To be a preacher, a "sower of the Word of God", and
not to be a theologian,
was the job description of any late Roman bishop. Augustine was no exception.
It is his letters and sermons that take to the heart of his life as a Christian
leader in North Africa.
By Peter Brown
About the Author: The Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University, Peter Brown is one of the world’s foremost Augustinian scholars. Born in Ireland, he received his B.A. from New College, Oxford and was a Fellow of All Souls. He has lectured and taught at Oxford, the University of London, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Padua. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the British Academy, the Medieval Academy of America, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His publications include: Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (1967); The World of Late Antiquity (1971); The Making of Late Antiquity (1978); The Cult of Saints (1981); The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988); Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Towards a Christian Empire (1992); Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianization of the Roman World (1995); and The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000 (1996).
AUGUSTINE DIED on August 28, 430, as a Vandal army, commanded by King Genseric,
gathered outside the walls of Hippo, a North African sea-port (now
Bône/Annaba in modern Algeria), so as to besiege the city in which Augustine
had been bishop for all of 33 years. To the besieged, it seemed as if the utterly
unexpected disaster of the Vandal invasion of North Africa had destroyed Augustine’s
life’s work as a Catholic bishop. In the terrible months that preceded
and followed Augustine’s death, Possidius, bishop of Calama, worked briskly
to ensure that Augustine’s literary legacy, at least, would survive intact
for future ages. He worked his way through the library of Augustine, drawing
on a complete list of Augustine’s works, an Indiculum. This Indiculum
recorded not only the titles of Augustine’s formal works (as Augustine
himself had done, when he wrote his Rectractationes in 427). It also
included brief titles of the sermons and letters that lay, partly sorted into
little piles, on the library shelves. Possidius eventually attached this list
to the end of his Life of Augustine. In time of siege, scripta manent,
“what is written remains,” was Possidius’ motto. He even concluded
his Life of Augustine, somewhat surprisingly for a Christian bishop,
with a quotation from the gravestone of a pagan poet:
Traveller, do you know how a poet can live beyond the grave? You stand. You read this verse. It is I, then, who speak. Reading these lines aloud, your living voice is mine.
Yet, despite Possidius’ efforts, not all of Augustine’s “living
voice” would be heard, by all persons all the time, in subsequent centuries.
Augustine’s formal works had been carefully placed in order by Augustine
himself, in his Retractationes, and by Possidius, in the Indiculum
attached to the Life of Augustine. These formal, theological works were
regularly copied throughout the Middle Ages and were published, in their entirety,
in the great printed editions of early modern times. Our knowledge of Augustine
the theologian comes from them. But at the time, in his own lifetime, the letters
and sermons of Augustine were just as important for his activity as a Catholic
bishop. To be a preacher, a seminator verbi, a “sower of the Word
of God” to his congregation, and not to be a theologian, was the job description
of any late Roman bishop. Augustine was no exception. It is his letters and
sermons that take us to the heart of his life as a Christian leader in North
Africa. These letters and sermons were also listed in Possidius’ Indiculum.
But they were not copied as systematically or as regularly in later centuries.
The collection of letters and sermons that appeared in the printed editions
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represent only a proportion of those
which Augustine had originally written and preached. Although modern scholars
have used these, as the basis of their study of Augustine as a bishop, they
have always known this fact. They had before them all the formal works
of Augustine; but not all the letters and sermons. Many other sermons and letters
had appeared in the original list given in Possidius’ Indiculum.
Some of these were known through references, even through extracts, in medieval
works. But they had not been included in the printed editions. They still awaited
discovery.
But few scholars made great efforts to find any more letters and sermons of
Augustine. Augustine’s known works were sufficiently extensive to absorb
their attention. To look for more seemed a hopeless task. The libraries of Europe
contained well over fifteen thousand manuscripts of Augustine, most of them
copies of well-known works, in ugly, late medieval script. To find an entirely
new corpus of letters and sermons of Augustine among so many manuscripts was
as unlikely as finding a first edition of the works of Shakespeare in an ordinary
second hand book store. Yet, this is exactly what happened, in 1975 and, again,
in 1990.
The prolonged peace of Europe, combined with the phenomenal development of
computer technology, encouraged scholars to examine the manuscripts stored in
the libraries of Europe more intensively than ever previously. In 1975, Johannes
Divjak of Vienna (on mission from the Austrian Academy, to catalogue all manuscripts
of Augustine in European libraries) found a mid-fifteenth century manuscript
in the Bibliothèque Municipale of Marseilles. Produced in around 1440
for King René of Anjou, a rich but unfortunate monarch, the author of
a courtly novel in the best late medieval manner, The Story of a Heart Caught
by Love, the manuscript had been known, but had not been closely examined.
