Michael Hollerich: Valesius and Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History: Scholarship and Politics in the Republic of Letters

As part of a project on the reception of Eusebius of Caesarea's Ecclesiastical History, I am submitting a proposal for a short communication on the critical edition of Eusebius' history published by Henri de Valois (Valesius) in 1659. I will set the edition in its contemporary context, indicate the primary purposes underlying it, and examine selected annotations in the edition that illustrate what features of Eusebius' history particularly drew his attention. I will argue that Valois pitched his project to his ecclesiastical and royal patrons in ways that balanced utility and scholarly impartiality, at a time in French ecclesiastical life when reliable access to tradition was especially important.

Michael Simmons: Exegesis and Hermeneutics in Eusebius of Caesarea's Theophany (Book IV): The Contemporary Fulfillment of Jesus' Prophecies

The original Greek text of Eusebius' Theophany is lost, surviving only in 17 fragments. A Syriac translation of the work written in the early fifth century has preserved all five books. Samuel Lee published the first edition of the Syriac text in 1842 and an English translation with notes the following year. Hugo Gressmann's German translation (1904) published in Band III.2 of the Griechischen Christlichen Schriftsteller compared the Syriac translation of the Theoph. with parallel Greek texts of various Eusebian works, the Greek fragments of the Theophany, and biblical passages, concluding that, on the whole, the Syriac translation is faithful to the original Greek. A number of scholars (Lightfoot [1880]; Gressmann [1904]; Quasten [1975]; Frede [1999]); and Kofsky [2002]) proposed that Theoph.Bk.IV was based on an earlier work devoted to the prophecies of Christ mentioned by Eusebius in the PE I.3. By offering a comparative philological study of the parallel Greek and Syriac passages of Book IV (12 of the 17 fragments come from this book, or 70.58%), this paper analyzes Eusebius' exegetical and hermeneutical method in conjunction with the overarching soteriological argument developed around a number of sub-themes in which he attempts to prove the fulfillment of Christ's predictions in contemporary society, a hermeneutic unique to Eusebius' apologies. A thorough analysis of the exegetical method which Eusebius applies to the 166 scriptural citations found in Book IV may help the modern historian to better understand the venue and purpose of this last apology of the bishop of Caesarea.

James Corke-Webster: The New Eusebius and the Changing Constantine

The 4^th century polymath Eusebius of Caesarea experimented with biography throughout his literary career. The Life of Constantine, his half-biography/half-panegyric chimaera, followed the Ecclesiastical History, a cross between biographical and national history, the collective biography The Martyrs of Palestine and the lost Life of Pamphilus, an idealised memorial of his mentor. This paper will use the last decade’s explosion of interest in Eusebius’ literary capacities to assess the changing portraits of Constantine in the Ecclesiastical History and the Life. In Books 9 and 10 of the Ecclesiastical History, largely complete by 316, Constantine is the climax of a work that presents the church to Eusebius’ audience of elite 4^th century Christians as the locus of traditional Roman values. Constantine enters Rome in triumph as the ideal Roman general and bringer of stability after civil war. He is not the first Christian emperor (Philip the Arab and perhaps Tiberius precede him); he is the ideal Roman emperor, ideal because of his privileged relationship with the divine. He is a figure of hope come to fill a seat prepared for him through Books 1-8. The Life of Constantine, a new biography of a familiar subject, is a celebration of that hope realised over twenty years later. Eusebius is not longer holding aloft a “Great Imperial Hope” to convince an audience of the inevitability of Christianity’s inheritance of the Roman Empire. He is now constructing an ideal exemplar of a Christian emperor in action rather than in expectation.

