I’ve written in the past about Eusebius of Emesa (d. ca. 360). He was a pupil of Eusebius of Caesarea, and therefore, inevitably, a scholarly man. He is identified by Jerome as an Arian. But in truth he was perhaps one of the many in the east who rejected the Nicene watch-word “homoousios” – consubstantial – as a key term of belief, because it was not scriptural. These people were thereby driven into the arms of the Arians, and it was part of the Nicene recovery to identify and separate these people, who only objected to the word, from the true Arians.
His career is recorded by Socrates, in his Ecclesiastical History book 2, chapter 9. After the emperor Constantius II arranged for Athanasius to be deposed as bishop of Alexandria, an Arian synod nominated Eusebius of Emesa to replace him. But Eusebius wisely refused, and his refusal was accepted. Probably the bishops realised that he was not the man for the rough work they had in mind. They nominated George of Cappadocia instead, who was to meet a violent end after the death of Constantius.
Eusebius was instead made bishop of Emesa, modern Homs, in Syria. He was in fact a native Syriac speaker, and therefore should have been acceptable. But he was unable to remain there, after his interest in scholarship and astronomy caused the locals to worry that he was a sorceror. A reconciliation was patched up, which collapsed, and thereafter he retreated to Antioch and lived a quiet life.
Most of the works attributed to him by Jerome have perished. A few quotations survive in later writers. But two collections of homilies have survived, one in an ancient Latin translation, the other in Armenian.
Both are basically inaccessible, even today.
The Latin homilies were edited by E. Buytaert in the 1950s, in two volumes. The first is a collection preserved only in a manuscript at Troyes, Bibliothèque Municipale 523, which also contains some works by Tertullian, and the De solstitiis et aequinoctibus. The second contains works published under other names in the 17th century by Sirmond.
But Buytaert’s edition is not accessible online. Indeed it is one of the ironies of our age that the actual manuscript, Troyes 523, is online as a scanned microfilm, while the edition is not. Thankfully Peeters of Leuven keep it in print, remarkably, so it can be purchased that way.
The Armenian homilies were edited by Nerses Akinian around the same time, and published in Handes Amsorya (= Monthly Review), published by the Mechitarist Fathers in Vienna. This is not online as far as I can tell, and actually I can’t find a research library near me that might have them. Worse, it seems that the University of Michigan did scan all their volumes, which it made available through Hathi, who make them unavailable on copyright grounds. The fact that the whole lot is in Armenian script makes it very hard to work with anyway. But I suspect that it might be OCR’d, and then machine translated. Or maybe not.
There do not seem to be any translations of any of this material.
The name of Eusebius of Emesa also became attached to a Latin collection of homilies known as “Eusebius Gallicanus”. The publication history of the latter involved confusion on exactly this point. But I will write more about these two, and also the homilies of Eusebius of Alexandria, which also feature in both cases.
