I. Introduction: Eusebius and Byzantine Eschatology

In the summer of 336 AD, officials and churchmen from all over the Roman world gathered in the new capital on the Bosporus to celebrate the thirtieth regnal year of its namesake, Emperor Constantine. The one surviving document from that occasion is the text of a panegyric (the Tricennial Oration) delivered in the presence of the emperor and his household at the closing ceremony by Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea.Footnote ¹ One of the most brilliant and prolific writers of late antiquity, Eusebius had written biblical commentaries and incisive apologies, invented the genre of church history, and pioneered the Christian world chronicle. Now he turned his formidable mind to the ancient rhetorical art of royal praise.

Drawing on Hellenistic theories of kingship, Eusebius put forth a vision of empire and the imperial office fit for the new, Christian imperial era.Footnote ² Modern scholars have characterized Eusebius's ideas in the Tricennial Oration as an influential new Christian theory of politics,Footnote ³ but also as a starting point for the ill-starred union of church and state, or even the subordination of the church to the state and theology to political ideology.Footnote ⁴ Moreover, since Eusebius suggested an orderly universe in which God and Christ ruled in heaven and Constantine ruled on earth, he has been accused of leaving little room for the incarnate Christ who died on the cross.Footnote ⁵

A somewhat more forceful corollary to this argument holds that Eusebius also displaced the triumphant Christ of the second coming. In place of the Christ of the Parousia, according to some scholars, Eusebius elevated Constantine and his heirs.Footnote ⁶ And in place of the eternal kingdom of heaven that Christians had awaited, Eusebius supposedly elevated the Roman Empire. Proponents of this view typically cite several works in Eusebius's corpus, but the centerpiece of this position has become one passage in the Tricennial Oration. Here, Eusebius praises Constantine for promoting his sons as his dynastic heirs:

Eusebius quotes here from the Old Testament Book of Daniel (chapter 7),Footnote ⁸ in which the prophet Daniel sees in a dream four beasts emerge from the sea. The fourth beast is described in explicitly negative terms, devouring its victims with iron teeth and trampling their remains underfoot. An ancient figure appears on a fiery throne and condemns the fourth beast to be burned. Then, a figure in the form of a man (a “son of man”) comes from heaven, and the ancient figure invests him with authority to establish a kingdom that will never be destroyed. When Daniel awakens, an angel explains that the beasts are the four successive kingdoms that will rule the earth. The fourth is the worst of them, but God will destroy it and replace it with an eternal kingdom, wherein “the saints of the Most High shall take up the kingdom; their kingdom shall be an everlasting kingdom” (Daniel 7:27). This vision echoes Daniel 2, in which Daniel interprets King Nebuchadnezzar's dream of a statue made of four metals (with head of gold, chest of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, and legs of iron) smashed by a great stone. According to Daniel, the four metals represent the four kingdoms of the earth, like the beasts in Daniel 7. The stone signifies an everlasting kingdom that would replace them.

The Book of Daniel was composed (perhaps utilizing earlier material) circa 163 BC at a time when the Jews were suffering persecution at the hands of the Hellenistic king Antiochus IV Epiphanes. In this original context, the fourth kingdom was evidently intended to represent the empire of Alexander the Great and his successors and the fifth kingdom a future Jewish kingdom that God would grant his chosen people in recompense for their suffering.Footnote ⁹ However, as time passed and the Roman Empire became the sole Mediterranean superpower (and especially after the Roman sack of Jerusalem in 70 AD), Jewish authors widely identified Rome as the fourth kingdom prophesied by Daniel.Footnote ¹⁰ The early Christian community, which was emerging from Judaism and suffering sporadic persecution by the Romans, adopted this interpretation.

The Book of Daniel long remained the most important source for Christian eschatological thought. The earliest surviving commentary on Daniel, written in Greek around 223–235 AD and attributed to Hippolytus of Rome, reiterated several times that Rome was the fourth kingdom in Daniel's visionFootnote ¹¹ and, as such, would be destroyed and replaced by a fifth.Footnote ¹² In this Christian interpretation, however, the fifth kingdom was not a future Jewish state but the eschatological kingdom that would dawn with Christ's second coming.Footnote ¹³ Other early Christian exegetes such as Lactantius shared a similar view:Footnote ¹⁴ Rome was the evil fourth kingdom (represented in Daniel 2 by the iron portions of the statue and in Daniel 7 by the fourth beast), and the fifth kingdom (represented by the stone that smashes the statue in Nebuchadnezzar's dream and by the “son of man” in Daniel's dream) was Christ's eschatological kingdom.Footnote ¹⁵

Eusebius's thinking is often represented as initiating a radical break from this interpretative tradition, making him a transformative figure for the development of Christian eschatology. By identifying the saints of the Most High (Daniel 7) with the sons of Constantine, he seemed to suggest that the Roman Empire had transformed from the fourth beast into the eternal fifth kingdom. A weak version of this thesis holds that Eusebius—as a worldly thinker who sought to reconcile Christianity with Roman civilization—was simply attempting to downplay the embarrassing apocalyptic content of Christianity by identifying an eschatological vision of a new earthly order with the peaceful succession of the reigning emperors.Footnote ¹⁶ A stronger thesis, however, has become increasingly prevalent: Eusebius suggested that the eternal kingdom of heaven really had arrived in the form of the Roman Empire itself, with Constantine replacing Christ as the herald and ruler of that kingdom. Thus, according to a recent monograph by Stephen Shoemaker: “Eusebius [in the Tricennial Oration] equates Constantine with Christ, and likewise, the empire with Christ's heavenly Kingdom. In effect, the coming of the Kingdom of God that Christ promised has now been realized, according to Eusebius, in the Roman Empire.”Footnote ¹⁷

Eusebius's eschatological views, therefore, have been characterized as “realized eschatology” or “imperial eschatology.”Footnote ¹⁸ This terminology has its roots in New Testament studies. The theologian C. H. Dodd coined the term “realized eschatology” in 1935 to describe his interpretation of Jesus's message in the Gospels—namely, that the kingdom of heaven lay not in the future, at the end of time, but was manifest in Jesus's ministry.Footnote ¹⁹ Applied to Eusebius, the term suggests that his message was that the kingdom of heaven was already manifest in the rule of Constantine and his successors. The concept of “imperial eschatology” has been popularized in scholarship on the apostle Paul, whose eschatological pronouncements about the glorious adventus of Christ at his second coming contrasts with the pagan notion of “imperial eschatology” focusing on the emperor's apotheosis.Footnote ²⁰ When scholars allege that Eusebius formulated Christian “imperial eschatology,” they suggest that he provided a new Christian veneer to an old pagan system of glorifying emperor and empire. This has wide implications, because Eusebius's supposed outlook, whether classified as “realized eschatology” or Christianized “imperial eschatology,” is often treated as the prototype for eschatology in the Byzantine Empire and the medieval Orthodox Church.

