We have seen the social diversity of the churches’ membership, their varying standards of achievement, their scope for perfectionism, their virgins, their visionaries, their reactions to persecution. Like Pionius and his prison lament, we can only wonder how such communities could ever cohere. Within their diversity, enough people, ultimately, accepted and desired similar ends and were prepared to recognize authority for their sake. Cohesion was achieved through a distinctive style of leadership: to appreciate it, we must explore the ideals and position of Christian bishops.
Bishops viewed superior Christians with a mixture of respect, wariness and outright hostility. They respected the sexual perfectionists, but were wary of their conceit and capacity for forcing their ideals on others: such people were also a source of scandal, even in the households of bishops or clerics where the females tended to be brought up. Superior “knowing” Christians were more of a menace and sometimes lost any claims to be Christians at all. Many of them rejected bishops as part of an inferior Creation beyond which their own awakened insight had led them. Bishops’ authority, some of them said, was a sterile creation for ignorant believers.1 Their claim to uncontrolled, personal “knowledge” soon provoked the reward of pseudo-intellectual systems which defy the content of historical texts: they moved others to refute them, and state their conservative case very forcefully. By the third century, “Gnostic” views were the curious beliefs of minorities who had become rather passé: better books had been written for those who wished to be enlightened, knowledgeable Christians while remaining within the Church.
Superior “knowing” Christians also laid emphasis on their visions. The respect for the prophet and the visionary was an obvious danger to the rule of leaders appointed for life. In Hermas’s third vision, the Church herself had told him to publish harsh words for the “leaders of the churches and those who occupy the foremost seats.” They were like sorcerers, she said, and nursed poison in their hearts: “how can you hope to educate the Lord’s elect when you have no education of your own?”2 This type of heavenly pamphlet was not the most welcome reading for its senior recipients.
By the third century, however, visionary experience was the acknowledged gift of bishops, while rival claims to the Spirit were subject to careful testing. The most admired revelations were the dreams of martyrs, but on the whole they were most concerned with the martyrs’ personal fate. The one surviving exception is the vision of the elderly Saturus, companion of Perpetua in Carthage in spring 203. “We went out from Paradise,” he wrote, “and before the gates we saw Bishop Optatus on the right and Aspasius the Elder and teacher on our left, separated from each other, and looking sad. They threw themselves at our feet and said, ‘Make peace between us…’ And we said, ‘Are you not our bishop and our presbyter, yet you throw yourselves at our feet?’ Perpetua began to embrace them and talk to them in Greek beneath an arbour of roses. But the angels rebuked their interruption and told off Bishop Optatus: ‘Correct your crowd [plebs],’ they said, ‘because they come to you like people returning from the circus and quarrelling about the teams.’”3
This vision was not an attack on an accepted principle of leadership: it was a call for proper leadership from those appointed to power. It was evidence of the bishops’ predicament, not of their illegitimacy. In Carthage, the community was beset by factious rivalries which already resembled the hooliganism of a city’s sports fans: discipline was the duty of a bishop with whom his own Elders might be at odds. It was left to two martyrs, one of whom was an unbaptized woman, to try to settle their differences. We can see from the letters of Bishop Cyprian, fifty years later, how the martyrs’ behaviour to bishops varied: in one case, we find them deferring to his “glorious” authority, although he himself was in hiding; in another, they send him a letter whose superiority shows through almost every sentence.4
Martyrs, however, were short-lived, and the leaders of the churches were quick to record the dates of their deaths and honour them safely as community occasions. A greater problem were the “confessors,” Christians who had been arrested and tried or sentenced to temporary punishments. When persecution ceased, they survived or were released. As agents of the Holy Spirit, they possessed a very great prestige. It was an official view, c. 200, that confessors could immediately be made priests and Elders, but not bishops: Cyprian’s letters show how a Church leader had to defer to their authority, even if he also wished to chide and redirect it. Bishops themselves were not well placed to counter this type of prestige: when Cyprian greeted a Christian who had first been a confessor and was then made a bishop, he compared his arrival with the coming of Christ.5 After the events of 250, we can well understand why. Like many other bishops, Cyprian had withdrawn into hiding. In Smyrna, the bishop had lapsed. Many in the Church were not slow to discover that age-old principle, that leaders are somehow too valuable to risk themselves in the front line.
As the persecutors themselves came to realize, the Christian leadership was a vital and distinctive part of their “state within a state”: the next edict after Decius’s singled out Church leaders as its particular target. Unlike any people whom we found in the pagan cults, Christian groups had accepted single leaders with wide powers, to be exercised for life. Was there any precedent for this type of authority, so essential to the degree of cohesion which Christian churches maintained?
Once again, the nearest parallel lies in the Jewish sect whom we know from the Dead Sea scrolls. The community’s overseer had had to teach and arbitrate, grade the religious progress of his membership, supervise the sect’s property and doctrine and act in all things as “father and shepherd.” Like the early churches, the sect had acknowledged two types of banishment, one for a brief period, the other for life.6 Our studies of the Holy Spirit, the close company of angels and the ideal of celibacy have led us repeatedly back to the Dead Sea sect: did Christians accept their bishops because this type of power was already familiar in Jewish sectarian practice? If a debt existed, it must have been indirect: the office of bishop did not emerge in the churches of the first Christian generation. Before bishops were sole accepted leaders, the Dead Sea sect had probably declined, taking its example with it.
In the Gentile world, lifelong rule by a single bishop was something quite new: it differed from any pattern of authority known in a pagan cult association. It was also a break with the practice of Jewish synagogues. Certainly, they had their leaders and dignitaries. In the first century the “chief of the synagogue” is known from Christian sources as the person who invited others to read the lesson from Scripture and expound it afterwards. He did not necessarily teach, and his general responsibility was for orderliness and the smooth conduct of the service. Presumably it was the “chief of the synagogue” who sat in the special “Chair of Moses”: in the synagogue on Delos, one survives, a marble chair with a footstool. However, the chief’s tenure and capacities were not necessarily the same in every community. In an inscription from Acmoneia in Phrygia, we find a “chief of the synagogue for life” with a mere “chief of the synagogue” mentioned next. When we later find a woman called the “chief” in Smyrna and children given the title elsewhere, we cannot assume the job was always a post of authority. “Chiefs of the synagogue” also record their personal spending on their synagogues’ buildings: it was presumably because of their property that women and children were chosen for the job. The “chief of the synagogue” seems more like a benefactor and president than a bishop.7
What of the other titles that we meet in evidence from the Diaspora? They are mostly known from Greek and Latin inscriptions, c. 200 A.D. or later, and from the rulings of Constantine and subsequent Emperors which refer to the authorities among the Diaspora’s Jews. We must be wary of reading these titles back into the synagogues of St. Paul’s lifetime, two or three centuries earlier: we cannot even be sure of the nature, or formal definition, of an order of Jewish “Elders” when Christianity first emerged.8 However, synagogues did need a firm authority: offensive members were banned; fines were imposed and floggings were ordered for religious offences. Beside the Elders, we hear of “rulers,” and between them, the two must have governed the communities’ affairs in Gentile cities. They will have heard cases between fellow Jews and seen to details of conduct which went beyond the regulation of worship: people record that they were both a “ruler” and a “chief of the synagogue,” perhaps concurrently. The “rulers” are not known to have served for life; there were several, not one; we know of a ruler (c. 100 A.D.) who paid an entry fee for selection to his office, like a pagan magistrate. We also know of “fathers” and “mothers” of the community, who assisted it as donors and benefactors. If this was their only role, they were comparable to the big benefactors in second- and third-century cities who were honoured in the same family language. Like the “rulers,” they were probably named on the model of contemporary civil practice.9
In Christian imagery, the bishop was heir to none of these titles. By the mid-third century, it could be assumed by Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, that bishops were successors to the priests of the Old Testament.10 Had Christians taken over the strand of priestly authority which Jews, meanwhile, had lost? The destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple had ended the role of the Jews’ own priesthood: to our eye, the authorities in Jewish life of the second and third centuries were the rabbis, or teachers, in the learned academies. Rabbis wrote and expressed opinions, but did not direct a formal Judaism. During the second and third centuries, however, tithes were still paid in Galilee to priestly individuals, and we find self-styled “priests” in funerary inscriptions from nearby Beth Shearim and in inscriptions in the Diaspora: we even find a “priestess,” buried in Rome. Not all of these people were mere descendants of the old priestly families, without any function, since we find Constantine giving immunities to “priests” of the Jewish community. This favour equated them with the ministers of a God and we cannot, then, entirely exclude some “priestly” element in the third-century synagogues.11 Its scope, however, is uncertain.
