Eusebius of Caesarea’s Representations of Christ, Constantine, and Rome: An ‘Eschatology of Replacement’

Abstract

The fourth-century historian Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea, lived during the anti-Christian persecutions of the Roman emperor Maximinus Daia and believed fervently that Jesus Christ would imminently return to alleviate the suffering of God’s people. When Constantine the Great became emperor and converted to Christianity, the bishop’s disposition towards the ‘last things’ or end times, known as eschatology, suddenly changed to a belief that God’s kingdom had already been inaugurated in this emperor’s reign. In this way, Eusebius conflated Church and Empire into a single organism governed by the emperor on behalf of Christ. This article demonstrates that this disposition in fact emerged from the bishop’s problematic Christology. Heretofore, the concept of the Logos had been applied to Son of God as creator of the world and who assumed human nature as Jesus. However, Eusebius’ disposition towards the Logos was subordinationist and dissociative, thus paving the way for him to depict the emperor as an agent of, and inhabited by, the Logos in the eschatological working out of earthly affairs from the vantage point of the city of Rome. Eusebius therefore essentially replaced Christ’s eschatological agency in the usurpation of the Church by the eternal city that was ultimately recapitulated within Constantine himself, even after the latter had died.

1. Introduction

This article argues that the early fourth-century Church historian Eusebius of Caesarea’s vision of the end of the historical continuum—what we could call his view of eschatology, the study of the ‘last things’—changed with his interpretation of the improved circumstances of the Church during the reign of Constantine the Great. Constantine was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity from 312 onwards, and Eusebius’ changed disposition affected his views on both the Church as the body of Christ and the Roman empire that had heretofore persecuted Christians. Initially believing in the imminent second coming of Christ, the changed circumstances led him to replace Christ with the advent of the Christian emperor in a kingdom that conflated Church and empire, as exhibited by his later works written between 335 and 337. These include the three orations On Christ’s Sepulchre, In Praise of Constantine, and Oration to the Assembly of the Saints (probably written after 337) and, more specifically, his Life of Constantine, which was published in 339, just two years after the emperor’s death in 337. The main contention of this article is that Eusebius’ ‘eschatology of replacement’ perceived in the emperor Constantine and his reign all of the qualities of the kingdom of God that had ‘not yet’ been fulfilled by Christ in the Church. This is made abundantly clear in his Life of Constantine, which—along with the aforementioned orations—exhibits Eusebius’s perception of the emperor as an agent of Jesus, the Son and Logos of God, in the eschatological working out of earthly affairs.

These themes have already been explored by scholarship, most notably in Glenn F. Chesnut’s work The First Christian Histories, which describes Eusebius’ eschatological depiction of Constantine as coming ‘perilously close … to giving him Christlike honours’ (Chesnut 1986, p. 161). As we shall see, many scholars tend to think of Eusebius as trying to articulate the simultaneous relationship and distinction between Constantine and the divine Logos, which, with various degrees of success, gave due credit to the achievements of the former while maintaining the exalted status of the latter as the only-begotten Son of God (Roldanus 2006, p. 61). The use of Logos (Λόγος) terminology by Eusebius is important. Taken from the prologue of John’s Gospel, which was completed in the late first century AD, the word has an ancient pedigree in the Greek philosophical tradition insofar as it refers to human reason as well as to a cosmic organisational principle or force that gives meaning and purpose to reality. Indeed, the ‘rational’ in humans and in the cosmos were here often related. In applying the term to Jesus, the author of John’s Gospel nuanced Christ’s relationship to the world as the Son of God in a way that became indispensable to the earliest Christian thinkers, including the apologists (e.g., Justin Martyr) and Eusebius.

This article contributes to contemporary scholarship by demonstrating that the aforementioned approach towards Eusebius’ view of Constantine—which distinguishes the emperor from the Logos in a way that maintains the divine status of the latter—does not adequately account for the hyperbolic eschatological emphasis that Eusebius placed on him in the Life of Constantine, which seems to portray him as an eschatological ruler inspired without intermediary by the Logos and whose reign overshadows both the role of the Church as Christ’s body and his second coming. This leads, I will argue, to his tacit articulation of what I have called an ‘eschatology of replacement’.

2. Review of Eusebian Scholarship and Its Assessment of Eschatology

Modern scholarship has explored some of the most significant aspects of Eusebius’ thought, including: his theological endeavours, philosophical presuppositions, and imperial panegyric of the emperor Constantine (and his sons) that inheres within his historiography. That his historiography cannot be separated from his theological, philosophical, and panegyrical enterprises has been thoroughly demonstrated and can generally be traced back to D. S. Wallace-Hadrill’s seminal monograph Eusebius of Caesarea.

Published in 1960, Eusebius of Caesarea begins with a contextualisation of Eusebius’ biblical interpretation before turning to his involvement in the Arian controversy and his view of Greek philosophy. The work then gives a brief analysis of his Chronicle and Ecclesiastical History as providing evidence for his historical method before culminating in a section on God’s providence in history. In this section, Wallace-Hadrill affirmed that Eusebius came to view history as providentially designed to culminate in Constantine’s reign, ‘finding in the earthly rule of Constantine elements which are derived from the heavenly rule of God himself’. According to Wallace-Hadrill, this perception had already begun to dawn on Eusebius when he wrote the Ecclesiastical History, which fulminates against the millenarian or chiliastic beliefs that were ‘widely held during the two preceding centuries, pointing as they did to a very different culmination’ (Wallace-Hadrill 1960, p. 187). Millenarianism, the belief that, at the end of the present world order, Jesus Christ would return to rule specifically for a thousand years—a millennium—with his saints in a blissful kingdom on earth, is based on a literalistic reading of Revelation 20:3–4 and 6 that does not consider the symbolism of the number ten and multiplications thereof. According to Grant R. Osborne, ‘multiples of ten were commonly used by Jewish writings symbolically, and it is likely that this [thousand years] refers to an indefinite but perfect period of time’ (Osborne 2002, p. 701).

Regretfully, Wallace-Hadrill dedicated a mere three pages to Eusebius’ eschatology in Eusebius of Caesarea and limited the scope of his investigation to the bishop’s denunciation of the millenarian beliefs of some early Christian writers. Nevertheless, he expertly demonstrated the complexity of Eusebius’ thought and the need to take more than just his penchant for ‘Church history’ into account. His approach to the Eusebian corpus concluded with an assessment of the integration of the various disciplines explored by the bishop—historical, biblical, philosophical, and theological—in his very final treatise the Theophany, which, as its title suggests, is mainly concerned with the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ (Wallace-Hadrill 1960, p. 195). In 1961, Jean Sirinelli published a monograph in French entitled Les vues historiques d’Eusèbe de Césarée durant la période prénicéenne (The Historical Views of Eusebius of Caesarea during the Pre-Nicene Period), where, in a review of the Theophany, he affirmed:

The second coming is treated by Eusebius as not an essential event, and even less like a culminating event, but only as one element which plays a symmetrical part as that of the theophanies of the Old Testament, compared to the first coming.

(Sirinelli 1961, p. 472)

This implies that Eusebius, having addressed the theme of the realisation of God’s kingdom in the reign of the emperor in his second last treatise the Life of Constantine, was not especially concerned with the belief in the second coming of Christ in his final work the Theophany; thus the marginalisation of its significance.

Perhaps the most comprehensive illustration of Eusebius’ eschatology can be found in Glenn F. Chesnut’s The First Christian Histories: Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret and Evagrius, published for the first time in 1977 (Chesnut 1986, repr.). Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the Eusebian corpus, Chesnut gave an illustration of the Hellenistic ruler cult in the ancient world and the Hebraic tradition of apocalypticism in order to demonstrate just how Eusebius synthesised them in his depiction of Constantine as the eschatological ‘emperor of the last days’ (Chesnut 1986, p. 164). In his formulation of this eschatological vision, Chesnut briefly delineated what he believed was Eusebius’ Origenist Christology that contributed to his description of the emperor. Moreover, he alluded to the ancient ‘combat myth,’ without explicitly mentioning it or unravelling its implications, by referring to the ‘dragon-slayer’ motif as an apocalyptic image that ‘fitted smoothly into Eusebius’ eschatology and the role he assigned in it to Constantine’ (Chesnut 1986, p. 171). The angle taken by Chesnut was for the most part neglected by the scholarship that immediately followed. In 1981, T. D. Barnes published Constantine and Eusebius, which was an impressive achievement that examined the main features of both Constantine and Eusebius’ immediate historical context, especially with reference to the latter’s view of the former. Unfortunately, the work contained only scant references to Eusebius’ eschatology, none of which sufficiently accounted for the bishop’s depiction of Constantine’s reign as the dawn of the eschatological age (Barnes 1981, pp. 101, 172–73).

In 1987, Frank S. Thielman published an important article entitled ‘Another Look at the Eschatology of Eusebius of Caesarea,’ which attempted to summarise and critique the so-called scholarly consensus on Eusebian eschatology. At the beginning of the article, Thielman observed that many scholars, including Wallace-Hadrill, Sirinelli, Chesnut, W. H. C. Frend, and to a lesser extent Barnes, believed that Eusebius saw in Constantine’s reign the fulfilment of God’s eschatological promise. This was in stark contrast to Eusebius’ earlier works, which exhibit what he calls an ‘end-time eschatology’ that was associated with Christ’s imminent second coming which, Thielman wrote, was emphasised by Eusebius in order to remind those persecuted by the Roman authorities that their sorrow would soon be reprieved by the return of Jesus (Thielman 1987, p. 228). Thielman claimed that the above-mentioned scholars described Eusebius’ view of the second coming as ‘a traditional and rather unwelcome appendage to the climax of history in the triumph of the Church,’ and that they unanimously agreed that Eusebius’ thought evolved from ‘end time eschatology’—as reflected from his early belief in the imminence of the second coming of Christ—to a ‘realised’ eschatology on account of the improved circumstances of the Church in the Roman Empire. He believed that this consensus stemmed from their overemphasis of ‘Eusebius’ disgust with millenarianism’ (Thielman 1987, p. 235).

