Christians, as the late second-century author of the Epistle to Diognetus famously remarked, ‘‘dwell in the world, but are not of the world’’ (Ep. ad Diognetum 6). A formulation packing much into few words (compare John 17: 11-16), ‘‘in but not of’’ captures neatly the ongoing tension faced by the late antique Church as it struggled to reconcile the spiritual and the worldly. For the Church as an organization, implicated as it was in secular relations ofpower, such an ideal ofdetachment remained out of reach. By taking the Church as a political institution, I shall touch in this chapter on some of the ways in which patterns of behavior and habits of thought from secular politics and earthly society followed churchmen into the realm of the spiritual.
The emperor Constantine has traditionally taken a full measure of blame for dragging the Church into the worldly. But we must not overlook other dimensions of contact between secular and spiritual that were nearly as old as Christianity itself. Constantine aligned himself with a Church whose basic principles of hierarchy and structures of power had been in place for a long time (Rapp 2005a, arguing for continuity between the pre - and post-Constantinian eras). The offices of bishop and presbyter, the foundations of church government, were already well established by the middle of the second century, supported by the key doctrine of apostolic succession and by firm definitions of orthodoxy and heresy. By the third century, worries began to be voiced that certain bishops might be tempted to aggrandize their power at their colleagues’ expense (see, e. g., Cyprian’s remarks at the Seventh Council of Carthage, ad 256). In the fourth century, Constantine and his successors gave the leaders of the Church the means to pursue their rivalries on a much larger stage. Bishops could now employ the state’s coercive powers against dissidents and rivals. From that point forward, the state was increasingly called upon to take sides and to settle disputes, as it found itself drawn deeper into the Church’s internal conflicts (Gaddis 2005: passim).
While the emperor’s role should not be denied its due weight, my focus here will instead be on what I call the ‘‘political Church.’’ We must consider how the Church
A Companion to Late Antiquity. Edited by Philip Rousseau © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-11980-1
Itself functioned as a polity - how it governed, regulated, and judged itself, and how its different authorities and centers of power related to one another. In so doing, it borrowed much from its external surroundings. Habits, discourses, and structures of power that had long pervaded the political and social culture of the Greco-Roman world found themselves transposed into the ecclesiastical realm and adapted to the government of the Church. Since constraints of space preclude a truly comprehensive treatment, I limit myself here to introducing several particular aspects of ecclesiastical politics that I believe deserve greater attention than they have yet received.
World History
