Peter Chrysologus

David Vincent Meconi, S.J.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317246299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Peter Chrysologus is the first book to offer an introduction to the life of Peter Chrysologus and a selection of his most important sermons in translation, as well as his letter to Eutyches.

Bishop Peter of Ravenna preached before the imperial family for nearly two decades (c. 430-450) after the imperial capital was moved to Peter's See of Ravenna in 402 by Emperor Honorius. With the Empire's elite directly before him, Peter also had the problems of 5th century Monophysitism behind him. As such, his homilies stress the incarnate Christ's ability to change lives by reuniting mortal humans with their life-giving God. The thorough introduction explores the figure of Peter, beginning with the obscure biographies telling of his early life, to his becoming Metropolitan of Ravenna, situating his elevation in the wider socio-political context of the powerful court of Valentinian III and the 5th century Roman West. It also looks at the significant influence his legacy had on future generations.

Translated into a modern idiom, this collection of sermons makes the preaching and pastoral wisdom of this key figure accessible to modern readers. It is an invaluable tool for anyone working on early Christian theology and the Early Church, as well as students of Late Antiquity and the Western Empire.

Part I

INTRODUCTION

1
LIFE AND TIMES

Late Antique Ravenna

Any Catholic in Ravenna would have been proud to tell you of the first bishop of this important Christian community, St. Apollinaris. Pious legend recalls how Saint Peter himself ordained Apollinaris and missioned him to Ravenna in order to tend to the few Christians already active not only in that ancient Etruscan settlement, but in Classe as well, its harbor town just a few miles away. Here Apollinaris labored tirelessly to organize ecclesial structures to provide the sacraments, convert the unbeliever, and take care of the marginalized. Widespread success led to resentment and Bishop Apollinaris was exiled a total of three times. Upon his final entry into Ravenna, he was met with such violence from the pagan idolaters that he was murderously beaten at Classe. Whether this martyrdom occurred under Nero (d. 68) or Vespasian (d. 79), sources are unreliable. What we do know for sure is that in the 6th century a group of Benedictine monks erected a small place of prayer where the martyr Apollinaris’ bones had been venerated since, a humble structure which was eventually transformed into the magnificent Basilica of St. Apollinare Nuovo.

Any accuracy in the dating of early Ravenna remains unsatisfactory, as historians such as Strabo and Ptolemy disagree in their estimations, and there is not even an answer to the meaning of the name Ravenna itself.¹ We do know that the Romans warred with Gallic armies in 390 BC for the first time in northeast Italy, and the earliest archeological evidence we have for a city center in the area around Ravenna comes from the late 3rd century BC. Strabo’s much-studied line that, “Arminium is a settlement of the Ombri, just as Ravenna is, although each of them has received Roman colonists,” suggests that Ravenna began to be an important place not long after Rimini was defeated by the Ombri in 268 BC.² Archeological evidence testifies to the complexity of a growing city center: sewers and an advanced drainage system, a network of dwellings built on well-secured piles and connected by bridges, ever-widening roads more inland, and some rather elegant private homes as well as public gathering places.

But above all, perhaps, Ravenna was best known for its maritime prowess. The Ravennate port, the aptly-named Classe (Latin for fleet), was founded by Caesar Augustus after the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, making Ravenna the northernmost naval base for the upper Adriatic Sea. Its strategic location facilitated trade at an almost unparalleled rate, and with the Empire’s dire need for a naval base in that area of the world, Ravenna brought in not only massive financial investments, but great expectations for nautical power as well. As such, it became a locale relied upon for both mercantile and military endeavors. In fact, numerous epigraphs for the dead bearing the title for Ravennate sailors from this time—classiari rauennati—have been found as far away as the Black Sea. For the imperial family desirous to prolong its reign from raiders from all sides, Ravenna proved to be a more fortifiable place, guarded by mountains to the west and the Tyrrhenian Sea to the east. At the turn of the 5th century AD, therefore, the Emperor Honorius obviously felt that it was more defensible than the sprawling streets of Milan and thus transferred the center of the Western Empire here in 402.

