Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity

Jennifer Barry. Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity. University of California Press, 2019.

Although the Edict of Milan officially ended official persecution of Christians in 313 CE, the joint proclamation of the emperors Constantine I and Licinius failed to usher in a period of peace among believers. Rather, Christian communities throughout the empire wrestled with questions of practices and doctrine. Communities also had to negotiate whether and how to reintegrate members who had complied with imperial officials or fled during times of persecution. These arguments were not simply theological: leaders were expelled from communities, sometimes under the threat of violence, for espousing beliefs deemed outside the emerging orthodoxy. As Jennifer Barry shows through a series of case studies, these moments, places, and memories of exile became loci for continued contestations of orthodoxy and heresy. Communities would remember (and forget) the exilic journeys of bishops to either rehabilitate them as pillars of orthodoxy or condemn them as heretics.

In her investigation of clerical flight in late antiquity, Barry frames her inquiry around an interdisciplinary approach. Exile was a sociopolitical reality in the Greco-Roman world, where exile would frequently replace capital punishment or otherwise relieve social tensions (pp. 5-11). Exile could function as “a rehabilitative and restorative legal process negotiated between the exiler and the exiled” (p. 10). Furthermore, Christian authors marshaled the memory of persecution and the language of martyrdom to describe exile as a new sort of martyrdom. The instances of exile and the potential of a return created a new Christian topography that was discursively created, challenged, and maintained through heresiological discourse. Exile was not understood as the displacement of individuals, but rather a means of establishing orthodoxy over the course of flight and return.

Barry’s case studies focus primarily on bishops from the eastern territories of the Roman Empire. She proceeds chronologically as exilic discourse was developed by exiles and their hagiographers, weaving various strands of scholarship with an impressive array of primary sources. As a result, the chapters deal with similar themes: the creation and condemnation of model cities to and from which exiles traveled, the development of episcopal exemplars in flight and return, and how various hagiographers and commentators remembered, rehabilitated, and interpreted exile. Barry’s examination complements other examinations of the period, contributing to broader scholarly conversation around heresiological discourses and the competition for authority. In the process, Barry illuminates the struggles between Eastern cities for status throughout the theological controversies.

Chapter 1 begins with arguably the most famous of late antique episcopal exiles, Athanasius of Alexandria, and the binary opposites of the desert and the polis of Alexandria. Barry examines Athanasius’s development of an exilic discourse in Defense before Constantius and Defense of his Flight, as well as allusions to his own flight in the Life of Anthony. Athanasius began as a supporter of Emperor Constantius, as seen in his Defense before Constantius; his exile was only at the behest of the emperor whom he obeyed as a law-abiding citizen. The Alexandrian bishop describes the desert as a place beyond imperial control, and therefore a “fearful place” (p. 39). However, as Athanasius spent more time outside the city walls of Alexandria, he transformed the idea of the desert from a place of “sinister wandering” to the setting of his “righteous exile” (p. 42). Athanasius completes his depiction of the desert as a place of righteousness in his Life of Anthony, “not only [legitimizing] the desert space which he now inhabits but also establishes the literary paradigm for how he imagines his own exile: as a desert askesis” (p. 49). As a result, Athanasius renders the desert a “heterotopia,” a space that simultaneously reflects “a space a person occupies and [holds] the image of a space from which a person is absent.” (p. 54) Athanasius’s discursive use and creation of the desert as a heterotopia, as well as his pro-Nicene stance against anti-Nicene figures like Eusebius of Nicomedia and Arius of Alexandria, would become useful for future Christian thinkers as Barry proves in her investigation.

In the second chapter, Barry turns to Gregory of Nazianzus and his use of episcopal flight to fight for his vision of orthodoxy. Like Athanasius, the political and theological importance of Gregory’s see would compel him to argue fiercely for his own orthodoxy, especially considering his own exile from Constantinople. Barry traces Gregory’s development of a bipartite discourse of ascetic withdrawal and triumphant return in his orations on Basil of Caesarea and Athanasius of Alexandria (p. 64). Gregory claims for Basil a background of desert wandering and asceticism under the persecutions of Maximinus. The twinned suffering and spiritual training of his predecessors prepared Basil for his exile into the desert (pp. 66-67). Basil’s time in the desert renders him an exemplary cleric, one who could oppose the heretical emperor Valens (pp. 68-69). To this theory of exile-as-training, Gregory adapted Athanasius’s exilic theory and pro-Nicene legacy to suit his own needs. Athanasius’s exile and return allowed Gregory to see the “embedding [of the heterotopic landscape of the desert] in the monk-bishop.” As a result, “it no longer matters where the bishop resides, because the life of the ascetic always resides in the person of the orthodox bishop” (p. 73).

Gregory’s theory of exile, however, assumed the inevitability of a return to the city. To that end, chapter 3 turns to John Chrysostom and the city of Antioch. Chrysostom’s failure to successfully return from exile challenged the narrative constructed by Athanasius and then modified by Gregory of Nazianzus. At first, Chrysostom’s narrative was built around recruiting supporters and sympathy for his reform agenda, writing letters presenting himself as the bishop of Constantinople despite no longer residing in the city (p. 93-95). After he realized he would be unable to return, his narrative shifted to universalize the exilic experience in order “to cultivate a philosophical life found in the Greek authors of the Second Sophistic” (p. 96). In this way, Chrysostom constructed a Christian identity that considered suffering and displacement as foundational, disseminating his viewpoints through epistolary discourse which produced “an authorial persona that justified his ongoing status as an exile” (p. 101). To be a Christian was to be an exile, and so his absence from the physical space of Constantinople was no longer problematic.

