by Joshua Shaw

Wrapping up Eusebius

In the last post (here), we saw some of Eusebius’s clever maneuvering with Plato. Plato had quoted Homer ungenerously to prove his point that God does not change nor does he come to the aid of ‘mad and wicked men.’ Eusebius fought fire with fire, using Plato to purify Homer with the one hand, and bringing the better element in Homer back in with the other–no longer ‘gods in many shapes appearing to men’ but the Logos become flesh to save a people for himself. Eusebius thus twists Plato in a very Platonic way to make him someone whose “philosophical system (ἑρμηνεία) was anticipated (or ‘prefaced’) in the oracles of the Hebrews” (PE XII.52, 35 : 636d) and with the right modifications is thus still congenial to Christian theology.

But is it acceptable thus to play with one’s sources, to twist them to suit one’s own aims? Is it better if we can assume the audience knows what is happening? Perhaps such questions are best answered when situated in light of the genre at hand: are we dealing with historiography, whose aim is historical truth plain and simple? Or is this rather literature, which makes no pretense to a full disclosure of the opponent’s views, but subordinates this to the artistic principles in use? This however begs the question, because–as was noted long ago in the first post (here)–Eusebius’s ‘art’, if we can call it such, certainly takes a puzzling form. But maybe the problem is with us and our lenses.

Ulrich von Willamowitz-Moellendorf, at least, thought something similar about Eusebius’s “Life of Constantine,” arguing–in an article on the Praeparatio–the following:

Only the one who understands the piece of writing “to Constantine”–which remains a “Life,”  as neither as a whole nor in particulars falsified, i.e., not as “the first thoroughly dishonest” [historiographical] work… but who instead understands it literarily in its disposition (Haltung) and psychologically tied to its own time–only such a reader would dare to set himself up as judge of such complicated times and personalities. (p. 110 footnote 1, ‘An Excerpt from Porphyry’s “Against the Christians” here).

Had Willamowitz, a hefty name in the world of scholarship on Classical Antiquity, put this comment anywhere but in a footnote in an obscure article, and indeed if he had expanded the idea a little further, it is quite possible that the current landscape of Eusebian scholarship would look a little differently. It is worth noting that Willamowitz here refers to the famous quotation from Jacob Burckhardt which we already quoted in the first post (third paragraph) and explicitly rejects it. This is an old debate.

The Beginnings of an Answer

Seeing as we did in past post some rather clever citational maneuvering–using Plato’s own words against himself in the way he used Homer’s against him–we might ask ourselves if this begins to answer the problem scholars have long had with the “massive catena” of quotations in the PE. Eusebius suggests that we should when, at the end of Book XIV, he says he “made an anthology (ἐξήνθισται) of a few from the plethora of the writings of the philosophers.” Given that Eusebius draws on this same analogy at greater length in Book I.5 of the Church History (here), perhaps we should be thinking of Meleager’s Garland (here) rather than Thucydides’ History as a fruitful point of comparison. But in what way might we, as Willamowitz suggests, understand this anthology “literarily”?

Eduard Norden, in his Kunstprosa (‘Artful Prose’), offers us some help (9). He there claims that the final stage of the development of rhetoric “came at last to the point that eloquence (eloquentia) carried the same meaning as that which we call literature” (trans. mine). Under this broad framework, it has been easy for scholars of Greek literature to see the writing of Eusebius as this decadence epitomized, whose words teem with crass uses of redundantia, childish word play, poorly constructed periods (that is, long sentences without a coherent logic connecting beginning, middle and end), puns, etc. Already in the ninth century AD a well-read Easterner (Photius in his Bibliotheca) could justly lament Eusebius’s poor grasp of style and art. But perhaps he, like so many other readers of Eusebius, was simply looking in the wrong place.

With the right lenses the canon of ancient literature will point us in the right direction, which Norden says is only applicable during the “full-bloom” (Blütezeit) of Greek prose: namely, that “art is at that moment perfect, when it appears to be nature, and so (this) nature achieves its goals, whenever it conceals its art” (ibid., 10, trans. mine). So then, under the standards of Classical Antiquity, “art was dead and gone from the moment it became an end in itself (Selbstzweck), or made a glamourous show of itself” (ibid.). This is of course the very definition of the Second Sophistic and the Atticist Revival of the early Empire, when the language but not the spirit of classical Greece was recaptured. And Eusebius, when himself writing, was possessed with this spirit, as Chaucer would say, “to the nones” (‘the nth degree’).