Of one higher authority among the Jews, we are told much more, but the reliability of Christians and rabbis on the subject may not be very great.12 In Palestine, from the second century onwards, Roman rule recognized a single patriarch, and rabbinic sources preserve several stories of the three successive Judahs who held this office from c. 170 until the later third century. They claimed that the patriarch regulated the calendar and declared fasts, imposed and received taxes, banned unsuitable teachers and pupils and appointed judges. They told of his contacts with Roman governors and the Emperors and projected a picture of his high status. Christian sources enlarge on it. Origen compared the patriarch to a king, when explaining the story of Susannah, and referred to his own experiences in the land of the Jews: people, he said, were still put to death “unofficially” by Jews with the patriarch’s connivance. However, his observation did not necessarily apply outside Palestine: only the late Christian texts allege that the patriarch sent “apostles” with encyclical letters round the Jewish communities. In the Diaspora, recently, it seemed as if a newly found inscription, datable c. 280, supported these notions.13 At Stobi, in Macedonia, its text laid down rules for the use of a synagogue building and stated that the fines for any infringement should be paid to “the patriarch.” This rule has been seen as a sign of the Great Patriarch’s authority, extending to small, local details so far outside Palestine. In the fourth century, however, the rulings of Christian Emperors address Jewish “patriarchs” who are local figures: at Stobi, the “patriarch” may only be a dignitary in the local community.
It is of great interest that the titles of rank in the Jewish synagogues were developing during the second and third centuries: we find “principals” and “fathers” as well as “priests” and “patriarchs.” Once again, we can compare the multiplication of titles of rank in secular society and suspect that the pattern owed something to contemporary practice in the pagan world. While Christians spread, the Jewish communities in the same cities were not static: once again, we have lost a vital angle on the history of this period, because no books survive from Diaspora Jews in an age of change. However, even without them, we can see that these titles offer no parallel for the pattern of power in the Christian Church. There, by contrast, rule by a single leader emerged and spread as the dominant authority. Christians had taken up a type of leadership which was used by a small sect: they multiplied it in each of their communities. The church of each city looked up to its monarchical bishop, who was a leader appointed for life. “One God, one Christ, one Holy Spirit,” the Christian laity called out in Rome after a dispute in the mid-third century, “and in a Catholic church there ought to be one bishop.”14 Their cry was all the more remarkable, as there had not been a hint of bishops in anything said by Jesus in the Gospels.
Other Christians had been quick to fill the gap.15 In the 90s, a leading Christian at Rome wrote to the church in Corinth and explained how the Apostles had appointed “bishops” from their first converts. He quoted Isaiah to support the point: “I will appoint their bishops in righteousness.” The text was a convenient misquotation. By the 170s, Irenaeus was confounding the heretics by citing a list of successive bishops of Rome, of which his contemporary, significantly, was the twelfth. The first, however, was his mistaken deduction from the epistles, where he had misconstrued an adjective as a bishop’s proper name. By the early third century, Tertullian argued that the Apostles had appointed bishops in the major cities and that their churches had “records” which connected them to Apostolic appointments. This documentary evidence was probably his exaggeration, not their fiction. By 250, Cyprian was assuming that the Apostles had been bishops themselves.
The emergence of bishops in cities of the Greek East is visible in the letters which Ignatius sent to the major churches of Asia, c. 110.16 His attempts to exalt the bishop’s authority suggest the shock waves which the office had spread in certain quarters. We cannot be more precise about its origins and we must always allow for differing local circumstances.17 In Alexandria, the Elders remained unusually important. Among the Syriac-speaking churches of eastern Syria and Mesopotamia, the sense of hierarchy and organization may have remained weaker. By the 170s, there is still no sign of bishops in the churches in southern Gaul.
From the third century, however, we are lucky to have a long description of the good bishop. It survives for us in a Syriac translation, whose original was composed in Greek.18 It presented its contents as the teaching which the Twelve Apostles circulated after their council in Jerusalem. This fake authority is all too characteristic. We will return later to its excellent picture of life in a small church community, but here, we must pick out its ideals of good leadership. The bishop, it said, should be a blameless character, preferably aged over fifty and married to a Christian wife. He must not have remarried and his own children ought to be good Christians. He must be meek and chaste, merciful and adept at making peace. His own family should be examined as proof of his discipline and talents for sound upbringing. If possible, he should be learned and lettered. If not, he could be illiterate, so long as he knew the Scriptures. If the church was a small one and if all the members bore witness to him, the bishop could be a young man. Was not Josiah, after all, a good king of the Jews at the age of eight? Earlier, Ignatius had written in support of a young bishop whom some Christians were opposing in the Asian city of Magnesia. Young though they might be, bishops were able to serve for the rest of their lives.
Bishops needed one supreme gift in everything which these “Apostles” prescribed for them. They had to be men of keen discernment, a requirement which takes us to the heart of their difficulties. They had to distinguish the widow in genuine need from the widow who was not so badly off. They had to investigate the sources of Christian charity, and if the donors were heathens or sinners, drunk or lazy, they had to reject it. They were not to buy food with money of dubious origin and risk polluting the widows and orphans: if they had to accept such funds, they should spend them where they did least harm, on firewood. Dubious sources of finance included Roman officials who were stained with innocent blood, abusers of slaves, imprisoners of the poor and innkeepers of singular vice who diluted their wines with water. Bishops must also see to the education of orphans, especially when richer Christians were unwilling to adopt them as their heirs. They must discern false teachers and expel them from the church. Above all, they must investigate the truth of quarrels and slanders and reconcile the Christian participants.
It is here that the gift of discernment was most urgent. Paul had advised his Christians to take their disputes before fellow Christians, not before pagan courts of law: arbitration and conciliation became the formidable tasks of every bishop. Their art was to strive for reconciliation, not to dispense summary justice. The “Apostles” advise that the deacons should call out in church and ask if anyone present had anything against one of the brethren. If so, the bishop must reprove the bearer of the grudge and try to talk him out of it. He should call both parties and hear and reprove them on a Monday, giving the two parties a whole week until Sunday to make up their differences. The bishop should always hear the two sides together and conduct a careful examination of their character in order to decide which party must be telling the truth, a faith in character as evidence which was rather optimistic. Not every accusation was merited, and false complaints were a severe test of any bishop’s insight. On no account, said the “Apostles,” should he accept a heathen’s testimony, but he should act slowly, imitating the slowness and diligence of a pagan court in a murder case, of whose workings the “Apostles” took an unusually favourable view. Like a “certified money changer,” they said, the bishop must test his disputants. He must work to abolish lawsuits, not to pass judgement, and he must not hold back if the two parties resist him. Kings only reign over their subjects’ bodies, said the “Apostles,” but bishops reign over their bodies and also their souls. They can bind and loose on earth with their gift of heavenly power. If necessary, they can invoke the wrath to come and threaten the fires of hell.19
During the bishop’s arbitration, the Elders could sit beside him, but throughout the process the greater assessor was Christ himself. Although the bishop was the mouthpiece of God, he was also under God’s eye and was personally accountable for every false judgement. If he condemned an innocent man, he himself would be condemned at the Last Day.20 He was also accountable for the conduct of his flock, a charge which obliged him to correct the local sinners. Deadly sins were thought to be beyond forgiveness, but progress could be made with lesser wrongdoing. The bishop should exclude sinners from church for two to seven weeks until they repented and were reconciled to Christian conduct. A bishop’s reproofs were greatly helped by a unified, blameless community. If a sinner entered such a church, he would be “confounded and go out quietly, in great shame, weeping and feeling remorse in his heart. And when the whole flock sees the tears and weeping of that man, it too will fear, knowing that everyone who sins will perish.”21 The group, then, was chastened with fear, while the individual was humiliated in public.
These practices were not altogether an innovation. The Gospels and epistles had stressed the community’s role in reproving a troublesome brother: Christians were advised to cut off contact with an offender after two warnings. Paul had already declared false teachers and “those who do not love Christ” to be “anathema”; they were given over to Satan, to whom the First Epistle to Timothy roundly consigned two “blasphemous” individuals. As the bishop became established, it was surely he who pronounced this sentence, just as we see bishops pronouncing it collectively in the acts of the earliest councils. Their penalties for sin range from a temporary denial of the Eucharist to excommunication, “ejection” and “anathematization,” a solemn surrender to God’s judgement.22
These sentences were extremely grave, and the bishop who controlled them was urged to be no respecter of persons. He must not fawn on the rich and famous or show hostility to the poor. He must strictly resist the bribes of sinners, as they would pollute the entire church. If a rich man entered church, he must ignore him and only make way for the poor man. The insistence on these values says something, it seems, about bishops in real life. The “Apostles”’ advice finds a near-contemporary support in the vivid remarks which Origen passed while commenting on Matthew’s Gospel in the 240s. “We terrify people,” he wrote, “and make ourselves inaccessible, especially if they are poor. To people who come and ask us to do something for them, we behave as no tyrant, even, would: we are more savage to petitioners than any civil rulers are. You can see this happening in many recognized churches, especially in the bigger cities.”23
We can well see how these tyrants had developed. More than any Emperor, bishops combined accessibility with the exercise of an awesome power. They “ruled in the place of God.” They could suspend a cleric or an ordinary Christian, ban him from church and damn him to eternal punishment. It was hard for a man to be open and humble when any slander against his person was said to be a slander against God. “Love your bishop as a father: fear him as a king: honour him as God…”: this ideal asked Christians to reconcile impossible opposites.24 The bishop had to retain his own insight while attracting a difficult mixture of affection and reverential fear.
