Section: 3A3 - Civic Action (not holding office)
Number of quotes: 41
Augustus to Constantine
Robert M. Grant
Book ID: 34 Page: 180
Section: 3A3
Just as the Roman state gave support to Roman communities within the empire, so the Roman church provided for Christians throughout the world.The Roman church was a center for Christian orthodoxy and Christian finance.
Quote ID: 649
Time Periods: 4567
Barbarians within the Gates of Rome
Thomas S. Burns
Book ID: 37 Page: 204
Section: 3A3
At Toulouse there was no garrison, so the bishop was the logical spokesperson for Roman interests.
Quote ID: 765
Time Periods: 45
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 213
Section: 3A3
The poor had always been of concern in large cities due to their propensity to riot at times of famine; the larger cities, such as Rome, had long made use of “bread and circuses” programmes in place to placate them. In offering help to the poor, a bishop was thus sustaining a traditional “pagan” role while at the same time acting as a pastor to his flock.This was recognized by Constantine, who distributed largesse for the poor of major cities through the bishops. Those entitled to help were entered on poor lists kept by the church and only through a licence given by the bishop could anyone beg. This was one of the ways that he used the bishops for the state ends.
Quote ID: 4918
Time Periods: 34
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 300
Section: 3A3,3A4
It was, however, in this context, with imperial authority crumbling in the west, that the role of the bishops of Rome gradually expanded.
Quote ID: 4987
Time Periods: 3
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 300
Section: 3A3,3A4
Shrewdly, Leo also tied the authority to the state by acting through Valentinian III (emperor of the west 425-55) in civil affairs. He asserted his own authority in the secular sphere in 452, when he personally led a delegation from Rome to confront Attila the Hun, whose armies were ravaging northern Italy. When Attila withdrew, possibly because of a lack of resources, Leo successfully took the credit.
Quote ID: 4990
Time Periods: 5
Closing of the Western Mind, The
Charles Freeman
Book ID: 205 Page: 305
Section: 3A1,3A3
Yet at the same time, what was now the Roman Catholic Church was assuming responsibility for the poor and unloved. The tradition of learning was narrow, particularly by comparison with the classical world, but in so far as education was preserved it was through the Church, as was a system of health care. These centuries were also a time when imperial authority had disappeared and the Church in the west began to fill the vacuum. The Church preserved Roman law and the bishops a structure of institutional authority.
Quote ID: 4996
Time Periods: 345
Constantine and Eusebius
Timothy D. Barnes
Book ID: 64 Page: 191
Section: 3A3
powerful and respectable long before it acquired an imperial champion. By the end of the third century there were completely Christian villages in Palestine and Phrygia, {2} and in most eastern cities and provinces Christians constituted either a majority of the population or at least an influential minority. { 3} Throughout the East, the Christian bishop had become a respected figure of the urban establishment whom provincial governors treated with respect or deference, and bishops acted as judges in legal disputes within the local Christian community. {4}
Quote ID: 1599
Time Periods: 3
Constantine the Great
Michael Grant
Book ID: 66 Page: 130
Section: 3A3
For the Christians, despite their disunity due to ’heresies’, possessed effective cult-groups, artisan associations and what might be described as retirement and funeral insurance companies, which extended right down to the humblest social classes and caused all concerned to feel greater loyalty to their Christian providers than to the government.Pagan emperors might try to emulate these in-group organizations, but did not do so sufficiently well to enable them to be regarded as anything but rivals and menaces. Even Julian the Apostate (361-3) was impressed by the organized charity and social cohesiveness achieved by the Christians, which he tried to make the pagan civil and religious authorities imitate.
Quote ID: 1708
Time Periods: 4
Continuity and Change in Roman Religion
J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz
Book ID: 313 Page: 308
Section: 3A3
When the political framework of the empire collapsed, the Church continued to provide a sense of community, while its bishops offered authoritative moral instruction and encouragement.{1} This was just what the shaken citizens of the overrun provinces needed.
Quote ID: 7642
Time Periods: 3
Conversion
A.D. Nock
Book ID: 70 Page: 207
Section: 3A3,3B
Suetonius says of the Neronian persecution, which he reckons among the acts of Nero which were not blameworthy (Nero, 16. 2), ‘There were punished the Christians, a race (or, kind; genus) of men characterized by a novel and maleficent superstition.’ Both the Christians and their opponents came to think of themselves as a new people: and it is clear in the work of Celsus that his real aim was to persuade the Christians not to forget loyalty to the State in their devotion to this new state within the State.
