4 Augustine’s memory of the 411 confrontation with Emeritus of Cherchell Geoffrey D. Dunn Emeritus of Cherchell1 does not spring rapidly to mind when we think of the Donatist opponents confronted by Augustine of Hippo Regius (in the province of Africa Proconsularis). 2 Indeed, Cherchell, a town located about halfway along modern Algeria’s coastline and the second-largest port on African shores ( Raven 1993 : 70–1; Sears 2011 : 41–3), was far removed from the heart of Roman Africa that centred on Carthage. The standard modern biography of Augustine in English ( Brown 2000 ) does not include any reference to Emeritus at all. Yet Emeritus of Chercell was an individual of some significance in Augus- tine’s life. Augustine wrote to him on a couple of occasions, including Epistula 87 (NBA, 21/2: 736–50; Dunn 2018 ). Augustine recorded the homily he preached in Cherchell in 418 (Sermo ad Caesariensis ecclesiae plebem ; NBA, 16/2)3 and an encounter with Emeritus on a visit to Cherchell in September 418 (Gesta cum Emerito Donatistarum episcopo liber unus ; NBA, 16/2). 4 These two texts preserve the memory of that encounter between Augustine and Emeritus, but also a utopianised memory of an earlier encounter between the two, which took place in Carthage in 411. The aim of this chapter is to examine how Augustine reshaped and re-presented the events of 411 seven years later, and to identify those (reimagined) arguments of 411 that remained valid for Augustine’s continuing struggles against the Donatists. Emeritus was one of the seven Donatist episcopal representatives selected to speak5 at what is often loosely termed the conference or colloquy of Carthage in 411, a debate against Augustine and his fellow representatives on the other side, known as the Caecilianists. These were named after Caecilian, whose controver- sial election as bishop of Carthage in 311 at the hands of a traditor bishop had started the controversy (see Chapter 3 by Jonathan Conant in this volume for some of the early history of Donatism).6 Both sides claimed to be catholic in this con- troversy, which had emerged as a result of the persecution under Diocletian, and was characterised by disputed interpretations on the necessity of the purity and sinlessness of the celebrant for the validity of sacraments. While scholarship tra- ditionally divides them into Donatists and Catholics, I prefer to label both parties after their ‘founders’ or early leading figures, since their catholicity or otherwise was the contested issue. 58 Geoffrey D. Dunn Rather than calling the meeting in 411 a ‘conference,’ the Latin collatio is bet- ter translated as a confrontation, or as Tilley put it, ‘an imperial administrative process’ (Tilley 1991 : 10). This meeting between Donatists and Caecilianists was not an episcopal synod, but an imperially mandated legal proceeding before an imperially appointed arbitrator (Marcellinus). Marcellinus heard an application for a court order to enforce previous legal decisions or to appeal against previous imperial rulings against the Donatists.7 The term collatio indicates a contestation, and hence ‘conference’ is too mild an English translation. The confrontation between the two parties was necessary because previous rulings had been overturned in an unpreserved ‘act of tolerance,’ produced in early 410 in the aftermath of instability at Ravenna following the assassination of Stilicho in August 408. This act of tolerance was revoked on 25 August 410 (CTh 16.5.51), the day after the sack of Rome under Alaric. The timing might have been purely coincidental since news of Rome’s capture would not have reached Ravenna that swiftly, but given that the imperial court in Ravenna was engaged in a power struggle until the emergence of Flavius Constantius to replace Stilicho in 411, it would not be surprising that in the jockeying for power overtures of pla- cating religious tensions would be made to Africa, vital for food supplies in Italy. The move to revoke the new tolerance that had been initiated by the Caecilianist bishops after their 14 June 410 synod ( Reg. eccl. Carthag. excerpta 107b, CCSL, 149: 220), and had been accepted by the emperor on 14 October 410 (Gesta 1.4, SC, 195: 564–68 and CTh 16.11.3), and by Marcellinus himself (Gesta 1.5–10, SC, 195: 568–86), makes it unlikely to have been an appeal, even though this is what the Donatists wanted. As such, it was a process in which the Donatists were the defendants, even though the Caecilianists did not want to be plaintiffs ( Lancel 2002 : 293–300). Emeritus too offered a reshaped memory of the 411 confrontation, albeit one that was only one sentence long, if we accept that Augustine, upon whom we are entirely dependent for Emeritus’s interventions, has not turned him into more of a literary mute than he was. While Emeritus believed that his side had