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Contributor
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Falls Creek, Oz.
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bolded extract in context below
Epitomes are only on the threshold of history. So far we have considered books which were meant to remind the reader of the events rather than to tell them afresh. But an important fact has already emerged. Whether in the form of chronographies or, later, in the form of breviaria, the Christian compilations were explicit in conveying a message: one can doubt whether the majority of the pagan compilations conveyed any message at all. Sulpicius Severus and Orosius fought for a cause, and it is to be remembered that Sulpicius Severus expressed the indignation felt by Ambrosius and Martin of Tours against the appeal to the secular arm in the Priscillianist controversy. Consequently, it was very easy to transform a pagan handbook into a Christian one, but almost impossible to make pagan what had been Christian. Later on we shall consider one possible exception to the rule that the Christians assimilate pagan ideas, while the Pagans do not appropriate Christian ones. The rule, however, stands: it is enough to indicate the trend of the century — and, incidentally, to explain why the Christians were so easily victorious. Just because the trend is so clear, we can perhaps conjecturally add yet another case of the easy transformation of pagan historical breviaria into Christian ones. All is in doubt about the first part of the Anonymus Valesianus —which is a brief life of Constantine under the name of Origo Constantini imperatoris. But a fourth-century date seen highly probable; and it also seems clear that the few Christian passages are later interpolations from Orosius. If so, the Origo Constantini imperatoris is a beautiful example of a short pagan work which, was made Christian by the simple addition of a few passages (20). The Christians could easily take it over because of the relatively neutral character of the original text. The pagans for their part kept away from Christian explosives.
Christian initiative was such that it did not hesitate to appropriate Jewish goods also. Pseudo-Philo’s Liber antiquitatum Biblicarum was originally a Jewish handbook of Biblical history. It seems to have been written its Hebrew for Jews in the first century A.D., it was later done into Greek, and, to all appearances, in, the fourth century, it was changed into a Christian handbook and translated into Latin (21).
The question then arises whether the Christians became the masters of the field also on the higher level of original historical writing and whether here, too, they confirmed their capacity for assimilating without being assimilated.
If the question were simply to be answered by a yes, it would not be worth asking. The traditional forms of higher historiography did not attract the Christians. They invented new ones. These inventions are the most important contributions made to historiography after the fifth- century B.C., and before the sixteenth century A.D. Yet the pagans are allowed by the Christians to remain the masters of traditional historiographical forms. To put it briefly, the Christians invented ecclesiastical history and the biography of the saints, but did not try to Christianize ordinary political history; and they influenced ordinary biography less than we would expect. In the fourth century A.D. there was no serious attempt to provide a Christian version of say, Thucydides or Tacitus — to mention two writers who were still being seriously studied. A reinterpretation of ordinary military, political or diplomatic history in Christian terms was neither achieved nor even attempted. Lactantius in the De Mortibus persecutorum is perhaps the only Christian writer to touch upon social and political events. He does so in a conservative and senatorial spirit which must be embarrassing to those who identify the Christians with, the lower middle class, but he never seriously develops his political interpretation: he is not to be compared as an analyst with, Ammianus Marcellinus or even with the Scriptores Historiae Augusta.
The consequence is plain. No real Christian historiography founded upon the political experience of Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus was transmitted to the Middle Ages. This is already apparent in the sixth century when a military and political historian like Procopius was basically pagan in outlook and technique. When in the fifteenth, and sixteenth, centuries the humanists rediscovered their Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy and Tacitus, they rediscovered something for which, there was no plain Christian alternative. It is not for me to say whether an alternative was possible: whether an earlier Tacitus christianus would have been less foolish, than the post-Reformation One. What I must point out is that the conditions which made Machiavelli and Guicciardini possible originated in the fourth century AD. The models for political and military history remained irretrievably pagan. In the higher historiography there was nothing comparable with the easy Christianizing of the pagan breviaria.
Here again Eusebius was the decisive influence. How much he owed to predecessors, and especially to the shadowy Hegesippus. we shall never know, unless new evidence is discovered (22). But it is fairly clear that Hegesippus wrote apologetic, not history. Apart from him, there is no other name that can seriously compete with Eusebius’ for the invention of ecclesiastical history. He was not vainly boasting when he asserted that he was the ‘first to enter on this Undertaking as travellers do on some desolate and untrodden way’ (23).