It was assumed that an elegant late medieval manuscript could hardly contain
any new work of an author as frequently copied as was Augustine. Hence the surprise
of Johannes Divjak when, on examining the text, he found that it contained,
added to a standard collection of Augustine’s letters, twenty nine other
letters, of which twenty seven (many of them very long) were utterly unknown.
Known now as the Divjak Letters, these twenty nine letters tell us in
great detail about hitherto unknown events and about the activities of Augustine
as a bishop in Roman North Africa in the last decades of his life: the longest
and most vivid of them range from between 419 and 428.
Yet again, in 1990, François Dolbeau perceived that an apparently uninteresting,
badly-copied manuscript of the late fifteenth century, recently catalogued in
the Stadtbibliothek of Mainz, contained groups of sermons known previously only
through titles in Possidius’ Indiculum and through Carolingian library
lists of sermons and a few, short extracts. They were first announced to the
learned world as the Mayence Sermons (from the French word for Mainz,
the place of their discovery) and are now known as the Dolbeau Sermons,
from their discoverer. One cluster of these sermons represents Augustine’s
preaching at Carthage in the spring and summer of 397—that is, in the crucial
year of the beginning of his career as a bishop, at a time when the Confessions
were already forming in his mind. The other group of sermons takes us to Carthage
and the little towns outside Carthage in the late winter and spring of 403-404,
at a time of urgent reform in Catholic worship combined with new Catholic aggression
against pagans and Donatists.
Let me give you an idea of what these sermons were like. One sermon was preached
on the occasion of the pagan feast of the Kalends of January, the Feast of the
New Year, in 404. It is 1546 lines long. What we have in this sermon is a faithful
stenographic record of Augustine preaching for more than two and a half hours.
The sermon takes us back in time to a world where Christianity was not yet dominant
in the Roman world. In 404, the Catholic Church was still struggling to define
itself against strong paganism in a great Roman city. The headlands of Carthage
were still guarded by shrines of Neptune. Classical statues still stood in all
the public places, and had remained objects of worship to pagans and of occult
fascination even to Christians. Intellectuals still viewed the prospect of conversion
to Christianity and the ritual of Christian baptism with evident distaste:
What! Shall I become a Christian like my serving woman—my ostiaria (we would say: my cleaning-lady)—and not a Plato, not a Pythagoras?
The Divjak Letters and the Dolbeau Sermons, I suspect, were copied
less frequently in the Middle Ages than were other letters and sermons of Augustine
precisely because of the qualities that make them so exciting to a modern historian.
They were not sermons and letters devoted only to the timeless verities of Catholic
theology, to which medieval scribes at any time and any place could relate.
Rather, they were rich in details of daily life and deeply rooted in the soil
of a very distant, fifth-century Africa. The monks and clergymen of northern
Europe, who still read and copied with zeal the formal, theological works of
Augustine, paid little attention to copying these vivid documents. They were
too full of details from a world that medieval Christianity had left behind.
As for Augustine himself, François Dolbeau, the discoverer of the Mainz
sermons, has found exactly the right words: to read such sermons, he says, is
an experience which can only be compared with
the emotion that one feels when a tape-recording brings back the voice of a long absent friend.
But what, exactly, is the tone of that voice?
Let us be clear on one point. It is not the voice of Augustine the philosopher
and only very occasionally of Augustine the theologian. It is not necessarily
the Augustine whom we would have wished to invite to a Center of Theological
Inquiry. It is, rather, the voice of Augustine the bishop, caught at three widely
spaced, but crucial moments of his career. In 397, we listen to Augustine when
he was the recently-consecrated bishop of Hippo as he preached, still as a comparative
newcomer, to the congregations of Carthage. In 404, rather, what we hear is
the ambitious reformer of Catholic piety and the upholder of a truly universal
and intransigent vision of Catholicism as the only true and natural religion
of mankind. Half a generation later, in the Divjak Letters, we are back
in Hippo. There we meet the old bishop facing, with rare patience and intellectual
tenacity, the problems created by his own eminence and by the evident weakness
of the Catholic Church, as it battled to control what had remained a deeply
profane, under-Christianized society, despite a century of official recognition
following the conversion of Constantine in 312. These problems came to him,
from all over the Mediterranean as well as from the uncontrolled countryside
of his own diocese, in a manner that he described to his friend Possidius, in
a poignant new letter of 419, as de tranverso hinc atque inde—“coming
unannounced from here, there and everywhere”—for the remainder of
his life.
