Confessor Eusebius

Eusebius of Samosata was a fourth-century bishop of Samosata, a city on the Euphrates in the Roman province of Commagene, in what is now southeastern Turkey. He is known chiefly from the ecclesiastical history of Theodoret of Cyrrhus and from the letters of Saint Basil the Great, who treated him as a trusted colleague in the defense of the Nicene faith. Nothing reliable is recorded of his birth, parentage, or early career. He already occupied the see of Samosata by 361 and had a reputation for personal courage and doctrinal firmness against Arianism.

In 361, after the Arian bishop Eudoxius had been translated from Antioch, a synod elected Meletius bishop of Antioch and entrusted the written act of that election to Eusebius for safekeeping. When the emperor Constantius II, who favored the Arians, learned that Meletius preached the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father, he demanded that Eusebius surrender the document so the election could be quashed. Eusebius refused. Theodoret relates that the emperor threatened to cut off his right hand; Eusebius held out both hands and said he would not betray those who had trusted him. Constantius, impressed, did not carry out the threat at that time.

Under the Arian emperor Valens the pressure on Nicene bishops grew much harsher. About 374 Eusebius was banished from Samosata and sent into exile in Thrace. Even then he continued to serve the homoousian cause. Contemporary accounts describe him traveling in disguise—sometimes on foot and in the clothing of a soldier or ordinary wayfarer—in order to ordain Nicene bishops and clergy in vacant or Arian-held sees and so to keep the apostolic succession of the Nicene party alive. After Valens was killed at Adrianople in 378, the emperor Gratian allowed the exiled Nicene bishops to return. Eusebius went back to Samosata and at once resumed the work of restoring orthodox pastors throughout Syria and the neighboring provinces.

On one such journey, after the accession of Theodosius I, he came to the town of Doliche in Commagene to install an orthodox bishop. An Arian woman threw a roof-tile from the top of a house; it struck Eusebius on the head and gave him a mortal wound. Theodoret records that the dying bishop, imitating Christ and Saint Stephen, forbade his attendants to hunt down or punish the woman. He died of the injury, most probably in 380. His body was carried back to Samosata and buried there, and he was at once honored as a martyr and confessor.

The Eastern churches keep his feast on 22 June; the Roman Martyrology enters him on 21 June. He is remembered as a confessor because of his long exile and hardships for the Nicene faith, and as a martyr because of the violent manner of his death. No spouse, children, or membership in a religious order is attested in the surviving sources. A series of letters from Basil the Great shows him as a bishop of practical wisdom, generosity to the poor, and unwavering attachment to the doctrine of Nicaea.