One of the most influential works propagating this view has been Gerhard Podskalsky's 1972 study of eschatology in the Byzantine Empire. Podskalsky contrasted “Byzantine” eschatology with the “Christian” eschatology found in the Gospels, the writings of Paul, and elsewhere in scripture. According to Podskalsky, Christian eschatology looked forward to the upending of the current order and the establishment of a utopian kingdom of heaven, while Byzantine eschatology sought only to justify the continued existence of imperial power.Footnote ²¹ Podskalsky pointed to Eusebius and his Tricennial Oration as one of the main starting points of “Byzantine” eschatology: “Eusebius did not shy away in his Tricennial speech from correlating the verse ‘the saints of the Most High shall take up the kingdom’ (Daniel 7:18) to Constantine's accession to power. . . . Thereby, not in words but in substance, the Roman Empire had merged with the kingdom of Christ.”Footnote ²²

Podskalsky's study remains the most important survey of eschatology in Byzantium and the medieval Orthodox Church, and it has influenced some of the finest scholars of late antiquity and the Byzantine Empire. As a result, it has become increasingly common to treat Eusebius's supposed identification of the earthly empire with the heavenly kingdom as the foundation of Byzantine political thought and of the political theology of medieval Orthodoxy. The great scholar of Orthodoxy John Meyendorff has suggested that: “Byzantine theocratic thought was, in fact, based upon a form of ‘realized eschatology,’ as if the Kingdom of God had already appeared ‘in power’ and as if the empire were the manifestation of this power in the world and in history.”Footnote ²³ According to the Byzantine historian Paul Magdalino, most Romans/Byzantines eventually “saw the Kingdom of Heaven as being both imminent and immanent in the Christian Empire.”Footnote ²⁴ He attributes this view to the increasing identification of the empire with the heavenly fifth kingdom, and further claims that this “interpretation of the Four Kingdoms prophecy in the Book of Daniel . . . had been hinted at by Eusebius in the fourth century.”Footnote ²⁵ Many others have echoed these views.Footnote ²⁶

Nonetheless, all these characterizations misrepresent the political thought of the Christian Roman/Byzantine Empire. With the possible exception of a few marginal figures, no Byzantines identified the empire as God's eternal kingdom, nor did they believe that the emperor had replaced Christ, christomimetic though his office might be. A reevaluation of Byzantine eschatology is necessary, and as a preliminary step in this larger project, this article will show that the supposed founder of Byzantine imperial eschatology, Eusebius of Caesarea, in no way suggested that the Roman Empire was Daniel's fifth kingdom or the kingdom of heaven.

This is not the first reexamination of Eusebius's eschatological views. Several scholars have raised questions over whether Eusebius really subscribed to a “realized eschatology” or treated Constantine and his sons as eschatological figures.Footnote ²⁷ None of these scholars, however, has attempted to make sense of the problematic line in the Tricennial Oration in which Eusebius seems to equate Constantine's sons with the eschatological inheritors of the eternal fifth kingdom. Nor have they directly addressed several other passages in Eusebius's corpus—most notably in his Life of Constantine—which also continue to be used to support the mistaken notion of his “realized” or “imperial” eschatology. Perhaps for these reasons, the more nuanced and accurate descriptions of Eusebius's political and eschatological views have not swayed the wider historiography, as indicated in the secondary material cited above. This article, therefore, will confront the common arguments in favor of Eusebius's “realized eschatology” and will argue definitively that Eusebius did not identify the Roman Empire with the eschatological kingdom of heaven, either in the Tricennial Oration or in any of his other writings. It will show that Eusebius evidently held that the Roman Empire was the fourth kingdom of Daniel—a worldly and mortal empire—and repeatedly expressed an expectation that an everlasting eschatological kingdom would dawn only at Christ's second coming.

II. Eusebius Reassessed

Most scholarship that presents Eusebius as an advocate of a “realized” or “imperial” eschatology bases this premise on two misapprehensions. The first is that Eusebius served as a spokesman for Constantine and, therefore, had a vested interested in elevating Constantine's reign as the beginning of a transcendent new age. The second is that Eusebius gradually abandoned any expectation of the second coming of Christ or attachment to traditional Christian eschatology and so could plausibly convince himself that Constantine inaugurated a transcendent new age. Both of these assumptions, however, have already been disproved in specialized scholarship on Eusebius.

Especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Eusebius was often portrayed as slavishly devoted to Constantine or else as the emperor's cynical propagandist.Footnote ²⁸ This view continues to live on in some scholarly literature. Some recent work has even suggested that Eusebius's political writings were an extension of a program of Constantine's imperial propaganda that sought to portray the emperor as a new Messiah, perhaps even the triumphant second coming of Christ himself.Footnote ²⁹

Nonetheless, more cautious scholarship on Eusebius in the past several decades has largely dismantled this outdated image of Eusebius as imperial mouthpiece. Already in 1976, Gerhard Ruhbach showed that Eusebius remained foremost a bishop and theologian.Footnote ³⁰ In 1981, Timothy Barnes put to rest the notion that Eusebius was particularly close to Emperor Constantine or in any way acted as an adviser or spokesman: “He [Eusebius] was no courtier, still less a trusted counselor. . . . He probably met and conversed with the emperor on no more than four occasions.”Footnote ³¹ Rather, Barnes points out, Eusebius was a provincial bishop who mostly worked far from the capital and who wrote for his own purposes. Building on the work of Ruhbach and Barnes, Aaron Johnson has demonstrated that Eusebius was far more concerned with defending the Christian faith and advocating for the church than with glorifying the emperor or the empire.

Indeed, Eusebius displayed a marked ambivalence toward the Roman Empire through much of his literary career. As Aaron Johnson has pointed out, Eusebius conceived of Christians as having an ethnos distinct from the Romans. In Eusebius's two complementary apologetic works, the Preparation for the Gospel (Praeparatio evangelica) and the Proof of the Gospel (Demonstratio evangelica), he treats the Roman Empire as a force of terrible power that historically had played a role similar to the one the Assyrian and Babylonian empires played in the history of the ancient Jews: sometimes bringing God's judgment and sometimes simply acting as an enemy of God's people.Footnote ³² True, by the time he composed the Tricennial Oration and the Life of Constantine, Eusebius had become a supporter of collaboration between Christianity and the Roman state. He certainly had a high opinion of Constantine (and, as we shall see, Augustus). Nonetheless, Eusebius apparently viewed Roman history as a succession of good and bad emperors—replete with high points and low points, but hardly perfect.Footnote ³³

The second major premise upon which assertions about Eusebius's “realized” or “imperial” eschatology is based—the position that Eusebius gradually abandoned a belief in the second coming of Christ—has also largely been disproven. In his General Elementary Introduction to the Gospel (the three surviving books of which are often referred to as the Prophetic Selections), Eusebius scoured the Old Testament for prophecies about Christ's life, death, resurrection, and second coming at the end of time.Footnote ³⁴ In this work, written sometime during the Great Persecution, Eusebius clearly awaited the impending second coming of Christ; all would be judged, and the good would be subsumed into an eternal heavenly kingdom.Footnote ³⁵ Nonetheless, several scholars have explicitly argued that there was a gradual change in Eusebius's views.Footnote ³⁶ D. S. Wallace-Hadrill and Podskalsky, for example, admit that, in his General Elementary Introduction, Eusebius expected the imminent second coming to bring an end to the persecution; yet, they argue that with Constantine's embrace of Christianity, Eusebius abandoned such eschatological expectation.Footnote ³⁷