The outlines of this advice on bishops’ conduct were much older than their clear statement by the “Apostles.” They already existed in the epistles addressed to Timothy, where bishops were exhorted to teach and befriend strangers, to show sobriety and eschew quarrels and financial corruption. The theology echoed much which Ignatius’s letters also expressed. The bishop, wrote Ignatius, was the “image of the Father.” The man who disregards him “deceives not the bishop, who is seen, but deceives God, who is invisible.” Whoever acts without the bishop is the “servant of the Devil.”25 Ignatius already had a strong sense of the potential awe of the Christians’ leadership, and expressed it by emphasizing the power of a bishop’s silence. “The more anyone sees a bishop to be silent, the more reverence should he feel towards him.”26 As silence was the quality of God himself, a silent bishop reflected God on earth: “He who possesses Jesus’s word is truly able also to hear his silence, so that he may be perfect, so that he may act through his words and be known through his silences.” Silent authority on earth reflected God’s silent authority in heaven: the bishop was “the likeness of God,” and the Elders “his council and the company of the Apostles.”
The exaltation of the bishop as the “man of God,” the high priest, the “bearer of the Spirit,” was not, then, a new development in the churches of the third century. It owed nothing to new patterns of social relations developing in surrounding worldly society.27 It was not the effect of any “common Mediterranean religious culture,” supposedly shared by pagans, Jews and Christians. The language of the bishop’s authority and inspiration went back to his very origin as a distinctive Christian minister: Ignatius had already praised him as the guardian of true doctrine who should pray for spiritual revelation of “things invisible.” He should care especially for the widows, and before long, his household became a recognized haven for orphans and resolute virgins: we have a vivid record of such girls’ turbulence in a papyrus record of the early fourth century.28 Ignatius had already advised Christians to marry in the presence of their bishop, and although there was no formal ceremony of Christian marriage in the early Church, this proposal connected bishops promptly with the private lives of their membership. When Christians went on to commit adultery, the bishop was involved again. By the early third century, some of the leading bishops were prepared to absolve this deadly sin and their “power of the keys” was extended accordingly. The more the bishop could forgive in the Spirit, the wider his authority extended.29
Power brings its own temptations and suspicions, especially a power which requires such insight, persuasion and honesty. It is not, then, so surprising that we know most about early bishops when they fell short of these ideals. Their job involved the care of money and the instruction of widows and virgins, while the power to “bind and loose” carried its own temptations. We have only to read Cyprian’s letters to discover bishops who were charged with succumbing to each of these specific sins: Cyprian knew how to suit his allegations to the particular temptations of the job. By Origen’s standards, few bishops lived up to it.30 “And the Lord said to Moses, Take all the chiefs of the people and expose them to the Lord over against the sun, and the anger of the Lord shall be turned from Israel…” “Perhaps,” wrote Origen, when he reached this choice episode in Numbers, “I will give offence to certain people in discussing this text.” The prospect did not deter him. Church leaders, he wrote, would not dare to compete for the rank and honour of their position if they remembered that they would be accountable for their own and their church’s sins.
In the pagan world, oracles had applauded the piety of priests and warned against their violation in texts which were much to the taste of the Emperor Julian. The sanctions surrounding a bishop were of an altogether sterner order. The bishop was the successor to the royal and priestly leaders of God’s chosen people and deserved a respect appropriate to his responsibilities. As Cyprian reminded one opponent, opposition to God’s minister was opposition to God himself.31 Scripture proved it, he wrote, from Deuteronomy to Acts: “the man who will not hearken unto the priest… shall die and all the people, when they hear, shall fear and act no more with presumption.” The equation of dissent with the Devil and the threat of reprisals in hell for any opponent strike us as abominable innovations. These threats, however, were not the roots of a bishop’s authority. They lay in the general manner of his job’s origin and the particular form of his election.
Bishops had not been imposed on most Christians from outside or above. They had been selected with local approval, as the best means to cope with problems. In the absence of Apostolic precedent, their origins can only be guessed, but it is not unjust to suspect that bishops were born from conflict. At first the early churches had looked up to “Elders,” respected men who were of an age to remember the churches’ founders. What, then, if the Elders disagreed? There was a need for a single “overseer” to settle disputes.32 Like Ignatius’s bishop in Magnesia, the chosen overseer might not be an “Elder” himself. Standing outside the group, this one individual could also take over the task of offering the Eucharist and administering the funds of a city’s church. As Christians were supposed to be one Body, he could represent his local community in the affairs of the wider Church. As the membership grew, Christians in the bigger cities became divided among various places of worship. Services had to be held in houses or private properties which were put at the Christians’ disposal. There was no single cathedral, or public “church.” By giving authority to one leader, the churches were better placed to maintain uniformity and avoid disintegration. The bishop became a badly needed focus in a city when the menace of heresy required a concerted counterattack and when persecution threatened to tear the community apart. Above all, there was the overriding worry of the Last Judgement.33 Here, the bishop was expected to answer for his flock’s conduct before God and to work for the community’s safety in the world to come. A good bishop was in everyone’s interest, both in this life and in the next.
There were solid grounds, then, for the bishop’s pre-eminence and we must not isolate him entirely from his fellow clergy. He sat on his own distinctive “chair,” covered with linen in Cyprian’s case: during a service, however, he was not raised above his congregation. High pulpits were thought an outrage: it has been calculated that Augustine, in his African church at Hippo, addressed his Sunday audience from a chair only five yards away from their front row.34 Before the age of Constantine, the bishop wore no special dress and could always consult freely with his wider company of Elders. They might sit beside him while he gave judgement and around him while he taught in church. In practice, a bishop could expel an offending Christian without further consultation, but he would naturally consult his supporting clergy when appropriate.35
His pre-eminence was linked with two basic instruments: pay and appointments. In each case, the bishop was supreme, but his supremacy had to be exercised tactfully if it was to be accepted. It is quite clear from Cyprian’s letters and other texts that a bishop could appoint his own choices to vacant jobs in the church; the “Apostles” compare his choosing of Elders and deacons with the wide powers enjoyed by Samuel.36 However, we can see from Cyprian’s letters that a consultation with the clergy and “mass membership” was more usual in many churches. It is true that Cyprian appointed a reader, an Elder and several minor officials while hiding from persecution. Yet he wrote very carefully to his fellow churchmen, emphasizing the special circumstances which obliged him to choose personally. Some of his appointments, he pleaded, were already confessors, who had stood trial for their faith and whom God, he said, had already approved. The churches, therefore, would hardly wish to dispute them. It is evident from such a letter that consultation was the more normal practice whenever bishops wished a change of personnel.
It is also evident that they could not appoint an entire new clergy on the occasion of their own appointment. They had to live with existing Elders and clerics: we can detect a group of supporting priests who served Cyprian’s daily business and ran his various errands for him, but they are essentially a power bloc whom he himself had attracted and built up.37 A similar constraint attached to finance. The bishop, ultimately, dispensed the charity. He allotted funds to the widows, orphans and deserving poor. He also paid the clergy their shares.38 This power allowed some skilful tactics: opponents, as Athanasius (c. 330) showed, could be struck off the list and paid nothing. However, both the bishop and the clergy depended on the good will of the laity for funds in the first place. At first, they were supported by a “dividend system,” financed by the total of their Christians’ offerings: the sum seems to have been paid monthly, and a bishop’s share was probably twice as big as an Elder’s.39 The offerings included first fruits from crops and produce: Christian polemic against the letter of the Mosaic law did not extend to its rules on first fruits and tithes: tithes, on one view, were payable to the minor clerics, widows, paupers and virgins. The notion of fixed clerical salaries was considered an outrage as late as c. 200, in both Rome and Asia. It was the shocking practice of Christian sectarians and heretics. In the Christian Empire, however, it became the orthodox system in the East. Salaries are the heretics’ one lasting legacy to Christian life.
The bishop who lost touch with his laity would find himself financially weakened and eventually with no funds for the task. Equally, if the laity failed to contribute, they robbed themselves of an ally in their search for salvation: the laity’s offerings, said the “Apostles’” letter, pass through the bishop for the remission of their sins.40 Above all, the bishop was their own man, however long he lived in office and however much they grumbled at him. “In almost all provinces,” said Cyprian, the entire clergy and laity of the local church met to approve the bishop’s election.41
However, his authority had a wider dimension: bishops were not merely local leaders whom the local Christian membership appointed. Their election and ordination required the participation of at least three neighbouring bishops: we know of elections by as many as seven or twelve or sixteen.42 These visitors’ role linked each bishop’s authority to the universal Church in the community of God. This universality was an earlier support to the bishop’s power than any supposed succession from the Twelve Apostles. The idea of a continuous chain of bishops, tracing back to the Apostles, is first apparent in texts of Hegesippus and Irenaeus in the mid- to later second century: they emphasize it to guarantee doctrine and orthodoxy, not to underpin the bishops’ general authority. In the early third century, Hippolytus then emphasizes the transmission of the Spirit from Apostles to bishops, with the implication that the latter are special guardians of the truth. Finally, in the 250s, Cyprian’s letters equate bishops and Apostles: the chain of succession has become an explicit argument for authority and obedience.43
Neither the laity nor the visitors exhausted the content of a bishop’s election. A third dimension entered the process: the approval, or “judgement,” of God. We hear most about this element from Cyprian, but it was not his invention, nor was it the response of Church leaders who found themselves under threat in the mid-third century.44 It was grounded in the very prayer and ritual of a bishop’s ordination. The texts of this procedure raise difficult problems of dating and elaboration, but the earliest material appears to have included a prayer to God for the gift of “the princely spirit to this, your servant whom you have chosen to the bishopric.”45 The prayer connected the bishop with God’s choice and with the “princes” and “priests” of Jewish history: the Church, it said, was the heir of the “race of the righteous,” descending from Abraham. The attending bishops prayed for the gift of the Holy Spirit to pass to their new candidate, while the entire assembly observed a silence to mark the occasion. Gifted with the Spirit, the bishop alone could impart the Spirit by laying hands on newly baptized Christians.
