ABSTRACT
Those extollers of the pro-Nicene Christian 'establishment', that intellectual triumvirate who confirmed for all time the role of Church history as a necessary act of rhetoric and a distinct literary genre, followed their most notable predecessors, Eusebius of Caesarea, Rufinus of Aquileia and Philostorgius of Cappadocia, in documenting the apportionments of divine justice in ecclesiastical and wider affairs. From Eusebius and to a lesser degree from Rufinus they imbibed a confident providentialism, if not triumphalism, reassuring their readers that God was protecting His people against error and political disorder. Against those who had attempted to cast the great Constantine as pro-Arian, and especially the Eunomian Philostorgius, who had dared to reinterpret history as if the divine Justice showed disfavour towards the post-Constantinian Homoousians, these three soon produced alternative narratives, which reflected their Nicaean theological dispositions and, more to the point of this book, interpreted divine rewards and punishments as a defence of the existing ('Theodosian') order. These three, I venture to assert, are the veritable consolidators of Byzantinism: Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret, a trio leaving us with the post-Biblical 'synoptic problem' of early Orthodoxy, and confirming yet again that the age-old task of the historian to apportion praise and blame was being resumed in Christian historiographical assessments. 1
These three ecclesiastical historians not only line up with the relevant documents and details to discompose the Arian parties, let alone the proponents of a revived paganism, but they also introduce a new element into 'historicized' retributive logic. Along with their expected concern to instance God's appropriate requitals in post-Constantinian affairs, they go beyond Eusebian triumphalism in the way they treat the 'justly pronounced' punishments by righteous emperors as reflections of divine retribution.
