The Desert and the Prison

Jennifer Barry’s Bishops in Flight is a stellar achievement that will serve as the new touchstone for the foreseeable future on the topic of late antique Christian discourse on exile and displacement. She adroitly analyzes discourses on how and when a bishop ought to flee, how a bishop ought to return from flight, how one might condemn a bishop for flight, and how one might rehabilitate a bishop returning from flight. In what follows, I will first offer an interpretive restatement of her main ideas. Then I want to raise two questions, through the lens of a particular documentary papyrus. Lastly, I want to offer an exploratory reflection on the potential stakes of the project.

Barry’s Bishops in Flight gives a clear sense that, for an ambitious bishop in the fourth and fifth centuries, the road to status, to prestige, to political influence — quite often — led straight through the experience of exile or displacement. For late antique bishops, if you play the game of thrones, you win or die— except that sometimes you win by exile, and other times you die by exile, and in exile. And yet, apparently to be exiled or to flee during a time of hardship was a sign that a bishop was someone of importance.

And yet, while fleeing could be construed as an act of holiness, likened to the flight of Christ from his opponents since his hour had not yet come, it could also be construed as fleeing the scene of a crime — the very proof of one’s guilt. Whether the crime was murder or heresy, if you ran away, it could be conceived as a form of admitting guilt, at least for some. In this way, one had to follow a careful rule book on how to flee. If you fled, you might be Christ or you might be the devil, and the difference between the two was most certainly in the details — the detailed script, that is, of how to go (usually voluntarily) into exile.

Barry provides much more than just simply an analysis of the topic. She provides a fresh lens for viewing the institutionalization of Christianity and the political maelstroms of the fourth and fifth centuries. This story is often told through the lens of the various Christological controversies and their ties to various locations and changing political landscapes. Barry tells this story but through a refreshing alternative perspective. Who flees and how, who returns and how; it was all about — please excuse my paraphrase Hamilton — who lives, who dies, and, most importantly, who tells your story.

Barry shows how any bishop worth his salt (and it was a his) was exiled (as another reviewer put it, it was almost a part of the bishop’s job description), as well as how the story of developing late antique Christianity was also about how to develop central casting for being properly and orthodoxly exiled. In reading Bishops in Flight I got the sense of a story of a story of crime and punishment, but more subtly backstage view into the audition for who gets assigned what roles in an already scripted play and why.

To wit, crime, and punishment …

Jennifer Barry insightfully evokes Tertullian as an opening frame for her book. The opening words of the prologue for Bishops in Flight come from Tertullian’s On Flight in Persecution. She uses the quotation to foreground the idea that fleeing from persecution in the late second and third centuries was a sign of cowardice, conceit, and frankly apostasy. A brilliant juxtaposition for what Barry will cover later in the book.

But I must admit (and here I acknowledge my own position as someone working on issues related to the carceral state), as I read Bishops in Flight, I found my mind returning to another snippet from Tertullian. In around 197 CE, Tertullian, the razor-tongued rhetor from Carthage, wrote a letter to a group of incarcerated Christians to encourage them to keep the faith. The letter is known to us as the treatise, To the Martyrs. In it, he wrote, “The prison is for the Christian what the desert was for the prophet.” Tertullian notes a substitution: while the desert was generative for the prophet — the place where a prophet was made or broken — the prison served the same function for second and third century Christians.

But this changed in the fourth century after the Edict of Milan in 313. As Michelle Salzman illustrated, by the end of the fourth century, not only was it not illegal to be a Christian, but a majority of Western senate high office holders identified as Christian. I wonder how Barry might comment on the idea that her book is about how the snippet from Tertullian gets reversed in the fourth and fifth century: The desert became for the late antique bishop, what the prison had been for the second and third-century Christian confessor.

Simultaneously, a place of death and a place of life, a place of disgrace and a place of glory, a place where both heroes and villains were born. The key difference, of course, between the prison of the second and third century and the desert of the fourth and fifth, is going to prison was often always an involuntary judicial matter, while the desert could be voluntary and non-judicial.

And yet, it wasn’t the case that by the time of Athanasius, for instance, that Christians were no longer put into prisons: it is more the case that only certain types of Christians — specifically of lower social status or less politically important people— went to prison.

And here I’d like to stage my first question. The question is: what about social status? This book is not just about bishops in flight, or even men in flight, but about highly educated, socially elite, politically influential men in flight.

I want to package the question in the form of a little-discussed papyri from May 23, 335 CE from Alexandria to Phathor, Egypt, which is now called P. Lond. 6. 1914. It documents several local Christians who had been mistreated by drunken soldiers. What makes this documentary papyrus so interesting is that about halfway through the letter, we find that this violence action against these local Christians was specifically at the direction of Athanasius. It is in such a connection that Peter van Minnen has rather dramatically called this little papyrus, “one of the most important documents ever published.”

While some were exiled, many others were kept in the region but were incarcerated in various locations — in the meat market, in the camp prison, in the “big prison.” One of the mistreated Christians named Callistos wrote a letter on this papyrus to report what had happened and to say they needed bread. Interestingly, then, this papyrus may corroborate or at least tell the other side of the story to some of the charges Athanasius faced on his trial in Tyre: of treating local competing Christians violently and potentially messing with the bread dole (the latter of the two, in fact, being the charge Athanasius was found guilty of and ultimately exiled). Here we catch a glimpse that Athanasius not only knew how to take a political and judicial punch; he almost knew had to dish it out, too.