These beliefs were most unfamiliar to pagans. At their oracles, Apollo gave a divine word of reference to his ministers. At Didyma, he “bore witness” to his prophet’s qualities, probably when the prophet was inaugurated. At the major shrines, the function of prophecy was divided between a thespode or “prophetess” and a prophet whom the god’s words approved. Unlike a bishop, the prophet changed frequently, usually every year. His inspiration was tied to a place and a fixed ritual and was not transmitted from one prophet to others: it was not a continuous guidance at all times and places. Even when a god enhanced a prophet’s faculties, the words were generally thought to be his own, not the speaker’s.
The bishop, by contrast, was selected by the “judgement” of God; he was approved by the “suffrage” of the people and validated by the “agreement” of fellow bishops. He promised no donations; he assumed a “perpetual magistracy” for life without agreeing to any accompanying “liturgy” to be performed at his own financial expense.
However, when we pass beyond the ideal, the practical problems begin to multiply. Did the visiting bishops choose their candidate and submit him to the assembled people for approval or did the people nominate their own candidates? What happened if the people and the bishops disagreed, or if God was believed to favour somebody else? What exactly was this popular “suffrage”? If the judgement was God’s, could people not argue that other methods might express it better? The questions do not end with the local churches, for the bishop was also the choice of the “Church universal”: who, then, resolved disputes between bishops in different places? Details of the liturgy were a bishop’s local responsibility, but questions of heresy and discipline raised theological issues about the very unity of the Church. Were all bishops autonomous, as Cyprian implied, while some were more equal than others, as his arguments presupposed? The ideal of unity could be employed, as always, to coerce dissidents, yet the very notion of a “bishop of the bishops” was still outrageous.46 It was equated by Tertullian and Cyprian with tyranny and an unsupportable dictatorship, and was applied only to their opponents. This rhetoric was very stirring, but it set a heavy weight on “consensus.” Could one church never interfere with another and fairly compel its leader? Only God, implied Cyprian, could judge a bishop’s conduct, but did this view imply that no bishop could force another into line? What if a bishop misbehaved and his church wished to be rid of him? The problems arose very sharply after persecutions, and it took a firm series of scriptural texts from Cyprian’s pen to reassure the laity that they were right in deposing lapsed bishops whom formerly they had elected.47
To answer these problems, we must examine the parts of the “electoral” process. The word “suffrage” had been imported into church elections from the language of secular elections and preferment: here, the churches in North Africa were no more immune than the synagogues in the Greek world to the language of surrounding society. In the third-century African cities, the elections of magistrates were still lively popular occasions: “popular clamour” could disrupt them, and as late as 325, in a very revealing law, we find Constantine acknowledging that the “suffrage of the people” played a part in the nomination of magistrates “by custom” in Africa, but insisting that only suitable candidates should be put forward.48 This continuing secular “custom” is very relevant to the language and scandals of elections in the contemporary African churches. People were used to exerting suffrage, and the Church was not alone in giving a role to it: it differed, however, in including the suffrage of slaves and women. In pagan appointments, the word “suffrage” had declined from its older sense of free “voting” to a feebler “acclamation” at elections or a word of “support” in a letter of testimony for a job:49 did the Church’s usage, too, lie near the bottom of the slope?
Stories in Eusebius’s histories and Cyprian’s own life show that the people’s suffrage could indeed be a force in its own right.50 It is latent in Eusebius’s simplest tales of election, tales like the appointment of Fabian to the bishopric of Rome. When a dove landed on the head of this obscure candidate, it signified his choice by the Holy Spirit and ensured his election by all the people and clergy. They had gathered, however, with other candidates in mind, suggesting that the people could have a general role as proposers. In the early third century, another story points in the same direction. When a faction arose in Jerusalem against the austere bishop Narcissus, he retired for peace to the Judaean desert, whereupon the neighbouring bishops presumed he had disappeared and appointed a successor. Narcissus then reappeared during his second successor’s reign and “the brethren,” said Eusebius, summoned him back to his old position. When Narcissus was too old to manage the job, God alerted the local Christians to an approved replacement. He sent them a vision by night in which he directed them to choose Alexander, a visitor from Cappadocia who happened to be touring the holy places as a pilgrim. The brethren waylaid him and the usual process was believed to have taken place. Neighbouring bishops became involved in the election and Alexander was approved as Narcissus’s partner. By now, Narcissus was a very poor advertisement for life appointments. In a contemporary church letter, he was described as 116 years old.
The story was probably more legend than fact, but its elements did conform to the accepted ideas of a bishop’s authority. Significantly, Narcissus’s enemies were said to have been punished by God’s vengeance, while he himself was remembered for his miracles, especially for the miraculous oil which he had produced one Easter and which survived in small quantities in Eusebius’s own day. In the third century, a bishop could still be idealized as a “holy man.” However, the legends of Narcissus’s divine authority could not conceal that his austere manner split his church and obliged him to retreat in despair at the quarrelling. Above all, the election of his partner was remembered for the same three elements which Cyprian’s letters stress: “divine judgement,” the “agreement” of neighbouring bishops and the “approval” of the local membership.
The waylaying of a visiting Christian and his elevation to a bishopric were to have a long history: how active was the laity in the process? Eusebius’s stories are told as if the “brethren” as a whole took the initiative: he knew two other examples in third-century Laodicea.51 It is significant that the stories were presented in this way, although we may suspect the planned action of particular groups or individuals within the wider community. In Cyprian’s own life, his admiring biographer found a further example. Cyprian himself was a recent convert, a man of considerable property and proven skill as a speaker and advocate in court. His rapid promotion to Carthage’s great bishopric was brought about, said his fond biographer, by the laity’s enthusiasm: “seething with ardour, the plebs swelled and the crowds besieged his doors…”52 This popular backing overrode his very brief time as a Christian, though it helped to alienate the “gang of five,” the five dissident Elders who then caused Cyprian such trouble in the conduct of his office. Perhaps the picture has been stylized to reflect credit on Cyprian, its hero, but again, it assumes that the people could bring decisive pressure to an election. No doubt, Cyprian’s social position and property speeded his cause. In civic life, electors paid great attention to the candidates’ willingness to promise gifts and perform civic services at their own expense. The laity could not be expected to abandon this familiar pattern whenever they met. The Church, too, needed money and service, and if Christians saw a rich candidate, they would anticipate charity for themselves and their community. By the later fourth century, the preferment of upper-class candidates was attracting widespread polemic.53
“Suffrage,” it is clear from these examples, was not a fixed power of voting: Christians did nothing to reverse the word’s decline “from vote to patronage.” In contemporary pagan elections in Africa, “suffrage” could force an undesirable candidate forwards; it was also the acclamation which greeted a proposed name, and which was so hard for a candidate to refuse. A unanimous shout from a crowd or assembly was widely seen as an omen from the gods: there is an irony, here, for historians, as Greek theorists in the free, classical past had considered election by shouting to be “childish.”54 On both points, Christian suffrage overlapped, essentially, with its contemporary pagan counterpart, familiar from civic life. To Eusebius, a “unanimous shout” was a divine sign; Cyprian calls suffrage “divine” too, but suffrage did not exhaust the element of “divine judgement” which at other times he connects with the agreement and testimony of bishops and clergy only.55 Suffrage was not a “right” of acclamation which alone could validate a candidate. The procedure was more fluid. It seems that visiting bishops and local clergy would put a suggested candidate before the people to see if they knew any “just cause or impediment.” They might already have forced the clergy’s hand, by waylaying a visitor or clamouring for someone like Cyprian, no doubt with the help of some skilful manipulation. If they disliked a candidate, they could withhold “suffrage” and stop his election. They might clamour for a rival, or they might rally unanimously and give the shout which seemed like a heaven-sent sign. Then the visiting bishops would “agree” and proceed to ordination while the people looked on. It is very doubtful if there was anything so formal as an election between two candidates, decided by the balance of popular noise. Nor was a unanimous acclamation a necessary part of the “judgement,” let alone a popular right.
“Suffrage” remains imprecise, not only because our evidence is indirect, but because it was in essence informal: the people’s dissent could stop an appointment or undermine one, and their assent could force one, if properly mobilized. However, only if “suffrage” was a real potential force can we understand the stories of bribes, faction and distortion at church elections.56 In the mid-fourth century, Church councils ruled explicitly against claques who were placed in the crowd to distort its “suffrage” by their shouting. Among these watchers, the shouts of slaves and women were as good a suffrage as any. In the early fourth century, a rich woman was said to have used bribes to distort the course of an entire election in Africa. We know of no comparable actions by women in any pagan elections.
By this combination of the bishops’ “judgement,” the clerical “testimony” and the popular “suffrage,” the new bishop was held to be “ordained by God.” He was dignified by God and chosen by God: the threats of God’s vengeance to anyone who opposed him rested firmly on the form of his public election.57 If the people had approved him by “divine” suffrage, who were they to disobey his will? Not everyone, however, thought the electoral process was sensible.
