THEODOSIUS DIED IN 395, SHORTLY AFTER THE BATTLE OF THE Frigidus. No one has ever claimed there was a serious threat to the stability of Roman order based on allegiance to the traditional gods at or after that date. Allegations of some pagan insurgency, quickly and brusquely squashed if it ever happened, are made by Christians at two later isolated dates in the fifth century, while there are a few other small spasms of Christian outrage at discovering that various old rites and practices have survived. The fifth century can show isolated intellectuals expressing dissent or nostalgia, but no sign they took their own resistance seriously. The silence is deafening. We can give equal credit for this silence to the effectiveness of Christian measures of suppression and to the power of ordinary indifference.
We can also see plenty of evidence of the survival of belief, practice, and allegiance in the realm of the ordinary. Most people didn’t care. The town of Harran on the Persian frontier, for example, was widely reputed to have held on to its ancient practices until the time of the Arab conquest—as why not? Old rites of the Lupercalia and the festivities surrounding the opening of the new year in January crop up at isolated points in the fifth century.1 The silence, I say, is deafening by comparison to what we might expect if the self-serving Christian narrative about die-hard resistance were true. The survival of traditional practices never amounted to an expression of a pagan movement. Outside Christian imaginations, there was no such thing as paganism, only people doing what they were in the habit of doing.
The questions that the history of paganism raise at the end of antiquity are actually questions about Christianity. One might reasonably ask what Christianity really was. And the answer is that Christianity was many things still in the process of evolving, collapsing, and reinventing themselves. Association with empire gave Christian leaders the opportunity to compel creation of a more coherent, hierarchical religious movement than had ever been associated with the names of Jesus or Christ before. We have mostly forgotten to be surprised that a street preacher’s followers discovered, several hundred years after his death, how to be a regimented multinational corporate enterprise.
Let us consider one example of how this played out in practice. Let’s go to Calama (mod. Guelma, Algeria), a modest Roman city in North Africa, one hundred fifty miles west of Carthage, in a valley about forty miles inland. One day in 408 CE in that very ordinary sort of place, people came out in numbers to celebrate an old local festival. Legally forbidden practices would not have been tolerated—certainly no blood sacrifice, for example—but traditional images and songs and costumes? Not unlikely at all. There were many places like this where people made necessary adjustments and continued to do things they had always done.
On this particular day, local Christian clergy objected to something going on in the festival, and the crowd reacted badly. What followed fell somewhere between a brawl and a riot. Rocks were thrown. The clergy remonstrated with the local authorities afterward and got blowback for their pains. As the days passed, a second, then a third hubbub broke out. On the third occasion, people tried to set fire to the church, one lower-ranking cleric was killed, and the bishop concealed himself in a secret place in the church to escape the angry mob. The bishop’s followers thought the hailstorm that day had been a divine warning to their enemies.2
On that telling, which comes from a Christian source, is that an outbreak of paganism? Or is it not what happens when enthusiasts pick a fight and get more than they bargained for? The people who tried to set fire to the church may well have been in the church on another day themselves as worshippers, passively and cheerfully enough. When the authority figures in the church interfered, perhaps tactlessly, with local prerogatives, we cannot be surprised if there was some vehement, violent reaction. None of this behavior reflects well on the parties involved, but only one side of the squabble fought with any ideological commitment.
We know of this event because the bishop of a larger neighboring city fell into correspondence with a local dignitary at Calama named Nectarius. Nectarius was a citizen of good standing, a churchgoing, Christian man, not the sort of person out in the street throwing rocks at a church. He began the correspondence with an appeal to the senior churchman to intervene and make the local clergy—whose bishop had been trained in the bigger city—calm down, respect local traditions, and not make trouble where trouble need not be. Nectarius hoped for, perhaps expected, understanding and a sympathetic response, but the bishop responded in the vigorous negative, and his friend was disappointed.
