HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

UNIVERSAL HISTORY 300‒1000 25thought varied from the skeletal but meaningful arrangement of historicaldata, to the focused treatment of the logic and particularexpressions of divine providence, often in the context of biblical exegesis.Jerome’s engagement with Eusebius reflected his preoccupationto explain and translate the Bible, as well as the need to interpretthe roots and terms of the history that Christians had acquired andmade. His contemporary Sulpicius Severus also traced a seamless yetrelentlessly sacred Chronicle (A.D. 400) from Creation to the present,and especially emphasized the continuum of recent holy experienceby joining the travails of the prophets to those of the church in asingle narrative. 25 Sulpicius worked out the prophetic vision of Daniel2 for the first time in a historiographical context: he parsed the metalcolossus of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream into the four great historicalmonarchies, from the golden head of Chaldea, via the silver andbronze of Persia and Macedonia, to Rome’s feet of clay and iron,all of which Christ, as the smiting stone, brings to nothing. Sulpicius’ssectarian focus and even prudery toward alien, secular forces—bethey heretics, Jews, or the Roman state—almost never widen beyondthe narrow path to salvation, and left his eloquent but promptly forgottennarrative unsuited for more broadly engaging what God andmen had wrought. 26Jerome’s efforts had the reach to deal positively with both, andtriggered interpretive echoes. His own concise exegesis of Daniel (A.D.407) reconfigured the basic identifications followed by Sulpicius inlight of the real progress, as it seemed to many, that the Romanworld had witnessed in and since Constantine’s conversion. Jeromeexplicitly accented God’s hand as the force behind the sweep ofworld empires, and emphasized the confluence of the prior ones inthe final monarchy of Rome, under which Christ himself had establishedworship of the true God for many and Jewish cult had expired. 27Without illusions as to setbacks, Jerome could see, with Eusebius,the progress of God’s purposes under the aegis of imperial Rome. 28For the future, his exegesis vested the continuance of the empire25Sulpicius arranged his work as two parts separated at the end of Old Testamenthistories, 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles.26Cf. von den Brincken (1957), 71–76.27Cf. Jerome, In Danielem 2, 21a; 2, 31/35; 7, 7b; 11, 24; ed. F. Glorie, CCSL75A (Turnhout, 1958), 787, 794, 843, 875.28Kelly (1975), 72–75, 175–77.