Desire and Disunity

Front matter

STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN BELIEF AND CULTURE

Series editors Dr Marios Costambeys, University of Liverpool Dr Martin Heale, University of Liverpool

Editorial board Dr Conrad Leyser, University of Oxford Dr Fiona Edmonds, Lancaster University Dr Anna French, University of Liverpool Professor Simon MacLean, University of St Andrews Dr Stephen Mossman, University of Manchester Dr Graeme Murdock, Trinity College Dublin Dr Laura Sangha, University of Exeter Professor Kristina Sessa, Ohio State University Dr Simon Yarrow, University of Birmingham

Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations Introduction

Part I: War, Morality, and Christian Conduct 1. Behave Yourselves: Christian Conduct during Wartime

Introduction

In the 440s, the Gallo-Roman presbyter Salvian of Marseille set out to write a treatise that would demonstrate God’s control over the world. This work, De gubernatione Dei,' has subsequently become infamous for its sexual hyperbole and depictions of lust and illicit sex in the late Roman West. Salvian outlined his motivation for writing the treatise: “Some men say that God 1s indifferent and, as it were, unconcerned with human acts, inasmuch as He neither protects the good nor curbs the wicked. They say that in this world, therefore, the good are generally unhappy; the evildoers, happy.” For the rest of the treatise, Salvian argued that these ‘good men’ were being justly and divinely punished through the mediums of warfare and barbarian dominion for all kinds of sinning, but most of all for their immoral sexual habits.

Salvian’s critique of Christian sexual standards is in many ways a synopsis of late antique sexuality, which this book examines. The late antique era is almost synonymous with the rise of the Christian church, which established itself as the focal point of society and culture — yet it failed in governing ancient sexual customs. Through detailed readings of moralising Christian authors, I examine clerical attempts to shift sexual norms. One must emphasise that these were, indeed, ‘attempts’ — for, as this book argues, efforts to change lay notions of sexual propriety were often met with resistance and disregard. Subsequently, moral failure was a recurring topic for ascetically influenced thinkers such as Salvian, but he was not alone in this. Many clerics discussed the highs and lows of Christian sexual habits, demonstrating varied ideas of approved and disapproved conduct. Contemporaries did not possess a unified set of sexual rules, but rather we find a fragmented, disunified, and confused effort to distinguish between Christian sexual standards and more widely accepted sexual norms rooted

' De gubernatione Dei (CSEL 8.1—200), trans. J. F. O’Sullivan, FONT 3 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1947). Hereafter shortened as De gub. Some translations have been altered for clarity, and any such amendments have been noted. ? Salvian, De gub. 1.1, trans. FONT 3.27: ‘Incuriosus a quibusdam et quasi neglegens humanorum actuum deus dicitur utpote nec bonos custodiens nec coercens malos, et ideo in hoc saeculo bonos plerumque miseros, malos beatos esse.’

in the ethics of late Roman society. Importantly, confusion over sexual propriety was not a problem for lay Christians only, but also prevailed among clerics, who were unsure what moral rulings were applicable or correct. This was not a world in which a streamlined programme to Christianise sexual norms can be found.

Such a reading of sexual norms challenges some wider appraisals of the topic. In 1993, Catherine Edwards drew on the views of Foucault to argue that ‘Christianity brought with it the institutionalisation of morality.” Her work does not cover this process, with the result that the long, winding, and confusing road to such institutionalisation, if it can be called such, is not examined in detail. The notion that early Christianity created a clear moral ‘code’ for believers might seem conclusive if one fast-forwards to the early medieval era, as from the mid-sixth and seventh centuries onwards British and Irish penitentials detailed penance for sexual excesses. ‘These guidebooks covered penance for all manner of sexual misconduct, including bestiality, rape, homosexual acts, adultery, fornication, incest, and more.’ Some of the first echoes of such punitive categorisation can be dated to the Council of Elvira in Spain, 305/6 CE, which produced canons on adultery, incest, fornication, sex work, homosexual acts, and further issues of sexual vice. The production of rules and the articulation of subsequent punishments hints that a categorisation and codification of sexual morality was taking place in the late Roman era, which continued into the early medieval world.

Yet we must question to what degree such prohibitions influenced the communities they were aimed at, or if these views were ever perceived to be the final word on the matter. There is a tendency in scholarship to accept that Christianity was a successfully repressive force on late ancient sexuality, and that ascetically influenced moralists represented the views of the many and enjoyed broad communal support. ‘This was not the case. Furthermore, we need to question what in each case prompted moralistic guidance and interpretation, as well as the lay reception of clerical demands. Ideal sexual

> Catharine Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 32.