Let us begin in the summer of 397. This was when Augustine was a new bishop.
Crowds flocked to him to hear his views. They wanted his opinion not only on
the issues that separated them from pagans and heretics. They wanted to hear
what he had to say on issues that Catholics were debating vigorously among themselves.
In the new Dolbeau sermons, we can see Augustine responding to these
questions with quite unusual openness and independence of mind.
On issues of Biblical interpretation, for instance, he maintained his own opinion,
in the face of commentators with as great a reputation for learning as Saint
Jerome.Yet, at the same time as he challenged the opinions of Jerome, at that
time the greatest authority of his age, he was prepared to admit that he, himself,
might also be wrong. The Word of God stood above the words of even the most
learned exegete—above Jerome, even above Augustine:
We who preach and write books, we write in a manner altogether different from the manner in which the canon of the Scriptures has been written. We write while we make progress. We learn something new every day. We dictate at the same time as we explore. We speak as we still knock for understanding . . . I urge your Charity, on my behalf and in my own case, that you should not take any previous book or preaching of mine as Holy Scripture . . . If anyone criticizes me when I have said what is right, he does me an injustice. But I would be more angry with the one who praises me and takes what I have written for Gospel truth (canonicum) than I would be with the one who criticizes me unfairly.
Augustine approached with similar openness of mind other issues on which Christian
opinion was divided. At the end of the fourth century, for instance, marriage
tended to be ignored by radical Christians. Celibate monks and virgins were
the heroes of the age. Married Christians seemed to be of little importance.
Once again, Augustine took care to distance himself from such widely popular
views. He pointed out that Paul himself, in his First Letter to the Corinthians,
had spoken at length on marriage. He had done so because he had thought that
marriage deserved so much attention. Marriage, Augustine insisted, was a full
part of the Christian life. It deserved as full a treatment as any other.
It may seem indecent to go on and on about such a topic . . . And what are we compared with the sanctity of Paul? Yet, there he goes. With pious humility, with healing words, Paul has entered human bedrooms.
Augustine would do the same. He would speak to his congregation about marriage
and even about sex in marriage. He made plain that he did so because he was
convinced that no aspect of the life of the Catholic congregation was beneath
the mercy of God; and that no human endeavor could be untouched by the action
of His grace. Augustine stressed this point, despite the popularity of monks,
virgins and unmarried clergy. He himself was now a member of that clergy, having
been converted to a life of celibacy by nothing less than the story of the great
Egyptian hermit, Saint Anthony. In these sermons, Augustine was determined to
make plain that the Catholic Church was not a body made up only of a spiritual
“elite” of celibate persons. Humble, married believers were just as
important to it as were the “stars” of the ascetic movement. The struggles
of ordinary Christians were not to be pushed to one side by the issues raised
by the shrill radical chic of the age.
We find the same attitude—I am tempted to say, a “democratic”
attitude—in his approach to the cult of the Christian saints. In 397, the
cult of the Christian martyrs was one of the most important features of the
Christian life of Carthage. Throughout that summer, Augustine preached at many
feasts of the martyrs. He brought his own, distinctive message to these occasions.
For his hearers, the festivals of the martyrs were the high points of their
lives. They were occasions marked by torchlight vigils in the warm summer night.
They were a time of glory, marked by the suspension of the ordinary—by
the chanting of songs, by the drinking of good wine, even by rhythmic dance.
The mood of happy popular celebration mirrored the manner in which God had miraculously
suspended, in the person of His servant the martyr, the grim laws of pain and
death. The laetitia—the frank high cheer and slightly drunken happiness—of
such a festival enabled the worshippers to participate, for a moment, in the
triumph of the martyrs. Martyrs were “super-stars”. They were not
to be imitated so much as enjoyed. Their deaths had been marked by a blinding
flash of supernatural power. The memory of these deaths, also, at the celebration
of their festival, brought, at the time, a touch of glory to the dull existence
of the average Christian. But this “glory” did not necessarily have
a place in their daily lives.
Augustine made clear that he did not see a martyr’s feast in such a way.
