Eusebius as Political Theologian

The Legend Continues

Dados Bibliográficos

ID20291802
AutoresDevin Singh (0000-0003-4146-877X, Yale University, autor correspondente)
Ano2015
Volume108
Fascículo1
Páginas129-154
Data de publicação2015-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoHarvard Theological Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0017-8160 • E-ISSN: 1475-4517
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0017816015000073
OpenAlexW2115536628
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas17
Referências citadas26

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

Ancient history · Art · Emperor · Epistemology · Ideology · Legend · Literature · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Relation (database) · Rhetoric · Scholarship · Theology · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Law · Philosophy