Quote ID: 1981
Time Periods: 1
Councils: First Seven Ecumenical Councils (325-787): Their History and Theology, The
Leo Donald Davis
Book ID: 224 Page: 23
Section: 3A3
There is evidence to show that the deliberative procedures of the Roman Senate left their mark on the collective deliberations of the Christian bishops. Bishops adopted for many of the councils the official senatorial formulae of convocation.
Quote ID: 5627
Time Periods: 45
Europe and the Faith
Hilaire Belloc
Book ID: 84 Page: 51
Section: 3A3
This “State within the States” by the year 200 already had affected the Empire: in the next generation it permeated the Empire; it was already transforming European civilization. By the year 200 the thing was done. As the Empire declined, the Catholic Church caught and preserved it.
This note should be used at the same time ( from Pierre Chuvin, A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, 125):
“Christianized nobles preserved Roman traditions. Not only did Christianity tolerate their national pride, it offered them a new manifestation of it when Pope Leo I “the Great” (440 - 461), conferring on Rome the praise attributed to the Jewish people, glorified ‘a holy nation, a chosen people, a priestly and royal city.’”
Quote ID: 2240
Time Periods: 234
Europe and the Faith
Hilaire Belloc
Book ID: 84 Page: 87
Section: 3A3
The Catholic Church, from a small but definite and very tenacious organization within the Empire, and on the whole antagonistic to it, had risen, first, to be the only group of men which knew its own mind (200 A.D.); next, to be the official religion (300 A.D.); finally, to be the cohesive political principle of the great majority of human beings (400 A. D.).
Quote ID: 2261
Time Periods: 234
Europe and the Faith
Hilaire Belloc
Book ID: 84 Page: 141
Section: 3A1,3A3,4B
Meanwhile the Catholic hierarchy as an institution—I have already called it by a violent metaphor, a civil institution—at any rate as a political institution—remained absolute above the social disintegration of the time.167/168 -1A- To summarize what has gone before: the Catholic Church becomes by the fifth century the soul, the vital principle, the continuity of Europe. It next suffers grievously from the accident, largely geographical, of the Eastern schism. It is of its nature perpetually subject to assault; from within, because it deals with matters not open to positive proof; from without, because all those, whether aliens or guests or parasites, who are not of our civilization, are naturally its enemies.
Quote ID: 2277
Time Periods: 57
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 72/73
Section: 3A3,3A4C
“As provincial government and city councils declined, instances would be multiplied when church leaders took over civilian duties, organizing military forces, negotiating with the enemy, ransoming prisoners through the sale of ecclesiastical plate, and even leading the city population into combat. In addition, when the imperial authorities failed to repair damage to public utilities, bishops assumed yet another duty.”
Quote ID: 5655
Time Periods: 3
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 73
Section: 3A1,3A3
The capacity of Church leaders to stand in for their civilian counterparts “constituted a vital link between the ancient and medieval worlds . . .”
Quote ID: 5657
Time Periods: 47
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 74
Section: 3A3
“Innocent I accompanied the Senatorial embassy to Alaric in 409, and in 452 Leo I led the mission that went out to negotiate with Attila. By a familiar mixture of bribery and promises of an imperial bride, the threat to the city was removed. On this occasion, however the bishop was responsible, and the poorer Christian population rejoiced in their papa (pope).”
Quote ID: 5660
Time Periods: 5
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 75
Section: 3A3
“In general, church leaders found it natural to work for the survival of their close relationship with the Roman civil authorities, even when the latter were doomed to defeat.”
Quote ID: 5661
Time Periods: 5
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 150
Section: 3A1,3A3,3A4C
In the vacuum left by senatorial flight to the East for jobs - p. 148, the church became a directing force in and around Rome.” As bishops had been involved in civic administration to some extent “since the fifth century at least, . . . it was expected by the local population. But the failure of other authorities to assist was more marked. During this time, “It was to their bishop that Romans looked for the city’s protection and their own well-being. When other, older traditions failed, the city turned to its Christian past and apostolic foundation.”
Quote ID: 5691
Time Periods: 35
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 152
Section: 3A1,3A3,3A4C
absence of political power, the bishop is expected to move in and take charge.
Quote ID: 5693
Time Periods: 35
Formation of Christendom, The
Judith Herrin
Book ID: 225 Page: 449
Section: 3A1,3A3
The territory around Rome in Italy was called “the holy Roman republic”. Farms established by the Popes were called “apostolic farmland”. These estates were decreed by their charters to be “forever and absolutely inalienable”.
