부산대학교 도서관

Thirty years after the Constantinian turn, which had amplified the emperor’s power in the church, leading bishops feared that provincial bishops and dogmatic opponents could gain the emperor’s attention and favour. To secure their own influence, resolutions regulating the bishops’ contacts with the emperor were passed at councils in Antioch and Serdica. In the first step, this paper attempts to reconstruct the motivations and objectives of the bishops. Subsequently, hypotheses are formed about the preferences of the emperors, who were directly affected by the regulations. Were the regulations (particularly in the west) directed against the power of the court, as many scholars think? Finally, in a case study devoted to Athanasius of Alexandria, we will examine whether these regulations took hold in imperial and ecclesiastical practice and how their observance and disregard were staged literarily. In this way, norm, practice, and representation will be brought together to form an overall picture that promises to shed new light on the relationship between church and state in both the east and west of the Roman Empire.