Devin Singh - "Disciplining Eusebius: Discursive Power and Representation of the Court Theologian"

Given the predominant tendency to discount his work as historian and theologian in light of his apparent political punditry, recent scholarship has sought to rebalance the picture we have of Eusebius of Caesarea. Attempts are made to situate Eusebius’s more well known panegyric and apologetic works in the context of his theological writings and biblical commentary.  Of note is the simultaneous move in such revisions to distance Eusebius from Constantine while asserting his scholarly integrity and theological merit. It is as if a mutual exclusivity exists between Eusebius as reliable historian and theologian of substance on one hand and political theologian of the empire on the other. This reception history of Eusebius offers an example of the interrelations of power and discourse as explored by Foucault. In problematizing the typical dichotomy introduced in the scholarship, this paper explores the nature of power as productive, as constitutive of knowledge and not merely as repressive or limiting. In particular, I examine ways to conceive how Eusebius’s broader corpus functions together with his politicized writings, how indeed a zone of indistinction exists between the political and theological in his work. I argue that this blurring of boundaries is instructive for considering the nature of theological discourse in general, and what is perhaps blatantly obvious in Eusebius marks a characteristic of all theological speech. This debate about how precisely Eusebius should be represented opens up onto a conversation about representation itself and its critical importance in the thought of Eusebius. Following Foucault’s intuitions about examining the episteme or representational regime of an era, I consider how the idea of representation, expressed theologically, is linked to broader socio-theoretical concerns in Eusebius (and his contemporaries).  For Eusebius, representation of the Father by the Son is tied to questions of imperial, ecclesiastical, and artistic representation. Critical is how power functions over distances and divides (God/creation, emperor/empire, bishop/church, prototype/image) through representational mediators.  Resituating Eusebius with nuanced sensitivity to discursive power, so as to take seriously both the theological and political in his thought, therefore, provides new conceptual vantage points for considering themes central to his work.