+A thorough study on codifying sex in the penitentials is Pierre J. Payer, Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Sexual Code, 550-1150 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984). See also Daniel A. Binchy and Ludwig Bieler, eds, The Irish Penitentials (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1963); Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis, eds, Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 1998); Stephen Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Julie Ann Smith, Ordering Women’s Lives: Penitentials and Nunnery Rules in the Early Medieval West (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001).

5 See Samuel Laeuchli, Power and Sexuality: The Emergence of Canon Law at the Synod of Elvira (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1972).

standards rarely reflect everyday behaviour — we might even make the point that they precisely do not, which is why they remain as ideals. The influence that Christian authors had on the sexual habits of their congregants in the late Roman and post-Roman eras needs further scrutiny and assessment. By doing so, we will develop a more nuanced context for ascetic views, enabling us to assess the impact of Christian moralising texts from a new perspective.

Between the late fourth and the early sixth centuries, we find many Christian writers reflecting on sexual mores in the West — some briefly and some more extensively. Of course, not all Christian writers addressed sexual vices — indeed, many writers had nothing to say about these matters at all, or at least no such material has survived. However, this makes what has survived even more worthy of examination, as such sources show what prompted clerics to discuss sex, frankly or euphemistically. By presenting these examinations, exhortations, and lamentations together, I intend to recapture moralistic disunity in the late Roman West, showing the clerical desire to root out sexual misconduct while not knowing exactly how to do so.

Salvian, whose passionate attack we started with, produced the most expansive account of late Roman sexual vice. Salvian’s work has attracted scholarly attention on many points — on barbarian ethnicity, wealth distribution, almsgiving, pastoral care, Christian community development, and the status of the coloni® — but his overall work has been viewed as tarnished by colourful, anti-hedonistic rebukes that he aimed at fellow Gallic Christians.” His commentary on sexual habits, on the other hand, ê Jean-Pierre Weiss, ‘Das Thema des guten Germanen bei Tacitus und Salvian von Marseille’, in Prinzipat und Kultur im 1. und 2. Jahrhundert: wissenschaftliche Tagung der Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena und der Iwane-Dshawachischwili-Universitat Tbilissi, ed. Barbara Kühnert (Bonn: Habelt, 1995), 56—62; D. J. Cleland, ‘Salvian and the Vandals’, Studia Patristica 10 (1970), 270-74; David Lambert, ‘Barbarians in Salvian’s De Gubernatione Dei’, in Ethnicity and Culture in Late Antiquity, ed. Stephen Mitchell and Geoffrey Greatrex (London: Duckworth, 2000), 103-15; Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 433-53; Gam Grey, ‘Salvian, the Ideal Christian Community and the Fate of the Poor in Fifth-Century Gaul’, in Poverty in the Roman World, ed. Margaret Atkins and Robin Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 162-82; Michael Maas, ‘Ethnicity, Orthodoxy and Community in Salvian of Marseilles’, in Fifth Century Gaul: A Crisis of Identity?, ed. J. F. Drinkwater and Hugh Elton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 275-84; Walter Goffart, ‘Salvian of Marseille, De Gubernatione Dei 5.38—45 and the “Colonate” Problem’, Antiquité Tardive 17 (2009), 269-88. The most detailed study on Salvian remains Jan Badewien, Geschichtstheologie und Sozialkritik im Werk Salvians von Marseille (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980).

See Raymond Thouvenot, ‘Salvien et la ruine de l’empire romain’, Mélanges d'archéologie et d’histoire 38 (1920), 145-63; F. Paschoud, Roma aeterna: Etudes sur le patriotisme romain remains largely unexplored. Yet his observations hit the nerve of a very specific time and era: his critiques were aggravated by military conflict and uncertainty about the future, he based his arguments on a Christian idealisation of chastity and purity, and he reflected the continued adherence of lay Christians to Roman sexual ethics.

Salvian’s frustrations in the 440s were intensified by the lack of any universal categorisation of sexual vice — although, as the Council of Elvira suggests, clerics in their own regions had been reflecting on such matters for a long time.’ Instead of a clear understanding of what sexual conduct was sinful for Christians, clergy articulated moral rulings as necessitated by their localities, whether an incest scandal in a nearby congregation or the rape of local Christians at the hands of Vandal forces. There are two realities at play: what Christian writers considered as sexual excess and what lay Christians, on the whole, considered as excess. The moral assessments of Christian writers were not harmonious either: clerics disagreed with one another, and we will find both the relaxation of rules as well as their tightening. Like any period of growth and soul-searching, the evidence is often contradictory.