There has in fact been a tendency among scholars, ever since Norman Cohn’s watershed achievement The Pursuit of the Millennium published in 1957—which Chesnut, for example, extensively engaged with in his exposition of the Constantinian antecedents for the tradition of the ‘emperor of the last days’ (Thielman 1987, p. 196)—to describe the eschatology of the early Church in almost exclusively millenarian terms. This reductionist approach towards eschatology—which does not consider the symbolism of the number ten—became widespread in academic circles ever since the publication of Cohn’s Pursuit. Its influence is manifested in a 1993 article by Avihu Zakai and Anya Mali entitled ‘Time, History and Eschatology: Ecclesiastical History from Eusebius to Augustine,’ which alludes to Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium throughout without actually referencing it. The two authors declared that the preponderant eschatological theme in the early Church was ‘a Christian theology of millenarianism,’ which included the ‘Christian themes of the parousia (Second Coming)’ (Zakai and Mali 1993, p. 403). The word ‘parousia’ (παρουσία), however, primarily means ‘presence’ and is not a concept that can be circumscribed by its secondary meaning, that of the ‘appearance’ or ‘manifestation’ (i.e., the second coming) of Christ at the eschaton (Lampe 1961, p. 1043). Far from being relegated to a singular meaning, the eschaton referred to the immanence of Christ’s presence in the Church which would be fulfilled at his second coming or parousia, which is when the perfect reign of Christ would occur. This is known as the ‘already/not yet’ tension: God’s kingdom having already come in the Church that Christ has established as his body but has not yet consummated, which will happen at the eschaton.

Thielman, who does not address the early Church’s disposition towards the eschaton directly, was therefore correct when he affirmed that ‘the conceptions of a literal millennium and of the second coming are entirely separate from Eusebius’ thought’—with the bishop in fact condemning the former and espousing the latter (Thielman 1987, p. 235). He concluded that the ‘realised’ eschatology of Eusebius espoused by scholars must be tempered by a more comprehensive view of the bishop’s eschatological vision that includes his belief in the second coming, which, despite not being mentioned in his later works, ‘was a common theme in his writings from first to last’ (ibid.). However, there are inconsistencies in Thielman’s assessment of the pre-existing scholarship that misrepresents some of the authors he criticised. For example, he accused Wallace-Hadrill and Chesnut of adhering too rigidly to a ‘realised’ eschatological scheme in Eusebius, which, he asserted, should be viewed in light of his belief in the second coming. But these claims are exaggerated. Wallace-Hadrill’s sparse references to Eusebian eschatology do not permit such an observation, and Chesnut deliberately framed this realised eschatology within the scope of the second coming at the ‘last things,’ which, he affirmed, Eusebius believed would immediately follow Constantine’s reign (Chesnut 1986, pp. 173–74). In any case, it is important to note that this form of realised eschatology was not without its discontents in the apologists who predated Eusebius. This has been amply demonstrated by Erik Peterson in his essay ‘Christ as Imperator’ (Peterson 2011, pp. 143–50).

The reality is that most of these scholars writing in the second half of the twentieth century arrived at a similar conclusion to M. J. Hollerich, who asserted that, although the evidence for Eusebius’ eschatological interpretation of Constantine and his Empire is convincing, his eschatology is nevertheless ‘too flexible to be confined to the present prosperity of the Constantinian regime’ (Hollerich 1999, p. 197). More recent scholarship since the 2000s, however, has not undertaken any thoroughgoing examinations of Eusebius’ eschatology per se. There are indeed some scant references. For example, in Oded Irshai’s ‘Fourth Century Christian Palestinian Politics’ we read that Eusebius dropped his heretofore adherence to ‘realised eschatology’ with the rise of Constantine (Irshai 2011, p. 26), which is inconsistent with the argument that we have been making thus far: that he in fact adhered to realised eschatology precisely when he perceived that God’s kingdom had come in Constantine’s reign. Related to this, Jeremy M. Schott has delineated Eusebius’ politicisation of Christian spiritual warfare in his Christianity, Empire, and the Making of Religion in Late Antiquity (Schott 2008, pp. 157–58), but he does not mention eschatology at all.

There has also been a general tendency to treat eschatology in relation to Eusebius’ historiography, which explains why it has not been addressed in much detail. For example, a recent article by Jason M. Scarborough entitled ‘Primitive, Unique and True: Eusebius and the Legacy of His Ecclesiastical History’ expounds upon the significance of the Christian notion of a culmination to history in the bishop’s Ecclesiastical History (Scarborough 2009, pp. 79, 85). But there are no references to the eschaton here. It is Noel Lenski who returns to the theme of Eusebius representing Constantine as a god in his book Constantine and the Cities:

With the white glare of this rhetoric, Eusebius blurs many boundaries here: that between emperor and god, between temporal rule and cosmic order, and between Christian and pagan solar theism. Through his dynasty, Constantine has become a god unto himself, guiding his empire even as he enlightens the world through the agency of his dynastic successors.

(Lenski 2016, p. 65)

Yet even this succinct summary of Eusebius’ concluding thoughts on Constantine in his Life of the emperor—which Lenski references throughout the above-mentioned work—does not mention eschatology. This has also been the case with the recent publication of Christianity, Philosophy, and Roman Power by Lea Niccolai. This book addresses the Eusebian corpus at length—including his Life of the emperor—but merely hones in on the bishop’s representation of Constantine as a ‘philosopher’ (Niccolai 2023, pp. 17, 29), without any reference to the eschatological framing of the emperor as a philosopher-king. Promisingly, a very recent publication by Nathan Israel Smolin identifies ‘Constantine’s Imperial authority as Eusebius describes it is not merely cosmic but eschatological’ (Smolin 2024, p. 92). Smolin demonstrates that Eusebius draws a parallel between Christ’s incarnation as vanquishing polytheistic worship and Constantine’s rule as destroying division in government, that this has come about as prophesied by the Jewish prophets (ibid., pp. 92–93), and that ‘if Constantine is the one divinely chosen eschatological agent of [cosmic, ecclesiastical, and imperial] unity, then Constantine must reign forever’ (ibid., p. 130). But Smolin explores the concept no further. The present article will explore in detail the background to Eusebius’ representation of the emperor as embedded in his subordinationist and dissociative Christology that helped him replace Christ with Constantine in the working out of the eschatological destiny of the world understood as the confluence of Church and Empire.

It can thus be stated with confidence that Eusebian scholarship up to the present has either attempted to delicately balance his realised eschatology centred on Constantine with his belief in the imminence of Christ’s second coming or has ignored the concept of eschatology—belonging as it does to the discipline of theology—altogether. In this way, the exaggerated eschatological statements concerning the emperor and his reign in his later writings, specifically his orations On Christ’s Sepulchre, In Praise of Constantine, To the Assembly of the Saints, and the Life of Constantine, have not been sufficiently accounted for, not even in Smolin’s work mentioned above (which arrives at a similar conclusion to the present article, although not demonstrated in great detail). Moreover, the implications that Eusebius’ vision of Constantine as an eschatological emperor would have on his ecclesiology have not been assessed. This is not to imply any deficiencies in the above works, which have their own important emphases and interests in relation to Eusebius’ representation of Constantine. But I have identified a lacuna, and it is the purpose of this article to demonstrate that, in these Eusebian writings, and especially the Life of Constantine, the bishop in fact replaced Christ’s second coming with the emperor’s ‘God-ordained’ rule over the earth, which, by implication, subsumed the Church within the Roman political authority as recapitulated within Constantine.

3. Constantine, Eusebius, and the Roman Empire

Constantine the Great, or Flavius Valerius Constantinus, was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, a disputed occasion which ostensibly occurred in A.D. 312 (see more below). Born in Naissus (Niš) to Flavius Constantius Chlorus and his wife Helena in either A.D. 272 or 276, Constantine was just a boy when, sometime between 284 and 285, the emperors Diocletian and Maximian took control of the Roman Empire as Augusti or senior emperors; with the latter choosing Constantine’s father to be his Caesar or ‘prince’. In A.D. 288, the senior emperors established the tetrarchy, or ‘rule of four,’ to better manage an Empire that in the West extended as far as Britain, encompassing Spain and North Africa, and in the East made it all the way to Armenia and Syria. In this tetrarchic scheme, Rome itself was, for a number of political reasons, conspicuously divested of the presence of a sovereign: Diocletian ruled from his court in Nicomedia in Asia Minor, Maximian from Milan in Italy, Constantius from Trier in Gaul, and Galerius from Sirmium in Illyria.

The young Constantine was taught Latin and Greek and was educated in philosophy and warfare before being sent in the 290s by his father to the Eastern territories of the Empire to fight for Diocletian and Galerius. In reality, however, he was more of a prisoner in the court of Nicomedia. In A.D. 303, as part of his traditionalist-paganising policies and in an attempt to wipe out ostensibly seditious elements from within the Empire, Diocletian initiated the Great Persecution against the Church, which lasted until 305 in its central and western territories (a persecution that was infrequently pursued in the eastern territories until about 311). Christians were killed, property was seized, scriptures were burned, and Constantine would have witnessed first-hand the endurance of the martyrs, those who died for their faith. The Great Persecution has traditionally been blamed on the emperor Diocletian’s propensity for superstition, but it had more to do with the adverse militaristic and economic situation of the Roman Empire at the time (Grant 1990, pp. 228–29). In 305, just before the above-mentioned Augusti abdicated, Constantius petitioned for his son to assist him in his war against the Picts, but Constantine escaped the court of Diocletian and met his father either in Gaul or, as is more popularly believed, in Britain, after which Constantius died, and Constantine was declared Augustus by the soldiers.