won the argu- ment in 411, his near silence in 418 would suggest that he was well aware that the decision in 411 had gone against them. For Augustine, 411 was a triumph. It cre- ated the ideal situation for the Caecilianists or for Christians in general as far as he was concerned, as we shall see in detail in this chapter. The possibility he had in mind was the church in Africa without schism, a church identical with that of the Caecilianists, but one in which the Donatists had not disappeared but rather had been reabsorbed into unity. The dice was loaded against the Donatists from the start, but in Augustine’s constant retelling of the story the outcome became noth- ing less than total victory. In this sense we can apply Thomas More’s concept of utopia ( More 1516 ) to Augustine’s interpretation of the 411 confrontation, since it created an ideal that did not match the reality ( Fitting 2009 ). It is more usual for Augustine’s De ciuitate Dei to be analysed for its contribution to the forma- tion of a Christian utopia, albeit one located not on earth but in heaven (or, more accurately, on earth but not earthly or secular) ( Raitiere 1973; Kaufman 2007 ; Lee and Dupont 2016 ) and for its influence upon Thomas More (1516 ). I am arguing Augustine’s memory of the 411 confrontation 59 here that the brief record of an encounter in 411 implied the existence (and a reshaped existence at that) of what we may call a utopia with regard to the resolu- tion of the Donatist controversy.8 Unlike More’s sense of utopia, which was something unattainable, Augustine believed that the ideal created in 411 could be implemented. Yet his interpretation of the ideal was gradually reshaped over the years that followed. The landscape created in 411 needed to be rewritten as he realised the continuing resistance to it, resistance personified in Emeritus himself. Most of the record of the confronta- tion has been preserved, and it is against this that we can assess Augustine’s ver- sion of events; yet it is Augustine’s retelling that is most familiar to us. Gesta cum Emerito is not a utopia of the present or the future like De ciuitate Dei (a work, incidentally, dedicated to Marcellinus), but a utopia about the past that had implications for the present. Its attention is focused not outside the church but inside it. While Augustine could imagine two cities co-existing in De ciuitate Dei , his vision of the heavenly city on earth could not allow for the continuing existence of Donatists. A Donatist utopian ecclesiology is less accessible to us (but see Gaumer 2008 ) and, as we shall see, Emeritus’s refusal to take an active role in the 418 encounter can be understood as a simple assertion that Donatist recalcitrants felt no need to modify their 411 position. In this chapter I examine the reshaping of Augustine’s memory in Gesta cum Emerito , one of four post-confrontation writings that he produced. It shows the utopian ecclesiology that lay behind such a reformulated memory, as well as how Emeritus interpreted that meeting. We begin by looking at the confrontation, before considering what Augustine chose to highlight during his last encounter with Emeritus in 418. Confrontation of 411 Reconstructing the confrontation of 411 is no simple task since we have two ver- sions of events. As mentioned, we have Augustine’s reconstruction of its proceed- ings ( Breuiculus collationis cum Donatistis ), as well as the copy with capitula made by a certain Marcellus of the officially edited minutes produced by the imperial scribes at the confrontation (Gesta collationis Carthaginiensis ), which has suffered some alteration due to the vicissitudes of manuscript transmission, as is the case with most ancient evidence ( Weidmann 2015 ). The confrontation has been little studied as a legal process in scholarship, with a few exceptions in more recent years ( Alexander 1970 , 1973 , 1977 , 1984 ; Tilley 1991 ; Hermanow- icz 2008 : 188–220; Graumann 2011; Weidmann 2015 ; and the essays by Lenski, McLynn, and Miles in Miles 2016 ). As the late Maureen Tilley (1991 : 7) noted: ‘Although most biographies of Augustine and histories of Christianity in North Africa mention this conference, they spend little time on the substance of the discussion which took place between the two parties.’ Indeed, we still have no English translation of the two volumes of text in the SC series. Further, except for Merdinger (2013 ), the 418 episode at Cherchell has been the subject of little scholarly research. 60 Geoffrey D. Dunn The gathering in 411 was not simply a ‘public debate’ (Marone 2015 : 77), but, as Honorius’s edict Inter imperii of 14 October 410 indicated, an opportunity for the vain error and unproductive conflict that had stained Africa caused by the Donatist superstition to be refuted by clear reason (Gesta 1.4, SC, 195: 562–4).