Devin Singh: Indolent Tyrants: A Eusebian Critique

This paper first introduces the workshop theme, laying out the significance of exploring notions of labor in light of patristic apocalyptic discourse. It then turns to Eusebius’ critique of tyrants in his veneration of Constantine, as explored primarily in the Vita Constantini. Eusebius distinguishes the tyrannical rule of Constantine’s predecessors in part by their use of resources and lack of willingness to display largesse to their subjects. Tyrants are rapacious, gluttonous, slothful, selfish, and exploitative, directing the resources of their territories to their own treasuries, and undermining the productivity of their subjects. In fact, their injustice is so great that generosity is inverted in their realms, becoming instead a crime. Tyrannical economies leach resources from the governed, negate exchange relations marked by surplus, and remove altruistic purpose from labor.
Eusebius’ portrayal of such tyranny is couched in a narrative of Constantinian fulfillment of redemption history, as the hand of God, sovereign over the political and economic unification of Rome, has installed the Christian emperor over a new form of economy. The emperor, whose reign is modeled after that of the Father and the Logos, demonstrates the proper use of resources and forges a territorial space of work, accumulation, and redistribution that reflects a higher, divine form of cosmic governance and resource allocation. Eusebius thus fashions a template of governance that includes attention to the resources of the realm and the dynamics of imperial labor and accumulation, legitimating such policies theologically, and forging a Western theopolitical legacy that must be examined.

Dan Batovici: The 'Petrine corpus' in Clement, Origen, and Eusebius

This paper is part of a larger project inquiring into the nature of the authority enjoyed for several centuries by early Christian texts which eventually were not included in the New Testament. The aim of the paper is to offer an assessment of the use of the works circulating under the name of Peter (the Gospel, the Acts, the Apocalypse, and also the canonical letters) in the works of the three Patristic authors in the title. Notoriously, Eusebius explicitly bases his own classification of Christian texts on the classification he finds in Origen’s works and he also offers an account of Clement’s take on the authority of several non-NT texts. Although the there is a vast literature on the (formation of the) New Testament canon, and also an important one devoted to the apocryphal literature, there is still the need assess the authority of such 'marginal' texts in early Patristic authors and to compare it with the perhaps 'marginal' texts of the New Testament. This paper does just that, on a a small sample of texts, the 'Petrine corpus'.

Erika Manders: Imperial foundations of the Christian Church: the building of imperial churches and the notion of agency in the fourth century AD

In his Vita Constantini (3.30-32), Eusebius records a letter of the emperor Constantine to Macarius, the bishop of Jerusalem. This letter informs us not only about the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in particular, but also, by describing the role of the different actors in the creation of a Christian cult place linked to the emperor, about the building of ‘imperial churches' in general. In this paper, the concept ‘imperial church' will be examined and the notion of agency regarding the construction of these churches will be investigated. The focus lies on imperial churches built in Rome, Constantinople, other imperial residence cities, and in the Holy Land in the fourth century AD, when the bishops emerged on the worldly stage of power. With the help of literary as well as archaeological evidence the following questions will be answered:
1. Which Christian cult places can be considered imperial churches and why?
2. Which roles did central authorities (the emperor) and local authorities (e.g. provincial governors, bishops) play in the building of imperial churches?
Through mapping the extent to which different actors influenced the construction of imperial churches, I hope to provide more insights into the positions of power of different types of leaders and into the role of church building in their legitimization strategies.

Jared Secord: WS Galen and the Theodotians: Embryology and Adoptionism in the Christian Schools of Rome

Eusebius preserves the claim, derived from an unknown author of the third century, that Galen was “worshipped” by the Theodotians, a group of Roman Christians with serious intellectual pretensions (HE 5.28.14). This paper disputes two common points made in previous interpretations of the passage. First, there is no reason to believe that Galen had any personal connection with the Theodotians, much less that he played a significant role in the development of their program of study, as has been claimed. Galen, the paper demonstrates, had no patience for amateur scholars from non-elite backgrounds, and he would thus have had nothing to do with the banausic Theodotians, whose founder was a leather-worker by profession. Second, and notwithstanding the paper’s first argument, the claim that the Theodotians worshipped Galen is a probable sign of their interest in medical subjects, contrary to suggestions that they were only interested in the Pergamene physician’s works on logic and philosophy. The Theodotians, the paper argues, had good reason to be interested in the research of Galen and other doctors, particularly in the area of embryology. For the Theodotians were proponents of an Adoptionist Christology, and thus concerned themselves with the circumstances of Jesus’ birth, and his development in the womb. To illustrate this possible link between Adoptionism and Embryology, the paper points to some similarities between Galen’s De Foetuum Formatione and the account of the Theodotians’ Adoptionist position in the Refutatio of pseudo-Hippolytus.

