Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity

Flight during times of persecution has a long and fraught history in early Christianity. In the third century, bishops who fl ed were considered cowards or, worse yet, heretics. On the face, flight meant denial of Christ and thus betrayal of faith and community. But by the fourth century, the terms of persecution changed as Christianity became the favored cult of the Roman Empire. Prominent Christians who fl ed and survived became founders and influencers of Christianity over time. Bishops in Flight examines the various ways these episcopal leaders both appealed to and altered the discourse of Christian flight to defend their status as purveyors of Christian truth, even when their exiles appeared to condemn them. Their stories illuminate how profoundly Christian authors deployed theological discourse and the rhetoric of heresy to respond to the phenomenal political instability of the fourth and fifth centuries. “This exciting book offers the first sustained examination of flight during times of persecution. A significant contribution to the study of late antiquity that readers are sure to find highly stimulating.” SUSANNA ELM, author of Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome “A fascinating meditative exploration of the shifting nature of exile and its uses in late ancient Christianity. Jennifer Barry depicts with lucid prose the adoptions and adaptations Christian bishops made of the concept in order to tap the authority exile could grant to those who managed it well. Those who study early church politics and imperial power will relish this book.” ELLEN MUEHLBERGER, author of Moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity JENNIFER BARRY is Assistant Professor of Religion at University of Mary Washington.

The primary scope of this book is the exile primarily of two famous bishops, Athanasius of Alexandria and John Chrysostom, taking into account also some related exile cases (26). The main strength of the book is its thorough and novel application of spatial theories to the development of a fourth-century discourse of exile.
The introduction gives a stimulating overview of models and theories underpinning Barry's interpretation of the discourse of exile in the main part of her book (11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25). Barry (like Daniel Washburn's 2013 book Banishment in the Later Roman Empire) sets out with the claim that exile came to be the new martyrdom, and that emperors were responsible for sending bishops into exile. Barry is right to qualify this claim on page 2 because indeed in the early to midfourth century it was normally the synod of bishops that took the initiative to exile Christian clerics. It is also doubtful that banishment was always the "outcome of doctrinal disputes" (2), as bishops could be banned for all sorts of reasons. While the introduction does include a brief discussion of the terminology of exile both in the classical and late antique periods (7-9), unfortunately there is no explanation of the legal implications of different categories of exile (relegatio, deportatio, and so on, while the Greek key term exoriā is not even listed). It is true enough that legal texts, including canonical ones, are more precise than narrative sources, which tend to be heavily biased, as Barry rightly points out. However, there is also a tendency throughout the book to further conflate the terms already indicated in the book title-flight, exile, and displacement-not least because subsequent sources are quoted in translation only, which are not always terminologically precise. For example, while Barry is right to say that it is unclear whether the flight of Athanasius was legally a kind of exile (2), she often subsumes under the generic term of "flight" different legal categories, as in the case of John Chrysostom, who was exiled on imperial order, and of Theophilus, who voluntarily left Constantinople (84-92).
The book is likewise not very precise in saying that "flight during times of persecution" came to change dramatically between the third and fourth century (26, for example, and the back cover text). To my mind, the author could have stated more clearly that this comes as a corollary to the fact that forced exiles of bishops were virtually unknown before the council of Nicaea in 325. The reason for this is explained in a nutshell by Sozomen (HE 3.23.3), who is probably right to say that Christian communities never developed a discourse of internal persecution before the Arian controversy because they all felt united by a hostile pagan environment and did not allow their differences to come between them. Nevertheless, clerical exile in the fourth century and beyond is firmly rooted not in the cowardly flight of bishops during periods of imperial persecution but rather in excommunication. This tradition is not new but goes back all the way to the Epistles of Paul (Gal 1-2). The overview of previous research in the introduction takes account of English language and some German language scholarship (Brennecke, but not the wider Athanasius Forschungsstelle). Vallejo Girvés is mentioned in the acknowledgements (page xii), but her important works on clerical exile do not appear in the bibliography. The clerical exile database mentioned on page 11 was at its early stages at the time of submission, but it is not among the resources "organized by many of the participants" of the 2015 Oxford Patristic workshop.
The main part of the book excels with its numerous close readings of the imagery attached to various exile locations. Chapter 1 argues that Athanasius casts the desert as a safe haven from heresy in his writings. It is, however, implausible that Athanasius alluded to classical motifs, such as Odysseus's and Oedipus's wanderings, in order to defend himself from heresy (42). Athanasius does not mention either of them, and the themes mentioned by Barry are too general to make that case. In his polemical writings Athanasius condemns these kinds of pagan semi-gods, and he is unlikely to compare himself simultaneously to Jesus and to Oedipus, who represents evil even in mythology. The same can be said about John Chrysostom, who demonizes every aspect of classical culture in his treatises and sermons. It is therefore not "clear that John Chrysostom combined classical works with biblical models" (96-99). The metaphor found in Ps.-Martyrius (and many other Christian authors) of Hercules slaying the multiple heads of the hydra may be a "classical trope" (113-14) but not in a favorable sense, as Barry's summary of this entire imagery indicates (176), because the hydra stands as much for classical philosophies as it stands for Christian heresies, as in Epiphanius, for example. Likewise, Athanasius would hardly have felt that the desert monk is an "unlikely hero" (49), given that Jesus of Nazareth, too, resisted the temptations of the devil in the desert. Barry is certainly aware of this, as both her cover illustration (the Temptation of Christ, a Byzantine mosaic from San Marco) and final conclusion indicate (175), but she is never explicit about the biblical origin of the desert imagery until the book finishes.
Chapter 2 analyses the motif of flight in the case of the voluntary resignation of Gregory of Nazianzus, arguing that the imagery found in his letters and sermons was building on Athanasius's exile. Chapter 3 focuses on the letters of John Chrysostom during his exile, chapter 4 on his biographers. Barry argues that both ancient and modern biographers of these orthodox bishops tend to reframe the places associated with their exiles as battlegrounds of their orthodoxy. Barry convincingly links these chapters by investigating the various depictions of Constantinople as a holy city and goes on to compare this imagery to the other cities mentioned in the rest of the book, such as in chapter 5 which analyses the rare surviving story of an exiled, nonorthodox bishop (Eusebius of Nicomedia in Philostorgius). Barry's application of spatial theories to the medical terminology found in the diverse exile narratives of Eusebius of Nicomedia is just one example that this approach offers of new insights for future studies. For instance, she convincingly analyses Socrates's narratives surrounding Constantine's baptism by Eusebius as an attempt to whitewash the emperor by describing Nicomedia as a city infected by persecution and Arius's disease . Her reading of the empress Eudoxia's miscarriage as a metaphor for the theological invasion of Constantinople is impressive (105)(106)(107)(108)(109)(110)(111)(112)(113)(114)(115)(116)(117)(118). Chapter 6 investigates the imagery of exile in the case of Meletius of Antioch, whose orthodoxy was seen as ambiguous. While discussing the various later accounts on the whereabouts of Meletius's relics and its link to his perceived orthodoxy (157-61, 167-72), Barry does not mention the cruciform church, excavated opposite the city just across the Orontes river, although this is probably the place where the relics of Meletius were finally deposited, and much of Barry's analysis is about the location of the relics of both Meletius and his companion Babylas and what this means for Meletius's orthodoxy. Barry's assertion that Tertullian was seen as a problematic author precisely because he had cast flight (during persecution) in a negative light does therefore require further demonstration (176). Despite some reservations, the book is a good read, and its results on spatial theories in regard to flight and exile are pioneering and important. Stefan Esders, Yaniv Fox, Yitzhak Hen, and Laury Sarti, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi + 360. ISBN: 978-1107187153

