Eusebius of Nicomedia, Arius
of Alexandria, and the
Marketing of Arianism
Or:
“…from a little spark a large fire
was kindled.”
-- Socrates Scholasticus
Arius, ~330 AD (with his IPad)
Different Methods of Marketing Religious Beliefs in the 300s:
Letter/Tract Writing
Use of Scripture
Persecution of Rivals
Songs/Ditties
Eusebius of Nicomedia
and Arius
(Beautiful Buildings/Artwork)
Public Debates
The Top-Down Method
Church Councils
Background to Arianism:
“Arians”:
• Arius—a priest
• Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia
• Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea
Nicomedia
“Nicenes”:
• Bishop Alexander of Alexandria
• Bishop Athanasius
• Emperor Constantine (sometimes)
• Eusebius of Caesarea (sometimes)
Constantinople
Caesarea
Alexandria
Arian Christianity
The Father is eternal;
The Son is emanated
from or created by the
Father (and therefore
comes later)
“There was a time
when the Son was not”
Nicene (later Catholic)
Christianity
The Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit are Eternal
(homoousius==same
nature)
Christianity is supposed to be Monotheistic (One God)
•
The Nicenes solved this by believing that the
Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is one nature,
but has different roles
•
The Arians solved this by having God eternal
Letter Writing (most were designed to be public)
Admonitions
Bishops to
fellow bishops
Letters to
parishioners
Demands
And
Emperors to
Bishops
Requests
Bishops to
Emperors
Textual Analysis
Topic Modeling—using computational linguistics to search for clusters of words
Computational Historiography or Algorithmic Historiography
David Mimno “Computational Historiography: Data Mining in a Century of
Classics Journals,”5, 1, Article 3 (April 2012), 19 pages. Journal on Computing and
Cultural Heritage (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/~amahoney/02-jocchmimno.pdf )
Bottom up: the program looks for clusters of words in a text
The Top-Down method—you give it the keywords
Textisbeautiful.net
Wordle.net (just shows frequency of words)
The Stanford Natural Language Processing Group (useful for
extremely large volumes of text)
MALLETT : MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit (useful for
extremely large volumes of text)
Show word maps and association maps
Text is Beautiful
The Deposition of Arius,
by Bishop Alexander
Of Alexandria (319 AD)
“Concept
Cloud”
Shows
Frequency of
use
represented
by the size of
the text.
The Color
shows groups
The Deposition of
Arius, by Bishop
Alexander
Of Alexandria (319
AD)
“Concept Web”
Concepts will be
positioned closely to
other concepts that
they are highly related
to.
The Deposition of Arius, by
Bishop Alexander
Of Alexandria (319 AD)
“Correlation Wheel”
Shows prominent
relationships between
concepts with high
prominence scores.
“Almost always together,
rarely apart”
Not related to frequency
The Deposition of Arius, by Bishop
Alexander
Of Alexandria (319 AD)
“Correlation Wheel”
Shows prominent relationships
between
draws links between concepts with
high prominence scores
“Almost always together, rarely
apart”
Not related to frequency
O.k.—so what?
Can reveal new relationships of ideas/concepts/words within a text
--very useful for large texts (up to 25,000 words, or 100 pages for
textisbeautiful—much, much more for other programs)
Better than keyword searches
Example from Early American Studies: “Doing More with Digitization:
An introduction to topic modeling of early American sources” by Sharon
Block, www.common-place.org · vol. 6 · no. 2 · January 2006
Use of Letter Metadata
a letter’s date, author, recipient, point of origin, point of
reception
to create spatial analysis of intellectual correspondence
networks.
Alexander
of
Alexandria’s
letters
Eusebius of
Nicomedia’s
letters
Letters of
Emperor
Constantine
Letters of
Athanasius
of
Alexandria
Letters of
Julius,
Bishop of
Rome
Use of Scripture: The Arian use of the Bible
“There was a time when the Son was not”
***Proverbs 8:22-5: “The Lord created me at the beginning of His
ways…before the ages he founded me…before all the hills he begets
me.”
Matt. 4:2 (cf. Luke 4:2) “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into
the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 4:2 He fasted forty days and
forty nights, and afterwards he was famished.”
Jn 8:42 Jesus said to them, "If God were your Father, you would love me,
for I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own; but
he sent me.”
Nicene/Catholic use of the Bible
Psalms 110:3 From the womb, before the morning have I begotten you?
John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word
John 1:18 …the only-begotten Son
John 1:3 …by Him were all things made
John 14:9 He who has seen Me has seen the Father?
