Eusebius of Caesarea's Representations of Christ, Constantine, and Rome

The fourth-century historian Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, lived during the anti-Christian persecutions of the Roman emperor Maximinus Daia and believed fervently that Jesus Christ would imminently return to alleviate the suffering of God's people. When Constantine the Great became emperor and converted to Christianity, the bishop's disposition towards the 'last things' or end times, known as eschatology, suddenly changed to a belief that God's kingdom had already been inaugurated in this emperor's reign. In this way, Eusebius conflated Church and Empire into a single organism governed by the emperor on behalf of Christ. This article demonstrates that this disposition in fact emerged from the bishop's problematic Christology. Heretofore, the concept of the Logos had been applied to Son of God as creator of the world and who assumed human nature as Jesus. However, Eusebius' disposition towards the Logos was subordinationist and dissociative, thus paving the way for him to depict the emperor as an agent of, and inhabited by, the Logos in the eschatological working out of earthly affairs from the vantage point of the city of Rome. Eusebius therefore essentially replaced Christ's eschatological agency in the usurpation of the Church by the eternal city that was ultimately recapitulated within Constantine himself, even after the latter had died

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