Already as a priest, his letters to his senior colleague, Aurelius of Carthage,
show a stern determination to remove the more exuberant elements from the laetitia,
the celebratory enjoyment, associated with such festivals—the wine, the
songs, the dancing. The Dolbeau Sermons of 397 remind us of the deeper
reasons for Augustine’s wish to reform Catholic practice. He wished to
lower the mood of excitement, associated with the Christian crowd’s desire
to participate in the triumph of the martyrs, so that the strong sense of the
inimitable, “other-worldly” glare of divine grace, associated with
their deaths, in the past, should not make the average Christian forget the
frequent, less dramatic, but no less spectacular, triumphs of God’s grace
in the present and in their own lives. If Augustine tried to make the feasts
of the martyrs less dramatic, it was because he wished to stress the daily drama
of God’s workings in the hearts of the average Christian. Martyrs were
the great “stars” of Christian piety. It was easy to believe that
the experiences of the martyrs were “out of this world,” and so that
they were not relevant to the daily life of the average Christian. Augustine
insisted, instead, that God’s grace was always present, and, so, that any
Christian, at any time, could be a “martyr” in his or her own way.
God has many martyrs in secret. We would not wish for a return to the persecution which our ancestors suffered at the hands of the authorities . . . But the world does not give up persecuting us. Sometimes you shiver with fever: you are fighting (like any martyr). You are in bed: it is you who are the athlete (of Christ).
We must remember that great pain accompanied much late Roman medical treatment;
and that everyone, Augustine included, believed that amulets, provided by skilled
magicians (many of whom were now Christians) did, indeed, protect the sufferer—but
at the cost of relying on supernatural powers other than Christ. Such powers
existed. Such amulets worked. To neglect them was like neglecting any other
medicine. But the Christian must not use them. Thus, for Augustine, to liken
a Christian sickbed to a scene of martyrdom was not an unreal or an exaggerated
comparison. He did so in order to bring a sense of the glory of God, celebrated
at long, hot feasts in the martyrs’ shrines scattered on the outskirts
of Carthage, into every Christian home. God’s grace was everywhere and
for every person.
These sermons were among the very first that Augustine preached outside Hippo
after he became bishop in 396.
By 404, the people of Carthage had heard Augustine for a further seven years.
They had not always liked what they heard. In 404, a further group of Dolbeau
sermons show the extent to which Augustine’s attempts to reform the Catholic
cult of the martyrs had made him unpopular with many members of the congregation
of the church of Carthage. The abolition of songs and of dance and drinking
at the grave of Saint Cyprian, combined with measures to separate the sexes
as they entered crowded churches and jostled each other around the tombs of
the martyrs, had caused resentment in Carthage.
This resentment exploded on the night of January 22, 404. It was the feast
day of Saint Vincent of Tarragona, held in Aurelius’ large cathedral-basilica,
in the middle of Carthage. Augustine, back once again in Carthage, stood up
to speak. But would his voice carry in so large a building? Part of the congregation
surged forwards towards the apse, to be closer to him. Another part, however,
gathered around the altar that stood in the middle of the church—as was
usually the case with early Christian altars. They shouted for Augustine to
come down to them, so as to speak (as he had done before) from the very center
of the building, surrounded on all sides by the congregation. It was, in itself,
a good proposal. The group that had moved towards the apse halted and began
to turn back: some pushed the others as they made their way back to the altar.
A chant went up from the group around the altar for Augustine to hurry up and
come down to them. It was a moment of chaos.
Augustine did not approve of this. He was plainly angered by the shouting.
He abruptly turned his back on the congregation, returned to the bench on which
the bishops sat and simply sat down. Part of the congregation was angry at this
gesture. By refusing to preach, Augustine seemed to have treated them with contempt.
A rhythmic chant of Missa sint: “Let’s get on with the Mass,”
went up from the middle of the church. They would not wait for a sermon. By
his hasty gesture, Augustine lost the opportunity to preach at the feast of
a major Catholic saint.
We seldom see Augustine so clearly as in that abrupt gesture. Nor, when he
had to explain himself next day, in a long sermon entitled On Obedience,
do we catch so clearly the tone of voice of a man committed to so intense a
sense of order. Obedience was no light matter. The fall of Adam and Eve—due
to disobedience to the first command of God—made that plain. He admitted
that he had, recently preached that a bishop’s duty was there “to
serve the weak.” But he served them for their own good, and for that reason,
he expected to be obeyed. In his opinion, Carthage was to be the showcase of
a new reformed Catholic order for the whole of Africa. When faced with
small congregations in the countryside who riot and oppose their bishop, I say to them: “Go, go and see the congregation of the Church of Carthage.”
