38 The bishop of Arelate
After the crisis of the early 5th century, Arelate was in full economic and urban development, as demonstrated by recent archaeological excavations. [1] The
Duplex Arelas [2] as Ausonius calls it, on one side extends along the river towards the South, passing the Circus, with the construction of a new neighbourhood, full of shops, warehouses and i
nsulae [3] inhabited by
foederati, given the presence of inscriptions in Gothic and Alan language, on the other it also extends on the right bank of the river, in the Camargue, in the neighborhood called
Insula Gallica, where there are shipbuilding yards, the arsenal (building with large brick ashlars), warehouses and docks , as well as rich peristyle villas, adorned with mosaics
As proof of the city's growth, the
cryptoporticus of the Forum was expanded with a fourth gallery, which became a sort of commercial centre, with shops of Suebi merchants, as evidenced by the ancient sources and archaeological finds. The immense water mill, located on the Rhone, which serves to feed the entire city, underwent a further expansion. The theatre, renovated, changes its intended use, becoming the venue for the meetings of the
Concilium Galliae, while both the Amphitheater and the Circus acquire new life, in which new shows are celebrated, financed by the local aristocracy, both Gallo-Roman and Gallo-Roman. sia
foederata, who thus wants to demonstrate his adherence to Roman culture.
A similar development occurs in ecclesiastical architecture: the cathedral, which in 314 had been the seat of the Council against the Donatists and was then built on the outskirts of the city, leaning against the eastern bastion, was moved to the centre, next to the Forum, to be dedicated to Stefano Protomartire. This recovery of the city depends on a series of factors: first of all its geographical position, which is characterized by its large bridge over the Rhone, a wooden bridge with movable parts to allow navigation of the river, which made it a fundamental hub in the trade between Italy and Hispania, whose economy, both due to the restoration of imperial authority and due to the commercial activism of the Suebi, was growing strongly.
Added to this is the effect of its institutional role, as the seat of the Council of Gaul, which Sidonius Apollinaris defined as
alter Senatus, [4] of the prefecture of the
praetorium of Gaul and the primatial seat of the Gallic church, which effectively made it a hub of local traffic : this impacts the economy of Aquitaine Gothic and the Loire valley, in which agricultural production in some way, in addition to exports to Ireland and Scandinavia, is oriented towards providing foodstuffs to support the growth of the population of Arelate. Economic vitality also demonstrated by the grand resumption of the activity of the mint, which resumed continuously minting both bronze coins (for which four workshops were intended, indicated by the Latin initials P S T and Q), and gold coins [5]
This affects Goths and Alans differently. The former, committed to enriching themselves as landowners, become less and less inclined to fight for the Empire and oriented towards a peaceful life: the latter, however, supported by agricultural revenues, tend to structure themselves more and more like a military elite at the service of the imperial army, which becomes an instrument of social growth for the Alans. This phenomenon, as well as by the reforms of Flavius Aetius in previous years, is accentuated by a further decision of Athaulf, who, to simplify the life of Roman officials and
foederati taxpayers, made his own the proposal of the
Questor thesauroum Flavius Iunius Quartus Palladius, to initiate a tax rationalization reform.
First of all, the
fiscus barbaricus was eliminated: [6] the taxes directed to the
comes foederati were collected directly by the imperial administration, which in turn redistributed them to those directly interested. The f
oederati would only pay taxes once. At the same time, duplicate tributes are cancelled, the same taxes paid twice, to the Empire and to the Comes, reducing the tax burden on the foederati by approximately 15% (the only exception are the Suebi, who, in the fantasy that put into finding ways to evade taxes, they are worthy competitors of the Roman senators). Finally, to prevent imperial officials from unduly pocketing quotas intended for the
foederati, this crime was punished not with the provisions of Roman law, but with the law of the
foederati, which was much more severe and with fewer protections for the accused... This reform fiscal, in addition to having a positive impact on the Gaul economy, it helped to calm the discontent of the Goths of Aquitaine, avoiding new revolts in the medium term.
At the same time, the growth of the city of Arelate, after the scandal of the assassination of Patroclus, also increased the importance of its bishop, sanctioned by the
Notitia Dignitatum, which objectively competed with that of Rome; the new bishop Euladius, who was an excellent administrator, a good diplomat, maintaining good neighborly relations with the Arian church, and alien to political intrigue, unlike his predecessor, seemed to be a good choice to mend relations with Rome. The problem is that his health was very poor, it would seem that he suffered from tuberculosis, so much so that he died suddenly in March 427.
Thus, with a rather unexpected choice, the one to be surprised, as Anicius Severus testifies, is Galla Placidia so much so that in the
Commentarii, he quotes a line from the Augusta, on God's strange sense of humor, Onoratus is elected as his successor.