In Origen, again, we have a contemporary in whom these uncertainties induced explicit distaste.58 Churches, he remarked, received the leaders they deserved, and generally, they were more interested in rank and position than scholarship. People competed for the jobs, and most of them had more of an eye for the church’s rich membership than for the Scriptures and their meaning. How wisely, by contrast, Moses had appointed Joshua. He had ignored his own sons and family. He had prayed for God’s sign and had merely presented Joshua to the priests and people as a foregone conclusion. There had been no scope for the people’s voice, which faction and bribery could corrupt, and no excuse for the intrigues of priests. These comments were not made at random.59 In the mid-second century, we happen to know of a bishop who could already point to seven other bishops among his relations. Brothers and sons assumed office in subsequent centuries and there was always the chance that an ageing bishop would simply announce his successor: Augustine availed himself of old age’s final tyranny by presenting “his” choice to his church before his death. In North Africa, in 259, the martyr Flavian gave a long “last testament” as he prepared to go to his execution: he “praised Lucian the Elder with a very fulsome eulogy and destined him, so far as he could, for a priesthood.” “Not undeservedly,” his “best friend” added in defence, “for it was not hard for him to have knowledge in the Spirit when Christ and heaven were so near…” We do not know what the other candidates thought of this long, unsolicited outburst.
The uncertainties and the skilled manoeuvres help us to see why so many appointments spilled out beyond the local church and became great Christian scandals of the third century. Any appointment involved the outside bishops, and if a choice was contested, there was as yet no order of primacy among the greater city sees. Rome had the most prestige, but had no agreed status as the senior power.60 No hierarchy of metropolitan bishops stood above the local bishops in a province. In the absence of a firm hierarchy, local appointments risked becoming everyone’s business. During the 90s, the deposition of clergymen in Corinth drew a warm letter from the church in Rome, pleading reconciliation and second thoughts.61 In the 170s, the affair of Montanus passed from Phrygia to Rome and Lyons and back again: afterwards, Irenaeus is found writing from Lyons to the bishop of Rome to complain about the orthodoxy of one of his priests. In the 250s, Cyprian was writing from Africa to the bishop of Rome, urging action against a bishop of Arles. His synod intervened against bishops in Spain whose conduct encouraged the worst sort of rumour, and he devoted much energy to opposing a breakaway “bishop” in Rome who disagreed with his principles.62
It is a commonplace among historians that the cities, groups and individuals of the second- and third-century Empire pursued their interests by a flurry of letters, envoys and petitions to any higher authority which could possibly advance them. While pagans were travelling to Roman officials and the Emperor, Christians were engaged in an equally vigorous pattern of embassies, petitions and letters amongst themselves. They swelled the ranks of those endless travellers, speakers, letter-bearers and petitioners who crossed and recrossed the Mediterranean world: major bishops would use their own clerics to carry their letters, trusted postmen who would be less likely to forge them.63 Their exchanges led to bishops’ meetings in synods, events which are well attested in both West and East during the early third century. As a seat of the Apostles, the church in Rome had particular prestige when invoked in a dispute: Rome’s primacy was to take shape from this early informality. What if the loser in a dispute refused to give up his position? If matters could not be resolved within the Church, might not one party follow the example of so many others throughout the Empire and appeal to the source with the most power to conclude it, the Emperor himself? Power, in the ancient world, had so often attracted the unresolved pleas and disputes of outsiders. Once established, it grew as much by unsolicited invitation as by imposition from above. It was only a matter of time, and desperation, before bishops somewhere invited an Emperor into their affairs.
By 272, we know of the first such appeal, and its reports sum up many of the ambiguities in the bishop’s position.64 At its centre stood one of the tragic figures of early Christian history, Paul, bishop of Antioch, who was finally excommunicated by a synod of bishops for reasonably holding that Christ was a man, not God. The dispute showed the relentless character of Christian authority. The visiting bishops interrogated Paul, while secretaries trained in shorthand took down the questions and answers. The bishops then addressed a circular letter on Paul’s person and views to churches throughout the world and accused him of vices which sit very neatly with a bishop’s exceptional responsibilities. Paul, they complained, had enriched himself by giving corrupt judgement, “though he was formerly poor and destitute”: if this charge is true, Paul is a rare example of a bishop who had enjoyed a sudden social promotion through his election. His particular vices were the style in which he held court to settle disputes and his sinister power over women. These vices were easily credited in a bishop when arbitration was so important and female “suffrage” ranked equally with male. Paul was said to have offered help in lawsuits in return for money; he gave himself airs, strutted with attendants in public, exalted his bishop’s throne in church and equipped himself with a secretariat, like a pagan magistrate. Women shouted applause in his presence, and their trained female choirs were alleged to sing psalms in his honour, even at Easter. Virgins were admitted to his household, but they succumbed to his advances and never dared to reveal their lapses. Paul, it was said, had already broken up with one woman and was now taking two “in the flower of youth and beauty” on his daily business, living in luxury wherever he could.
As Cyprian well knew, women, corrupt justice and financial embezzlement were easy charges to lay against a bishop. Paul was excommunicated, but he refused to surrender the church building. His enemies did not wait for God’s vengeance. They invoked secular power by sending their dispute at once to the Emperor Aurelian. By invitation, an Emperor thus found himself requested to deal with Church affairs. The request, perhaps, was no odder than many which reached him, but his reply showed a grasp of Christian authority which can only have come from a sympathetic adviser in his service. He replied that the church building should be assigned to whomsoever the bishops of Italy and Rome approved. The answer respected Christian ideas of universality, and the decision duly went against Paul.
The affair had not only invited the Emperor into the business of the Church. It illustrated the power of bishops to commune and excommunicate, and the tensions which could easily surround its use. This power had always found Christians who would criticize it, especially those Christians of superior knowledge and insight who claimed that the bishops’ authority was imposed by an inferior Creator. Their views attracted a strong polemic, but their own practice was more interesting. Some of them avoided the contradictions of a church “election” by returning to that great device of earlier Greek society, selection by lot. Use of the lot still apportioned the equal shares in many families’ inheritances, but politically, it was dead. In the second century, it was revived by Christian minorities who valued it, as Homer’s heroes had once valued it too, as the expression of the will of God.65
“Nowhere,” complained Tertullian, “is promotion easier than in the camp of the rebels where the mere fact of being present is a prominent service. So, today one man is bishop, tomorrow another…” The lot appointed the leader for the day, as Irenaeus described in meetings of Marcus, a pupil of the heretic Valentinus. As each member was equally inspired with the Holy Spirit, nobody officiated by a permanent right. Instead, they cast lots to find God’s choice for the occasion. The practice contrasted sharply with “orthodox” elections and had a certain logic: if Christians were equals in Christ, why should one rule over another? The lot, as Greek theorists knew, restrained faction and discontent in the selection of officers from a company of equals. It was not nearly so childish as a choice by acclamation, or so arguable as preselection by an inner ring of clergy. When complaining of these practices, Origen himself entertained its use with a certain enthusiasm.66 It was also much cheaper for the candidates, as it excluded bribery.
Selection by lot had a good scriptural precedent in the Apostles’ replacement of the traitor Judas. The precedent was variously discussed and dismissed, but it did lead, finally, to one of the best reflections on a bishop’s predicament. In the later fourth century, John Chrysostom took the text as his cue for a lament on the problems which beset the bishops of his age.67 They were compounded, he said, by the bishops’ great prestige, which no governor and no other visitor to “great houses of rich ladies” could possibly equal. Nonetheless, their problems still followed the patterns which we have sketched. Bishops, he complained, sought prestige, while treating their responsibilities too lightly. They forgot that they bore the burden of all their flock and that one single soul lost to God would count against them at the Last Judgement. Their freedom, however, was limited. In an acute comment, John raised the problem which besets authority in any company appointed for life: what should a new bishop do to the mediocrities whom he inherits from his predecessor as Elders and clergy? Should he risk sacking them all? If he did not, he was still responsible for their acts before God. In John’s perfectionist approach, we catch clear echoes of Origen’s complaints. We find other suggestive perceptions: the losers in an election, John remarked, should follow the Apostles’ example and “believe that the choice is with God.” Their talents might be great, but ill suited to a church’s particular needs: God’s disposition was for the best. Like every other appointment, a bishopric, it seems, roused strong feeling in failed candidates, that potent source of stasis, or faction, in so much of the theory and practice of ancient government. Properly construed, said John, the job was not one which the winner could treat idly: “the soul of the bishop is like a vessel in a storm, lashed from every side, by friends and foes, by his own people, by strangers.” His authority had to combine the opposites of harshness and equity. We return to the ideals with which we began and to which John adds a telling postscript. People bothered the bishop day and night: they expected favours and resented discipline, but it was no use threatening them. “As for the fear of God, it does not influence people about their bishop in the slightest degree.” If we trace a bishop’s authority to threats, we miss the limits and the ambiguities of his position.
