- DACL
Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie
- HR
Historia religiosa
- PO
Patrologia Orientalia
- ZKG
Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte
In the course of the third and fourth centuries Christianity expanded beyond the great urban centres of the Roman world into their rural hinterland. This world beyond the cities was a place where peripheral heresies, such as the Montanists and Novatians of central Anatolia, continued to coexist with a ‘universal’ Church, the institution supported and sanctioned by the emperor and by centrally organised councils.Footnote 1 But Christianity's claims to be a universal religion, coupled with the increased aspirations of a centralised institutional Church after the reign of Constantine, meant that such backwaters could not be ignored.
Hagiography composed in the fifth century, such as Theodoret of Cyrrhus' Historia religiosa, began to incorporate the practices of holy men in the countryside of Syria and Anatolia and present it in acceptable forms.Footnote 2 And the expansion in religious belief forced a corresponding growth in the institutional trappings of the Church, of its employment of priests and bishops, who supervised the distribution of sacraments and, at least in theory, supervised popular belief. An important phase in this process of expansion was the institution of chorepiscopoi, rural bishops who supervised komai and metrokomai in less urbanised provinces.Footnote 3
Destephens and Métivier have gathered evidence for these chorepiscopoi in Anatolia and reprised the parameters of a classic institutional narrative. They observe that rural bishops are first attested in the third century and gradually declined in number and importance in the synodal records between Nicaea in 325 and Chalcedon in 451. They note further that their sacramental role, specifically the ordination of priests, was also curtailed in this period through the legislation of the minor Anatolian synods, and identify this as a marker of the municipalisation of the Church in Asia Minor.Footnote 4
The subscriptions of chorepiscopoi at Nicaea show them to be concentrated in rural regions, in Syria I, Cilicia and, most especially, Cappadocia and Isauria, and, notably, they are recorded by region and not by see, perhaps implying that they were independent of control from the urban sees.Footnote 5 In these zones, the rural extension of church structures, and the opportunities for employment that they brought, gave a voice to rural communities in a way that previously had been absent.Footnote 6 The establishment's desire to monitor and control the religious life of the periphery meant that the educational forms, status symbols and patronage networks of the centre were increasingly opened up to those living in what had been the backwaters of the empire.Footnote 7
The letters of Basil of Caesarea indicate that the chorepiscopate existed as part of this extension of patronage and of political participation. Basil was served by around fifty chorepiscopoi, and his correspondence reveals him using them to get information from scattered parts of his diocese and to manage hospitals on his behalf. At the same time Basil also defended their tax exemptions and argued with them over accusations of simony and putting forward candidates for ordination without his agreement.Footnote 8 The pattern visible from the letters is of a symbiosis, where a bishop in a rural see needed chorepiscopoi to further his influence (and probably his missionary activities), while the men themselves were protected by the bishop from excessive taxation and from their enemies within ecclesiastical politics. Moreover, their relative isolation allowed them to engage in a little money-making on the side or to bypass the bishops’ authority and go to others. Basil was probably unusual in needing quite so many rural aides, but the general pattern of church government in the countryside in a loose symbiosis with its bishop might also have held true in the other rural zones where chorepiscopoi are attested at Nicaea.
The pattern of the Anatolian evidence suggests that the chorepiscopate was one of a number of avenues for participation in church politics and patronage by individuals drawn from the komai and metrokomai of more rural provinces. Furthermore, the power of these chorepiscopoi independent of their bishops was curtailed in Anatolia as part of a process of centralisation in the fifth and sixth centuries.
However, there is a body of evidence in Syriac, pertaining to Mesopotamia, which has not been added to the Anatolian evidence.Footnote 9 This evidence, which is chiefly drawn from hagiographies produced during the Christological controversies of the sixth century, suggests that chorepiscopoi remained an important feature of Christianity at the village level and that they played a role in monitoring orthodoxy and orthopraxy in these more remote areas. Moreover, these hagiographic writings also investigate the behaviour of the chorepiscopoi themselves, with regard to issues of orthodoxy and orthopraxy. The chorepiscopoi Addai and Harfat who are described in these texts illustrate not only the continuing significance of this relatively prestigious institution at a local level, but also the ability of these structures to survive even when estranged from wider church organisations, at a time when communities across Mesopotamia were divided by schism and accusations of heresy, and when there was no clear consensus on issues of Christology. It is precisely their position as exiles that allows us to see this emphasis on the function of local structures, which might be obscured in the sources of a more unified Church.
