A Compressed Philostorgius-Weighted History of Nicaea

 Let me try to lay this out the way it actually looks once you make Philostorgius your baseline and then just keep asking a very boring question: for each key moment, what do the other four “big channels” do with it – Vita Constantini (VC), Gelasius of Caesarea, Rufinus, and Socrates? Yes/no, plus a short tag. That’s it.

The point isn’t to re-tell the whole fourth century; it’s to show how much of what we call the “Nicene” story is really a later overlay that rewrites an Arian-leaning imperial reality.

I’m going to walk through Philostorgius’ own chronology and, at each node, check what the other four say.

305–306: Constantius’ death, Constantine’s succession

Philostorgius starts with a very concrete scene: Constantius dies in Britain, Constantine is actually there, buries him, is proclaimed Augustus on the spot. The message is: Constantine is a dynastic, military, very earthly emperor – there is nothing here about “proto-Nicene champion” status.

VC says “yes” to this sequence. Eusebius’ Constantine biography gives the standard tetrarchic story and Constantine’s rise, wrapped in providential rhetoric, but nothing that marks him as a theological outlier yet, let alone as the future anti-Arian hammer.

Gelasius says “yes” in his way: his fragments on Diocletian/Maximian and Constantine’s family are basically a restart of the Eusebian dossier, but again, nothing particularly dogmatic here.

Rufinus says “yes”: book 9 just passes on the Eusebian HE version, no Arian twist, no retro-Nicene coloring.

Socrates says “yes”: 1.2–3 follows the familiar pattern for Constantius’ death and Constantine’s accession.

So at the starting gun, everybody’s on the same page. Philostorgius is not yet “the weird Arian.” He’s just narrating the same transition from Constantius to Constantine that the pro-Nicene side happily accepts.

312: Vision and Milvian Bridge

At the Milvian Bridge Philostorgius does something interesting. He gives the heavenly cross but with an explicit Latin motto: “In hoc signo vinces.” It’s an Arian historian leaning into a very Catholic-sounding catchphrase, while simultaneously framing this as Constantine’s real point of conversion and legitimation.

VC again says “yes, but.” Eusebius gives a detailed vision narrative (1.28–32) but the Latin slogan is not there. His account is more panegyrical: the sign, the dream, the victory. It’s high imperial propaganda, not the later catechism formula.

Gelasius: “yes.” His fragments use the same victory-over-Maxentius dossier. He pushes “God’s favor on Constantine” rather than caring about the exact wording on the sky-banner.

Rufinus: “yes.” The tail end of book 9 reproduces the HE/VC Milvian material. No explicit “In hoc signo vinces,” no obsessive interest in the Latin words.

Socrates: “yes.” He knows the vision/victory tradition (plus details that look like Lactantius), but again, he doesn’t canonize the slogan.

Everybody agrees Constantine won and credited Christ. Philostorgius puts a slogan on the cross; the others don’t. Nothing “Nicene” yet. The theology comes later.

325: Nicaea and Arius

This is where Philostorgius becomes radioactive for the later story.

For him Nicaea is an Arian-sympathetic council. Arius is not demonized; he is treated as basically right. Homoousios is a violent innovation that gets shoved in. Only Secundus and Theon refuse to sign; everyone else caves under pressure, signs under protest, and lives to fight another day under Constantine’s Arianizing successors. In other words: Nicaea is a botched compromise, not the birth of Nicene orthodoxy.

VC only half-acknowledges Nicaea. The council is there in the background as Constantine’s crowning church-policy achievement, but there is no full conciliar dossier. No creed, no transcripts, no blow-by-blow; just “Constantine gathered bishops and healed the Church.” That vagueness is exactly what later writers will exploit.

Gelasius says “yes, and let me fix that for you.” His big Nicaea fragments (F11–F14) carry the same little anecdote cluster we know from later tradition – Arians handing in petitions that get burned, the dialectician humiliated in debate, Paphnutius as anti-ascetic hero, Spyridon the rustic miracle worker – but the framing is now firmly pro-Nicene. The same data points are re-spun into a story where homoousios wins and Arius’ people are humiliated.

