O'Donnell, 'Caesarius of Arles:  The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9501
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9501-o'donnell-caesarius

@@@@95.1.5, Klingshirn, Caesarius of Arles

William E. Klingshirn.  Caesarius of Arles:  The Making of a
Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul.  Cambridge Studies in
Medieval Life and Thought.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University
Press, 1994.  ISBN 0-521-43095-X.  Pp. xxii, 317.
  Reviewed by James J. O'Donnell -- University of Pennsylvania

  The Gallo-Roman society of late antiquity has every claim to
be one of the most admirable and successful of ancient
Mediterranean communities.  Alone of Latin-speaking communities
it rivaled the cultured prosperity of Asia Minor.  Of all western
provinces it absorbed the "barbarian" invasions with the most
aplomb and managed the greatest continuity of society and culture
into the middle ages.  For a long time, modern nationalist
history distorted its history by fitting it into the history of
"France", but in the last generation a hardy international band
of Gallo-Roman scholars has begun to exploit the remarkable
documents that survive.
  Klingshirn has chosen as his point of departure a figure of
considerable power, the bishop Caesarius of Arles who dominated
south Gallic Christian politics throughout his tenure of that
bishopric from 502-542.  The last biographies of Caesarius are
almost a hundred years old and antedate Germain Morin's edition
of the literary remains.  (The particular challenge is that
Caesarius was an assiduous student of the sermons of Augustine,
and there survive manuscript collections of sermons which
intermingle works of Augustine, works of Caesarius, and works of
Augustine remodeled for reuse by Caesarius.  Morin's edition is a
landmark.)  The time was thus ripe in several ways for this
study.
  Title and subtitle clearly state that two different agenda are
pursued in these pages.  One is the refinement and enhancement of
the biographical portrait of its subject, the other is the
exploitation of the point of view thus won for re-interpreting
the history of Christianity in Caesarius' places and times.  The
two agenda are interwoven skillfully in these pages, which are
clearly written with an extensive erudition more or less lightly
borne.  The resulting volume is not a page-turner, but it is a
serious scholarly contribution that undergraduates can read with
profit as well.
  If we still have a mental picture of late antiquity c. 500 as
a fully Christian society, Caesarius is a good place to begin to
revise it.  The last generation has rediscovered just how long
and slow a process full Christianization of traditional societies
was.  Even in the cities, installing bishops, abolishing "pagan"
rites, and getting people to go to church was one thing; but
finding a new communal ethos and shaping a new culture was
another.  In the countryside, matters were altogether different
and penetration much slower.  Caesarius' sermons are eloquent
preachments, but a fair number of them contain the admonitions of
an irked cleric to his congregation to stay around for the
eucharist and not drift away after the rhetorical showpiece
sermon was over.  Bishop and congregation were not necessarily at
one in their sense of what was going on in that building on
Sunday morning.  If one did not have preconceived notions of
Christianity and strong feelings about it in hand (if, say,
Christianity had died out in about the tenth century), it is far
from clear how comprehensive a transformation one would be
inclined to see in this late antique society.  "What kind of a
Christian is the man who . . . drinks until he vomits and, after
he is drunk, gets up to dance and leap like a madman in
diabolical fashion, and sings shameful, bawdy, and wanton
verses?" asks Caesarius (<i>serm.</i> 16.3, quoted here at p.
198):  to Caesarius, obviously not a very good Christian; but
statistically speaking, his kind outnumbered Caesarius, and that
kind evidently thought his conviviality a sign of religious zeal. 
The great strength of this book is to dismantle a sequence of
historical inevitabilities (inevitable in that they really
happened this way) and to make them come alive as a series of
contingencies that need not have happened this way after all.
  What turns out to be most distinctively Christian about such a
society is the emergence of the specialist, the cadre of
professional Christians in the clergy and the monastic
communities; and what is most distinctively Christian about
Caesarius is the way he foreshadows the hortatory behavior of
later generations of medieval clergy in the behavior he
implicitly <i>accepts</i> precisely by the way he continues to
preach ineffectually against it.
  Caesarius was also alert to the politics and powers of his
day.  The church councils he managed were important in the
history of doctrine, but more importantly, he carried these off
in a political environment of some volatility.  In the course of
his time at Arles the dominance of the Visigoths was shaken in
warfare initiated by Franks and Burgundians with Byzantine
