The word ‘hierarchy’ can mean both status hierarchy and a hierarchy of command. The managerial hierarchy of a modern company is instrumental, not embedded in a system of meaning and values. Late Antique hierarchies of command were on the other hand integrated in the value system, but even so this hierarchy of power should be distinguished from status hierarchy, though the two were intertwined. Some societies have more hierarchy of the status sort than others. The Church of late Antiquity was on the high end of the hierarchy scale. There was a multiplicity of gradations of status within the clergy, as well as a sharp differentiation between clergy and laity.

The celibacy within marriage of the secular clergy may have been a response to the celibacy of monks, because monks were becoming prominent in Western Christianity in the fourth century. Originally lay, without clerical orders, their relation to the ordinary clergy, while not hostile, was complicated and problematic from the start. What happened when clerics became monks or vice versa, for instance? Dealing with the interactions of these two elites would be a central role of the papacy ever afterwards. In the early papal legislation we see the start of this mediating role.