Rome

After their initial failure to win support in Milan, the ascetic company turned to Damasus of Rome, Ambrose's most powerful colleague in the western episcopate, and a man who might be flattered by a strong appeal to his authority. Priscillian's Letter to Damasus was submitted to the Roman bishop—"you who are senior to all of us"—along with letters of communion from the clergy and laity of the churches of the three Spanish bishops. In the letter, as we have seen, Priscillian skillfully defends his orthodoxy and the legitimacy of his episcopacy, stressing that he has never been condemned by a council, and invoking the authority of a letter of Damasus "in which, in accordance with gospel laws, you had enjoined that nothing be decided against those absent and unheard." Priscillian emphasizes his preference for ecclesiastical rather than secular judgment in matters of faith and requests that Damasus call for the convening of an episcopal

council at Rome. Alternatively, suggests Priscillian, Damasus might use his influence to persuade the Spanish bishops to convene a council in their own territory. At such a council, Hydatius would be forced to substantiate his accusations, and Priscillian and his companions would be heard and judged fairly. Priscillian adds that Hydatius need not fear that Priscillian and his supporters would press charges against him.^[53]

Priscillian's attempt to clear himself fell on deaf ears—or rather, blind eyes. Severus notes briefly that Damasus refused to see the supplicants: Priscillian and his companions were "not even admitted into Damasus' sight."^[54] It is possible that Damasus, like Ambrose, had already been persuaded by Hydatius' claim that the Spanish bishops were Manichaeans. On the other hand, he may have been considerably less adamant in his judgment of the Spanish controversy. Jerome, who was closely associated with the Roman bishop in the years immediately following Priscillian's visit, still had a remarkably neutral opinion of Priscillian in 392, when he wrote from Palestine that, although Priscillian was accused by some of gnosticism, others considered him orthodox.^[55] Particularly if Jerome's comment at this point reflects views shared by Damasus a decade earlier,^[56] the Roman bishop's refusal to see Priscillian may have been motivated not so much by strong opposition to the Spanish ascetics as by the political concerns of his own position. Again, the paucity of our knowledge of Priscillian's visit to Rome is balanced by the relatively rich documentation of the local context that would have conditioned Damasus' response to Priscillian.

In Rome, as in Milan, the Arian controversy had created deep fissures in a Christian community that had long been characterized by extraordinary diversity, including in the late fourth century identifiable groups of Manichaeans, Donatists, and Luciferians, at the very least.^[57] Here too, conflicts increasingly took the form of struggles to claim the authority of the public sphere and, correspondingly, to represent the opposition as suspiciously privatized. Damasus' election following the death of Bishop Liberius had been secured only by a series of forceful acts of imperial intervention, which ended two years of bloody fighting between local ecclesiastical factions whose allegiances had crystallized around the remembered rivalry between Liberius and Felix, the latter appointed bishop of Rome during the period of Liberius' exile (355–58).^[58] Indeed, Damasus had not been the only man consecrated bishop of Rome in 366, and although his opponent Ursinus had finally been expelled from Rome in 368, both the letter of a synodal gathering in Rome in 378 and Ambrose's request for Ursinus' exile from Milan in 381 suggest that he was still actively agitating around the time of Priscillian's Italian visit.^[59] In this intensely

competitive context, Damasus was unlikely to support Priscillian at the risk of alienating such a crucial ally, or offering an advantage to so serious a rival as Ambrose, no matter how benign Damasus' assessment of Priscillian's position may have been.^[60] Nor could the Roman bishop afford to associate himself with a group of Spanish bishops whose asceticism and relationships with women left them vulnerable to the same privatized representation and accusations of sexual promiscuity with which Ursinus had attempted to discredit Damasus in 368, accusations that had seemingly resurfaced in the form of adultery charges as recently as 378.^[61]

In the context of such factionalized heterogeneity, facilitated by complex networks of patronage, within which diverse competing movements flourished, Damasus—himself a most skillful broker of patronage relationships—had moved to consolidate a more centralized episcopal authority, which aggressively constructed itself as both public and orthodox over against opponents who were correspondingly hereticized and privatized.^[62] As in the case of Ambrose, imperial support proved crucial to the solidification of Damasus' episcopal authority, and in 378 Gratian continued his father's policy of backing Damasus against Ursinus in Rome.^[63] But imperial rescripts provided just one buttress for the structure of episcopal authority. In Rome, as in Milan, topography proves particularly revealing of a bishop's explicitly public articulation of ecclesiastical authority through the liturgical and architectural manipulation of space. Damasus is credited with having transformed the face of Rome in the period of its "second Christian establishment" through a building program that included the erection of at least three churches and the beginnings of one or two more, as part of a campaign to replace the private architectural forms of the old Roman "community centers"—the domus ecclesiae of the original tituli —with ostentatiously public basilicas.^[64] Damasus' enhancement of the architectural space of the historic churches seems to have been matched by his development of the mobile liturgical practices that subsequently played a crucial role in linking Roman episcopal authority with the complex Roman Christian topography.^[65]

The events surrounding Damasus' episcopal ordination further suggest that his manipulation of the existing topography was as important as his role as builder in the articulation of an explicitly public episcopal authority. When in 366 Ursinus was consecrated bishop in the Basilica of Julius, Damasus moved immediately to occupy Rome's cathedral, the sumptuous Lateran basilica—a product not of the "second" but of the "first Christian establishment" in Rome under Constantine.^[66] It was in the Lateran that Damasus was consecrated soon thereafter, thus choosing to make his audacious bid for the episcopacy from a building whose very

architecture, setting, and history provided a metaphor for the ambiguous and complex process by which the Christian community and its leadership was moving to claim the public sphere. An unmistakably public edifice, the church founded by Constantine yet rose startlingly and somewhat incongruously from the midst of an upper-class residential neighborhood at the edge of Rome, on the site of a private villa formerly owned by Constantine himself.^[67] The particular juxtaposition of the public and private architecture of the Lateran and its setting seems to mirror visually the social rise of the episcopal "seat" from private into public space under Damasus' leadership, while also hinting at the possibility that the bishop's locus of authority remained, after all, just one more Christian domus among so many potential competitors in Rome; indeed, we have seen that his rivals' jibes at Damasus' "womanizing" emphasize precisely Damasus' private networks of influence. If it was Constantine's power that initially defined the Lateran's publicity, imperial power continued to provide not only a direct source but also the closest analogue for the aggressively public construal of the authority of a Roman bishop whose own building projects harked back to the classical style of the period of the first Augustus.^[68]

This brief glimpse into the historical context of Damasus' episcopacy provides a meaningful context—if not an "explanation"—for the Roman bishop's refusal to give Priscillian a hearing. Like both Ambrose of Milan and Delphinus of Bordeaux, Damasus struggled to maintain his authority over a diverse and factious Christian community. Like Ambrose and perhaps also Delphinus, he moved to strengthen his position both by monopolizing control of the church's public space and by enhancing the authority of that space through the skillful manipulation of architecture, ritual, and rhetoric. Here his strategies aligned him more closely with Hydatius than with Priscillian. Priscillian's own more private and ascetic techniques of self-authorization had been effectively turned against him through the accusation of Manichaeism. "Not even admitted into Damasus' sight,"^[69] he now found himself further damagingly privatized by being denied visibility on the public stage of the Roman church.