Sébastien Morlet: Eusèbe le grammairien. A propos des Questions évangéliques. Eusebius the grammarian. A note on the Quaestiones evangelicae.

A stricking and previously unnoticed parallel between Eusebius' Quaestiones evangelicae and a scholion on Pindar shows the importance of the grammatical (more than rhetorical) approach in this work. Eusebius obviously uses greek grammatikê as a tool to solve textual problems. This observation could lead to new hypotheses concerning his education and culture, and new evaluations of the literal exegesis in his works.

Sébastien Morlet - « Un nouveau fragment du traité de Porphyre contre les chrétiens ? (A new fragment of Porphyry’s Against the Christians ?) »

The paper discusses the possibility that an attack against Origen, transmitted by Marcellus of Ancyra and quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea, may derive from Porphyry’s Against the Christians. Though it is possible that Marcellus is the author of this criticism, there are also good reasons to assume that Porphyry may be behind the text quoted by Eusebius.

Christian Müller - Die Synode von Mailand 355, Eusebius von Vercelli und die Folgen

Die Synode von Mailand 355 sollte nach dem Willen des Kaisers Constantius II. die endgültige Verurteilung des Athanasius und deren reichsweite Anerkennung besiegeln. Doch es kam anders: Manche Bischöfe verweigerten die Verurteilung und gingen ins Exil, das wiederum neue Kontakte zu Athanasius und Gleichgesinnten mit sich brachte.

Der Vortrag betrachtet die Rolle des Eusebius von Vercelli in diesen ungeplanten, aber folgenreichen Verwicklungen. Dazu werden zunächst die Ereignisse rund um die Synode von Mailand 355 in kritischer Auseinandersetzung mit bisherigen Versuchen (Brennecke, Williams, Simonetti u. a.) rekonstruiert, wodurch Bedeutung und Eigenständigkeit des Eusebius erkennbar werden. Anschließend wird Eusebius von Vercellis Situation im Exil skizziert, wobei für die Echtheit des in der Forschung umstrittenen Briefes an Gregor von Elvira argumentiert wird. In einem Ausblick wird seine Rolle auf der Synode von Alexandria 362 und in den weiteren Jahren umrissen, aus denen wir nur noch indirekte Informationen, aber keine Schriften des Eusebius besitzen. 

Insgesamt wird so die Bedeutung des Eusebius als Vermittler zwischen Ost und West und als »confessor« im arianischen Streit neu akzentuiert.

Konstantinos Georgiadis - Eusebius of Caesarea, the father of the byzantine iconoclasm (according to the Records of the 7th Ecumenical Synod)

Following the philological, historical and theological argumentation of the Greek and Latin Fathers of the 7^th Ecumenical Synod, which are vindicated today on the basis of modern scientific proves, my short announcement would include and explain the following positions:

The hierarchs of the 7^th Ecumenical Synod call in question the value of Eusebius as a theologian, but not as an approved historian.

Eusebius couldn't propose the removal of the holy icons from the Christian churches. He knows that this ecclesiastical tradition is so ancient as the Old Testament. However, he doesn’ t believe that the icons are holy, part of the body of Christ. For him, the icons are only a kind of religious art.

The Arianizing Eusebius of Caesarea, introducing the notion of “φύσει μείζων Πατὴρ καὶ ἐλλάσσων Υἱὸς” reveals his faith that the described “θεῖον ἐνσημαινόμενον” of the holy icons, the Christ, is a created being, with the consequence that, in his mind, the veneration of the holy icons implies idolatry. Moreover, his Christological malevolence concerning the “ἐξόλων ὅλῃ μεταβολὴ” of the human nature of Christ and its ἀπόθεσις in the divinity after the Resurrection involves in principle the devaluation of the whole human nature of Christ and subsequently the devaluation of the his individual human elements, especially those περιγραπτόν. Therefore, the ἔνσαρκος Θεὸς Λόγος is deemed as indescribable, in which case also his holy icons are identified in an analogous way as a shadowy impression of him.