Frank Thielman, however, has already demonstrated that Eusebius continued to refer often to Christ's second coming in his later works.Footnote ³⁸ For example, in book 6 of his Proof of the Gospel, Eusebius identifies Old Testament prophecies (Habakkuk 3; Isaiah 66:18–19) as predictions of Christ's glorious second coming.Footnote ³⁹ Moreover, though the second half of the Proof of the Gospel is not extant, some of these books apparently dealt directly with the end of the world and the second coming.Footnote ⁴⁰ Thielman pointed out that even the Tricennial Oration and the Life of Constantine took for granted the transience of the present world and the coming of a future kingdom of God.Footnote ⁴¹ Finally, Thielman showed that Eusebius's On the Theophany, composed sometime between 333 and 337 AD (perhaps one of his last compositions and, therefore, potentially useful in providing insight into the bishop's position on eschatology late in life), talks frankly of Christ's second coming.Footnote ⁴²

Subsequently, Michael Hollerich has shown that Eusebius also dwelled at length on the second coming of Christ, the destruction of the current order, and the eternal heavenly kingdom of Christ in his Commentary on Isaiah, probably composed between 325 and 327 AD.Footnote ⁴³ As Hollerich notes in his study of the text: “Eusebius has preserved the basic structure of traditional biblical eschatology, in which Christ returns at the end of time to judge all men after a universal resurrection, and to consign them to their respective fates for eternity.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Eusebius did break with some of his pre-Constantinian forebears regarding one major facet of eschatology: he fiercely opposed chiliasm (also called “millennialism”), that is, the controversial belief (derived from Revelation 20) that Christ's kingdom would be manifested for one thousand years upon the earth. Chiliasm had been popular in the early church. Eusebius's older contemporary, Lactantius (d. circa 325 AD), for example, assures the readers of his Divine Institutes that Christ, at his second coming, will reign on earth for one thousand years. In this last age, according to Lactantius, the earth will overflow with abundance, the Christian survivors of the last tribulations will procreate together, the surviving pagans will serve as their slaves, and the martyrs will be resurrected to govern alongside Christ.Footnote ⁴⁵

Eusebius rejected this view of the heavenly kingdom entirely. He was, no doubt, influenced by Origen, who had asserted in his On First Principles (written around 229 AD) that those who believed that there could be a worldly kingdom under Christ—with eating, drinking, and sex, and with Christians ruling over gentiles—were in error: “Such then are the views of those who do indeed believe in Christ, but, in understanding the divine scriptures in a sort of Jewish sense, derive from them nothing worthy of divine promises.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Origen argued instead for an allegorical interpretation which aligned more closely with Christ's words in the Gospel of John (18:36): “My kingdom is not of this world.”

For Eusebius, who was deeply influenced by the teachings of Origen, the concept of the millennium of Christ ruling on earth trivialized the heavenly kingdom. In his Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius approvingly quotes Origen's student Dionysius of Alexandria (d. 264 AD) in his indictment of chiliasm: “It leads them [believers] to hope for small and mortal things in the kingdom of God and for things such as exist now.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Eusebius was outspoken that the eternal kingdom spoken of in Daniel and other prophecies would not be an earthly realm full of “the delights of the belly and of sexual passion,” but rather that it would be a heavenly, otherworldly state under Christ's eternal rule after the end of time. This opposition to chiliasm was a recurrent theme in his work. He remained dubious about the canonicity of the Book of Revelation.Footnote ⁴⁸ One possible motivation for Eusebius's Chronicle was to provide an alternative to the chronicle of Julius Africanus, whose chronology was influenced by his chiliasm.Footnote ⁴⁹ Even in the Commentary on Isaiah, where he describes the reign of Christ together with his saints in the New Jerusalem, Eusebius scrupulously avoids chiliastic sentiments.Footnote ⁵⁰

There is no indication that Eusebius ever wavered from his anti-chiliasm. This alone makes it unlikely that he could have considered the Roman Empire to be the fifth kingdom of Daniel, since Eusebius did not believe that the kingdom of the Messiah would exist on earth. If there would be no earthly millennium, the fifth kingdom had to be the eternal merging of heaven and earth after the Last Judgment, not the Roman Empire.

III. Pax Romana and Biblical Prophecy

Despite Eusebius's clear opposition to chiliasm, numerous scholars have suggested that he actually rejected the idea of the millennium under Christ because he believed that the millennium had already begun—not under Christ, but under Roman rule. For example, in a study of historical varieties of millennial expectation, Richard Landes classifies Eusebius's views as “imperial millennialism.”Footnote ⁵¹ According to the scholar of late antique religion Yuri Stoyanov: “Constantine the Great's imperial apologist, Eusebius of Caesarea, . . . envisage[d] Christ's thousand-year reign on earth to be manifested through the Christian Roman Empire which thus was to merge with the divinely-founded ultimate kingdom of the Danielic schema.”Footnote ⁵² Much as Augustine of Hippo would later undermine chiliasm by identifying the millennium from Revelation 20 with the era of the church, Eusebius supposedly could deny a literal millennium while identifying it symbolically with the Roman Empire. In light of Eusebius's doubts about the status of the Book of Revelation, this seems unlikely, but the argument merits exploration and a response. Proponents of this position often cite the Tricennial Oration, but they also point to other works where Eusebius suggests that the Old Testament prophecies about an era of peace had been fulfilled in the Roman Empire.Footnote ⁵³ Erik Peterson first called attention to several of these lines in his 1935 Monotheism as a Political Problem in order to argue that Eusebius revealed himself as a tactless political propagandist by claiming that eschatological prophecies from the Old Testament had been fulfilled in the Pax Romana.Footnote ⁵⁴ Some subsequent scholarship has taken this accusation to its logical conclusion. Since such prophecies were usually associated with the Messiah, some have argued that Eusebius therefore presented the Roman Empire actually as the messianic kingdom (and as such, it could represent the thousand-year kingdom from Revelation). A close look at Eusebius's statements in these works, however, will show that this is not the case.