These ideals of a bishop and his authority were the practical setting in which Christian thought and teaching impinged on most early Christian lives. It is particularly important to do them justice, because so much of our early Christian literature happens to survive from a different angle. Relatively little of it is written by bishops and almost all of it derives from authors in the big cities of the Empire, Alexandria, Carthage, Rome and Ephesus. These Christian authors adapt pagan wisdom to a Christian framework and lead naturally to studies of early Christianity and the “classical tradition” or “classical culture.” However, many of the texts in this vein discuss questions which only bothered those few Christians who had a degree of higher education. The most explicit may be the most misleading, the books written in answer or “apology” to pagan critics or addressed to the Emperor himself. As with the “apologies” which Greek-speaking Jews had addressed to the Hellenistic world, the main audience for these books was probably people of the apologist’s own persuasion, Christians, not pagans.68 In them, Christians tried to be as accommodating as possible to pagan culture and philosophy. They wished to show their faith to be reasonable and universal, the near-relation of Plato and the old philosophic wisdom of the East. These demonstrations were good for their author’s reputation and good for the morale of Christian pupils and contemporaries, who liked to know that their faith could stand up to the highest schooling of the age. However, few pagan men of culture would bother with books which quoted Scriptures of such repellently bad Greek: Celsus was exceptional in acquainting himself with the heresies of Marcion and using a Christian heretic’s views against his Christian opponents.69
How deep, then, did the continuity go between “Athens and Jerusalem,” between Christians’ lives and a classical education? The humbler Christians were not literate by habit, in the sense that they would read freely in complicated books. Although they took a keen interest in theological questions, this interest was based on preaching and discussion. For them, the outlook of their priests and bishops was the main guide or stimulus to disagreement. The bishop’s teaching and authority rested on profoundly unclassical sources, yet it was the bishop who set a pattern for most Christians’ lives, not only in the big cities but in the multitude of lesser towns from which no early Christian texts on higher theology emerged.
By the mid-third century, we happen to know something of several bishops’ outlook, after a century or more in which their writings are poorly represented. We can even begin to see how bishops could graduate from their classical schooling, how far, indeed, the study of “Athens” guided their future practice in “Jerusalem.” Of one bishop’s progress, we can form such a picture: just as Pionius’s diary helped to bring out the nature and problems of martyrdom, so a bishop’s letters may help to connect the ideals of the “apologists” to practical Christian life. Gregory, bishop of Pontus, lived from c. 220 to c. 272. His life is known from several angles, from a detailed panegyric of his life which was delivered in his home town during the 380s, from doctrinal works whose claims to authenticity vary, from references in Eusebius’s history, from a flourishing legend of his miracles in Latin, Syriac and Armenian and, above all, from an autobiographical letter which he addressed to his teacher, Origen.70 We have Origen’s own letter back to him and, later, an abbreviated letter of discipline which Gregory issued during his episcopate. A recent challenge to the identity of the letters to and from Origen has only served to underline their attribution to Gregory himself. They were collected by Origen’s pupil Pamphilus and published in his defence of Origen, where Eusebius also knew them. The panegyric and the legend raise more awkward questions, not least because attempts to prove their use of Gregory’s own letters have met with no success.
These differing sources open different perspectives. Through the letters, we can follow a bishop through his years of schooling to his practical use of authority. In his panegyric, we face once again the question of the scale of Christian conversions in the mid-third century. The legend remains less penetrable. Gregory’s example and sayings were revered for a century and more in the churches which he had founded, and he joins the very small company of bishops who ever attracted hagiography. It is hard to control it, but Eusebius’s history may give us an opening.71 He knew Gregory’s early letters, and also knew of Gregory’s service as a bishop, although he had not known him personally. By implication, he did not rate Gregory among the greatest bishops of his age. Instead, he was a notable figure, perhaps nothing more, whose legendary miracles were not known to Eusebius, or else not worth recording. Among the legends of Gregory, it is as well to allow for this moderate view: Gregory’s progress may be less untypical than oral tradition later implied. If so, its interest for historians is all the greater.
Gregory was born Theodore, the son of pagan parents in Pontus who could afford to send him for a good education. At the age of fourteen, as he recalled in his letter to Origen, he lost his father and first made contact with Christian teaching.1 The time was ripe for this encounter: fourteen, said the ancients, was the traditional year at which a boy began to use his reason. We do not know what part, if any, his widowed mother played in his Christianity, but we do know that she considered his worldly career. She sent him to a teacher of rhetoric in her city of Neocaesarea, choosing an art which was already well based there. Only a few years earlier, an author of a Roman law book had illustrated a vexed point by citing the case of “sophists, doctors and teachers” who migrated from a nearby city in order to teach in Neocaesarea. The place was not a cultural desert.2
The city itself housed an imposing monument to this type of study.3 In the 170s, an unknown man of letters had built himself a large family memorial and arranged for statues to crown its façade. He guarded its future in an elegant Greek inscription which threatened vandals with a long list of divinities, the “all-seeing Sun,” the most “ancient goddess” Curse and a minor divinity whose roots lie only in Attic Eleusis. The entire text matched a famous Attic model, the inscriptions on the family memorials which the great Herodes, “king of words,” had scattered over Attica in memory of his kinsmen and friends. By the 170s, this unknown student from Neocaesarea had travelled west for a higher schooling at Athens and entered the circle of its grandest teacher, Herodes. Even there, there was no knowing what a student might bring home with him.4 Another of Herodes’s pupils, Amphicles, returned to Euboea and put up a text of similar shape for a memorial, it seems, to a son who had died young. Yet the curse which protected his monument had been lifted word for word from Deuteronomy and alluded only to a single God.
Schooling abroad was to transform Gregory, too, but the changes came about through a different career and contact: the law and Christianity.5 Gregory’s teacher in rhetoric proposed to teach him the elements of Roman law, a subject with which he was not unfamiliar. The study, he said with appealing modernity, would give the boy a “passport and qualification” from which he could always earn a living, whether he chose to plead as an orator in court or whether he “chose to be something else.” In the culture of other second-century orators, we catch hints of a grounding in Roman legal texts; the “something else” is best seen in the developing careers of men whose legal skills brought them into the service of Emperors and governors. Under Marcus Aurelius, we find the first attested legal expert of provincial origin on the Emperor’s advisory council, a man who bore a Greek name. Others followed, while similar openings drew legally competent provincials to the staffs of provincial governors. Second-and third-century inscriptions show two men of this type from Amaseia, a neighbouring city to Gregory’s own: both served outside the province, as was obligatory.
The market for Roman law was growing. Already, in the mid-second century, several of Gaius’s law books addressed subjects of interest to provincial readers. By Gregory’s own lifetime, recent works by Modestinus and others met a similar need.6 Since the edict of 212, Roman citizenship was widespread in the provinces, bringing Roman law into yet more provincial lives, if they chose to use it. A bright young man from Pontus would no longer look naturally to Herodes’s literary heirs in Athens. Law, moreover, was already present in Gregory’s family. His brother-in-law was a talented legal man who had been summoned to “something else,” a job as adviser to the governor of Syria. Although Gregory’s own teacher was handling the law and Latin skilfully, the lessons were interrupted by a message from Syria which seemed to be heaven-sent. Gregory’s brother-in-law sent a request for his wife to join him in Caesarea and despatched a soldier to escort her at public expense. Her two brothers were invited to keep the party company. As his next step, Gregory had already been considering a course in law at Rome, but he now realized that the prominent law school of Beirut lay near to his sister’s destination. He and his brother accepted the offer and took up their free tickets for travel by the Imperial post, a privilege which he recalls with all the pride of a man sent first-class at official expense.
Departures of bright young men from provincial towns to more favoured cities were familiar occasions in third-century society, and Menander’s handbook for orators told young students what to say when taking their leave.7 They should praise the great city to which they were going, saying that it was a “workshop of the Muses,” “a real Helicon.” But they must praise their own city more strongly and promise to share with it their new fruits of learning. “You should go on to say: ‘I shall draw my ration of literature and philosophy, I shall learn for your sakes and for our common country, and when I feel quite able to help the land that gave me birth, once again I shall long for this city and my family. For who, after meeting the Sirens or arriving in the land of the Lotus-eaters, would not prefer you here at home?’” Gregory’s return, some eight years later, brought gifts of an unexpected nature.
While waiting with their brother-in-law in Caesarea, the two brothers were introduced to Origen, the great Christian teacher. The date of their meeting is uncertain, but it probably falls in the later 230s. Origen had several friends in Cappadocia, just to the south of Gregory’s home city, with whom he had spent time during the persecutions of 235/6.8 Perhaps these contacts guided Gregory to his presence in this cosmopolitan city of pagans, Christians and prominent Jewish communities. Gregory recalls how he was swept off his feet at his first meeting with a Christian teacher of genius.
In his letter of thanks and farewell, Gregory does not emphasize the aspects of Origen which overawe a modern reader, his astonishing memory, his extreme pursuit of chastity, and his capacity for work and writing, pressed to such extremes that even fellow Christians felt happier with epitomes and handbooks of his main commentaries and teachings. Gregory gives no hint of Origen’s local debates with Jewish leaders or the ammunition which he derived from Jews who became Christians and brought him an inside knowledge of their explanations of Scripture.9 He does not mention Origen’s interest in Hebrew or his work on parallel texts of the Old Testament. For him, Origen was a teacher in Greek of Scripture, philosophy and ethics. When Origen first offered these subjects to Gregory and his brother, they hesitated for several days. Perfect piety, Origen told them, required a knowledge of philosophy; Gregory recalled how he presented the subject in the manner of the “protreptic” speeches with which pagan teachers tried to lure pupils into their branch of higher studies.10 Gregory felt a familiar apprehension: philosophy was a subject on which he had hardly touched. After a few days’ thought, the brothers succumbed to persuasion. Gregory’s very soul was drawn to his new friend and master; he was like a second Jonathan, he later wrote, holding fast to his beloved David.
