Local, provincial, or ecumenical councils offered rare opportunities for bishops and other clergy members to weigh in on normative practice and establish precedents for ecclesiastical polity. While it remains debatable whether councils were effective in prescribing (or proscribing) Christian conduct and beliefs – be they among the heady echelons of clergy members or among the vast majority of laypeople – they nevertheless offer precious windows into which matters Christian leaders considered most urgent and immediate. Conciliar canons from late antiquity, and any historical period, resound with the bias and agenda of the dominant majority, and so treating them as windows through which modern readers can see what religious life was like “on the ground” for everyday Christians is problematic at best. By design, the canons convey the voice of the victors, so figuring out objections to them can be a challenge – and we can be sure that alternatives to the conciliar decisions existed. What conciliar canons do provide, then, is an indication of debates that raged among Christian groups in particular localities – debates about theology, clerical authority, communal organization and identity, ritual performance, and ascetic behavior.

Celibacy is a strong theme in the earliest papal legislation and it is connected with both kinds of hierarchy. The connection with status hierarchy is strongest as celibacy marked off the deacons, priests, and bishops from lower levels of clerical status, but the ‘celibacy line’ is also linked to command hierarchy, as deacons, the first level of hierarchy of which celibacy was required, were key figures in the government of episcopal churches, notably at Rome, where they were more powerful than priests. The clerical celibacy of late Antiquity is a different sort from that of the eleventh-century Gregorian Reform. In the second half of the fourth century the Roman Church began to enforce the rule that clerics should give up sex if they wanted to be promoted to deacon, though they would not separate from their wives (below which there were a series of levels where clerics could be sexually active with their wives). This celibacy rule may have arisen to help the ordinary clergy keep up with monastic asceticism, but its rationale and function was to mark out the separateness of those who came closest to the Eucharist.