Chapter 5 - Fighting the Good Fight

Summary

Chapter 5 investigates the impact of prohibitions against fighting on clerical masculinity. It examines two clerical groups: those who acted violently but wished to remain clerics and those who abandoned their religious status. Both Western and Eastern canon law forbade clerical fighting, with an important difference: the Western Church put emphasis on bloodshed; the Eastern was more concerned with the clerics’ state of mind and the avoidance of anger. This meant that, in Romanía, outside of strict prohibitions against killing, there was more of an overlap in the exercise of moderate force. The situation was different for clerics who abandoned religious life. Eastern canon law insisted on strict religious/secular distinctions through a focus on vestments, but authors of histories accepted such shifts with little comment. In Romanía, religious status – and, as a result, one’s gender – could prove to be rather fluid throughout one’s life. The chapter ends with a case study focusing on Michael Chōniatēs’ Life of Niketas, the eunuch bishop of Chonai, who fought visible and invisible enemies. His example offers a limit case for how an ecclesiastic could show his masculinity while maintaining an attitude that was considered acceptable, and even ideal, for a clerical man within religious circles.