Modern scholars, following Peterson, have made much of the important place the Pax Romana established by Emperor Augustus has in Eusebius's apologetic works.Footnote ⁵⁵ Eusebius frequently repeats the formulation of his intellectual forebears—most prominently Melito of Sardis and Origen—that Christ's birth during the reign of the first emperor, Augustus, was no coincidence: the unification of the world under Roman rule established the necessary circumstances for the spread of the Gospel.Footnote ⁵⁶ Eusebius builds upon this concept further by suggesting that Augustus's victory over all his rivals and divergent governments prefigured Christ's triumph over polytheism.Footnote ⁵⁷ Further, in the Proof of the Gospel, Eusebius reads Micah 4:4—“they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid”—and Isaiah 2:4—“they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more”—as prophecies proved true when Augustus brought an end to endemic war in the Mediterranean.Footnote ⁵⁸ Could such statements indicate that Eusebius preached a realized eschatology, wherein the kingdom of heaven was already manifested in Jesus's day, not in his ministry but in the Roman Empire which enforced the kingdom of peace?Footnote ⁵⁹

A careful reading of the relevant passages does not bear out such an interpretation. The Proof of the Gospel was an apologetic work, and the clear target of the chapters where Eusebius discusses these prophecies was the Jews. Eusebius attempts to demonstrate that although the Jews rejected Jesus as the Messiah, his birth corresponded to Old Testament prophecies that the Jews already associated with the Messiah:

Eusebius argues that all these things had happened: the Jewish Temple and Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Romans only shortly after the time of Jesus, the Jews had been subjugated by their enemies (the Romans), and around the time of the birth of Jesus, Augustus had brought about an abundance of peace and overturned all other governments. Therefore, Eusebius argues: “What is the alternative except that the prophesied king, the Messiah of God, has come.”Footnote ⁶¹ Many of the prophesied circumstances of the birth of the Messiah had been brought about by Roman imperialism, but this was simply incidental for Eusebius. He was not focused on Roman power; he was trying to prove that Jesus was the Messiah. If anything, Eusebius suggested, the Jews had erred in identifying the prophecies of peace with a powerful earthly kingdom (a Jewish kingdom under the governance of the Messiah); the Jews had overlooked the true Messiah because they failed to realize that the prophecies only meant that the Messiah would be born in a time of peace. The Roman Empire of Augustus laid the groundwork for the first coming of Christ, but it was not a messianic kingdom.

Though Eusebius clearly did not suggest that Augustus inaugurated the heavenly kingdom, several scholars have plausibly suggested that Eusebius treated Constantine as the fulfillment of that which Augustus began.Footnote ⁶² And, indeed, Eusebius suggests in various works that the end of the persecution of Christianity and imperial support for the faith also fulfilled prophecies of peace. This, too, has often been used to support the argument that Eusebius identified the Roman Empire as the messianic kingdom and, further, that Constantine was a new Messiah. This view was perhaps most effectively articulated by the church historian Robert Markus: “Verses which had traditionally been interpreted in the Church in a messianic sense, are now boldly referred to the person of Constantine. Eusebius introduces his eulogy of Constantine in the last book of the Ecclesiastical History as the messianic ‘new song unto the Lord.’ . . . Constantine brings to a fulfilment what God himself had prepared in Christ and Augustus.”Footnote ⁶³ As a result, Markus argues: “Eusebius represents Constantine with all the features of a Messianic Saviour-king.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Nonetheless, Markus is very careful to clarify: “Eusebius, naturally, stops short of pressing the implications of this messianic conception to its limits: Constantine is not actually the saviour, nor is his Empire actually the Kingdom of Christ.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Some more recent scholarship has not exhibited the same caution. For example, according to Francis Oakley, Eusebius invoked such prophecies to suggest that, with Constantine's reign, “the world might be witnessing at long last the dawning of the messianic era that, as the scriptures had foretold, was destined to succeed the reign of Antichrist.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Richard Landes has similarly claimed that Eusebius hailed Constantine as “the savior who inaugurated the ‘peace’ the prophets had promised.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Such statements, however, wrongly imbue the concept of peace with automatic eschatological meaning. True, Eusebius was keen to present the reign of Constantine as the fulfillment of prophecies from Psalms, Isaiah, and Micah—repeating such assertions in his Ecclesiastical History, his Oration on the Holy Sepulcher, and in his Commentary on Isaiah—but it is necessary to approach these claims carefully. Eusebius clearly believed that Constantine played an important role in God's plan for history, a role that the prophets may have foreseen, but just because Constantine brought an end to persecution and civil war did not mean that such a peace was the final cosmic peace, nor did it make him any more of a Messiah than it had Augustus.

Though modern scholars have often focused on the importance of the emperor in Eusebius's writings, the bishop of Caesarea was concerned primarily with Christianity, the church, and the figure whom he actually considered the Messiah—Jesus Christ. When he cites prophecies of peace in book 10 of his Ecclesiastical History, it is to celebrate the peace and prosperity of the church; Constantine was the facilitator of this, to be sure, but in doing so he was simply a good servant of Christ. Eusebius's Oration on the Holy Sepulcher is particularly instructive on this point. In this oration, which may have been delivered in Constantine's presence, Eusebius cites Psalm 72:8 and Isaiah 2:4 as prophecies fulfilled in the recent peace of the church and follows this with praise for a great king who had inaugurated peace, subdued the power of demons, defeated tyrants, and brought an end to blood sacrifices; this king was not Constantine, it was Jesus Christ.Footnote ⁶⁸ In his Commentary on Isaiah, Eusebius likewise presents the contemporary peace of the church as the fulfillment of prophecy, but he never even mentions Constantine by name. As Michael Hollerich has pointed out, Eusebius had the opportunity in this commentary to try to associate Constantine with Cyrus the Great—a conquering king and liberator described as God's anointed (τῷ χριστῷ μου) in Isaiah 45—but he did not do so.Footnote ⁶⁹ Instead, his focus in the Commentary is on Jesus Christ, Eusebius's actual Messiah and the focus of his devotion.

IV. The Kingdom of Heaven in the Tricennial Oration

As described above, the most common source cited for the view that Eusebius identified the empire of Constantine with the kingdom of heaven has been the Tricennial Oration. This is where, in praising Constantine, Eusebius suggests that through the elevation of Constantine's sons as his heirs, “He [God] fulfills the predictions of the divine prophets, which ages and ages ago proclaimed that ‘the saints of the Most High shall take up the kingdom.’”Footnote ⁷⁰ As we have seen, in his study of Byzantine eschatology, Gerhard Podskalsky interpreted this to mean that Eusebius identified Constantine's empire with the heavenly and eternal fifth kingdom from the Book of Daniel.Footnote ⁷¹ Many other scholars have done the same. D. S. Wallace-Hadrill perhaps first highlighted the importance of the allusion to Daniel 7 in the Tricennial Oration in his classic 1960 study of Eusebius, though he did so simply to support the idea that the bishop of Caesarea viewed Constantine as a part of God's plan that had been prophesied in advance; however, Wallace-Hadrill did briefly venture further to suggest that Eusebius understood Constantine's reign as the culmination of God's plan for history and as “an extension of the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth.”Footnote ⁷² Subsequent scholarship built on this, and put even greater emphasis on the allusion to Daniel. According to Glenn Chesnut's important study of church historians, Eusebius identified the Roman Empire as “the predicted eschatological Kingdom of Peace. . . . Eusebius believed that the successive rulers of the Constantinian dynasty, ‘the saints of the Most High’ in Daniel's vision of the Four Beasts, were to reign as the eschatological emperors.”Footnote ⁷³ Stephen Shoemaker, on the basis of the Tricennial Oration, concluded that Eusebius believed that “the Kingdom of God and the Roman Empire had become virtually one.”Footnote ⁷⁴

