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23990 results in Ancient history

Page 328 of 1200

  • Chapter 3 - Christian Intellectuals

  • from Part II
  • James Corke-Webster, King's College London
  • Book:
    Eusebius and Empire
    Published online:
    04 January 2019
    Print publication:
    10 January 2019, pp 89-120

  • Summary

    Chapter 3 considers Eusebius’ consistent privileging of the intellectual and literary in Christian leaders. These qualities are not celebrated in isolation, the chapter suggests, but only in so far as they have a concrete positive effect on others, via pastoral and anti-heretical activities. Simultaneously, Eusebius was wary of the independent authority that intellectual excellence could bring, since his goal was ultimately to celebrate the orthodox, institutional church and its denizens. That meant not simply highlighting the intellectual and literary qualities of official clerics, but either suppressing or appropriating Christianity’s tradition of independent and eclectic teaching. In this, Eusebius was wading into an ongoing debate among early Christians over the basis of legitimate authority for Christian leaders. He was also responding to elite Graeco-Roman prejudices about Christian status and education, since this picture of an intellectualised Christianity effectively countered the stereotype of Christianity as a religion that was born in the gutter and evangelised only the foolish, young, and gullible, and established it instead as an elite intellectual movement alongside comparable groups that had flourished under the Roman Empire. This, Chapter 3 argues, was the first aspect of Eusebius’ new vision of Christianity and its place in the Empire.

  • Chapter 4 - Christian Ascetics

  • from Part II
  • James Corke-Webster, King's College London
  • Book:
    Eusebius and Empire
    Published online:
    04 January 2019
    Print publication:
    10 January 2019, pp 121-148

  • Summary

    Chapter 4 considers Eusebius’ treatment of asceticism. Countering common assumptions about Eusebius’ enthusiasm for acts of physical hardship, it argues that in the History renunciation, sexual continence, and voluntary poverty are applauded only in educational settings and when they contribute to an ethic of community support. When they become extreme or prove detrimental to the community Eusebius is critical. He promotes instead a brand of intellectual, philosophical asceticism characterised by self-control. Eusebius envisages two paths for Christian life, with asceticism suitable only for a small intellectual elite whose ascetic lifestyle complemented their philosophical study. Eusebius thus reappropriated the volatile authority of those Christians of the second and third century famous for their virginity, fasting, etc., and the literature that celebrated them, both of which imagined Christianity in opposition to the Roman Empire; he aligned them instead with traditional elite Graeco-Roman attitudes that were suspicious of immoderate behaviour and its associations with isolationism, misanthropy, and subversion (charges that had also been levelled at Christianity by its elite critics). Finally, Eusebius’ presentation of asceticism was designed to showcase Christians’ self-control, a crucial factor in Roman constructions of authority. It thus forms the second virtue in Eusebius’ rhetoric of intellectual and moral authority.

  • Chapter 7 - The Church

  • from Part III
  • James Corke-Webster, King's College London
  • Book:
    Eusebius and Empire
    Published online:
    04 January 2019
    Print publication:
    10 January 2019, pp 215-248

  • Summary

    Where Chapters 3 to 6 consider various aspects of Eusebius’ construction of a model of Christian authority, Chapter 7 argues that these are in turn building blocks for Eusebius’ construction of the Christian collective, the church. As prominent in the History as these leaders are the ties formed between them. These are created via pedagogical succession and epistolary correspondence, since the former link Christian leaders in time and the latter in space. Both had been to varying degrees emphasised by earlier Christian writers, particularly, as ever, the Alexandrians. But with them Eusebius did what no earlier writer had done – construct a picture of a unified, unchanging, and Empire-wide church, the same in the first century as in the fourth, from Lyons to Edessa. Key was his depiction of church councils as the ‘hubs’ of this pedagogical-epistolary network, establishing blanket policy across centuries and provinces. Eusebius’ picture distorts the size and coherence of the earliest church, in part as a more effective response than any previously offered to elite critiques of Christianity as fractured, divided, and impermanent, and as a powerful statement about the place of Christianity in the early fourth century.

