Plebs in the church

Thanks to Tim Enloe for getting me a copy of David Rankin’s 2004 article, “Class Distinction as a Way of Doing Church: The Early Fathers and the Christian Plebs” ( Vigiliae Christianae 58). He examines the way the terminology and orders of Roman society were imported into the church.

As early as Clement of Rome, for instance, the word laos is being used to refer to the “laity,” rather than to the people as a whole:

“For him the Christian clergy are the ecclesiastical equivalent of the Roman ordo (though he does not say so explicitly) and the non-clergy, the laikoi , the laity, the Roman plebs. At 41,1 he again speaks of each member of the church being ‘pleasing to God in his own rank’ and employs the Greek tãgma as the equivalent of the sense of ordo as ‘class.’ At 44,3 Clement speaks of the ‘eminent persons . . . ’ beyond the time of the original Apostles, who appointed those who were to have oversight (bishops) of the church. The term honestiores would not have been out of place here.”

Rankin cites Juvenal’s satirical description of the patronage system: “Juvenal speaks of the impoverished person in Rome hurrying along in
his toga before dawn to the house of his benefactor. He speaks bitterly, too, of the fact that he and his fellow clientes are forced by the vagaries of life into accepting a cake at a dinner party given by their patron and being thereby ‘compelled to pay a tip [sc. to a slave] and add to a well-dressed servant’s property.’ He also paints a picture of clients rushing to their patron’s home to collect a hand-out meal which must then be kept warm on the way home by their own slaves! A picture indeed of a patronage system which brought for those at the bottom end of the social scale certainly some measure of social and political protection and security but only at the cost of considerable inconvenience and personal humiliation.”

And he sees Clement reinscribing this system into the church’s life. Instead of emphasizing the mutual dependence of all members of the body on each other, Clement suggests that the poor of the church are dependent on the rich and, apparently, have nothing much to contribute to the welfare of the wealthy: “‘Let the rich person bestow help on the poor and the poor give thanks to God that God gave him one to supply his needs’ (38,2). The aid of the wealthy is not then given gratuitously but appears to assume that the one aided will in turn pray for his or her benefactor. This is the patronage system of Rome in its most primitive expression, as essentially a quid pro quo .”

In the Apostolic Traditions , Hippolytus replicates “the
exercise of the role of the Roman patronus in the cena dominica . This takes place in the context of an agape meal held in a private home and refers to a relationship of mutual obligation—the act of generosity on the part of one being reciprocated by the prayers of the others—between the householder as host and the invited participants: ‘And at every act of offering let the one who offers remember him who invited him, for to this end he petitioned that they might come under his roof’ (26,2).”

He adds: “In his study Bobertz deals with what he recognises as ‘the maze of social relations surrounding the description of privately sponsored Lord’s Suppers (chs. 26-29), and especially the role and status of the sponsors of those suppers, local patrons of the Roman Christian community.’ These cenae dominicae were evidently dinners provided for the local Christian community and paid for by wealthier members of that community. They demonstrate for Bobertz the hierarchical structure of the social environment in which the church found itself and the influence of that environment on personal relationships within the community, although Bobertz does make clear that his use here of the terms ‘patrons’ and ‘clients’ need not carry
the full import of the formal relationships found in Roman society.”

At least from the time of Hermas, the Roman notion of paterfamilias was being applied to church leaders, bishops and abbots.

Rankin summarizes his conclusions: “The implications of the translation of these Roman notions into the very life of the church
for the ordering of the Christian community are far-reaching. The distinction of ordo and plebs translated into the church, the movement from a notion of the laos as the whole people of God to that of an inferior, utterly subordinate laity, transformed a de facto and pragmatic organisational distinction or even separation of roles into a ecclesiastical one. That of patronus and cliens places the provision of ministerial services within the personal ‘gift’ of the patron and this had enormous implications for the administration of the sacraments, for pastoral relationships and liturgical actions and so on.”

The sacramental import of this shift is particularly noteworthy. Could the machinery of medieval Catholic sacramentalism have developed without this prior shift in ecclesiology, if the priest had never been conceived on the model of a Roman patron?

Rankin’s article is a sad, but unsurprising, reminder of how quickly, and how frequently, the new society is corrupted by the structures and orders of the old.