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 (Historiae adversum paganos) — 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 (Roman Bracara Augusta), and to have left it under pressure of the barbarian incursions — Vandals, Suevi, and Alans had crossed into Hispania in 409 — that were then unsettling the western provinces. Even his name comes down divided: the Paulus is uncertain, the dates of his birth and death are blanks, and the conventional date of around 420 for his death is a placeholder, not a record. He arrives in the light abruptly, in his middle years, already a priest and already in flight; he leaves it the same way.

A depiction of Paulus Orosius, the fifth-century priest and historian. — detail of an engraving, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A flight that becomes a career

What can be established begins around 414, when Orosius crossed from the troubled peninsula to North Africa and attached himself to Augustine of Hippo. He did not arrive empty-handed. He carried with him a short memorandum on the heresies then agitating the Spanish church — the Commonitorium de errore Priscillianistarum et Origenistarum, a briefing on the followers of Priscillian and on the Origenist currents he had encountered at home — and Augustine answered it with a treatise of his own. The exchange marks the young priest as something more than a refugee: he came as an informant on the doctrinal state of the West’s far edge, and Augustine found him useful.

Useful enough to send onward. Augustine dispatched Orosius eastward to Jerome in Bethlehem, on two errands at once. The first was a question that Augustine could not settle and would not pretend to: the origin of the soul — whether each soul is created fresh by God, passed on through the parents, or otherwise brought into being. It was the sort of problem Augustine preferred to hold open rather than force, and Orosius was to lay it before the older scholar in Palestine. The second errand was combative. The teaching of the British monk Pelagius on grace and free will — that the human will, unaided, can choose the good and so contribute to its own salvation — had moved east with its author, and Augustine wanted it pressed there. (The substance of that quarrel, the weighing of grace against the freedom of the will, belongs to the doctrines themselves and to the men who framed them; Orosius’s part was as advocate, not architect.)

The advocacy went badly. At a gathering of clergy in Jerusalem in July 415, convened under the city’s bishop John, Orosius attacked Pelagius’s positions and came off the worse for it; John did not condemn the accused, and the matter was referred onward. Later that year a synod of fourteen bishops met at Diospolis — the ancient Lydda — and acquitted Pelagius altogether, a result Augustine would afterward parse with a dry severity: it was not the heresy that had been cleared there, he wrote, but the man who had disowned it. Orosius, stung and on the defensive, composed a Liber apologeticus in his own justification, a tract as much about his own treatment as about the doctrine in dispute.

He turned for home in 416, and here the one vivid, near-legendary episode of his life enters the record. The bones of Stephen the protomartyr — the first to die for the Christian confession, stoned in the book of the Acts of the Apostles — had reportedly just been rediscovered near Jerusalem, and Orosius carried a portion of these relics westward. He could not complete the journey to his own Spain, still too disordered to receive him, and the relics came to rest in the western Mediterranean while he went on to Africa. After that the record simply stops. He may have died soon, he may have lived on in obscurity; no one wrote it down. The man who would supply the Latin West with its memory of a thousand years of history left almost no trace of his own end.

The Seven Books

Back at Hippo, Orosius was set to the work that would outlast everything else about him. Augustine had been composing, across many years and many books, the City of God — a vast answer to the pagans of Rome who blamed the sack of the city by Alaric’s Goths in 410 on the abandonment of the old gods for the new faith. Augustine’s reply was theological and philosophical; what he wanted from Orosius was the historical ballast: a survey of the whole human past, assembled to demonstrate that war, famine, plague, and the burning of cities had always been the lot of the human race, and that the centuries before Christ had been, if anything, more terrible. Written around 416 and 417 and finished in haste — there are signs the older man wanted it quickly, perhaps to draw on while completing his own great work — the Historiae became the first universal history composed by a Christian: a single narrative running from the Flood down to the author’s own day.

