BMCR reviews another book that chips away at the myth of the “Constantinian Revolution.”

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.

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.

Not a week after my close encounter with Kenneth Howell’s fine new translation (with theological commentary) of Ignatius of Antioch’s letters, I find myself curled up with another book on this eloquent and theologically profound bishop of the first century, who died at the beginning of the second. A reader of Ignatius can’t help but marvel at the richness of Christian thought, so early in Christian history. Already in 107 A.D. we find an integrated theology of the Church and the sacraments, of martyrdom and morals, of authority and discipline. The theology is there in its complexity, though the martyr-bishop’s language is lovely in its simplicity and passion. He is a pastor and a preacher. He is above all a father of the family that is his church. So he’s not lecturing his recipients, not explaining or defending, so much as laying out the Gospel in terms he assumes they already know.

Well, the book that’s renewing last week’s renewal of my appreciation of Ignatius is Thomas A. Robinson’s Ignatius of Antioch and the Parting of the Ways: Early Jewish-Christian Relations. It’s just out from Hendrickson, and I’m just today dipping into it, but I’m finding it hard to put down.

A biography of Ignatius is, alas, an impossibility. We know nothing about his manner of exercising his office. We know nothing with certainty about his time in Antioch. The (much) later historians drop a few anecdotes here and there, but they’re not much to go on. We know his letters, and they are rare, warm, vital witnesses to the Church’s life in 107 A.D. But they’re hardly autobiographical.

So how to draw closer to this attractive Christian life?

Robinson does it the only way possible, this side of heaven. He gives us guided tours of the cultural contexts that would influence a man like Ignatius. He leads us through Antioch, a bustling commercial and military center, multicultural and multi-religious. He guides us through the varieties of Jewish religious experience during the first century — the sects, the migrations, the wars and the riots, the literature, the proselytes and God-fearers and God-worshippers. He does all of this in clear, concise, lively prose. The book is encyclopedic, but it never reads like an encyclopedia. It’s a sustained argument. It’s just colorful, picturesque, engaging, dramatic, riveting — like the first century.

Robinson is most concerned with Ignatius’s relations with the Jews. What do his letters tell us about Christianity’s relationship with Judaism in those crucial first decades after the passion of the Christ and the destruction of the Temple? Modern scholars tend toward two extremes: they either vilify the early Christians as anti-Semites or they explain away Christian rhetoric so that it’s toothless and practically senseless. Both approaches err in refusing to understand early Christianity on its own terms. Robinson, a professor of religious studies at the University of Lethbridge, helps us to see the first-century Jews and Christians as they established and defended their distinctive identities. Their positions are fairly well marked out, even then. I won’t spoil the ending, but I can’t help but believe that this clear, clean window on the first century will also help us catch a reflection of the state of our arguments in the twenty-first.

Along the way, Robinson takes aim at current fashions in early Christian studies, exposing them with rare common sense. Take, for example, his take on the charge that Ignatius “invented” the office of bishop.

Ignatius supplies the earliest evidence of what appears to be a fairly clearly defined three-part structure of authority: a bishop, with a subordinate presbytery, assisted by a group of deacons. This structure is referred to as a “monarchical episcopate,” or perhaps more precisely, the “monepiscopate,” so named after the nature of its highest office. Since Ignatius is the earliest witness to this structure, some scholars have suggested that he was either the creator of this ecclesiastical framework of authority or the primary promoter of it and the reason for its success.

The problem with this thesis is that Ignatius is able to use the term “bishop” in its rather full-blown form in letters addressed to churches far removed from Antioch. Ignatius assumes that the churches in the province of Asia have a three-fold division of leadership and that the members  there understand the terms of office in roughly the same way as he uses them. Indeed, the terms for the offices prominently dot the pages of Ignatius’s correspondence.

He’s just as good when he deals with the tiresome terminology of “Christianities” and “Judaisms.”

In recent years it has become fashionable to speak of Judaisms and Christianities and to discount any meaningful use of the singular forms of these terms. To complicate the debate even further, some scholars have challenged the adequacy of other “monolithic” terms, such as “early Christianity,” “Jewish,” “Gentile,” “pagan,” and “Greco-Oriental.”

Added to this is an overly careful policing of terms to prevent any anachronistic employment. What is inadequately appreciated is the fact that monolithic terms, by their nature, include ambiguities on the edges, whether of subject or of time. Such terms may well have a proper “anachronistic” use, in that the terms, by their nature as monolithic terms, can identify movements from their early stages, before the time a formal label was coined and applied.

