Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity by Jennifer Barry

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity by Jennifer Barry Dirk Rohmann Bishops in Flight: Exile and Displacement in Late Antiquity Jennifer Barry Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. Pp. xix + 200. ISBN: 9780520300378 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 (11–25). 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 mid-fourth 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 [End Page 245] (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...