In isolation, then, Salvian’s claims about lustful Christians performing all manner of sexual sins do, indeed, strike one as hyperbolical, but when his arguments are broken down, we find many of them echoed by his contemporaries. Studies of late Roman sexual norms have often focused on the views of specific authors or, if studies have been comparative, they have been so on a grand scale of centuries and/or empires.’ Here a long fifth century is considered as its own period of Christian moral debates in order to allow the evidence to interact with its context. Such a shift is an important contribution to our understanding of the Christian formulation of sexual norms at this time. To facilitate this goal, this book makes use of dans l’Occident latin à l'époque des grandes invasions (Rome: Institut Suisse de Rome, 1969); and especially Pierre Paul Courcelle, Histoire littéraire des grandes invasions germaniques (Paris: Etudes augustiniennes, 1964), 118-30. Courcelle painted Salvian as a barbarian sympathiser, who relished seeing ‘the fall’ of Rome, motivated by his supposed Germanic origins. While Courcelle’s views are largely unfounded, his analysis has been hugely influential.

8 It is also important to note that attempts to define proper and improper Christian conduct also occurred for other types of sinning: heresiologies are another example of Christian attempts to categorise and rationalise deviant behaviour. For more, see Todd S. Berzon, Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016).

° See Henny Fiskå Hägg, ‘Continence and Marriage: The Concept of Enkrateia in Clement of Alexandria’, Symbolae Osloenses 81.1 (2006), 126—43; Paul Veyne, ‘La famille et ’amour sous le Haut-Empire romain’, Annales (1978), 35-63; Wolfgang Seibel, Fleisch und Geist beim Heiligen Ambrosius (Munich: K. Zink, 1958).

numerous western Latin writers who pre- and post-date Salvian. Authors such as Valerian of Cimiez and Maximus of Turin form a significant part of the analysis, as do more famed figures such as Augustine and Leo the Great.” While examining a broad range of clerics, I will offer granular analysis on local challenges to sexual norms, highlighting contextual and discursive cues.

The Christianisation Question

Academic interest in late antique sexual norms has had a late start, but as this book delves into the topics of incest, fornication, et cetera — that is to say, topics that one might not immediately bring up in polite company — the delay in academic interest reflects society’s attitudes and openness towards sex at large. The Christianisation of sexual norms in the centuries following the death of Christ and after the conversion of Constantine has fascinated less polite scholars for half a century now.”

The late antique period has been characterised as one of ‘Christianisation’ in which the Christian faith and the church were integral to sociocultural change, transforming the world into a Christian one.'? One

10 Augustine’s views on sex and sexuality are used comparatively with his contemporaries. For indicative discussion of Augustine’s views on issues surrounding sex and gender, see Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, 20th anniversary reprint edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 387-427; David G. Hunter, ‘Augustinian Pessimism? A New Look at Augustine’s Teaching on Sex, Marriage, and Celibacy’, Augustinian Studies 25 (1994), 153-77; John Cavadini, ‘Feeling Right: Augustine on the Passions and Sexual Desire’, Augustinian Studies 36 (2005), 195-217; Kim Power, Veiled Desire: Augustine’s Writing on Women (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1995); David G. Hunter, ‘Augustine on the Body’, in A Companion to Augustine, ed. Mark Vessey (Chichester: Wiley—Blackwell, 2012), 353-64.

"Key studies that cover in full, or in part, the late antique period include Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, Sexual Practices G the Medieval Church (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1982); James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Paul Veyne, ed., A History of Private Life, vol. 1: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987). For the late antique era, see Judith Evans-Grubbs, Law and Family in Late Antiquity: The Emperor Constantine’s Marriage Legislation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Kathy L. Gaca, The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003); Brown, Body and Society; Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

® For overviews of the Christian Western church between the years 350 and 550, see Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 23-36; R. A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge manifestation of this is that Christian commentaries on moral issues became more far-reaching in their aims than before, seeking to control the private lives of all believers.’ Yet there was no single-paradigm model for Christian morality, nor a universally agreed end goal. Rather, multiple strands of influence account for layered perspectives at a time when ecclesiastical authority was still findings its strengths.'* The composition of Christian communities was varied, with old Christian families and recent converts, although the actual number of Christians is difficult to quantify, as is, indeed, knowing what branch of Christianity such people adhered to. Moreover, the dedication of believers to the Christian faith varied considerably, impacting their eagerness or reluctance to buy into the moral standards set before them. Questions regarding sex were ones of when, how, where, with whom, how often, and for what reason — questions that were not being asked for the first time, but were now examined by clerics with complex Christian communities in their care.

