BMCR 2009.07.52: Lim on Norton, Episcopal Elections 250-600: Hierarchy and Popular Will in Late Antiquity. Oxford Classical Monographs

Peter Norton, Episcopal Elections 250-600: Hierarchy and Popular Will
in Late Antiquity. Oxford Classical Monographs.  Oxford:  Oxford
University Press, 2007.  Pp. xi, 271.  ISBN 978-0-19-920747-3.  $99.00.


Reviewed by Richard Lim, Smith College ([email protected])
Word count:  2252 words
-------------------------------
To read a print-formatted version of this review, see
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2009/2009-07-52.html
To comment on this review, see
http://www.bmcreview.org/2009/07/20090752.html
-------------------------------

Preview (http://books.google.com/books?id=c28kC5W2te4C)

According to church historians who subscribe to the theories of Max
Weber, the early church's spiritual power became routinized into a form
of hierarchical authority represented by office-holding bishops who
were more bureaucratic functionaries than charismatic leaders. With the
growing involvement of the Roman state in church affairs after the
conversion of Emperor Constantine, the process further accelerated with
the result that local Christian communities more or less lost their
ability to shape their own destinies, squeezed as it were between
interventionist Christian Roman emperors and equally imposing
metropolitan bishops who single-mindedly pursued their own agenda. Thus
most historical narratives of late antique Christianity focus upon the
interactions between these two groups of powerful actors, with local
communities outside the metropolitan cities frequently relegated to a
secondary or tertiary role. The result is that, for moderns who regard
the effective autonomy of local communities and democratic practices on
a grassroots level as signposts of societal health, the converging
authoritarian trends in the late Roman state and church serve to
indicate a deeply-set malaise.

Against such an image of a society that was moving inexorably towards
greater autocracy in respect of both imperial power and ecclesiastical
authority, Norton offers his fruitful book as a riposte as well as a
cause for hope. Episcopal Elections closely examines the specific
circumstances by which bishops came into office as well as the types of
interventions and obstructions that continued to threaten or undermine
the ability of local communities to elect their own religious leaders.
While the scope of the study appears at first sight to be quite
narrowly circumscribed, this project has direct relevance for our
broader understanding of the evolving relationship between local
Christian communities, ecclesiastical hierarchies, and the late Roman
imperial state. Through an appraisal of the forms of agency that
determined the (s)election of late antique bishops and their efficacy,
Norton presents a well-crafted argument against a set of widely-shared
assumptions regarding the extent to which the rise of imperial
Christianity in the later fourth century onwards repressed the
effective autonomy of local Christian communities.

The individual chapters in this book take on topics and themes that
have long been deemed worthy of study by specialists such as historians
of the church, ancient historians and classicists. The volume
introduction is followed by Chapter Two, "Legislation and Theory,"
which addresses the formal prescriptions stemming from Christian
churches and the Roman state regarding the election of bishops.
Drawing upon conciliar and synodal canons as well as imperial
pronouncements on the subject, the author articulates the principal
rationales and means by which ecclesiastical and state authorities
sought to regulate the procedures and, to a certain extent, impose a
set of minimal criteria for those who sought the office of bishop.
Chapter Three, "The Electorate: Local Communities and Public Disorder,"
parses the composition and competence of those who cast the vote for
bishops, namely the local Christian congregations. After reviewing
particularly well-known cases of disputed episcopal elections, Norton
concludes that the "popular will" of Christian "electorates" by and
large prevailed not only in theory but also in practice even in the
face of attempted imperial interventions in favor of rival candidates.
The ensuing chapter (ch. 4) logically expands on the prevalence and
effectiveness of imperial meddling in episcopal elections. It posits
and then goes on to provide evidence for a categorical difference
between elections to the most important sees, such as Constantinople,
Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria by Egypt, and Rome, and those to smaller
and (both symbolically and juridically) less important ones, concluding
that the emperors only showed significant interest in the outcomes of
the former. At this particular juncture, the study expands its scope
beyond the frontiers of the late Roman imperial state by describing
royal interventions in episcopal elections in the post-Roman west:
Vandal Africa, Visigothic Spain and Frankish Gaul; it provides,
however, no treatment of the important Christian communities within the
Sassanian Persian Empire.

