sign in sign up
<<
Home , Origen

chapter 7 in (Eusebios, Theodoretos, Cyril)

Sébastien Morlet

Eusebios of (c. 260–339/340 AD) is the first Christian writer to quote a text by Plutarch.*,1 Plutarch was used by the Christians from the time of Clement of (c. 150–215 AD), but the latter never mentions his name. Origen (c. 185–254 AD) also knew and used Plutarch, but mentions his name only once, in his Against (c. 248 AD), in a remark relating to Plutarch’s On the :

Now, that miraculous appearances have sometimes been witnessed by human beings is related by the Greeks; and not only by those of them who might be suspected of composing fabulous narratives, but also by those who have given every evidence of being genuine philosophers, and of having related with perfect truth what had happened to them. Accounts of this kind we have read in the writings of Chrysippus of Soli, and also some things of the same kind in ; as well as in some of the more recent writers who lived a very short time ago, as in the treatise of Plutarch of Chaeronea On the soul, and in the second book of the work of Numenius the Pythagorean On the incorruptibility of the soul. Now, when such accounts are related by the Greeks, and especially by the phi- losophers among them, they are not received with mockery and ridicule, nor regarded as fictions and fables.2

Origen is here suggesting a possible apologetic use of Plutarch, which would be widely developed by his spiritual pupil, Eusebios, though the possibility

* This text is dedicated to the memory of Professor Françoise Frazier. In 2004, she invited me to write a paper on the reception of Plutarch in Eusebios’ Preparation for the for a workshop organised in Toulouse. She has remained a close friend and colleague ever since. 1 On the Christian reception of Plutarch in antiquity, see Whittaker (1981); La Matina (1988); Fernández Ardanaz (1993); Bonazzi (2000); Bouton-Touboulic (2005); Morlet (2005). Regarding the Christian reception of philosophy in general, see Morlet (2014). 2  5.5.57 (tr. F. Crombie).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004409446_009 120 Morlet remains that Origen already used Plutarch in this way in another lost work (see below).

1 Eusebios of Caesarea

Eusebios is a major figure of Christian antiquity.3 Probably born and educat- ed in Caesarea (Palestine), in the last years of the third century AD, he met there the priest Pamphilus, who was known to have been the pupil of , who had been himself one of Origen’s students. Pamphilus was an admirer of Origen’s thought and dedicated his life to collecting, copying, and editing the master’s works. Pamphilus was also a teacher and probably had a cru- cial influence on Eusebios’ theological and exegetical education.4 In 303, the “Great Persecution” broke out. Pamphilus was arrested and put to in 310. Eusebios escaped martyrdom and soon after the end of the persecution (313) he became bishop of Caesarea. We know almost nothing about his activ- ity until the beginning of the Arian crisis, at the beginning of the 320s. Then, Eusebios set himself against ’ opponents. He subscribed to the Nicaean creed (325) but dedicated the end of his life to the struggle against the adver- saries of (Athanasius , Marcellus of Ancyra), though he was not himself an “Arian” strictly speaking. He seems to have been very close to the Emperor Constantine, whose counsellor he may have been occasionally. Eusebios played a major role in the constitution of Christian literature. Although he is mostly famous as a historian, writer of the first History of the church and of the first preserved Christian Chronicle, he was also a biographer, a biblical scholar and a polemicist. He wrote a Life of Pamphilus, today lost, and an influential Life of Constantine after the death of the emperor in 337. He composed the first (partially but extensively) preserved commentaries on the Psalms and on Isaiah and he made several tools for the study of the , such as the Onomasticon (a lexicon of the toponyms of the ) and the Evangelical canons (ten tables giving all the parallel passages in the ). As a polemicist, he wrote against the , first in the tenth book of the General elementary introduction, now lost, and in the twofold work Against Marcellus-Ecclesiastical theology, intended against Marcellus’ theology, which

3 On Eusebios, see Schwartz (1907); Wallace-Hadrill (1960); Sirinelli (1961); Moreau (1966); Barnes (1981); Attridge-Hata (1992); Perrone (1995); Fusco (1998); Johnson (2006a); Morlet (2009); Inowlocki-Zamagni (2011); Morlet (2012a). 4 See Morlet (2011).