheless served as informational storehouses whence he might draw strength in apologetic contexts. Of similar function were his chronological tables: apt tools in the hands of a skilled apologist.
Preparing for the Praeparatio: The Greek Apologetic Tradition
In this connection we will introduce briefly some of Eusebius’ forebears, next turning to the PE as a whole and, for this post, ending with a short foray into the part of the PE we will be looking at in the coming weeks.
Like Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen before him, he wanted to provide a “thoroughly researched account” (ἐξεταστικός λόγος) of the Christian religion (First Apology 2.3) . To see the suggestions of this “thorough research” which Eusebius carried to the bitter end, I want to look briefly at Justin and Clement. Justin, a known model of Eusebius’ apologetic endeavours (Church History IV.8.3, 11.8-11), was writing, as he says, “to demand [the judges, i.e., the emperor(s)] to give a a decision according to a precise and well-researched account” (κατὰ τὸν ἀκριβῆ καὶ ἐξεταστικὸν λόγον I.2.3 Source Chretiennes (SC)Vol. 507). This “well-researched account” (ἐξεταστικός λόγος) is thus the content of Justin’s two Apologies which he is laying before the judges. Ἐξεταστκός ‘exetastikos’, ‘well-researched, -probed,’ and its cognates—oft paired with cognates of ἀκριβοῦς ‘akribous’ = exact—thus becomes a buzzword for early Christian apologetics, with roots both in Plato and the Septuagint (LXX). It is associated with philosophical enquiry on the one hand (Plato, Theaetetus. 154d, 184c; Phaedrus. 258d, 261a; Laws. 764a) and (divine) courts or judgement on the other (Wisd. 4:6; Prov. 1:32; Deut. 19:18, in New Testament with the simple sense of ‘find out’ Matt. 2:8, 10:11). Through Justin’s particular usage, it becomes an apt description of the early Christian’s attempt to defend their new and radical religion over against the solemn and disparaging claims of the Jews and Greeks. Christians would prove by research and reason that their religion had the superior claim to truth.
Clement of Alexandria likewise paved the way for this “well-researched account” by his massive collocation of materials, pagan, Christian, and apocryphal in the Miscellanies (Stromateis), which were nevertheless largely based on verbal similarities (Daniel Ridings, The Attic Moses, 35-112). Though Clement himself was no sluggard, he acknowledged that “if we were to go over all the [pagan] texts we would never be finished with showing all that all of the wisdom of the Hellenes comes from barbarian philosophy. So extensive is the evidence to be collected! … Even this has been quietly shown by the things we have said, that is, how the works of the Hellenes should be approached by one who is capable of swimming in the rough waves of their books” (trans. ibid., 47, Misc. V.14.140). Much of this very chapter of the Miscellanies is quoted by Eusebius in the thirteenth book of the PE: more precisely, it is quoted at a pivotal moment in the PE where Eusebius turns away from Plato and encourages his readers to do the same. Clement was thus a source, a guide, and an inspiration for Eusebius.
In connection to Justin and Clement we can say of Eusebius that his main contribution is his theoretical or systematic arrangement of the materials (as opposed to Clement’s sporadic and haphazard approach to verbal similarities ibid. p. 101 and PE XI.1,1) and the sheer extent of his studies and bibliographic efforts. He indeed quotes a number of things from his predecessors, but in a great many cases he has returned to the original sources (so it happened that Eusebius has preserved fragments of many works not extant elsewhere). Furthermore, at the beginning of the PE, Eusebius aligns himself explicitly with the foregoing Christian apologetic tradition:
For since some have supposed that Christianity preserves no reasoning, but that opinion rules sovereignly over those who pretend to the name by means of an irrational faith and unresearched compact … inasmuch as they are called ‘the faithful’ on account of an uncritical and ill-founded faith, reasonably then I have set myself to this treatise … [and] suppose it necessary as preparation for the greater argument to take up in advance a short treatment of the things disputed against us with good reason by the Greeks and those of the circumcision and anyone trying to learn more about our affairs with exacting examination. (PE I, 1,11 (4), cf. Karl Mras, Griechische Christliche Schriftsteller der ersten Jahrhunderten (GCS) Vol. 8 pt. I)
The PE of Eusebius was not, as you can see in the passage just quoted, an argument about Greek philosophy as itself “preparation for the gospel” but was itself “preparation” (327) for the “larger argument” he is making (εἰς προκατασκευὴν τῆς ὅλης ὑποθέσεως); by the “larger argument” is meant the Demonstratio Evangelica (apparently consisting in twenty books according to Jerome, though only ten survive). The PE is thus an effort to lay the epistemological groundwork, as it were, for all those coming from without.
