Pious and Impious Christian Rulers According to Egyptian Historiography and Hagiography: A First Survey of the Evidence

The role of Athanasius, as both a historical character (exiled by the first Christian emperor, Constantine) and a writer able to select documents and create stories about himself and other historical actors, has been emphasised because his influence extends over the centuries and in different contexts thanks to the images created by him and his statements about the relationship between church and political power. Athanasius’ model of writing history and personal defense exerted its influence on the HEpA and Timothy Aelurus’ historical work. The latter too appears affected by Athanasius’ style of polemics, but also as a creator of new images and ideas, in turn reworked in later literature. One such motif is the contrast between the happy times of Cyril of Alexandria and Emperor Theodosius the Younger when church and state were cooperating, and the dark times of the Emperor Marcian and Leo’s Tome, connected to the arrival of the Antichrist, when passions for money, career, and sex corrupted the exercise of the public power. At the same time, hagiographic texts such as the Life of Dioscorus and the Panegyric of Macarius placed emphasis on the stories concerning the representatives of the political power, such as the “adulterous” relationship between Marcian and Pulcheria, or the servile attitude on the part of some bishops towards the emperors. These texts connect the first phase of Alexandrian historiography to the next one. A second phase in the conceptualisation of the past begins with the redaction of the Coptic History of the Church (dated to the sixth century), which gives a good indication of the evolving identity of the Egyptian church both in its internal structure and in its relationship with the empire, that, in spite of everything, remained its fundamental political framework, not questioned by any form of nationalism. The text also pays attention to the irrational side of power, which is expressed especially through the political and ecclesiastical action of women like Eudoxia and Pulcheria and contrasted by Theodora who, according to some historical accounts, was sensitive to the holiness of the “orthodox” bishops. This is the period in which a new church was born, separate from the Chalcedonian one often supported by the empire. Of course the conception of political power is deeply affected by the motif of Christological orthodoxy: the emperor must be “orthodox” if he wants to be a good emperor. But the choice of the Roman Empire was to gradually embrace the Chalcedonian heresy; Marcian and Justinian were the main promoters of this line of religious policy. The author (authors) of Coptic History of the Church collected Coptic homilies and traditions about cultic establishments, while the references to real documents are rare. In this late production, references to fourth century emperors such as Constantine, Constantius, and Jovian allowed Egyptian historians to express additional traits of the ideal good emperor. He is not only the one who destroys pagan cults and supports the church against heresy, punishing deviations, but also the one who, through his political and social mediations, favours the expansion of ecclesiastical structures on the territory and their urban visibility by supporting the cult in all its forms, and strengthening social cohesion among the different civil and ecclesiastical actors. It should be questioned if the image of the emperor as “builder” answers only to late antique needs or is connected also to the new situation of Christians under the Arab rule, when the restoration of old churches, but above all the construction of new ones, could become a difficult question, to which some homilies tried to find different solutions.