Chapters Five to Seven are devoted to the institutional and power
structures of the church, including the relations between the
metropolitan bishops and bishops of other sees. A succinct narrative
traces the rise of the concept of the five patriarchal sees of Rome,
Alexandria, Constantinople, Jerusalem, and Antioch and surveys the
roles played by their respective bishops. Given that elections to these
metropolitan sees attracted the preponderance of attention in our
surviving sources, this discussion underscores what can be known in
evidentiary terms and cautions against the extrapolation of conclusions
based on such examples to the less elevated sees. In examining the
effective power that bishops of the patriarchal sees had in shaping the
election of suffragan bishops, the author concludes that the
pree+minence of the metropolitan bishops was mainly manifested in their
role as the consecrators of the elected bishops rather than in their
actual ability to determine the outcome of particular episcopal
elections.

Chapter Eight, "Corruption, Constraint, and Nepotism," offers a useful
examination of the varieties of practices by which men sought to
influence the course of episcopal elections. By pointing out that the
later fourth- and fifth-century churches accrued increasingly sizeable
patrimonies and therefore became valued prizes that were thought worthy
of capturing at almost any price, the stage is set for understanding
the growth in the practice of simony. As Christianizing aristocratic
dynasties sought to secure church offices for family members by
whatever means possible, including offering monetary bribes to the
right persons, such practices would in turn provoke anti-simony
rhetoric and measures. The book is rounded off with an appendix ("Greek
and Latin Texts of Canons Relating to Episcopal Elections"), a
bibliography and an index of cited names and main topics.

The present book originated in an Oxford dissertation written under the
supervision of G.E.M. de Ste Croix. Its genesis in a 1980s academic and
intellectual milieu has greatly informed its choice of topic, structure
and approach. In the book, the popular sovereignty of the plebs
christiana is used as a barometer of the fundamental health of the
church and the society at large. Thus the author's well-intentioned
desire to give due weight to the agency of the non-elite, which
underpins the book's central intellectual premise, turns the
investigation into how "sovereign" communities resisted the impositions
placed on them by powerful "outsiders." In short, Norton has been
motivated by the scholarly desire to highlight the success of the
"voiceless masses" in maintaining their agency and autonomy, especially
during an age that many have characterized as being marked by the
rising authoritarianism of a centralizing state and ecclesiastical
hierarchy. A similar intellectual outlook has guided a number of other
studies that attempt to discover traces of the continued functioning of
conciliar bodies and civic institutions well into the late Roman period
and, more generally, seek to underscore the practical limits of
imperial autocracy during this time. Norton's proposal that the will of
the Christian plebs continued to play a central role in determining the
outcome of episcopal elections, especially outside of the major centers
of power where imperial intervention was less common, offers thus a
reassuring message.

In suggesting that local communities continued to exert meaningful
influence over the (s)election of bishops, the author is thereby also
advancing a claim that the post-Constantinian church had been much less
transformed by the rise of imperial Christianity than some scholars
have previously supposed. Yet by conforming the book so much to the
pursuit of its main thesis, the author may have missed an opportunity
to lay out some of the very fundamentals regarding episcopal elections
that most readers of the book would appreciate learning about. Still,
this book opens the way into an important topic and invites further
investigation into the nature of electoral practices in the ancient
world, including the mechanisms of episcopal elections, the exercise of
influence and patronage, the use of slogans and pamphleteering, and the
role of cliques and claques in shaping the outcomes of episcopal and
other elections.