Affairs in Calama quieted, so it was some months later when Nectarius wrote back reflectively and respectfully. He compared his churchman friend to Cicero himself. “So when you made a powerful case for worshiping and following the god who is over all, I listened with pleasure. When you persuaded us to gaze upon the heavenly homeland, I was delighted to hear it. For you were not speaking of a city that has a circle of walls around it, nor even a city that the books of the philosophers argue we all belong to in this world, but rather a city occupied as their own by a great god and the souls that have deserved well of him, the kind that all the laws are seeking to establish by their different paths and ways, which we cannot express in words but perhaps can imagine in thought.”3
Handsomely said, I think we would agree. Nectarius goes on: “This city is to be sought and loved above all, but I still do not think we should abandon the one in which we were begotten and born: the city that first bestowed the gift of light upon us, that nurtured us, that educated us.” He closes by asking his friend to imagine the tears Nectarius is shedding for the city he loves and to respect the patriotism of this world along with the patriotism of the next.
Nectarius is so reasonable and gentlemanly that he was for a long time thought to be a pagan himself. The evidence is clear, though, that he was a churchgoing baptized Christian. At the same time, he clearly distances himself from his zealous bishop and neighbors by his willingness to see the good in continuity of tradition. He does not explicitly defend anything pagan—that is, cult paid to the old gods—in what had been going on; his only point is to resist people who make trouble for an established, peaceful, law-abiding community.
Nectarius is known—and interesting—to us because the bishop with whom he corresponded, the one who reminds him of Cicero, was again the famous Augustine of Hippo. Three or four years after this encounter, Augustine began writing one of his two great books, his City of God, that picked up the very ideas that Nectarius was so charmed by and used them to paint a great canvas of human history. Cicero was much on Augustine’s mind when he wrote that book, as model and as rival. I’ve written the story of Augustine’s life elsewhere, but let me show him in a light relevant to our purposes here.
Augustine makes sure to tell us, in his Confessions and other works, that his life fell into two neat halves, Before and After—the old man and the new, in Pauline terms, the un-Christian and the Christian. We can and should remember to see the way in which the Christian Augustine had been there all along, in his mother’s faith, in his own attempts even from early childhood to draw closer to the church, up to the long journey through Manicheism—a form of Christianity—and the ditherings of Milan that led him to seek baptism.4 There was never anything remotely “pagan” about Augustine’s religious affiliations.5 He was there just as Ambrose was quarreling with Valentinian II and the boy emperor’s mother over points of doctrine, with riots in the streets, and as Magnus Maximus, having overthrown Gratian, was threatening further advances.
That is one side of the story of Augustine’s conversion: that he never needed converting because he was Christian already, in the eyes of many.
Even there, the very notion of “Christianity” was unstable and in play. When the Manichees prayed, they turned by day toward the sun, by night toward the moon, and offered their prayers that way. Though even hostile readers would admit sometimes that this was a symbolic deference to the way those astral powers showed their own homage to the divine, when it was polemically convenient to do so, that practice could be termed pagan.6 Such an accusation is as well grounded as any—and as irrelevant as most. The function of it is not to state a fact about the opposition but to claim a mantle of purity and postpagan integrity for the attacker. From within Manicheism, as from within the form of Christianity that Augustine eventually chose, the fundamentally “modern” rhetorical gesture was to spotlight the newfound problem of ancient religion in all its pluralities and to propose an alternative path of singularity, purity, and global authority. That ambition was common. Which of the ambitious parties would prevail? How was this question being worked out in churches, communities, and the imperial court?
There is another way of looking at this story: to conclude that Augustine never converted at all. Every powerful personality finds himself the object of multiple stories and we do not know someone until we know the range of stories that are told. This one gets told infrequently at best, so I will take a little time with it.
Augustine began life in the rigid and predictable confines of the lower upper class of the Roman Empire, in a family proud enough of its Romanness to use men’s names borrowed from public life. Augustinus would ring as heavily as Washingtonian might in the name of an American, while his father was Patricius, a title of rank in the empire and which might have the same ring as the surname Noble. Augustine was brought up to the old ways of class and culture and given the best entirely traditional education that borrowed money could buy. He excelled at it and became himself a professor who purveyed the means of demonstrating full membership in the elite classes of a traditional society. Until he was in his thirties, he pursued a highly visible career pointed straight at the top of Roman society. At least a provincial governorship is what he was aiming for when Symmachus sent him along to Milan and the imperial court in the summer of 384 with a recommendation for the senior professorship there. Within a few months, he was delivering high ceremonial oratory in honor and in the presence of the emperor. That it was a child emperor probably only made the drama more pompous and the effort of glorification more strenuous.