Quote ID: 5701
Time Periods: 7
From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought
Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan
Book ID: 92 Page: 3
Section: 3A3,3A4C
c. The difficulty in military service was twofold: (1) the military oath, the offensiveness of which was not confined to its quasi-religious implications, symbolized in the offensive “chaplet” worn as ceremonial dress; (2) responsibility for bloodshed, which made the civil tasks of keeping the peace certainly as offensive, if not more so, than service in battle. Civil magistracy, therefore, was also problematic for the same reason. It is, however, rare to find Christians saying that judicial bloodshed is wrong simpliciter, as distinct from being wrong for Christians.d. The opinion of Christian teachers changed imperceptibly. There is no reason to think Tertullian idiosyncratic for the second and third centuries, Montanist though he was, except in the aggressiveness of his rhetoric. Fourth-century writers, however, found no moral difficulty with military service in war, unaware, apparently, of the gulf dividing their attitudes from earlier ones. (“Homicide in war is not reckoned by our fathers as homicide,” Basil, Ep. 188). This is in striking contrast to the conscientious anxiety which frequently surfaced in the fourth and fifth centuries about responsibility for capital punishment.
e. This general unawareness of the change of attitude makes it unlikely that the modification of the church’s stance was at all self-conscious. An act like that of the Council of Arles (314), discouraging Constantine’s soldiers from leaving the service in peacetime, should be seen as an improvised response and an interesting measure of what some Christian opinion had come to expect by that point, but not as a decisive reversal of traditional judgments. Difficulties over the place of senior magistrates in the church continued to arise in the early Christian empire from their official duty to impose capital punishment and to take evidence under torture.
Quote ID: 2373
Time Periods: 2345
Growth of Church Institutions, The
The Rev. Edwin Hatch, M. A., D.D., (Reader In Ecclesiastical History In The University Of Oxford Sec
Book ID: 230 Page: 11/12
Section: 3A1,3A3,3A4,3D2,4B
The Celts and Romans still formed the mass of the population. They retained their customs and their laws. The framework of the imperial organization remained without material change. And within that framework two features, the one of German character and the other of German usage, preserved much that was old, and laid the foundation of much that was to come. The one feature was that the Germans loved the country rather than the town, and that consequently, though great estates changed hands, the cities were left for the most part to their former inhabitants. The other feature was that, following their traditional usage, they did not impose their own laws upon the inhabitants of the territories which they conquered, but allowed each race to retain, and to be judged by, its own legal code. The general result was that in the cities was gathered together almost all that survived of Rome; the schools preserved the Roman tongue, the courts preserved Roman law, the Church preserved Roman Christianity. Of all this survival of Roman life, the bishop of the civitas was the centre. Round him the aristocracy of the old Roman families naturally gathered. He symbolised to them their past glories and their ancient liberties. He was their refuge in trouble, and their chief shield against oppression. His house was not infrequently the old praetorium, the residence of the Roman governor. Even his dress was that of a Roman official. In him the empire still lived.3A
Quote ID: 5770
Time Periods: 56
Journal of Early Christian Studies Volume 19 / Number 3 / Fall 2011
The John Hopkins University Press
Book ID: 122 Page: 328
Section: 3A1,3A3
...an ability to sate the craving for justice of aggrieved parties like Annianus was an indispensable asset to religious specialists and magistrates alike in the third and fourth centuries. Among the religious specialists, Christian bishops seem to have had a gift for making their ability to deliver justice seem natural and even inevitable, but our understanding of the real basis of their authority is still in its infancy.
Quote ID: 2781
Time Periods: 34
Journal of Early Christian Studies Volume 19 / Number 3 / Fall 2011
The John Hopkins University Press
Book ID: 122 Page: 375
Section: 3A1,3A3
Under the later Roman Empire, Christian bishops not only judged disputes concerning their fellow clerics and ruled on matters relating to church discipline and doctrine, they also settled cases that fell under the Roman civil law.
