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14 Augustine's Secular City 14 AUGUSTINE’S SECULAR CITY Robert Dodaro ‘I need not describe the power of patriotic love (caritas patriae), for you know it already; it alone could justly take precedence over affection for our parents’. So begins Nectarius, an elderly resident of Calama, in a letter addressed to Augustine, the Catholic bishop of Hippo Regius, some 65 km northwest. If a good man’s service of his home town had any limit or terminus, then by now I might deserve to excuse myself worthily from my duties to it. On the contrary, though, one’s affection and gratitude for one’s city grows as each day passes; and the nearer life approaches to its end, the more one desires to leave it flourishing and secure. That is why I am delighted before all else to be conducting this discussion with a man who is thoroughly well educated. 1 Nectarius is a pagan and a former official in the imperial civil service. 2 The ‘discussion’ that he opens with Augustine concerns the recent outbreak of ferocious, anti-Christian violence in Calama, his home town. On 1 June AD 408 and on two successive days a week later, rioting between devotees of a local pagan cult and the city’s Catholics seriously disrupted the peace. As Augustine later recounts the incident, violence first broke out when Possidius, the city’s bishop and a close friend, intervened to impede certain rites connected with an unspecified pagan festival. During the ensuing confrontation, stones were hurled at the bishop’s church as a reprisal for his interference. When, eight days later, in accordance with established legal procedure, Possidius lodged a formal complaint over the incident with the municipal officials, his church was again attacked, and, on the following day, was stoned a third time, looted of valuables and set ablaze. One of the members of his church was killed in the conflict, and Possidius himself narrowly escaped assassination by hiding from the mob, perhaps in his own house ( ep. 91–8). Not all the criminal acts were committed by pagans; a number of Christians either failed to render assistance when the church was burning, or participated in the looting ( ep. 104.9). Possidius knew that, in attempting to prevent the pagan rites from being observed, he was acting in full accord with a recent edict of the Emperor Honorius, addressed to Africa during the previous year, which reiterated a ban by 232 AUGUSTINE’S SECULAR CITY the Emperor Theodosius in AD 391 against pagan religious ceremonies, such as public processions and festivals, and gave Catholic bishops the right to intervene against them. Honorius charged imperial officials with enforcing these edicts and protecting the Catholic church against interference from pagans. 3 In this first of his two letters to Augustine, Nectarius acknowledges that serious crimes had been committed against the church, and that harsh penalties could thus lawfully be applied to residents who were convicted of related, illegal activities, because they either participated in the violence or did not act to prevent it. He writes to Augustine in loyal response to an urgent request of the municipal council, but also out of sympathy with the city’s pain, in the hope that the bishop will accept a settlement for damages suffered by the church, and that he will intercede with imperial officials to reduce the harshness of whatever criminal penalties (supplicia) they might contemplate against the city’s inhabitants. Sometime before the end of June, Augustine visits Calama and meets separately with groups of Christians and pagans, the latter at their own request, in an effort to gather information about the incidents and impart counsel ( ep. 91– 10). Returning to Hippo Regius, he receives Nectarius’ letter in July and responds to it immediately and at length (ep. 91). He assures the city’s representative that, although the matter is not his to decide, he will strongly urge that no one in Calama suffer the death penalty or any physical torture, but that penalties be restricted to heavy fines. He warns, however, that in order for this Christian leniency to be shown, the fines may have to be applied more indiscriminately than if judicial investigations were undertaken to distinguish more clearly the guilty from the innocent. Such interrogations could not be carried out lawfully without the application of torture, and neither Augustine nor Nectarius wished this to happen ( ep. 91–9). An additional reason for Augustine to welcome a more widespread application of fines against the city’s residents is that he suspects members of the municipal council not only of failing to prevent the unlawful festival, and the ensuing violence against the church, but even of actively encouraging them. 4 Because many of these councillors are wealthy landowners, he hopes the fines will punish them in a way that leads them to true repentance, and serve as a warning to municipal councils elsewhere in Africa that anti-Christian violence will not be condoned. 5 Some time passes before Nectarius writes in response to Augustine. 