Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/758

Rh 722 E U S E B I U S at the dictation of the emperor. After the Council he con tinued to identify himself with the fortunes of the Arian rather than of the Athanasian party, and his great favour at court and his influence with the imperial authorities enabled him to protect the one party at the expense of the other. It is this personal attitude which has mainly identified him with Arianism. In so far as he was a partisan, and lent himself to the persecution of the &quot; orthodox &quot; or Athauasians, the conduct of Eusebius is deserving of the censure that has been bestowed upon it. But it is to be remembered that from his own theological stand-point he was disposed to regard the treatment of Arius by his opponents as indefensible, and to consider his opinions as tenable within the church. In short the Athanasians were to him the innovators in doctrine rather than Arius, who only maintained a stand-point that many had held in the church before him, even if he rest lessly drew unfounded conclusions from it, whereas the Athauasian development evidently appeared to Eusebius to go beyond the older and less determinate doctrine in which he had been trained. The special defect of Eusebius seems to have been a lack of that spiritual and speculative insight which sees the true drift of opinions, and detects below the surface of language a true from a false. line of development of Christian thought. As Dorner says of the theological position at the time, it was clear that the church had arrived at a point at which it could not stand still, but must choose one or other of two courses, either to take a step in advance and define the indefinite, or to go back wards either into heathenism or into Judaism. The opinions of Eusebius himself may be summarized as follows. God is with him One, or the Monas, exalted in his supreme essence above all plurality. He is Being abso lutely, TO &quot;Oi/, or the primal substance, r/ -n-pwrrj Ova-ia. Thus essentially conceived, God is infinitely above the world, His relation to which is in and through the Son, &quot; who is the image of the invisible, the first born of every creature &quot; (Col. i. 15). He would have substituted the Greek of the latter expression, irpwTOTOKos Trao-^s KTiVews, instead of the formula finally adopted in the Nicene creed, that the Son is o^oou o-ios TW irarpi, &quot;of the same sub stance with the Father.&quot; But in no sense did he recognize the ; Son as Himself a creature or as sprung like other creatures, owe cWwv. He was not &quot; the same as the Father, of equal power and glory,&quot; because the idea of the Divine is conceivably complete in God as One; but He was begotten of the Father before all worlds or seons. He was in a true sense dvapxos, &quot; without beginning in time.&quot; Eusebius repudiated therefore the Arian formula, &quot; There was a time when the Son was not/ he could even say, &quot;the Son was always with the Father,&quot; r&amp;lt;3 Trarpi d&amp;gt;s vlov 8ia TTUVTO? a-vvovra (Dem. Ev., 4, 8), yet he&quot; shrunk from calling the Son owcuStos or &quot;co-eternal&quot; with the Father. While holding, in short, in his own sense to the true divinity of the Son, he shrunk from attempting to define either with the Arians or the Athanasians the relation between the Father and the Son, as beyond human conception. The nearest image by which the relation could be conceived was that of eLSta (Dem. Ev., 4, 3), or the relation between a flower and its perfume. He seems to have preferred this to the image of light and its brightness, or &quot; light of light,&quot; although both this phrase and the associated phrase &quot;God of God&quot; surviving in the Nicene creed were in the original &quot; profes sion of faith &quot; which he submitted to the council From this brief statement it is evident that Eusebius was not himself doctrinally an Arian, however he may have favoured the Arian party. He was separated from it on the essential point, that the Son was in no sense a creature or made, ef OVK OI/TWK The name Exoucontian, by- which the Arians came to be specifically known, could never have been applied to him. On the other hand, he is separated from the Athanasians chiefly by the twofold conception of Deity, now as the semi-Platonic Monas or &quot;Of, abiding in un approachable self-existence, and now as the Divine Father self -revealing Himself in the Son, and in the world created by the Son. As his mind dwelt on the idea of Deity pure and simple, or as absolute Being, he seems to have recoiled from the identity of the Supreme God with the Logos; but as he dwelt on the idea of the Divine in relation to the ivorlJ, he saw in the Logos or Son the full expression of the Divine the organ or power through whom all created exist ence is called into being. There is, in other words, with him a : sensus eminens &quot; in which God is One, alone in power and glory; but the Christian or revealed conception of God is nevertheless acknowledged by him as Trinitarian. Ac cording to Dorner s explanation of the Eusebian theology, &quot;God s being a Trinity depends on II is will. At the same time this does not mean that God might be other than Trinitarian, for it is impossible to God not to will the perfect.&quot; These views of Eusebius are chiefly contained in his well- known Dcmonstratio Evangelica, in the first book of his lately discovered treatise on the Theophania, and in his treatise against Marcellus, who in extreme reaction from Arianism taught a doctrine approaching Sabellianism. It only remains further to add that Eusebius is undoubt edly more of a writer and critic than of a thinker. He is admitted to have excelled in mere erudition all the church fathers, hardly excepting Origen and Jerome. But his writings are arid and artificial in style, with an air of com pilation rather than of original power. His Ecclesiastical History is destitute of method or graphic interest of any kind, but is a valuable repertory of the opinions of the Christian writers of the 2d or 3d century, whose works have otherwise perished. It has been charged with person ality and inaccuracy by Gibbon, but without adequate evi dence. (See general estimate of Eusebius as an historian, article CHURCH HISTORY, vol. v., p. 764.) The personal rela tions of Eusebius to Constantine have been, like other points of his life, variously judged. He was undoubtedly more of a courtier than was becoming in a Christian bishop, and in his Life of Comtantine has written an extravagant panegyric rather than a biography of the emperor. Altogetherhe is a conspicuous and significant, rather than a great or noble figure in the history of the church. Of Eusebius s works the most important are the following : 1. The Ecclesiastical History, in tea books, comprising the history of the church from the ascension of Christ to the defeat and death of Licinius, 324 A.D. 2. The Chronicon, in two hooks, com prising an historical sketch, with chronological tahles, of the most important events in the history of the world from the days of Abraham till the twentieth year of the reign of Constantine. This work, which is one of great importance in the study of ancient history, was published in its complete form for the first time at Milan in 181 8. 3. The Pracpa.ra.tio Evangehca, in fifteen books, a collection of facts and quotations from the work of nearly all the philosophers of antiquity, intended to prepare the reader s mind for the acceptance of the Christian evidences. 4. The Dcmonstratio Evangdica, in twenty hooks, of which ten are extant, a learned and valuable treatise on the evidences themselves. It is intended to complete the Christian argument for which the previ ous work was a preparation. In addition there are various minor works of Eusebius, viz., the Thcopliania, in four b^pks, translated from a Syriac MS., discovered by Tattarnin an Italian monastery in 1839 ; his treatises against Marcellus in two books, and against Hierocles ; his life of Constantine DC vita Constantini, and his 0-iwmasticon, a description of the towns and places mentioned in Holy Scripture, arranged in alphabetical order. For accounts of Eusebius himself and his opinions, see Herzog s Ency., s. voc.; Schaff, Church Hist., ii. 872-9 ; Introd. to Lee s translation of the Thr.ophania; Dorner s Hist, of the Person of Christ, ii. 217, el scq., Translation in Clark s Foreign Theological Library. (J. T.) EUSEBIUS, of Emesa, a learned ecclesiastic of the Greek church, was born at Edessa about the beginning of the 4th century. After receiving his early education in