After consolidating territory in the western provinces of the Empire, Constantine moved to systematically dismantle the tetrarchy, which eventually led to a major battle against his rival emperor Maxentius in A.D. 312 at Pons Milvius, or the Milvian Bridge, that crosses the Tiber River into Rome. The Christian apologist Lactantius, who later tutored Constantine’s sons, reported in c. 313–314 that Christ appeared to Constantine in a vision the night before the battle and ordered him to place the christogram—the first two letters of the name Χριστός in Greek, the chi(Χ) rho(Ρ)—on his shields and standards as a sort of talismanic protection against his foes (Nicholson 2000, pp. 310–11). This would become the Christian equivalent of the Roman vexillum or military standard that was essential in the rallying and organisation of regiments during battle, later known as the labarum. Constantine placed the chi-rho over a portrait that depicted him and his sons, thus above their heads. This portrait that also showed him thrusting the devil into the abyss. In it, however, the devil was identified as Constantine’s rival emperor Licinius. Thus, from the beginning of his conversion to Christianity we see a conflation of religious and political themes—Church and Empire—in the reign of this emperor. (This portrait would also appear, according to Eusebius, above the entrance to Constantine’s palace in Constantinople). The next day, after an ostensible vision of the cross in the sky with the words ‘By this conquer’ (ἐν τούτῳ νίκα) attached to it, the emperor not only defeated his rival emperor Maxentius, but henceforth never lost a battle (Eusebius of Caesarea 1999, pp. 81–82).

From 312 onwards, Constantine was master of the Western Roman Empire, though the eastern territories were ruled by his brother-in-law, Licinius (the latter had married Constantine’s half-sister, Constantia). The new Christian emperor restored Church property stolen during the Great Persecution, conferred benefits on the Church and exempted the clergy from public service, while initiating ecclesiastical building projects in and around Rome, including: St John Lateran (c. 324), Sts Marcellinus and Peter (completed 324–326), St Lawrence (date uncertain), St Sebastian (c. 335), St Agnes (c. 335), St Paul Outside the Walls (date uncertain), old St Peter’s on what is now the hill of the Vatican (c. 329), and various others such as Santa Croce in Gerusalemme (the Holy Cross in Jerusalem, c. 325). Later, in the 320s, Constantine would also initiate building projects in the Holy Land.

During the years 315–317, war broke out between Constantine and Licinius, with the latter eventually suing for peace. In 320 Licinius persecuted the Christians in his domain and was attacked by Constantine, but it was not until 324 that Licinius was finally defeated and Constantine became sole ruler of the Empire. It was while Constantine was pursuing his enemy throughout the eastern territories in the 320s that he surveyed the city of Byzantium, located on the promontory in Thrace bestriding the Bosphorus in what is modern day Turkey. The emperor determined that the site was ideally situated for the construction of his new capital, especially since it was surrounded by three bodies of water: the Golden Horn to the north and the Sea of Marmara to the south, with the Bosphorus to the east. Thus, he threw up walls on its landward side and began construction in A.D. 325. Philostorgius, a fifth-century A.D. Byzantine historian, tells us that construction began where ‘the great porphyry column bearing his statue now stands’ (Philostorgius 2007, p. 25). Constantine’s city, named New Rome and also Constantinople, would become the capital of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire that would last for over a thousand years. The emperor himself constructed at least two churches within the city itself, ‘one of which he named Irene, and the other The Apostles,’ and two just outside of it, the Michaelion in Chalcedon and the church of St Mochius. In this way he laid the groundwork for later emperors to turn Constantinople into an emphatically Christian capital that simultaneously recognised and admired its classical inheritance. Constantine made changes to Roman legislation in favour of Christianity, intervened in internal Church politics and doctrinal disputes, and even convoked what would become known as the first ecumenical council of Nicaea in A.D. 325, which pronounced against the subordinationist Christology of the Libyan presbyter Arius and advocated, doctrinally and legally, that Christ is of ‘one essence’ with God the Father.

Eusebius was born in the maritime port of Caesarea, Palestine in 255, and was raised a Christian. Receiving an elementary and secondary education in classical Greek and establishing himself as a prolific writer from a young age, Eusebius would have grown up in an atmosphere of relative peace which saw the number of Christians multiply in official positions such as the military and the imperial court of the Roman Empire (Corcoran 2006 p. 56). Throughout his early life, he was under the tutelage of the presbyter Pamphilus (later third century, 309), who had acquired a large repository of Origen’s writings on account of the fact that the latter had also lived in Caesarea from 234 until his death in 255 (Trigg 1998, pp. 36, 61). Inheriting his teacher’s admiration for Origen, Eusebius embarked upon a literary career of his own, with his first treatises—the Chronicle and the Ecclesiastical History—undergoing successive redactions over the next several decades, especially on account of the dramatic changes in the status of the Church in the Roman world (Treadgold 2007, pp. 26, 31).

The first major change to affect the content and aim of Eusebius’ literary output was of course the Great Persecution. In the late third century, the Empire was suffering from an overall crisis in which economic and social factors combined to weaken it internally and ‘threaten its disintegration in the face of strong external enemies’ (Corcoran 2006, pp. 36–37). As we have seen, in 293, Diocletian, in an attempt to effectuate some sort of stability, divided the Empire into four quadrants to be ruled by four emperors. The tetrarchy ‘not only created more princes to deal with multiple emergencies but implied an order of succession fixed in advance within a new dynastic framework’. This dynastic framework was marked by the traditional religious titles applied to the Augusti in the east and west, symbolising their relationship. Diocletian was Iovius, Jupiter-like, devising and commanding, and Maxentius was Herculius, and hence, like Hercules, heroically performed his allotted tasks (Smolin 2024, p. 20). These titles not only reflect the relationship of the senior Augustus Diocletian and his subordinate Maxentius, but they also indicate Diocletian’s overall traditionalising and conservative approach towards Roman religion. In taking the names of these gods, Diocletian was both seeking the favour of these deities and affirming his confidence in their divine protection of the emperor and the state. Consequently, novelty in religion was considered subversive to the Empire’s welfare, resulting in the persecution of new ‘sects’ such as the Manicheans and the Christians. It was especially against the latter that these persecutions were directed. The years of relative peace for Christians which preceded the Great Persecution had brought them deep into the military and the imperial court, and Diocletian believed that they endangered conformity to traditional religious practices that were necessary to secure divine favour for the state. The emperor therefore issued an edict in 303 under which all churches were to be pulled down, scriptures destroyed, Christians of rank stripped of their status and forced to sacrifice to idols, and Christian freedmen re-enslaved (Lenski 2016, p. 93).

After the abdication of Diocletian and his replacement by Galerius, the persecution was continued with ferocity by the latter until, just before his death in 311, he issued an edict of toleration. This resulted in a temporary imperial clemency towards the Christians which was neglected by Galerius’ nephew and successor, Maximinus Daia (r. 308–313), who, as ruler of Asia Minor, Syria-Palestine, and Egypt, ‘continued the persecutions till Licinius defeated him in July 313’. At the epicentre of Maximinus’ persecutions was Palestine. Imprisoned there in 307, Pamphilus was martyred just a few years later, prompting Eusebius henceforth to refer to himself as ‘son of Pamphilus’—or Eusebius Pamphili—in all of his works (Roldanus 2006, p. 52). In fact, since the outbreak of the persecution in 303, Eusebius had written the Prophetic Eclogues, Commentary on Luke (after 309), and the Life of Pamphilus (after 311), to name a few (Wallace-Hadrill 1960, p. 17). In addition to these texts, Eusebius was updating his Chronicle and Ecclesiastical History, and, according to some scholars, he had begun work on his Preparation for the Gospel and Proof of the Gospel around the years 312–313 (Kofsky 2002, pp. 74–75), a period which falls within the scope of the end of Maximinus’ persecution in the eastern territories. It should come as no surprise to discover, therefore, that the persecution, as well as hastening Eusebius’ literary output, also affected the content of his works. In his Martyrs of Palestine, Eusebius describes the martyrdom of certain Egyptians in the region as a τελείωσις which means ‘completion,’ ‘consummation,’ or ‘perfection’ (Eusebius of Caesarea 1959, p. 331), all of which are synonyms that express the eschatological state, which can also be described as a ‘consummation’. Eusebius dwelt extensively on the topic of martyrdom in his Ecclesiastical History, where he portrayed the martyrs as ‘shining lights’ in whom ‘they furnished a clear proof that the power of our Saviour is truly divine’ (Eusebius of Caesarea 1980, p. 295), the animals which were set upon them in the arenas not daring ‘to touch or even approach the bodies of God’s beloved’ (Eusebius of Caesarea 1989. p. 102). In light of this, we can infer that Eusebius seemed to believe that martyrdom was tantamount to participation in Christ, which, we have seen, would have been considered as conducive towards their participation in the eschatological victory over the devil and sin established in his very person (Middleton 2006, p. 88).

