by Scott McGill
The paradigmatic status ascribed by scholars to Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History and the apparent conformation to that model by the preserved successors in Greek (Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, and Evagrius) has led to the perception of the genre as essentially an imitation and emulation of Eusebius. Ecclesiastical history then appears as a genre that writes about the recent and contemporary history of the church in general and that continues a preceding history, so as to insert itself into a continuous history from Christ to the end of times. This perception is the product of the choice by later generations to preserve these Greek histories because they were perceived to form an authoritative account of the past and offered together a continuous account from Christ to the sixth century. This is most clearly expressed in the fact that Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, who all wrote about the church in the fourth and early fifth century, were gathered into a single tripartite history by Theodore Lector in 518, who, in turn, inspired a similar work in Latin by Cassiodorus (ca. 540–550). In that authoritative sequence, then, the needs of later readers are found, and not the intentions of the individual authors.
Moreover, the canonization of these four works led to the loss or marginalization of a series of other church histories, whose authors often made other choices for the organization of their material. A church history could take on a monographic character and focus on a single event, as do, for example, the Anonymous of Cyzicus (after 476) on the Council of Nicea (325) and Hesychius of Jerusalem (ca. 434–439) on that of Ephesus (431). Alternatively, the work could be more expansive and include the history of the church from its very origins: Sozomen says he composed an epitome of Eusebius in two books (Church History, Dedication) and, in Syriac, the Miaphysite John of Ephesus started his church history with Caesar (ca. 588), whereas the Nestorian Daniel Bar‐Maryam started with Christ (seventh century). Ecclesiastical historiography could also be local, as demonstrated by the Coptic church history of Alexandria. Finally, ecclesiastical histories could also take the form of compilations, as illustrated by Theodore Lector, Cassiodorus, and Pseudo‐Zachariah (568). Each of these forms could express a particular historiographical strategy: “Supersessionist” accounts such as the one by John of Ephesus allowed a rewriting of the past from the perspective of current orthodoxy; compilations allowed to marshal past authorities for contemporary issues, as did Cassiodorus by selecting episodes to question Justinian’s church policy; monographs could highlight the finding of truth that was challenged by contemporary heretics; local histories could express local identities.
If the genre of ecclesiastical history was internally diversified, its boundaries were fluid. I shall illustrate this by looking at four types of texts that were close enough to ecclesiastical history to be sometimes assimilated to it. First, a singular undertaking was the Christian history by Philip of Side (ca. 426–439), who wrote a narrative history from Adam to his own day. Its title clearly indicates it was consciously not an ecclesiastical history, as it started before the existence of the church. This Christian history can be understood as the combination of church history and “sacred history,” the origins of which were often assigned to Moses.
Second, collections of documents were an omnipresent tool of public argument in late antiquity: Documents were gathered in a sequence, often guided by a brief narrative framework, and served to prove a particular position. The best‐known examples of the genre are the so‐called Historia Arianorum of Athanasius (ca. 295–373) and his Apologia Secunda. Not only were these collections important sources for church historians; they could also be labeled “ecclesiastical history,” as happened with the collection of Timothy the Apollinarian and, probably, with the so‐called ecclesiastical history of the Alexandrian Episcopate (Van Nuffelen 2002a; Bausi and Camplani 2013). As church historians often quoted documents, the transfer of title need not cause surprise. Yet, in these collections the balance was clearly tilted toward documents and against narrative.
Third, Eusebius described his church history as a more extensive version of his chronicle (Eusebius, Church History 1.1.7) and there was, indeed, overlap in content between both genres: Chronicles written by Christians always included ecclesiastical events. Moreover, contrary to what their annalistic format suggests, chronicles could be every inch as argumentative as narrative histories, as is shown at the end of the sixth century by the chronicles of Victor of Tunnuna and John of Biclar, who challenged Justinian’s policy on the Three Chapters. When chronicles took on a narrative form in the sixth century, they started to incorporate material from ecclesiastical history, as John Malalas illustrates. In the Syriac tradition, as we shall see, this led to a division of chronicles into a secular and an ecclesiastical part.
Finally, biography was an important part of late ancient Christian literature production. If hagiography often assimilates itself to history, the similarities with church histories are the greatest in the case of serial biographies – for example, so‐called histories of monks (e.g. Historia monachorum in Aegypto) and collections of martyr accounts. As the example of Eusebius, author of On the Martyrs of Palestine, shows, church historians could write both types of texts, as did Theodoret of Cyrrhus and John of Ephesus. The fact that part of the manuscript tradition of Eusebius’s church history includes the Martyrs of Palestine as a book of the church history, demonstrates that both could be assimilated (Cassin, Debié, and Perrin 2012). At the same time, it is clear that such biographical narratives were seen as distinct from the broader scope of a church history and that monks and martyrs were only part of its subject matter. It is, indeed, striking that the tradition of serial biography of bishops or abbots, best attested for Rome in the Liber pontificalis, is never called a church history in the Greek and Latin tradition, an observation that is, with some exceptions such as the Chronicle of Arbela, also correct for the Syriac tradition.
