Eusebius of Nicomedia, Arius of Alexandria, and

the Marketing of ArianismOr:

“…from a little spark a large fire was kindled.”

-- Socrates Scholasticus

Arius, ~330 AD (with his IPad)

Different Methods of Marketing Religious Beliefs in the 300s:

Eusebius of Nicomedia and Arius

Letter/Tract Writing

Use of Scripture

Public Debates

The Top-Down Method

Church Councils

Persecution of Rivals

Songs/Ditties

(Beautiful Buildings/Artwork)

Background to Arianism:

“Arians”:• Arius—a priest• Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia• Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea

“Nicenes”:• Bishop Alexander of Alexandria• Bishop Athanasius• Emperor Constantine (sometimes)• Eusebius of Caesarea (sometimes)

Alexandria

Caesarea

Constantinople

Nicomedia

Arian Christianity Nicene (later Catholic) Christianity

The Father is eternal;The Son is emanated from or created by the Father (and therefore comes later)

The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are Eternal (homoousius==same nature)

“There was a time when the Son was not”

Christianity is supposed to be Monotheistic (One God)

• The Nicenes solved this by believing that the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is one nature, but has different roles

• The Arians solved this by having God eternal

Letter Writing (most were designed to be public)

Bishops to Emperors

Letters to parishionersBishops to

fellow bishops

And

Emperors to Bishops

Admonitions

Demands

Requests

Bottom up: the program looks for clusters of words in a text

The Top-Down method—you give it the keywords

Textual AnalysisTopic Modeling—using computational linguistics to search for clusters of words

Computational Historiography or Algorithmic Historiography

David Mimno “Computational Historiography: Data Mining in a Century of Classics Journals,”5, 1, Article 3 (April 2012), 19 pages. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/~amahoney/02-jocch-mimno.pdf )

Textisbeautiful.net

Wordle.net (just shows frequency of words)

The Stanford Natural Language Processing Group (useful for extremely large volumes of text)

MALLETT : MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit (useful for extremely large volumes of text)

Show word maps and association mapsThe Deposition of Arius, by Bishop AlexanderOf Alexandria (319 AD)

“Concept Cloud”

Shows Frequency of use represented by the size of the text.The Color shows groups

Text is Beautiful

“Concept Web”

Concepts will be positioned closely to other concepts that they are highly related to.

The Deposition of Arius, by Bishop AlexanderOf Alexandria (319 AD)

The Deposition of Arius, by Bishop AlexanderOf Alexandria (319 AD)

“Correlation Wheel”

Shows prominent relationships between concepts with high prominence scores.“Almost always together, rarely apart”

Not related to frequency

The Deposition of Arius, by Bishop AlexanderOf Alexandria (319 AD)

“Correlation Wheel”

Shows prominent relationships between draws links between concepts with high prominence scores“Almost always together, rarely apart”

Not related to frequency

O.k.—so what?

Can reveal new relationships of ideas/concepts/words within a text--very useful for large texts (up to 25,000 words, or 100 pages for textisbeautiful—much, much more for other programs)

Better than keyword searches

Example from Early American Studies: “Doing More with Digitization: An introduction to topic modeling of early American sources” by Sharon Block, www.common-place.org · vol. 6 · no. 2 · January 2006

Use of Letter Metadata

a letter’s date, author, recipient, point of origin, point of reception

to create spatial analysis of intellectual correspondence networks.

Alexander of Alexandria’s letters

Eusebius of Nicomedia’s letters

Letters of Emperor Constantine

Letters of Athanasius of Alexandria

Letters of Julius, Bishop of Rome

“There was a time when the Son was not”

***Proverbs 8:22-5: “The Lord created me at the beginning of His ways…before the ages he founded me…before all the hills he begets me.”

Matt. 4:2 (cf. Luke 4:2)  “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into

the wilderness  to be tempted by the devil. 4:2 He fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he  was famished.”

Jn 8:42 Jesus said to them, "If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own; but he sent me.”

Use of Scripture: The Arian use of the Bible

Nicene/Catholic use of the BiblePsalms 110:3 From the womb, before the morning have I begotten you?

John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word

John 1:18 …the only-begotten Son

John 1:3 …by Him were all things made

John 14:9 He who has seen Me has seen the Father?