  • Chapter 1 - Eusebius, of Caesarea

  • from Part I
  • James Corke-Webster, King's College London
  • Book:
    Eusebius and Empire
    Published online:
    04 January 2019
    Print publication:
    10 January 2019, pp 13-53

  • Summary

    The first chapter argues that it is impossible to understand the History without understanding Eusebius’ own context. It sets out in turn what we know of Eusebius’ own life and the times through which he lived, of the city of Caesarea in which he spent most of his life (and its Christian school in particular), of his literary oeuvre, and of his relationship with earlier authors (biblical, Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Roman). It seeks to demonstrate that what limited information about Eusebius’ life we have testifies largely to his scholarly tendencies; that the broader circumstances of his life, hometown, and school all encourage the impression that Eusebius was deeply rooted in a rich Graeco-Roman heritage, and shaped in particular by a Alexandrian-Caesarean Christian intellectual tradition that included Clement (and, more problematically, Origen); that this influence is evident in his extraordinarily learned, inventive, and interwoven body of work, through which runs a central historical thread and an overarching concern for pedagogy; and finally that Eusebius’ relationship with his heritage was always active – he did not simply regurgitate his inheritance, including that from Origen, but rather appropriated and moulded it to serve his own circumstances.

  • Chapter 8 - The Church and Rome

  • from Part III
  • James Corke-Webster, King's College London
  • Book:
    Eusebius and Empire
    Published online:
    04 January 2019
    Print publication:
    10 January 2019, pp 249-279

  • Summary

    Chapter 8 treats Eusebius’ picture of the dynamics between church and Rome. It argues that Eusebius not only suggested that Christianity had been of importance in the Roman world from its birth, but also that its interests had always been aligned with those of Rome. By appropriating the traditional binary model of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emperors from earlier Greek and Roman imperial historiography, Eusebius suggested that only those emperors traditionally seen to be tyrants had persecuted Christianity, and that those emperors most respected by posterity had actually gone out of their way to protect it. Periods of persecution were thus anomalous; toleration was the norm. Most challenging was the most recent such anomaly, the ‘Great Persecution’, fresh in his audience’s memory. By affiliating the recent tetrarchs with famous despots of the Roman past such as Nero and Domitian, Eusebius explained away their abuse of Christians as part of wider tyrannical abuse of Roman elites. This ingenious historical schema was the capstone to Eusebius’ accommodationist picture of Christian history, both as an essential part of his reassurance to his audience about the pedigree of Christianity and to further his argument that Christians were among the best of Roman society.

  • Chapter 5 - Christian Families

  • from Part II
  • James Corke-Webster, King's College London
  • Book:
    Eusebius and Empire
    Published online:
    04 January 2019
    Print publication:
    10 January 2019, pp 149-174

  • Summary

    Chapter 5 argues that Eusebius, despite his reputation as a champion of asceticism, in fact presents Christian families as the last bastion of traditional Roman family values. He thus rewrote the rejection of family inherent in much Christian literature of the second and third centuries, where Christian protagonists fight with pagan parents who resist their conversions, and aligned himself instead with more pro-familial factions in early Christianity. Non-Christian critics of Christianity had also presented Christianity as a religious minority that seduced innocent children away from their parents, and Christians as rebels who rejected the stable family unit in favour of sedition, immorality, and isolation. Eusebius instead sought to construct a picture of the Christian family aligned with traditional Graeco-Roman family values. He presents Christian families as exemplifying precisely the reciprocal obedience, affection and solidarity that characterised idealised Roman conceptions of the family, and hails them as the key locus for education. Moreover, at times of crisis in the History, Christians exemplify ideal Roman family values while non-Christians (Jews and ‘pagans’) fail to do so. As in the previous two chapters, Eusebius thus both responded to traditional elite criticisms of Christianity and affirmed the traditional nature of Christian piety.

Page 328 of 1200