All of a sudden, in the middle of this sermon, we catch Augustine speaking
of himself, when he was a student at Carthage thirty years previously:
When I went to vigils as a student in this city, I spent the night rubbing up beside women, along with other boys anxious to make an impression on the girls, and where, who knows, the opportunity might present itself to have a love-affair with them.
Augustine had written of such an incident in the Confessions. But he
had done so in a discreetly condensed manner. Without the new Dolbeau
sermon, we would have known nothing more about this incident. It is a remarkably
frank statement. It shows how much had happened to Augustine in the past thirty
years. The excited student of the 370s had now become the Catholic bishop and
the preacher of the sermon On Obedience of 404.
Yet, despite the stern tone of the sermon On Obedience, the other newly-discovered
sermons of that time reveal, rather, an Augustine struggling with all the rhetorical
and didactic resources at his disposal to keep the Christian congregation from
being absorbed in a world in which Christianity had by no means yet captured
the cultural high ground.
Hence the importance of the great two and a half hour sermon on the Kalends
of January, to which I have referred, and of similar, shorter sermons, preached,
in 404, to congregations that included pagan hearers. On those occasions, Augustine
gave nothing but the best. It is seldom that we can hear Augustine, as we can
in these new Dolbeau Sermons, talking spontaneously on the central themes
of his own, magnificent vision of the Christian religion. In these sermons,
which, we must remember, were preserved as they were spoken, by stenographers,
we hear the principal themes of the Confessions, of the De Trinitate
and of the City of God brought to life for us in the simple Latin of
the streets of Carthage and of the small towns of the Medjerda valley.
You, brethren, who have not the strength of vision to see what they [the pagan sages] saw, who are not able, by the sole power of thought, to rise above all created things . . . to see the changeless God . . .Do not be anxious, do not give up hope. . . For what did it profit them to see that homeland of the soul at a distance in their pride? . . . They saw that homeland as if from the mountaintop of pride, as if standing on a ridge over against it. But no one can get up to that far crest unless he first goes down to the valley below . . . For our way leads downwards, to humility. Christ showed this Himself in His own self. Whoever strays from that way wanders into a mountainside of winding paths that go nowhere, upon whose slopes the Devil lurks . . .
In the Dolbeau Sermons of 397 and again of 404, we meet Augustine in
an intimate situation—principally at Carthage—as a bishop preaching
to attentive crowds, within the walls of the Catholic basilica. With the Divjak
Letters we now move forwards in time by fifteen years—effectively to
the 420s, the last decade of Augustine’s life, when he was in his late
60s and early 70s. We find ourselves, also, in a very different scene. We are
back in Hippo, and with Augustine, we now scan with anxious eyes the entire
length of the Roman Mediterranean. From 413 onwards, the Pelagian controversy
had made Augustine, for the first time in his life, a truly international figure.
The Divjak Letters reveal hitherto unknown approaches, on issues related
to the Pelagian controversy, to Jerome at Bethlehem, to the patriarch Cyril
at Alexandria, and to the patriarch Atticus at Constantinople.
In the last decade of Augustine’s life, the Divjak Letters remind
us that it was important for his position that Augustine was bishop of a town
called Hippo Regius. For “Hippo” was the Punic word for “Port.”
Hippo Regius was, indeed, the “Royal Port.” Hippo was the one sea-port
that linked the hinterland of Numidia to Rome. Through it passed grain, taxes
and, as we shall see, grim convoys of slaves. Every year, the sea would “smile.”
A summer calm would settle on the Mediterranean, from March to October, and
the little ships would sail from coast to coast. Navigare, to “sail
to court”—to Italy, to the pope at Rome and to the emperor at Ravenna—is
a recurrent phrase in the Divjak Letters. The great Alypius bishop of
Thagaste, Augustine’s lifelong friend, would pass through the port, or,
more often, his couriers. For, in the 420s, Alypius lived much of his life “across
the water,” always present at the imperial court at Ravenna. He was an
almost permanent ambassador of the Catholic Church of Africa, ensuring that
the laws against the Pelagians and other heretics were maintained, but also,
as we have learned for the first time from the Divjak Letters, striving
constantly to bring the many social ills of Africa to the emperor’s attention.