A page from the Bobbio Orosius, an early seventh-century Insular manuscript of a work of Orosius (Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana MS D. 23 Sup.). — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Its architecture is deliberate. The first of the seven books opens not with events but with the earth itself — a descriptio orbis terrarum, a tour of the known world’s lands and seas, including one of the earliest detailed Latin descriptions of Hispania, set down as a triangle nearly islanded by ocean and sea — before turning to history from the Deluge to the founding of Rome. The second book carries Rome to the Gallic sack and sets beside it the rise of Persia and the affairs of Greece; the third is dominated by the Macedonian empire of Alexander and his successors; the fourth brings Rome to the destruction of Carthage; and the last three follow Rome alone, down to Orosius’s own troubled present. Threaded through the whole is a scheme of world-empires succeeding one another — Babylon in the east, then Macedonia, then Carthage, then the Roman Empire as the inheritor of them all, with Christian Rome as the providential heir of the sequence. Orosius’s particular contribution to this old pattern of four kingdoms was to slot Carthage into it; behind the first of the four, the empire of the Assyrians and their great city stands as the archetype of worldly dominion, the eastern power against which Assyria and Babylon together furnish the polemic with its image of the first and harshest age.

Beneath the catalog of disasters runs a single argument, and it is unmistakably Orosius’s own. History, on his reading, has on the whole improved since the coming of Christ; the calamities of the pagan past were the just wages of an age that did not know God, and the present, for all its Gothic terrors, is milder than what came before. He binds this to Rome by a stroke of chronology he never tires of: Christ was born under Augustus, in the years of the imperial peace, so that the Pax Romana and the advent of the savior coincide and the empire takes its place inside the divine plan. One God, one widening peace, one empire to carry the faith — the thesis is providential through and through, and it is offered as demonstration, by the tallying of slaughters across the centuries. That this is Orosius’s claim, and not a neutral finding, was plain to careful readers even in antiquity: the history is bent to its conclusion before it begins. He leans hard on his predecessors — the chronicle tradition behind him, the Roman annalists, the compendia — and handles them freely, compressing, rearranging, and at times mistaking them, so that on the modern measure of method his work rates low. It was never meant as disinterested inquiry. It is an apology in the shape of a chronicle, and it knows what it wants the past to say.

Research and reception

The scholarly recovery of Orosius rests on a stable text and a steady, sometimes severe, modern assessment. The standard critical Latin edition is the one prepared by Karl Zangemeister, issued first in the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum at Vienna in 1882 and again, in a more portable form, in the Teubner series at Leipzig in 1889; Marie-Pierre Arnaud-Lindet’s Budé edition with facing French followed in the early 1990s. English readers have had Roy J. Deferrari’s version in the Fathers of the Church series (1964) and, with a full critical introduction, A. T. Fear’s translation in Translated Texts for Historians (Liverpool, 2010), whose reception underlined both the work’s ideological frankness and its enduring value as a witness to how the early Christian West narrated its own past. The verdict of those editors is consistent: the Historiae is a polemical world-history, dependent on earlier writers for everything before the author’s own lifetime and reliable as a source mainly for the contemporary events of roughly 377 to 417 that Orosius could speak to directly.

The afterlife is where the proportions invert. A book of middling standing as history became one of the most widely copied works of the Latin Middle Ages. Nearly two hundred and fifty manuscripts and fragments survive — a dozen of them from before 800, with copying peaking in the twelfth century and again in the fifteenth — and through them the Historiae served as the standard medieval compendium of ancient history and geography, a one-volume past for readers who would never see Livy or the Greek historians. Its geographical first book, in particular, supplied generations of mapmakers and encyclopedists with their picture of the inhabited world. Around the year 890 it was rendered into West-Saxon prose by an anonymous translator in the circle of King Alfred — the Old English Orosius — which compressed the seven books into six, dropped what an Anglo-Saxon audience would not follow, and added fresh matter, most famously the firsthand voyage-accounts of Ohthere of Halogaland, who sailed the northern seas toward the White Sea, and Wulfstan, who crossed the Baltic from Hedeby: travelers’ reports given at Alfred’s court and grafted onto a fifth-century Spaniard’s geography, our earliest detailed glimpse of the far north of Europe.

The flyleaf of the Tollemache (Lauderdale) Orosius, the earliest manuscript of the Old English Orosius, made at Winchester around 900 (British Library, Add. MS 47967). — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Orosius is not an esoteric figure, and the tradition he served was unsparing toward the older religions it displaced. He stands 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.

→ Related: Grace In Christianity · Marcion Of Sinope · Tatian · Augustine Of Hippo · Jerome · Free Will · Soul · Roman Empire · Middle Ages · Babylon · Assyria · Carthage