When one considers Constantine’s pro-Christian edicts, numerous building projects, and involvement in Church affairs, it is easy to see how the emperor himself set the foundations for Eusebius’ thorough ‘Christianisation’ of him, leading to the creation of a what Rudolph Storch has described as an ‘Eusebian Constantine’ (Storch 1971, p. 145). Although Eusebius panegyrises Constantine in the final book of his Ecclesiastical History completed around the year 325, this ‘Eusebian Constantine’ becomes apparent only in the bishop’s above-mentioned works written in the late 330s, with the Life being completed in 339, two years after Constantine’s death. Therefore, although from 312 the emperor prioritised Christianity to other religions and sects within the Empire—and it only becomes absolutely clear that he committed himself entirely to the Church as reflected by his baptism towards the end of his life—Eusebius nevertheless reinterpreted Constantine’s entire life and reign as not only a ‘harmonious ode’ to the Christian Logos, but as conducive towards the eschatological transformation of the entire world. This could have been on account of Eusebius’ close proximity to the emperor and his desire for persecution never to happen again. Indeed, contemporary scholarship has painted a conventional portrait which depicts Eusebius as Constantine’s ‘close confidant and principal counsellor on ecclesiastical matters,’ although this has been questioned by authors such as T. D. Barnes (Barnes 1981, p. 266). In his Life of the emperor, Eusebius even claims to have spoken to him directly on certain occasions, including at the council of Nicaea, where he claims the emperor famously told him: ‘You are bishops of those within the Church, but I am perhaps too a bishop appointed by God over those outside’ (Eusebius of Caesarea 1999, p. 161).

In any case, Eusebius’ later outlook stood in stark contrast to his early disposition, which consisted of the belief that Christ would return imminently to establish the kingdom of God on earth, a view precipitated by the persecutions and martyrdoms in Palestine between 309 and 312 under the tyranny of Maximinus Daia. Eusebius’ many works between this early period and his three orations and the Life do not contain any explicit references to Christ’s imminent second coming. This could mean that the relative ‘peace of the Church’ initiated by Constantine’s reign from the Edict of Milan in 313 onwards precluded the need for such eschatological emphases. It is not until towards the end of Constantine’s life that Eusebius began to remonstrate once more concerning the eschaton, giving shape to a particular view of the emperor which he began in his orations but which was not crystallised until the bishop’s second last work, the Life of Constantine. In this work, it will now be argued, Eusebius replaced Christ’s imminent second coming with the immanence of the emperor in the world comprised of Church and Empire, turning him into the ‘emperor of the last days’ who has finally inaugurated God’s eschatological kingdom. The background to this will now be explored, along with the textual evidence.

4. The Christological Background to Constantine as an Eschatological Redeemer

Eusebius began the Life of Constantine, published in 339, two years after Constantine’s death, with a panegyric to the deceased emperor. After recalling the ‘various ten year banquets’ of Constantine (three in all) celebrated by ‘the whole human race’, he affirmed:

But today our thought stands helpless, longing to express some of the conventional things, but at a loss which way to turn, stunned by the sheer wonder of the amazing spectacle. Wherever it casts its gaze, whether east or west, whether all over the earth or up to heaven itself, every way and everywhere it observes the Blessed One present with the Empire itself.

(Eusebius of Caesarea 1999, p. 67)

For Eusebius, the deceased emperor, who is so intimately identified with the Empire, remains present within it even after his death. Now in the presence of God, Constantine is ‘brilliant in a flashing robe of light’ and ‘honoured with the ever-blooming garland of endless life and the immortality of blessed eternity’ (ibid.). Lenski recently described this post-mortem omnipresence of Constantine as his filling out the Empire with his sons and nephews as rulers, a dynastic succession (Lenski 2016, pp. 55–56) which, as Eusebius states, ‘is multiplied in the succession of his sons’ (Eusebius of Caesarea 1999, p. 67). But a comparative analysis with other Eusebian texts including On Christ’s Sepulchre, In Praise of Constantine, and To the Assembly of the Saints indicates that Eusebius’ logic is consistent with his subordinationist and dissociative Christology. So, while the full implications of this statement concerning the emperor’s immortality do not arise until the end of the Life of Constantine with specific reference to the circumstances of his death, before delving into them we must turn to Eusebius’ Christology, where we will see that the theme of the universality of the emperor is based on the universality of the Logos of God. Indeed, just a little further down, the bishop declared that our human thought:

…condemns itself to silence, and concedes to the superior and universal Thought [Logos] the right to utter worthy praises. For him and him alone who is the immortal Thought of God is it possible to confirm his own words, by which he predicted that those who give him glory and honour would excel in generous recompense, while those who set themselves up as his enemies and foes would bring on themselves the destruction of their lives.

(ibid.)

Here, the Logos—the same Logos who, as Christ, was for Eusebius the transcendent Son of God—is depicted as uttering worthy praises to the deceased emperor! The relationship of the Logos and the emperor had been established by Eusebius in the orations mentioned above. In these texts, Eusebius adumbrates a Christology which has been described in classic texts by Ferrar (Eusebius of Caesarea 1981, p. xxiv) and Chesnut (Chesnut 1986, p. 161) as predominantly Origenist. In other words, Eusebius’ Christology was based on the theological insights of the great, yet controversial, third century Alexandrian father of the Church named Origen, whose writings were, some argue unjustly, condemned at the fifth ecumenical council held in Constantinople in A.D. 553. According to Grillmeier, Origen affirmed that, although the nature of the Father is ‘utterly incomprehensible and transcendent,’ it is ‘another matter with the Son’. In him the transcendent properties of the Father, though ultimately inexpressible, take form on account of the fact that he is the ‘revelation of the Father and the mediator towards the world’ (Grillmeier 1975, p. 142). For Origen, however, there was never a time when the Son was not, for the Father ‘generates an uncreated Son,’ whose ‘generation is as eternal and everlasting as the brightness which is produced from the sun’ (Roberts and Donaldson 1979, p. 270). Moreover, as stated more recently by John Behr within the context of his analysis of Origen’s use of Christ’s epithet ‘wisdom’ taken from 1 Corinthians 1:24 (and drawing on The Wisdom of Solomon) as emanating from the ‘purest glory of the Almighty’ [i.e., God the Father]:

As it is impossible to be father without a son, so also it is impossible for God to be almighty ‘if there are not those things over whom he can exercise his power’, and, as it is clearly better for God to be almighty than not, those things by virtue of which he is almighty must have always existed.

(Behr 2017, p. lvii)

In contrast to Origen, in his On Christ’s Sepulchre Eusebius articulated his first-stage Christology—namely the relationship between God the Father and the Son and Logos—as follows. Ordained by the unbegotten Father as ‘Framer and Organizer’ and ‘Captain and Pilot’ of the universe, the ‘Only-Begotten’ Logos of God, partaking of the transcendent and unbegotten (ungenerated) Father’s ‘ineffable qualities,’ mediates between him and the creation (Eusebius of Caesarea 1975, p. 105).

Eusebius departed from Origen’s insistence on the co-eternity of the Father and the Son in his assertion—propounded at length in his The Proof of the Gospel—that the begotten Logos has his ‘own essence and existence in himself’ (Eusebius of Caesarea 1981, p. 234) and is therefore not identical to the Father—whose essence is characterised by his unbegottenness—implying that the latter temporally precedes the former (Williams 2001, p. 172). Indeed, here the words ‘unbegotten’ and ‘begotten’ seem to condition the respective essences of the Father and Son much like in the formulations of Eunomius (d. 393) (Behr 2004, pp. 287–88). It is for this reason that Eusebius described the Logos as a ‘Second God after the Most High and Supreme’ (Eusebius of Caesarea 1981, p. 271). Moreover, although much has been said in seminal works by scholars—including Georges Florovsky (Florovsky 1987, p. 20) and Rowan Williams (Williams 2001, pp. 172–73)—concerning Eusebius’ so-called repudiation of the Arian tenet that the Son was brought into being out of nothing, his assertion above that the Logos was ‘brought forth from that which did not exist’ (Eusebius of Caesarea 1975, p. 105) flatly contradicts this, placing him squarely within the semi-Arian camp, and, perhaps more precisely, its Eunomian branch (Behr 2004, p. 138). As an image of God the Father, the Son is God himself only because the Father has given him an ‘unparalleled share in his own godhead’ (Williams 2001, p. 171). As far as his relationship to the cosmos is concerned, the Logos is

…present in all things and pervading the whole with intellectual power. Looking upward towards His Father, He pilots this inferior and dependant sphere as a Common Savior of All in accordance with His ordinances, standing somehow midway and uniting generated with ungenerated existence.

(Eusebius of Caesarea 1975, p. 108)

There is therefore a gradation of being from the highest or transcendent God the Father that is mediated through his lesser manifestation or generation, the Logos, who in turn organises and permeates the material universe. According to Eusebius, the Logos and the universe are both products of the Father’s will, with the distinction between them comprising that, while the Logos is begotten of the Father out of nothing, the universe is created both from the Father and through the Son (Robertson 2007, p. 73). Eusebius, in a manner consistent with Origen (Eusebius of Caesarea 1981, pp. xxiv–xxv)—who was influenced by the presuppositions of the Middle Platonists (see below)—identifies God the Father with the first principle and merges the roles of the Intellect (or Nous) and the World Soul into the Logos, thereby, according to Barnes, adopting the doctrine of first and second gods espoused by Middle Platonism (Barnes 1981, p. 100). That Eusebius was indeed influenced by Middle Platonism has been demonstrated by Friedo Ricken (Ricken 1967, pp. 341–58), and more recently by Smolin (Smolin 2024, p. 89) and Aaron P. Johnson (Johnson 2011, pp. 113–14). Understood this way, Eusebius’ theology stands at the threshold—and one may even argue in contrast—to the developments in the theology of the period. Ever since Arius began to preach that the Logos, like the world, ‘once was not’ and ‘came out of nothing’ and that, like the cosmos, ‘came to be by the divine will’ (Wolfson 1976, p. 227), the use of the term βουλή came to be attacked, principally by Athanasius of Alexandria, who, in his First Oration Against the Arians, affirmed that Christ is:

True Son of the Father, natural and genuine, proper to His essence, Wisdom Only-begotten, and true and Only Word of God is He; not a creature or work, but an offspring proper to the Father’s essence. Wherefore He is truly God, existing one in essence with the very Father.