Once again, however, a careful reading of Eusebius's body of work does not support this interpretation. In his exegetical writings, where he engaged more directly with the prophecies in the Book of Daniel, Eusebius does not adopt the radical new interpretation of the Danielic kingdoms implied in the Tricennial Oration. Instead, he closely follows the traditional Christian interpretation attested by Irenaeus and Hippolytus—namely, that the Roman Empire was, and at the time of Eusebius's writing remained, the fourth kingdom, doomed to pass away like all kingdoms, and that the fifth kingdom would dawn only with the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Such an interpretation is suggested in book 7 of the Proof of the Gospel. Here, Eusebius notes that Biblical prophecies are cloaked in coded language and never mention the Roman Empire explicitly so as to avoid angering the Roman authorities, since either God or the prophets themselves knew these revelations would circulate widely within the Roman Empire.Footnote ⁷⁵ Of the prophecies whose true meaning would upset the Roman rulers, Eusebius singles out “especially [those] in the visions of Daniel.”Footnote ⁷⁶ If Eusebius believed that the visions of Daniel proclaimed Rome the heavenly fifth kingdom, he would have had no reason to suspect that these visions would upset the Roman authorities.Footnote ⁷⁷

More explicit indications of Eusebius's eschatology would likely have been found in the later books of the Proof of the Gospel, but only the first ten of its twenty total books survive. Some of these lost books apparently dealt directly with the eschaton. Fortunately, fragments of these are preserved in a catena of excerpts from various Greek church fathers on the Book of Daniel compiled by a certain John the Drungarios in the seventh century.Footnote ⁷⁸ These confirm that Eusebius adhered to a very traditional understanding of Daniel's four kingdoms.

Citing the lost book 15 of the Proof of the Gospel, John the Drungarios excerpts Eusebius's explanation of Nebuchadnezzar's dream of the statue of four metals from Daniel 2.Footnote ⁷⁹ Here, Eusebius follows the interpretation of the four kingdoms represented by the four metals in the statue in the same way as generations of Christian exegetes before him: the kingdoms are the Babylonians (or “Assyrians,” as he calls them), Persians, Greeks, and Romans.Footnote ⁸⁰ The stone that smashes the statue represented the eschatological kingdom of God.Footnote ⁸¹ Eusebius is clear that this fifth kingdom is not the Roman Empire (the Roman Empire was the fourth kingdom). And, moreover, he states explicitly that the kingdom of God will dawn only after the four kingdoms have passed away.Footnote ⁸²

The Daniel catena of John the Drungarios preserves further relevant fragments from Eusebius in its section on Daniel 7 (Daniel's dream of the four beasts).Footnote ⁸³ These fragments again show that Eusebius believed that Daniel's fifth kingdom—the eternal kingdom of the saints—would arrive only after Christ's second coming. One fragment preserves Eusebius's statement that the vision in Daniel 7 “concerns the Antichrist, and the establishment of the kingdom of our glorious savior.”Footnote ⁸⁴ In this same fragment, Eusebius discusses the very “saints of the Most High” whom in his panegyric to Constantine he associated with Constantine and his heirs: “Who are these heirs of God, these co-heirs of Christ? The kingdom of heaven has also been promised to them, a kingdom that will be established after the four kingdoms that were seen by the prophet [Daniel].”Footnote ⁸⁵ Eusebius uses the future tense (ἐπιστησομένην) and so implies that the history of the four kingdoms has not yet come to an end. The fifth kingdom remained in the future, a kingdom of the saints after the second coming of Christ—not the Roman Empire under Constantine.Footnote ⁸⁶

Although in the fragments on Daniel, Eusebius leaves ambiguous the identity of the “saints of the Most High,” in his Commentary on Isaiah he explicitly identifies them: they are the Christian clergy.Footnote ⁸⁷ At the second coming of Christ, according to Eusebius, the clergy will minister to him and rule over the New Jerusalem. Combining passages from Isaiah 24:23 and 25:1–5, Matthew 25:31–34, and Daniel 7:18, Eusebius sets out a vision of the place of the clergy at Christ's right hand in the heavenly kingdom:

Neither Constantine nor his sons nor the Roman Empire are mentioned in this interpretation of the eschatological kingdom. Indeed, in this same passage, Eusebius asserts (referencing 1 Corinthians 15:24) that Christ's kingdom will dawn after God “has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power.”Footnote ⁸⁹

The Proof of the Gospel was completed probably around 324 AD and the Commentary on Isaiah was probably written about a decade before the delivery of the Tricennial Oration in 336 AD, so it might be argued that Eusebius adopted a new understanding of the meaning of Daniel 7 in the intervening period. But this appears rather unlikely: as we have already seen, Eusebius's understanding of eschatology remained consistent over his body of work. Perhaps more importantly, the notion that Constantine's reign or his elevation of his sons represented the dawning of a heavenly fifth kingdom is contradicted within the Tricennial Oration itself.

Throughout the Tricennial Oration, Eusebius makes it clear that Constantine's empire is emphatically not the eschatological kingdom of heaven from biblical prophecy. Eusebius suggests that the heavenly kingdom does already exist, but it exists within heaven; only at the end of time, with Christ's second coming, will the world be subsumed into the heavenly kingdom. True, Eusebius suggests that Constantine has a unique relationship with the Logos that has enabled him to run his empire on the model of the perfected heavenly kingdom.Footnote ⁹⁰ However, his empire is precisely that: a mimesis—an earthly reflection—and not the actual heavenly kingdom. In other words, Constantine, as a pious Christian emperor, can govern his realm more like God governs heaven than previous emperors have, but this in no way implies that Constantine's realm is the eternal heavenly kingdom.

Eusebius makes this abundantly clear only two paragraphs after his remark about Constantine's heirs inheriting the kingdom. Here he alludes to a passage in Plato's Republic wherein Socrates has unfavorably contrasted democracy with the rule of a philosopher king, comparing them, respectively, with an untrained crew of a ship and with the ship's captain. In Socrates's metaphor, the untrained sailors (representing the voters of a democracy untrained in rulership) do not know how to steer a ship and, in their ignorance, they cannot comprehend that, when the captain stares at the sky, he is in fact guiding the vessel by practicing the art of navigation (just as a king practices the careful art of rulership).Footnote ⁹¹ Eusebius alludes to this metaphor from the Republic apparently because it supports his argument that the perfect order consists of one God in heaven and one emperor on earth. Eusebius builds on Plato's imagery: Constantine as captain gazes at the heavens, according to Eusebius, not to read the stars (as had Plato's captain) but to view the workings of the heavenly kingdom above in order to imitate the divine order administered by God in heaven, so that he might steer the ship of state “according to the archetypal form [ἀρχέτυπον ἰδέαν].”Footnote ⁹²

This statement calls to mind another aspect of Platonic philosophy—namely, the world of the forms. For Eusebius, the kingdom of heaven was the ideal form, the perfect archetype, and the empire of Constantine was the earthly form. Constantine, “dressed in the image [εἰκόνι] of the kingdom of heaven,” and governed as much as possible like God governed his kingdom.Footnote ⁹³ Therefore, the Roman Empire had become just and well-governed under his rule, but it remained a dim earthly reflection of the heavenly kingdom. Eusebius explicitly contrasts the two by asserting that Constantine eagerly awaits the true kingdom of heaven: “He cherishes in his heart an indescribable longing for the lights there, by comparison with which he judges the honors of his present life to be no more than darkness. For he recognizes that rule over men is a small and fleeting authority over a mortal and temporary life, not much greater than the rule exercised by goatherds or shepherds or cowherds.”Footnote ⁹⁴ The Roman Empire, compared to God's heavenly kingdom, is but an unremarkable flock of beasts.