This was the last descendant of a Roman consular family, which had been established in its large estates in Gaul for at least three generations,
Having received a solid pagan education, Onoratus converted to Christianity with his older brother Venantius. Initially, this was a political decision, to make a career in the imperial bureaucracy, but the two brothers proclaimed themselves disciples of Caprasius, a hermit who lived in a cave on the island of Lerinus, who according to Cassiodorus, had made this choice more out of antipathy towards compared to the rest of the human race, than by faith. Although Capriasus did not want to deal with Honorius and Venantius, whom he probably considered nothing more than two nuisances, the brothers try to imitate his style of outlook, which was hindered by their father. So, Onoratus and Venantius had no choice but to abandon their native land and, taking Caprasius with them by force, who only wanted to stay calm in his cave, they set sail for Greece in search of a desert suitable for ascetic life, in Arcadia.
The arduous undertaking proved disastrous: Venantius, who was not used to ascetic privations, soon died and the other two, who fell ill, were forced to retrace their steps. Having finally arrived in Gaul, they retired to a hermitic life in the hills above Fréjus, in the Provençal hinterland. Thanks to some disciples of Saint Martin of Tours, Onoratus learned of the Rule of Saint Pacomius, founder of cenobitic monasticism in the East. At the insistence of Capriasus, who missed his old cave and probably wondered what he had done wrong, to suffer these unwanted vicissitudes, Onoratus decided to return to Lerinus, founding a monastic community which in just twenty years became a famous monastery.
The new community followed the Pachomian rule: some monks preferred community life, while others opted to become anchorites, living in cells arranged around the main buildings. Soon Onorato received priestly ordination and remained as spiritual father at the monastery he founded, with his fame spreading throughout Gaul.
Probably the faithful of Arelate, tired of the intrigues and scandals of previous years, had decided to see what the effect of having a holy bishop was; Onoratus, however, had no intention of leaving his Lerinus, an opinion also shared by the rest of the monks, so much so that they wrote a protest against the community of Arleate, which ended with the famous phrase
Who gave you the desire to possess this man for yourselves to the detriment of those to whom God had granted him in his desert?
In the end, only Flavius Aetius, to go and get him by force, convinces Onoratus to accept the appointment. Despite all these discussions, Onoratus immediately decided to give his own imprint to the Gallic church: animated by a strong ascetic spirit he began to promote a reform of ecclesiastical discipline inspired by monastic rigorism. In accordance with this orientation he chooses the bishops not among the clerics trained within the Gallic church, but among the monks who were generally lay people, or made their choice fall on foreign people; this activism, however, was not appreciated by the bishop of Rome Coelestinus, who, like his predecessors, tried in every way to limit the autonomy and influence of the church of Arelate.
In January 428, an event occurred that offered Coelestinus the opportunity to intervene and make Rome's authority felt. The monk Daniel, accused in Alexandria of a series of crimes, including having been Hypatia's lover, a pity that at the time Daniel was not even in Egypt, to avoid the local tradition of lynching, had fled to Arelate. [7]
Daniel, from what
Georgius Florentius [8] tells us, whose testimony, however, dating back to the following century, must be taken with appropriate caution, had, at his own risk and peril, entered into controversy with Bishop Cyrillus: Daniel, follower of the Aristotelian tradition , underlined the humanity of Christ and the union of his two natures, which remained intact in one person, Cyrillus, follower of Platon, gives absolute precedence to the divinity of Christ. [9] Since the bishop of Alexandria had failed to convince Daniel to renounce his ideas, he had accused his opponent of being a pro-Arian heretic; the various Egyptian presbyters, to acquire merits towards their bishop, had escalated the situation, adding accusation after accusation.
Now, a normal bishop, Daniel having ended up on the other side of the Mediterranean, would have dropped the matter, but everything can be said about Cyrillus, except that he was not resentful. To have the dissenting monk punished, the bishop of Alexandria sent a letter to Rome, listing all the crimes of which Daniel had been guilty. Coelestinus, who had rather vague ideas of Cyrillus's bad character and for political reasons, sent a subdeacon to Arles with the request that the accused be sent to Rome for trial; Onoratus, who had realized that Daniel's Christological ideas were in line with Nicean theology and not wanting to open a controversy with the Arian church, turned a deaf ear to the request. The story would have ended there, if Onoratus, who was both holy and not very political, seeing that Daniel was a skilled preacher and full of charity for the faithful, appointed him bishop.
Now, Coelestinus' level of touchiness was not equal to that of Cyrillus, the bishop of Rome had his own bad temper and took this affair as a personal affront, so, in February 428, he sent an epistle full of fire and flames, [10] directed to the Gallic church. The first issue addressed was of a disciplinary nature and obviously concerned the question of the episcopal ordination of the monks, who were lay people, which had taken place in violation of a rule, sanctioned by the Council of Serdica, which prohibited the appointment of non-consecrated persons as bishops.
The canon was practically ignored during the 4th century, as in the case of Ambrosius in Milan, but the bishops of Rome in the 5th century had reiterated it several times. For Coelestinus, the ecclesiastical "curriculum" is proof of the candidate's preparation for the task of bishop and a guarantee for the Churches against unpleasant surprises. The rule, according to which "whoever wishes to be a teacher must first be a disciple", also applies, and above all, to the difficult task of the episcopate.
