The minor orders of the Roman Catholic Church—doorkeepers (ostiarii), readers (lectores), exorcists, acolytes, and subdeacons—were abolished in one of the reforms following the II Vatican Council (1962–1965). Only the grades for which a clear scriptural basis could be claimed remained: bishops, presbyters, and deacons. For the historian of Late Antiquity, this could cause mixed feelings. On the one hand, when we try to write the history of the church in any period, the clergy, and particularly the higher clergy, are usually the main protagonists. This is evident especially in classical positivist historiography: if general history was primarily the history of kings and battles, the history of the church tended to be mainly the history of the bishops, their activities and teachings, and the quarrels between them. Accordingly, studies on early Christian clerics have very often been studies on bishops. On the other hand, while the bishops were obviously the most visible group of clergy, they were neither the only nor the most numerous group. It is true that they attract most attention in the sources, but other clerics do find their place. This is where our studies begin, making visible clerics from the lower ranks.As we come to know the lower echelons of the church orders, we see more acutely that the boundaries between the different grades of clergy and between the clergy and the lay world were not always very clearly defined. Naturally, the duties and privileges of the three higher grades, that is, bishops, presbyters, and deacons, were the most sharply delineated. Many sources, especially canonical ones, deal with the problem, defining exactly what can and should and what cannot or should not be done by presbyters and deacons. This principally concerns the liturgy, especially the most important sacraments: baptism and the Eucharist. Both were originally performed by bishops, but the participation of presbyters and deacons in the rites was considered important. Quite soon, both baptism and the Eucharist started to be celebrated by presbyters on their own (although there was always the possibility of baptism being performed by the lower clergy or even laypeople). Debates on competence between bishops and presbyters moved to other prerogatives, mainly to administering penance, blessing chrism and other holy oils, and blessing virgins. Ordination remained an episcopal prerogative, as did blessing virgins.1 The question of holy oils was resolved by a compromise, with permission granted to presbyters to use them on the condition that the bishops would remain the only ones to bless them.2 The reconciliation of penitents was generally delegated to the presbyters, who, for their part, jealously guarded their privileges against the deacons. In this issue, Geoffrey Dunn offers us a glimpse of what such disputes looked like in the early fifth century in Rome and Ravenna.Such debates on the relations between higher clerical grades are already of great interest, but they tend to concentrate on liturgical issues. Things get even more fascinating when we approach the lower grades, which, first, have no explicit scriptural basis and, second, were clearly not indispensable for the liturgy.The question of who exactly was and who was not a cleric should also be raised at this point. This was not an abstract question, because it bore serious legal consequences, such as exemption from municipal duties and whether one came under a bishop’s jurisdiction. However, we do not hear of any particular ceremonies for “making” someone a lower-grade cleric, in contrast to the solemn rites that accompanied elevation to the higher grades. It is also proven by the Liber pontificalis (The Book of Pontiffs), in which each pope’s ordinations of bishops, presbyters, and deacons are carefully noted, but no information is offered about the lower grades.3 We should probably assume that no ceremonies were involved in such cases and that simply undertaking the function of, say, a reader, counted one as a cleric; this is confirmed by a canon of the African councils from the early fifth century: having read publicly in a church even once, one might already be ineligible to become a cleric in another place, because one was already considered a reader and hence a member of the clergy of the first church.4This lack of an introductory ceremony is one reason why the boundaries between the lower clergy and laypeople were so fluid. Another reason is that while the liturgical roles of the deacons, presbyters, and bishops were carefully circumscribed, the lower clergy were certainly serving the church but not necessarily during liturgy. Turning our attention to the lower grades, we see also that church life was not limited to the Eucharistic liturgy and that communities required staff to perform other tasks, sometimes connected to the liturgy or the maintenance of ecclesiastical buildings and at other times not.The study by Juliette Day, presented in this issue, is about the doorkeepers (ostiarii), an obvious requirement for any institution owning buildings and organizing mass gatherings (hence we can say that they had a minor, but still utile, liturgical function). They settled later as a symbolic first rung on the clerical ladder. Further study may be done on those who were initially counted among the clergy but eventually lost that