Mesopotamia: a Christian frontier
The cities and highlands of Osrhoene still housed active, public paganism in a way that the rest of the Roman east did not. The city of Harran continued to host public paganism until well into the Islamic period, and its pagan culture is also attested in nearby villages such as Sogmatar.Footnote 10 Sixth-century Edessene texts such as the Syriac Julian romance condemn the Harranians for their ancient paganism.Footnote 11 And Edessa itself was the site of public pagan processions even at the start of the sixth century.Footnote 12 In an environment where Christians still lived cheek by jowl with an active, public paganism, the middle-ranking clergy are envisaged as playing an important part in the spread of Christianity. Rabbula of Edessa's canons for the bnay qyama, issued in the 430s, regulate their role in cutting down sacred trees, building churches and rooting out wizards in the countryside.Footnote 13 Osrhoene comes across in Rabbula's canons as part of an open frontier with paganism, an environment that seems much less Christianised and regulated than the world presented by the Anatolian canons a century before. Above all, Rabbula's need to repeat the regulatory instructions of the Anatolian councils, at a time when it was no longer necessary further west, may also imply that the institutional Church was weaker in parts of Osrhoene, where a ‘universal Church’, that is a Church self-conscious of an orthodoxy and authority structures shared with the other Christian communities of the Roman world, had been dominant over other Christian groups only for a relatively brief period.Footnote 14
Rabbula's canons were issued with a wish to regulate the Church of Edessa in accordance with the norms of orthopraxy. He was the first bishop of Edessa to be deeply involved in the high-level theological debates that divided the patriarchal cities of Antioch and Alexandria. He emerged as an important partisan of Cyril of Alexandria, who emphasised the (anti-Chalcedonian) Miaphysite formula that stressed the single, united nature of Christ as both human and divine. Rabbula played an important role in commissioning translations of Cyril's works into Syriac and driving Dyophysite rivals into exile. His canons can be seen in the same vein as his suppression of the Syriac Diatessaron, the Gospel Harmony that had inspired earlier Syriac commentaries in the fourth century: both represent an effort to put his own house in order and to resist criticisms of heteropraxy from rivals across the theological divide, whose Churches corresponded more closely to the Roman ‘norm’.Footnote 15
However, the failure to produce a centrally agreed Christology in the east in the sixth century meant that a centralising drive of the kind attempted by Rabbula had become less attractive, because of the breakdown of equal dialogue between the two sides of the debate. Such a drive had also become less practicable, because of the lack of cooperation between bishops and lower clergy if they were divided on issues of theology. In the environment of Mesopotamia, where rural Christians might still rely on middle-ranking clergy and chorepiscopoi to oppose pagan practices on their borders, we might anyway expect a greater prestige to be allotted to subepiscopal clerics and ascetics.Footnote 16 But the Christological controversies provided the momentum for a deliberate emphasis on the role of these clerics and ascetics as opponents of a corrupted episcopal hierarchy or as auditors of proper practice and belief.
Addai the chorepiscopos: an ecclesiastical structure in rebellion
One large hagiographic collection, John of Ephesus’ Lives of the eastern saints, provides a wealth of data about the Miaphysite movement, which heavily influenced Mesopotamia in the sixth century, and about the operation of the Church at the level of individual villages and monasteries.Footnote 17 This text was written in the course of one of the periodic attempts at persecution and reconciliation attempted by the emperor Justin ii (c. 568), and reflects back on the previous generation, when Justin's predecessor Justinian presided over similar efforts to unite Miaphysites and Chalcedonians. The vignettes gathered in this collection illustrate how John presented his home land of Mesopotamia as a land of ascetics, unfairly driven from their isolation and their monasteries by persecution.Footnote 18 He presents an image of a chosen land, confirmed in its orthodoxy by ascetic leaders. His text can also be read as a partial, rhetorical illustration of the social realities of Mesopotamian Miaphysitism in this time of persecution, of how the government of the Church worked in practice and of how this contributed to the emergence and permanence of the Miaphysite movement.
