Expectations of Justice in the Age of Augustine (review)

In the space between Peter Brown’s Power and Persuasion in the Late Antique World and Carole Straw’s Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection, Kevin Uhalde interrogates late-antique Latin bishops with the impertinence, tenacity, and intelligence of Lieutenant Columbo. The result is a contribution to the revision of our understanding of late-antique Christian society away from self-dramatizing narratives of triumph, decline, and tragedy toward a collection of more richly textured narratives not all in harmony with each other.

Uhalde takes encouragement from seeing his investigations lead away from a model of late-antique developments on which pro- and anti-Christian scholars collaborated unwittingly for too many years. On that model, it was perfectly reasonable that the public social institutions of ancient society should fade in power as men and women turned their attention to higher (on one view) or nonexistent (on the other) things. It was equally reasonable, as the textual culture of Christianity gained strength and sophistication, for the devout study of the letter of the law of God to result in a community defined by its rigorous devotion, or its exclusion—or at least disprivileging—of those who did not participate in the new majority culture of fidelity to the written word.

To impose such narratives on the many societies and Christianities of the Mediterranean, north European, west Asian, and even east African worlds of a period that lasted centuries is now only too clearly seen as gross simplification. Simply to assert the weakness of such models is not necessarily original, but is repeatedly necessary as we work collectively in the community of scholars through the implications of our need to craft more responsive narratives.

Uhalde’s method is impressionistic, and his argument ranges over the time from Augustine to Gregory the Great for evidence, not least because the sources are scattered, anecdotal, and to be taken as they are found. The business of the book is the bishop as judge—the new or at least expanded role of the socially prominent and divinely guided leader of Christian Roman society. In that role, the bishop needed to navigate the paradoxes of life in a fallen world, where the strictest gospel maxims (against oaths, for example) encountered the need to make peace and order in ordinary, messy social relations. The line of argument follows the path to justice from an ingenious starting point: not crime, but accusation, and not true accusation, but false. Legal action does not arise because wrong is done, but because human beings choose to accuse that wrong is done, and they are not always truthful or correct. Starting with cases where there is no grounding for condemnation and punishment puts the argument in a fruitfully disorienting place, where the focus can be on the bishop’s aporias seeking a valid process and a righteous outcome with too few chances to be sure he would succeed or—after the trial—had succeeded. Accusation, judicial process, oaths (an integral part of any ancient judicial process), and sentence (for Christians, the sentence of mercy rather than iron justice—at least in principle) form the bases for his substantial chapters.

Given the limitations of the evidence, the argument remains powerfully suggestive and should and will shape discussion of subsequent and related issues such as penance (sacramental and otherwise), purgatory, and episcopal authority. Uhalde is learned, lucid, and persuasive.