Ecclesiastical history, thus, interacted creatively with other forms of historical writing, both within and outside the church. This is an obvious reflection of its nature: Being history, it was influenced by what late ancient authors thought was historiography, a tradition that was inherited from classical antiquity; being a history of the church, it had a potential interest in all aspects of ecclesiastical life and was open to the various genres that focused on partial aspects. Ecclesiastical history, therefore, can be defined in a tautology: It is a history of the church, that is, an account of the Christian institution and community in the mold of what was considered to be historiography.
10.3 History and Theology
Scholars have often defined the genre in theological terms, in two respects. First, as a history of the church, it presupposes a view of the Christian community – that is, the church – and it is thus conditioned on an ecclesiology. Second, as histories, church histories express the Christian view about history and about God’s impact on it. Both propositions are correct, if easily overstated. Having to deal with all the components of the church, from bishop to laity, church histories project views of the church. Yet they are not to be read as developing an ecclesiology that would be theoretically coherent. Rather, an ecclesiology is presupposed and shimmers through in the narrative. In other terms, ecclesiastical histories reflect ecclesiology but do not necessarily reflect on it. The most fruitful recent suggestion in this respect is that of Philippe Blaudeau (2006), who sees church histories as reflecting “geo‐ecclesiologies.” In the doctrinal controversies that marked the ancient church, the various patriarchal sees understood themselves as incarnating the right theology, which was, in turn, related to presuppositions on how the relations between the various churches needed to be organized. Ecclesiology thus had a geographical focus. Indeed, church histories usually have a clear geographical focal point, which normally coincides with the see the history implicitly identifies as the norm of orthodoxy. Theodore Lector, for example, has a clearly Constantinopolitan focus, whereas Zachariah Scholasticus (492–495) focuses on Alexandria. Theodoret of Cyrrhus, in turn, has a clearly Antiochean focus.
It is often assumed that ecclesiastical historians hold strong presuppositions about the theology of history. The fundamental aim of church history is defined as tracing the plan of God in history and determining how each event contributes to the history of salvation. This has led to dismissive judgments, for church historians are supposed not to be interested in “real history,” as they already know how events will develop (Timpe 2001; Meier 2004). Such a view relies on a misunderstanding of late ancient theology of history, which generally emphasizes that our human capacities are too limited to fully understand God and, hence, the world. If a church historian (as any late ancient author) believes that the hand of God ultimately lies behind everything, he also affirms his own incapacity to define the precise significance of each event. Indeed, properly theological works are the place to discuss explicitly the meaning of what happens in the world, but history is not the genre to pontificate on the meaning of history. There is more theology of history in Theodoret’s Homilies on Providence than in his Ecclesiastical History. In addition, late ancient historians leave ample space for human causality and do not attribute everything that happens directly to God. Indeed, the Syriac chronicler Pseudo‐Joshua the Stylite engages in extensive reflection on how one can reconcile human and divine causality (Chronicle, preface). As with ecclesiology, ecclesiastical histories are not texts designed to reflect on the theology of history: They start out from assumptions, they reflect on the difficulties of attributing causes to God, man and the devil, and they wonder about the meaning of things, but they never achieve a high level of coherent theoretical reflection. In this, the genre remains true to its vocation of historiography as defined in the ancient tradition – to record truthfully what had happened – but does this within a changing intellectual environment.
10.4 Development
Because of the fractious nature of the late ancient church, there were many different views on its past available. All sides in the debates about orthodoxy and heresy engaged in the writing of history, which could provide proof of the true tradition. The preservation of texts was, obviously, influenced by orthodoxy: In Greek and Latin, preserved histories are Chalcedonian; in Syriac, Miaphysite or Nestorian. Yet, many orthodox works are also lost. While chance certainly was a factor, works with a wider scope and a smaller explicitly polemical intent seem to have had greater chance of survival, as they had a greater interest in the eyes of posterity. In this section, I shall survey the various traditions of ecclesiastical historiography according to language, including the fragmentary material so as to offer as complete an image as possible.
In Greek, the tradition of writing ecclesiastical history seems robust from Eusebius until Evagrius, with the five standard Greek histories. As we have seen, the integration of fragmentary evidence considerably nuances the picture of the genre produced by these five preserved works, and the same can be said for its development. The second generation of historians, Philostorgius, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, consciously start where Eusebius left off. Yet some church histories are attested for the fourth century, such as that by Philo of Carpasia (ca. 375–400), who seemed to have focused on edifying stories about martyrs and confessors (Van Hoof, Manafis, and Van Nuffelen 2017). A late Syriac source attests to a history written for the time from Christ to Constantine by a certain Sabinus the Arian (Nau 1915–1917). He may be identical to Sabinus of Heracleia (second half of the fourth century), a homoiousian, who composed a collection of documents on fourth‐century church history, but the evidence is too limited to build much of an argument from it. As we have seen, Timothy the Apollinarian composed a collection that went under the title of church history. The so‐called Anonymus Arian historiographer is not a church historian but a chronicler who continued an earlier continuation of Eusebius’s Chronicle until 363 (Burgess 1999; Van Nuffelen forthcoming). On the Nicene side evidence is not much better: Alexandria may have produced a history of its see under Theophilus (385–412), but its aspect, as we can gather from the fragments, is that of a collection of documents. Gelasius of Caesarea (d. 395) is said to have composed a church history at the end of the fourth century, but extant fragments indicate a use of Socrates, which turns this into a pseudonymous work (Winkelmann 1966; Van Nuffelen 2002b).
