Interpreting the Functions of the Roman Clergy in the Early Fifth Century

Abstract

Examining the information we have about deacons and presbyters in Rome during the first two decades of the fifth century contributes to the larger picture of their role and function and is instructive for several reasons. While there has been scholarly attention drawn to the prescriptive decrees of the Roman bishops regulating the life of their clergy, particularly regarding the clerical cursus honorum and lifestyle (marriage and sexual continence), less has been given to descriptive information about how deacons and presbyters operated. Although far from complete, this information is valuable. From the letters of Innocent I (402–417) we discover much about the liturgical functions of such clerics (through the invaluable letter to Decentius of Gubbio) as well as the role they played in being episcopal letter-bearers and negotiators. From Boniface I (418–422) we are reminded of another role of deacons and presbyters, that of electors and candidates for episcopal office. This information is filtered through the imperial correspondence concerning the electoral dispute between Boniface and Eulalius. We only gain insight into this process of episcopal election in practice when something went wrong. In this case, the undercurrent of tension between deacons and presbyters in Rome overflowed into open rivalry that required imperial intervention. This dispute is linked with the tensions that characterized the last months of Zosimus’s episcopacy of 417–418, where complaints about the bishop reached the imperial court in Ravenna and seem to have flowed from reactions to Zosimus’s changing responses to the Pelagian controversy. Such tension between deacons and presbyters existed in the time of Damasus (366–384), as revealed through Ambrosiaster and Jerome. It would be reasonable to conclude that such tension was present throughout this fifty-year period, ignited by different issues and most visible at the time of the election of a new bishop. Why then do we not find evidence of this tension under Innocent I? Perhaps he was a successful enough manager of his personnel that there were no significant outbreaks, or whatever problems there were did not require him to write about them to anyone else, thereby eliminating any trace of them from recorded memory. Most of our information comes filtered through the bishop’s perspective, and it is only with a letter sent from the presbyters of Rome to Ravenna in 419 in support of Boniface that we hear anything from the clergy themselves during this period. The evidence for the liturgical function of presbyters in the letter to Decentius perhaps unwittingly helps us understand the tension. Presbyters were closely tied to the populace, while, as we know from elsewhere, deacons were more closely tied to the bishop. It was the priestly or sacramental function of presbyters in controlling the boundaries of church membership that contributed to the collision course between them and the financially and administratively powerful deacons.