been completely incomprehensible to the men and women of late antiquity. In an extended sense, then, this study hopes to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the nature of authority in late antiquity in general.
PREVIOUS SCHOLARSHIP ON THE ROLE OF BISHOPS IN LATE ANTIQUITY
No single figure seems to encapsulate the changes and transformations of late antiquity better than the Christian bishop. Bishops figure prominently in the scholarly literature about this period. They are often invoked in overview treatments of church history, social structure, and urbanism as the focal point on which significant transformations hinge. The common underlying assumption of such studies tends to be that the rise of Christianity goes hand in hand with the rise of the bishop to political prominence, a rise whose lasting consequences reverberate into the Middle Ages and beyond. Bishops were actively involved in the defense of their cities, acted as judges in civil cases, amassed great wealth, became important building patrons, and on more than one occasion usurped or challenged civil authorities. These are just a few of the litany of examples that are commonly adduced to illustrate the rise of the shepherd of the Christian flock to unprecedented political power.
Studies of the growth of Christianity tend to idealize the Christian communities of the apostolic and subapostolic age, where social differentiations were forcefully rejected, the gifts of the spirit were shared by all, and several episkopoi fulfilled the function of overseers. The subsequent departures from this ideal are noted, from the hindsight of the historian, with sadness and alarm. The first significant step in this decline was the stratification and formalization of relationships within the Christian community through the development of a hierarchy of offices within the clergy, combined with the notion that only one bishop should stand at the head of each large urban community. This monarchic episcopate arose at a time when the unity and integrity of the church were threatened by persecution and heresy. Ignatius of Antioch in the late second century and Cyprian of Carthage in the midthird century responded to this challenge by advocating strong episcopal leadership as a guarantee for the cohesion of the church. The second step in the development of the episcopate, which signaled a further departure from the apostolic ideal—so the conventional narrative goes—occurred when the emperor Constantine began to champion Christianity and showered the bishops with privileges and benefactions. At the same time, he charged them with certain tasks and duties that have been interpreted as extending far beyond the bishops’ original reach—a notion that will be challenged in the chapter titled “Empire.” During the age of persecutions, the church had defined itself in opposition to the state; now it was put in a position to cooperate with it. Later developments did not essentially alter this relationship; they merely intensified it. The bishops’ public role and their political power increased over time, especially in those regions where the existing social order was disrupted by invasions and central government had become ineffectual, obsolete, or nonexistent.
Continental historians of early Christianity, in particular, tend to blame the progressive institutionalization of the church for the attendant loss of spirituality of the early times. The extreme position in this approach was taken by Theodor Klauser who regarded Constantine’s ecclesiastical policy as an unprecedented and dangerously successful attempt by the state to absorb the church and its representatives into its administrative apparatus.6 Klauser based his argument on the observation that certain adjectives, such as gloriosissimus, which signaled high status at the top of a social hierarchy of imperial offices, were also used to address bishops. His thesis was proposed over half a century ago and has since then repeatedly come under criticism from different angles. Hans Ulrich Instinsky pointed out that martyrs had been honored with this adjective long before the reign of Constantine. His study of the titulature and other elements of episcopal and imperial ceremonial emphasized the similarities and possible mutual influence between the two.7 In response to Klauser and Instinsky, Santo Mazzarino noted that in late antiquity episcopal and imperial authority were thought to have a common origin in the supreme divinity as the source of all power and glory.8 Ernst Jerg’s systematic study of the variety of forms of address used by secular authorities for bishops settled the issue once and for all by demonstrating that bishops were never formally integrated into the administrative apparatus of the empire.9 The recent book by Harold Drake, Constantine and the Bishops, goes a long way to inject a healthy dose of realpolitik into the evaluation of the emperor’s religious politics and his treatment of bishops as uneasy allies, moral and spiritual superiors, and subject citizens.10 Scholarly debate, however, continues to be occupied with the central question that Klauser raised: How are the public activities of a bishop to be interpreted?
French and Italian scholars, many of them rooted in the Catholic tradition, tend to adopt a teleological perspective and welcome the new, public role of bishops after Constantine as paving the way for the rise of the papacy. This is often evident in the anachronistic use of the term “pope” by these scholars for the bishop of Rome, even though the sources they use clearly speak of the episcopus and were written at a time when the primacy of the see of Rome was not yet taken for granted. Not surprisingly, French scholars have also been in the forefront of the study of early canon law, beginning with the fourth century, which provides valuable insight into episcopal self-definition.11
While the work of church historians especially until the mid-twentieth century is often colored by their own Christian confession, the approach of social and political historians of a more recent generation is marked by a noticeable neglect of the religious or even ecclesiastical dimension of the episcopate. The recent trend in late antique studies to regard the period largely in terms of urban transformations, coupled with the desire to counterbalance the literary record with archaeological findings, has focused attention on the role of bishops not within the empire, or even within the larger structure of the church, but within the context of their own cities. But although the picture that emerges from such studies is more nuanced, the verdict remains the same: bishops are seen as political actors whose power derives from their social position and wealth.
Peter Brown in Power and Persuasion, for example, studies the rising power of the bishop against the background of the transformation of urban culture in late antiquity. In the post-Diocletianic empire, he argues, the bishops gained greater prominence as part of a tighter administrative web that extended a closer grip on cities and individuals than ever before. In this context, the bishop’s ability to become an advocate for his community, including its poor, is explained as having its basis in the common cultural “language” of paideia—a mode of comportment and a form of expression based on a thorough education in the classical tradition—that is shared by bishops and prominent town councilors, provincial governors, and imperial administrators alike.12 According to this model, the power of bishops has the same root and is measured by their late antique contemporaries with the same yardstick as that of other prominent men.
There is much to be said for this approach, as the city was the primary stage on which the bishop’s role was played out.13 The Roman Empire, especially along the coast of the Mediterranean, was dotted with cities, each a microcosm of different social groups, each a cultural hub, and each a focal center for the economy and administration of its rural hinterland. The decline of the traditional markers of city life brought to light by the archaeological record—the disappearance of the grid system of streets, the crumbling of theatres, and the shrinking of the walls that enclosed the city territory—has long been taken as evidence for a widespread, simultaneous, and steady decline of urban culture that marks the end of the Roman Empire. The research of the last decades, however, especially the recent synthesis by Wolfgang Liebeschuetz,14 has challenged this view as being too schematic. Greater attention is now being paid to regional differences. While in northern Gaul the few existing cities disappeared altogether by the fifth century, the commercial centers in the eastern Mediterranean were thriving well into the seventh century.15 The excavations at Aphrodisias, for example, have shown the continued vitality of this large city, with its theatre and other public buildings intact.16 A more nuanced view has also been taken with regard to urban building
