evidence for military chaplains attached to units of the Roman army. Augustine observed that Christ did
not ask the centurion in the gospel to find a new career. But he might have felt strong misgivings had he
seen the order of service prescribed for Toledo cathedral about 500 'when the Visigothic king goes forth
to war'.
A more plausible answer than pacifism (or what Gibbon memorably called the Christian preaching of
patience and pusillanimity) is that the Church provided an alternative society with a rival career structure
and different loyalties. Warnings in ascetic texts betray awareness that bishoprics could be sought for
reasons not exclusively religious. The Church competed for the available talent. It drew into its power
structure men ambitious, not necessarily for themselves, but for the cause they served, who might well
have been useful soldiers or administrators or traders or manufacturers increasing the material wealth of
society instead of channelling it into poor relief or noble basilicas like the Ravenna churches. Even this
answer to the question evidently rests on a concealed value judgement. In the second century Celsus
thought the Church had too few educated people ready to accept public office. Was it that in the fourth
and fifth century it employed too many?
The evidence of the time shows that the churches of late antiquity were desperately understaffed.
Successive north-African councils deplored the shortage of clergy. Those whom they did have seem
from Augustine's correspondence to be altogether unremarkable. There are obvious exceptions. Ambrose
left a provincial governorship to become bishop at Milan, where his sermons instructed Valentinian II in
his duties. He served as special envoy in matters of state. In that age bishops were often so used; there
was an assumption that as negotiators they might be successful because they had divine aid. The
millionaire Paulinus sold most of his estates to retire to Nola to write religious verse in honour of St
Felix. His renunciation was not well regarded by all Christians; when he asked for a papal audience to
tell the glad tidings, he was abruptly refused.
One could move from high positions in the world to become a bishop, but it was not socially proper to
move in the reverse direction. In late antiquity bishops did not, like their successors in the late Middle
Ages or the Renaissance, combine spiritual office with major secular administration. It was thought
highly unusual when Cyrus, the patriarch who surrendered Alexandria to the Arab invaders in 641,
combined his patriarchate with the post of prefect of Egypt. He wore one shoe with the insignia of the
patriarch, the other with those of the prefect-the ancient equivalent of wearing two hats.
There is one unquestionable respect in which conversion to Christianity brought to the administration of
the Empire complexities it would prefer to have done without. The Christians tended to quarrel about
ever more refined points of dogma and to take their disagreements to the crucial point of suspending
eucharistic communion. That meant a denial that those with whom one refused to hold communion were
part of the commonwealth of God; they were to be held as strangers and outsiders. From 311 until the
coming of Islam at the end of the seventh century the great Church of north Africa was split between
two rival groups, whose theological disagreement was enforced by rancour, by prohibitions on mixed
marriages, and by one side wholly rejecting the validity of orders and sacraments on the other side. In
the East also there were successive splinter-groups, some only small but others very substantial. The
followers of Nestorius flourished outside the Empire in Persia and across central Asia into China. At the