The Late-Roman African Church

The Christianity of Roman North Africa in the fourth century — the most thoroughly Latin Church of the West, heir to Tertullian and Cyprian, marked by an intense martyr-cult and a rigorist conception of the Church’s purity, and torn by the Donatist schism that had split the province for nearly a century before Augustine became a bishop within it. It was also the seedbed of Manichaeism in the West, the dualist religion that would capture the young Augustine for nine years. This file sets the ecclesial and religious landscape into which Augustine was born and which he would spend his episcopate confronting.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; “Blessed Augustine”)

A Latin Church on Roman Soil

Roman Africa — the provinces stretching west from the coast of modern Tunisia across Numidia (eastern Algeria) toward Mauretania — was by the fourth century one of the wealthiest and most populous regions of the Western Empire, the granary of Rome and the home of a dense network of cities (Brown 2000, ch. 1). Its Church was the oldest Latin-speaking Christianity of which we have substantial record. While the Church of Rome itself was still largely Greek-speaking in the second century, the African Church produced the first great body of Christian literature in Latin: the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs of 180 — the earliest dated Latin Christian document — records African Christians condemned at Carthage (Chadwick 1986, ch. 1).

Out of this Church came two figures whose stamp on African Christianity Augustine could never escape. Tertullian of Carthage (c. 155 – c. 220), the first major Latin theologian, gave the Latin West much of its theological vocabulary — trinitas, persona, substantia — and bequeathed it a rigorist, combative temper (Chadwick 1986, ch. 1). Cyprian of Carthage (bishop c. 248–258, martyred under Valerian), whose On the Unity of the Catholic Church and whose letters made him the classic African authority on the Church and its bishops, taught that “outside the Church there is no salvation” (salus extra ecclesiam non est, Cyprian, Epistle 73.21) and that there is no valid baptism outside the one Church (Cyprian, On the Unity of the Church 6; Frend 1952, ch. 9). Both the catholic Augustine and his Donatist opponents would claim Cyprian as their father — a fact that lies at the root of the Donatist controversy.

The Cult of the Martyrs and the Rigorist Temper

African Christianity was shaped to an unusual degree by the memory of persecution and the cult of the martyrs. The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas (203) — the diary of a young Carthaginian matron martyred in the arena, one of the most vivid documents of the early Church — fixed the martyr at the center of African devotion (Brown 2000, ch. 1; Frend 1952, ch. 1). The great persecutions, above all the Diocletianic persecution of 303–305, were a living memory in Augustine’s youth, and the shrines of the martyrs (memoriae) were the focus of an exuberant popular piety that Augustine as a bishop would labor to discipline.

From this martyr-cult flowed a particular conception of the Church: the Church as the company of the pure, the ecclesia of the holy, sharply divided from a hostile world. The cardinal African anxiety was the question of the lapsi — those who, under persecution, had handed over the Scriptures (the traditores, “traitors”) or offered sacrifice. Cyprian’s generation had already faced the question of how to readmit the lapsed; the Diocletianic persecution reopened it with new force. The rigorist instinct — that a Church compromised by traditores was no Church, and that sacraments administered by them were void — would become the engine of the Donatist schism (Frend 1952, ch. 1; on Augustine’s later answer, see Against the Donatists).

The Donatist Schism

By the time of Augustine’s birth in 354 the African Church had been divided for more than forty years. The schism arose out of the Diocletianic persecution. In 311 Caecilian was consecrated bishop of Carthage by, among others, Felix of Aptungi, who was alleged to have been a traditor during the persecution. A rigorist party, holding that consecration by a traditor was invalid, repudiated Caecilian and elected a rival, soon succeeded by Donatus, from whom the movement took its name (Frend 1952, chs. 1–2; Brown 2000, ch. 19). The Donatists held that the catholic (“Caecilianist”) Church had defiled itself by communion with traditores and was no longer the true Church; that the true Church was the pure remnant they constituted; and that sacraments administered outside that pure Church — including baptism — were void and must be repeated for those entering it (Frend 1952, ch. 9).

