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<p>Among the numerous commitments late ancient Christians throughout the Roman Empire
shared with their non-Christian neighbors was a preoccupation with justice. Not only
was the latter one of the celebrated characteristics of God, the New Testament had
charged Christians, particularly those who served as bishops or elders, with ensuring
and maintaining justice in their communities from the tradition's very origins. In
the early fourth century, this aspect of episcopal responsibilities had received an
unexpected boost when the Emperor Constantine not only recognized bishops' role in
intra-Christian conflict resolution, but expanded their judicial capacity to include
even outsiders in the so-called audientia episcopalis, the bishop's court. </p><p>Christians
had, of course, never resolved the question of what constituted justice in a vacuum.
Yet bishops' increasing integration into the sprawling and frequently amorphous apparatus
of the Roman legal system introduced new pressures as well as new opportunities into
Christian judicial discourse. Roman law could become an ally in a minister's exegetical
or homiletical efforts. Yet it also came to intrude into spheres that had previously
regarded themselves as set apart from Roman society, including especially monastic
and clerical communities. The latter proved to be particularly permeable to different
shades of legal discourse, inasmuch as they served as privileged feeders for episcopal
sees. Their members were part of the Christian elites, whose judicial formation promised
to bear disproportionate fruit among the laity under their actual or eventual care.
This dissertation's task is the examination of the ways in which Christians in these
environments throughout the Latin West at the turn of the fifth century thought and
wrote about justice. I contend that no single influence proved dominant, but that
three strands of judicial discourse emerge as significant throughout these sources:
that of popular philosophical thought; that of biblical exegesis; and that of reasoning
from Roman legal precept and practice. Late ancient Christian rhetoric consciously
and selectively deployed these threads to craft visions of justice, both divine and
human, that could be treated as distinctively Christian while remaining intelligible
in the broader context of the Roman Empire.</p>
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