so-called Chronographia, he produced an outline of the history of five major nations: the Assyrians, Hebrews, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. In calculating the reigns of these nations’ rulers, he engaged in some critical discussions of the systems used for dating. The chronological differences among the Greek, Hebrew, and Samaritan texts were discussed with Eusebius generally opting for the LXX calculations. In his so-called Chronicon, Eusebius utilized a series of parallel columns for presenting the synchronism of the various empires. He took the birth of Abraham as his fixed point for reckoning and placed this in 3,184 anno mundi. The flood was dated to 2,242 and the exodus 505 years after the birth of Abraham. By choosing Abraham as the beginning point in his calculations, Eusebius thus partially sidestepped the LXX/Hebrew chronological problems, since the major differences are found in the early chapters of Genesis.34
Eusebius did not produce his chronology in any hope of detailing the coming of the eschatological end-time, nor did he, like Africanus, work with any world-age scheme. Uncertainty about the times and seasons, he wrote, applies “not merely to the final cataclysm but to all times.” For him, “chronology was something between an exact science and an instrument of propaganda.”35 Eusebius’s career spanned the time that saw the church move from a persecuted sect to a state institution. His days were times of triumph for Christianity and Eusebius’s writings affirm this as the providential purpose of God whose action in human affairs was the real nucleus of the historical process.
Eusebius was not only the ablest of the ancient Christian chronographers, he was also the father of ecclesiastical history. Eusebius was the first to produce a history of the church—which for him extended from the incarnation until his own day, in which the savior had wrought a great and final deliverance and destroyed the enemies of true religion. In approaching his subject, Eusebius confessed, in the first chapter of his Ecclesiastical History, that “as the first of those that have entered upon the subject, we are attempting a kind of trackless and unbeaten path.” In executing his narration of church history, Eusebius spoke of the fragmentary knowledge of the past and the evidence available.
We are totally unable to find even the bare vestiges of those who may have travelled the way before us; unless, perhaps, what is only presented in the slight intimations, which some in different ways have transmitted to us in certain partial narratives of the times in which they lived; who, raising their voices before us, like torches at a distance, and as looking down from some commanding height, call out and exhort us where we should walk, and whither direct our course with certainty and safety. Whatsoever, therefore, we deem likely to be advantageous to the proposed subject, we shall endeavour to reduce to a compact body by historical narration. For this purpose we have collected the materials that have been scattered by our predecessors, and culled, as from some intellectual meadows, the appropriate extracts from ancient authors. (1.1)
In carrying out this procedure, Eusebius made a lasting contribution to Western historiography.
A new chapter of historiography begins with Eusebius not only because he invented ecclesiastical history, but because he wrote it with a documentation that is utterly different from that of pagan historians.36
Over one hundred works are cited directly or referred to as read by Eusebius. It is true, as Eusebius’s critics have frequently noted, that his intellectual qualifications were somewhat defective, that he sometimes suppressed that which might disgrace religion, that he occasionally misquoted sources, and that he sometimes failed to note that his quoted documents were contradictory. Nonetheless, Eusebius realized that the writing of history is dependent upon the reading and discriminating study of the documents of the past. Considering the number of spurious documents he chose not to utilize, one must judge Eusebius an outstanding source critic for his age.
Eusebius wrote his works in the glow of Christianity’s newly acquired status. In the glare of the conflagration kindled by the barbarian invasion of the Roman empire, Augustine (354–430 CE), the converted ex-teacher of rhetoric, sought to gather the whole of human history into a theological-eschatological framework. Christianity, like the empire, found itself on the defensive in the days of Augustine, and he launched a counter-offensive against paganism’s attempts to lay the blame for the empire’s troubles on the steps of the church. For the later Augustine, any attempt to present the Roman empire in messianic terms would have constituted a heresy of the first order.
Augustine took the six-day scheme of creation and transposed these into a sixfold periodization of sacred history, the history of De civitate dei versus De civitate terrena: Just as there were six days of creation, so there were six ages of history: the first from Adam to the flood, the second from the flood to Abraham, the next three (as outlined in St Matthew’s gospel) from Abraham to David, from David to the Babylonian captivity, and from the Babylonian captivity to the birth of Christ. Then came the sixth age, in which the human mind was recreated in the image of God, just as on the sixth day of creation humandkind was created in the image of God. In this age men now lived (De civitate dei 22.30). The time from Adam to Noah constituted the first day and saw the light of a promised redeemer given to the fallen parents of the human race. The second day—the period of childhood—extended from Noah to Abraham with the ark as the symbol of the promise of salvation. From Abraham to David was the third day of youthful adolescence, and, as God has separated the waters on the third day, so he in this age separated the chosen people from the heathen masses. From David to the exile was the day of early manhood. The period of full manhood—the fifth day—extended from the scattering of the chosen people until the coming of the Messiah. The period of old age—the sixth day—was the age of Christian salvation with its new Adam (Jesus) and its new Eve (the church). The seventh day, corresponding to the divine sabbath, would dawn with the return of Christ in glory to establish a peace that would know no end. Augustine thus placed his own time within the waning period of the sixth day. That day had dawned with John the Baptist, with Christ’s incarnation the sun had risen, and with the spread of Christianity noonday had arrived. The sun had now begun its descent and senility set in but Augustine warned against precise speculation on the arrival of sunset.
In Augustine’s schematization, a number of factors are of significance. (1) He is not so much concerned with history as with the philosophy of history. (2) It is sacred history, the history of De civitate dei, that is important, not the outer events or occurrences nor human actions and causality. (3) The past of humankind and of Israel and Judah are of importance only as the prelude to the age of redemption, which itself is only a prelude to that final timeless period of total salvation and damnation. (4) Augustine’s vision embodies a penultimate pessimism about his own day, which was the age of senility, the time before the end. (5) Augustine sought “to direct man’s gaze from the contemplation of himself and the achievements of his reason upwards to the majesty of God.”37
In The City of God, Augustine had attempted to prove that the calamities that had befallen the Romans were not limited to the period of the church and, whenever they had occurred, were the result of the corruption of manners and the vices of the soul. The expansion of this thesis he bequeathed to his contemporary and admirer, Orosius. The latter’s Historiarum adversus paganos libri septem, completed in 418 CE, was an attempt “to trace the beginning and man’s wretchedness from the beginning of man’s sin” (1.1). Orosius prefaced his main discussion with a description of Asia, Europe, and Africa, thus manifesting a recognition of the importance of geography for history (as had Caesar, Cicero, and Sallust). Orosius’s work is important for subsequent historiography not because he “set forth . . . the desires and punishments of sinful men, the struggles of the world and the judgments of God, from the beginning of the world down to the present day, that is, during five thousand six hundred and eighteen years” (7.43), but because of his particular periodization of world history. According to Orosius, there had existed four world empires: Babylon, Macedon, Carthage, and Rome. His thesis is no doubt based on a particular interpretation of the four empires in Daniel (Babylonian, Persian, Median, and Greek), which identified the fourth empire with Rome. However, Orosius took a far more favorable attitude towards the Roman empire than his idol Augustine. For him, the iron teeth and claws of the fourth beast were a deterrent to the barbarians and the antichrist.
