Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/778

Rh 764 CHURCH HISTORY With respect to style, apart from the general canons on the matter derivable from the science of rhetoric, there are one or two special conditions dictated to the church historian by the nature of his subject. He is engaged on a descrip tion of what is a lively and varied panorama of events his model, therefore, should be the picture, not the inven tory. He is dealing with the progress of a divine idea through the ages he is bound to leave a certain impres sion of majesty on the mind of his reader. He is handling matters that concern all men, and that have moved the profoundest and the most passionate natures to the very depth of their being his pages should be alive vth genuine biographical interest and every relevant form of human sympathy. 4. The history of the LITERATURE of the subject divides itself naturally into three periods, which may be called the Unscientific, the Transition, and the Scientific periods. Speaking roughly, the Unscientific period may be said to have lasted until the Reformation, the Transition from the Reformation to the time of Mosheim, and the Scientific since then. The Unscientific period of church history is marked by the absence of impartiality, of thorough criticism, of natural arrangement, and of what, since the days of Polybius, has been called the pragmatic method, i.e., the treatment of historical phenomena with reference to their causes. The idea of the subjection of history to law had not yet emerged. The church especially was governed by arbitrary divine interpositions, whose effects could not, in any degree, be calculated beforehand; and as the conception of general councils as the organs of the Holy Spirit gained ground, that of ecclesiastical events, and particularly doctrine, as developments in the sequence of ordinary cause and effect vanished more completely if that were possible. History was simply a collection of incidents, often incredibly mar vellous, threaded by no connection except that of appear ing to intimate the favour of God for the Catholic Church, and with no other arrangement than the arbitrary one of years, or decades of years, or of the reigns of emperors or popes. This was simply the period of the collection of ma terials for subsequent scientific history to sift and work into proper form. During the six first centuries the Greek Church furnished almost all that was valuable in church history, but after that it ceased to bo productive, and Latin writers took possession of the field. At the head of the Greek School stands Eusebius, bishop of Csesarea in the earlier part of the 4th century, usually called the father of church history, although that title strictly belongs to Hegesippus, who about the middle of the 2d century wrote certain ecclesiastical memorials, all of which have perished, .with the exception of a few fragments mostly preserved by Eusebius himself. The history or chronicle of Euse bius, coining down to 324 A.D., although impaired in value by the writer s avowed resolution to record only what would reflect honour on the church, is rich in material, the archives of the empire having been placed at his com mand by Constantino, who held him in peculiar esteem. The other Greek historians were simply continuators of Eusebius. Socrates and Sozomen brought down the narrative to 439, and Theodoret to 428. Of these Socrates writes the best style, while Theodoret gives most new do cuments and information, especially as to the East. Eva- grius treated of affairs from 431 to 594, while Philostor- gitis, most of whose work is lost, wrote, in the Arian interest, a history from the rise of Arianism to 41^3. The only other Greek historians of any note are Eutychius of Alexandria, about 940, who is chiefly valuable on the relations of Mohammedanism and Christianity, and Nice- phorus Callisti of Constantinople, about 1350, who, with the assistance of the documents in the library of St Sophia, wrote a church history to the end of the 6th century. To these may be added, as completing the Greek sources, the ecclesiastical allusions in the long line of Byzantine civil historians from 500 to 1500. Among the earlier Latin writers, Rufinus translated Eusebius and added an indifferent continuation of his own to the end of the 4th century. Sulpicius Severus, a terse writer, sometimes called the Christian Sallust, wrote a history from the creation to the year 400. Cassiodorus, in the middle of the 4th century, first a Government official of the Ostro-Gothic empire, and latterly prior of a monastery, caused a condensed translation of Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret to be made, which continued to be authoritative until the revival of letters. From this time to the Reforma tion, a great amount of historical material was produced both in the form of chronicles and of special and general history. Among the chroniclers may be mentioned the venerable Bede, Regino, Otto of Freisingen, Hermannus Con- tractus, Lambert of Aschaffenburg, Siegbert of Gemblour, with such anonymous chronicles as that of Monte Casino, the Great Belgian, the Saxon, etc., to which maybe added, although it forms perhaps more of a general history, the Liber Pontificalia, or lives of the popes to 885, of uncer tain authorship. Of the writers of special histories are worthy of mention Gregory of Tours, the historian of the French Church during the 5th and 6th centuries, and the father of French church history ; the venerable Bede, the father of English church history, and its narrator to the middle of the 8th century; Paul the deacon, who did the same office for the same period in the case of the Lombards; Adam of Bremen, the authority for Scan dinavian church history from the 9th to the llth cen tury ; and Kranz, who died the year that witnessed the outbreak of the Reformation, and who furnished sources for the ecclesiastical history of Saxony and Westphalia. Of histories of the universal church during this period may be mentioned those of Haymo of Halberstadt in 840, embracing the four first centuries ; of Odericus Vitalis, from the Christian era to the 12th century ; and of Bartholomew of Lucca to the 14th; while the greatest work of pro- Reformation times on the subject is the Summa Historialis of Antoninus of Florence, narrating events from the crea tion of the world to 1459. All these works, it must be remembered, are full of legends and fables, and exhibit a credulous spirit. The Transition period in church history may be taken as beginning with the Reformation. It was marked on all sides by a more searching and comprehensive survey of the sources, and on some sides by an absence of the credulity, which accepted tradition as genuine, and every act and utterance of the dominant church as divinely guided. It was, however, still for the most part devoid of the spirit of impartiality and of the idea of law as traceable in the succession of events, and consequently recognized no great and gradually evolved crises in history, naturally dividing it into periods. It was an approach to the scientific, without actually reaching it. It was stimulated and aided by the same causes which assisted the Reformation itself. The spirit of inquiry was abroad. Already, in the field of the history of the church, Laurentius Valla had led the way in the direction of true criticism by discrediting the legend of the donation of Constantine, in which he had been fol lowed to a certain extent even by Antoninus. The rise of humanism, consequent on the fall of Constantinople and migration of Greek scholars to the West, had unlocked the store-house of material contained in that language, while the invention of printing, by bringing the sources under the eye of an immensely enlarged and practically unlimited circle of observers, increased proportionally the chances of unpledged criticism. It was the shock of the Reformation