"The 4th century was a time of tremendous upheaval. The Emperor Constantine made Christianity the recognized religion of the empire after his conversion in 312 -- which might seem a solution to the problems of a church intermittently persecuted in its early days. But the immediately post-Constantinian time was a period of stressful growth for Christianity, which was torn by heresies, unsure of its own internal authorities, and launched on a new course of make-or-break ascetical adventures. At the very moment when Christianity seemed to have won worldly success, the spiritual leadership of that church became dramaticaly & intransigently otherworldly. While previously unexpected order was being imposed from the top down by Constantine - who ran church councils as his political right, broke heresies, and installed bishops - a different kind of authority was surging up from below, to heady acclaim from ordinary people. Priests & bishops were caught between these totaly different impulses. If they aligned themselves too simply with one of the two dynamics, they could suffer defeat from the other. An imperial discipline derived from the Roman state could leave them open to charges of corruption in the eyes of the purists of the desert communities. On the other hand, an alignment with the unruly monks & mystics of Syria could lead to Roman repression, to a bishop's loss of patronage, including his revenues & his see itself.
We can see stages of this struggle when Athenasius of Alexandria hid among the desert communities while on the run from the imperial police in the 360s. Another stage was marked when Theophilus of Alexandria and John Chrysostom of Constantinople used a band of insurgent monks as pawns in their own power game, bargaining for the best way to present the treatment of them to the emperor in the early fifth century. These are just two better known cases of the problem posed to bishops by the adventurous ascetics at the time of their greatest popular appeal. The authorities did not know how to deal with the people who were outside the normal parish structure, and who felt that they were too pure themselves to submit to compromising clerics who were married, or tainted by political power, or so far below them in our Lord's favor that to move down toward them rather than farther up toward God was to betray the ascetic calling itself.
The man who has made it possible for us modern folk to understand the extraordinary power of the ascetics of the 4th & 5th centuries is Peter Brown. In his The Body & Society (1988) and other works, he has described how these daring souls commandeered the imagination of their time. They were the astronauts of spiritual space haunted by demons, people who tortured themselves into an entirely new state of being. David Brakke has compared them to those "technicians of the self" conceived by Michael Foucault, men who make of their owm bodies and psyches the laboratories of a new anthropological era. Their celebrity, earned paradoxically far off the ancient urban map, drew crowds to them for adulation and consultation, for the aura of wisdom that no longer shone upon mere priests or politicians. The difference in moral authority between priests & ascetics can be seen from this: Gregory Nazianzus late denounced his own Christian parents for persuading him to renounce ascetic life to become a priest. John Chrysostom only became a priest after his health broke in the desert, forcing him to give up the ascetic life.
One way to reduce the gap between priestly & ascetic authority was for the priests to imitate the ascetics, trying to regain lost ground by becoming celibate themselves, by fasting in the city as well as in the desert. An even quicker solution might be to co-opt the ascetics, making them priests or bishops, so people could not so easily contrast the two orders to the detriment of the priests. But the desert saints resisted this tactic. To leave the desert, to give up the utopian egalitarianism of the monasteries or the splendid isolation of the hermitages, would be a descent to the ordinary after the long struggle up onto rarified heights. It would, in Gregory Nazianzus's words, be a surrender of the ascetics dangerous glamour for "the drudging commerce in souls". Athanasius had to beg the desert stars to become bishops, and he sometimes failed. When the famous monk Ammonius was summoned to take on his duty as a bishop, he sent back his left ear, and threatened to send his tounge if asked again - thus disqualifying himself for ordination.
Consecrated female virgins were also a potential power in the 4th century, as the Arians proved by giving them teachers who recruited them for the conflict with orthodox tinitarians like Athanasius. Athenasius responed in his own see of Alexandria by creating a body of writings that proved from scripture that women must be docile, unlearned, and sequestered. He could not use that approach to the male heroes of the desert. He wooed them instead with campaigns to integrate them into the life of the laity & parish churches, curbing their penitential excesses with scriptural arguments, encouraging them to be politically active (but on his side), and subtly reshaping the image of their great symbolic leader, Saint Antony.
