Pelagius I und der Primat Roms. Ein Beitrag zum Drei-Kapitel-Streit und zur Papstgeschichte des 6. Jahrhunderts by Florian Battistella (review)

This deceptively slim volume contains almost everything that any casual reader or specialist on the late antique episcopate of Rome needs to know about Pelagius I, who was pope during some of Rome's darkest days, from 556–561 ce.

The author, Florian Battistella, who trained at the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, now works on a government-funded project based at Tübingen entitled "Threatened Order: Societies under Stress." The purpose of this interesting project is to look at how extreme situations such as upheavals, revolutions, and disasters affect everyday life, on the basis that such situations can also lead to rapid change in social perception and behavior patterns. The participants work on modern threat scenarios such as the Arab Spring, the financial crisis, and the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima as well as examples from the late ancient world. Sub-projects such as that led by Mischa Meier (with Battistella as a collaborator) on threatened governments from 300–900 ce investigate the manner in which various social orders change, especially when facing threats to their very existence. With its emphasis on Pelagius' attempts to restore social order in the context of doctrinal and inter-ecclesial strife, this volume fits well into the larger Tübingen project.

Battistella builds on Kristina Sessa's identification of good household management as the guiding principle of papal activity in Late Antiquity (132). As he states in his conclusion: "The very virtues of maintaining order and religious impeccability within a domus were central to Pelagius' argumentation here analyzed. This statement applies to said virtues not only in the sense of being used as a means of staging Pelagius' own legitimacy, but also in use as arguments for effecting a certain action of the recipients of his letters" (192). Battistella's focus is very much on doctrinal and ecclesial management rather than on the exigencies of daily life in post-Gothic war Italy, a society that was breaking down after Justinian's largely failed attempt to restore Italy to Byzantine rule and whose leaders were struggling to come to terms with the new Merovingian rule in the mid-sixth century. Aristocratic Rome was certainly a threatened social order. After a brief introduction and literature review, as well as a treatment of the origins of the Roman pontificate, Battistella moves onto Pelagius and the Merovingians, and specifically his relationship with the diocese of Arles and with King Childebert I (chapter 4). In chapter 5, he treats the fall-out from the Three Chapters controversy, which had bedevilled the reign of his predecessor Vigilius. That pope had fallen foul of Justinian's attempt to secure church unity across the Empire by condemning the person and writings of Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and certain writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Ibas of Edessa, which seemed to support a "one-nature" Christology. Bishops of northern Italy, especially those of Aquileia, Liguria, Aemilia, Milan and the Istrian peninsula, joined forces to resist this imperial condemnation, first issued in 543. In council they separated themselves from communion with Rome in 553, when Vigilius was brow-beaten into accepting it after a three-years sojourn in Constantinople at the hospitality of the emperor. While still a deacon, and apocrisiarius for Vigilius in Constantinople, Pelagius had contributed his views on the controversy in the form of a tract opposing Justinian's condemnation of the three so-called "monophysites." Opinion is divided as to whether the tract (mentioned in Pelagius' ep. 80) is to be identified with the short work In Defence of the Three Chapters (CPL 1703), edited by Robert Devreesse in 1932. Battistella asserts that it is the same document, and not a later forgery or incorrect attribution (31 note 68).

When he came to be elected in 556, Pelagius had a public relations disaster on his hands. Barely anyone...