St Ambrose of Milan, the Roman See and the development of the church organization in Illyricum at the end of the 4th century

Abstract

The article is devoted to the problem of regional consolidation of the episcopate in the Late Antiquity. The author tried to show that such processes were developing at once in two interconnected, but fundamentally different planes: hierarchical, which implied primacy of some sees within a particular region, and “party”, associated with the division of the episcopate in the framework of the Arian controversy in small consolidated groups (“micro-parties”), coordinating their theological positions and church-political activities. At the same time, although the “party” mechanisms were often more effective in the conditions of church-political struggle, they could not, in principle, be translated into a normative plane, while hierarchical principles found some fixation in the ecclesiastical canons. After examining in detail the evidence of sources related to the relationship of St Ambrose of Milan and the Illyrian episcopate, the author came to the conclusion that these contacts fit rather into the “party” paradigm and were largely determined by the regional confrontation between Nicenes and Homoians. In this regard, the current idea about the struggle between Milan and Rome for the hierarchical subordination of the Illyrian Churches do not seem to be justified.