The Demonic in the Political Thought of Eusebius of Caesarea by Hazel Johannessen (review)

Eusebius’s voluminous writings constitute the most extensive discourses about Christianity in the early fourth century. Unfortunately, the Caesarean scholar has long been described as promoting opportunistic apologetics, ruthless Constantinian politics, and a triumphalist realized eschatology at what was seen as a uniquely secure moment for Christians in the Roman Empire. As Hazel Johannessen’s new study demonstrates, however, these assessments rely on selective readings of Eusebius’s works. Although Johannessen claims modestly to cast her net after Eusebian demonology, her attentive identification and interpretation of numerous demonic appearances in Eusebius’s works, in sensitive dialogue with contemporary demonological discourses, yields persuasive revisions of the broader cosmology, anthropology, and political thought of this crucial scholar.

Johannessen’s arguments unfold over six chapters bracketed with an introduction and a brief conclusion. Her foundational first chapter, an up-to-date and judicious overview of Eusebius’s works, highlights the varied social circumstances and differing audiences of the Ecclesiastical History, Praeparatio and Demonstratio Evangelica, Life of Constantine, and In Praise of Constantine. (The only conspicuously absent scholarship is the introduction to the new commentary on the History edited by Sébastien Morlet and Lorenzo Perrone.) Despite Johannessen’s warning not to expect consistency from works written over a quarter century, Chapters Two and Three sketch “a remarkably consistent picture of demons” (73–74). For Eusebius, demons are material beings, envious, deceitful, dark, irrational, enslaving, and barbaric—fitting foot soldiers for Satan and appropriate adversaries for the angels who face them in a bipolarized cosmos. While these conclusions will hardly surprise students of ancient demonology, Johannessen refutes recent scholarship by showing that Eusebius did not view demons as having retreated at the incarnation, as Eusebius makes this point just twice, whilst trumpeting a contemporaneous elimination of human sacrifice (PE 4.15–17) and the death of the god Pan (PE 5.17). To the contrary Eusebius repeatedly described demons as otherwise active into his own day (146–49 with 87–89).

Johannessen explores the implications of Eusebius’s demonology in Chapters Four through Six. On the subject of free will and responsibility, Johannessen puts the traditional view of Eusebius as an advocate of both on a firmer historical footing. Seconding the Stoics and Origen that human souls had free choice (proairesis) as a consequence of their rationality, her Eusebius enjoins humans to resist demonic temptation through intellectual and ascetic training. On historical theology, Johannessen notes that, where Eusebius famously credits civilizing progress to God, demons’ agency has degraded civilized order repeatedly—and potentially could again even after the best of circumstances. Demons’ instruments of devastation include powerful institutional heads, especially Roman emperors, whom Eusebius perceived as determining the empire’s stance toward the church. In order to resist demonic influence, Christian leaders must inculcate Christ’s more ethical teaching. Because Constantine was the most prominent Christian leader, Johannessen argues, his imitation of the divine disseminates the divine virtues that restrain demons. Constantine thus becomes not a harbinger of a realized eschatology, but a foil for the tyrants who empower demons in their realms; Eusebius’s portraits of both Constantine and anti-Christian rulers such as Licinius aim to dissuade future rulers from submission to demons.

When Eusebius’s demonology comes into focus, Johannessen shows, the Caesarean scholar projects caution rather than triumphalism, subtlety rather than bombast, distance from rather than fealty toward Roman imperialism, and an enduring pedagogical program rather than reactive polemics. Disagreements will of course arise even from sympathetic critics. For example, Johannessen could perhaps have emphasized Eusebius’s role as an educator more, given Johnson’s and Morlet’s demonstrations that much of the scholar’s oeuvre reflects a pedagogical purpose (cf. 161). The pervasive role of demons in Eusebius’s pedagogical projects surely reflects his concern with an enduring threat. In accepting Aaron Johnson’s argument that Eusebius “refused to celebrate the empire itself unreservedly as long as its leadership remained...