Authorized Lives in Early Christian Biography: Between Eusebius and Augustine (review)

In Authorized Lives in Early Christian Biography, Michael Stuart Williams argues that the development of Christian biography in the fourth and fifth centuries reveals that late antique Christian writers and readers thought that their present could and should be the scene for the "reenactment" of the past world of Scripture. Drawing on such Christian biographies as Eusebius's Life of Constantine, Athanasius's Life of Antony, and Gregory of Nyssa's funeral oration for his brother Basil (among others), Williams discovers that the "biblicizing" templates evident in all these vitae betray a widespread sense that there was "an implied continuity" between the scriptural past and the late antique present. Late antique Christians understood themselves and their leaders as "reenactments" of biblical characters, their lives as "re-enactments" of scriptural events. In this regard, Christian biography continued the tradition of typological scriptural interpretation, with one crucial difference: whereas typology tends to be understood as diachronic, with the type finding final fulfillment according to a unidirectional chronology, the continuity implied in these biblicizing Christian biographies suggests that scriptural reenactment operates in both directions. For example, when Gregory portrays his brother Basil as a new Moses, Basil does not finally fulfill the Moses type, but rather post-figures or reenacts the life of Moses. And if "the effect was to assert an equivalence between the two historical situations" (225), then "[n]ot only was Basil identified as a reenactment of Moses, but Moses himself became a kind of proto-Basil" (19f.). "As a result," Williams argues, "the apparently biblical world that these figures exemplified was, at the same time, the familiar contemporary world inhabited by their readers. . . . [These vitae] gave them an opportunity to reimagine the world in which they already lived" (232). In this newly reimagined world, the scriptural past and the late antique present spoke to each other and formed a sort of double helix of divine providence. The "irruption of Scripture into everyday life" (225) that these biographies performed thereby established communication between the past and the present, and allowed late antique Christians to live their lives in both worlds simultaneously.

Chapter One, "Constantine: The Authorized Life," focuses on Eusebius's efforts to remove the emperor from the standard context of imperial exemplars (former emperors) and instead to situate him firmly in an exclusively Christian context by figuring him as a new Moses and a new Christ. As Williams puts it nicely, in Eusebius's hands, "Constantine's reign followed on instead directly from the days of the Old and the New Testament" (54). In Chapter Two, "Gregory and Basil: A Double Life," Williams examines how Gregory of Nyssa extends this biographical tradition from the imperial to the ecclesiastical sphere, figuring not an emperor, but a bishop, as the new Moses. Two features of this discussion are especially interesting. First, as I have already mentioned, Gregory likens Moses and Basil to such an extent that analogy gives way to identity: Basil is Moses, and vice versa; Moses is just as much a "projection" backward of Basil as Basil is a fulfillment of Moses. Second, once the analogy has collapsed into identity, Gregory must negotiate a dangerous implication, namely that he, as Basil's brother, threatens to become part of this biblical re-enactment. Gregory shows little interest in playing Aaron to Basil's Moses, but the "lack of control" embedded in the collapse of difference and time clearly gives Gregory real pause. As Williams notes, while Gregory struggles to absent himself from the reenactment he has just inaugurated, he also leaves his readers, and future writers, free to write him or themselves into just such a scene. This leads Williams in Chapter Three, "Antony and Jerome: Life on the Edge," to consider how Athanasius appears as a character in his own Life of Antony and Jerome in his own Lives of Illustrious Men. These burgeoning biographies of ascetics, and their authors' places among the ascetics, served at once to depict an...