connivance, then replaced by the arrival of the largest power on
the western Mediterranean scene at the time, the Ostrogoths, in
508; and by the end of Caesarius' career, the Ostrogoths
themselves were in retreat before Byzantine invasions and the
Franks had finally succeeded to control of Arles.  Caesarius was
a deft representative of his community's interests through all
this period, negotiating not only the political shoals but also
the ecclesiastical reefs between powers of differing stripes of
Christian allegiance.  What emerges in the end is an impressive
portrait of a society and its leaders showing exceptional
resilience and resourcefulness through times that could have been
much more difficult than they were had affairs been conducted
more obtusely.
  In the end, the book succeeds at what it sets out to do, but
mild reservations may be expressed, if only to help us think
about how to continue in the line of studies like this.  The link
between biography and social history is a tenuous one; for a
variety of reasons, not least of them here Klingshirn's own
sophistication in forging that link, in this case the link does
not break.  But one last inevitability remains insufficiently
disturbed here:  to tell this story from the outset as a story
centered on Caesarius leaves us too cautiously centered on the
known and makes it harder to achieve a sense of the alternate
possibilities that were very much alive to contemporaries.  Oddly
enough, it is precisely Caesarius' success that is understood
least well by being taken for granted.
  There is further a question of how to handle evidence from
this period.  One of the most important sources is the life of
Caesarius written within a few yaers of his death by clerics who
knew him.  It is one of the best such "sources" from the period,
full of anecdote and detail written from first-hand experience. 
But of course it contains a fair number of stories that modern
readers dismiss out of hand:  Caesarius the wonder-worker is as
important a part of that narrative as Caesarius the diplomat. 
Further, it imposes a kind of biographical framework on the life
that we judiciously dismantle before using the data the document
contains.  We are less interested in Caesarius' visions, at least
for the purposes of this study, than his contemporaries were, and
so we leave such things chiefly for discussion in other settings
by scholars with different interests.  
  So far, so good, and a traditional, positivist approach to
such documents.  The problem is that a preliminary choice has
been made that is in the main alien to the text itself:  that is,
to privilege <i>this</i> text for reasons of its usefulness to
modern students and to dismiss as of less value many other texts
that contemporaries would have read side by side with it.  The
fifth and sixth centuries in southern Gaul and Italy were a
booming time for the production of "lives" of holy men.  Many of
those texts have not been printed in several hundred years,
because they fall short of our criteria of value as historical
sources:  fanciful lives of martyrs, translations from the Greek,
and so forth.  But the distinction we force that extracts a few
of these and promotes them as historical sources is one alien to
the time; the further subdivision of the texts themselves into
kernels of historic information and pious fluff distorts once
again.  
  This objection applies not only to the reports we use and what
we use them for, but it gets at the way lives were lived as well. 
A bishop who lived and wielded influence for a good long time in
that age was already the object of veneration and comparison by
his flock, or at least by some of his flock, and the way he lived
imitated the lives written of in texts around him and anticipated
the textualization of his own life afterwards.  We take too
easily for granted that these figures wrote and were written
about, and we have till yet made too little study of the way
Christian authority was created and maintained by the astute use
of texts.  The documents are not transparent.  Caesarius did not
merely deliver those sermons to parishioners skulking out the
door, for he also wrote and preserved them and meant for them to
be read and reused.  The <i>next</i> book about Caesarius should
be one that resists the temptation to create linear narrative (I
say this as one who has created his own share of linear narrative
about late antique writers), but begin with the thing that is in
the end <i>most</i> striking about him, that he comes with this
cloud of works by and about, this dossier of documentation, and
look closely at how that dossier's nature and structure
themselves offer a point of departure for illuminating the age. 
The last and in many ways the greatest miracle of Caesarius is
that we know so much about him; this should make us both admiring
and cautious.  Klingshirn's sober but in the end traditional
study of him and his times will shape Caesarian studies for a
generation at least, but it deserves as well to be questioned and
rewritten in search of a fuller, howbeit perhaps more
impressionistic and fragmentary, portrait.