position. The most obvious examples are gravediggers (fossores), who were very important, at least in the Roman Church, and who were counted among the clerics in De septem ordinibus ecclesiae (On the seven ranks of the Church).5 It is also interesting to ask why cantors did not gain a position equal to that of lectors. By contrast, exorcists, who were mainly responsible for taking care of the sick, the mentally ill, and the needy approaching the church for help, were always ranked among the clergy, although their role, which differs from that of popular imagination, may also be better scrutinized. Another group worth consideration is the defensores ecclesiae (the defenders of the church), who ran various juridical and economical agendas for the church and were also enforcers of the church’s moral and doctrinal instructions. With time, their positions were forgotten.The nature of our sources is such that it is natural to concentrate on clerical functions in doctrinal debates and liturgy. The church hierarchy is most visible during services, but even clerics did not spend all their time on church work, and then there was parish life apart from the liturgy. This mainly involved teaching and charitable works but also the broader context of everyday life.An important aspect of this broader context is economic. Clerics were not excluded from the normal economic life of society. This is because, first, they generally did not renounce their personal property, and second, the church itself also obviously had its own property, which was administered mainly by the clerics; this also implied their participation in legal suits. Obviously, more important matters concerning money and real estate fell within the realm of the higher clergy, as sermons 355 and 356 of Augustine delightfully exemplify.6 However, as with any building, so too churches and chapels required everyday care and maintenance. In the period under discussion, such mundane tasks were deemed best delegated to lower clerics. For example, several councils from the Iberian Peninsula in the fifth and sixth centuries expressed their concern about the shortage of clergy, even the lowest grade; the bishops were particularly keen on providing staff for every church so that oil lamps could be attended to.7It is therefore clear that the life of the clergy did not consist of liturgy alone. However, it cannot be denied that it concentrated on the liturgy, with the Eucharist in first place, and the celebration of the Eucharist required a bishop or a presbyter. They became “real” priests, presenting a sacrificial victim to God.8 Although the role of the deacons was important in Eucharistic celebrations, and they were also considered higher clerics, they could not celebrate the Eucharist on their own. A “threshold of sanctity” was created, not so much separating the laity from clerics as a whole group but separating clergy from clergy, with bishops and presbyters on one side and all the others on the other side. Sexual discipline was developed in parallel, which pertained mainly to the three higher grades, tending toward the imposition of celibacy, which obviously involved a further separation from the lay world.9In Late Antiquity, lower clerical grades had their role in the church, but only the bishops and the presbyters proved truly indispensable. This directed further evolution of the church hierarchy, eliminating the “useless” grades or turning them into mere short stops in a clerical career. The side effect was a further “clericalization” of the clergy, meaning not only their professionalization but also ever deeper divisions from the rest of society. The church hierarchy would become less complicated, and flatter; instead of the many-layered clerical pyramid of the early centuries, in the Middle Ages, presbyters would become the clearly dominant group, including numerically. The lower clergy, those in the middle between the higher clergy and lay people, would begin to disappear gradually. However, this was all in the future, and for the period we describe, they were an important feature of the ecclesiastical and social panorama.The papers by Juliette Day and Geoffrey Dunn published in this volume were first presented in Warsaw at the “Clerics in Church and Society up to 700” conference in April 2019. The conference was organized by the team of the “Presbyters in the Late Antique West” project, founded by the Polish National Science Center and based at the University of Warsaw.10 Since 2014, the team has gathered all the available evidence (literary sources, normative texts, and epigraphic data) from all the western regions of Christianity up to the end of the seventh century. This research yields prosopographical information, both about outstanding individuals and about hundreds of average clergymen. However, our database is not only a prosopography of the presbyters. It also gathers information about anonymous presbyters and evidence on the duties and conduct of the ideal presbyter (as presented by councils’ canons and bishops’ exhortations), regarding his activities both in the church and within society more generally. All this material is being assembled into a searchable online database (http://www.presbytersproject.ihuw.pl), which allows the user to find and sort data covering many aspects of the life of the early Christian clergy.