Rufinus says “yes” and goes all-in. Book 10.1–6 is the Latin pipeline for that whole anecdotal dossier: the dialectician who gets refuted, Paphnutius defending marriage, Spyridon’s miracles, the detail about “seventeen” bishops standing with Arius, the famous “they signed with the hand but not with the heart” line. He presents this as his own continuation of Eusebius, and it is entirely anti-Arian.

Socrates says “yes” and canonicalizes it. 1.8–10 covers Alexander, Arius, the council, the creed, the exiles, and treats homoousios and Nicaea as the orthodox standard.

So at 325, the fork is obvious. Philostorgius keeps a living, contested Nicaea that Arians can still interpret their way. Gelasius–Rufinus–Socrates take essentially the same raw material and turn it into the story of the Nicene triumph. That is already a massive re-narration of the same council.

c. 328: Alexander’s death and Athanasius’ ordination

Philostorgius is brutal here: Athanasius is not a saint; he’s a thug. The story is that he forces two Egyptian bishops, locked inside a church, to consecrate him. Other bishops anathematize him. It’s an Arian attempt to delegitimize his entire career at the root.

VC simply doesn’t touch this. Athanasius is a heroic defender of “orthodoxy” in the Nicene imagination, but Eusebius’ Constantine Life is a panegyric to the emperor and doesn’t narrate the alleged illicit ordination at all.

Gelasius knows Athanasius only as Nicene champion. His Athanasian fragments (F18–F21) paint him as persecuted for the true faith; the Arian ordination story is nowhere in sight. It may as well not exist.

Rufinus counters Philostorgius with an entirely different legend: the famous “baptizing game” on the seashore, Alexander seeing prophetic signs in the boy Athanasius, raising him like Samuel in the temple, and then designating him as his successor. That’s 10.15. Structurally it answers the Arian calumny: where they have coercion, he offers divine election.

Socrates lines up with Athanasian tradition too: Alexander designates Athanasius; a regular synod ordains him. The “locked church” motif is explicitly rejected as calumny.

You can almost see the polemical call-and-response: Arian slander → pro-Nicene hagiography. The later “Nicene” story is not neutral memory; it is built as a rebuttal to exactly the kind of Arian dossier Philostorgius is preserving.

330/334: Constantinople, foundation and bishops

Philostorgius dates the founding and dedication of Constantinople to Constantine’s 28th year and glosses that as 334. He also compresses the episcopal succession so Alexander of Constantinople is treated as almost a non-entity, quickly displaced by Eusebius of Nicomedia. Constantinople is being written as an Arian headquarters, and the Nicene track is flattened.

VC says yes to Constantinople as “New Rome” and celebrates the project, but it doesn’t share Philostorgius’ compressed episcopal list or his 334 date. Eusebius is more interested in Constantine’s symbolism than in the local bishop’s tenure.

Gelasius implicitly pushes back. He presupposes Alexander of Constantinople as a substantial figure (F22b, Vita Metrophanis et Alexandri, etc.). The very existence of that dossier is a silent protest against Philostorgius’ attempt to erase or miniaturize Alexander.

Rufinus follows a similar line. 10.12–14 puts Alexander of Constantinople in real conflict with Eusebius of Nicomedia over Arius’ attempt to be received in Constantinople. There’s no explicit year, but the whole episode floats in that 330–334 window and assumes Alexander actually matters.

Socrates goes further and corrects the chronology. He gives a succession Metrophanes → Alexander → Paul → Eusebius and explicitly dates the dedication of the city to 330, shifting Philostorgius’ “28th year = 334” back.

So again, Philostorgius preserves an Arian reading: Constantinople as essentially an Eusebian project. The pro-Nicene historians respond by inflating Alexander and tidying the dates so the Nicene side is rooted there from the start.

