Hagiography as a Historiographic Genre: From Eusebius to Cyril of Scythopolis, and Eustratius of Constantinople (original) (raw)
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Late Antiquity from the third to the sixth centuries was the era of the development of the great Christian narrative, an interpretatio Christiana of the history of humankind. This meant reassessing and relocating past histories, ideas and persons on the historical mental map. In this construction of the past, Christian writers built on the models of the preceding tradition, creating competing chronologies and alternative histories. This article analyses the concept of history conveyed by two Christian fourth- and fifth-century historians, Eusebius of Caesarea and Orosius, and discusses the various ways in which these writers created the Christian past. One of the ways was to determine the greater antiquity of Christianity in comparison to the Greco-Roman tradition. This led Eusebius to develop his synchronistic chronology of the human past in his Chronici canones. In his approach, Eusebius developed further the Greek chronographic tradition for Christian apologetic purposes. Another way was to interpret history as guided by divine providence. For example, for Orosius in his Historiae adversus paganos, the appearance of Christianity in the Roman Empire was part of the divine plan for humankind. The concept of divine providence was also connected with ideas of divine favour and anger. In the world view of ancient Christian writers such as Orosius, divine retribution played an important role in explaining the adversities of humankind. Even though Orosius is usually dismissed in modern scholarship as a crude and unsophisticated historian, his ideas deserve a more nuanced reading. This article argues that both Eusebius and Orosius developed their views of history in contention with other, prevailing views of the past. Both writers aimed to challenge these views – Eusebius with his synchronistic chronology and Orosius with his reappraisal of the entire history of Rome.
Review of Making Christian History: Eusebius of Caesarea and His Readers, by Michael J. Hollerich
Church History, 2022
's Making Christian History examines the influence of the first Ecclesiastical History and the reception of its author, Eusebius of Caesarea (d. 339). Building on previous scholarship, Hollerich asserts that Eusebius invented a new historical genre, though not without earlier influences and antecedents. He notes that the Ecclesiastical History was written in the mold of national histories, conceiving of Christians as a new nation or people, but differed from classical histories in eschewing invented speeches in favor of long quotations from documents, and in introducing a chronology based around imperial reigns and episcopal tenures (32-40). For Eusebius, the Church's orthodoxy did not change but remained consistent from the beginning. As a result, rather than focusing on military and political affairs as most ancient histories do, Eusebius's history finds its primary drama in the struggle against doctrinal error introduced by heretics. Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History "dominated interpretations of early Christianity in both Eastern and Western Christianity" (47) and was much imitated, thanks to its rapid translation from the original Greek into Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and possibly Coptic. Despite his focus on the Ecclesiastical History, Hollerich inevitably gives almost as much attention to Eusebius's Chronicle. In his Chronicle, Eusebius organized historical data upon which he would draw for his Ecclesiastical History, and the two projects together constitute what Hollerich calls Eusebius's "historical diptych" (22). "The first universal synchronism of world history ever written," Eusebius's Chronicle provided a timeline of world history from the life of Abraham divided among "long tables or 'canons' of national dynasties set in parallel columns" (23). Hollerich argues that Eusebius's Chronicle established a distinctly Christian way of looking at world history: Eusebius organized his chronology around nations/ empires, and the Chronicle culminated in the triumph of Christianity within the Roman Empire. It was translated into Syriac (now lost) and is preserved in Latin and Armenian translations. As Hollerich shows, its reception was bound up with the Ecclesiastical History-many later imitators merged universal chronicles and church histories in inventive ways. After introducing Eusebius and his corpus in chapter 1, Hollerich documents how Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History and Chronicle shaped how later generations thought and wrote about church history. Chapter 2 addresses the Ecclesiastical History's manuscript tradition, its Latin translator and continuator Rufinus, and its late antique Greek continuators (Socrates, Sozomen, etc.). Chapter 3 follows Eusebius's works among Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic authors, who had to confront new realities: the rise of Islam challenged Eusebius's triumphalist narrative, and Eusebius's historical model had to be adapted to an eastern church that had fragmented along doctrinal and linguistic lines. Growing divisions also affected the medieval Latin West, the topic of chapter 4, where smaller, national churches became the focus of church historians; Hollerich explores several examples, starting with Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Chapter 5 focuses on Byzantium, where Eusebius's Chronicle remained influential, but church history as a genre went into abeyance until the fourteenth century. Chapter 6 follows the rediscovery of the Greek original of Eusebius's Ecclesiastical 646 Book Reviews and Notes
Christus, Kosmos, Diatribe: Themen der frühen Kirche als Beiträge zu einer historischen Theologie
2005