The reasoning of the iconoclasts of the synod of Hiereia (754) is encountered in the epistle of Eusebius of Caesaria “Πρὸς Κωνσταντίαν” and undertaken to be substantiated within the common use of the interrelated biblical passages 2 Cor 5:16 and Phil 3:21.  Therefore, the issue of Iconoclasm is concerned most especially with its idea about the πρωτότυπον of the holy icons.  For the Iconoclasts, nothing remains, after the Resurrection, of the created nature either of Christ or even of the saints, with the result that it is not possible for it to be described conjecturally.

The theory of Eusebius concerning the holy icons does not derive from the ancient Hellenic philosophy, the dualism of Plato or Plotinus, because none of them was against the material art. In a multi- cultural Byzantine Empire, ideological currents are encountered emanating as much from the Greco-Roman world as from the mysticism of the East. The inherent Gnosticism or Manicheanism in the subconscious of the Eusebius and iconoclasts is the main, perhaps even only, root cause of their heresy.

Aaron Johnson - Porphyry's Letter to Anebo among the Christians: Augustine vs. Eusebius

The primary witnesses to Porphyry’s fragmentary Letter to Anebo are Eusebius (Praep.ev. 5 and 14), Iamblichus (de Myst.), and Augustine (Civ.Dei 10.11).  The modern editor, A. R. Sodano, claimed that Eusebius was untrustworthy as a witness to the proper ordering of the fragments (Lettera ad Anebo (Naples: L’Arte tipographica, 1958), XLVI-XLVII).  The paper proposed here seeks to investigate the issue.  It will conclude that Eusebius is, indeed, a reliable source; for, Iamblichus admits to re-organizing Porphyry’s material in his own response in the de Myst., and there is good reason to believe that Augustine was a following Iamblichus (or more likely an intermediary source).

Martin Wallraff - The Canon Tables of the Psalms. An unknown work of Eusebius of Caesarea

Eusebius’ Canon Tables are well known. Lavishly decorated, they can be found in many medieval gospel books. Their purpose is to help finding parallels in the four gospels. However, it is less known the Eusebius also drew up a system of “canon tables” for the psalms. This system is much less sophisticated, but it may be an important pre-stage of the famous gospel synopsis. It is significant both for the early history of illuminated Christian books and for the history of exegesis.

Georgia Frank - Gazing upon the Feet: The Ascension of Jesus in Fourth- and Fifth-Century Preaching and Pilgrimage

This paper examines the role of the senses in ancient Christian retellings of Jesus’ ascension to heaven (Luke 24:50-53; Acts 1:9-10). The episode prompted later interpreters to focus on the apostles’ sensory perceptions, who were the last to see Jesus with the “eyes of the body,” and those of the angels, who first saw Jesus in heaven. As this paper shall argue, both preachers and pilgrims puzzled over what value--if any-- the physical senses might still hold for lay Christians in a post-Ascension world.  This paper shall focus on sermons from the Feast of the Ascension by John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, and Proclus of Constantinople, as well as the writings about the rituals at the holy site, as described by Eusebius, Egeria, Cyril of Jerusalem and Paulinus of Nola). 

Scott Manor - Proclus: The North African Montanist?

It is generally taken for granted that Proclus was the leader of a Montanist faction in Rome.  This is due primarily to the evidence provided by Eusebius, who speaks of a work entitled Dialogue against Proclus, composed by a certain Gaius of Rome during the pontificate of Zephyrinus (HE 2.25.6-7; 3.28.1-2; 3.31.4; 6.20.3).  In turn, the brief notices and few quotations that Eusebius preserves of the Dialogue with Proclus have been understood as bearing direct attestation to Roman Montanism during the early years of the third century C.E.  Given the paucity of evidence concerning Roman Montanism at this time, Gaius’ Dialogue with Proclus is generally considered to be of immense value.