Clearly, Eusebius did not attempt to argue in his Tricennial Oration that Constantine's empire or the accession of his sons represented the kingdom of heaven. There remains, however, an unresolved question: Why exactly did Eusebius suggest, albeit in one isolated passage, that Constantine and his sons fulfilled a prophecy from Daniel 7? Before offering an explanation, it will be useful to examine relevant evidence from a final source which modern scholars have used to try to argue that Eusebius identified the Roman Empire as the heavenly kingdom—namely, Eusebius's Life of Constantine.

V. The Life of Constantine and Considerations of Rhetoric

The Life of Constantine, written after the emperor's death, was part panegyric, part hagiography, and part mirror for princes (probably directed at Constantine's sons).Footnote ⁹⁵ If Eusebius intended to present the reign of Constantine or the inheritance of his sons as the kingdom of heaven on earth, this encomium would be as ideal a setting as any to do so. Eusebius did not explicitly do so, though several scholars have pointed to places in the Life of Constantine where Eusebius seems to have portrayed Constantine's regime as the fulfillment of eschatological prophecy. Paula Fredriksen has summarized the traditional interpretation of Eusebius's eschatology in light of such charged statements in the Life of Constantine thus: “See, Eusebius could say, the prophets spoke not about the end of time, but about our time, now; and the glorious ruler whom they foresaw was not the Christ of the Apocalypse, but our patron, the emperor of Rome.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Three examples are often cited to support this interpretation. In the Life of Constantine, Eusebius provides an ekphrasis of a painting Constantine had commissioned for the entrance of his palace (presumably at Constantinople) in which he and his sons, surmounted by “the savior's sign” (either the cross or labarum), trampled an impaled serpent. According to Eusebius, by portraying himself crushing a serpent, which represented the devil (and likely also his vanquished imperial rival Licinius), Constantine wisely alluded to the prophecy in Isaiah 27:1: “On that day the Lord with his cruel and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent.”Footnote ⁹⁷ The historian Charles Odahl has argued that Constantine deployed such imagery purposely to suggest that his reign marked the beginning of Christ's millennial kingdom on earth (so that the slaying of the serpent alluded not just to Isaiah but also to the victory of the Messiah over the dragon, Satan, in the Book of Revelation).Footnote ⁹⁸ Odahl proposes that Eusebius disseminated Constantine's propagandistic millennialist message to his audience by describing the painting.Footnote ⁹⁹

In another scene, Eusebius describes the celebrations of Constantine's twentieth regnal year, when he and other bishops were invited to the palace to feast with the emperor and his court; describing the lavishness of the banquet and the respect given to Christian bishops, Eusebius states: “It might have been supposed that it was an imaginary representation [εἰκόνα] of the kingdom of Christ.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The connection between a feast and the kingdom of God perhaps drew on biblical imagery: Isaiah 25:6–10 describes an eschatological banquet that God will make for all people, and the Gospel of Matthew (8:11, 22:1–14, 25:1–13) often describes the kingdom of heaven in terms of feasting. Eusebius's statement has been interpreted by several modern scholars as a suggestion that Constantine's feast represented the prophesied “messianic banquet,” and therefore, Constantine's rule, more broadly, had manifested the eschatological kingdom of God on earth.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Finally and most notably, Eusebius describes Constantine's renovation of Jerusalem, especially his construction of the great basilica at the site of the holy sepulcher, and adds: “This being perhaps that fresh [καινὴν] new Jerusalem proclaimed in prophetic oracles.”Footnote ¹⁰² The reference to the “fresh new Jerusalem” has been taken by some modern scholars to mean that Eusebius intended to indicate that the new Jerusalem foreseen in the books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Revelation had been made to descend upon the earth by Constantine.Footnote ¹⁰³ Jonathan Bardill has summed up this interpretation: “Eusebius’ suggestion that the church might be the long prophesied New Temple carries the striking implication that Constantine, as the founder, might be Christ Himself, who was due to found the New Jerusalem at the time of His Second Coming.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Such characterizations, however, once again read too much into a few isolated comments in order to ascribe to Eusebius a realized eschatology in which the kingdom of heaven had arrived in Constantine's rule. As in the case of the Tricennial Oration, there are passages in the Life of Constantine that contradict the notion that Eusebius tried to depict Constantine as an eschatological figure who had inaugurated the New Jerusalem. Eusebius recounts that, during a ceremony dedicating the new basilica at the Holy Sepulcher, a bishop, in “excessive boldness” called Constantine blessed and told him that he would rule alongside the Son of God in the next life. Eusebius reports that Constantine was annoyed by this excessive praise and responded by saying that he only hoped to be judged worthy as God's slave in both this world and the next.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Eusebius apparently wanted to depict Constantine as both mindful of the difference between the present world and the kingdom to come and humbly aware of his role as a mere servant of God.

Moreover, an eschatological interpretation of Eusebius's praise of Constantine in the Life of Constantine does not accord with Eusebius's views stated in his other works. There is no reason to believe, for example, that his description of the painting of the trampled serpent was designed to invoke an eschatological message.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In his Commentary on Isaiah, Eusebius described Isaiah 27:1 as a prophecy of the end of the world when God/Christ would slay Satan—which is to say that Eusebius interpreted the prophecy as an event that would come to pass in the eschatological future.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Nor did Eusebius, in the Commentary on Isaiah, associate the messianic feast in Isaiah 25 with Constantine: to Eusebius, the feast represented the coming together of all people in the church.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ When, in the Life of Constantine, Eusebius describes Constantine's vicennalia celebration as the “εἰκόνα of the kingdom of Christ,” the idea here is more or less the same as in the Tricennial Oration, where Eusebius describes Constantine's regime as an εἰκόνα of the kingdom of heaven (see section IV above). Since Constantine had been a good ruler, in Eusebius's estimation, he was an image (or representation or form) of God's perfect rule in heaven. The feast with Constantine, therefore, was an earthly reflection of the glory that the elect would experience in the kingdom of heaven. Nonetheless, in Eusebius's view, the Roman Empire was not the kingdom of heaven and Constantine emphatically was not the second coming of Christ. This is not to deny that Eusebius drew parallels between Constantine and Christ; however, Eusebius emphasized parallels between Constantine and many biblical figures—most frequently Moses.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Eusebius's statement that Constantine had perhaps built the New Jerusalem foretold by the prophets is more cryptic, but once again, statements in Eusebius's other writings preclude the possibility that he literally meant that Constantine had brought into being the heavenly Jerusalem. If he truly believed this, why did he not once mention it in is his Oration on the Holy Sepulcher, which surely would have been a fitting occasion? In his Commentary on Isaiah, Eusebius suggests that the New Jerusalem will appear after the second coming of Christ (which had clearly not yet taken place) and that it will be the abode of the resurrected saints.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Insofar as the New Jerusalem had already become manifest on earth, it was the church, for the church was the City of God and the True Jerusalem (as opposed to the Jewish city destroyed by the Romans).Footnote ¹¹¹ Once again, though Eusebius's statement in the Life of Constantine is ambiguous, when viewed in light of Eusebius's overall portrait of Constantine in the entirety of the work and in the context of the bishop's other writings, the interpretations of eschatological maximalists appear extremely unlikely.