(PG 26, 28–29D)1

The Son and Logos, Jesus Christ, was not to be viewed as ‘created out of nothing,’ as both Arius and Eusebius had maintained, but as the proper offspring of the Father and Only-begotten; he is of one essence with the Father, and thus true God. Athanasius in this way disparaged the subordinationism of the Son to the Father, rendering the notions of first and second god with their respective ‘essences’ redundant. Despite this, the Father held a pre-eminent hierarchical position that reflects the dualistic cosmological framework of the eclectic Middle Platonic movement prevalent in the period, which distinguished between two gods, the first of which consisted of ‘the transcendent principle equated with the Good of Plato’s Republic, the self-thinking Intellect of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, or the One of Pythagorean cosmology’ (Moreschini 2005, p. 7189).

In Middle Platonism, forms or ideas are those archetypal patterns upon which all particular things in the material world are modelled. These had an independent existence in Plato, but in Middle Platonism were located within a second ‘demiurgic’ Intellect (or God) that activated the World Soul in its work of ordering the material cosmos based on these ideas. That Eusebius appropriated much of this Middle Platonic framework is made clear in his In Praise of Constantine, where he stated:

Who made known to those on earth Ideas, which are invisible and formless, or Essence, Incorporeal and shapeless? So there had to be a medium for these things, the one, all-pervading Logos of God, the Father of the rational and intellectual faculty in men, alone endowed with the Father’s divinity, who channels the paternal emanations into His own progeny.

(Eusebius of Caesarea 1975, p. 88)

This language is significant. The subordinationist framework of the Middle Platonists actually laid the groundwork for an emanationist theory, always associated with Middle Platonism, but which was for the first time systematically articulated by the founder of Neo-Platonism, Plotinus, a contemporary of Origen. Neo-Platonic cosmology generally posited that the transcendent fullness of all being—the Good, the Father, or the One—emanated the Nous that looked upwards towards the One, and, in imitation of him, generated within itself all the universal and individual ideas or forms upon which all particular things in the material world are modelled (Stumpf and Fieser 2008, pp. 109–10). The Nous in turn emanated the World Soul, which, looking ‘upwards to the Nous but also downwards to the world of nature,’ imitated the Nous by giving material form to the ideas and subsequently permeating, vivifying, and organising the universe which emanated from it (Copleston 2008, p. 468). Thus, it is within the Middle Platonic subordinationist framework that Eusebius worked out his view concerning the incarnation, the act by which the Son and Logos—who remains absolutely prior to creation as its ideal and exemplar—‘condescended to commune and converse with mortals through the instrument of a mortal body, with the intentions of saving humanity through resemblance’ (Eusebius of Caesarea 1975, p. 115).

For Eusebius, the divine Logos employed a bodily instrument (ὀργάνῳ σῶματι) in order to save perishable humanity through likeness to that which is perishable (τὸ θνητὸν διὰ τοῦ ὁμοίου σῶσαι): he took a human shape and assumed a human form (δι´ ἀνθρωπείου σχήματός τε καὶ εἴδους); he took a statue or image (ἄγαλμα)—that is, the human body—with which he co-existed and within which he dwelt (PG 20, 1408B–1409B). In his On Christ’s Sepulchre, Eusebius declared that

…since it was especially necessary that the mortal instrument, after the abundant service which it had rendered to the divine Logos, meet an end befitting a God, death was administered to it in this way … the Universal Life-giving Logos of God, wishing to prove that the mortal instrument was stronger than death, and to reveal it as a participant in His own life and immortality, undertook a most useful arrangement. Abandoning His body for a brief time and surrendering His mortal form to death in proof of its own nature, not long after He raised it back from the dead as proof of His divine power.

(Eusebius of Caesarea 1975, p. 117)

The sharp distinction between the Son and Logos and the ‘mortal instrument’ that he utilised in order to demonstrate his power over death points to the disjointed nature of Eusebius’ incarnational or second-stage Christology. If his disposition to first-stage Christology—the relationship between the Father and the pre-incarnate Son and Logos—is subordinationist, then his articulation of the relationship between the Logos and the humanity that he assumed in the incarnation is dualistic or dissociative. In other words, while Eusebius affirmed that the human body was a participant in the divinity of the Logos, much in the same way that the Logos was a participant in the Father’s divinity, he also stated that the Logos ‘took nothing of mortality in return’ (ibid., p. 116), thereby maintaining the distinction between the Son’s divinity and the human body or flesh that he assumed. The problem lies in the fact that Eusebius’ articulation of the relationship between the Logos and the body he took for himself is so tentative that it permitted him to later apply the qualities of the Logos, without any mention of the body of Christ which he so sharply dissociated from the former, to the emperor Constantine.

In his oration In Praise of Constantine, Eusebius declared that the Logos, the governor of the universe, ‘has modelled the kingdom on earth into a likeness of the one in heaven’ (Eusebius of Caesarea 1975, p. 88), before affirming that

…in this God’s friend [Constantine] henceforth shall participate, having been furnished by God with natural virtues and having received in his soul the emanations from that place. His ability to reason has come from the Universal Logos, his wisdom from communion with Wisdom, goodness from contact with the Good, and justness from his association with Justice. He is prudent in the ideal of Prudence, and from sharing in the Highest Power has he courage. For he who would bear the title of sovereign with true reason has patterned regal virtue in his soul after the model of that distant kingdom.

(ibid., p. 89)

The divine Logos, who since Philo of Alexandria (20 B.C.–A.D. 50) had been identified with Wisdom, Justice, etc. (Philo of Alexandria 1993, p. 209), was therefore present in modelling the kingdom on earth—i.e., Constantine’s kingdom—into a likeness of the one in heaven. This he accomplished through Constantine, who participates in the Logos in a similar manner that the body of Christ is articulated as participating and receiving its divine qualities from him. In his In Praise of Constantine, Eusebius refers to the Logos almost exclusively as a metaphysical principle. The personhood of Christ is not emphasised, and neither does his name appear in the text. Instead, it is the soul of the emperor which has received ‘emanations’ from the Logos. With his soul patterned on the regal virtue of the heavenly kingdom, Constantine is ‘supplied from above by royal streams’ in his piloting of ‘affairs below with an upward gaze, to steer by the archetypal form’—i.e., the Logos (Eusebius of Caesarea 1975, p. 87).

Eusebius actually stood at the crossroads of the transition from Middle to Neo-Platonism, which occurred sometime in the fourth century and lasted, in its pagan form, down to the sixth century A.D. While his Middle Platonic background is clear, it nevertheless remains difficult to tell whether or not he specifically borrowed terminology from writers belonging to either the Middle or the Neo-Platonic traditions. We have seen that Ricken (Ricken 1967, pp. 341–58), Smolin (Smolin 2024, p. 89), and Johnson (Johnson 2011, pp. 113–14)—but also Cameron, Hall (Eusebius of Caesarea 1999, p. 36), and Barnes (Barnes 1981, p. 100)—all agree that Middle Platonism had a formative influence on Eusebius’ worldview. With the exception of Terence N. Nicols, who affirmed that Eusebius’ thought was ‘strongly marked by Neo-Platonism’ (Nicols 1989, p. 136), the impact of this latter manifestation of Platonism on his thought still needs a thorough examination, which cannot take place here. Suffice it to state that it seems likely that Eusebius borrowed elements from both forms of Platonism that conditioned the broader philosophical context of the eclectic epoch in which he lived. For example, although Eusebius’ articulation of the relationship between the Father and the Son intimates the Middle Platonic conception of first and second gods, his cosmological framework nevertheless seems to reflect the Neo-Platonic emanationist scheme which he endeavoured to Christianise.

According to Eusebius, the Logos acted as the governor of the cosmos, stretching himself throughout the whole and enclosing its ‘length and breadth’ within the palms of his hands (Eusebius of Caesarea 1975, p. 106). Despite this, the Logos remained an intermediary between God and the world and therefore could not become too associated with the latter, especially when one considers the disparagement of matter as an intrinsic tenet of the dualistic cosmologies of both Middle and Neo-Platonism. This dualism was almost certainly inherited by Eusebius, as reflected by his dissociative Christological formulations and the lack of a permanent identification of the Logos with the body of Christ. In the body’s ‘absence,’ the Logos required another agent in the working out of earthly affairs. According to Eusebius, this agent was Constantine, whose soul received the emanations from the Logos, thereby using him as his own intermediary within the material world. For Eusebius, the Logos, while leading the Empire and even modelling ‘the kingdom on earth into a likeness of the one in heaven,’ did not, however, engage directly or intimately in the affairs of the world (Eusebius of Caesarea 1975, p. 88). Instead, it brought the entire universe into concord on a cosmic scale ad extra, whereas Constantine, as the Logos’ agent, was responsible for the calling into unity of the inhabited world ad intra, thereby taking the place of that both Middle and Neo-Platonists ascribed to the World Soul. In this way, for the first time in Christian history, Eusebius placed the Roman emperor, whom he considered an image of the Logos in the same way that the Logos was an image of the Father (Chesnut 1986, p. 160), into a conceptual framework that permitted him to work out the affairs of the Empire—which, by implication, includes the Church—on behalf of the Logos, and moreover, to bring them into a harmonious unity or concord that reflected the kingdom of heaven.