Yet while Eusebius makes it clear that Gaius was a representative of Roman orthodoxy, he never claims that Proclus also resided in this capital city.  Other early sources also speak of Proclus, but none of these allude to his Roman provenance.  

In this paper I shall argue that the extant evidence concerning this Montanist leader does not lead to the conclusion that Proclus was located in Rome, but rather that he was a representative of Montanism in North Africa.  In particular, it will be demonstrated that the citations Eusebius preserves from Gaius’ refutation actually exclude the possibility that he was located in Rome.  The Eusebian evidence also suggests that Proclus maintained eschatological views that approximated those of Tertullian in Carthage (Adv. Marc. 3.24).  Furthermore, the evidence from Tertullian suggests that he knew Proclus personally (Adv. Val. 5).  Thus, not only does the available evidence lead away from the conclusion that Proclus was Rome, it also raises some interesting considerations for the subject of Montanism in Rome at the beginning of the third century.

Marika Rose - The Significance of Michel Foucault for Approaches to Patristics - Response and Reflections

Patristics is not only a study of the past but a practice which, speaking for theologically authoritative sources, has its own sort of authority and carries its own theological weight. Foucault offers to patristics a set of tools which may be used not only for examining the past but also for reflecting critically on the practice of patristics itself.

The papers themselves illustrate this in the way that they relate to contemporary theological issues. Athanasius is not the last theologian to repackage theological innovation as nothing more than the rearticulation of tradition. Yet Newheiser's unpicking of the narrative of a univocal tradition itself reflects a contemporary interest in diversity and multiplicity, which claims to speak on behalf of those excluded and marginalised by Christian orthodoxy. This move too is an exercise of a particular sort of productive power. 

Ever since Nietzsche declared the 'death of God', Christian theology has struggled to reclaim ground lost to secular philosophy. Elgendy's discussion of the relationship between Nyssen's practices of the self to Foucault's political project of freedom fits nicely with the contemporary interest in 'the theological turn' in continental philosophy, which both picks up on explicit theological themes in contemporary philosophers and argues for the indebtedness of contemporary philosophy to ancient theological concepts. This theological reclamation of contemporary philosophers can serve a range of theological interests.

Singh's paper plays most directly into the question of methodological self-reflection: just as for Eusebius, the representation of the Father by the Son plays into wider questions of social and political representation, so contemporary patristics scholars represent the Fathers to the rest of the academic and ecclesiastical world, and they would do well to consider the ways in which such representations are inevitably social and political in their implications.

James Corke-Webster - A Literary Historian: Eusebius of Caesarea and the Martyrs of Lyons

Eusebius of Caesarea’s historical writings are the primary gateway through which we approach the first three centuries of the early Christian church. Although Eusebius has received attention from many different angles, insufficient attention has been paid to his writing techniques. My paper here will build on the recent work of two scholars who have drawn attention to Eusebius’ skills of composition. Doron Mendels, in his 1999 work The Media Revolution of Early Christianity, has drawn attention to Eusebius’ skill at massaging his pericopes to suit the context, and his appreciation of the power of martyr stories within narrative for his audience. More recently, in a 2002 article, Erica Carotenuto has argued that Eusebius is demonstrably fabricating an incident in The Martyrs of Palestine, creating a fictional account by combining and repeating material drawn from two other separate stories in that work. 

It is in the light of these insights that I intend to read the intriguing letter from the churches in Lyons and Vienne, an allegedly 2^nd C document which Eusebius says he is simply transmitting in book 5 of his Ecclesiastical History, but which continues to exercise scholars. Having noted the problems of dating inherent in the extant transmission of the letter, and a series of historical criticisms identified by James Thompson back in 1912, I will then demonstrate the literary similarities between this document and martyr stories Eusebius composes for himself (in book 8 of the Ecclesiastical History and The Martyrs of Palestine), in particular his characterisations of the martyrs and the portrait of the “persecuting” governor. The stories about Apphianus (chapter 4) and the companions of Pamphilus (chapter 11) in The Martyrs of Palestine prove particularly interesting parallels. By noting these narrative and linguistic similarities, I suggest, not only will we shed further light on the letter from the churches in Lyons and Vienne, one of the most important documents for our studies of the second century; we will also begin to appreciate better Eusebius’ own style of composition and his particularly literary endeavour.

