Kalani Craig » Episcopal Trading Cards

Sinicius of Reims (and Soissons)

Kalani Craig — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 19:13:27 +0000

Sinicius, like Sixtus before him, had a personal relationship with St. Peter, a relationship which served to strengthen the church of Reims. Yet Sinicius’ ties to his predecessors’ authority don’t end there. Flodoard adds a description of Sicinius that is key to understanding the relationship between each successive bishop in a see. As a result of “working zealously to save souls and decisively fighting the good fight, [Sicinius] deserved to be associated with his predecessor in heaven as well as on earth.”[1] That is, Sinicius’ deeds earned him the right to be associated with Sixtus, Sixtus’ deeds on earth, and Sixtus’ spiritual ascendancy.[2]

This tie between Sixtus and Sinicius, and Flodoard’s reference to episcopal predecessors as a yardstick by which the current bishop was measured, emphasizes the duality of a sitting bishop’s authority. Both the office and the person were important: the former for its historical precedent, the latter for his his individual behavioral patterns and personal relationships with other authority figures. Upon consecration of a bishop, the official and personal elements fused, imbuing the individual person of an archbishop with the full authority inherent in–and inherited from–the office and the men who held it previously. In Sinicius’ case, his individual conduct and its resulting authority rendered him worthy of the authority of the episcopal seat itself.

The presentation of this fusion of personal and official authority so early in Flodoard’s gesta nicely sets the stage for an ongoing augmentation of the authority of Reims’ episcopal seat via the actions of the individual men who held the seat. In turn, we can explain the appearance of episcopal gesta across a broad expanse of time and space in medieval Europe because only by recording episcopal deeds in serial form can bishops call on the full accretion of power as we see it in the life of Sinicius.

Works cited: Historia Remensis Ecclesiae; Claudia Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature of Christian Leadership in an Age of Transition; Maureen Miller, The Bishop’s Palace: Architecture and Authority in Medieval Italy.

FOOTNOTES
1. Historia Remensis Ecclesiae I.III. “Ubi pro animarum salute fideliter elaborans, bonumque certamen decertans, cum decessore, ut in coelis, ita etiam meruit in terris habere consortium….”↑
2. Claudia Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity, 6-10; Maureen Miller, The Bishop’s Palace, 50.↑

Sixtus of Reims

Kalani Craig — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:58:41 +0000

Sixtus’ life is a lovely example of the original Peter Principle (not that new-fangled incompetence theory that has overtaken the world, but the Petrine Doctrine of a Christian church based on St. Peter’s consecration as Christ’s successor) playing out in episcopal lives and authority structures. In Flodoard’s version of Sixtus’ life, St. Peter was a princeps of the church who acted as such, ordaining important successors and representatives like Sinicius to administrate valuable church property and endowing them with his own authority in the process.

Works cited: Historia Remensis Ecclesiae.

Augustine of Canterbury

Kalani Craig — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:30:00 +0000

William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Pontificum Anglorum begins with a single chapter on the early years of the see of Canterbury (597-690), a chapter based on Bede’s The Ecclesiastical History of the English People. (For more on this, see David Preest’s footnotes.) Still, each of the bishops mentioned is mentioned within the context of a discrete life that conforms to the structure of Carolingian gesta and the Liber Pontificalis.

Works cited: De Gestis pontificum Anglorum or The Deeds of the Bishops of England.

Aderitus of Ravenna

Kalani Craig — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:19:41 +0000

Aderitus’ life is somewhat less detailed, to say the least, than Agnellus’ life of Apollinaris, but the structure of the gesta genre requires that each bishop have a fully fleshed out life. Aderitus is thus instructive for the modern historian studying Ravenna’s episcopal politics because his life offers an example of the kinds of topoi Agnellus uses in the absence of any other data about a bishop.

Works cited: Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis, or The Book of the Pontiffs of Ravenna, ch. 3.

Apollinaris of Ravenna

Kalani Craig — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:53:18 +0000

Apollinaris was sent by St. Peter himself to convert Ravenna, and it seems Apollinaris was an excellent choice. In addition to bringing down Ravenna’s pagan Temple of Apollo with prayer, Apollinaris converted many pagans, ordained many priests and died a martyr in Ravenna during Vespasian’s persecutions. Apollinaris’ martyrdom gave Ravenna’s newly converted Christian population a patron saint around whom they could rally.

Notable in Agnellus’ version of the life of St. Apollinaris are the echoes of miracles Agnellus ascribed to St. Peter. In the opening lines of the life of Apollinaris, Agnellus mentions two instances in which St. Peter’s touch alone melted solid rock, leaving imprints of the holy man’s body in the rock itself. Agnellus tells us that Apollinaris, too, left imprints of his feet where he stood in prayer in a basilica in Ravenna.

The echo is important not only because it further sanctifies Apollinaris but because Agnellus underscores Apollinaris’ inheritance from St. Peter while simultaneously demonstrating his ability to rival St. Peter’s miraculous touch. Agnellus’ need to justify Ravenna’s independence from Rome asserts itself immediately in his descriptions of the very first bishop in Ravenna.

Apollinaris’ life also provides the foundational topoi which Agnellus uses for standard hagiographical miracles–healing the sick and blind, cleansing lepers, bringing the dead back to life. I would argue that these topoi can then be used to help differentiate between standard hagiographic miracles and less formulaic, but far more meaningful, instances of divine intervention in significant conflicts between later bishops and their Roman and Byzantine contemporaries.

Works cited: Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis, or The Book of the Pontiffs of the Church of Ravenna, ch 1-2.