The overall impression of the Divjak Letters is of a man staking out,
with uncomplaining patience, the limits of what had become a far-flung intellectual
empire. If genius is “an infinite capacity for taking pains,” then,
in these letters, we come close to the genius of the old Augustine. Many modern
readers of the formal works of Augustine do not like the repetitive and polemical
tone of Augustine’s later writings against the Pelagians. In the newly
discovered Divjak Letters, we find a different, more attractive side
of the old man. The Divjak Letters show that Augustine was prepared to
give his unstinting attention to any problem that might trouble the faithful,
no matter how seemingly trivial and no matter how remote from Hippo and eccentric
the author might be.
Not all of these writers were respectful of Augustine’s new authority.
The letters that he received, in 419, from Consentius, a learned and highly
eccentric Christian layman settled in the Balearic Islands, throw a new light
on how exactly many contemporaries viewed Augustine. Their tastes are not always
ours. Consentius, for instance, told Augustine that he had bought a copy of
Augustine’s Confessions twelve years before. But he was not impressed
by it. He had scanned a few pages and had put it aside. It was much too modern
a book. He greatly preferred, he told Augustine, the “clear and elegantly
ordered style” of Lactantius, whose classical prose had earned him the
title of “the Christian Cicero.” One suspects that there were many
Christians of old-fashioned taste, in the early fifth century A.D., who thought
as Consentius did. Nor was Consentius prepared to accept all that Augustine
had written as a theologian: speculative theology, such as Augustine’s,
caused him disquiet
even if we said that Augustine’s writings are beyond reproach, still we do not know what the judgement of posterity will be on his works. Neither did anyone rebuke . . . Origen while he was alive—Origen who, there is no doubt, was condemned after two hundred years or so.
Altogether, the new Divjak Letters make us realize that these were hard
years for Augustine, now a man in his late sixties. In three months, Augustine
wrote to his friend Possidius, in 419, he had dictated 6000 lines, some 60,000
words, setting aside the nights of Saturday and Sunday to prepare the final
text of his Tractatus on the Gospel of Saint John. It never seemed to
stop. Three more pamphlets had just arrived, from as far apart as southern Numidia
and Gibraltar. Once again, the writing of the City of God would have
to wait:
But I am annoyed because of the demands that are thrust on me to write, arriving unannounced, from here, there and everywhere. They interrupt and hold up all the other things that we have so neatly lined up in order. They never seem to stop.
We, of course, as historians, are delighted that they did not stop. For we are shown an aspect of the life of the old Augustine of which we had little idea before the discovery of the Divjak Letters. Few documents have illustrated so vividly, as have these letters (many of which take the form of legal memoranda) the extent and the urgency of the involvement of Augustine and his colleagues in the social ills of their own time. Nor have any previous letters given such a vivid impression of the difficulties which Augustine faced even in his own diocese.
In order to illustrate this last point, I trust that you will allow me an autobiographical
aside. We had long known an urgent letter which Augustine wrote to pope Celestine,
in 422, recounting the misdeeds of a country bishop, Antoninus of Fussala, whom
Augustine had installed on the outskirts of the diocese of Hippo, largely on
the strength of the young man’s knowledge of Punic. I read that letter
as a student in 1955. I was struck by its vividness. The letter revealed a story
of “intolerable tyranny, rapacity, oppression and abuses of various kinds”
committed only fifty miles away from Hippo. It showed that the Roman empire,
in North Africa, was not the orderly structure that I had been led to believe
by classical historians. Nor was the Catholic Church a perfectly-functioning
institution. The story of young Antoninus of Fussala reminded me, rather, of
all that I had read on the violence and disorder of the medieval, “feudal”
West. To study Augustine’s North Africa, I concluded, as a student, would
be extremely interesting. It was because of the misdeeds of the young Antoninus
of Fussala and not only because of the impression left on me by my first reading
of the Confessions, that I first turned to the study of Augustine.
Hence, you can imagine my feelings, almost thirty years later, in 1982, when
I first realized, on opening the uncut edition of the newly-published Divjak
Letters—to be precise, indeed, at the very moment when the relevant
pages slowly emerged into the tray of the copy machine as I hurriedly copied
the book before returning it to the Library of the University of California
in Berkeley—that here was a yet fuller account of the misdeeds of Antoninus,
written by Augustine to warn a Roman senatorial lady, Fabiola, to whom Antoninus
had appealed for protection.