With hindsight, Gregory attributed his progress since youth to the approving care of his guardian angel.11 In Origen’s classes on Scripture, he would have heard much of these guardians, at Mambre’s oak tree, by the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite or beside the young Tobias, urging him to endure. Origen emphasized them, fellow travellers through the labyrinth of Christian life. To our eye, however, Gregory’s progress is not so unusual. It spanned a fashionable education, good family connections and a tutor who gave him direction when the world first opened before his path. The idea of a guardian angel helped a fortunate young man to break with his father’s example, and to feel that his good fortune was guided by an approving power.
He was not alone in his idealization of a teacher of higher philosophy. Like the best pagan philosophers in the third century, Origen, too, was a teacher who worked outside the hierarchy of an old, established school. He attracted personal devotion, and bestrode a subject which had become ever more complex and remote from a plain man’s schooling. He seemed a godlike master, an impression which other contemporaries shared. Like Gregory, Alexander of Cappadocia left his distant home and met Origen in Caesarea before ending his career unexpectedly as a bishop. Eusebius quoted a letter in which Alexander described the warmth of a meeting with Origen and traced it to the will of God.12 Origen evoked a strong sense of guidance in visiting pupils.
In Origen’s company, Gregory was tutored in a godlike mastery of soul over body and the age-old objective of “knowing himself.”13 His classes observed the natural progression of studies which Origen described in his own works. Classes in astronomy and geometry helped the young Gregory to refine his views on the beauty of God’s Creation, while logic and readings in ethics replaced the study of rhetoric which had dominated his past. After this preparation, he passed to the study of Scriptures and the philosophers, “Greek and barbarian” alike: we know from criticisms by Porphyry that these “barbarian” philosophers were authors like Numenius of Syria, who wrote in Greek. Only Origen’s better pupils were allowed to advance to a full philosophical course which used the Greek masters as the “handmaids of Scripture.” The Bible dominated their training, not merely a book or two of the Scriptures but the entire Old Testament, as Origen recommended in his own biblical Commentaries. The philosophers supplemented this sweep of Scripture, except for the Epicureans, whose denials of Providence disqualified them from serious reading. To open their books, said Gregory, was to risk corruption.
Was there a distinctive “Origenism” which the master imparted to his pupils? Later quarrels over Origen’s orthodoxy made Origenism a clearly defined doctrine, but Gregory and a fellow pupil, Dionysius of Alexandria, give us a chance to see its contemporary impact.14 Gregory’s church in Neocaesarea was later believed to have preserved the wording of his theological creed, “written in the saint’s own hand.” The wording survives, albeit with signs of its heirs’ improvement, but the hard core is probably genuine and has justly been related to Origen’s own views of the Father, the Word and the Spirit. The similarities are rather general, as are the traces of Origen’s teaching which surface in the theology of Gregory’s farewell letter. Neither divides the pupil from his master.
A second work, “To Theopompus,” raises much more difficult problems.15 It is ascribed to Gregory in a Syriac manuscript of the sixth century, in which it alone survives; it shows Gregory discussing theology among friends and then answering a pagan, Theopompus, who had protested at the doctrine that God could suffer. The theology of his answer is not true to Origen’s own, a discrepancy which has been taken to prove that the work is not by Gregory, his pupil. Nobody else alludes to this work’s existence and the case against his authorship is strong. It might belong to Gregory’s years as a bishop when the atmosphere of discussion and philosophy would be particularly interesting. It can hardly belong to the years in Caesarea, where Origen’s teaching would have suggested a very different argument.
Suspicion of this work is reinforced by a third, a “Paraphrase” of the Book of Ecclesiastes which was ascribed to Gregory by Jerome and subsequent Christians.16 Seldom, if ever, studied, it is a fine example of a Christian’s rewriting of an inconvenient text: “The wise benevolence of the author,” concluded one of its few students, in the 1840s, “is more apparent than his critical skill. No book was more likely to puzzle a pagan inquirer than this, so the paraphrase gives it meaning and consistency, but over and over again, not Solomon’s meaning, I am persuaded.”
Gregory was not alone in his reaction to this puzzling text. We do not know who first wrote this world-weary classic of religious experience, presenting it as the wisdom of a preacher who had once been king of Israel. Its Jewish author probably lived in the later third century B.C. and was quite untouched by the Greek wisdom which historians have fondly ascribed to him. Very soon, his text was given an apologetic epilogue by a Jew who wished to defend it: early fragments have been found near the Dead Sea and show how Jews continued to rewrite its message to suit more conventional taste.17 Christians worked with its translation into Greek and were more drastic with its contents. The preacher had questioned the meaning of life in the face of death with a sharpness unique in the Old Testament. On the way, he had expressed his changing views of the world and concluded that they, too, were vanity, no better than fleshly pleasures. Gregory and subsequent Christians accepted that the royal author was King Solomon himself and emphasized his weary view of pleasure: they rephrased his similar views on wisdom as the foolish views of his past. In their hands the text lost its subtlety and became a one-sided sermon on asceticism.18 It contained so much which Christians could approve: words on the virtue of chastity and the vanity of idle laughter, the merit in obeying kings and the impossibility of finding even one chaste woman to every thousand chaste men on earth. A few of “Solomon’s” lapses were simply omitted: “If two lie together,” wrote the author, but not Gregory, “they are warm, but how can one be warm alone?” Other chapters were ruined. “Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth”: Gregory misread the “evil day which cometh” and saw it as the Christian Day of Judgement. The “grinders” were indeed brought low and the “daughters of music” were silenced. They were lascivious slave girls, thought Gregory, who were grinding in mills and piping at parties. No silver cord was loosed; no golden pitcher broken. Gregory wrecked the greatest scriptural dirge on ageing and death, and made Solomon warn promiscuous women about the imminent wrath of God.
Some books are too subtle for their contemporaries and heirs, and perhaps none has suffered more than Ecclesiastes. Ever since its composition, it has puzzled and eluded a host of lesser renderings, from its first Jewish paraphrase to its Greek translation and subsequent Christian misuse. Gregory’s “Paraphrase” reflects very poorly on Origen’s critical classes. It ignored the Hebrew version and falsified Solomon’s authority in order to impose Gregory’s own views. It stands at the head of the many similar Christian versions which extend from Gregory through Ambrose to Jerome and Gregory of Nyssa.19 “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher”: to Christians, the ascetic message seemed obvious. When Jerome wrote to Paula, a young Christian virgin, he urged her to study Ecclesiastes, as it would teach her to despise the things of the world.
Gregory’s interest and the tone of his work are traceable to Origen himself.20 At Caesarea, we know that Origen covered Ecclesiastes in his briefer expositions. He read it as part of a significant trilogy by King Solomon, in which it stood midway between Solomon’s Proverbs and his mystical Song of Songs. Proverbs, he argued, taught morals; Ecclesiastes progressed to natural science, while the Song of Songs advanced to unseen eternal truths. Solomon’s trilogy had linked the three subjects in ascending order, like the courses of instruction in the Greek schools of philosophy. Solomon, therefore, was a true philosopher whose very titles were full of meaning. Solomon, said Origen, was the type of Christ. His “words of Ecclesiastes” hinted at Christ’s role as a preacher, gatherer of his own Ecclesia, the Church.
This trail of sensational misreading was not lost on his pupils. It excited Gregory; it also inspired a fellow pupil, Dionysius, the future bishop of Alexandria. Before the 230s, Ecclesiastes had aroused next to no interest in Christian literature, but then, quite suddenly, Origen’s pupils produced two books on its text. Gregory paraphrased it freely; Dionysius seems to have commented at length on the opening chapters, and a newly found fragment, if genuine, implies that his commentary strayed further into “Solomon’s” work.21 His book has no known date, but its only modern editor had no doubts: “The general impression left on the reader will be that he is here in the presence of a mind which is either not yet matured or else altogether of a lower order…” Like Gregory’s, his book seems to be an exercise which was inspired at school.
The pupils owed their subject to Origen’s example: was “Origenism” the guide to their interpretation? Gregory composed a free, if dishonest, “Paraphrase,” and only resorted to the mildest allegory; Dionysius keeps closer to the spirit of the original in our few fragments of his text. At most, he misunderstands it in a Christian sense. “There is nothing good for a man,” said the Preacher, “but what he eats and drinks”: the reference, said Dionysius, must be to mystical food. These explanations were a far cry from Origen’s own search for hidden meanings.22 We know one of his interpretations of a passage in Ecclesiastes, and as so often, it dug deeply for the words’ allegorical secret. Does the pupils’ neglect of allegory divide them from their master? Origen’s use of it was strongly attacked by the pagan Porphyry and by fellow Christians, to whom he himself alludes in his biblical works. It was not, however, his particular invention. It had many precedents, pagan and Jewish, and in Caesarea, a former Jew had confirmed the approach’s validity.23 He had told Origen how Scripture was like a house full of locked rooms: God, he said, had confused the keys, and it was up to his heirs to fit the right key to each lock. Origen considered this view a “beautiful tradition” and showed himself an inventive opener of some very secret doors. His allegories were totally false to the plain meaning of Scripture. He believed, however, that they were given to him by God’s inspiration and that they were the preserve of a few favoured Christians. “Only he who shuts can open”: Gregory ascribed Origen’s bold allegories to his personal gift of the Spirit and his help from God’s word.24 In his own commentaries, we find Origen taking a similar view. If, then, his pupils did not use allegory themselves, they were not implying that they disapproved of it. They thought that, as yet, they lacked the necessary gifts from God to practise it. Later, when Dionysius was a bishop, he did not shrink from the allegorical method when facing villagers in the Arsinoite nome. In Revelation, he explained, the text on the millennium was an allegory, not to be taken literally.
