Article,
Eusebius as Political Theologian: The Legend Continues
Harvard Theological Review, (2015)
DOI: 10.1017/S0017816015000073
Abstract
It was Franz Overbeck who, in his attack on Harnack, referred to Eusebius's work as “that of a hairdresser for the emperor's theological periwig,” and the eminent historian Jacob Burckhardt who declared Eusebius to be “the most objectionable of all eulogists” and “first thoroughly dishonest historian of antiquity.” The summary judgment of such luminaries has aided the tendency to write off the bishop of Caesarea as a hopeless ideologue. In recent decades, a shift has been underway to recalibrate the picture we have of Eusebius, with robust scholarship arguing in support of his work as an historian and biblical scholar. The aim has been in part to distance Eusebius from Constantine, a proximity that is the source of much of the modern consternation with the bishop, given modernity's own genealogical unease with the relation between religion and politics. Whatever Eusebius's actual relations with the emperor, however, his rhetoric of apparently unequivocal exaltation of Constantine endures. Yet this, too, requires reassessment.