6 When he does so, he objects to the latter’s suggestion of serious fines as punishment on the grounds that ‘a life of poverty produces endless misfortune’, and that many would rather die than face such stark, material deprivation ( ep. 103.3). He points out that those Christians who have confessed criminal involvement in the affair (possibly in open court before a magistrate), and who are undergoing penance (poenitentia) within the church, have already been exempted from any penalties. If, by publicly confessing and repenting of their sins, Christians can justly be spared civil punishments, why cannot the same leniency apply to pagans? Nectarius takes little notice of Augustine’s earlier assurances that he will urge imperial officials to avoid inflicting capital punishment or torture, and voices his ROBERT DODARO 233 fear that innocent, non-Christian residents who are subjected at random to torture in this matter will be enraged at the sight of self-confessed, but unpunished, Christian criminals ( ep. 103.4). Augustine’s reply opens with his repeated assurance that he will intercede with imperial officials to prevent the application of capital punishment or physical torture in the pursuit of justice at Calama, and he invites Nectarius to make him aware of any such occurrences should they arise ( ep. 104.1 and 5). However, he insists that substantial fines ought to be applied against those who may have been involved, even indirectly, in the crimes committed against the church, because their extravagant wealth is used to support pagan religion and to oppose Christianity ( ep. 104.5). By continuing to do so unpunished, they might incite pagan aristocrats in other cities to follow their example. Augustine clearly has the wealthiest landowners in mind here. He does not wish them to be reduced to begging, but demands that they be stripped of superfluous wealth ( ep. 104.6). He defends the practice of excusing those Christians from civil penalties who publicly confess their crimes and submit themselves to penance, and of not extending this same leniency to non-Christians, on the grounds that Christians who do penance will be forced, thereby, to take time to reflect deeply upon their misdeeds, while non-Christians, for whom a public confession and apology is an expeditious, judicial formality, will not do so. Aside from deterring other cities from following the violent example of Calama, the only goal of punishment in this case is conversion of heart. True sorrow for grave crimes cannot be mass produced in a short period of time. Conversion requires a gradual process of interior reflection that allows the soul sufficient time to recognise itself uncomfortably in its misdeeds. 7 Thus, its aim is to reshape desire at the heart of the individual. Augustine does not believe that the church’s practice is unjustly discriminatory toward non-Christians. If Nectarius were sincerely concerned for his city’s best interests, he would be more anxious over the lack of true conversion of heart than he is in mitigating the very penalties which alone may produce such conversion ( ep. 104.5–10). 8 The politics of confession The four letters constituting the correspondence between Nectarius and Augustine have attracted the attention of a recent critic of Augustinian political thought. Writing in The Augustinian Imperative, William Connolly comments on the Calama affair as one among many illustrations of Augustinian political authoritarianism and intolerance of religions other than his own brand of Catholic Christianity. 9 Although Connolly concerns himself only briefly with the specific issues between Nectarius and Augustine, he examines them in conjunction with similar applications of political thought drawn from a range of the bishop’s pastoral activities, including his attitudes to pagans, his treatment of women and his opposition to heretical groups such as Manichaeans, Donatists and Pelagians. 10 234 AUGUSTINE’S SECULAR CITY Connolly’s is a sweeping, well-reasoned and penetrating indictment of the philosophical and theological underpinnings of Augustine’s political thought, and it pays close attention to the role of moral conversion accompanied by confession of sins. As such, it deserves to be taken seriously by Augustinian scholars. He develops his analysis of what he terms the ‘Augustinian imperative’ through readings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, and develops a highly original critique which none the less runs parallel at points to those of other scholars from Hannah Arendt to Elaine Pagels.11 Discussing the case Connolly makes thus enables one to address, in a limited fashion, a cluster of criticisms aimed at the more troubling foundations of Augustinian political thought. 12 I propose to do this by briefly summarising some of the features of Connolly’s critique that seem the most compelling, and then by discussing them in the context of Augustine’s debate with Nectarius over the best ways to care for the city.
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