Many of these clergy were incarcerated, and not exiled, not because they had committed a different kind of action, but because they belonged to a different social status. The Roman legal code distinguished punishments for people of different social status. If you were one of the honestiores at the rank of decurion or above, you would be exiled. If you were one of the humiliores below the rank of decurion (i.e. probably about 98% of the population of the Roman world), you would have been incarcerated in the mines — even though you had committed the same crime.

We see this exact scenario played out in a letter correspondence between Cyprian and several of his fellow Christian clergy. In 257 CE, he wrote as an “exile” from his garden estate in the North African coastal town of Curubis to a group of Christians incarcerated in the mines in Numidia. Cyprian worked hard to correlate his experience of relegatio in his extravagant beach house with their incomprehensibly awful living conditions incarcerated inside the mines. They had not committed different “crimes;” they were simply different people — or more precisely people of radically different social status. By looking at these two other scenarios — those of the Christians incarcerated at Athanasius’s direction and the letters of Cyprian and his colleagues — I think we can interrogate some of the key questions raised by Bishops in Flight and push the discussion in a direction that I suspect Barry herself would welcome. How does social positionality inflect the discourse of bishops in flight, when it is socially elite, politically influential males in flight, and we know other people would have suffered other penalties for perceived deviance, not only because they lacked the social clout but also the economic ability to flee.

Which brings me to my second question that I kept returning to as I read Bishops in Flight: in what sense is this a story about media? I mean media in two senses, both of which are illustrated by the two examples of Callistos’s letter about Athanasius and the letter correspondence between Cyprian and Numidian clergy in the mines.

First, I think we can talk about media and expectations of generic materiality. P. Lond. 6.1914 is a letter, a piece of documentation, never intended to achieve wide and public circulation. Put differently, the letter existed in the medium of papyrus, but it was not media in the sense that it did not exist in ancient media streams. Likewise, with Cyprian’s Ep. 77–79 constitute the responses Cyprian’s fellow clergy(?) that he received back from the mines. Each of the three letters have an increasing non-literary and more “normal letter” feel to them, and one get the distinct sense that they would have been utterly lost in time, had they not been preserved in Cyprianic letter collection. Cyprian’s letter, however, has a distinctly literary flare to it and has an eye on a wider public, and the writings about Athanasius’s (both his own and those after him) and Chrysostom’s (both his own and those after him) are clearly geared toward a wider and public readership.

Which raises the second sense of media: in what sense is Bishops in Flight also a story about media in the sense of mass communication in an effort to “control the narrative” in ancient media streams? As Bishops in Flight illustrates well, “when you play the game of late antique bishop, you win or die,” but of course winning didn’t mean “not get exiled” — just the opposite, perhaps. What “winning” meant was having a Christlike rather than a diabolic kind of flight, and the difference between the two, it seems to me, is a question directly related to practices of ancient mass media. So, in what sense is it useful to add the lens of media to the discourse of exile and displacement so insightfully traced in Bishops in Flight?

Finally, let me conclude with this reflection on the stakes of Barry’s Bishops in Flight. Barry places this late antique discourse within broader and more modern discourse on displacement, and helpfully suggests how such a placement is a productive one for us as historians. Let me ever so briefly raise one other issue. The book gave me a clearer sense that at least one way of telling the story of developing late ancient Christianity is the story of cultivating and preserving a persecution complex, almost against all odds. The process of victimization seems legible for a movement that started with its leader being executed as a public enemy of the state, as someone perceived as a failed revolutionary insurrectionist. It is legible for a community of people regarded as a dangerous disease and superstition undermining the Roman state. Holding onto a persecution complex Christians in the mid-fourth to fifth century required cultivation and innovation.

Tools were forged for maintaining a persecution complex in the late antique Christian world of the fourth and fifth centuries that have had a long and often troubling history. When one is “treated badly,” was it because they were in fact in error and deserved sanction, or were they a victim in need of “controlling the narrative” of persecution? As we see this strategy alive in the world still, in what sense does Barry’s narrative of fleeing, on the one hand, and displacement, on the other, offer us a useful analytical tool?

So, in conclusion, in my personal pantheon of books on the intersecting topics of carcerality, sanctions, and human mobility, Barry’s Bishops in Flight takes its places alongside such books as Julia Hillner’s Prison, Penance, and Punishment, Pilar Pavón Torrejón’s La Cárcel Y El Encarcelamiento En El Mundo Romano, Daniel Washburn’s Banishment in the Later Roman Empire, and Theodor Mommsen’s Römisches Strafrecht. Or, to say it differently, if you haven’t read it yet, please do so, and since it is open access, you have no excuse not to.

Matthew Larsen is a historian of the ancient Mediterranean world, especially the cultural and material histories of ancient Christian communities from the first to fifth centuries. Currently, he is an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, where he is the PI of a multi-year research project studying the materiality of incarceration in Mediterranean antiquity (Carlsberg Foundation).