There has been much debate over Christians and ‘pagans’ at this time, but the dichotomy of pagan/Christian has long been recognised as misleading.” In his landmark 1990 study, R. A. Markus remarked that ‘there just is not a different culture to distinguish Christians from their

University Press, 1990); Alan Kreider, ed., The Origins of Christendom in the West (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2001); Augustine Casiday and Frederick W. Norris, eds, The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 2: Constantine to c. 600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 317—430; Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000, 2nd edn (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2013), 72-122, 145-54. !3 See esp. Chapter 7 on polygyny.

1t See the excellent study by Kristina Sessa, The Formation of Papal Authority in Late Antique Italy: Roman Bishops and the Domestic Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

For moderate estimates, see Keith Hopkins, ‘Christian Number and its Implications’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 6.2 (1998), 185—226. For higher estimates, see Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), although his maximalist methodologies have been heavily criticised. For a more moderate estimate, see Ian Wood, The Transformation of the Roman West (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 57-73.

Vern L. Bullough, Sexual Variance in Society and History (New York: Wiley, 1976); Edwards, Politics of Immorality; John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1990).

Some significant works include Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, esp. 27—62, 125-35; Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 103-49; John R. Curran, Pagan City and Christian Capital: Rome in the Fourth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 159-323; Maijastina Kahlos, Forbearance and Compulsion: The Rhetoric of Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Late Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 2009), 1-54; Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 14—32.

pagan peers, only their religion’.'* More recently, Susanna Elm has argued that Christian/pagan are of little value as categories for late ancient studies, as the shared cultural ethos bound these people to essentially identical views of the world.” Ideas, beliefs, and customs bled from one to the other or were fundamentally the same. Consequently, Christian leaders had to be cautious. As argued by Keith Hopkins, Christianity was in a continuous process of integrating vast numbers of new recruits, and as such it ‘always had to be questioning its members about the nature and degree of their adherence’.”” Hopkins’s study is concerned with Christianity prior to the fourth century, but if we accept that conversion work was making strides post-380, with Christianity’s rise to the official religion of the Roman Empire, we also need to reflect on the religiosity of Christian communities in the fifth century and beyond. Through conversion, one entered a holy religious community — or, at least, one should have done. In a religion that valued the chastity of all believers, sexual norms needed to be addressed and monitored.

Instead of viewing late Roman society and culture as consisting of distinctive Christian and non-Christian groups, therefore, it is more helpful to approach these as people whose views, traditions, and beliefs represented a mixture of both. Maijastina Kahlos has described people who fall between adamant Christians and adamant pagans as incerti: these people’s religious habits are inconclusive regarding their beliefs, or they practised both Christian and non-Christian worship.” Thinking of people as incerti is particularly useful as we examine how the clergy framed sexual norms for their audiences: a sermon is not necessarily delivered to a group of hardline Christians, but rather to people whose beliefs and habits lie somewhere between orthodox Christian thinking and more traditional Roman views. It is this multitude of differing and overlapping beliefs and moral standards that community leaders had to navigate.

However, a cohesive ‘Christianisation’ of sexual mores has held much sway in scholarship. In his seminal study The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argued that Christian views on sexuality derived from the need to care for the self: sexuality was part of an introspective self-analysis and improvement regime.” Peter Brown’s pioneering 1988 study The Body and

!8 Markus, End of Ancient Christianity, 12.

19 Susanna Elm, Sons of Hellenism, Fathers of the Church: Emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus, and the Vision of Rome (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), esp. 479-87.

2 Hopkins, ‘Christian Number’, 221.

^l Maijastina Kahlos, Debate and Dialogue: Christian and Pagan Cultures c. 360-430 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 30—33.

» Michel Foucault, L’usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (London: Allen Lane, 1985); Michel

Society took heed of Foucault, compiling views of Christian writers on ascetic values and bringing into focus the rise of ascetic ideology. Late Roman sexuality was a self-aware examination by Christian intellectuals, who used sex to explore the relation of the Christian to the secular world and the divine — and, certainly, this is a significant part of the phenomenon. However, there is much more that can be said of sexual morality if we shift some of our focus back to Christians at large.