Then he broke off. The Confessions tell us, more or less, why and how he decided to abandon that career in the late summer of 386, rising his thirty-second birthday. What he did then was entirely of a piece with his class and culture. He borrowed a country villa, rounded up friends and students, and went there to read, talk, and write. What he wrote that winter at a place called Cassiciacum—the first works that survive from his pen in an oeuvre that amounts to five million words in all—were dialogues exactly modeled on those Cicero had written in the last years of his life at Tusculum, his villa not far from Rome.
In those books, learned amateurs indulge the pleasures of country house life, including philosophical dialogue not too technical to follow, not too demanding even for participants who were not as well educated as the host. The philosophical dialogues took place in the afternoons at Cassiciacum; the mornings were spent reading Vergil’s Aeneid with students. The works that Augustine then circulated to a few friends had splendidly jejune titles: The Happy Life, The Academic Philosophers, Order in the Universe, and (here a new word he coined with a long future in front of it) Soliloquies, in which “Reason” and “Augustine” enjoyed a dialogue without mentioning the pleasures of the country house. Just as Cicero constructed his Tusculan dialogues to evoke Platonic models, so Augustine set out, at the onset of his now more professedly Christian life, to make himself a new Cicero. He did a fine job of it.
In The Academic Philosophers he made an interesting peace with the radical skepticism emerging from one strand of the Platonic tradition. The work has usually been titled Against the Academics, but it is not really a critique or refutation of the school whose views we encountered in Cicero’s The Nature of the Gods. Rather, in agreement with Cicero, Augustine underscored the argument that there was no philosophical way to prove the truth of fundamental propositions. Augustine’s addition to Cicero is his assertion that faith in Christ provides an alternate path to truth, the only one that works for humankind. For Augustine at this moment, Christianity is deeply embedded in the classical philosophical tradition and speaks to its issues decisively.
Should a fastidious Christian criticize him for doing that? In one sense, of course not. Jesus had suggested that putting new wine in old wineskins would burst them disastrously, but writers had been doing that for centuries in Augustine’s time and have done so for many centuries since. Augustine differs from Nectarius in his judgments of what can be safely retained and what must be discarded, but both agree that much can and should be retained.
How did a future Christian bishop come to display such cultural savoir faire? Our earliest glimpses of Christians from an outside perspective show us small, isolated social groups rather than churches or cults. In the early second century, the younger Pliny, serving as governor in Bithynia in northwestern Asia Minor, wrote to the emperor Trajan for guidance in dealing with them: “They claimed that all they did was meet regularly on a certain day of the week before dawn to sing a hymn to Christ as to a god, then to make an oath together, not to commit any crime but to refrain from fraud, theft, and adultery and to keep their commitments to one another. When they had done this, they went away to gather again later for a meal of the most ordinary and innocent kind.”7 In the second and third centuries, for many people, a Christian group meant a social club often centered on tending the graves of ancestors and relatives.8 Such behavior did not differentiate them sharply from that of many other religious groups. For followers of Jesus who heeded the messages embedded in the Gospels, at least, this was not surprising. Jesus never prescribed elaborate ritual, large buildings, or close connection with civic and imperial power.9
Many communities of early Christians were neither the poor and the downtrodden nor the social elites with traditional educations and an admiration for the life of the mind. In some places, especially Alexandria, Christianity could be found among intellectual classes, and those people shaped much that would come after, both in Christian doctrine and in style of life. But it did still take until the fourth century for any appreciable group of intellectually ambitious and articulate leaders to emerge in the Latin church. One reason we pay so much attention to Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome is that they had no real predecessors in three hundred fifty years of Christianity in the Latin realms.10 If we think now of Roman Christianity as a movement and an organization with theologically articulate leaders, we must reckon with that three-hundred-fifty-year gap (as long a time as separates us from Milton and Cromwell) and reflect on the kinds of lives Christians lived in the meantime.
In Constantine’s wake, social and cultural opportunities arose for Christianity that would have been unimaginable before. The informal meals of early Christianity had turned into a Eucharistic ritual with the air and atmosphere of a recognizably traditional religious rite, complete with the exclusion of noninitiates from the central part of the ritual. That exclusion went against at least one Gospel parable—that of the wedding feast and the host who went out to round up guests from the highways and byways. In this respect it had become more traditional. And it is this version of Christianity that concerns “Augustine After,” the Augustine of his conversion, after he’d written in the style of Cicero.