John 14:10 I am in the Father, and the Father in Me

John 10:30 My Father and I are one

Arius was known to publically debate (Theoderet, H.E. 1.1, 1.2)

Auxentius, an Arian bishop living in Milan, Italy (in the 380s)

In the late 300s there are a large number (both Arian and otherwise)

Public Debates

The conversion of the Emperor/other bishops/local hierarchy

See Philostorgius 3.12: Athanasius and the Homoousian (Nicene) faith

Constantina

Emperor Constantius II

341(?) Eusebius, bishop of Nicomedia becomes bishop of Constantinople, the most powerful see in the east

The Top-Down Method

Church Councils

318-320—Church Council in Alexandria, Egypt: Arius was kicked out of the church320-322 Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia held a council and said that Arius was Orthodox325 (early) Church Council at Antioch: Eusebius of Caesarea

was threatened with excommunication325 Council of Nicea 335 Council of Tyre (condemnation of Athanasius)343 Council of Sardica358 Council of Sirmium359 Council of Rimini359 Seleucia(16 different creeds during this period alone)

Persecution of Rivals

“Heretics” and Exile

• Arius

• Eusebius of Nicomedia and Theognis of Nicea

• Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, was sent into exile five times between 328-373

Persecution of Rivals

Charges:

Killings, charges of disrupting church services/destroying church paraphernalia, kidnappings, disrupting the official food supply to Constantinople , sexual exploits (mistresses, having children with prostitutes), confusing innocent virgins

Death of Arius in 336 (Socrates Scholasticus H.E. 1.38)

Songs/Jingles

Philostorgius H.E. 2:2: Sailors, millers, travellers

“King Henry the Eighth,to six wives he was wedded.One died, one survived,two divorced, two beheaded.”

“Thalia” (The Banquet)—by Arius

We Just Can’t Get Along…

We are never, ever, ever, getting back togetherWe are never, ever, ever, getting back togetherYou go talk to your friends, talk to my friends, talk to meBut we are never, ever, ever, ever, getting back together

--Taylor Swift (Or Athanasius talking to Arius/Eusebius)

Use of Churches

Arian Baptistery Ravenna, Italy

Ambrose vs. Emperor Valentinian II and his wife Justina (in the 380s)

A Walk-Through of St. Peter’s Basilica

Open up your 360Cities App

Search (the search-glass is in the upper left) for St. Peters Basilica

Along the top there is a Map button or a List button. Click on List.

Open up the one titled:

2011 05 18 13 54 Vatican St Peter High Resolution

Did all of these techniques matter, and/or did they make an impression on the common people?

• Individuals fought each other• Cities were divided• Religious riots• Churches were burned or invaded by the other

side• Official Persecution• Natural Disasters (believed to be brought on by

God)

Keeping Up with the (Ancient) Times using Modern Tech:

• ***Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/t/Arianism)• Google Scholar (which will email new scholarship to you)• Twitter (hardly anything on Arianism that is academic)• Blogs (not very many!)• Podcasts• JSTOR

Presentation of Research:• ThingLink/Aurasma/My personal website

www.digitalancienthistory.com ; Slideshare;

Future Research Directions

• Rise of Christianity: History, Documents, and Key Questions (manuscript is due May 1, 2015). I’ll be using these categories (along with digital material—podcasts, videos, timelines, using Aurasma)

• A book on Eusebius and the part he played in spreading Arianism

• Digital mapping projects (using GIS—Geographical Information System): The spread of both Christianity and the “Barbarians” and incorporating this research on why and how they converted

Different Methods of Spreading/Accepting Religious Beliefs:

***Eusebius of Nicomedia and Arius

Letter Writing

Use of Scripture

Public Debates

The Top-Down Method

Church Councils

Persecution of Rivals

Songs/Ditties

(Beautiful Buildings/Artwork)

Appeal of Manichaeism

• Intellectual appeal• Duality• Art• Appeal to women

Concept Cloud

History of the Arians--Athanasius

Concept Web

Eusebius of Nicomedia and Arius

Alexander of Alexandria Ossius of Cordova

Athanasius of Alexandria

Eusebius of Caesarea

George of Constantinople

Emperor Constantine

Emperor LiciniusEmperor Constantius II

Ulfila the GothEarly 300s AD

Use of Art

The Baptism of Constantine by Pope Sylvester ----Raphael or Penni (1520s)

Sylvester died in 335

Constantine died in 337

“Donation of Constantine” (torn apart by L. Valla)

A mosaic in the Arian Baptistery,Ravenna, Italy (about 500 AD)

Early Christianity databases

• Thesaurus Linguae Graecae: A digital library of Greek works

• The Unbound Bible

• All-in-One Biblical Resources Search

• American Theological Library Association religion database

• Windows contains a very simple data search that will look for specific words within a folder