The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Eusebius of Vercelli
died c. 371Patristic
The first bishop of Vercelli, who made his city clergy live together like monks and planted a pattern the West kept.
Summary
- Lived died c. 371.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers and The Martyrs.
- Tradition: Patristic / Western.
The life
Eusebius was born in Sardinia about 283, taken to Rome as a child after his father died, and served there as a lector. Around 345 he was made the first bishop of Vercelli, in the Piedmont plain of northern Italy.
He did something in that office that had not been done in the West: he had his clergy live together in community, under a common discipline, like monks. Priests in a city, sharing a table and a rule of prayer, was an Eastern idea, and Eusebius planted it in Italy. Ambrose praised the arrangement; it became a model, and much later the pattern of canons regular traced itself back to him.
In 355 the emperor Constantius summoned a council at Milan and demanded that the bishops sign the condemnation of Athanasius. Eusebius did not want to come. When he did, he refused to discuss Athanasius until the assembly first affirmed the faith, and he laid the Nicene Creed on the table and asked every bishop present to sign that before anything else. Dionysius of Milan reached for the pen; the Arian party stopped him; the meeting collapsed into shouting. Constantius eventually summoned the bishops into the palace and threatened them. Eusebius still refused.
He was exiled, first to Scythopolis in Palestine, where the local Arian bishop Patrophilus had him seized, dragged through the streets, and kept in close confinement until he nearly starved; then to Cappadocia; then to the Thebaid in Upper Egypt. Three of his letters from exile survive, including one to his congregation at Vercelli, and they are among the most vivid firsthand accounts of what a bishop's banishment actually involved.
Julian's amnesty released him in 362. He did not go straight home. He went to Alexandria, took part with Athanasius in the council held there that year, and then travelled through the East and through Illyricum working to reconcile churches split by the long controversy, before returning to Italy and joining Hilary of Poitiers in the campaign against the Arian bishop Auxentius of Milan.
Tradition credits him with the Codex Vercellensis, the oldest surviving manuscript of the Old Latin gospels, still kept at Vercelli.
He died there in 371.
Sources: Eusebius of Vercelli, Letters; Jerome, On Illustrious Men, 96; Ambrose of Milan, Letter 63; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "St. Eusebius of Vercelli".
What was happening while he lived4 moments · AD 313–600
- 313The Edict of Milan makes Christianity legalConstantine and Licinius agreed that everyone in the empire could worship as they chose, and ordered confiscated church property returned. After nearly three centuries of being an illegal religion, the church woke up protected.
- 325The Council of NicaeaAbout three hundred bishops met in a lakeside town in what is now Turkey to answer Arius, an Alexandrian pastor who taught that the Son was God's first and greatest creature, glorious, but made, so that "there was when He was not." The council answered with one word: the Son is *homoousios* with the Father, of the very same being, begotten, not made.
- 335Athanasius is exiled for the first timeThe bishop of Alexandria, who had been at Nicaea as a young deacon, was banished to Trier in Germany after a rigged synod. Four more exiles followed; he spent roughly seventeen of his forty-five years as bishop away from his city.
- 367Athanasius's Easter letter lists the twenty-sevenHis thirty-ninth Festal Letter names exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament we use today, the earliest surviving list that matches ours. Councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed the same list in the West.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Eusebius of Vercelli at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Chose exile in the Egyptian desert over signing a document against Athanasius.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received. Hangs on The Martyrs: The witnesses who paid with their lives, from the arena at Carthage to the present day, and the confessors who paid with everything short of their lives.
Standing beside himThe Fathers & the Creeds · 130 on this stretch of wall
Exiled five separate times for refusing to say the Son was anything less than God, they called it Athanasius against the world.
Made a Roman emperor stand outside the church door until he repented of a massacre.
Heard 'sell what you have' read aloud in church, walked into the Egyptian desert, and started monasticism.
A brilliant, restless sinner whose mother prayed for him thirty years; his Confessions still read like a man talking straight to God.
Built an entire town for the sick and the poor outside his city, and wrote the rule Eastern monks still live by.
Preached five sermons in a tiny borrowed chapel that settled how the whole church speaks about the Trinity.