One may, perhaps, object to this formulation and argue that Eusebius's isolated aberrant statements about fulfilled prophecy in the Tricennial Oration and Life of Constantine should be given more weight rather than less, since they seem so strongly to contradict traditional Christian eschatology. One might argue that in these places Eusebius let slip his true opinions or put forth a careful trial balloon for a more expansive Christian understanding of the Roman Empire. Nonetheless, the rhetorical context of these works must be considered. The Life of Constantine was, to an extent, a panegyric like the Tricennial Oration, and a panegyric is foremost a context in which to praise, not to pursue a coherent thesis on political theology.Footnote ¹¹²

Other surviving panegyrics by non-Christians written in honor of the same emperor are filled with elaborate, religiously inflected praise. Why is it assumed that Eusebius intended his statement that Constantine had perhaps built the New Jerusalem to be taken any more literally than the anonymous, pagan Latin panegyrist intended his suggestion that Constantine might reign like a god over the return of the golden age prophesied in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue?Footnote ¹¹³ Did Eusebius believe his claim that Constantine's sons fulfilled Daniel's prophecy about the kingdom of the saints any more than other pagan panegyrists truly believed it when they promised and prayed that Constantine and his sons would rule the earth for all eternity?Footnote ¹¹⁴ It may seem distasteful for a Christian theologian to flatter a ruler in similar terms and to invoke holy scripture as lightly as others invoked Virgil, but in praising Constantine, Eusebius had to pioneer the Christianization of a genre that had long modeled fulsome praise of emperors with reference to gods and ancient prophecies and which played on associative echoes between rulers and classical literature. He may at times have gone rather far. Nonetheless, incautious flattery makes far better sense than the notion that Eusebius had attempted, in a few isolated allusions, to promulgate a wholly new understanding of Christian eschatology.

A useful comparison to Eusebius's rhetoric in his Constantinian texts is provided by an earlier panegyric he composed—one directed not at an emperor or the empire but at a bishop and a church. In his Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius preserved the text of a panegyric he had delivered around the year 316 AD celebrating the construction of a new cathedral in Tyre. In it he praises the building and Paulinus, the bishop who oversaw its construction. Eusebius describes Paulinus much like he would later describe Constantine in the Tricennial Oration: Paulinus's gaze is fixed on heaven in order to imitate its example—in Paulinus's case, so that he might build his cathedral according to the heavenly archetype.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Having compared Paulinus—as builder of the cathedral—to Solomon, Eusebius calls the bishop “king of a fresh and far better Jerusalem [καινῆς καὶ πολὺ κρείττονος Ἱερουσαλὴμ],” echoing his later praise of Constantine as founder of a “fresh new Jerusalem” (καινὴν καὶ νέαν Ἰερουσαλήμ).Footnote ¹¹⁶ Similar to Eusebius's later claim that God “fulfilled the predictions of the divine prophets” (θείων προφητῶν ἀποπληροῖ θεσπίσματα) through Constantine's raising up of his heirs, in his panegyric for Paulinus, Eusebius asserts that through the bishop and his magnificent decoration of his cathedral God was “fulfilling the prophecy” (ἀποπληροῦν προφητείαν) of Isaiah (54:11–14) which describes the rebuilding of Jerusalem in jewels and precious stones—an unmistakable reference to the heavenly Jerusalem.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Eusebius's panegyric reaches its crescendo when he suggests that “the entire Christ himself has taken a seat” (αὐτὸς ὅλος ἐγκάθηται Χριστὸς) in the person of Paulinus as head of the congregation.Footnote ¹¹⁸ One might postulate that Eusebius held the bishop Paulinus as an eschatological Messiah-figure and then transferred this hope onto Constantine, but certainly a much more likely explanation is that the similarity of Eusebius's praise of Paulinus and of Constantine derive from stock features of his laudatory rhetoric.

This is not to say that Eusebius's flattery was necessarily empty or mendacious. Christine Smith has explored Eusebius's use of rhetoric in the panegyric on Paulinus and his cathedral, showing that Eusebius combed the Bible for references to architecture—such as descriptions of the heavenly Jerusalem—and then related these back to the cathedral and its bishop.Footnote ¹¹⁹ As Smith notes, these are allegories and metaphors and are intended not to be literal but evocative.Footnote ¹²⁰ They might also be understood as typological.Footnote ¹²¹ The building of a magnificent church not long after the difficulties of the Great Persecution was the typological precursor to the building of heavenly Jerusalem after the tribulations at the end of time. God was fulfilling Biblical prophecy in a small way through Paulinus, but the fuller and truer fulfillment of the prophecy could be understood as awaiting the end of history.Footnote ¹²² The function of this was to suggest the historical importance of the subject of the panegyric, while also demonstrating Eusebius's authorial skill in identifying parallels between his subject and scripture.

We might understand Eusebius as doing something similar with Constantine in the Life of Constantine: making a skillful display of associative echoes between Constantine's biography and scripture, especially from the Book of Isaiah.Footnote ¹²³ Constantine portrayed himself trampling a serpent just as God kills the serpent in Isaiah 27. Constantine held a grand banquet, reminiscent of the feast of God in Isaiah 25. Constantine rebuilt Jerusalem, and the later books of Isaiah spoke of a New Jerusalem. Constantine's building in Jerusalem was no more the literal fulfillment of the prophecy of the heavenly Jerusalem than had been the church in Tyre, but it was evocative of scripture in the same way, glorifying the first Christian emperor and presenting him perhaps as a step toward—or a foretaste of—the fulfillment of God's promises, but not the ultimate fulfillment of those prophecies.

Such logic can also help explain the meaning of Eusebius's statement in the Tricennial Oration that relates the sons of Constantine to the saints who will inherit the Danielic fifth kingdom. Eusebius likely wanted his audience to notice the similarity between Constantine raising up his heirs and the prophecy in Daniel 7 and, perhaps, to see the ostensible fulfilment of the prophecy in Constantine's sons as an indication of their holiness, since it foreshadowed the truer, fuller fulfillment of Daniel's prophecy at the end of time. In praising Constantine in both the Tricennial Oration and the Life of Constantine, Eusebius suggested that Constantine's reign echoed or rhymed with lines from scripture (just as his life echoed the life of Moses) and pointed toward the future fulfillment of eschatological prophecy, though those prophecies would be truly fulfilled only at Christ's second coming.