… But such nuancing of the debate often fails to appreciate that the larger world in which Jews and Christians lived commonly employed such general and sweeping terms to identify Jews and Christians. The ancients almost entirely missed the diversity that many modern reconstructions see as the most distinctive aspect of these movements.

Those passages aren’t at the core of his argument. But they do touch upon my pet peeves, and I own this property. So there.

There’s so much more — not to mention excellent notes, bibliography, and indices. I hope you’ll buy Robinson’s Ignatius of Antioch and the Parting of the Ways: Early Jewish-Christian Relations (along with Howell’s Ignatius of Antioch), and talk about them here!

I haven’t read these books or heard the audio tapes they were based on, but I’ll bet they’re fascinating. Cistercian Publications has brought out multiple volumes of edited transcriptions of Thomas Merton’s conferences for Trappist novices. Several volumes deal exclusively or mostly with the Church Fathers: Cassian and the Fathers, An Introduction to Christian Mysticism: (from the Apostolic Fathers to the Council of Trent), Pre-Benedictine Monasticism, and The Rule of Saint Benedict. Merton could be maddening and often controversial. He certainly sinned grievously against his vows. But he was brilliant and gifted with remarkable insight. I hope to peruse these conferences some day. The original audio sources are for sale here.

BMCR reviews the third edition of Michael W. Holmes’ The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations, a handsome, durable, beautifully bound book that is never far from my reach.

This third edition of The Apostolic Fathers, edited and translated by Michael W. Holmes, traces its origins back to the bilingual edition of J. B. Lightfoot collected, edited, and published posthumously by J. R. Harmer in 1891. Holmes revised the Greek texts and English translations of this nineteenth-century work in 1992 and published an updated edition in 1999. The new edition under review here, however, has shed almost all vestiges of Lightfoot-Harmer and stands on its own as an independent critical edition of the Greek texts and English translations of the Apostolic Fathers.

The volume contains introductions to and editions and translations of the following works: First Clement, Second Clement, the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch, the Letter of Polycarp to the Philippians, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Didache, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Epistle to Diognetus, the Fragment of Quadratus, and Fragments of Papias.

The reviewer helpfully treats each ancient author individually. Read on.

This week I received the pure, unmerited grace of a trip to EWTN, the network that airs my television series with Scott Hahn. This time, though, I went to Alabama (sans banjo) to see my friend Johnnette Benkovic and appear on her talk show, “The Abundant Life.” We had a great time together, discussing my book Angels of God: The Bible, the Church and the Heavenly Hosts. I’m told that the show is scheduled to air during the Western Church’s week of angels — i.e., from September 29 (St. Michael) to October 2 (Guardian Angels).

Many great surprises awaited me at the cottage where I stayed. First: my old buddy Mark Shea, blogger and author of By What Authority? (a book we all should consider memorizing).

Then, by my bed, a beaten-up copy of Kenneth Howell’s recent translation of and commentary on the Ignatius of Antioch‘s corpus of letters. I read the whole thing during my downtime. It’s stunning — with helpful theological essays and notes throughout. I’m planning to buy a copy, so I can post a fuller review. It’s published by my friends at the Coming Home Network.

My newest new book, Fire of God’s Love: 120 Reflections on the Eucharist, has arrived!

It’s a collection of unusual (if I do say so myself), but entirely orthodox meditations from a diverse assortment of saints and thinkers. For example:

Marshall McLuhan

J.R.R. Tolkien

Maria Montessori

Blaise Pascal

Richard John Neuhaus

G.E.M. Anscombe

Plus the Fathers, of course: Augustine, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Ephrem, Caesarius of Arles, Cyril of Jerusalem, Balaeus, Irenaeus, Justin, Ignatius, Jacob of Sarugh, Maximus Confessor, Sechnall … And, as the folks at Ronco used to say, many more.

I’ve also invoked some names that were ubiquitous a century or a half ago, and should not be forgotten: Moritz Meschler, Nicholas Gihr, Maurice Zundel, April Oursler Armstrong, A.M. Roguet, Lawrence Lovasik … And, as the folks at Ronco used to say, many more.

And I’ve included my beloved friends Carl Sommer and Father Ronald Lawler — and Scott Hahn, to whom the book is dedicated.

I think you’ll like it. It’s a substantial book that sticks to your ribs. The readings I chose have stuck to mine, down the years.

BMCR posted a review of the new Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies.

My book The Grail Code: Quest for the Real Presence, co-authored with Chris Bailey, is now out in a second Portuguese edition — this one suitable for Portugal rather than Brazil. The cover’s really cool and spooky.