Introduction

In 388, after some years spent abroad in Rome and Milan, Augustine again set foot on African soil. Whilst it is impossible to know this with any certainty, the Roman citizen, now aged 34, must have been bewildered by thoughts of where his life had taken him thus far, and even more so by his future path.1 Although the years after his homecoming are sparsely recorded, either by Augustine or his biographer, Possidius, one can nevertheless sense the flurry of activity that surrounded that period. Hoping to find the serenity of a provincial lifestyle, characterised by calm, study, and discernment, Augustine found himself instead in an uncertain retirement. Hoping for peace, he was instead surrounded by eager followers and demands on his time from the broader Christian community in this Roman province of Numidia. By 391, the man who had wished to spend the rest of his life enjoying a con- templative existence, was inducted, reluctantly apparently,2 into public min- istry as a presbyter of the Hippo Regius diocese.3 His Church, which he would probably have been familiar with as a boy, as an adolescent, and throughout his Manichean period, was part of the same community that he had come to know through his sojourns on the Italian peninsula. Yet this branch of the Church, the one he had long known, and which he had also seen during his forays abroad, was not the sole group in Africa claiming to be the Christian Church. All around him, in Hippo Regius and elsewhere in Roman North Africa, there were other Christians who created an environment of uneasy peace at the best of times, and palpable tension, if not outright provocation, when

1 One need only consider how drastic were the ‘vocational’ changes Augustine had already undergone in the 380s: first as an aspiring instructor of rhetoric who had to leave his native North Africa (after relocating to bigger, more influential cities like Carthage), then as an im- perial teacher of rhetoric, a semi-established member of the late antique ‘bourgeois’ class. There followed a period as an uncomfortable philosophe dabbling in the tenets of Mani, and a period of neo-Platonism, until eventually he found himself a bewildered catechumen, with his world turned upside down within the walls of the Christian basilica in Milan, in the pres- ence of its most famous bishop, Ambrose. 2 Augustine recounted a degree of trepidation about this, see: s. 355,2. One biographer has identified this under-reported event as the most important of the ‘conversions processes’ Augustine would undergo. See James O’Donnell, Augustine: A New Biography (New York: HarperPerennial, 2006), 26. 3 Hippo Regius (or Hippo), known as Bône before independence from France, is now called Annaba and is located in north-eastern Algeria.

2 Introduction disagreements escalated. Augustine, and the group he ministered to, were Christians who overtly embraced (and were affirmed by) other communities of co-religionists throughout their known world, to which they were linked by common apostolic origins. The rival North African group likewise enjoyed a flourishing membership, but saw life and the rest of the world through the prism of their own African assuredness. This group would have been ever before the eyes of Augustine the priest; even in the midst of liturgical acts he could not escape their reality.4 Augustine, with Optatus of Milevis, a predecessor of the same Church, came to call their own community ‘Christians’, and more specifically ‘Catholics’. The rival group also called themselves ‘Christians’ and ‘Catholics’, but through the process of history became known as ‘Donatists’, the label applied by Optatus, Augustine and their Church.5 Since mention of ‘Donatist’ Christians had already appeared in Augustine’s writings by 392,6 it is inconceivable that the presbyter from Hippo was not already intimately knowledgeable about the two

4 Aug., Ep. 29,11. 5 The Donatists were a majority group in Hippo Regius and its environs with strong backing from the citizenry; Aug., Ioh. evang. tract. 6,25 (ccsl 36,66); C. ep. Parm. 1, 17–18 (csel 51, 38– 41); C. litt. Pet. 1,26 (csel 52, 20–21); 2,184 (csel 52, 112–15); Possidius, Vita Augustini 7,2 (pl 32, 446–53). On the diffusion of Donatist Christianity see also P. MacKendrick, The North African Stones Speak (Chapel Hill, nc: University of North Carolina Press: 1980), 261–83. Catholics were reportedly often threatened by Donatist Circumcelliones; En. in Ps. 10,5 (csel 93/1A, 225–28); C. ep. Parm. 2,4 (csel 51, 52–54); C. litt. Pet. 1,26 (csel 52, 21–22); 2,65 (csel 52, 98); Cresc. 3, 15–16 (csel 52, 424–26); Ep. 43,24 (csel 34/2, 106); 76,3 (csel 34/2, 327–28); 87, 4–5 (csel 34/2, 400–02). 6 Augustine’s first indirect reference to the Donatists is found in En. in Ps. 10,1. He makes the first descriptive reference in En. in Ps. 10,5 (wsa iii/15, 164–65): ‘How can I feel sure for in- stance, that those who were in communion with you yesterday, in communion with you today and in communion with you tomorrow, have committed no sin during these three days? But if neither you nor I are defiled because we do not know, what reason have you for rebaptising those who know nothing of the treachery and reproach of the days of Marcarius? As for the Christians hailing from Mesopotamia who have never so much as heard the names Caecilian and Donatus, how can you dare to rebaptise them on the plea that they are not Christians?’ (ccsl 38, 78): ‘Unde ergo confido in eis quibus heri communicasti, et hodie com- municas, et cras communicabis, utrum uel isto triduo nihil mali commiserint? Quod si nec te nec me polluit quod nescimus, quae causa est ut rebaptizes eos qui tempora traditionis et Macarianae inuidiae non nouerunt? Quae causa est ut christianos de Mesopotamia uenien- tes, qui Caeciliani et Donati nec nomen audierunt, rebaptizare audeas, et neges esse christianos?’. Finally, in Ex.2 in Ps. 21,2 (wsa iii/15, 228) he will refer explicitly to the ‘parte Donati’: ‘I wonder, brethren, whether this Psalm is being read among the Donatists?’