Roman bishops figure prominently in the history of penance. In particular, their letters, and those involving other Roman clergy (most notably during the original Novatianist controversy) as authors, are important sources for penitential thought and practice from the third through the sixth centuries. Scholars generally understand most of this evidence to have been written in reaction to various sorts of rigorists thriving in Rome itself or drawing attention to their activities elsewhere. Consequentially, analyses of the epistolary material, especially in the fourth and fifth centuries up to Leo the Great, tend to focus on defining the terms of conflict and mining them for sacramental practices. Far less attention has been given to semantic usage or rhetorical strategies within the letters. As uneven and fragmentary as the evidence is, this paper intends: first, to situate the language of penance used in the Roman episcopal letters against prior and contemporary penitential literature in order to better assess its novelty or otherwise; this leads to the suggestion that whether or not actual Luciferians, Novatians, and others in the late fourth century were causing a commotion about penance in reality might have been immaterial to the motivations and tactics behind some of the Roman evidence (including here for example some of Ambrosiaster’s orations); third, this is because popes, like many other Christian writers, were most accustomed to discussing penitential theology in narrative forms, above all stories either as conversion stories or forensic debates with heretics. In sum, this paper will argue that semantic and narrative habits associated in other contemporary literature to do with penance was also active in episcopal letters, which fact may in some cases temper our reading of them as the surviving side of actual debates. They are as important to understanding the cultural and literary history of penance as its doctrinal and sacramental formation.
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