In the fifth century, church history was written when the history of the church seemed to take on its final shape. Philostorgius writes fully aware of the fact that his Eunomian sect is a tiny outlawed minority in the Theodosian Empire and draws on apocalyptic tropes in his last books. Socrates and Sozomen, by contrast, affirm the return of peace after a century‐long struggle against Arianism and other evils. The church history of Theodoret aligns itself at first sight with these works and with the ideology of the Theodosian court. Yet his decision to end his history before the start of the Nestorian controversy, in which he himself was heavily involved on the wrong side, shows that his history reflects strongly on the permanent dangers posed to orthodoxy. Even if these general histories dominate our view of ecclesiastical historiography in the age of Theodosius II, we should not forget that other forms existed, such as the work focused on the council of Ephesus by Hesychius of Jerusalem (Van Hoof, Manafis, and Van Nuffelen 2016).
After the council of Chalcedon (451), we witness a series of ecclesiastical histories of all stripes and colors: The genre now becomes one of the literary genres in which rights and wrongs are claimed. On the Chalcedonian side, histories start with Chalcedon (Basil of Cilicia [after 512], Theodore Lector), whereas Miaphysite histories often went back to the Nestorian controversy (Timothy Aelourus [457–477], John Diacrinomenus [after 512]), thus expressing their view that Chalcedon had actually returned to Nestorius. But other options were available to them: Zachariah Scholasticus started with the run‐up to Chalcedon, whereas John of Aegea (after 488) started with the council of Nicaea. All of these histories are to be dated in the last decades of the fifth and early‐middle sixth century, and there does not seem to have been an immediate forerunner for Evagrius Scholasticus, writing at the very end of the sixth century. Indeed, the ecclesiastical troubles of the second half of the sixth century seem to have spurred the writing of church history in Syriac rather than in Greek, as we shall see below. Evagrius also represents a new, somewhat more settled way of approaching church history: He is willing to use the heretical history of Zachariah as a source of information, thus accepting that truthful and good information can be found there. His narrative is supersessionist, in that it goes back to Nestorianism and covers events already described by others, yet it preserves dissonant voices.
The end of church history in Greek has generated much scholarly interest. The traditional explanation is that, in a Christianized empire, it became increasingly hard to separate ecclesiastical from secular events. As evidence for this, the last book of Evagrius, which is by and large secular in nature, is usually adduced. Yet earlier historians, like Philostorgius and Sozomen, also shifted their narrative toward secular events in the last books, and, as we have seen, ecclesiastical historians pondered the difficulties of separating both realms. It has also been suggested that we witness a shift toward chronicles that started with the Creation, but chronicles and ecclesiastical histories had existed side by side for a long time. The end of the need for an apologetic genre of writing history has also been adduced, but on this account one would expect to see ecclesiastical history resurface at every conflict – for example, iconoclasm (Wallraff 2015). An alternative suggestion would be to think about church history as the social activity of a particular group. Writing a church history implied affirming the church as an autonomous sphere of society and was, therefore, also a form of social self‐affirmation. We see it practiced by clerics or individuals closely aligned with a religious lifestyle. The fact that Socrates, Sozomen, and Evagrius, authors of three of the five preserved Greek histories, were lay persons seems, at first sight, to contradict this suggestion. Yet all of them were closely aligned with religious groups, Evagrius being, for example, legal aide t
o the patriarch of Antioch. It may be, then, that the end of ecclesiastical history in Greek is due to the fact that after the progressive Christianization in the sixth century and the transformations of the state in the “dark” seventh and eighth century, the Byzantine clerical and secular elite were more strongly integrated, thus generating less need for a self‐affirmation of the church as an independent entity.
In Latin, ecclesiastical history never took off, and when it occurs, it is under the influence of the Greek‐speaking East. We have seen that Rufinus translated and updated Eusebius (402–403), a work ordered by Chromatius of Aquileia to serve as a consolation to his flock in the face of recent troubles. In Constantinople, ca. 540–550, Cassiodorus had a Latin compilation made of Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, inspired by a similar work in Greek by Theodore Lector and probably with the aim of finding ammunition against Justinian’s condemnation of the Three Chapters. The breviarium of Liberatus has the same function (ca. 565) and is an ecclesiastical history in all but name. In the ninth century, Anastasius the Librarian (871–874) produced Latin translations of Greek historiographical works for John Hymonides, who intended to produce an ecclesiastical history, but the project never materialized. The only exception is Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, a work inspired by Rufinus and Cassiodorus but original in its outcome: It picks up the Eusebian idea of ecclesiastical history as a narrative of the people of God but transfers this to a single people. By that maneuver, the English become a particular locus of God’s attention and its readers are reminded of the high charge placed on them.