The Theological Anthropology of Eustathius of Antioch by Sophie Cartwright (review)

Building from J. H. Declerck’s editorial insights (CCG 51) into the surviving work of Eustathius of Antioch, Cartwright explores this remarkable, nuanced thinker. What emerges is the portrait of a theologian who anticipates Augustine’s moral psychology. More compellingly, though, he balances and assesses the political implications of the grand narratives of cosmic return and renewal in his exegesis.

Eustathius is a witness to the debate over the soteriological structure of early pro-Arian theopaschitism. While condemned at Serdica in 343, and often taken as the defining characteristic of pro-Arianism, little primary source material on the point survives. But Contra Ariomanitas de anima, recently attributed to Eustathius by Declerck, debates whether the Word is immutable willfully or intrinsically. Eustathius characterizes pro-Arian theology arguing the former, thereby applying Origen’s doctrine of Christ’s soul to the Word. In this way, theopaschitism is the corollary to docetism: by insisting on the Word’s contingent goodness and immutability (thereby enabling his suffering and distinction from the Father), one denies his divinity; but in denying Christ a human soul while maintaining the immutability of the Word, one denies the reality of his sufferings (59–61). Surprisingly, Eustathius reverts to the paschite structure of Origen’s doctrine of Christ’s soul, united to the Word by will. From here, Cartwright argues that Ariomanitas is a response to Eusebian authors (65). In particular, it is the simplistic apsychon anthropology of the Ecclesiastica Theologica (63) that Eustathius rejects as implying the (Origenian?) transmigration of souls. Docetism was as important to early Arian theology as theopaschitism.

Such nuanced conclusions are why this book is worth reading. But as Cartwright is careful to acknowledge, such conclusions are reconstructions. Ariomanitas is an epitome. Lacunae span the discourses on, say, the transmigration of souls and the contingent goodness of the Word. Yet besides his Engastrimytho, Ariomanitas is the best preserved of all Eustathius’s works. After advancing the debate on Eustathius’ relation to Paulinus (a rival for the see; 14–16) and his deposition (likely in 327 c.e.; 23–24) in Chapter One, Cartwright reconstructs his oeuvre (Chapter Two). She argues that Engastrimytho is prior to the “outbreak” of the Arian controversy and that Ariomanitas is subsequent. From these two seminal works she traces a development in Eustathius’s anthropological Christology. She aligns the remaining fragments accordingly. Thus a critical foundation of the monograph is unstable. But this is not the fault of the author. The surviving fragments are almost exclusively Christological, from a sixth-century Syriac miaphysite florilegium. While the argument is difficult to follow at times, Cartwright is to be commended not only for paying attention to the speculative nature of her argument, but also for maintaining consistent methodology amidst difficult source material. Her subsequent chapters present Eustathius’s pre-Arian controversy views before showing how these developed in Ariomanitas and related fragments. Further scholarship is needed to criticize and nuance her arguments based on internal evidence, but she has done the field a massive service by her diligent initial examinations.

Of importance for future research will be the questions of Eustathius’s interlocutors or sources and the role of Eustathius as a source in e.g. Gregory of Nyssa. At some of these junctures the reader wishes Cartwright had more space. For instance, in Chapter Three, she argues that Eustathius understands the soul as blood (108–9). As life giving charakter imprinted on the body, soul moves the organs in a kind of domino effect. Eustathius uses this point as the ground upon which to argue that grief is morally appropriate (199–200). But in her analysis of soul as charakter, she adduces parallels that leave open many questions: “we are reminded” of Athanasius; a similar picture “is found in Marcellus”; the terms “may be lifted from Irenaeus”; “he appears to be drawing on Origen” (100). Cartwright’s purpose is not to specify the exact relationship between these authors. It is rather to demonstrate...