Quote ID: 2790
Time Periods: 345
Journal of Early Christian Studies Volume 19 / Number 3 / Fall 2011
The John Hopkins University Press
Book ID: 122 Page: 403
Section: 3A1,3A3
We shall suggest that such emergent “grey areas” of everyday life, freshly created by the confluence of enduring Roman traditions, nascent paradigms of Christian mortality, and acute periods of social instability, opened up new areas of potential intervention for Roman bishops in the domestic sphere.{9}
Quote ID: 2793
Time Periods: 345
Journal of Early Christian Studies Volume 19 / Number 3 / Fall 2011
The John Hopkins University Press
Book ID: 122 Page: 407
Section: 3A1,3A3
On the most basic level, late antique bishops were “watchmen”, men placed in positions of authority in light of their perceived moral excellence and their ability to oversee various facets of a Christian community’s religious life: its rituals, its teachings, its dispensation of justice, its wealth.{20} Yet oversight was a fairly plastic charge, which could be folded into a variety of paradigms.
Quote ID: 2794
Time Periods: 456
Journal of Early Christian Studies Volume 19 / Number 3 / Fall 2011
The John Hopkins University Press
Book ID: 122 Page: 410
Section: 3A1,3A3,4B
.....late ancient bishops, especially those in Rome, wielded far less power in society than elite householders.{33} However, bishops could potentially offer the family something that lay householders could not: a reputation for spiritual acuity and a perceived familiarity with both religious ethics and civil law.
Quote ID: 2796
Time Periods: 456
Journal of Early Christian Studies Volume 19 / Number 3 / Fall 2011
The John Hopkins University Press
Book ID: 122 Page: 411
Section: 3A1A,3A3
This is not to suggest that Roman clerics were the first to attempt to exercise authority within the private home. Christian clergy throughout the late antique world had long tried to do just this, whether as marriage counselors, ritual celebrants of domestic rites, administrators of almsgiving, or even informal arbitrators in civil disputes involving family members.{37} Moreover, through the institution of the church council, bishops tried to legislate how Christians lived within the home from as early as the first decade of the fourth century.
Quote ID: 2797
Time Periods: 4567
Journal of Early Christian Studies Volume 19 / Number 3 / Fall 2011
The John Hopkins University Press
Book ID: 122 Page: 461
Section: 3A1,3A3
Gregory therefore diverted from the letter of the law in the case of Felix of Sipontum (and perhaps in other cases involving monastic confinement in a variety of ways. He did not involve a civil judge in the hearing or sentencing, and he prescribed a different penalty than the law prescribed. Yet Gregory apparently did not anticipate that his procedure would create any problems with civil authority.. . . .
Recent research has shown that, in the context of Roman criminal procedures, it was common judicial practice that judges applied discretion in sentencing and very often diverted from the penalties prescribed by the laws.{85}
Quote ID: 2821
Time Periods: 6
Journal of Early Christian Studies Volume 19 / Number 3 / Fall 2011
The John Hopkins University Press
Book ID: 122 Page: 462
Section: 3A1,3A3
Surely in principle, in an ideal world of functioning civil authority, a civil judge would have taken care of lay people. However, in Gregory’s Italy, at least judging from the evidence of his letters, the reality was that many people turned to the bishop. In these individual cases, Gregory made sure to let his audience know–which was probably widely accepted–that he shouldered the burden of the civil judge.
Quote ID: 2822
Time Periods: 6
Later Roman Empire, The
Averil Cameron
Book ID: 243 Page: 71c
Section: 3A3,3C,4B
By a law, C made the Xn church able to inherit property. Immense wealth began to flow to her. With such wealth, a local bishop might find himself looked upon as an authoritarian figure by the local populace. He begins to play the part of urban patron.
Quote ID: 6128
Time Periods: 4
Organization of the Early Christian Churches, The
Edwin Hatch, M. A.
Book ID: 255 Page: 149/151
Section: 3C,3A3,4B
Lecture VI: The Clergy as a Separate Class.Into this primitive state of things the State introduced a change.
I. It allowed the Churches to hold property{25}. And hardly had the holding of property become possible before the Church became a kind of universal legatee. The merit of bequeathing property to the Church was preached with so much success that restraining enactments became necessary. Just as the State did not abolish, though it found it necessary to limit, its concession of exemption to Church officers, so it pursued the policy of limiting rather than of abolishing the right to acquire property{26}. ‘I do not complain of the law,’ says Jerome, writing on this point, ‘but of the causes which have rendered the law necessary{27}.’
2. The enthusiasm, or the policy, of Constantine went considerably beyond this. He ordered that not only the clergy but also the widows and orphans who were on the Church-roll should receive fixed annual allowances{28} : he endowed some Churches with fixed revenues chargeable upon the lands of the municipalities{29} : in some cases, he gave to churches the rich revenues or the splendid buildings of heathen temples{30}.