This book sets out to be a history of Christian worship with a difference. Martin Stringer's field is anthropology and sociology, but, as an undergraduate, he had the opportunity to study liturgy in the theology faculty at Manchester in the days when Kenneth Stevenson and Richard Burton offered a very popular liturgy course at no cost to the university. Stringer is appreciative of the teaching, but notes that the syllabus was heavily text-based-as indeed were most liturgy courses in that era. This study purports to be from a very different perspective, namely, with the recognition that liturgy texts were for worship, and thus performance. After a brief history of the study of liturgy as a discipline, Stringer concludes that today liturgical studies mainly fall into three categories : historical study of rites, such as Stevenson's work on marriage rites ; those of a more social and cultural approach, such as Susan White's study on women in worship ; and those broader studies such as James White's Brief history of Christian worship. Stringer then turns to discuss some postmodern exponents on discourse, such as Foucault and Bourdieu, before setting out his own intention of telling a broader story of worship, with concern beyond the text, looking at performance, devotion and the story of more ordinary members of the congregations. The history is set forth in chapters covering 300 years at a time (though not hard and fast), with kaleidoscopic key themes of discourse, from text and context, to public space, hegemonic worship of empires, cosmological Christianity, devotional discourse, humanistic discourse and globalisation of worship. Like many books of extravagant promise, this book whets the appetite but the author then fails to deliver the goods. To begin with the treatment of the material is extremely uneven, with worship not at all being the main focus of some chapters ; the reader is left wondering whether sacred space, the spread of Christianity or modern mission is the real subject under scrutiny. Second, the work which promises to deliver beyond the text is in fact almost entirely based on secondary sources, some of which are now superseded. There is a certain irony in discussing postmodern writers, only to present a grand narrative based on other grand narratives ; indeed, at times the book reads like a summary of the Grove Liturgical Studies series, with a few liturgical classics thrown in for good measure. Missing are the personal diaries and accounts (other than Egeria) which are absolutely central if the views of the ordinary Christian really are to be reflected. Third, there is too much that is dated and misleading. Few liturgical scholars would attempt single-handed to write a history of
Research has not yet fully agreed on how to define the work attributed to George Synkellos and has not yet sufficiently clarified his motivations or models in writing it at the beginning of the 9th century. Synkellos is studied mostly because his work preserves fragments of the lost chronographical literature from Late Antiquity and because of his relationship with Theophanes Confessor—the most important Greek chronicler of the so-called Dark Ages. This article analyzes the place of Synkellos' work in the ancient and medieval chronographical tradition and offers new analyses and interpretations based on this contextualization. There is no disagreement that George Synkellos is important to the reconstruction of the origins of Christian chronography, although, as shown in the following survey of previous research, his merits have been strongly questioned in modern historiography. This can be attributed to both its patchwork style and its narrow historical scope, covering only the period between the Creation and Diocletian. This article is based on the premise that Synkellos wrote a chronography, as shown by William Adler and Richard Burgess, and not a chronicle, as is often claimed by Byzantinists, and that it must be analyzed in the context of the chronographical tradition. However, although renowned scholars of Late Antiquity and Christian chronography, such as Adler and Burgess, have rightly pointed out the generic affiliation of Synkellos' work, virtually none have approached the impact or significance of the chronographical tradition in Synkellos' own time. Also, it has been assumed, upon considering his work mainly as a chronicle, that Synkellos' aim was merely to produce yet another account of the past ; in this case, a particularly disjointed and unfinished one. Nevertheless, it will be argued that the main purpose of Synkellos' work was polemical, and to my knowledge, this has not yet been sufficiently highlighted. In this sense, his work strongly differs from those by his late antique predecessors, whose purposes were essentially apologetic—and this can be seen as his own contribution to the tradition of Christian chronography. This also reveals that the chronographical genre remained alive in the Greek Middle Ages, but its function and purpose had been updated. It should thus be added to the reference works on Byzantine historiography, from which it is currently absent. This updating in turn can be explained because the chronographical genre, originally conceived as a vehicle for propaganda, in Synkellos' time served an important religious controversy: that of icon veneration. This article will show that the main target of Synkellos' polemical narrative was Eusebius of Caesarea and that this can be explained in light of the religious context of 9th-century Constantinople, which associated Eusebius with iconoclast theology. In order to clarify our understanding of Synkellos' work it is necessary to review some misconceptions about
The hagiographical Experiment: Developing Discourses of Sainthood, ed. by Christa Gray and James Corke-Webster, 2020
