HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

UNIVERSAL HISTORY 300‒1000 27instability and basic indifference of any links between secular powerand the purely spiritual promise of redemption in Christian times.The bishop dismissed the facile triumphalism and convenient presumptionsof some fellow believers, and Orosius joined Jerome asone of them. 31Nonetheless, Orosius salvaged from his tale of calamities a creativestatement of Christian Roman confidence, expressed as a masterlyreconfiguration of universal history. He exploits the possibilitiesof narrative not only to trace the misfortunes of the world from theirstart but also to shape the telling through argument and allegoryinto a new historical vision. Orosius follows Jerome’s framework andprovides a place for all peoples in the pre-Abrahamic landscape bymeans of a comprehensive survey of geography. 32 He moves fromsin as common root, to the world as common theatre, for the economyof calamity, chastisement, reward, and salvation that he meansto trace. Orosius addresses Augustine’s original brief by recountingthe recurrent slaughters and natural disasters of ancient history. Hisseven books unfold both the depths and breadth of human miscreanceand God’s unfailing punishments: misery as its own reward andas the consequence of divine justice. That would have sufficed forthe assigned task, but Jerome’s Chronicle, among other prods, invitedmore than a mere expansion of its most sombre cues. A fundamentalinsight was to seize upon and virtually sacralize the concurrence ofChrist’s transformative entry into history and the rise of the Romanimperial dispensation under Augustus. Orosius configured Jesus’s publicadvent and call to all peoples in terms of the monarchy that ruledthem, and that monarchy itself, whatever the failings of its leaders,assumed from its distant origins the aura of a pre-ordained benefactionand historical culmination. The years from Rome’s foundingpace the subsequent chronology of the world. 33 The arrival of Christunder Augustus begins Orosius’s final book and a new dispensationof favour in which even secular disasters weigh lighter for the comingof the Redeemer.This rosy conceptualization emphasized the progress of Christiantimes over the past, and reflected both a wide optimism and particulareffort by Orosius. Hippolytus of Rome also had noticed the31Cf. Mommsen (1959a); Markus (1988), 1–71; Mommsen (1959b), 287, 297.32Orosius, Historiae I.2, ed. Arnaud-Lindet, 1:13–42. Cf. Janvier (1982).33Orosius, Historiae II.3.5–10, ed. Arnaud-Lindet, 1:89–90.