Eusebius’ incorporation of Constantine into a worldview influenced by Middle and Neo-Platonic presuppositions has its antecedents in his immediate religious and philosophical context. In line with his predecessors, Constantine styled himself as the representative of the supreme divinity and especially one of its chief manifestations, the sun god Sol, in whose divinity he participated and whose position was later taken by Christ. Constantine, with his various letters and effigies, probably also laid the groundwork which Eusebius later elaborated upon. According to Chesnut, the tradition of ‘portraying the king or emperor as the Law or Reason or Logos of God’ (ibid., p. 143) could be found in Philo, Cicero (106–43 B.C.), and Plutarch (A.D. 46–120) (ibid., pp. 152–58). The emperor’s soul—in distinction to other souls which also participated in the Logos—was regarded as the very ‘seat of the Living Law, Sacred Thought, or Divine Logos—the precise term varied from author to author but the basic idea was much the same,’ i.e., that the emperor, in his imitation of the cosmic order, became an embodiment of that order in himself on account of his divine office and his own abundant piety, asceticism, and virtue (ibid., pp. 143–44). Although Eusebius did not identify the Logos exclusively with the emperor, he did affirm that

…the One who is over all, through all, and in all, visible and invisible, the all-pervasive Logos of God, from whom and through whom bearing the image of the higher kingdom, the sovereign dear to God, in imitation of the Higher Power, directs the helm and sets straight all things on earth.

(Eusebius of Caesarea 1975, p. 85)

5. Rome, the Church, and an Eschatology of Replacement

It has been stated that Eusebius’ weak Christology, which was influenced by the intellectual paradigms of the epoch, allowed him to transfer some of the qualities of the Logos to Constantine, albeit on a lower grade of the ontological scale (or chain of being). The significance of this, however, cannot be understood outside of his view of the theme of the providential co-incidence of the birth of Christ and the emergence of the Pax Romana instituted by the Roman emperor Augustus, which was a favoured apologetic theme of writers such as Origen (Caspary 2022, p. 173) and Melito of Sardis (d.180) (Droge 1992, p. 71) in their correspondence with Roman authorities. In his On Christ’s Sepulchre, Eusebius declared:

And as the knowledge of One God was imparted to all men and one manner of piety, the salutary teaching of Christ, in the same way at one and the same time a single sovereign arose [Augustus] for the entire Roman Empire and a deep peace took hold of the totality. Together, at the same critical moment, as if from a single divine will, two beneficial shoots were produced for mankind: the Empire of the Romans and the teachings of true worship.

(Eusebius of Caesarea 1975, p. 120)

Constantine expressed in his letters and decrees a desire to unify the Church and that this would, in turn, bring stability to the Empire. Eusebius interpreted this ontologically. The world of matter, for the Neo-Platonists, was the world of multiplicity and was thus ontologically inferior to the unity exemplified by the source of all being, the One (Stumpf and Fieser 2008, pp. 108–9). Eusebius viewed the state of affairs that prevailed before the incarnation of the Son of God and the rise of the Roman Empire in terms of this same Platonic inimical disposition towards multiplicity, affirming that division in government, which was prevalent before the ‘peace of Rome’ instituted by Augustus and reflected in Eusebius’ immediate context by the tetrarchy, always led to chaos. Eusebius went on to state that if ‘you should ascribe the reason for these evils to polytheistic error, you would not miss the mark’ (Eusebius of Caesarea 1975, pp. 119–20). Pagan polytheism, identified with demonic activity, and division in government were for Eusebius intimately related, with the former conducive towards the latter. However, when the incarnation occurred

…the All-Holy Body of Christ … had been seen to be stronger than all demonic error and the adversary of evil-doing, whether by deed or word; once it had been raised as a victory trophy over the demons and a safeguard against ancient evils, then at once all the acts of the demons also were undone. No longer were there localized governments and states ruled by many, tyrannies and democracies, and the devastations and sieges that resulted from these, but One God was proclaimed to all.

(ibid., p. 120)

For Eusebius, Christ’s incarnation and triumph over death, in despoiling the demons which caused disunity in government, brought the single Roman Empire, which was God’s chosen Empire, into being. In this way, the world, which was once in a state of fractured multiplicity, was called into a harmonious, ontological unity by the Logos in order to mirror the kingdom of heaven. Thus, there was for Eusebius a providential simultaneity of the truth of the one God being preached with the advent of a single, organised Empire directly under Christ, who wished ‘to establish in His name a nation which had never been heard of, and then founded it—not in some forgotten corner of the world but everywhere under the sun’ (ibid., p. 120). In this scheme, Christ becomes the founder of Roma aeterna, the eternal Rome, and the incarnation becomes entangled with the pagan historiography that extolled Rome as a universal city.

Ironically, in his On Christ’s Sepulchre Eusebius was so concerned with both elucidating Christian theology for the emperor and praising his organisation of the state that he neglected to mention the infrequent persecution of the Church by Constantine’s predecessors which he experienced firsthand in Palestine and which prevailed up until the Christian emperor’s rise to power. In his Praise, he extolled Constantine as a victor

…who has triumphed over the passions which have overcome mankind, who has modeled himself after the archetypal form of the Supreme Sovereign, whose thoughts mirror its virtuous rays, by which he has been made perfectly wise, good, just, courageous, pious, and God-loving. Truly, therefore is only this man a philosopher-king, who knows himself and understands the showers of every blessing which descend on him from outside, or rather, from heaven.

(ibid., p. 89)

For Eusebius, there was one God, and his Logos who was inseparably united to him, one Empire, and a single sovereign who, as an exemplification of the philosopher-king adumbrated at length by Plato (428–348 B.C.) in his Republic, had to rule himself (i.e., his passions) before he ruled others (Plato 1982, p. 509). Not only was Constantine the philosopher-king who recapitulated the Empire within himself as its principal representative; he was, according to Eusebius, also a ‘universal bishop’ (Eusebius of Caesarea 1999, p. 87) who constantly pressed everyone in his dominions ‘to lead the godly life’ (ibid., p. 161). To the ancient notion of the inseparability of the Roman state from its sovereign, Eusebius added the Church, and Constantine, having existentially modelled himself on the archetype of the Logos, is made worthy and capable to organise the Empire on God’s behalf. Thus, for Eusebius, if both the Empire and the Church are intrinsically related to the sovereign, then they both also coalesce and merge within the person of the emperor.

The Empire—and the Church with which it was intimately associated via the ‘episcopate’ of the emperor (ibid., p. 161)—was not meant to simply reflect the heavenly kingdom, but was called to participate in the divinity of the Logos via his earthly mediator, Constantine, in order to bring the earthly sphere into a ceaseless, ontological harmony that reflected the kingdom of heaven and was akin to, if not explicitly identified with, God’s kingdom of the ‘last days,’ the eschaton. The establishment of this eschatological kingdom had been ‘publicly proclaimed in Hebrew Scripture ages ago’ (Eusebius of Caesarea 1975, p. 121), meaning that, for Eusebius, it was part of God’s providential design. Indeed, the notion of providence permeates his Life of Constantine, where the bishop’s eschatological depiction of the ruler and his Empire is most strikingly manifested. At the beginning of the work, Eusebius wrote:

This is also what God himself, whom Constantine honoured, by standing at Constantine’s right side at the beginning, the middle and the end of his reign, confirmed by his manifest judgement, putting forward this man as a lesson in the pattern of godliness to the human race … Making him the model of his own monarchical reign, he appointed him victor over the whole race of tyrants and destroyer of the God-battling giants, who in mental frenzy raised weapons against the Sovereign of the universe himself.

(Eusebius of Caesarea 1999, p. 69)

From the outset, the rise of Constantine is described by Eusebius as a confirmation of God’s design and judgment for the world. His reign had been predicted in the scriptures, and God’s nearness to him throughout is a manifestation of his providence which teaches the human race the way of ‘godliness’ (ibid., pp. 67–68). Providence is here related to another theme. If God desires to gather all people to himself and order the world through the instrument of the emperor, then all acts to the contrary are an attack directed not only against Constantine, but against God himself. This Eusebius made quite clear in the first book of his Life, where he constantly juxtaposed the emperor to his rivals, Maxentius, Galerius, Maximinus, and Licinius, in an almost dualistic fashion. Indeed, in his description of the above-mentioned political events which brought Constantine to power, Eusebius contrasts the ‘Godbeloved and Thrice blessed’ emperor (ibid., p. 69) to his demon-possessed adversaries, whom he refers to as tyrants throughout the text (ibid., pp. 69–73).

In order to add weight to his belief that the emperor was beloved and chosen by God, Eusebius created an analogy between Constantine and the prophet Moses, explaining that Moses was reared among tyrants until he left Egypt to serve the will of God, who ‘raised him up as leader of the whole nation, and he liberated the Hebrews from bondage to their enemies, while through him he pressed the tyrannical race with the torments of divine pursuit’ (ibid., p. 73). Moses, considered by Philo as the archetypal philosopher-leader (Melamed 2003, p. 23), was considered by the early Christians to be a type pointing towards Christ himself (France 2007, p. 41). For Eusebius, however, he becomes the type of Constantine, foreshadowing his reign. To this end, Eusebius claimed that the Moses narrative is believed by certain people to be a kind of myth which has been surpassed by the contemporary circumstances under Constantine (Eusebius of Caesarea 1999, p. 73).