On the whole, Episcopal Elections posits the communal or local popular
voice as a relatively unproblematic category, whereas "popular will" is
not only itself an object of contested representations but also a
formulation that glosses over the many-faceted and multi-layered
exercise of power and influence that went into shaping any given
contest for office. The limited attention paid to the role of local
notables in shaping the results of elections, and this only en passant
in the conclusion (240-41), serves as a telling illustration of the
book's tendency to present a dyadic juxtaposition of local congregation
versus outside authority as the premise and framework for its analysis.
In declining to address the admittedly complex issue of the
constructedness of the "popular will," and the various competing
rhetorics of power and community, the author in effect presents the
local mechanisms and process of episcopal elections as analytical
"black boxes" that are to be used to gauge the presence or absence of
effective popular sovereignty rather than as explananda in themselves.
In other words, he seems less interested in studying the processes that
led to the (s)election of bishops than in engaging in a broader debate
about the extent to which popular will was able to withstand outside
challenges. The book therefore seems to take for granted that, where
such elections were unopposed by outside ecclesiastical and imperial
authorities, the popular will was allowed to prevail and, where they
were interfered with, the local communities were effectively overruled.

Yet elements of compulsion, moral or physical, may be assumed to have
been a fairly constant ingredient in contested elections as rival
congregants could -- and historically did -- inflict violence on each
other to bring about a particular outcome. Nor can the process that led
to the shaping of "local" views be assumed to have been monolithic,
benign or free from the practice of "bullying." By the same token,
"outside" interventions might not have been all morally bad or by
nature violent. Thus electoral results in which "outside" manipulation
played little or no role may not be by nature more valid, either
morally or intrinsically, than those in which "outsiders" played a
significant role.

As the author evinces in his introduction, Episcopal Elections has been
updated since the writing of the original dissertation with the
inclusion of more recent scholarship, notably Claudia Rapp's fine study
of the figure of the late ancient bishop. Even so, the book's
engagement with issues and methodologies that have come into prominence
in the past two decades remains selective. Among issues that would have
benefited from closer scrutiny of these developments is the use of
highly stylized literary texts as historical evidence for social
realia. Ancient authors' references to mass participation in events
such as the election of bishops have been accepted at face value even
though the authors in question were invariably pursuing specific agenda
as they gave voice to particular constructions of the nature of
ecclesiastical authority. What historians have before them in the
literary sources is therefore not so much a body of transparent or
direct evidence for the participation (or non-participation) of the
common people but rather elite views regarding their supposed roles.
Averil Cameron, Elizabeth Clark and others have called attention to the
need to give due weight to just such a consideration, an emphasis some
choose to call the "rhetorical turn." Indeed, such a perspective has
informed successful historical interpretations such as Peter Brown's
pioneering studies on urban bishops' invocation of the "Christian poor"
as their own special charge and Conrad Leyser's examination of the
episcopal language of reticence and humility as an aspect of the
self-representation of power-wielding bishops.

Lacking a requisite measure of attentiveness to the importance of
rhetoric and representation, the analyses found in Episcopal Elections
seem to offer instead descriptions of what happened in realia rather
than narrative refracted through the lenses of elite Christian writers
who were usually interested parties if not partisans in the
controversies under consideration. And yet, even if the investigation
is to remain focused on the presentation and analysis of historical
realia, it might still have devoted some attention to a wider set of
contextual issues such as both lay aristocratic and ecclesiastical
patronage, the nature of communal violence in contested episcopal
elections such as that in the Laurentian schism in Rome--admittedly out
of the purview of this study given its metropolitan setting--and the
relative importance of the possession of real and symbolic property
(e.g., prestigious urban basilicas that conferred legitimacy and
authority) to the assessment of the character of a given episcopal
election itself.

Episcopal Elections represents a concise monograph that offers readers
a helpful and intelligent introduction to an important subject. Even
while its treatment of the topic may have been too severely restricted
in scope to make a fully effective challenge to the prevailing
paradigm, the book's investigation of the ongoing dynamism of popular
sovereignty as a practice in late antique Christian communities still
contributes in useful ways to the important ongoing conversations
regarding the role and authority of the figure of the late antique
bishop as well as the scope and effect of imperial interventions in
ecclesiastical affairs. By cautioning against the prevalent view that
makes the increasingly powerful bishop and Christian emperors the
center-pieces of our historical accounts, in which local Christian
communities in turn necessarily come to be relegated to the role of
voiceless and passive agents, the book invites further discussion
regarding the factors that limited the ability of even the most
powerful actors such as the emperors in shaping the lives and
experiences of their social and political inferiors.