Despite all this I contend that Eusebius was a master of concealing his art, only his medium is different. His medium is no longer his own words but the words of his enemies, his predecessors, his friends. He liked to call these not words, but “facts”:

…providing proofs to my readers, by means of the deeds and, so to speak, the very facts themselves, that we chose, instead of the Greek, the Hebrew philosophy and way of life, itself at once ancient and true, and this we did not do heedlessly but with sober and decisive reasoning (PE XV.1, 6 : 789c τοῖς ἐντυγχάνουσιν, ἔργοις τε, ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν, καὶ αὐτοῖς πράγμασι τὰς ἀποδείξεις τοῦ μὴ ἀσκόπως ἡμας, κεκριμμένῳ δὲ καὶ σώφρονι λογισμῷ πρὸ τῆς Ἑλλήνων τὴν Ἑβραίων ὁμοῦ παλαιὰν καὶ ἀληθῆ φιλοσοφίαν τε καὶ εὐσέβειαν ἐπανῃρῆσθαι παρασχόμενος .)

The quotation becomes in Eusebius’s hands raw material fit for artistic achievement: it was material, a thing to be shaped and subordinated to a beautiful whole. And indeed he hid his art rather well, perhaps too well, since most have not found it so beautiful. Maybe his enterprise therefore ultimately failed as such; perhaps the citation can or should not be so used as he used it and in any case one’s own clumsy prose should not disconcert and distract the reader. But to have noticed his intentions gives us greater insight into his works and methods as a “historian.” Returning to our beginning we can, I believe, affirm Bishop Lightfoot’s judgement that “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” (here, paragraph 4). Though spoken of the Church History, these words can be justly applied to the Preparation for the Proof of the Gospel.

How Then Shall We Dialogue? The Right Method

The Praeparatio Evangelica is about finding the right texts, the right commentators for the right texts, and the right methods of interpretation. On the one hand the myths are shown to have been “violently” interpreted by the philosophers and in truth are full of “shameful things.” Allegory, it is implied, therefore ‘does violence to’ the myths because it does not stand on top of a ‘literal interpretation’ in comparison to, for instance, the work of Origen who applies both literal and allegorical interpretations in a harmonious way. What is the right way to interpret a book, an author, or a philosophical system?

In the view of Eusebius, those from within are the proper witnesses to a system of thought (οἰκεῖος ‘oikeios’ means first ‘from the same household’ but comes in philosophy to mean ‘proper’ or ‘fitting’; this equivocation lies at the bottom of Eusebius’s whole method). A while back, Trevor Anderson (here), commenting on R.C. Sproul’s simultaneous affirmation that Catholicism is not, in the principal sense, Christian, and that we nonetheless ought to know Catholic theology all the same, makes the same claim as Eusebius: “it would perhaps be disingenuous to suppose (Catholic theology is) known and understood if one has limited oneself largely to books on Catholic theology by Protestants, rather than Catholic theology written by Catholics.” Similarly, as Matthew Gaetano showed (here), Voetius thought that sometimes previous Catholic theologians were nearer the truth than their successors and thus that it made much sense to convict them “by their own domestic witnesses” (emphasis added).

Methodologically, then, Eusebius was on the right track and for that reason deserves some credit historically, even if his praxis did not match his theoria (at least on our terms). Precisely where he failed, or seemed to fail, he remains a useful example: “domestic witnesses” are, simply put, a necessary ingredient in our evaluation of other (alien) systems of thought. Indeed, we might go further. If we wish to know anything in this world beyond our own mind, we should not be satisfied until we have not only “looked at” but “looked along” (see here). Shy of converting to Catholicism to understand Catholicism (or v.v., which I am not proposing), “domestic witness” are the ticket in: to “looking along.”

On Whose Authority?

Yet there is an even weightier question at hand: what about authority? In the post announcing TRF there was a lengthy discussion in the comments about clerical authority and ‘sheep stealing.’ Though interesting in itself, it seemed to miss the mark about what TRF (as I understand it) is about.