Though still a child, Constantine was, for Eusebius, distinguished from all others by his exceptional virtue. Seeking further justification for God’s elevation of the emperor, Eusebius depicted his father Constantius as ‘the only one who had adopted an independent policy and was on friendly terms with the God over all’ (ibid., p. 74). Whether or not Constantius was favourably disposed to the Church or not is, in reality, just as difficult to ascertain as his son’s view of Christianity before A.D. 312 (ibid., p. 91). What is significant here is that Eusebius is establishing precedents for the elevation of Constantine, who, when appointed Augustus, showed to all that, ‘as though revived, his father reigned through him’ (ibid., p. 78). The virtue of the father, transmitted to the son, is carried over to Constantine’s sons also, who are described as ‘Godbeloved’. Immediately after his elevation to the rank of Augustus, Constantine brought all the affairs in his father’s dominions into order (ibid., p. 70), when he then, according to Eusebius, perceived

…that the whole earthly element was like a great body, and next became aware that the head of the whole, the imperial city of the Roman Empire, lay oppressed by bondage to a tyrant, he first gave opportunity for those who governed the other parts to rescue it, inasmuch as they were senior in years; but when none of these was able to give aid, and even those who did make the attempt had met a shameful end, he declared that his life was not worth living if he were to allow the imperial city to remain in such a plight, and began preparations to overthrow the tyrant.

(ibid., p. 79)

The concept of Rome as the head of the body of the world has its antecedents in Stoicism. The second century Latin sceptic Sextus Empiricus, in his Against the Physicists, expounds the relationship between Plato’s views and those espoused by founder of Stoicism, Zeno of Citium (334–262 B.C.), before merging Plato’s World Soul with the Logos:

Thus Plato has set out virtually the same argument as Zeno; for the former also asserts that ‘the All is most fair, being a work executed according to nature and according to the likely account a living creature endowed with soul, both intelligent and rational [λογικόν]’.

(Sextus Empiricus 1997, p. 59)

The Stoic concept of the universe as a body or a ‘living creature’ became associated with the notion of the Roma aeterna, so that Rome began to be viewed as the head of the body of the universe, the universal city (Dunne 1978, p. 145). Eusebius explained that Constantine, fixated on rescuing the city, sought divine assistance and thus pledged himself to the one God who transcends the universe, as opposed to the many pagan deities, which, he believed, brought about the failure of those before him who believed in them (Eusebius of Caesarea 1999, p. 80). Eusebius may have been reading into Constantine’s concern for the unity of Church and Empire: belief in a single God, however understood, would bring about for Constantine the unity of Church and political authority (ibid., p. 116). Having resolved to worship the Christian God and entreat him alone, the bishop went on to describe Constantine’s vision of the cross in the sky over the sun, which may have been a literary device deliberately employed by the bishop to replace the sun god Sol, who was one of Constantine’s patron deities throughout his reign up until the mid 320s, with Christ. After receiving the vision, Constantine ‘summoned those expert in words’ in order to explain it to him that it was a Christian symbol denoting Christ’s victory over death (ibid., p. 82). This vision of the cross of Christ was accompanied by a dream in which Christ told Constantine to inscribe the chi-rho on his shields and military standards described above. Eusebius described the Christian labarum (military standard) in elaborate detail, claiming that the emperor showed it to him personally. It is worthwhile including his description here in full:

A tall pole plated with gold had a transverse bar forming the shape of a cross. Up at the extreme top a wreath woven of precious stones and gold had been fastened. On it two letters, intimating by its first characters the name ‘Christ,’ formed the monogram of the Saviour’s title, rho being intersected in the middle by chi. These letters the Emperor also used to wear upon his helmet in later times. From the transverse bar, which was bisected by the pole, hung suspended a cloth, an imperial tapestry covered with a pattern of precious stones fastened together, which glittered with shafts of light, and interwoven with much gold, producing an impression of indescribable beauty on those who saw it. This banner then, attached to the bar, was given equal dimensions of length and breadth. But the upright pole, which extended upwards a long way from its lower end, below the trophy of the cross and near the top of the tapestry delineated, carried the golden head-and-shoulders portrait of the Godbeloved Emperor, and likewise his sons.

(ibid., pp. 81–82)

Constantine’s armies, headed by the Christian military standard with the chi-rho at its apex, attacked his rival Maxentius, who was defeated and drowned at the Milvian Bridge by Constantine with God’s aid. Eusebius then states that the emperor entered Rome in triumph, liberating its citizens, before declaring that:

He announced to all people in large lettering and inscriptions the sign of the Saviour, setting this up in the middle of the imperial city as a great trophy of victory over his enemies, explicitly inscribing this in indelible letters as the salvific sign of the authority of Rome and the protection of the whole Empire. He therefore immediately ordered a tall pole to be erected in the shape of a cross in the hand of a statue made to represent himself, and this text to be inscribed upon it word for word in Latin: ‘By this salutary sign, the true proof of valour, I liberated your city, saved from the tyrant’s yoke; moreover the Senate and the People of Rome I liberated and restored to the ancient splendor and brilliance’. The Godbeloved Emperor, proudly confessing in this way the victory-bringing cross, was entirely open in making the Son of God known to the Romans. All the city’s population together, including the Senate and all the people, as they recovered from a bitter tyrannical repression, seemed to be enjoying beams of purer light and to be participating in rebirth to a fresh new life.

(ibid., pp. 85–86)

Eusebius acknowledged that Rome is the head of the body of the universe, the eternal city, and interpreted Constantine’s triumphal entry into Rome as an act of divine providence. Under the oppression of a tyrant, Rome was liberated by the emperor with God’s aid as symbolised by the labarum, which, as a talisman, assisted Constantine in his destruction of his enemies—who are also the enemies of God—in Christ’s name. The setting up of the statue of Constantine bearing ‘the salvific sign’ (ibid., p. 85), the cross, has a twofold dimension. On the one hand it represents Christ’s victory over his enemies who would try to enthrone themselves in the seat of the Empire, an Empire which included the Church and which Christ himself had raised to power as his chosen nation; the universal Empire under the universal Logos and his universal sovereign. It was in this way that Constantine was to make ‘the Son of God known to the Romans’ (ibid., p. 86). On the other hand, Eusebius, having already described the cross as ‘an abiding trophy of the victory over death’ (ibid., p. 82), affirmed that, upon its establishment in the centre of Rome by the emperor, all the nations ‘seemed to be enjoying beams of purer light and to be participating in rebirth to a fresh new life’ (ibid., p. 86).

Now the cross can only be considered a victory over death because of Christ’s resurrection from the dead, and the life of resurrection is tantamount to a participation in the eschaton traditionally understood as beginning in this life and yet not consummated until the second coming of Christ. In other words, by participating in the life of the body of Christ, the Church—which heretofore in traditional Christian eschatology was considered as separate from and beyond Empire—Christians experienced a foretaste of the general resurrection that will occur at the second coming, at the ‘last things’. By depicting Constantine placing the cross in the centre of Rome, Eusebius was implying that this eschatological state, characterised by ‘rebirth to a fresh new life’ (ibid., p. 86), was made manifest in the here-and-now in Constantine’s very actions. Insofar as Rome remained the head of the body of the world, the entire cosmos would experience this life of resurrection, but only as a potentiality that was to be actualised by Constantine’s campaigns against his rival emperors in other parts of the Empire still captive to their subversive rule. To assist him, Eusebius states that ‘this saving sign was always used by the Emperor for protection against every opposing and hostile force, and he commanded replicas of it to lead all his armies’ (ibid., p. 82).

That the ‘saving sign,’ set up at the centre of the Empire and thus the universe, was used to bring order and concord—and thus the eschatological state—to those parts of the Empire still captive to demon-driven enemies, Eusebius made clear with reference to Constantine’s defeat of Licinius. According to Eusebius, Licinius was planning another ‘general persecution,’ when the Logos, ‘the Champion of his own people anticipated the event, and lit a great lantern in the darkness and blackest night, when he guided to these parts his servant Constantine’ (ibid., p. 95). Constantine, Eusebius affirmed, had recourse to the God of the Christians in order to secure his victory over his enemy and surrounded himself with the priests and bishops of the Church who would entreat God on his behalf (ibid., p. 96). Eusebius then described Licinius in stark contradiction to Constantine as a polytheist surrounded by Egyptian druggists and wizards, sacrificial interpreters, and prophets of what he thought of as gods (ibid.). When the two met in battle, Eusebius asserted that Constantine’s achievements against Licinius were accomplished with the saving sign—the labarum—inscribed with the monogram representing Christ’s name:

Where this was displayed, there ensued a rout of the enemy and pursuit by the victors. The Emperor became aware of this and wherever he saw a unit of his own army in difficulties, he would give orders for the saving trophy to give support there as a sort of victorious antidote.