In Caesarea, then, works which are certainly by Gregory do not diverge from Origen’s own principles: the point tells against the acceptance of “To Theopompus” as our Gregory’s work. Contact with Origen broadened his theology and encouraged his sense of a guardian angel. It also inspired him to misread a neglected book of Scripture. We can set his own impressions and responses beside the letter which Origen later sent him and which is best placed as his answer to Gregory’s “letter of thanks.” In it, Origen warned his departing student not to let philosophy drag him down into heresy. He asked him to hold fast to his text of Scripture and remember that its meaning was God’s gift in answer to prayer.25 His pupils, it seems, obeyed him: Gregory’s name was given to two works which answered pagan objectors. One was “To Theopompus,” the other, the “Exposition of Faith,” which answered a pagan, Aelian, and contained theological remarks about God and his Son: Basil later had to excuse them as Gregory’s passing concessions to his opponent.26 The text, he said, had suffered from subsequent miscopying, an excuse which reminds us how the theology of an innocent mid-third-century author could seem controversial to a later age with different interests. The work had tried to meet pagan critics on their own ground. Dionysius, too, left one book on philosophy. It is a routine attack on the Epicureans, the sect whose writings Origen had banned.27 Neither pupil, it seems, put his philosophical studies to deeper, intelligent use. They played on the surface of classical thought, no more.
In his farewell letter, Gregory implied that his studies with Origen had extended over eight years. We know of other eternal students in antiquity, pupils who spent up to five years with the same sophist, but Gregory’s words imply he had kept at other work besides. As he began his letter, he apologized to Origen for his Greek style: a different study, he said, was occupying his mind “strongly.” Here, he referred to the study of Roman law in Latin.28 After two of the clumsiest sentences in the history of Greek prose, he refuted his disclaimer by a fluent abundance which does not lack ingenuity.
Gregory, it seems, had not abandoned his legal studies as abruptly as he implied. The Roman laws, he said, were “our” laws, in an interesting and not untypical equation of Roman and provincial concerns.29 They were “wise, precise and varied and marvellous and, in a word, most Greek.” They were not an easy subject of study. These laws were not “reconciled,” on the likelier of the translations, nor were they “learned by heart” without effort. To study Roman law was necessarily to learn Latin, a language which struck Gregory as “awesome, solemn and well suited to Imperial authority.” His comment is one of our few appraisals of Latin’s qualities by a Greek-speaker in an age when more Greeks than ever were learning it. His remarkable view of Roman law as “most Greek” may owe something to the textbooks in which he had met it.30 Later in Beirut, students began their course with Gaius’s Institutes, a work whose early use abroad is attested by a mid-third-century papyrus from Egypt. The Institutes cited differing views on a topic side by side and suggests how Gregory had found “variety and precision” in laws which were “so hard to reconcile.” Like other third-century law books, Gaius’s text reveals a distant debt to the concepts of Greek thinkers. By an unsuspected route, its laws did have a trace of the “Greekness” which Gregory idealized. Shortly before his lifetime, the renowned lawyer Ulpian, from Tyre, had praised Roman law as the “art of the good and fair,” “whose priests, in a sense, all lawyers are.” They encouraged virtue, he wrote in the preface of his textbook, and deterred vice while “aiming at true, not pretended, philosophy.” The ideals of a legal teacher were not so remote from the ideals of Origen’s classes in ethics.31
Gregory’s judgements on law and Latin were those of a man who had not abandoned law school. Gregory’s idealization of Origen was combined, it seems, with a continuing respect for his worldly career. Beirut, a Roman colony, was a living seat of the Latin in which Roman law was then taught.32 We can see that by the 190s rulings from the Emperors were commonly posted there, and the convenience of these local documents may relate to the law school’s contemporary rise. “Mother of the laws,” Beirut was a city whose temptations and small rivalries stand out in the memoirs of her fourth- and fifth-century pupils. The pupils grouped themselves in “herds,” or age groups, by their year of entry, with a “master” at their societies’ heads. The years had their nicknames and extended the usual contempt to new arrivals. The new recruit found himself mocked and ragged as a test of his self-control. His fellow students were quick to master the pleasures of wine and the races, city women and a life with concubines, by whom some of them fathered children. Their four-year course competed with compelling ties of friendship and worldly experience, and like most of its kind, it lost the competition more often than it won it.
Conditions will have been little different in the 230s, and it is against them that we can picture Gregory’s instruction, now in law, now in Christianity. Conversion is amply attested for other roving students: as a lawyer and a Christian convert, Gregory also finds a contemporary match in the speakers in Minucius’s charming dialogue or in men like Gaius, the Christian lawyer, who was buried in mid-third-century Eumeneia.33 Like Gregory’s own letter of thanks, these lawyers’ literary portraits were not concerned to emphasize Christ or scriptural texts. The lack of these themes in Gregory’s letters should cause us no surprise.
In his letter of reply to Gregory’s farewell, Origen included a brilliant allegory, as befitted his spiritual gifts. He explained Exodus as a man’s progress from Christian teachings to worldly studies. He then applauded Gregory’s gifts as philosopher and lawyer in words which suit our picture of a student commuting between Caesarea and Beirut. He had “wished,” he said, that Gregory would use his gifts to a Christian end.34 Gregory himself had been more melancholy as his own letter to Origen drew to a close. He was falling, he wrote, from Paradise. He was a second Adam, banished into the world, a Prodigal Son setting out on his travels, an exile by the waters of Babylon, a returning Samaritan at risk to thieves on his way north from Caesarea.35 Gregory the reluctant graduate was taking leave of his tutor with the proper extravagance. He was leaving Origen’s “inspired presence” for “public places, lawsuits, crowds and pomp,” the busy company of men, and “wicked men,” at that. As Origen hinted, Gregory seemed to be expecting the life of a law-court orator and a public figure in Pontus.
“Pray for a good escort, a fellow traveller,” he asked Origen, pleading for the despatch of a guardian angel to guide him along his route. He had studied philosophy and Scripture. He had kept up his law, and like his fellow pupil Dionysius, he had not lost his grasp of rhetoric. It is in their works that we first find themes and similes from Scripture applied ingeniously to the author’s own predicament.36 Together, they stand at the beginning of a new Greek manner in prose. Behind their fall from Paradise, however, there may have lain a more awkward reason.37 By an Imperial ruling, students from propertied families were required to return for service to their home towns within ten years of study elsewhere. In the 280s, the Emperor Diocletian was asked to rule specifically on the problem of upper-class students who lingered at the Beirut law school until the age of twenty-five or more and thus avoided the claims on their time and money which were justly advanced by their home towns. By birth, Gregory belonged to the upper class of Neocaesarea. After eight years, the eternal student may have been obliged to return to his city in order to meet its demands.
A Beirut student could expect great things in the future if his city ever let him go.38 An inscription from the mid- to later third century has shown us young Conon from Pamphylia, a Beirut law student, an assistant of Roman governors in Judaea and Antioch, Nicomedia and Egypt’s Thebaid. He died prematurely in Egypt, where his father collected his body: the news of his death, said his epitaph, nearly killed his mother with grief. Neocaesarea’s student returned with a different surprise. He had changed his name from Theodore to Gregory, the “awakened” or, equally, the “awakener.” How, then, did his family and city respond to this Prodigal Son and his Christian call?
If Gregory had disappeared from history on taking leave of his tutor, he would be classed among Christians who combined classical and biblical culture, who felt that Athens (and Beirut) had much to do with the new Jerusalem and who were not brought up to exercise worldly authority: Origen, his teacher, took a cold and critical view of the standard of Christian who led the churches. Gregory, however, does not disappear. His subsequent career raises questions of the scale and nature of the Christians’ missionary successes. It also shows the relation between a Christian’s writings and his resources as a bishop, when obliged to rule in the field.
A network of major Roman roads ran up the eastern frontier and linked Caesarea to Gregory’s home; on his return, his career is mostly known through a difficult source, the panegyric which another Gregory, Gregory of Nyssa, delivered in his home town during November (probably) of the year 380.1 Its stories were developed from the oral traditions of local Christians who were still very loyal to their image of Gregory, their churches’ founder.2 They held fast to his reported practices and believed that his creed was preserved in the church in Neocaesarea, “written in the saint’s own hand.” Families had passed down a living tradition of Gregory’s words; we know how the grandmother of the panegyrist told her younger relations the sayings and stories of Gregory which she had heard, she said, from contemporaries. The panegyric’s stories and emphasis were not their author’s invention. A similar outline was already known to the