Here too Eusebius is instructive precisely because his enterprise is distinct from ours. The PE is an apologetic work. For Eusebius the ruling question throughout the PE is, ‘whom do you trust?’ Is it the pagan gods (Books I-II), philosophical speculation about pagan gods (Book III), oracles (Book IV, VII)? Is it the greatest of all the Greeks himself, the wondrous Plato (Book IX-V)? Idolatry, that is, the casting down of the “most sacred name of God” down to the filth of demons or men, taking His τίμη (‘honor’ but in a concrete, religious sense) and giving it to those who do not deserve it, is the chief point. If he can show his reader that their trust is misplaced, that they ought to put it in the “oracles of the Hebrews” which “claim God as author,” and authenticate themselves by the brilliance of truth and the fulfillment of prophecy. The Scriptures become for the reader an unshakable epistemological foundation, one “above every kind of falsehood.” He does not leave us guessing at his aim in all this; in the preface of Book XIV he says explicitly, “This (to show God’s word is to be preferred to man’s) is what our entire project (logos) strove to demonstrate.”

That being Eusebius’s aim, the central question is one of authority.

But this is in fact not the case at TRF. We are meeting in this space as equals—all confessing, in Eusebius’s words, the triune God and the life after Him. Of course we do diverge when we apply this across the whole spectrum of our faith, and indeed the “authority” in each case is somewhat different and differently articulated (Scripture, Pope, Tradition, Councils, etc.) Nevertheless, the aim here is not to try to discredit one another’s authority but to clarify the information and knowledge in light of which our reason- and faith-informed consciences make such decisions.

Informing our Information

Yet making TRF simply about ‘better information’ would, in my view, be in itself too simplistic, as good a thing as it is. We are not replacing the respective tradition’s authority, nor again are we only giving information. There is a still higher thing we want to foster here: to paraphrase the words of the Apostle, ‘exercising through habit the faculty of discerning good and evil’ (cf. Hebrews 4:13).

To illustrate my meaning, a short anecdote. I once was told by a pastor (himself well-read), that, instead of digging around in the muck for flecks of gold, why not give people the pure bars? The context was a conversation about laymen and women reading beyond one’s own confession–supposed ‘heretics’ such as, in this case, N.T. Wright and Federal Vision folks (for which, see here), but also things further afield like Barth, Origen, Bonaventure–all of whom, depending on one’s confession, are more or less ‘worthy of reading.’ Opposed to these, I could only guess, would be someone like John Owen or Augustine, perhaps. A matter of prudence, he added.

For this pastor the point and purpose of reading was to digest what had already been decided by one’s own tradition as good—to memorize and internalize, as it were, a catechism. And while this is of course a good thing, I would restrict it to Scripture and the catholic creeds of the church and finally one’s own actual confession. But is this the purpose of the higher forms of education and any reading beyond these documents? Besides implying perhaps a certain elitism (excluding the ‘normal folk’ from reading beyond a select group), it also, more importantly, entails the inevitable atrophy of our moral faculties, which grow by their use–discerning good and evil. I can think of no faster track to the narrow-mindedness of heresy. For a Protestant this is especially dangerous, because we draw a sharp ontological distinction between the Word of God and the words of men (more on this in a coming post).

Everything not the Word of God requires sifting and this sifting exercises an indispenable organ: the organ by which we discern right and wrong.

How then shall we dialogue?

The highest aim is therefore to exercise together, in the words of Milton, our “organs of fancy,” the faculty by which we discern good and evil. Milton’s Satan provides a nice foil to our efforts here:

                        …Him there they found
Squat like a toad close at the ear of Eve
Assaying by his dev’lish art to reach
The organs of her fancy and with them forge
Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams…
                                                …thence raise
At least distempered, discontented thoughts,
Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires
Blow up with high conceits engend’ring pride.
(Paradise Lost IV.799-809, emphasis added)

We are not trying like so many squatting toads to infiltrate our reader’s mind and with it “forge illusions as we list” nor again “engender pride,” but rather to aid one another in our great duty of discriminating good and evil.

In practice this means our aim is not to set before the readers a group of predigested authors and texts, some falling into the ‘good,’ i.e., trustworthy and authoritative, category and some the ‘bad,’ but to illustrate the process of discerning good and evil itself: pulling from every tradition what good is there to discover and discern.

Yes: this means our reader must sift what we say. This requires from all of us a number of virtues, such as charity, patience, and humility–not to mention a “touch of celestial temper,” the pure light of divine truth. It requires in the moment a calmer approach to discussion. This is not about about tearing down the old, nor again erecting the new (here and here)–but the plain but important task of thinking and talking together (dialogos).