This is the second element in the change : the clergy became not only independent, but in some cases wealthy. In an age of social decay and struggling poverty they had not only enough but to spare.
. . . .
The effect of the recognition of Christianity by the State was thus not only to create a class civilly distinct from the rest of the community, but also to give that class social independence. In other words, the Christian clergy, in addition to their original prestige as office-bearers, had the privileges of a favoured class, and the power of a moneyed class.
Quote ID: 6431
Time Periods: 45
Origins of Modern Europe, The
R. Allen Brown
Book ID: 256 Page: 65
Section: 3A3
As the fabric of the Roman state collapsed and civil government ceased, whatever local administration, justice, public order or public works there were devolved upon the bishop, who undertook them faute de mieux as the one surviving public figure capable and concerned. ‘You are the salvation of your country’, wrote Venantius Fortunatus in Merovingian Gaul to Felix, bishop of Nantes, who amongst other good works altered the course of the river Loire for the benefit of his diocese, ‘you who give to the lands what justice requires and restore to them the joys of the past....Voice of the principal citizens, light of the nobility, defender of the people, you are the port in which shipwreck can be escaped’.
Quote ID: 6491
Time Periods: 6
Papal Monarchy from St. Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII (590-1303), The
William Barry
Book ID: 342 Page: 50
Section: 3A1,3A3,3G
Yet on him it fell to feed and defend the city. The imperial officers could do nothing.
Quote ID: 7933
Time Periods: 267
Patronage in Early Christianity
Alan B. Wheatley
Book ID: 396 Page: 170
Section: 3A3
PJ: Cyprian c. 205–258Wealth given by God should rather be used for the known purposes of God, that is, it should be given to those who are in need. To do so is to “feed Christ” Hab. 11; Opere 11).
Quote ID: 8444
Time Periods: 3
Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire
Peter Brown
Book ID: 183 Page: 147/148
Section: 3A1,3A3
The system was not changed by such encounters. Ambrose ended his life disillusioned by his inability to control the unbridled avaritia, the land-grabbing and amassment of private fortunes, associated with the high officials in charge of taxation in northern Italy.{142} Preaching at Turin in the 400s, Bishop Maximus was no more optimistic. The “protection of the people” required the bishop to “raise his voice to a shout.”{143} Administrators and tax collectors were unimpressed. They turned up every Sunday, finely dressed for church. Behavior appropriate for a monk or clergyman, they said, was not to be demanded of a tax official.{144}It was, rather, on the local level, as “controller of crowds,” responsible for the peace of the cities, that the bishops consolidated the advantages that they had first gained at the end of the fourth century.
Quote ID: 4087
Time Periods: 45
Rise of Western Christendom, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 265 Page: 208
Section: 3A3
We have seen what powers in secular life came to be exercised by bishops such as Gregory of Tours in Gaul and by Gregory’s colleagues throughout the eastern Roman empire. Bishops were expected to do anything. On the plateau of Spain, they were responsible for the rounding up of stray horses. In Sicily, at a slightly later time, the bishop of Palermo could even be nominated, by the local governor, as an inspector of brothels.
Quote ID: 6715
Time Periods: 6
Rise of Western Christendom, The
Peter Brown
Book ID: 265 Page: 213
Section: 2C,3A1,3A3
The bishop of Salona (Solun, near Split) was the proud ruler of a “Roman” imperial enclave on the Dalmatian coast. He was a bishop of the old style. He justified his lavish banquet by an appeal to the hospitality of Abraham. Gregory was not amused.“In no way do you give attention to reading the scriptures, in no way are you vigilant to offer exhortation, rather, you ignore even the common norms of an ecclesiastical way of life.”
On his epitaph, Gregory was acclaimed as consul Dei, “God’s consul.”
Quote ID: 6717
Time Periods: 67
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 95
Section: 3A3
The inhabitants displaced in the upheavals that made these changes necessary poured into Rome as their only refuge to becomes a charge on the Church, the only body with the administrative capacity to deal with the problem.
Quote ID: 4302
Time Periods: 67
Rome in the Dark Ages
Peter Llewellyn
Book ID: 191 Page: 104
Section: 3A3
His administrative achievements made possible the survival of Rome itself, by employing the vast wealth that the Church still retained to feed, maintain and defend the city. From the large quantity of his surviving Correspondence, the whole process of the Church’s utilization of its estates and properties can be realized.
Quote ID: 4314
Time Periods: ?
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