Why Legitimacy Requires Sacrifice: Church and State in Late Antiquity

Abstract

Legitimacy depends on agents signaling their independence of corrupting powers. This paper explores the transition of Christianity after its legalization in the Roman Empire by combining the literature on the club model of religion (Iannaccone, 1992) with the literature on religious legitimacy (Greif and Rubin, 2024). Religious freedom allowed the Christian church to grow, but church leaders were no longer independent of delegitimating worldly influence. The crisis of legitimacy threatened to break the church apart. Instead of endemic schisms, monastics, developed in the midst of the larger church. Monastic sects are able to credibly signal their own independence of worldly affairs making them impartial legitimating agents for bishops who could not make such credible signals by the nature of their occupation. The resulting institution is "two-tiered" where an ascetic sect of monastics legitimates the episcopal leadership. I explore this hypothesis with examples from the formative fourth to ninth centuries.

Keywords: religion, monasticism, sacrifice, commitment, Rome, Christianity, legitimacy, Constantine, Athanasius

JEL Classification: Z12, N33, N35, N43, N45