An important piece of evidence for this investigation is provided in John's Life of Addai the chorepiscopos (Life 8). The chorepiscopos was a rural bishop, immediately answerable to a bishop with an urban see and often responsible for a much wider area. John locates Addai in a monastery in the highland village of Fardaisa on the Armenian frontier and attributes to him ‘blameless religious conduct, visiting the poor, caring for orphans, providing for widows, admonishing clerics and telling each man to devote himself to his ministry’.Footnote 19 John makes Addai the binding force for social order and the source of the Church's charity within his locality.Footnote 20
Peter Brown has suggested that the urban bishop's control of charity made him a new and powerful force in the traditional Roman city, since his relationship with the poor gave him an automatic advantage in the mob politics of the day.Footnote 21 As we have seen, the urban bishops that Brown describes were keen to circumscribe and control the independence and behaviour of rural ascetics and the chorepiscopoi and periodeutai who ministered to the countryside. But perhaps Brown is only describing the first step in a process of Christian transformation: where the powerful clerics of the fourth century, such as Basil of Caesarea, were locked into an urban power game with other elite contestants, John's description of Addai makes him the leader of a self-sufficient rural Christian community. John imagines Addai to be independent of the ecclesiastical structures that had asserted their control of the chorepiscopate in the fourth and fifth centuries, and Addai's cooperation with the rest of the Church hierarchy is made dependent on that hierarchy's continued orthodoxy. An orthodoxy defined, of course, from John's perspective.
Throughout John's hagiography, his saints draw an ascetic prestige from their separation from the city and the corruption that it represents, especially from the threat of bribery by richer Chalcedonian opponents.Footnote 22 A reccurring indication of his saints’ purity is their refusal to be bribed. The chorepiscopos Harfat refuses the inducement of riches to be made a Chalcedonian bishop and flees Amida, and the Chalcedonians ordain a lay relative of his instead. And Maro the ihidaya (lone ascetic) refuses money offered to him in an audience with Theodora.Footnote 23 In Addai's case, the pious saint declares that he would rather have Christ than possessions when he is driven into exile from his monastery, leaving behind his Chalcedonian abbot. John presents an ecclesiastical structure that could fragment to prevent contamination through materially-induced backsliding, which is a recurrent feature of the urban bishops and abbots of his hagiography. He contrasts these with pure figures like Addai in their rural exile, who prefer to flee than to accept Chalcedonian sacraments.
When Addai is eventually captured by the Chalcedonians the saint declares that ‘Now Christ is driven into exile by you [Chalcedonians], who would not also be banished rather than being infidels and be banished by Him.’ Addai goes on to deny the emperor's command, saying: ‘If there were a king who ordered me to sacrifice like the martyrs, would you have urged me to sacrifice to the idols because he was the king?’Footnote 24 Addai is presented not only as an ascetic, but also as a martyr, in a scene in which the Chalcedonians are shown re-enacting the roles of the pagans during Diocletian's persecution. And, significantly, this criticism is extended to the emperor Justinian himself. The environment that John evokes, with his wandering ascetics and pure Nazarenes in the wilderness seems to evoke the world of the Book of Judges, a pre-regal land made holy by his ascetics and not by the emperor's rule.Footnote 25
John's Life of Addai sets up the saint as an ascetic leader for his village and it is on the strength of this reputation that he challenges the right of his monastery, his bishop in Amida and the emperor's officials to tell him to go over to the Chalcedonians. Addai is portrayed as a fount of piety, reminding the villagers of the imminent apocalypse: ‘This is the last time, when the false Christs will come among us … the Lord will come as a thief in the night … so keep the purity of your souls as well as your bodies.’Footnote 26 These injunctions come as a prelude to Chalcedon: Addai is already prepared for his wandering exile from Fardaisa and his ascetic activity by his behaviour and state of mind before ‘the fires of persecution’. John develops Addai's story into a proof of Miaphysite orthodoxy, whereby true and false Christians are revealed at a time of persecution.
Harfat the chorepiscopos: asceticism and moderation
Addai's status as a chorepiscopos may have allowed him to attain the kind of local prestige that made him a suitable subject for John's hagiography. His official position allowed him to act within church structures and provide official charity, but also remained important once he broke with these structures after they had become compromised by Chalcedonianism. And throughout the Life his independence is assured by his rural position, far from the reach of agents of the state, as well as by his personal asceticism.
But the position of rural bishops such as Addai seems much more precarious and problematic when we look at John's description of his contemporary Harfat (Life 11). Harfat is said to have retreated to the mountains after refusing to be bishop of Samosata, and there ‘placed irons on himself, because he was simple and thought this the consummation of perfection’. He sat on the mountain ‘and wept and mourned’. When asked why, he replies ‘who would not weep, when he sees a rotting corpse set down in his house’, seemingly a reference both to the state of his own soul and to the appearance of the Chalcedonians.