336–337: Arius’ death, Constantine’s end, and the handover

Philostorgius emphasizes Arian rehabilitation at the end: Constantine reconciles with the Arian party; bishops like Eusebius of Nicomedia are in favor; the momentum is firmly “homoian” going into Constantius’ reign. He downplays or reshapes the “Alexander prays, Arius dies on the privy” miracle. And programmatically he says that Eusebius’ history reaches the point where Constantine is succeeded by his sons.

VC absolutely provides the skeleton here. Book 4 narrates Constantine’s illness, his baptism by Eusebius of Nicomedia, his death, and the division of the empire among his sons. That’s the biographical endpoint Philostorgius clearly has in view when he talks about “Eusebius’” scope.

Gelasius says yes to the Arius death story, but with a twist. In F22/F22b he tells the Alexander-prayer / latrine-death version but rubrics it as happening “early in Constantius’ reign,” i.e., he pushes the miracle just past Constantine’s life rather than under him. Same content as Rufinus/Socrates, but chronologically relocated.

Rufinus is the one who locks the miracle under Constantine. 10.12–14 gives the fullest Latin version: Constantia’s Arian presbyter, Arius’ “orthodox” creed, Alexander’s vigil and prayer, Arius’ bowels pouring out in the public toilet. He puts it firmly in Constantine’s last days.

Socrates follows that structure: 1.25–26 tells the same story under Constantine, then finishes Book 1 with Constantine’s death and only then moves on. And significantly, when he opens Book 2, he immediately corrects Rufinus on chronological matters in this post-Constantine segment, right at the point where the scope of “Eusebius” and its continuations is in dispute.

So: Philostorgius sees a smooth Arian rehabilitation into Constantine’s later years and beyond. Rufinus–Socrates–Gelasius insist on a dramatic miracle that slams the door on Arius, and they fight over exactly where to place it relative to Constantine’s death. You can feel them arguing not just with Philostorgius’ content, but with his underlying assumption that Eusebius’ “history” ends around this same transition.

The “extent” of Eusebius’ history

This sounds like a technical question, but it’s actually crucial to the whole game.

Philostorgius explicitly says that Eusebius’ history goes down to the time when Constantine is succeeded by his sons. That statement only makes sense if he’s thinking of HE + VC (or HE + some continuation) as a single arc: “Eusebius” as a dossier, not just a single book.

VC obviously matches that: it ends with Constantine’s death and the division among his sons. HE proper stops earlier, but if you bundle HE + VC, you get exactly the stopping point Philostorgius is describing.

Gelasius positions himself as the one who picks up “after Eusebius and what he did not record,” but in practice his fragments restart from Diocletian/Constantine and run all the way through Valens. So a codex that binds Eusebius + Gelasius together naturally sails past Constantine’s sons into the Arian council cycle. “Eusebius + continuation” becomes an open set.

Rufinus, in Latin, does the opposite. He insists Greek HE 10 had very little historical material. He folds whatever there was into his book 9 and then writes books 10–11, covering “from the time of Constantine after the persecution to the death of Theodosius,” as his own work. For him, Eusebius proper ends before the real Arian drama, and he (Rufinus) owns the narrative from there on.

Socrates starts his own history with a programmatic claim: Eusebius stops at the Licinius victory and the peace of the Church (1.1). Yet in practice he narrates Constantine’s death, then opens Book 2 by correcting Rufinus’ chronology right afterward. That only makes sense in a world where some notion of “Eusebius+” extending to Constantine’s end is already in play, and where the boundaries between Eusebius’ own work and later continuations are contested.

In other words: Philostorgius is not just some Arian crank wandering off alone. He is reading “Eusebius” as HE+VC+continuation down to Constantine’s sons and then writing his own church history on top of that framework. The Nicene-leaning historians (Gelasius, Rufinus, Socrates) are all, in different ways, fighting over that same framework – where it stops, who gets to continue it, and how Nicaea and the Arian conflict are supposed to look.

Once you weight the story toward Philostorgius and then watch the others say “yes, but” or “no, here’s a better version,” you start to see how much of the tidy “Nicene” history is late, polemical scaffolding erected on top of a much messier, Arian-friendly fourth century.