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Among the matters upon which the Seventh Ecumenical Council passed in 787 was that of the fidelity of a fourth-century bishop to the Orthodox faith.' In declaring Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea an Arianist heretic, the fathers assembled at Nicaea brought the last great council of the Catholic church to a close on the same issue that had prompted St. Constantine to call the first: trinitarianism.
That Eusebius' teaching on the question of the relation between Father and Son should have merited such high-level attention more than four centuries after his death requires some explanation. It will be the goal of this paper to explain the Council's verdict, to tell why Eusebius remains a significant figure today, and, most importantly, to show how his work affected the Orthodox understanding of the proper relationship between society generally and Christ's Church in particular. Eusebius of Caesarea was a subordinationist heretic, but he was also the first great, Christian historian and the first and most important hagiographer of St. Constantine; his subordinationism and his historiographical technique shaped his portrait of St. Constantine. Had Constantine's foremost biographer not been an exponent of the Levant's (and perhaps Christendom's) regnant understanding of the relation between Father and Son, the Church's teaching on the proper relationship between Church and State and of the proper behavior of a Christian king likely would have been completely different.
Eusebius' station at Caesarea, the capital city of the Roman province of Palestine, was an extremely important one. As Metropolitan, he was one of the four or five most important men in the entire Church.
From his strategic position, Eusebius himself was responsible for toppling the Patriarch of Antioch in 330, and he intervened to similar effect in a dispute involving the Patriarch of Alexandria in 335. In recognition of his prominence and learning, Eusebius was offered the position of Patriarch of Antioch in 331 (on which more below).
Eusebius' writings, even as winnowed by time and the vicissitudes of manuscript life, are voluminous. He was particularly well-situated to describe many of the central events in Christianity's progress, and he believed it was therefore his duty to record them. He gave a similar reason for writing a life of Constantine, saying that God must have conferred Constantine's...