Reviewed by Scott G. Bruce (Fordham University)
This volume comprises twenty-one essays originally presented in 2014 as part of a joint German-Israeli project examining the Merovingian kingdoms in the context of the Mediterranean world. Like many conference proceedings, the contents of this collection range in quality and relevance to the volume's theme, but the arc and aggregate of the book suggests that the Merovingians had "complicated and multilayered social, cultural, and political relations with their eastern Mediterranean counterparts, that is, the Byzantine Empire and the Umayyad Caliphate" (3). Far from isolated in their western European territories, the Merovingians benefitted from commerce of all kinds-material, personal, intellectual, and spiritual-that left its mark on the archaeological and literary record.
The book has five parts. Part One ("Expanding Political Horizons") features three contributions. Jörg Drauschke surveys the archaeological evidence for material imports from the eastern Mediterranean in Merovingian graves from the sixth and seventh centuries, including textiles, jewelry, and silver items, which "points to patterns of continuous exchange and trade" (31), even when the historical record is otherwise mute about contact this period. Eastern connections are tangential in Yaniv Fox's article, which treats Burgundian foreign policy in the early sixth century, but they return in Helmut Reimitz's study of Frankish strategies of political legitimization, a process informed by interaction with other Mediterranean polities, especially Byzantium.
Part Two ("Patterns of Intensification: The 580s") presents a potpourri of studies tethered to the notion that the late sixth century witnessed an intensification of contact between the Merovingian kingdoms and foreign polities. Phillip Wynn explores evidence for the importation to the west of a specific feature of the Christianized culture of war adopted by the Byzantines: the practice of carrying saints' relics into battle. Wolfram Drews and Benjamin Fourlas examine textual and archaological evidence for Merovingian military activity in Visigothic Spain and Greater Syria, respectively, while Andreas Fischer argues that the distribution