The dispute was referred to the Emperor and adjudicated against the Donatists at a synod in Rome (313) and the Council of Arles (314), and again by Constantine himself; but the schism did not heal — it hardened (Frend 1952, ch. 11). By Augustine’s day the Donatists were not a fringe but, in many parts of Numidia, the majority Church, with their own hierarchy, their own martyrs, their own theology, and at their fringe the violent Circumcellions, roving bands who attacked catholic clergy (Brown 2000, ch. 19; Frend 1952, ch. 15). The schism was as much a social and regional phenomenon — Punic- and Berber-speaking inland Numidia against the more Romanized coast — as a theological one (Frend 1952 advances this reading; the social interpretation is itself debated [Disputed: Frend (1952) reads Donatism substantially as a movement of Berber and rural social protest; later scholars including Brown (2000) and Maureen Tilley (1997) emphasize that it was first and last a religious movement of African ecclesiology and martyr-piety, and caution against reducing it to social grievance]).

This was the Church into which Augustine was born and in which, at Hippo, he would become a bishop — a Church whose deepest internal question was the nature of the Church itself and the validity of its sacraments.

Manichaeism in the West

The fourth-century African religious world held more than catholic and Donatist Christians. It also held the Manichees. Manichaeism was a self-consciously universal religion founded by the Persian prophet Mani (c. 216 – c. 276), who taught a thoroughgoing cosmic dualism: two eternal, opposed principles, Light and Darkness, Good and Evil, locked in conflict, with the material world the product of their mixture and the soul a fragment of trapped Light yearning for liberation (Chadwick 1986, ch. 2; Brown 2000, ch. 5). The Manichees presented themselves as the true, rational Christianity — purified of the Old Testament, which they rejected as the work of an inferior god, and of the embarrassing anthropomorphisms of the Hebrew Scriptures — and they appealed to educated young men by promising knowledge (scientia) in place of mere faith (fides) (Brown 2000, ch. 5).

The religion was organized in two grades: the Elect, who kept a strict ascetic discipline of celibacy and a vegetarian diet (the better to release the particles of Light), and the Hearers (auditores), a wider circle of adherents who supported the Elect without the full discipline (Chadwick 1986, ch. 2; Brown 2000, ch. 5). It was as a Hearer that Augustine would spend nine years (see The Restless Heart). Manichaeism answered, for a time, the two questions that most pressed the young Augustine: the problem of evil (evil is a substance, an opposing kingdom, not the responsibility of the good God) and the offense of the Old Testament (which the Manichees simply discarded). His eventual rejection of both answers — evil as the privation of good rather than a substance, and the Old Testament read figurally as Scripture — would be among the deepest structures of his mature theology (see Against the Manichees).

A Province of Theological Energy

What this landscape gave Augustine was a Church of extraordinary theological energy and extraordinary fracture. North Africa had given Latin Christianity its language and its first martyrs; it had given it Cyprian’s ecclesiology; and it had given it, in the Donatist schism, a hundred-year argument about the purity and unity of the Church, and in Manichaeism a powerful rival claiming to be the true and rational faith. Every major preoccupation of Augustine’s episcopate — the nature of the Church and the validity of its sacraments, the goodness of creation against dualism, the relation of grace to a fallen will — grew in this African soil before it grew in him.

That Augustine would become the theologian who answered these African questions for the whole Latin West is the irony at the center of his life: the provincial from Thagaste, schooled in Carthage, became, by way of Milan and Hippo, the most influential mind the Western Church would produce. But he began as a son of this fractious, fervent, deeply Latin African Church, and never wholly ceased to be one.

References

Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Brown, Peter. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. New ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. (Chs. 1, 5, 19 on Roman Africa, Manichaeism, and Donatism.)
Chadwick, Henry. Augustine: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. (Chs. 1–2 on the African Church and Manichaeism.)
Cyprian of Carthage. On the Unity of the Catholic Church and Letters. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 5. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1886.
Frend, W. H. C. The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952.
Tilley, Maureen A. The Bible in Christian North Africa: The Donatist World. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997.
The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas. Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 3.