Harfat's asceticism was not private in spite of his retreat, since ‘he caused all men to marvel and tales of his mortification filled all places’. Like the holy men of Theodoret of Cyrrhus’ Historia religiosa, the retreat of ascetics still allowed them to have an audience, and they are, to some extent, defined by this social role in his hagiography. But John is uncomfortable about the extremism of Harfat's asceticism, and inserts himself into the narrative by describing how he persuaded Harfat to remove his chains. He reminds him ‘it is better to serve God by loving your neighbour’.Footnote 27
These descriptions of extreme personal asceticism by Harfat and the other saints of John's collection are very similar to those used by Ephraem for fourth-century Mesopotamia and Theodoret for fifth-century Cyrrhestica, further to the south. In both John and Theodoret's collections, saints are described as tying heavy boulders or manacles to themselves, as well as living as long-haired nazarites, subsisting on a diet of herbs and roots and weeping uncontrollably.Footnote 28 And Ephraem had praised the Edessene holy man Julian Saba for wandering the mountains in ragged clothes, subsisting on roots and grass.Footnote 29
But what is especially notable about John's description of Harfat is that his extreme asceticism takes place in spite of his having an important institutional role in the Church. While the practices that John describes do seem to exist in a continuum with those recorded by Ephraem and Theodoret, their ascetics were not clergy: if they were ordained, as is the case for two of Theodoret's saints, their ordinations were performed shortly before death and the saints do not themselves fulfil normal priestly functions, in the way that many of John's saints do. Indeed, Rabbula had specifically condemned ascetics who wore chains. Yet here a chain-wearing ascetic is the hero of a hagiography.Footnote 30
It might be suggested that John's praise for Miaphysite clergy engaged in banned ascetic practices should be seen firstly as a practical recognition of the continuing popularity of these customs in rural Mesopotamia, as indications of a social reality where priests continued to support the customs of a pre-institutional Christianity that had proved an embarrassment to Rabbula. Simultaneously, the fact that John records these men in his hagiography also shows that John was under much less pressure than Rabbula to conform to universal norms of orthopraxy. It should be remembered that John was writing about a monastic world that had undergone a displacement from cities such as Amida to the villages and that orthopraxy was consequently harder to enforce. Moreover, the central patronage that had motivated Rabbula to ban many local practices as heretical, and to embrace the popular Miaphysitism of his day, had evaporated. In this environment, it proved easier for John to praise many of these continuing practices as symbols of piety peculiar to Syria, further enhancing the distinctiveness of his chosen territory. Thus John praises several saints as ihidaye, lone ascetics in the mould of Ephraem's madrashe that preceded the foundation of cenobitic monasteries, or presented them as distributing hnana, the blessed earth of the saints that had courted controversy in the fifth century.Footnote 31 In particular, John praises two saints as nazire, long-haired ascetics, whose traditional displays of piety were not respected by their Chalcedonian persecutors.Footnote 32
The tightrope of Messalianism
John's presentation of Harfat shows the continuing importance of distinctive forms of asceticism that had survived into sixth-century Mesopotamia, even within the institutional Church. Yet John's Life of Harfat is reluctant to leave his asceticism un-moderated: John emphasises his own role in pointing Harfat towards ‘the company of men’.
