It has long been acknowledged that from the fourth century onwards the bishop grew to be one of the central figures in the late-antique world and thus there have been many works published which examine bishops in relation to their cities, to Emperors and to each other. These works have tended, however, to be limited to either the Eastern or the Western world or to one of these relationships. This collection, the result of an international conference in Geneva in 2011 from which it takes its title, contains a thorough and fascinating look at the position of bishops in the late-antique world spanning East and West from the fourth to the seventh centuries.
Many of the essays examine the interaction of bishops with imperial rule and the shifting role that emperors played with bishops as representatives of their communities. J. Torres and R. Teja, ‘A Dispute of Episcopal Legitimacy’, offer a thorough narrative and analysis of the dispute between Gregory Nazianzen and Maximus the Cynic as experienced by Gregory, and the intervention of Theodosius who intervened but was undermined by bishops and supporters of the Alexandrian see.
In contrast F.U., ‘The Donatist Conflict as seen by Constantine and the Bishops’, provides an interesting perspective on Constantine's willingness to treat with the Donatists as indicative of his emphasis on maintaining peace and harmony rather than Catholicism. F.U. thus shows an emperor at the peak of control with the most significant bishop, Caecilianus, subject entirely to his authority and the Catholic community dependent on his good will.
M.V. Escribano Paño, ‘Bishops, Judges and Emperors’, demonstrates the interaction between bishops and Emperors in producing laws that dealt with violence against clerics. Paño further considers incidents in Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries to which these laws seem to relate, thus particularly demonstrating the intervention of Augustine as key to their creation. While it may be dangerous to generalise from Augustine to the interactions of all bishops with religious authorities, his involvement reveals the manner by which bishops could interact with imperial authority to create law in Late Antiquity.
F., ‘Bishops, Imperialism and the Barbaricum’, examines how Christian and Roman ideas of dominance came to interlock after the accession of Constantine. F. surveys the role local bishops played in the foreign policy of subsequent emperors and successor kings as both religious and political advocates for their rulers and how this collapsed in the wake of internal fighting in the Church. This wide-ranging essay seems to be a segment of a profitable larger argument regarding bishops as elements of late Roman foreign policy.
This consideration of the relationship between the ‘barbarian’ kings and episcopal authority is also the study of P. Castillo Maldonado in ‘Conflict and Compromise: the Spanish Catholic Bishops and the Arian Kingdom of Toledo’. Maldonado examines tolerance in fifth-century Toledo to develop a greater understanding of the ways in which Catholic bishops were able to ally themselves with ‘heretical’ kings. Maldonado offers a nuanced view of this period, reaching below the surface of the relationships, although the focus of the article excludes an interesting third party, the Arian bishops, from the state of the question.
F. Salvador Ventura, ‘The Bishops and the Byzantine Intervention in Hispania’, considers the impact that local elites, led by bishops, had on the conflict between the Visigoths and the Byzantines in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. Using case studies of four bishops Ventura demonstrates that bishops grew to favour the increasingly Catholic Visigoths over the Byzantine Empire, and so helped to create and strengthen local power. Ventura thus presents bishops who have grown into their own power and whose loyalty is to their local populations.
A further set of essays reflects on the position of the Pope and his search for primacy. M. focuses on Pope Zosimus' relationships with bishops, notably in the recognition of Arles as the metropolitan see. He uses Zosimus' own under-utilised works to good effect to present a Pope attempting to demonstrate Roman primacy but failing as local power bases looked to the Emperor, not Rome, as their final court of appeal.
A. Evers, ‘East and West, Emperor and Bishop: Hormisdas and the Authority of the See of Rome’, considers the Libellus Hormisdae as one of a series of statements that redefined the relationship of the Eastern and Western Churches, following the Council of Chalcedon and the Henotikon. In this climate Evers presents Hormisdas, thanks to the changing political situation and the nature of the involved personalities, as beginning to succeed where Zosimus could not.
T. Sardella, ‘Controversy and Debate over Sexual Matters in the Western Church (IV Century)’, also factors into this debate over the primacy of Rome. Considering the decretals issued by Damasus and Siricius regarding sexual behaviour, Sardella examines the connection between the ascetic attitude towards sexual behaviour and the authority of the Pope, observing that local circumstance could limit the ability of the Pope to act as an arbiter. This essay represents part of a larger, and much needed, study of power and sexuality, and the complicated relationship between bishops and monastic culture on this issue is a promising area.
Another set of essays develops the role of bishops in religious conflicts. In ‘Bishops, Heresy and Power’ P. Ubric Rabaneda considers Epistula 11 of Consentius to Augustine and discusses the strategies presented therein by which bishops might deal with the threat of heresy, the relationship between affinitas and power, and the role of bishops and episcopal courts in producing compromise solutions to local problems. Rabaneda thus raises several fascinating issues, all of which deserve examination in greater depth, demonstrates the independence of many bishops, and again highlights the importance of local conditions in their decision-making.
In ‘Ius et religio’ C. Garcia Mac Gaw also focuses on Augustine in examining the Conference of Carthage and the manner by which the Donatists were suppressed. Mac Gaw considers the theological and propaganda arguments on both sides, and reveals the effect of the Donatist arguments on Augustine in the development of his own doctrine.
M. Kahlos, ‘Pacifiers and Instigators’, discusses the role played by bishops in conflicts between Christians and pagans in the fourth and fifth centuries. Kahlos centres her consideration on Augustine and the tension between his lobbying for stricter controls on polytheists on one hand, and his pleas to respect the property of the polytheists that was under attack from Christian militants on the other. Kahlos demonstrates clearly the complex nature of every incident, with bishops set between competing interests, the hallmark of the late-antique bishop.
A.J. Quiroga Puertas, ‘Preaching and Mesmerizing: the Resolution of Religious Conflicts in Antiquity’ (following A. Cameron's Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire [1991]), emphasises the importance of rhetoric in early Christian texts and notably its standardisation in the West, in the creation of a Christian orthodoxy centred on bishops. This is an important contribution to the volume in addressing the creation of textual style and its uses.
The essays in this volume present a dynamic picture of the central position of the bishop not simply as a power in his own right, but as a power broker who could exacerbate or smooth over conflicts. The collection is significant in that it brings together Anglophone and Spanish authors, many of the latter having rarely published in English, and thus opens some valuable perspectives of which many English readers may have been unaware. The rich variety and range of works demonstrate the varied positions of bishops in a constantly changing period across a wide geographic area.
