A new legal cosmos : late Roman lawyers and the early medieval church

Abstract

The idea that a knowledge of Roman legal techniques would lead to a correct understanding of Christian Scripture, and thence to orthodox belief and practice, belongs to the age of Justinian. One reason why Roman law appears in early Christian writings is because early Christian writers used Roman law and Roman legal institutions in everyday contexts. The chapter focuses on a specific example: the imperial grant of permanent 'defenders' (advocates) to Christian churches, made in response to a planned and co-ordinated initiative from a group of early fifth-century North African ecclesiastics. It briefly describes the late Roman imperial law and its cosmological context. Christian, legal cosmos in which the 'saints' function as privileged cosmic actors–their earthly judgments underpinned by their participation in the Final Judgment to come. On a cosmological scale, heretics were to be 'eliminated like a poison from humanity'.