Christianity's Quiet Success: The Eusebius Gallicanus Sermon Collection and the Power of the Church in Late Antique Gaul

2. The Eusebius Gallicanus Sermon Collection

c h a p t e r t w o The Eusebius Gallicanus Sermon Collection The Eusebius Gallicanus is a key example of an important genre: the anonymous collection, designed as a preaching handbook. As such it represents some widely practiced sermon models and preaching styles. We know that it was used and that it was popular.1 It should loom large in scholarly discussions of early medieval preaching and the development of the Gallic Church, but to date it has not. This is, in large part, because of the seemingly unresolvable arguments over its authorship, an obstacle which has occupied the attention of scholars investigating the collection and scared off others from using such a contentious source. Such problems are endemic to sermon studies in general. As Dolbeau has shown, the confusion surrounding the sermons of Augustine has contributed to the relative neglect of the works of even so examined an individual.2 Unsurprisingly, scholars 29 30 Christianity’s Quiet Success have been even less inclined to dabble in the muddy waters of the Eusebius Gallicanus, and it has remained a peripheral source. This chapter outlines the state of debate over the collection and why it has stalled on key issues. Some plausible solutions are suggested , but other questions are recognised as unanswerable. The latter arise from the nature of the source and from the extent to which late antique attitudes towards authorship and originality differ from our own. Rather than seeing these problems as roadblocks, however, I treat them as opportunities. Recognising the nature of the source and the context from which it emerges makes it possible for scholars to talk about and use the Eusebius Gallicanus not in spite of the problems it presents, but because the problems themselves are evidence for the history and character of the late antique Church. It is characteristic of the state of Eusebian scholarship that even the collection’s proper name is the subject of dispute. “Eusebius Gallicanus ” was the designation granted it by a seventeenth-century editor based on the recurrence of the name Eusebius in manuscripts of the sermons and on their apparent Gallic origins.3 No Eusebius of Gaul has emerged from the historical record to claim responsibility for the texts. Few medieval scribes seem to have known who the­ author was. They term him Eusebius episcopus, identify him with known Eusebii such as the bishops of Caesarea, Emesa, and Vercelli, and even suggest that the works were translated from Greek or Hebrew .4 All of these scribal conjectures have been subsequently dismissed .5 Instead, scholars argue that the name Eusebius may have been a pious pseudonym, a way of giving the collection an “oriental” flavour, or a result of confusion with a collection of sermons circu­ lating under the name of Eusebius of Alexandria.6 They also point out that the scribes just as frequently claimed the sermons for Augustine , Caesarius, Faustus, Faustinus, Gregory, Jerome, Maximus, and others.7 As a result the collection has been known, among other things, as the “pseudo-Eusebius,” the “Collectio Gallicana,” and the “collection attributed to Eusebius of Emesa.”8 This proliferation of titles has only added to the confusion surrounding the text and the difficulty for scholars in accessing information about it. The collection is designated the “Eusebius Gallicanus” in this study because The Eusebius Gallicanus Sermon Collection 31 this is the name under which it has now been edited in the CCSL. This choice does not imply a specific claim about the sermons’ authorship but is simply in the interest of standardisation. Scholarly circumlocutions, though accurate, are in this instance unhelpful. What Jean Leroy terms the “nomenclature luxuriante” of the Eusebius Gallicanus manuscripts resulted in a complicated publishing history prior to the Corpus Christianorum edition.9 In 1531 the ten sermons ad monachos were published in Cologne under the name of Eusebius, bishop of Emesa.10 Jean de Gaigny published fifty-six of the homilies under this same attribution in 1547 and eighteen of them were published by Lievens under the name of Eucherius of Lyon in 1602. These two editions were then published together by André Schott in 1618 under the name Eusebius Gallicanus and re­ issued in 1677 as part of the Maxima Bibliotheca Patrum. Sermons included in the CCSL edition by Glorie have also appeared in editions of the works of other authors, particularly Faustus of Riez, Eucherius of Lyon, Caesarius of Arles, and...