Eusebius of Vercelli

Eusebius of Vercelli was a fourth-century bishop in northern Italy and a leading Western defender of the Nicene faith against Arianism. Early tradition holds that he was born in Sardinia and later served as a lector in the church of Rome. Around the middle of the fourth century he was chosen as the first bishop of Vercelli (ancient Vercellae) in Piedmont. As bishop he gathered his cathedral clergy into a community that lived a common life of prayer, study, and discipline, an arrangement later remembered as an important early Western attempt to join the clerical office with a monastic pattern of life.

In the doctrinal struggles of his time Eusebius aligned himself with Athanasius of Alexandria and the supporters of the Creed of Nicaea. At the Council of Milan in 355, held under strong pressure from the emperor Constantius II, he refused to subscribe to the condemnation of Athanasius. For that refusal he was deposed and banished to the East. His exile took him first to Scythopolis in Palestine and afterward to other places, including Cappadocia and the Thebaid in Upper Egypt. From exile he continued to write in support of Nicene communities.

After Constantius died in 361, the emperor Julian permitted the return of banished bishops. Eusebius came back by way of Alexandria, where he took part in the synod of 362 that sought to reconcile divided anti-Arian groups. He then worked in Italy, together with Hilary of Poitiers, to restore orthodox bishops and to limit remaining Arian influence. He died at Vercelli; the traditional date of his death is 1 August 371.

A small number of letters attributed to him survive and show his pastoral and doctrinal concerns. Local tradition has long associated him with the Codex Vercellensis, a very early Old Latin Gospel manuscript preserved at Vercelli and said to have been copied by his own hand; modern scholarship treats that attribution with caution while recognizing the manuscript’s antiquity. Eusebius was venerated as a saint from an early period. In the Roman Catholic Church his feast is kept on 2 August, and he is honored as patron of the city and church of Vercelli.