Furthermore, Coelestinus reiterated the need for the bishop to be preferably chosen from among the clerics of the same Church, to more easily obtain the necessary consent of the clergy and the people that he will have to govern, a concept reiterated in the phrase
.. a priest from another Church is not elected unless someone from the local Church is deemed worthy, which in our opinion cannot occur. It is necessary to reconsider the custom of preferring those of other Churches, nor to appeal to foreigners for fear that it does not appear to have established a new college from which to extract the new bishops
By reaffirming the condition of this consent, the Rome bishop intended to erect an obstacle to the repetition of ordinations of foreigners or lay people and, therefore, of monks, and to reiterate the distinction between the monastic state of life and the episcopal office, invalidating the decisions of Onoratus . Not content with this, Coelestinus also formulates in the letter a harsh criticism of the "presumptuous innovations" introduced into Gaul by the bishop-monks. They exhibited their ascetic rigor in their external ways of living and also in the style of their dress (they were called "palliati" due to the monastic cloak they wore). And they also wanted to impose this entirely external lifestyle on the faithful, which replaced the ancient customs of the Church based on the valorization of the internal dispositions of the Christian. Coelestinus judges this reform as "superstition", because it exalts the literal sense of the Holy Scriptures and ignores its spiritual meaning.
In the same letter Coelestinus addresses the theme of penance at the point of death, which in Gaul, also due to the rigorist line supported by the monks, continued to be denied, giving the reason that the penitent would not have had the possibility of carrying out the works of penance that usually the Church imposed on him for a certain period, before readmitting him into communion. In Rome for some time the refusal of penance "in extremis" had been considered contrary to the evangelical spirit. At the beginning of the fifth century, in fact, the traditional rigorist tendency persisted, but the push for a more lenient attitude was growing. Pope Innocent had already intervened in this conflict, in 405, with the letter in which, responding to a specific question from Esuperius of Toulouse, he explained why the Church had rightly decided to grant penance and
viaticum to the dying. Coelestinus expresses himself with greater severity than those who despair of God's mercy, recalling that Jesus accepted the repentance of the thief dying on the cross, whom the bishop of Rome, accepting the tradition derived from the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, calls Dismas.
If Patroclus had still been there, a schism would probably have broken out, but Onoratus had a completely different ambition in life than to quarrel with the bishop of Rome, being, through the inspiration of Pelagius, that the church, in addition to being the mystical body of Christ is also the community of Christians rooted in the apostolic succession and founded on the primacy of Peter, a totality that surpasses the parts and a time that comes before space. For this reason, through Flavius Aetius, who despite not being a model Christian, had taken a liking to the strange bishop of Arelate, proposed a compromise to Coelestinus.
The Primate of Gaul, as prescribed in the
Notitia Dignitatum, would have continued to freely appoint his bishops, but the monks, before accessing the episcopal seat, would have had to be consecrated; also being convinced of the words of Paul of Tarsus
Even if I spoke the languages of men and angels, but did not have Love, I am like resounding bronze or a tinkling cymbal.
And if I had the gift of prophecy and knew all mysteries and all science, and possessed the fullness of faith so as to move mountains, but did not have Love, I am nothing.
And even if I distributed all my substances and gave my body to be burned, but did not have Love, nothing benefits me.
And since penance at the point of death was an act of love granted by the Church to her faithful, he accepted Rome's position. Compromise which was accepted by Coelestinus, also because the object of the dispute, Daniel had died in the odor of sanctity: thus, with the utmost satisfaction of both parties, the controversy was concluded with a new epistle from the bishop of Rome, dated May 428, aimed at reconciliation with the Gallic church. [11]
[1] The ITL changes further accentuate a phenomenon that also occurs OTL
[2] The double Arles
[3] In the late ancient period, as evidenced by the excavations of Rome, Tindari and Ostia antica, to cite the best-known examples, improvements in finishing were made to resemble our modern condominiums more and more... And I am almost tempted to have them introduced by Theodosius III a specific law on condominium disputes!
[4] Another Senate
[5] OTL the minting of bronze coins ceases with Iohannes Primicerius
[6] Which as you can guess, has a slightly different meaning from OTL
[7] I fictionalized what happens a little OTL too
[8] Obviously the life and works of Gregory of Tours will be slightly different
[9] The Royal Rumble of Cyrillus versus Nestorius is approaching... Now even if like OTL, it is much more likely that the Arian bishops will attend the show by eating lupins and hazelnuts and throwing the peels at the two contenders, to make the Timeline more fun, I would like let them also intervene in the controversy... So suggestions are welcomed
[10] Epistle with very similar contents, which also ships OTL
[11] Crisis that also OTL; in a different way it is avoided, also because Coelestinus' priority becomes understanding what the hell the eastern bishops have invented this time, to fight over the nature of Christ!