The fourth century CE is widely known for the engulfing conflicts that pitted various Christian factions against each other during the so-called Arian controversy. As bishops rose to prominence and emperors attempted to unify them through councils and theological formulas to describe and explain Christian dogma, the stakes rose increasingly higher, fanning the flames of discord among entrenched factions. Bishops who opposed whatever emerging consensus the emperor supported typically found themselves banished. Older scholarship tended to focus on the theological aspects of these conflicts, taking the perspective of our dominant pro-Nicene sources at face value, and therefore presenting narratives of orthodox bishops pitted against their heretical foes. Scholarship of the last decades, however, has increasingly moved toward interpreting these events as ecclesiastical politics; orthodoxy and heresy as negotiated, contested, performed, and constructed; and the traditional narrative has become much messier, blurring the distinction between orthodox and heretics. Instead, we have learned to pay attention to the literary aspects, the emplotment of events and the discourse and rhetoric of our Christian authors, who we now read more critically, against the grain of what they were trying to convey. Additionally, we now tend to read late antique authors to understand their view of events and how these were remembered, rather than for historical information about these events.

In Bishops in Flight, a revision of her 2013 Drew University dissertation, Jennifer Barry weaves together these recent trends in a sophisticated literary analysis of contemporary depictions of episcopal exile to explore “why the discourse of Christian flight became an important part of the narrative of pro-Nicene orthodoxy” (xiii). Taking Athanasius of Alexandria and John Chrysostom, the two most famous exiled bishops of the period, as her touchstone, Barry analyzes the different and rivaling understandings and depictions of episcopal exile by mainly Greek Christian authors of the fourth and fifth century. She starts with the contrast between Tertullian's view that one should not flee from persecutions because they are ordained by God and Cyprian's view that fleeing from persecution was God's command, to ask the larger question: how does one explain this changing understanding of Christian flight? Her answer is that it was closely linked to the definition of orthodoxy espoused by the author and his position within the spectrum of Christian beliefs. In this, she builds upon and continues a trend observed in recent studies of episcopal exile. But she also provides a new and valuable perspective by applying the insights of space/place theory in order to show that the construction of orthodoxy (and its opposite) was closely connected to specific locations, in the endless episcopal wrangling between Alexandria, Antioch, Nicomedia, and Constantinople. This is probably the most original aspect of this captivating book, which provides a fresh perspective on familiar stories.

Barry lays out her argument in six tightly knit chapters, in addition to a prologue, a general introduction to present the topic and its historiography, an epilogue, a bibliography, and an index. Chapter 1 focuses on Athanasius's Defense Before Constantius and Defense of His Flight. Because he came to see his city as controlled by heretical enemies, the bishop expressed the view that the desert, with his ascetic way of life (as depicted in the Life of Antony), became an alternative city that preserved his episcopal status. In this way, Barry argues, Athanasius “reconfigure[ed] his exile as desert askesis, which authenticates his claim to orthodoxy” (54). Chapter 2 shows the popularity of Athanasius's depiction of his own exile by explaining how Gregory of Nazianzus was the first to borrow and expand upon “Athanasius’ theory of exile as desert askesis” (70). Gregory also makes a similar argument regarding Basil of Caesarea, and Barry underlines how both of these depictions served Gregory's claims to orthodoxy in his own embattled Constantinopolitan context. Chapter 3 switches the focus to John Chrysostom's letters from exile, in which Barry detects a malleable discourse allowing the bishop to craft different persona depending on the letter's recipient. Once John realized that his situation was permanent, however, he turned his reflections to the universal condition of Christians to emphasize suffering. The challenge with John Chrysostom was that he died in exile, which seemed to confirm his guilt. Chapter 4 looks at his biographers’ struggles to depict him as innocent while in exile, focusing on Pseudo-Martyrius and Palladius of Helenopolis to show that they presented different versions of events in order to achieve their own goals and continuously invoked Athanasius's legacy to question John's unclear status and turn him into a saint. The last two chapters, by contrast, look at how pro-Nicene ecclesiastical historians of the fifth century picked up on this tradition to depict anti-Nicene bishops’ exile as proof of their heresy. Here, Barry emphasizes Nicomedia and Antioch as loci of heresy to show that “episcopal flight from particular spaces was intimately tied to the process of crafting orthodoxy” (133), by comparing and contrasting accounts of Eusebius of Nicomedia and Meletius of Antioch by the anti-Nicene Philostorgius and the pro-Nicene Socrates Scholasticus, Theodoret, and Sozomenus (in chapter 6), although the reason for relegating Sozomenus to a separate chapter is not altogether clear.

Despite the flurry of scholarship on episcopal exile in recent years, Barry makes an important contribution to the topic, particularly by insisting on the theological connotations that came to be attached to specific spaces and locations, which displacement attempted to sever and disrupt. Readers should beware, however, of the slightly misleading nature of the book's title. This is not a study of Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity largely conceived, but a literary analysis of the reception and memorialization of famous Eastern, Greek-speaking bishops of the fourth century. Similarly, Barry's interchangeable use of “flight” and “exile” throughout the book seems to muddy the waters by including what were at times vastly different experiences. Notwithstanding these slight reservations, this is a highly stimulating book that all students of late antiquity should find rewarding. And both the author and the press are particularly to be commended for making it freely available as part of the Luminos collection, which should especially please financially struggling graduate students everywhere!