In his 1988 work, Brown recognised the messier and more complex state of affairs, stating that ascetically inclined Christian writers were ‘a small and vociferous minority, in an ancient society that changed very slowly. Even the minority was divided in its opinions.’ Despite this caveat, Brown sought to outline a Christian idealism of sexual morality. Ramsay MacMullen has argued that, when examining what exactly Christianity changed in the late Roman world, the single answer is late ancient sexuality.” Kyle Harper’s 2013 work linked sexual morality to notions of free will and argued for a ‘distinctive sexual program’ that fundamentally broke away from pre-Christian ideas of sexual norms.” A question remains, however: whose lives did these ascetic opinions and ideals revolutionise, exactly?

This ‘Christianisation’ of ancient sexuality needs to be newly questioned. A focus on ascetic sources often assumes the success of these ideas in daily life and in shaping Christian behaviour. Similarly, examining codes and canons suggests organisation and consensus, but such legislation underlines that Christians were not living in ways that pleased ecclesiastical authorities. We need to break away from the notion of a systematic ‘movement’ when analysing the power of minorities with limited reach to turn idealism into practice. While it has been argued that ‘it is not possible to track the ongoing encounter, parish by parish, between Christian preaching and the customs of secular sexuality’, this book aims to show that doing some of this legwork is not fruitless, but enhances our understanding of tensions and challenges in influencing sexual norms. We should also consider what, exactly, qualifies critiques as distinctly ‘Christianising’ instead of being more generally moralising, when many views put forward by the Christian clergy clung on to Roman sexual norms. We will enrich our understanding

Foucault, Le souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3: The Care of the Self (London: Allen Lane, 1986); Michel Foucault, Les aveux de la chair, ed. Frédéric Gros (Paris: Gallimard, 2018); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 4: Confessions of the Flesh (London: Vintage, 2022).

” Brown, Body and Society, 429.

** Ramsay MacMullen, ‘What Difference Did Christianity Make?’, Historia: Zeitschrift fiir Alte Geschichte 35.3 (1986), 322—43.

°° Harper, From Shame to Sin, 11.

°° Kyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 324.

of late ancient sexuality by allowing more space for divided opinions and a multitude of perspectives that were not, necessarily, even very Christian.

Textual and Social Realities

Past studies have examined late ancient sexuality especially in terms of genre. Virginia Burrus has demonstrated how sexual mores were idealised in hagiographies, while Jennifer Knust has argued that sexual slander was actively employed in creating friends and enemies, and that entire communities were framed in these terms.” Mark Masterson has argued that late Roman panegyrics and other homosocial literature were used to convey same-sex desire within well-educated male circles at a time when expressing such desire was otherwise becoming illicit.” These studies have demonstrated, first, that the sexual content found in literary sources can be examined in terms of functions, aims, and the context within which they were created. Secondly, late Roman cultural studies can produce intricate analyses of the complexities of ancient sexuality for the society under examination.

The current study does not focus on a singular genre, however, but rather draws upon a range of patristic writings: sermons, letters, treatises, and histories. On top of this, I also use late ancient law codes. All of these sources have genre-specific conventions and will pose differing challenges, especially for contextualisation and for considering reception.

Sermons are a rich source for clerical perspectives on sexual norms, as well as audience responses. Much late antique preaching sought to guide Christian flocks, providing a clerical platform for communicating how to live and what not to do. Determining who exactly was present when a sermon was delivered is not, however, straightforward: Ramsay MacMullen has argued that most congregational audiences were composed of the well-educated elite, leaving little room for the plebs and the lowborn, whereas Philip Rousseau has shown this to be too limited and that sermons most likely had a diverse group of listeners from the local religious community.” This latter view is more persuasive,

7 Virginia Burrus, The Sex Lives of Saints (Philidelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Jennifer Wright Knust, Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and Ancient Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

28 Mark Masterson, Man to Man: Desire, Homosociality, and Authority in Late Roman Manhood (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2014).

2° Ramsay MacMullen, “The Preacher’s Audience (AD 350—400, Journal of Theological Studies 40.2 (1989), 503-11. Reactions include Wendy Mayer, ‘John Chrysostom: Extraordinary Preacher, Ordinary Audience’, in Preacher and Audience: Studies in Early Christian and Byzantine Homiletics, ed. Mary Cunningham and Pauline Allen (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 105-37; and Philip Rousseau, “The Preacher’s Audience: A especially as studies on preaching have shown that sermons reflect the religious habits and experiences of lay Christians, functioning as a tool of communal change.*’ Jaclyn Maxwell’s and Bella Sandwell’s studies have explored John Chrysostom’s sermons in this regard, with Blake Leyerle further demonstrating how Chrysostom sought to control the behaviour of Christians in Antioch and Constantinople through his preaching.*! Eric Rebillard has also argued that sermons were attempts to change the views and habits of the people present.”