John 14:10 I am in the Father, and the Father in Me
John 10:30 My Father and I are one
Public Debates
Arius was known to publically debate (Theoderet, H.E. 1.1,
1.2)
Auxentius, an Arian bishop living in Milan, Italy (in the
380s)
In the late 300s there are a large number (both Arian and
otherwise)
The Top-Down Method
The conversion of the Emperor/other bishops/local hierarchy
See Philostorgius 3.12: Athanasius and the Homoousian (Nicene) faith
Constantina
Emperor Constantius II
341(?) Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia becomes bishop of Constantinople, the
most powerful see in the east
Church Councils
318-320—Church Council in Alexandria, Egypt: Arius was kicked
out of the church
320-322 Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia held a
council and said that Arius was Orthodox
325 (early) Church Council at Antioch: Eusebius of Caesarea was
threatened with excommunication
325 Council of Nicea
335 Council of Tyre (condemnation of Athanasius)
343 Council of Sardica
358 Council of Sirmium
359 Council of Rimini
359 Seleucia
(16 different creeds during this period alone)
Persecution of Rivals
“Heretics” and Exile
• Arius
• Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis of Nicea
• Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, was sent into
exile five times between 328-373
Persecution of Rivals
Charges:
Killings, charges of disrupting church services/destroying
church paraphernalia, kidnappings, disrupting the official food
supply to Constantinople , sexual exploits (mistresses, having
children with prostitutes), confusing innocent virgins
Death of Arius in 336 (Socrates Scholasticus H.E. 1.38)
Songs/Jingles
Philostorgius H.E. 2:2: Sailors, millers, travellers
“King Henry the Eighth,
to six wives he was wedded.
One died, one survived,
two divorced, two beheaded.”
“Thalia” (The Banquet)—by Arius
We Just Can’t Get Along…
We are never, ever, ever, getting back together
We are never, ever, ever, getting back together
You go talk to your friends, talk to my friends, talk to me
But we are never, ever, ever, ever, getting back together
--Taylor Swift (Or Athanasius talking to Arius/Eusebius)
Use of Churches
Arian Baptistery
Ravenna, Italy
Ambrose vs. Emperor
Valentinian II and his
wife Justina (in the
380s)
A Walk-Through of St. Peter’s Basilica
Open up your 360Cities App
Search (the search-glass is in the upper left) for St. Peters Basilica
Along the top there is a Map button or a List button. Click on List.
Open up the one titled:
2011 05 18 13 54 Vatican St Peter High Resolution
Did all of these techniques matter, and/or did they
make an impression on the common people?
•
•
•
•
•
•
Individuals fought each other
Cities were divided
Religious riots
Churches were burned or invaded by the other side
Official Persecution
Natural Disasters (believed to be brought on by God)
Keeping Up with the (Ancient) Times using Modern Tech:
•
•
•
•
•
•
***Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/t/Arianism)
Google Scholar (which will email new scholarship to you)
Twitter (hardly anything on Arianism that is academic)
Blogs (not very many!)
Podcasts
JSTOR
Presentation of Research:
• ThingLink/Aurasma/My personal website www.digitalancienthistory.com ;
Slideshare;
Future Research Directions
•
Rise of Christianity: History, Documents, and Key Questions (manuscript is due
May 1, 2015). I’ll be using these categories (along with digital material—
podcasts, videos, timelines, using Aurasma)
•
A book on Eusebius and the part he played in spreading Arianism
•
Digital mapping projects (using GIS—Geographical Information System):
The spread of both Christianity and the “Barbarians” and incorporating this
research on why and how they converted
Different Methods of Spreading/Accepting Religious
Beliefs:
Letter Writing
Use of Scripture
Persecution of Rivals
Songs/Ditties
***Eusebius of Nicomedia
and Arius
(Beautiful Buildings/Artwork)
Public Debates
The Top-Down Method
Church Councils
Appeal of Manichaeism
•
•
•
•
Intellectual appeal
Duality
Art
Appeal to women
Concept
Cloud
History of the
Arians-Athanasius
Concept
Web
Early 300s AD
Ulfila the Goth
Ossius of Cordova
Alexander of Alexandria
George of Constantinople
Eusebius of Nicomedia
and Arius
Emperor Constantine
Athanasius of
Alexandria
Eusebius of Caesarea
Emperor Constantius II
Emperor Licinius
Use of Art
The Baptism of
Constantine by Pope
Sylvester ----Raphael or
Penni (1520s)
Sylvester died in 335
Constantine died in 337
“Donation of Constantine” (torn apart
by L. Valla)
A mosaic in the
Arian Baptistery,
Ravenna, Italy
(about 500 AD)
Early Christianity databases
• Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: A digital
library of Greek works
• The Unbound Bible
• All-in-One Biblical Resources Search
• American Theological Library Association
religion database
• Windows contains a very
simple data search that
will look for specific
words within a folder