Orosius

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Paulus Orosius was a Christian priest, theologian, and historian active in the early fifth century, remembered chiefly as the author of the Seven Books of History Against the Pagans — a universal history written to answer the charge that Christianity had brought ruin on Rome. Almost nothing of his life is secure outside his own writings and a few notices by others. He seems to have come from Gallaecia, in the northwest of the Iberian peninsula, perhaps from Braga, and to have left it under pressure of the barbarian incursions that were then unsettling the western provinces.

What can be established begins around 414, when Orosius arrived in North Africa and attached himself to Augustine of Hippo. Augustine found the young priest useful and sent him eastward to Jerome in Bethlehem, partly to carry questions about the origin of the soul and partly to assist in the campaign against the teaching of Pelagius on grace and free will. In Palestine Orosius pressed the case against Pelagius at a synod in 415 and came off badly; he returned west with the relics of Saint Stephen, said to have been newly discovered, and then disappears from the record. The date and place of his death are unknown, which is why the conventional “c. 420” is a guess rather than a fact.

The Seven Books were written at Augustine’s suggestion, around 416 and 417, as a kind of companion volume to the City of God. Augustine had argued, at length, that the Roman disasters of the age — above all the sack of the city by Alaric’s Goths in 410 — were not the fault of the abandoned old gods. Orosius was set to supply the historical proof: a survey of the whole human past from the Flood onward, marshaled to show that war, plague, and catastrophe had always been the human lot, and that the centuries before Christ had been if anything worse. The work is openly polemical, its history bent to a thesis, and later readers have often found its handling of sources loose. It was, even so, enormously successful. Through the Middle Ages the Historiae served as a standard compendium of ancient history; it survives in hundreds of manuscripts, was rendered into Old English in the circle of King Alfred, and shaped how the Latin West remembered antiquity for the better part of a thousand years.

Orosius is not an esoteric figure, and the tradition he served was unsparing toward the older religions it displaced. He earns a place here as a hinge: a writer through whom the pagan past reached medieval Christendom already framed, selected, and turned to Christian use. Much of what the Latin Middle Ages knew of the gods and empires that came before came filtered through his polemic — one age handing the next its memory of what went before.

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