The focus on the need for ascetics to exist within communities may be a reaction to accusations of Messalianism that accompanied the doctrinal debates of the sixth century, but that originated in the normalisation of ascetic practice in the Church in fourth-century Anatolia. Daniel Caner and Columba Stewart have emphasised the existence of a consistent corpus of accusations levelled against ‘Messalians’ that have their origins in the court records of the trial of the Messalian leader Adelphius by Flavian, the patriarch of Antioch. They are accused of over-emphasising the efficacy of prayer (thus their name msallyane/ euchitai) to the exclusion of baptism, which they believe prompts the indwelling of the Holy Ghost in the soul and freedom from passions. Associated with these practices are their claims to prophecy, their disregard for communion, their refusal to work, their ascetic appearance (their long hair and ragged clothes) and their desire for sleeplessness (which facilitated constant prayer).Footnote 33
The identification of a set of doctrines associated with this Adelphius do not equate to the existence of a Messalian movement. Adelphius himself does not appear to have had a school or a set of writings. Instead his behaviour should be seen as symptomatic of tendencies within Syrian ascetic practice towards ‘extreme’ asceticism. The similarity of the writings of sixth-century Syrian authors to aspects of the theology of the followers of Adelphius should also lead us to see the reflection of long-standing concerns rather than direct influence. Such concerns are exemplified in the use of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in Jacob of Serug and the reference to different grades of ascetic duties in Philoxenus of Mabbug.Footnote 34
The links between the kinds of ascetic behaviour that John found praiseworthy and the cluster of ideas that were condemned as heteropraxy and associated with the Messalian denial of the Church and its regulation and sacraments is seen in a third scene involving a chorepiscopos, this time a Chalcedonian, who captures and interrogates an itinerant Miaphysite bishop in the mountains of the Persian border in the 520s. In this scene, in Elias's 538 Life of John of Tella, the chorepiscopos Christophorus accuses John of deceiving 
Footnote 35 the world ‘with your hair tunic, your black robes and your long beard’. Here Christophorus attacks the outward symbols of John's asceticism that had courted controversy in the fifth century: it is these same features, of ragged clothes and long hair that had been staples in the conviction of Syrian Messalians. John of Ephesus had emphasised communal boundaries that used ‘traditional’ features of Mesopotamian asceticism. But it should be recognised that in doing so he also walked a dangerous political tightrope and that his symbols of piety might also be represented as signs of his heteropraxy.
However, John of Tella's reply to his interrogator shows how both sides of the debate faced the same problem. John replies to Christophorus: ‘By what you say, whoever wears a hair tunic, as you do yourself, and is dressed like the saints of old is a deceiver.’Footnote 36 Both sides of the Christological controversies valued ascetic clergy, and this may have been especially true of less ‘reformed’ rural communities who appreciated the ascetic display of their chorepiscopoi.
So while Miaphysite hagiographers, whose saints were persecuted and driven out of their cities, might claim that they were better successors to ‘the saints of old’, their ascetic emphasis might also be presented as ultra-ascetic, and their saints might be labelled as Messalian deceivers of the generosity of poor communities.
It is this proximity between his ascetics and the Messalians that explains John's emphasis on the saints’ manual labour and cultivation of the land. His ascetics build gardens and vineyards and make baskets, setting an example to the young to avoid idleness.Footnote 37 In two instances, the foundation of settlements by John's ascetics is a direct reaction to suspicions that they are scrounging from the people by engaging in constant wandering: as much as these ihidaye might have been respected, their behaviour also generated concern at the intentions of men operating outside a tight ecclesiastical structure that John had to allay.Footnote 38 Thus in his Life of Addai and Abraham (Life 22), one saint says to the other ‘Why do we go aimlessly about and not show labour for the Lord’, after which they give up their wandering and set up twelve small martyrs’ chapels in the mountains and train men in religion.
For John, one of the key indications of his saints’ piety is the effect that they have on the people who share their exile in the mountains and the central importance of Christian fellowship. In his description of his saint Symeon the mountaineer, John juxtaposes the settlement and cultivation with the practice of true religion. The saint tells the villagers:
‘your souls are barren and wild from neglect, like soil where thorns and briars have grown, so that a man who wishes to till it must pluck them up before planting seed. Fast and pray before breaking bread on Sunday’… then he gathered them from their mountains to his house, converting them afresh from paganism and gathered them in like beasts of the field.Footnote 39
Chorepiscopoi continued to play an important role in rural Mesopotamia after they ceased to be of importance in provinces to the south or west. Perhaps because of the proximity of public paganism in Harran, or the more recent importance of the ‘universal Church’ in Mesopotamia, chorepiscopoi still appear in the sixth-century hagiographies as prestigious local figures and as auditors of proper religious practice. In particular, John's hagiographies show us how such men preserved ascetic customs that were considered ‘heteropraxy’ at other times and in other places.
Even after its displacement into the countryside, the Miaphysite movement still retained the organisational structures of rural monasteries and middle-ranking clergy such as the chorepiscopoi Harfat and Addai, who could be detached from parts of the institutional Church that went over to Chalcedon but still retain their local influence and prestige. And with this came the authority of ‘indigenous’ asceticism that was promoted by the religious leadership of the small communities that these exiles led and educated, a feature that may have contributed to the survival of the Miaphysite movement across the rural parts of the Roman east.
