Eusebius of Emesa, a pupil of the Caesarean Eusebius, was an able exegete and theologian, though not as illustrious as his teacher in either capacity. The object of this excellent book, the first of its scope in English, is to rescue him from the obscurity into which he fell when his fellow-Greeks allowed his works to perish. As Winn explains in his introduction, much has been retrieved from Greek catenae, Armenian translations of his commentaries and sermons and a corpus of twenty-nine Latin sermons, deftly identified as his by French philologists of the mid-twentieth century. None of these discoveries, to judge by Winn's first chapter (‘The world of Eusebius’), enables us to fix a date for Eusebius' birth in Edessa, though we know that his career fell almost entirely in the first half of the fourth century. For reasons that I shall explain below, I cannot embrace Winn's theory that his distaste for the pagan cult of the sun in Emesa explains his deprecation of solar imagery in his teaching on the Trinity (p. 45); Winn's conjecture that his peregrinations after his sojourn in Antioch were dictated by those of George of Laodicea may be enticing, but it is clear that we can speak more confidently of his writings than of his life.

In the second chapter, ‘Rhetorical and exegetic strategies’, Winn observes that Eusebius, in praising the Apostles, displays his familiarity with the usual tropes of rhetoric, but without following the sequence commended by Menander Rhetor (pp. 58–60). He might have added that this discrepancy shows him to be acquainted not only with the rhetorical handbooks but with a tradition of divergence that is exemplified in Porphyry's Life of Plotinus and in the Life of Apollonius by Philostratus, who often has more in common with Mark and John than with the straw man who is held up in his name by biblical scholars as a foil to those evangelists. Winn goes on to observe that the public sermons of Eusebius make little use of terms which are unattested in the Scriptures, not because he denies the right of the Church to frame its own vocabulary, but because such terms are apt to breed controversy. The same could be said of many Christian authors of the fourth century who were not directly engaged in a controversy, and when it is pointed out in chapter iv that Eusebius sometimes speaks of the Son as homoios rather than homoousios with the Father, we should remember that this choice sometimes represents an adherence to a biblical minimum rather than a calculated rejection of Nicene technicalities. As chapter iii (‘The natural world and human nature’) intimates, Eusebius often prefers to take up questions that did not divide the orthodox, and no churchman of his time would have demurred when he admonished his congregation on the one hand not to ‘deify’ the world and, on the other, not to fall into a Manichaean, encratitic or Gnostic denigration of the body and its Creator.

The goodness of God, his incorporeality and his Trinitarian character furnish the matter of the fourth and longest chapter, in which, as I have already hinted, it is possible that Winn, like the ancient critics of Eusebius, makes too much of his apparent deviation from the catholic belief in the equality of the three persons. Nevertheless, he succeeds both in explaining and dispelling Jerome's charge of Arianism; he is less convincing when he suggests that it was the friendship of Eusebius with the homoiousian George of Laodicea that exposed him to the equally baseless imputation of Sabellianism (p. 182). Eusebius himself put this construction on the theology of Marcellus, but the formula homoios kat'ousian was preferred to the homoousion by opponents of Marcellus precisely because the adjective homoios precludes numerical identity. Winn goes on to demonstrate in chapter v (‘The humanity and divinity of Christ’) that it is as futile to thrust a choice between Alexandrian and Antiochene Christologies on Eusebius as to ask whether he was an Arian or a Sabellian. The evidence produced by Winn suggests (though he does not say this) that he followed his usual practice of saying only what he could find in Scripture: it may indeed be doubted whether any theologian of the fourth century would have ventured to contradict the clear allusion to the soul of Christ at John xii.27, or to dissociate himself without qualification from the logos-sarx Christology which is asserted in plain terms at John i.14. I will break Winn's silence once again to add that Origen too should be reckoned among the mentors of Eusebius, as it was he who proposed the impossible experiment of melting iron in fire as an illustration of the absorption of Christ's humanity into his Godhead (p. 217; Princ. 2.6.4). This proof of his indebtedness to Origen should be set against his refusal to endorse the latter's analogy between the procession of light from the Sun and the generation of the Second Person from the First (p. 127: the simile was by no means peculiar to Origen, and, as Winn himself points out, there were other doctors of the fourth century who rejected this ante-Nicene commonplace on the grounds that it compromised the incorporeality of God).

In his pastoral role, as we learn from the final chapter (‘Martyrs and virgins’), Eusebius inculcates the practices of fasting, sexual continence and almsgiving as an anticipation of the angelic life which is laid up for the saints in heaven. Little in his teaching is exceptional, except perhaps his readiness to see even the modest virtue of refraining from perjury as a species of martyrdom for those who were free of external persecutions (p. 245). An appendix draws attention to the synonymity of nature and essence in Eusebius and to his use of Exodus iii.14 to demonstrate that, since the Son and the Father share one essence, it is the essence of both ‘to be’. Eusebius, we have said, was no great thinker, but in this study he receives his due.