(ibid., p. 98)

At this point Eusebius discusses the labarum at length to highlight its power over enemies (ibid.), before establishing the correlation between Constantine’s ascetical endeavours and his victories in war. For Eusebius, Constantine first pleased God through ‘fasts and harsh treatments of the body,’ and then God would in turn inspire him via divine revelation to attack his enemies at an opportune time (ibid., p. 100). But Eusebius is at pains throughout to demonstrate that the emperor is not the aggressor, and that ‘he took unsleeping care for the general welfare, interceding for the safety not only of his own men, but also of his enemies’ (ibid.). For Eusebius, Constantine undertook his military campaigns out of benevolence and pity for his tormented foes, and he was almost always provoked into action (ibid., pp. 99–100). This is pertinently reflected in his magnanimity towards Licinius. He gives him several opportunities for concord before the rival emperor, ‘protected by shapes of dead people in lifeless images,’ launched a final attack against Constantine, who, with the help of the labarum, ‘with one blow put to flight the whole opposing force, and won victories over enemies and demons alike’ (ibid., p. 100). Eusebius described the state ushered in by Licinius’ defeat:

Now that the evil men were removed, the sunlight shone, purified at last of dictatorial tyranny. The whole Roman dominion was joined together, the peoples of the east being united with the other half, and the whole body was orderly disposed by the single universal government acting as its head, the authority of a single ruler reaching every part. Bright beams of the light of true religion brought shining days to those who before had ‘sat in darkness and the shadow of death’ (Luke 1:79/Isaiah 9:1). There was no more memory of former evils, as all people everywhere sang praise to the Victor and professed to know only his Saviour God. And he, famous for every godly virtue, the Emperor Victor (he created this title personally for himself as the most appropriate surname because of the victory which God had given him over all his enemies and foes) took over the east. He brought under his control one Roman Empire united as of old, the first to proclaim to all the monarchy of God and by monarchy himself directing the whole of life under Roman rule. All fear was removed of those evils by which all had been formerly oppressed. The people in every province and city celebrated merry feasts, and those who before were sad looked on each other with smiling faces and bright eyes. Their choruses and hymns spoke first of all of God the universal King as he truly is, and then with unrestrained voices celebrated the Conqueror and his most virtuous and Godbeloved sons the Caesars. There was a forgetting of ancient ills, oblivion of every wickedness, enjoyment of present good and expectation of more to come.

(ibid., pp. 100–2)

The evil men that this passage refers to are Maxentius, Galerius, Maximinus, and Licinius. With their removal, the western half of the Roman Empire, which had already been brought into order by Constantine, was united to the Eastern provinces. Echoing not only the Stoic notion of the universe as a body, but the Platonic emphasis on unity or singularity as opposed to multiplicity, Constantine, by ending disunity in the Empire, established a ‘single universal government’ (ibid., p. 102) at the head of the body of the world presided by a single monarch under a single God. Constantine achieved this with God’s help, exemplified by the ‘saving sign’ carried at the forefront of his military forces. Thus, the implication in the above excerpt is that he brought the entire Roman world to the eschatological ‘rebirth to a fresh new life’ (ibid., p. 86), a process he had begun when he captured the imperial city. Constantine is henceforth described as issuing many edicts in favour of the Church, facilitating Church-building programs and destroying pagan temples (ibid., pp. 104–9, 132–37, 144–47). In other words, as the regent of the Logos, he begins a ‘Christianisation’ process which will be conducive towards the final unity of Church and Empire. But this unity, which is an ontological unity that reflects the heavenly kingdom, though described by Eusebius as a permanent phenomenon—especially in the wake of the emperor’s victories over his opponents, both material and spiritual—is constantly frustrated. Eusebius often refers to the demon Envy, a sort of personification of evil which he describes as ‘the hater of good, resenting the prosperity of the Church’ (ibid., p. 120). Envy assails the Church at times of peace and prosperity; once the absolute unity and concord established by the emperor falls apart on account of the demon’s attacks, he swiftly takes action to establish it again (ibid.).

6. Concluding Remarks

During the period of persecution between the years 309 and 312, Eusebius’ writings reflected a belief in the eschaton’s already/not yet tension. The kingdom of God had already been established with Christ’s first advent and would soon be consummated with his second coming. However, as we have seen, the rise of Constantine and the benefits he accorded to the Church had a direct impact on Eusebius’ eschatological vision. Eusebius ceased to refer to Christ’s second coming, returning to it in his final work, the Theophany published in 339, only in passing (Sirinelli 1961, p. 472). Instead, it was the emperor who now perpetuated the kingdom of God on behalf of the Logos, and the intimate relationship between the two comes out of not only the tradition of the ruler cult, but Eusebius’ subordinationist Christology, which demarcated too sharply between Christ’s divinity and humanity. We have seen that a proper understanding of Christology is essential to eschatology. Christ, the incarnate Logos and Son of God, established the eschaton within the Church and would consummate it at his second coming. Eusebius’ dualistic worldview precluded him from allowing the Logos to engage directly in the affairs of the universe. Instead, he organised it ad extra, while Constantine, to whom the Logos could be freely applied on account of the bishop’s dissociative Christology, now defeated the devil and organised the world into a harmonious unity that was tantamount to the eschatological kingdom ad intra.

Eusebius thus failed to perceive the fullest ramifications of the foundational Christian belief that the establishment of God’s kingdom had already occurred in Christ’s very person and is distributed by anticipation to his body the Church. Instead, his view of the eschaton became, with Constantine’s accession to power, completely externalised, as it was identified with the Roman Empire that, for the bishop, was raised to power by Christ and maintained by his servant the emperor. Inevitably, in such a schema the Church becomes subordinate to the Empire and to the emperor himself.

As the Logos’ regent in the material world, Constantine received many of its qualities and functions, especially with reference to the apocalyptic working out of earthly affairs, thereby effectively replacing Christ and precluding the need for the second coming. But Constantine, though intimately associated with the Son and Logos who has forever vanquished the devil and death with his resurrection, was not the Logos incarnate—he was not Jesus Christ. It is for this reason that Eusebius was at pains to maintain that the permanent and enduring peace and prosperity established by the emperor in his destruction of all the tyrants who were motivated by the greatest tyrant of all, the devil. For Eusebius, temporary lapses into chaos—and the horrors these would bring—did not result from any inherent flaws in the Constantinian system but were caused ad extra or ‘from the outside’ by the demon Envy.

The extent of Eusebius’ eschatological depiction of the emperor can be inferred from both the end and the beginning of the Life of Constantine. At the end of the Life, Eusebius delineated the circumstances surrounding the death of Constantine, including his baptism, the final disposition of his property, and the bestowal of the inheritance of the Empire to his sons (Eusebius of Caesarea 1999, p. 178), before stating:

Each of these events took place during the greatest festival, the utterly sacred and holy Pentecost, honoured with seven weeks and sealed up with a single day, during which divine words describe the ascension into Heaven of the universal Saviour and the descent of the Holy Spirit upon mankind. Being granted these things during the festival, on the last day of all, which one might call the Feast of Feasts, about the time of the midday sun the Emperor was taken up to his God; he bequeathed to mortals what was akin to them, but he himself, with that part of him which is the soul’s intelligence and love of God, was united to his God. That was the end of the life of Constantine.

(ibid., pp. 178–79)

In his On the Solemnity of Easter written in 325, Eusebius expounded the significance of the seven-week period of Pentecost, describing it as bearing ‘the likeness of the kingdom of heaven’ and as going ‘one day beyond’ this symbolic seven-week cycle, representing ‘our future refreshment,’ that is, the eschaton (ibid., p. 341). Eusebius depicted Constantine as dying at midday on Pentecost, the day of the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples, and his soul ascending—very much like Christ forty days after his resurrection—to God, thereby associating the passing of the emperor with his direct participation in the eschaton. What is strange about this is the passage that follows the description of Constantine’s body being placed in state for the mourners:

Alone of mortals the Blessed One reigned even after death, and the customs were maintained just as if he were alive, God having granted this to him and no other since time began. Alone therefore among Emperors and unlike any other he had honoured by acts of every kind the all-sovereign God and his Christ, and it is right that he alone enjoyed these things, as the God over all allowed his mortal part to reign among mankind, thus demonstrating the ageless and deathless reign of his soul to those with minds not stony-hard.

(ibid., p. 180)

The mortal body of Constantine is here being treated in a similar fashion to the mortal body of Christ, with the latter ‘raised as a victory trophy over the demons’ (ibid., p. 120) and the former reigning in the Empire (and Church) ‘even after death’ (ibid., p. 180). Constantine did not just rule below, but above also; with the reign of his ‘mortal part’ among humankind pointing to ‘the ageless and deathless reign of his soul’ (ibid.). As the universal bishop and universal sovereign, the emperor recapitulated within himself both the Church and Empire that he was called by the Logos to bring into harmony, and, upon his death—in a manner reflecting the return of all things to the source of all being, the One, in Neo-Platonism (Copleston 2008, p. 471)—‘mystically’ took the world with him up into heaven. Indeed, it is only by interpreting the ascent of his soul to heaven from the perspective of Eusebius’ Middle/Neo-Platonic presuppositions that the emperor’s ‘eternal reign’ becomes intelligible.

If this wasn’t enough, at the beginning of the Life, Eusebius described Constantine’s death in the language of martyrdom, which, in the Christian testimony (we have seen) was conducive towards a direct participation in the eschaton. Eusebius’ identification of the emperor as an eschatological ruler was moreover strengthened by his declaration that Constantine would posthumously direct ‘the whole government of affairs more firmly than before, as he is multiplied in the succession of his sons’ (Eusebius of Caesarea 1999, p. 67) who will extend the Empire to ‘unaging time like a paternal inheritance’ (ibid., p. 71). In such a worldview, where the emperor posthumously controlled—both on his own (via his ‘deathless soul’) and through his sons—the affairs of the Empire and indeed of the Church and the world entire, there was no place for Christ’s second coming. Indeed, the deceased emperor, everywhere ‘present with the Empire itself’ (ibid., p. 67), became an immanent organisational force in the world which, in Eusebius’ later works, displaced his fervent belief in the imminence of Christ’s return. Thus, Eusebius’ enthusiastic portrayal of the Christian emperor results in his perhaps unconscious articulation of an eschatology of replacement, wherein the emperor fulfilled the tasks which the Church declares have already been accomplished in the person of Jesus Christ, but which will only be consummated upon his return.