But Ravenna attracted not only tradesmen, military strategists, and politicians, it has also captured poets and artists for centuries. Closer to our own time, writers have immortalized their love of Ravenna, but for much different reasons. Oscar Wilde, for instance, penned a paean to Ravenna, acknowledging its ancient allure:

But thou, Ravenna, better loved than all,/Thy ruined palaces are but a pall/That hides thy fallen greatness! and thy name/Burns like a grey and flickering candle-flame,/Beneath the noon-day splendour of the sun/Of new Italia! for the night is done,/The night of dark oppression, and the day/Hath dawned in passionate splendour: far away.³

Drawn by the ancient echoes of all its mosaics told, Wilde heard in Ravenna a more primal and pristine form of Christian devotion, pushing him one step closer to the ancient elements of the Roman Church.⁴ Far from looking back into Christian antiquity, T.S. Eliot espies Ravenna in order to look forward to the possibility of renewed romance, telling of a newly-married couple who leave their mundane Indiana hometown to spend their honeymoon among these ancient sites, “Moins d’une lieue d’ici est Saint Apollinaire/In Classe, basilique connue des amateurs/De chapitaux d’acanthe que tournoie le vent.”⁵ Here in this “passionate splendour,” and here at that basilica “famous among lovers,” the mosaics of Late Antiquity still draw pilgrims, and the vestiges of a bygone political dominance are even now readily discoverable. It is here that Flavius Odoacer reinstated the King-ship of Italy after defeating Romulus Augustus in 476, thus marking the end of the Roman Empire in the West. Here the greatest of all Italian poets, Dante Alighieri (d. 1321), spent his final days and whose tomb is still venerated in the aptly named city center’s zona dantesca.⁶

With such a rich history, it is surprising that our knowledge of the beginnings of Ravenna are still as murky as some of its modern waterways. Despite the many stories surrounding Bishop Apollinaris, for example, no evidence for a Ravennate Church is discoverable until the late 2nd century when Christian funerary inscriptions begin to bear the traditional images and terms for that time. Furthermore, while legends blossomed as a later Ravenna sought to show ascendency over Rome, the first Bishop of Ravenna for whom we have any concrete evidence is actually Severus (d. c. 348), whose introduction is possible only because his name survives from a bishops’ list after attending the Synod of Serdica in 343 in order to extinguish Arian tendencies in that part of the Empire. This is no doubt why later legends were composed in order to fill in these historical gaps.

Among the leaders in this genre is Andreas Agnellus (c. 805-after 846). Agnellus’ 175-chaptered Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis was composed sometime in the middle of the 9th century and was Ravenna’s answer to the much older and more revered Liber Pontificalis, which proudly cataloged all the bishops of Rome beginning with Saint Peter himself. In the 6th century this proudly Roman Liber Pontificalis was amplified to include short biographies of each of the popes, and Ravenna’s historian would not be undone. For Agnellus wrote at a time when Ravenna sought its identity, at a time when the city was a double-dyarchy, a typically medieval arrangement in which the king and the pope shared secular rule but the pope in Rome and the local Archbishop shared ecclesial authority. So, between 830 and the last time we hear from Agnellus (dying sometime after 846), this young Ravennate priest sat down to write the first history of his hometown, full of colorful stories and intriguing sagas.⁷ Bishops who proved overly Roman or imperially friendly receive dutiful mention; bishops who rebelled against the creeping powers of emperor and pope tend to receive more of Agnellus’ time and certainly more of his devotion. The staunchly Ravennate clergy receive unmatched encomiums and their achievements are more consistently reviewed; the bishops who came from a foreign assignment and appear to have affinities and allegiances outside Ravenna are cast in a subtly suspicious light and described in fairly bland generalities.

This is no doubt due to the fact that Andreas Agnellus came from a very proud and well-heeled local family. He was a bit of a town celebrity around Ravenna, known especially for his ability to form study-groups and offer a medieval equivalent of “adult education” programs, a charism which eventually made him titular abbot of a group of vowed male religious at St. Bartholomew Monastery. Historians today, however, have grown quite critical of his work, noting the many ways the presentation of historical facticity of the Liber pontificalis ecclesiae Ravennatis is quite unreliable. Perhaps this criticism is captured most colorfully by von Simson who, although he set out to discuss Byzantine art as a form of Justinian propaganda a generation ago (focusing on St. Apollinare in Classe, St. Apollinare Nuovo, and San Vitale in Ravenna), could not keep himself from remarking that Agnellus was really “a medieval chronicler, not a historian. In his work historical and biographical facts appear curiously distorted, dissolved into the cloudlike contours of legend, as in the imagination of a child.” Clearly, Agnellus’ overall aim was to rely on the power of hagiography, thaumaturgy, and biography to establish the superiority and therefore independence of the Church over and against the Empire, and especially of Ravenna over Rome.⁸