Gregory Robbins - "Number Determinate is Kept Concealed" (Dante, Paradiso XXIX.126-145): Eusebius and the Transformation of the List (E.H. III.25)

This communication takes as its point of departure an insightful comment by Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams to assess the upshot Eusebius’ Chronicle, his visual rendering of history.  They note, “Reading the Hexapla column against column, in other words, taught Eusebius to compare texts word by word.  And the evidence that Eusebius turned up as he did so forced him to admit that no single authoritative chronology of the world could be drawn from the Old Testament.  Eusebius read the Hexapla as Origen had meant it to be read:  as a treasury of exegetical materials, some of them perplexing, rather than an effort to provide a stable perfect text of the Bible.  By doing so, he turned chronology from a fixed, perfect armature for the history of the world into an open, hotly debated discipline” (Christianity and the Transformation of the Book, pp.169-170, emphasis mine).  I wish to make a similar claim about Eusebius’ promise in H.E. III.3.3 “to indicate successively which of the orthodox writers in each period used any of the contested writings, and what they said about the ‘encovenanted’ and acknowledged writings and about those which are not,” and the categorizations he proffered in III.25.  As Eusebius surveyed the Christian textual landscape, he could not, unlike his Jewish counterpart, Josephus, provide a finite list of authoritative, sacred books (H.E. III.10.1-5).  Scholars have noted that his rhetoric of enumeration in III.25 is hardly perspicuous; his catalogue of Christian writings is maddeningly imprecise in its precision.  I suggest that Eusebius, the “impresario of the codex” (Grafton/Williams) initiated a new discipline (imperfectly construed as “the canon debate”).  His discussion, the almost-visualized arrangement of H.E. III.25 must be seen as a step in a process Umberto Eco (The Infinity of Lists) characterizes as “exchanges between list and form,” transformations for which Eusebius is justly famous.  

Sean Hill - Genesis Six in Early Christian Racial Discourse

In the face of Roman accusations of novelty, Christian authors often used the Old Testament to form their own narrative of descent and establish Christianity as the possessor of true cultural heritage.  This paper adds to the literature on ethnic reasoning in early Christianity by providing a case study on the exegesis of a specific series of verses: Genesis 6:1-4. These verses describe how the “sons of God,” usually understood by Christians to be fallen angels, were overcome by the beauty of human women and took them as wives.  The illicit offspring of these relationships provided an ideally degrading set of spiritual and ideological ancestors which Christian authors identified as the founding figures of Graeco-Roman religion.  By focusing on the exegeses of Eusebius, Justin Martyr, Lactantius, and Commodianus in contrast to the pagan philosopher Porphyry, this paper investigates the role of ancestry and ethnic reasoning in early Christianity.

The theoretical approach taken in this paper relies on recent work done by Aaron Johnson and Denise Buell on ethnicity in early Christian discourse.  Buell, in particular, notes the importance of ancestry for membership in an ethnic group and how Christians such as Justin Martyr used the language of descent to create a group identity.  At the same time, the fluidity of belief and practice as elements of “Christianness” contrasts the fixity of membership by heritage.  

Using the exegesis of Genesis 6:1-4 as a case study, this paper investigates the model of ethno-racial reasoning as an integral part of early Christian discourse. Ultimately, I argue that the ethnic argumentation in the rhetoric surrounding Genesis 6 is a response to the Roman accusation of novelty in an attempt to characterize the pantheon as void of any respectable genealogy.  In this particular case, it is difficult to claim that Christianity created a dialogue of ethnicity and genealogy on its own since it relied on existing Roman ideals of antiquity.  Perhaps more significant is that early Christians used Scripture to engage in the Roman ethnic discourse.  Building on the notion of ethnic reasoning discussed in recent patristic scholarship, I will argue that the language of ethnic reasoning played a central role in early Christian rhetoric.

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.