Athanasius's Life of Antony is one of the spiritual classics. It would play a role in Augustine's conversion. It helped to spread the monastic ideal. But Athanasius inflated the reputation of the saint while reducing his prickly individuality to manageable dimensions. He played down, for instance, the learning that Antony displays in his surviving letters, making him a docile follower of Athenasius in his own attacks on the learned pretensions of Arians. In the biography, Antony is made to tell Neoplatonist philosophers:
"We Christians acquire secret wisdom not by skill in Greek arguments but by the power of faith dispensed to us through Jesus Christ... You cannot by your verbal enticings halt the advance of Christ's teaching, whereas we, by calling on the crucified Christ, can disperse those demons you revere as gods. Through the symbol of the cross, your magic becomes impotent, your potions ineffectual."
The power of the ascetic came through prayer, which worked miracles. Athanasius, even while celebrating this cleansing holiness, had to control it. In a typical contest between charismatic & institutional leadership, he won the contest by not claiming a total victory for his side. Instead, he relativized the differences between the two groups.Sometimes, he said, even bishops work miracles. And sometimes, by his careful promptings, even monks can submit to organizational disciplines. He made the monks more ecclesial and the priests more ascetical. This was an important step along the path to an entirely celibate priesthood. After all, some monks had refused to take the Eucharist from bishops they considered too worldly. One remedy for that was to make priests more ritually pure.
What gave the ascetics their renown, as Peter Brown emphasizes, was the perception of their spiritual powers. - to heal, to forsee, to exorcise, to defy the devil. Athanasius could not compete in this arena, miracle by miracle, but he could empphasize what power the priest had and the ascetic did not - the miraculous power to consecrate bread & wine and make it become the Lord. "Monks participated in the unity through receiving the sacraments at the hands of the bishops. By using this maneuver, Athanasius helped promote the idea of the priest as a person whose power resides in his eucharistic consecration. The Eucharist was Athanasius'strump card. If the monks would not be ordained themselves, they remained dependant on the bishops for "the celebration of Lent and Easter, because Christian Pasch was an epitome of the Christian life," no matter what other rites the ascetics could invent. Spiritual power surged up from below in the monks' triumphs over the body. But another kind of power struck from above, like lightening, and was distributed out through the consecrating hands of priests. This view could help along the tendancy to focus authority at the top of the hierarchic structure, where power to ordain channeled power to consecrate out among the priests. In time this power to consecrate would be seen as the essence of the priesthood. For many it still is. Paul VI speaks in his encyclical of "the ministry of the Eucharist, in which the whole spiritual good of the Church is contained."
The danger of this approach is that it seperates the priest from the community whose joint meal was the original condition of the Eucharist. We see that in the way the priest eventually began to celebrate the Eucharist by himself - after all, what really mattered was just his consecration of the sacred elements. Everything else could be dispensed with. This one power of the priest was the source of awe he could elicit from the faithful; it became a kind of magic potency. Folk legend among Catholics told of wierd uses the power could be put to. we heard such stories from the nuns. A fallen priest had only to pronounce the magic words over a bakery window, and all the bread would be turned into the Lord - so a pious priest would have to eat every last crumb in order to prevent others from desecrating the Lord's body. If a hurried communicant leaves the church with the Lord's body still undigested in him, an acolyte hurries along with a lighted candle to show the Lord is still present.
When I was young I used to serve a private Mass for a priest who was either so scrupulous or so pious that when he came to the purported words of consecration he sounded out each consonant and vowel seperately, as if making sure the magic formulae was given all its force: "Hoc est e-nim cor-pus me-um." A quantifying of the miracles arose, in which it was considered "wasteful" for priests to celebrate the Eucharist together since they could each consecrate that much more of the Lord if they said their seperate Masses. The original sign of union had become a means of seperation. The priest's private business at the altar was something the laity could only behold from afar, if at all, as the sanctuaries became a reserve for the priestly caste. The priest turned his back on the laity, as if huddled over his private mystery. Rood screens, or (later) communion rails, fenced the vulgar multitude off from the sacred proceeedings."
Papal Sin - Structures of Deceit by Garry Wills
