Macarius discovered in Jerusalem

The original great relic was the “true cross” that the bishop Macarius discovered in Jerusalem in the fourth century, excavating it at the behest of the emperor Constantine. It proved a friable discovery, for the first sighting of a relic from the cross in another land dates from as early as 359, in the north African city of Sitifis (now Setif). In 540, another piece of the cross protected the city of Apamea against a Persian invader, so successfully that the story was told far and wide and soon Justin II had the relic transferred to Constantinople. The emperor Maurice used a golden lance containing a fragment of the cross when he went campaigning in the Balkans in the 590s, and Heraclius did likewise when he went out to fight the Persians in 622, as part of a campaign to recapture the remains found in Jerusalem of the one and only true cross. Down to the present day in the Roman church, the consecrated altar of any church is required to have a saint’s relic embedded in it.

Earliest Christianity

The buildings and rites of Christianity were traditionally Roman as well. Earliest Christianity is reported to us as a thing of people and common meals, with leaders but not clergy and homes but not architecture. Rituals and the priests to manage them emerged early enough for Tertullian (c. 200) to have to defend Christianity against salacious rumors of cannibalism and sexual orgies carried on behind closed doors. (One story had it that the Christians tied dogs to the candlesticks, then startled them into knocking over the candlesticks, thus dousing the lights and providing a cover of darkness in which brother was expected to fornicate with sister.) Architecture emerged later, with respectability, and the buildings of Christianity departed from their models, the ancient temples, in several ways. But a religion of priests, rites, and looming handsome buildings is something that Jesus practiced in moderation and criticized firmly, occasionally without moderation. He would have recognized the Christianities of 500 and 600 for what they were, and perhaps not disowned them.

Those puritanical bishops who emerged in the fifth and sixth centuries, men like Martin of Braga, who kept trying to water down or eradicate customs they knew were marked by the old religious ways, represented something genuinely new, a wave of the future that could still, with some difficulty, connect itself to the message of Jesus and the distinctly Christian past. They were the true men of the book, joined in their textual obsessions by the men of monasteries, whose numbers now began to explode personal tours bulgaria.

Ambrose and Augustine

As late as 400, most bishops and churchmen were of modest social and educational background, from the periphery of imperial culture. At that time, figures such as Ambrose and Augustine already foretold the future, in which the textual practices of the imperial bureaucracy became the order of the day within established Christianity. There would be more copies of scripture and more readers, but that meant there were also more books written about scripture, and the library of the writings of the venerated “fathers of the church” began to hedge the Christian past with contemporary authoritative interpretation. Knowing scripture alone was no longer enough.

The Christian library of theology would be accompanied by the Christian bureaucracy of ecclesiastical administration, and never more so than in the oldest home of bureaucracy, Rome itself. By the time of Pope Gregory I, the administration of the papal household and office had aligned itself almost perfectly to the hierarchical structure of Roman imperial government. A complete bureaucratic structure of offices and documents grew up and flourished. The simple Christian bishop had once spoken to an audience within the sound of his own voice, but now the powerful Christian patriarch in Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, or Alexandria wrote to an audience far beyond his ken, and expected his words to be taken seriously.

We can even see the textualization of charisma in the church building itself, when someone like Augustine would have stenographers trained as the Roman government had trained them sitting by his side to take down every word of his sermons, and would send authorized copies to selected friends. In the fifth century we have the story of Sidonius as bishop in Clermont going into church one day only to have the libellus (a small folded piece of writing) on which he had written the prayers for the day snatched from his hand by a prankster.14 The account praises the bishop for carrying off the ceremonies as if nothing had happened, thereby indirectly con-firming that premeditation and a prepared text were by now the expected supplements for divine inspiration. A century later, great bishops celebrating the Mass were surrounded by books, probably four in all, handled by different minor clergy: one for scriptural readings, one for prayers, one for songs, and one for stage directions for managing the comings and goings around the altar.