After the sermon and church service were over, however, the cleric had little control over the conduct of congregants. We see this in the West: Melissa Markauskas has noted how dispiriting preaching was for Augustine in Roman North Africa,” while William Klingshirn has studied the attempts of Caesarius of Arles to whip up a more vigorously Christian society in sixth-century Gaul.** Convincing people to adhere to the local preacher’s rulings was hard work. Lisa Kaaren Bailey has observed that, despite clerical influences, lay Christians ‘made their own decisions about what being a Christian meant in their daily lives’.

More Optimistic View’, in Ancient History in a Modern University, ed. T. W. Hillard and E. A. Judge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 391—400.

30 See the collected studies in Cunningham and Allen, eds, Preacher and Audience, and Anthony Dupont, Shari Boodts, Gert Partoens, and Johan Leemans, eds, Preaching in the Patristic Era: Sermons, Preachers, and Audiences in the Latin West (Leiden: Brill, 2018).

3! Jaclyn LaRae Maxwell, Christianization and Communication in Late Antiquity: John Chrysostom and His Congregation in Antioch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Isabella Sandwell, Religious Identity in Late Antiquity: Greeks, Jews, and Christians in Antioch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Isabella Sandwell, ‘A Milky Text Suitable for Children: The Significance of John Chrysostom’s Preaching on Genesis 1:1 for Fourth Century Audiences’, in Delivering the Word: Preaching and Exegesis in the Western Christian Tradition, ed. William John Lyons and Isabella Sandwell (Sheffield: Equinox, 2012), 80—98; Blake Leyerle, ‘John Chrysostom and the Strategic Use of Fear’, in Social Control in Late Antiquity: The Violence of Small Worlds ed. Kate Cooper and Jamie Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 173-87.

32 Eric Rebillard, ‘Interaction Between the Preacher and his Audience: The Case-study of Augustine’s Preaching on Death’, Studia Patristica 31 (1997), 86—96; reprinted in Eric Rebillard, Transformations of Religious Practices in Late Antiquity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013). See Maxwell, Christianization and Communication, 172—75, for similar conclusions.

33 Melissa Markauskas, ‘Coercing the Catechists: Augustine’s De Catechizandis Rudibus’, in Cooper and Wood, eds, Social Control in Late Antiquity, 256—74.

“t William Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles: The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

* Lisa Kaaren Bailey, The Religious Worlds of the Laity in Late Antique Gaul (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 3. See also Lisa Kaaren Bailey, Christianity’s Quiet Success: The

Sermons nevertheless offer glimpses not only into lay behaviour but lay responses. Some sermons indicate off-the-cuff delivery and the audience responding to the preacher in the moment.” In this way, preaching was an interactive dialogue, in which both recipient and orator influenced one another.?” As will be examined later, preachers also incorporated imagined lay responses into their sermons, anticipating what counterarguments their audience was likely to offer and seeking to refute them.” Sermons thus had a primary audience of live spectators, but these orations were also transcribed and edited for circulation by the preacher or a later editor — in this way, sermons that articulated moralistic exhortations also had secondary, tertiary, and further audiences removed from the original context.” It is also likely that details of the original context were lost in editing processes, with later versions wishing to emphasise the exemplary rhetoric and Christian learning that the sermon contained. This makes reconstructing the lives of lay Christians more difficult. Close readings of sermons, however, show that this is not impossible.

Yet challenges remain. Sermons often cannot be firmly dated, and the exact occasion of preaching has been lost. This poses challenges in interpreting sermons that addressed sexual morality, where a local context or incident likely inspired the cleric’s remarks, as will be examined throughout this book. The same is true for treatises such as Salvian’s. ‘Treatises allowed Christian writers to examine one or more topics at length, showing off their education, rhetorical skills, and command of Christian scripture and learning. Unlike sermons delivered in person to mixed audiences, treatises were commonly dedicated to fellow Christian intellectuals and intended for literary circulation among one’s peers. Again, such sources would go on to have multiple audiences — and, often, it is likewise not clear what inspired the work at its origin.