An Anatomy of a Crisis in Ecclesiastical Leadership: Isidore and Eusebius in Pelusium
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Theodore de Bruyn
Abstract
This paper investigates a crisis in leadership in the Christian church after changes in imperial policy made it more acceptable socially and more advantageous financially to occupy clerical positions. For several decades in the early 5th century, Isidore of Pelusium and his network of friends reproached and lamented the venal conduct of Eusebius, bishop of Pelusium, and several clerics he had appointed. But their efforts to alter the situation had little effect. To understand why this was so, the paper considers the types of people who wrote letters lamenting the situation in order to understand the nature of their response in relation to their social or political position, and it explores reasons why Eusebius and the other clerics were not dislodged by the censure and even derision of their critics. The conflict, it is argued, exposes the limitations of παρρησία as a means of altering the actions of the powerful and qualifies the role of ascetic authority in the de facto exercise of episcopal office in Late Antiquity.
Acknowledgements
Research for this paper was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project 200100334 (2020–2022) on “Crises of Leadership in the Eastern Roman Empire (250–1000 CE).” I am grateful to Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Bronwen Neil, and the anonymous reviewer for several bibliographical suggestions.
© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- Sin, Heresy and Righteousness in Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians
- Origen of Alexandria and Human Dignity
- The Nous Seeing its Own Light According to Evagrius Ponticus
- An Anatomy of a Crisis in Ecclesiastical Leadership: Isidore and Eusebius in Pelusium
- Biblical Anthropology and Doctrine of the Soul in the Letters of Isidore of Pelusium
- Book under discussion
- Peter Brown: “Journeys of the Mind. A Life in History”
- The Making of a Stylite Scholar
- Der lange Weg nach Osten: Peter Brown und die Sprachen des „christlichen Orients“
- Exploring Transformations of the Roman World
- “And what an Age!”: Peter Brown and Magical Late Antiquity
- Religion as a Catalyst for the Historical Imagination
- Religion as Distant Presence
- Peter Brown: Response