We do not often find Augustine in so helpless a situation. In 422, he was stranded
for weeks in the middle of a countryside where everyone spoke only Punic. He
visited the village of Fussala, where the inhabitants pointed out to him the
holes in the houses from which Antoninus had pillaged the stones in order to
build a splendid new episcopal palace. He was finally left, sitting alone, one
morning, in a village church after the entire congregation had walked out in
disgust —even, he told Fabiola, the nuns—leaving him and his colleagues
to wonder how, by what series of misjudgments ably exploited by an able rogue,
they had brought “so much sadness upon the country people.” This was
not the sort of man that Fabiola should trust.
You seek God [as a well-to-do pious Christian] in the world; he seeks the world within the church.
But then, what could “the church” do in “the world,” the
saeculum? The question continued to haunt Augustine as he labored to
finish the “great and arduous work” of the City of God.
If a modern scholar had informed Augustine that he lived and wrote at a time
when, after the conversion of Constantine, he and his colleagues had become
the undisputed spiritual leaders of a society “in which [to quote a modern
scholar] church and state had become inextricably interdependent,” he might
have thanked the author of such an optimistic judgement for their good wishes.
But he would have pointed out that, seen from Hippo in the 420s, the saeculum,
the continued, non-Christian habits of “the world” had lost none of
their power. We should not be misled by the statements of many text-books on
the rapid rise to power of the Catholic Church in late Roman society. The victory
of Christianity in the age of Augustine had been, in many ways, spectacular
but fragile. Over a century after the conversion of Constantine, “church
and state” were far from being “inextricably interdependent.”
In this respect, the Divjak Letters that Augustine wrote, principally
to Alypius, in the last few years of his life, have come as a surprise to us.
Though headed by Catholic emperors, at Ravenna, the imperial administration
had remained oppressive and resolutely profane. A Divjak Letter, written
in early 420, to Alypius, reveals this clearly. Bishops who had allowed fiscal
debtors to take refuge in the churches were prosecuted by the imperial government
for obstructing “the public necessity” of taxation. Recruitment of
the clergy suffered, as the classes who usually provided recruits to the clergy
were impoverished by arbitrary tax demands. All that Alypius could do was petition
the emperor, yet again, for the institution in Africa of elected “defenders
of the city”—a purely secular device applied in other provinces. Otherwise,
there was nothing the bishops could do. Compared with the forces of the saeculum,
of “the world”—that is, the officials and great landowners—the
Catholic bishops of Africa had remained little men, with little power. Church
sanctuary might protect a few victims of injustice; but the cities and the poor
continued to be ground down, “while we groan and are unable to help.”
Worse was to come a few years lat ner, when Augustine was entering his seventies
(and was an old man by ancient standards). In collusion with the local authorities,
the coast of Africa was opened up, as never before, to bands of slave-traders
and kidnappers, anxious to obtain slaves for the devastated estates of Italy
and southern Gaul by kidnapping African peasants.
With ululating war-cries, dressed up as soldiers and barbarians to inspire fear, they invade sparsely populated and remote rural areas.
They carried off free Romans as slaves. Columns of captives made their way
down to the coast, at Hippo itself, where the slave-ships lay at anchor in full
sight of the coast-guard authorities. The Christians of Hippo ransomed some
120 of them. Augustine in person interviewed a terrified young girl who told
him, through her brother, of the attack on her farm and the murder of its defenders.
And yet, at that very moment, the bishop’s staff, who had attempted to
interrupt the trade, were being sued for damages by well-placed protectors of
the slave-merchants.
Anger was not enough in such a situation. As a bishop, Augustine had to work
entirely within the framework of the Roman laws. Texts of these laws were difficult
to obtain. Their interpretation was ambiguous. He sent a copy of one law to
Alypius; but it seemed out of date to him, and not fully applicable to the case
in hand. Alypius should look in the libraries of Rome for better laws. Somehow
or other, he must bring the matter to the attention of the emperor. This is
what Alypius should say—and once again, with the effortless skill of a
great rhetor, Augustine dictated the appropriate, high phrases to move a distant
court:
Barbarians are resisted when the Roman army is in good condition for fear that Romans will be held in barbarian captivity. But who resists these traders who are found everywhere, who traffick, not in animals but in human beings, not in barbarians but in loyal Romans? . . .Who will resist, in the name of Roman freedom—I do not say the common freedom of the Roman state but of their very own.
