Socrates Scholasticus

Socrates was born at Constantinople about 380 and was still writing in 439. He was a layman, the byname Scholasticus most likely means he practised law, and he lived in the capital, where he was educated by two pagan grammarians who had been driven out of Alexandria after the destruction of the Serapeum in 391.

His Ecclesiastical History is in seven books and covers the years 305 to 439, picking up where Eusebius left off and ending, he says, because he did not want to write about living emperors.

He tells the reader his method, which is unusual for the period. He says he wrote a first edition, then found it depended too heavily on Rufinus, went back to the original documents, and rewrote it. He quotes imperial edicts, synodal letters, and creeds at length rather than paraphrasing them. He interviewed people. He explains that he has included secular affairs, wars, usurpations, famines, because church history cannot be told apart from them, and because, he remarks, the reader needs relief from the endless quarrels of bishops.

That weariness with quarrelling shapes the whole book, and it is the reason he is valuable. Socrates was a convinced Nicene Christian and he says so, but he refuses to write the history as a morality play. He records the good actions of Arians and the bad actions of the orthodox. He is critical of Cyril of Alexandria and gives a plain account of the murder of the pagan philosopher Hypatia by a Christian mob in 415, saying it brought the greatest disgrace on the church of Alexandria. He is sympathetic to the Novatianists, a rigorist sect, and quotes their sources; some scholars have suspected he belonged to them, though he never says so and defends the wider church against them.

He also has an eye for the concrete detail that other historians drop. He tells how the practice of antiphonal singing began at Antioch. He describes the ordination customs of different provinces and notes, matter-of-factly, that churches differ in fasting and in Easter reckoning and that this has never destroyed communion, a point he presses more than once.

His limits are real. He is sometimes careless with chronology and dates, he leans on the collection of documents assembled by the Arian Sabinus without always sifting it, and he is better on Constantinople than on the West, which he barely covers.

He is nonetheless the principal narrative source for the fourth and early fifth centuries. His near-contemporaries Sozomen and Theodoret wrote parallel histories, and Sozomen used him heavily. All three were later stitched into a single Greek compilation. The English translation in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers has kept him readable for a hundred and fifty years.

Sources: Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series volume 2); Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church; Photius, Bibliotheca (for the ancient assessment).