Eusebius, like any other educated man, knew what proper history was. He knew that it was a rhetorical work with a maximum of invented speeches and a minimum of authentic documents. Since he chose to give plenty of documents and refrained from inventing speeches, he must have intended to produce something different from ordinary history. Did he then intend to produce a preparatory work to history, hypomnema? This is hardly credible. First of all, historical hypomnemata were normally confined to contemporary events. Secondly, Eusebius speaks as if he were writing history, and not collecting materials for a future history.
It was Eduard Schwartz who in one of his most whimsical moments suggested that German professors of Kirchengeschichte had been the victims of their poor Greek. They had not understood that Ekklesiiastike historia did not mean Kirchengeschichte, but Materialen zur Kirchengeschichte. Eduard Schwartz, of course was fighting his great battle against the isolation of ecclesiastical history in German universities, and we who share his beliefs can hardly blame him for this paradox. But a paradox it was (24).
Eusebius knew only too well that he was writing a new kind of history. The Christians were a nation in his view. Thus he was writing national history. But his nation had a transcendental origin. Though it had appeared on earth in Augustus’ time, it was born in heaven ‘with the first dispensation concerning the Christ himself’ (1.1.8). Such, a nation was not fighting ordinary wars. Its struggles were persecutions and heresies. Behind the Christian nation there was Christ, just as the devil was behind its enemies. The ecclesiastical history was bound to be different from ordinary history because it was a history of the struggle against the devil, who tried to pollute the purity of the Christian Church as guaranteed by the apostolic succession.
Having started to collect his materials during Diocletian’s persecutions, Eusebius never forgot his original purpose which was to produce factual evidence about the past and about the character of the persecuted Church. He piled up his evidence of quotations from reputable authorities and records in the form that was natural to any ancient controversialist. As he was dealing with a Church that represented a school of thought there was much he could learn, in the matter of presentation from the histories of philosophic schools which, he knew well. These dealt with doctrinal controversies, questions of authenticity, successions of scholarchs. But he did away with all that was anecdotal and worldly in the pagan biographies of philosophers. This is why we shall never know whether Clemens Alexandrinus was fond of eating green figs and of basking in the sun — which are established points in the biography of Zeno the Stoic. At the same time Eusebius certainly had in mind Jewish-Hellenistic historiography, as exemplified for him and for us by Flavius Josephus. In Josephus he found the emphasis on the past, the apologetic tone, the doctrinal digression, the display (though not so lavish) of documents: above all there was the idea of a nation which is different from ordinary pagan nations. Jewish historiography emphatically underlined the importance of the remote past in comparison with recent times and the importance of cult in comparison with, politics.
The suggestion that Eusebius combined the methods of philosophic historiography with the approach, of Jewish-Hellenistic historiography has at least the merit of being a guide to the sources of his thought. Yet it is far from accounting for all the main features of his work. There were obvious differences between the history of the Church and that of any other institution. Persecution had been an all-pervading factor of Christianity. Heresy was a new conception which (whatever its origins) had hardly the same importance in any other school of thought, even in Judaism. An account of the Christian Church based on the notion of orthodoxy and on its relations with a persecuting power was bound to be something different from any other historical account. The new type of exposition chosen by Eusebius proved to be adequate to the new type of institution represented by the Christian Church. It was founded upon authority and not upon the free judgement of which the pagan historians were proud. His contemporaries felt that he had made a new start. Continuators, imitators and translators multiplied. Some of them (most particularly Sozomen) tried to be more conventional in their historiographical style, more obedient to rhetorical traditions. None departed from the main structure of Eusebius’ creation with its emphasis on the struggle against persecutors and heretics and therefore on the purity and continuity of the doctrinal tradition.
Eusebius introduced a new type of historical exposition which was characterized by the importance attributed to the more remote past, by the central position of doctrinal controversies and by the lavish use of documents.
--- Arnaldo Momigliano,
--- c.1960
Extracted from here
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04-16-2007, 08:07 AM