This paper deals with late antique vitae whose heroes belonged to the clergy, and particularly with the questions of for whom and for what these texts were written. In order to introduce this issue, however, I will begin with monastic hagiography. While this volume argues that it would go too far to say that the lives of holy monks gave rise to the very idea of writing the stories of the Christian saints, there is not much doubt that they started the interest in those personages whose merits lay in their life, and not in their martyrdom. What was the purpose of these writings? Hippolyte Delehaye, whose name we still quote with reverence and justly so, defined hagiography as literature written in order to launch, promote, or maintain the cult * The research on this article has been supported by a grant from the National Science Centre (Poland, DEC-2013/10/E/HS3/00202) and by the ERC Advanced Grant The Cult of Saints: a Christendom-wide study of its origins, spread and development up to 700 (COS) run by Bryan Ward-Perkins at the University of Oxford with partnership at the University of Warsaw. of a saint. 1 Interestingly, this definition does not fit well with majority of the earliest lives of holy monks. In the Life of Antony, written most probably in the 360s, which set the rules for the genre, we find neither an exact date of its hero's death nor the localisation of his grave which, as the author tells us, remains hidden. 2 Thus two pieces of information essential for the development of the cult, two coordonées hagiographiques, as Delehaye calls them, are missing. Moreover, there are only few miracles in this text and none of them is posthumous. 3 Thus, the Life of Antony was certainly not written to start a cult. Athanasius tells about his purpose directly -he writes in order to provide an example of virtue and askēsis to be followed by those who entered upon a noble rivalry with the monks of Egypt. 4 And the contents of the Life of Antony, including a long sermon addressed to his pupils, show that this was really the goal that the author had in mind. 5 The cultic ambitions, which can be found in several early martyrdoms, are absent from other early vitae as well. There is no trace of them in Jerome's lives of Paul and Malchus, both written not long after the Life of Antony. 6 Only in the last of his monastic vitae, that of Hilarion, dating from the early 390s, does Jerome try to construct the cult of his hero, but even here the parenetic function is dominant. 7 It does not mean that the lives of the holy men of the desert were composed just for the training of the monks, but the monks were certainly an important, intended, and real audience which sought this kind of literature. It suffices to mention the Rule of Benedict, which recommended them to read the vitae patrum, which are 'the instruments whereby well-living and obedient monks attain to virtue '. 8 In this article, I want to raise the question of whether the lives of saintly clerics had a similar function; whether they were written in order to provide their colleagues or followers with a role model. The writing of clerical vitae started quite early. The first life of a bishop, the Vita Cypriani, was composed probably shortly after its protagonist's death in AD 258 and so somehow preceded the heyday of hagiography by over hundred years. Its author, Pontius of Carthage, explains that he aims to describe the life of a man who, not only in his death, but also in his life was an incomparable example to others. 9 Pontius emphasises the priesthood of his hero and claims that since Cyprian was a martyr and bishop he should be honoured more than those martyrs who were simply lay people and catechumens. 10 Still, Cyprian did suffer 1 Hippolyte Delehaye, Les Légendes hagiographiques (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1955, 2nd ed.), 2. 2 Athan. V. Anton. 90-2. 3 Athan. V. Anton. 54-65. 4
Time in Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History: Periodization, Narration, Transitions
Studies in Late Antiquity, 2021
Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History, a seminal late-antique historical narrative, features three periodizations of the church’s past. First, a soteriological periodization divides God’s relationship with humanity at Christ’s Incarnation, an event that Eusebius marks in Book 1 with detailed commentary on the gospels rather than narrative. Second, an ecclesiastical periodization divides pristine, heroic apostolic times from post-apostolic times. The divide between apostolic times and the post-apostolic periods is illustrated through a comparison of History 2.13–17, about Simon Magus, Peter, and Mark, and 6.12, on Serapion of Antioch. And third, an epistemological periodization distinguished earlier times from Eusebius’s lifetime, the latter marked by frequent references to “our time.” Eusebius changed numerous narrative features with his changes of period, including alternating between commentary, diachronic, and synchronic format for different time periods; changing protagonists’ fallibility, individuality, composition of texts, and citation of scripture; and providing notices of episcopal successions and quotation of sources. Moreover, Eusebius’s History changed periods not with the sharp breaks of many modern histories but with gradual transitions. He also underscored key continuities, including God’s intervention in human events and alternation between persecuting and protecting rulers—a continuity within which, contrary to scholarly assumptions, the History never inaugurates a new era with the emergence of Constantine. The case study of Eusebius’s periodization suggests an important limitation of the analytic usefulness of periodizations such as “Late Antiquity” for organizing intellectual history. On p. 610 n. 98, this paper includes a correction to DeVore, "The Only Event Mightier than Everyone's Hope': Classical Historiography and Eusebius' Plague Narrative" (Histos 14, 2020).
The Hagiographic Traditions of Late Antiquity
2018
This undergraduate work of mine provides an overview on the historical genre of hagiography. The paper examines hagiographic texts in the Western and Eastern traditions, as well as its usage in successor states such as Ethiopia and Anglo-Saxon England. Received 95%