HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor
HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor
UNIVERSAL HISTORY 300‒1000 19positively to advance claims to authority and antiquity. By the endof the second century A.D., Clement of Alexandria could build onthe efforts of numerous predecessors, including co-opted Jewish learning,to assert the temporal and logical priority of Christian revelation.He compared biblical time-spans with parallel evidence forAssyrian, Egyptian, and Greek history and showed that God’s revealedtruth predated and nourished Greek philosophy. Outward-lookingargument claimed title by precedence and suggested the practicalreach of sacred chronology and the common human roots traced inBible. Both the origin and end of time figured in the Chronographyof Julius Africanus, who, after schooling in Alexandria, elaboratedthe first, broadly framed Christian treatement of world-historical data(ca. A.D. 217). In addition to showing Old Testament priority bymeans of its synchronies with other world history, Africanus explicitlyfixed Christ’s birth in the year 5,500 from Creation, based onbiblical sums that he confirmed—as Nero’s identity is revealed inthe Apocalypse—by symbolical substitution. The coherence of biblicalhistory invited typological proofs, whose hallmark was to bridge thedivide of the Incarnation, where ancient foreshadowings resolve inthe Christian “fullness of time”. 6 To start, Africanus presupposed alifespan for the world of 7,000 years, and followed in that an establishedcosmic remapping of the Six Days of Creation, plus a Sabbathof Rest, which literally accounted “a day in God’s sight as a thousandyears” (cf. Ps. 89:4; 2 Pet. 3:8). Christ, the Beginning and Endof Creation (cf. Rev. 21:6), thus died in his Passion at the half pointof the sixth day of the week ( John 19:14), and so the Incarnation ofthe 5,500th year coincided with its own sacramental fulfillment inthe final week and day of the Saviour’s earthly work. Africanus, alayman in imperial service, cribbed this ambitious typological keyfrom the Commentary on Daniel (ca. A.D. 204) of Hippolytus, a rigoristpresbyter and later schismatic bishop of Rome, who himself issueda tightly focused Chronicle in A.D. 234, near the end of a life markedby confessional strife, secular persecution, and his own major summationof church liturgy and discipline, the Apostolic Tradition (A.D. 215).Hippolytus and Africanus together bear witness to an intense preoccupationwith the details of history, as number and symbolicalconfirmation, deployed to address the situation of believers in time.6Gal. 4:4. On the Bible and its interpretation, see de Lubac (1959–64).
20 MICHAEL I. ALLENFrom the flux of the agreed sixth millennium, Hippolytus fixed hisfollowers, and a wider readership, in the 5,738th year of the worldand, thereby, removed to an emphatically unnamed (and perhapsunknowable) distance the spectre of the cosmic end (cf. Acts 1:7).The bishop’s pronouncement on time bent attention back to theimperatives of continued communal existence. 7 Where Hippolytusacted with pastoral specificity, Africanus integrated broader historicaldetail, the rhetoric of precedence, the logic of typology, and evenfresh, if sketchy, speculation on a safely distant seventh millennium.Africanus wrought the first comprehensive, if now fragmentary, visionof world time, and meant therein to push its end from proximity.In doing both, he drew together the possibilities suggested by thefundamental biblical narrative and also the time-bound concerns andexegetical methods of his contemporaries. These, in rapid sketch,were the terms and beginnings of a new historical idiom.EusebiusThis Christian universal history embraced the inhabited world (theHellenistic oikoumêne) and counted time from Creation, based on theBible and parallel secular evidence. It showed a pragmatic engagementwith this same world, both as a place of learning and as thevessel of salvation. One century later, Eusebius of Caesarea stillpraised Africanus’s monumental exactitude, 8 but, more important, hefollowed and greatly expanded his exemplar. The translations andre-applications of Eusebius’s results and ideas, especially by St. Jerome(†ca. 419), would determine the content and shape of most strandsof universal historical writing in the Latin West.Eusebius (ca. 260–339) first approached history from the standpointof a biblical exegete and only afterwards as a leading ecclesiasticin a new, assertively Christian imperial dispensation. Duringthe scholar’s long tenure as bishop (from ca. 312), Constantine theGreat (306–337) successively snuffed out competing co-rulers anddefinitively ended the recurrent and recently disastrous state-sponsoredpersecutions that had always complicated Christian-Roman7Haeusler (1980), 7–11; Altaner and Stuiber (1966), 166–67, 209–10.8Historia ecclesiastica VI.31.2.
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- Page 11 and 12: 2 DEBORAH MAUSKOPF DELIYANNISMuch o
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20 MICHAEL I. ALLENFrom the flux of the agreed sixth millennium, Hippolytus fixed hisfollowers, and a wider readership, in the 5,738th year of the worldand, thereby, removed to an emphatically unnamed (and perhapsunknowable) distance the spectre of the cosmic end (cf. Acts 1:7).The bishop’s pronouncement on time bent attention back to theimperatives of continued communal existence. 7 Where Hippolytusacted with pastoral specificity, Africanus integrated broader historicaldetail, the rhetoric of precedence, the logic of typology, and evenfresh, if sketchy, speculation on a safely distant seventh millennium.Africanus wrought the first comprehensive, if now fragmentary, visionof world time, and meant therein to push its end from proximity.In doing both, he drew together the possibilities suggested by thefundamental biblical narrative and also the time-bound concerns andexegetical methods of his contemporaries. These, in rapid sketch,were the terms and beginnings of a new historical idiom.EusebiusThis Christian universal history embraced the inhabited world (theHellenistic oikoumêne) and counted time from Creation, based on theBible and parallel secular evidence. It showed a pragmatic engagementwith this same world, both as a place of learning and as thevessel of salvation. One century later, Eusebius of Caesarea stillpraised Africanus’s monumental exactitude, 8 but, more important, hefollowed and greatly expanded his exemplar. The translations andre-applications of Eusebius’s results and ideas, especially by St. Jerome(†ca. 419), would determine the content and shape of most strandsof universal historical writing in the Latin West.Eusebius (ca. 260–339) first approached history from the standpointof a biblical exegete and only afterwards as a leading ecclesiasticin a new, assertively Christian imperial dispensation. Duringthe scholar’s long tenure as bishop (from ca. 312), Constantine theGreat (306–337) successively snuffed out competing co-rulers anddefinitively ended the recurrent and recently disastrous state-sponsoredpersecutions that had always complicated Christian-Roman7Haeusler (1980), 7–11; Altaner and Stuiber (1966), 166–67, 209–10.8Historia ecclesiastica VI.31.2.
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