At some time close to this appalling incident, in 428, Augustine received a
letter, the last in time of the Divjak Letters, from an older, more peaceful
world. Firmus, a cultivated nobleman of Carthage had written to him, sending
a copy of the schoolboy declamations of his son, which the old bishop had asked
to see. Firmus had been with Augustine at Carthage, some years before, when
the eighteenth book of the City of God had been read, at a public reading,
on three consecutive afternoons. He had now read as far as book ten.
Yet Firmus remained unconvinced. He would not be baptized as a Christian. A
man of a very ancient world, Firmus invoked the pagan tradition of reverent
hesitation in the face of so great a mystery. He would await a sign from God—a
dream, perhaps, like Constantine, or some other unusual event. Yet his wife
was already baptized: for all Firmus’ knowledge of Christian literature,
she, and not Firmus, had the mystic knowledge (the rite of baptism and access
to the Eucharist) that would save her soul.
So while you may be more learned in doctrine, she is more secure [of her salvation] by reason of her knowledge of the mysteries . . . And so, in effect, you are throwing away the fruits of all those books you love. What fruits? Not that some [who read the City of God] may have some interesting reading nor that they may learn a number of things they had not known before. But that the readers [of the City of God] may be convinced of the [real] “City of God” [the reality of that Heavenly Jerusalem that awaited the faithful in the Catholic church]; that they might enter into that “City of God” without delay and, once entered, be all the more moved to stay within it, entering it first through re-birth [in baptism] and then continuing through love of righteousness. If those by whom these books are read and praised do not actually take action and do these things, of what good are the books?
It is Augustine’s last word, to a hitherto unknown interlocutor, on the
purpose of his life as a writer.
He would soon die. But others, he knew, would continue to write. “Our
little Greek,” as Augustine called Firmus’ son, had shown great talent
in his declamation. He was a credit to his education. “You of all people
know that these are good things, and of great advantage.” But these gifts
were there to be used. The boy should remember his Cicero:
Eloquence combined with wisdom has proved to be of the greatest benefit to states; but eloquence without wisdom, harmful and of no good to anyone.
The boy should grow up to be what Cicero said he should be: a good man, skilled
in speaking.
The ancients knew what they were saying [Augustine continued] when they said that when the rules of eloquence are taught to fools, orators are not being produced, but armaments placed in the hands of lunatics.
Meanwhile, Firmus was to be sure to tell Augustine how old the boy was now
and what Greek and Latin texts he had been reading.
No historian had come to tell the old Augustine that the Dark Ages were about
to begin. He was unaware, or simply unconcerned, that any melodramatic and irrevocable
changes might come upon the world to which he was accustomed. For all he knew,
Roman society and Roman culture might continue undisturbed. He faced the final
stages of his life hardly doubting that, in the years ahead, Cicero would still
be memorized by little boys and that the glittering armory of Roman rhetoric
would still be available—to be used supremely well by some, as he himself
had striven to do, over the years, and by others, quite frankly, in his opinion,
“as hi-tech lunatics.” It is the letter of an old man who had come
to face, with unusual serenity, the essential ambivalence of the saeculum
in which he had lived. A mature Roman culture and a seemingly solid, still Roman
social order had, indeed, done much to help him and his Church. But at the same
time, in irresponsible hands, the abuse of power and culture alike had been
a source of so much cruelty, of so much error, and of so much suffering to himself
and to others.
Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, Reprinted with Epilogue
(London: Faber/Berkeley: University of California Press 2000).
Divjak Letters: Discovered 1975 by Johannes Divjak in the Bibliothèque
Municipale of Marseilles.
Oeuvres de Saint Augustin 46B: Lettres 1*-29*, Bibliothèque Augustinienne
(Paris: Études augustiniennes 1987).
Letters of Saint Augustine 6: Letters 1*-29*, transl. R. Eno, Fathers
of the Church 81 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press 1989).
Mayence(Mainz)/Dolbeau Sermons: Discovered 1990 by François Dolbeau
in the Stadtbibliothek of Mainz.
Augustin d’Hippone: Vingt-Six Sermons au Peuple d’Afrique,
ed. François Dolbeau (Paris: Institut d’Études augustiniennes
1996)
The Works of Saint Augustine. A Translation for the 21st Century: Sermons
III/11. Newly Discovered Sermons, transl. E. Hill (Hyde Park, New York:
New City Press 1997).