An Excursus: the Apologetics of C.S. Lewis and Eusebius
We may for a moment here digress to point up one of the broadest distinctions between ancient and modern apologetics. While in the modern world the most successful apologists have either confronted us directly through rational argumentation or else circumvented our “watchful dragons” through imaginative literature (Mere Christianity and Miracles for the former, the Chronicles of Narnia for the latter), the ancient apologist had to confront the Christian lack of cultural history: he had to make it old again.
The Jews, albeit despised for their smallness (Cicero thought their religion barbarous and opposed to Roman dignity and that they were “fit to be slaves”), were nevertheless at least of ancient descent. Over against the Jews Eusebius had to show that Christians were the “real Hebrews,” those who had preserved and extended the true religion of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; against the Greeks he had to prove, if not their dependence upon, at least the inferiority of, their philosophy when compared with the Hebrew Law and the Prophets.
Greek philosophy was for him derivative and always thoroughly “mixed with error” (PE XIII.14,1-4), even when it did contain some truth (for this summary see Aaron Johnson, Ethnicity and Argument 2013, 1-24). In answer to the inadequacy of Greek philosophy, Eusebius needed to show the divine inspiration (and thus infallibility) of Scripture. For this reason history (and thus documentation) was vital: for Origen (IV.I.6-7) and many that followed (including Eusebius), it was the historical fulfillment of prophecy that verified the divine inspiration and authority of the Old and New Testament: “The writings of the Hebrews, inasmuch they contain prophecies and oracles of a divine power, that is, a power beyond human ability, both ascribing to God their authorship and granting credibility to the promise by the foretelling of future events and their fulfilment in accord with the prediction, are said to be above all thought capable of error” (XIII.14,1).
In a direction rather opposite, then, to C.S. Lewis in Narnia or Till We Have Faces, Eusebius found all previous myths to be increasingly fragmented perversions of an earlier, more pristine, theology rather than reflections of the Gospel variously clear or muddy.
The Preparation for the Gospel: Eusebius’ Aims and Audience
We will finish with a brief introduction to the part of the PE we will be examining in the coming articles. The first that needs to be said is that, for Eusebius, the greatest of the Greek philosophers was Plato (for Clement, it was arguably Pythagoras: see Ridings, 89). Within his larger apologetic program, Eusebius devotes a lion’s share to establishing the agreements of Christianity with Plato’s writings (XI-XIII.13) as well as the disagreements (XIII.14-end) and the subsequent failure of Platonism shown through the historical development of Greek philosophy (XIV-XV). By providing the most systematic and widely-ranging comparison of Platonic writings with scripture, he re-educates the Platonist convert. This he accomplishes first by proving his respect for Plato, second the agreement of Plato’s teachings with Christianity by-and-large (κατα πλεῖστα is his favorite phrase), and third Plato’s inferiority to the scripture insofar as he does not agree with himself. This last is an important point for Eusebius.
To let Eusebius speak for himself we end with the proem of Book 11, which will set us up well for the coming weeks. Here is important to note 1) Eusebius’ method is prove his case “not by his own words,” 2) as Clement, Eusebius considers Plato mostly likely dependent upon Moses for his truest doctrines, 3) harmony is the key word for the relationship of Christianity and (the better parts of) Platonism, 4) Plato is nevertheless exceptional among pagan philosophers for his “commentary” on Moses, and 5) the analogous use of the terms “testimony” and “martyr/witness” for the Platonic and Christian “orthodox.”
The book which preceded this one, that is, the tenth of the Evangelical Preparation, consisted not in my own words but in external testimonies that it is not unlikely that the Greeks … procured all they had from the Barbarians and were not entirely ignorant of the Hebrew writings. … For they were proved thieves not by an argument produced by our own people (i.e., Christians), but by themselves. But also we came to see that they were especially young in thought and maturity, by-and-large falling short of Hebrew ancient lore, which we have shown through chronological proofs. … This present (book) aims to … deliver on the promised thesis, i.e., to show the harmony of many dogmatic teachings of the Hebrews with the Greeks: excusing the majority of these the Chief is called forward … the only one sufficient to the task, the great Plato. … If necessary for the sake of clarifying that genius’s system of thought, I shall make use of his faithful witnesses. … Let there be this qualification, that I do not believe that genius said everything fittingly … which we will show in its own place. (ΧΙ.1,1-4 trans. mine)