In the end, Eusebius's seemingly eschatological statements about Constantine in the Tricennial Oration and Life of Constantine should be understood in the context of rhetorical praise which drew on typological parallels with scriptural prophecies. Such a reading is fully consistent with Eusebius's views on eschatology expressed in his exegetical and apologetic writings. Therefore, this reading should be preferred to the notion that he was proclaiming the Roman Empire as the kingdom of heaven, an idea inconsistent with both his other writings and, more importantly, with other statements found even within the Tricennial Oration and Life of Constantine, both of which at points stress Constantine's humility and the smallness of the Roman Empire in comparison to the kingdom of God.

VI. The Legacy of Eusebius, Past and Present

Admittedly, this more nuanced understanding of Eusebius's allusions to eschatological prophecy in his panegyrics does not disprove the notion that Eusebius should be characterized as the beginning of Byzantine imperial eschatology. Just as modern readers have misinterpreted Eusebius's eschatological views, his premodern audiences may have done the same. Therefore, more important than what Eusebius may have personally believed is the possible effect of his rhetoric on his audience. Did the Tricennial Oration lead Constantine or his sons to believe that they reigned over Daniel's fifth kingdom? Did later readers of the Life of Constantine believe that the heavenly Jerusalem had appeared upon the earth in the time of Constantine? Did Eusebius inspire successive generations of Byzantines to view the empire as the kingdom of heaven on earth?

None of these questions can be answered in the affirmative. Though we have little information about how Eusebius's Constantinian panegyrics were received—either in his lifetime or later—there is no good reason to suppose their influence on late Roman and Byzantine eschatology was significant. Indeed, although several of Eusebius's works proved quite popular and influential, especially his Ecclesiastical History—“as well preserved as any book from antiquity,” in the words of its modern editor—his Tricennial Oration and Life of Constantine appear not to have been well-known through the millennium of Byzantine history.Footnote ¹²⁴ According to Anthony Kaldellis: “Eusebios’ Constantinian writings were not popular in Byzantium.”Footnote ¹²⁵ To the extent that the Tricennial Oration and Life of Constantine were read and copied, there is no indication that this activity was driven by any interest in Eusebius's few short allusions to eschatological prophecies. Rather, these works were likely read as rhetorical exemplars and/or as historical documents relevant to the history of the church under the first Christian emperor.Footnote ¹²⁶ Nor were the eschatological allusions in them excerpted in the way that, for example, a prophecy from the seventh-century history of Theophylact Simocatta was sometimes copied by itself and analyzed for its eschatological meaning in surviving manuscripts of Greek apocalyptic material.Footnote ¹²⁷ In fact, there is no indication that later Byzantine authors recognized any significance in Eusebius's allusions to the kingdoms of Daniel or the heavenly Jerusalem, and certainly no one appears to have built an eschatological justification of empire upon them.Footnote ¹²⁸

The fascination with Eusebius's Constantinian panegyrics is a modern phenomenon, and it was modern scholars who first called attention to the eschatological allusions in them in order to attribute to Eusebius a “realized” or “imperial” eschatology. This impulse was based on an outdated understanding of the bishop of Caesarea as either a cynical propagandist for Constantine or a credulous consumer of such propaganda (or both). Moreover, it grew out of a modern discomfort with Eusebius, who seemed too willing to allow the state to co-opt Christianity for its own ends, and out of a tendency to use him as a cautionary symbol. This took on added urgency in the important work on Eusebius and his eschatology produced in the 1930s and after by scholars deeply affected by National Socialism and its co-optation of Christianity. As we have seen, Erik Peterson's influential Monotheism as a Political Problem helped establish the prevailing view of Eusebius's eschatology by disapprovingly suggesting that Eusebius acclaimed Constantine as the fulfillment of messianic prophecy; published in 1935 while the author was in self-imposed exile from Germany following the rise of Hitler's regime, Peterson's study subtly cast Eusebius as representative of a state- and ruler-centric perversion of Christianity that the Nazis were reviving.Footnote ¹²⁹ During and after World War II, several scholars saw in Constantinian Christianity—embodied by Eusebius—a prototype of the intellectual currents that made possible the worship of the state and its leader under fascist regimes.Footnote ¹³⁰ Then, in the context of the Cold War, the Byzantine legacy (and sometimes Eusebius himself) was commonly invoked to explain why Russia—the so-called Third Rome—and its Eastern European satellites tended toward absolutism.Footnote ¹³¹ Moreover, the Byzantine co-optation of Christian eschatology provided a supposed parallel to how the Soviet Union turned Marx's utopian vision of communism into the ideology of a totalitarian state.Footnote ¹³² Podskalsky, whose juxtaposition of “Christian” and “Byzantine” eschatology was discussed at the beginning of this study, was strongly influenced by both Peterson's treatment of Eusebius and by the tendency to draw parallels between Byzantine and Soviet thought; Podskalsky introduced the idea that the traditional treatment of Eusebius could be applied to all Byzantine eschatology.Footnote ¹³³

Moreover, much of the scholarship that has attributed to Eusebius a “realized eschatology” has done so in the context of contrasting the bishop of Caesarea with Augustine of Hippo.Footnote ¹³⁴ Some scholarship has used the two theologians as indicative of a divergence between West and East: Augustine's Latin City of God, with its doctrine of the heavenly and earthly cities, supposedly led the West toward separation of church and state, while Eusebius's Greek writings left the East mired in Caesaropapism, or even state-worshipping autocracy.Footnote ¹³⁵ If Augustine recognized the prophesied millennium in the church, it only made sense to suppose Eusebius—the “herald of Byzantinism”—identified it with the state. Such ideas have become ingrained in the historiography so that they have persisted even after the dissipation of the political circumstances that gave rise to them.

However, such misinterpretations must finally be put to rest. The tendency to attribute to Eusebius an eschatology bound up with the ruling order not only distorts the modern understanding of the ideology of the Byzantine Empire and medieval Orthodox Church, but it also reduces to a caricature the thought of one of late antiquity's most learned thinkers. Eusebius was a historian who understood history not as a random sequence of events but as imbued with patterns and a purpose reflecting the will of God. No doubt, Eusebius became an optimist as he witnessed a fruitful cooperation between the Christian Church and the Roman state under Constantine, and he hoped this situation would continue under Constantine's sons. Eusebius saw the hand of God at work in the reign of Constantine, just as he saw it at work in all of history. But the Roman Empire was only a historical means; it was not the end of history. It is high time to abandon the idea that Eusebius subscribed to a realized eschatology, along with the widely repeatedly assertion that Eusebius was the source of Byzantine imperial eschatology (if such a phenomenon ever actually existed at all).