Thoughts from Eusebius....something different.

Image obtained from Wikipedia

A note to readers:  I've added this post as something different as far as topic matter.  I've always been fascinated by the early Christian Church and have spent considerable time reading texts regarding the initial fathers of the Christian movement.  The likes of Paul, Origen, Tertullian, et al, continues to intrigue.  What one takes from the blog post below concerning UFOs is somewhat at the discretion of the reader, however I see elements of the necessity of the employment of critical and rational thinking hinted at by the post's subject matter.  I readily profess that I'm not an expert in the area of antiquity, but am drawn to it none the less...Tim Hebert

A few years back I had procured The History of the Church, written by the early Christian scholar, Eusebius.  This work was translated by G. A. Williamson (1965) with an introduction by Andrew Louth, 1988.  Eusebius' great work opened the door as to pointing me in the right direction as far as the works of the first generation of the Apostolic Fathers.

During Eusebius' scholarly works, he was Bishop of Caesarea. ca 313 AD.  The city of Jerusalem was a mere shell of it's former self as a result of the decimation of the Jewish population and culture by the Roman legions under Titus and Vespasian following the two Jewish Wars (66 AD, 135 AD). Even in name Jerusalem had changed to Aelia Capitolina. Thus was the changing landscape of politics and geography during Eusebius' times.

Andrew Louth, in his introduction, stated that though Eusebius was a great scholar, he was lacking in producing original Christian thought. This may be true to some extent, but Louth seems to glance over the fact that for all practical purposes, Eusebius was issued what tantamount to a gag order after being denounced at the council of Antioch in 325 for his support of Arius and Arianism.  So from then on it seems that Eusebius had to walk and talk a fine line in order to avoid excommunication from the Church.  To this day, Eusebius is largely forgotten, or ignored, by the Catholic Church.  Such is the price that he paid going against the grain of church politics.

The following is an excerpt from The History of the Church which I believe provides great insight into the past thinking of our religious scholars and a hint at some of Eusebius' original thoughts:

Why He was not preached long ago, as He is now, to all men an to every, what follows will make clear.  It was impossible for the teaching of Christ in all its wisdom and virtue to be grasped by the human race in its former state.  At the very beginning, after the original life of blessedness, the first man disregarded the divine command and fell into this mortal, transitory state, receiving this earth with its curse in place of the former heavenly delights.

His descendants, who peopled all our world, showed themselves much worse, apart from one or two, plunging into a beastly existence and a life not worth living.  City and state, arts and sciences meant nothing to them; laws and statutes, morality and philosophy were not even names...nature's gift of reason and germs of thought and culture in the human soul were destroyed by the immensity of their deliberate wickedness.

Eusebius

I've bold printed the main idea that is of importance, yet kept the full paragraphs as to keep it in the context of Eusebius' thoughts.  True the above passage pertains to Christian thought as Eusebius provides a rationalization for the coming of Christ at a specific time period in our history, but what is of interest is his reasoning that certain aspects of man's intellectual development had to be achieved to set the stage for the coming of Christ.

Let's look at Eusebius' words in a secular light.  Man's cognitive state had to evolve beyond the old hunter-gatherer days and his nomadic lifestyle to embrace new ways of thinking. Eusebius in two paragraphs of his writings encapsulates the intellectual impact of the Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Persian civilizations.  Man's ability to develop the concepts of art, science and philosophy and cultivate the fruits of these intellectual endeavors was paramount for the continuing and the fine tuning of rational thought.  It is from the nurturing of these disciplines that a sense of governance, law, morality and ethics came into being albeit not perfect, yet constantly evolving as such concepts are never static.