Despite his death in exile, Chrysostom was viewed as a bridge between the period of Athanasius and Gregory and the later defenders of pro-Nicene orthodoxy. Since dying as an exile was often a characteristic of heretics, John’s biographers endeavored to defend his orthodoxy by rehabilitating his exile. Chrysostom’s biographers invoked the Athanasian narrative of persecution, exile, and triumph. In his funerary speech, Ps.-Martyrius draws attention to Chrysostom’s exile to praise the late bishop’s “efforts to promote and preserve orthodoxy” while attacking the former bishop’s opponents, Theophilus of Alexandria and the Empress Eudoxia (pp. 105-106). Palladius of Helenopolis goes a step beyond the partisan politics displayed in Ps.-Martyrius’s account, depicting Chrysostom and his rivals locked in a much fiercer battle that shaped the eastern capital. According to his biographer, Chrysostom’s exile plunged his community into disarray: “the church body is incapable of functioning properly without its bishop there to keep it all together” (p. 120). Taken together, the two addresses transform Chrysostom from a failed bishop into a “moveable object” for his biographers to project their theological claims upon (p. 125). Both writers return to Athanasius and his exilic experience, joining his triumph over suffering and exile with the idea of a Nicene triumph over heresy. The allusions to Athanasius carried sufficient weight to sanitize the less palatable aspects of Chrysostom’s character (pp. 128-131).

Not all exilic figures were as lucky as John Chrysostom. In Chapter 5, Barry examines the figure of Eusebius of Nicomedia in the ecclesiastical histories of Philostorgius of Cappadocia, Socrates of Constantinople, and Theodoret of Cyrrhus. Because space, place, and bishop are so closely intertwined, Eusebius’s city of Nicomedia becomes a subject of inquiry in the never-ending quest to establish orthodoxy (p. 136). Because of his relationship with Arius, Eusebius’s exile and his legacy were contested as pro-Nicene figures attempted to pave a triumphant road for their vision of orthodoxy. Philostorgius of Cappadocia applied the narrative of exile and triumphant return to Eusebius to underscore his orthodoxy. Philostorgius, an anti-Nicene writer, connects Eusebius to the capital city, relying on a logic of proximity: if Eusebius was not theologically correct, how could he have enjoyed such a successful episcopal career at Constantinople (p. 141)?

Socrates of Constantinople attempts to answer this question by linking Eusebius with Nicomedia, the place where Constantine was convinced to readmit Arius to Alexandria (p. 143). Nicomedia had been the imperial residence of Diocletian, one of the great imperial persecutors of the Christian church. However, the city had undergone a Christian transformation, becoming the purported site of Constantine’s baptism by Eusebius. Although Socrates underplays Eusebius’s influence on Constantine’s Christian faith, he plays with the themes of exile, readmission, and shifting power to cast Eusebius not as a successful bishop of an important city, but “as the bishop of a cursed landscape,” that is, Nicomedia (p. 147). Despite Eusebius’s own status as former-exile-turned-successful-bishop, Theodoret of Cyrrhus crafts Eusebius as a literary foil to Athanasius’s actions in securing orthodoxy (p. 150). As the anti-Athanasius, Eusebius and his followers cannot be deemed orthodox within his writings. They can only stand with the “Arians” as heretics and destabilizing elements in cities such as Nicomedia, Constantinople, Alexandria, and, most importantly for Theodoret, Antioch.

The final chapter deals with how memories of flight of both bishops and martyrs informed theological discourse. Recalling the example of John Chrysostom, Barry observes how the legacy of imperial persecution informs the reception of exilic discourse in the case of Meletius of Antioch, whose “status as an exile continues to slip beyond pro- or anti-Nicene categories of orthodoxy” (p. 154). Meletius offers a critical example of how exilic narratives shaped arguments around orthodox Christian belief. Theodoret, who had been so critical of Eusebius, champions Meletius as an orthodox figure despite the thorny historical detail that the Arian faction in Antioch had elevated Meletius to champion their position (p. 55). Theodoret supports his position by rehearsing Meletius’s stance on the Trinity to prove his Nicene leanings which resulted in his expulsion from the anti-nicene community. This exile, along with two subsequent expulsions, proved his orthodoxy. Meletius’s story exemplifies Barry’s over-arching argument that orthodoxy is conferred on and by the body of the wandering bishop, whether or not he is within urban space. However, Meletius’s antagonistic relationship with the pro-Nicene faction led him to recruit followers outside of Antioch. While Sozomen remembers this moment ambivalently, Socrates locates Meletius outside of the bounds of orthodoxy and outside the environs of Antioch. Competing historical narratives provided a site not only for contesting the memory of Christian figures but also for constructing emerging orthodoxy.

Jennifer Barry’s book invites us to consider how narratives were created, leveraged, and modified to suit the needs of an author or an audience. The critical question is not whether our sources grant us access to the “historical” Athanasius or John Chrysostom. What matters is how later Christians crafted their memory to project a vision of religious belief and practice against a backdrop of imperial persecution and eventual imperial intervention in theological debates. Bishops in Flight reminds us to look at how narratives arise in the collective memory of a community.

Madeleine St. Marie is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Riverside. She currently teaches concurrent enrollment courses at the Community College of Denver. Her dissertation examines the role of pastoral care in Sidonius Apollinaris's depiction of his episcopal career in his extant epistolary collection. She is also interested in the intersection of popular media and history, especially in video and board games.