Hierarchy, Bishops and Leadership in the Church
by Stephen Parsons, Surviving Church:
A few years ago, I was giving a paper on Joan of Arc. The details of that talk are not important here, except for one point I made. Joan’s command of an army to fight the English around the city of Orleans in the early 1430s was an exceptional event. Socially she was of fairly humble stock, certainly not officer class. Her authority to command soldiers had to be given to her and supported by someone who actually had the legal/feudal power to occupy a leadership role. Those who had this were always the ones with noble or aristocratic connections. They occupied places within the fixed hierarchy which was built into the whole of mediaeval society. Allowing a person of humble roots to take command of soldiers was highly unusual and it is this event which conveys to us something of the remarkable impact that Joan made on her contemporaries and the soldiers she commanded.
The word hierarchy is a Greek word. Some of the thinking about the idea of rank and hierarchy in both church and state can be linked back to two 5th century Greek works attributed to an anonymous writer known to us as the Pseudo-Dionysius. This writer, deeply affected by Platonic ideas, saw the world as a fixed order emanating from God. At the top were various orders of angels. Lower down, where these orders became visible in our world, we see the ranks of divinely imbued ecclesiastical orders of bishops. priests, deacons and monks. By extension, later writers saw kingship as belonging to this same priestly hierarchy. Elements of this thinking, that make the coronation rite into a kind of episcopal consecration, can still be found in our contemporary coronation liturgies. Such ideas also fed into feudal notions which saw the ranks of society as being irrevocably fixed, with kings, bishops and feudal lords all occupying exalted places within a hierarchy of being. Echoes of this thinking can also be found in the children’s hymn from Victorian times. The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate…
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