In so doing, Agnellus’ amplified tone is tinged with just a bit of “little brother” complex, forced to live under the shadow of Rome’s beleaguered but ongoing supremacy, the rise of the Carolingians, as well as the waning of the power of the See of Ravenna in the 9th century.⁹ As Constantinople could boast of its great preacher John (d. 407) to whom they could give the moniker Chrysostom, St. John the Golden-Mouthed Bishop, thanks to Agnellus, Ravenna now had in Peter its own Golden-Worded orator, Chrysologus. Or, consider how “the Great” Bishop of Rome, Leo Magnus, turned Atilla the Hun away from the Eternal City. Agnellus proudly reports how their brave Bishop John did the same thing with equal efficiency, keeping Ravenna forever safe from the Huns. A problem typical with Agnellus here, is that Atilla swept through Italy in 450–51, but John was Bishop of Ravenna 477–94, a good 25 years after Atilla had died in Hungary; furthermore, there is absolutely no historical evidence that Atilla’s army ever went as far east as Ravenna so as to make their way through its streets and seashores.¹⁰

So, whereas Antony had his Athanasius, Hilarion his Jerome, and Augustine his Possidius, Ravenna’s Peter had only Agnellus, and it is the modern reader’s responsibility to discern carefully between hard history and hopeful hagiography. Even when we turn to the entry of the pinnacle of the Ravennate episcopal list, Agnellus has actually confused his Chrysologus with the other Bishop Peter of Ravenna who reigned from 494 to 519. This led to centuries of confusion, and today modern-day scholars are finally paying more academic attention to the life and theology of Chrysologus, thus providing more accurate conclusions regarding his life’s pivotal dates and events.

A central reason for this confusion is Agnellus’ placing Peter’s episcopal consecration under the pontificate of Sixtus III (432–40), consequently pushing the other major events of his life ahead by at least a decade. But when we understand that Peter was ordained Bishop of Ravenna by Pope Celestine (422–32), a clearer and more accurate portrait comes into view. According to Deliyannis, this mistake

has influenced the dating of Chrysologus’ own reign. Given the legendary nature of this entire story (of Peter’s elevation), however, it is most likely that Agnellus names Sixtus because he was the predecessor of Leo the Great, with whom Chrysologus was connected, and not because of any definite source that told the event.¹¹

A quick survey confirms how key this inversion to studies on Peter’s life has proven, as Agnellus’ miscalculations and solecisms have been uncritically incorporated into most studies of Peter hitherto.

Only a generation ago, for example, the Jesuit classicist and philosopher George Ganss, S.J. (whose work was acknowledged earlier), followed Agnellus’ dating of Peter’s episcopal consecration “Under Sixtus III” in “probably c. 433,” and therefore placed Peter’s birth as late as 406.¹² Yet, more critical scholars like Ruggero Benericetti and Dom Alejandre Olivar, rightly arguing that Peter was elevated to the episcopacy under Pope Celestine sometime between 425 and 429, tend to situate Peter’s birth in or around 380, while all agree that Agnellus was correct in reporting that Bishop Peter died in December of 450. Agnellus insists in many felicitous phrases that Peter was a very upright and intelligent Christian leader. We learn that Peter was faithful and highly effective in managing the resources of Ravenna, overseeing many building projects, but he also “wrote many volumes and was very wise.”¹³ Yet, among all of these great stories included in this collection of Agnellus’ episcopal lists, the most stupendous legend is how Peter came to be selected and ordained bishop of Ravenna.

According to Agnellus, upon the death of Bishop Ursus (perhaps in late 425 or early 426), the See of Ravenna waited eagerly for its next bishop. As we saw, Agnellus’ dating is off a couple of decades and his sources have failed him. Yet, despite the rampant historical inaccuracies, the story of Peter’s elevation is worth telling. As Agnellus convey...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Sermons
• Bibliography
• Index
• Index of Scriptural Citations