After taking baptism in the spring of 387 at the hand of Ambrose in Milan,11 Augustine and his family, no longer expecting the plum jobs of empire, made their way back to his native Africa and to the family estate at a place called Tagaste. It was another Calama or Sufes, with a few more Christians perhaps. Its Christians had fallen afoul of imperial law a few years before Augustine’s birth, and so its clergy had been replaced with imperially approved priests imposed from outside. This purge went on in a variety of ways and places from the fourth century onward, standardizing, stabilizing, and officializing churches.
There back in Tagaste, Augustine followed his father’s model, taking up the duties and social roles of a Roman landowner. He had entered an early, imprudent marriage with a woman beneath his mother’s ambitions, so Monnica broke it up when she thought she could make him a better match. With Monnica dead and his desire for marriage abandoned, Augustine was left with a son and heir named Adeodatus (“Gift of God”) to look after, not least by preserving the family wealth. Rich and idle, Augustine wrote a few books and letters to share among like-minded intellectually able friends. He was not well connected with wider literary or social circles and there is no evidence that what he did or said in these years mattered to anybody beyond his tiny circle of friends and readers. At age thirty-seven, he was a typical Roman failure. He’d had his chance for advancement and distinction, left it behind, and gone home to go to seed.
Then his son died in his teens, making Augustine’s financial legacy moot, and his mind turned to finding a different, still more obscure way of life, in a “monastery.” These communities were still rare in the Latin world, and Augustine had probably never seen one, but he knew it was a place of seclusion, where he could concentrate on prayer and study. What he found instead was a second chance at fame and glory.
He took it. Visiting the coastal city of Hippo (modern Annaba, Algeria), mingling with the local Christians, he fell in with, as Ambrose had, enthusiastic Christians who pressed him to accept ordination as a priest. He wept at the idea when he thought of what he was giving up, underwent ordination, then fled home to Tagaste, not sure what he would do. He could have made good an escape, but he went back to Hippo and took up responsibilities he would very much rather have avoided. Perhaps he remembered Ambrose’s own career and decided to attempt something like it.
What emerged was the Augustine of history. As priest for five years, then as bishop for thirty-five, he made this ordinary provincial city, known only as a port for shipping grain from Africa to Rome, into the base for his expanding fame. His preaching built his local reputation while his writing extended his reach into the rest of the Latin world.
This was the great age of the bishop as preacher. Leaders of Christian communities had always preached, but perhaps because few to none were brilliant scholars, pulpit performers had not been on high display. It was in the late fourth century that oratorical stars such as Augustine and Ambrose and John Chrysostom (“Goldmouth”—from the magic of his oratory) emerged in Constantinople.12 Churches were thronged with the best people—men and women carefully separated—hanging on every word.13 That was how Augustine had come under Ambrose’s spell—he said he just went to church to hear the famous speaker.
In the society of the intimate assembly—the Senate house and Forum, in particular—oratory had been the making of leaders in the Roman Republic. With the concentration of power in the hands of emperors, however, speakers had been kept on a tight leash. Demonstrated oratorical skill still qualified men for public life, and the very best could wield some cultural influence, but this influence was divorced from political power.14 Roman education for centuries had idealized the orator—what old Cato called “the good man skilled at speaking”—as the paragon of civility. Under the emperors he could be a paragon of celebrity.
Augustine as bishop was back in the element he had been trained for. His city of Hippo was marginal to the movement of wealth and power in his world, so for many of the years of his bishopric, he left home after the great festival of Easter to travel to Carthage a hundred fifty miles away along the coast. There he spent the summer and early fall months preaching in the churches and working with his senior colleague, Bishop Aurelius of Carthage. They were allied in a struggle to establish their church organization as the dominant one in Africa, but they began from behind.
The African church had divided into two factions in the time of persecution almost a century earlier, “Donatist” and “Caecilianist” we may call them after early leaders on each side.15 The Donatist church had inherited the traditions and practices of pre-Constantinian Christianity in Africa and embraced the greater number of congregants in the larger and wealthier churches of the province for many years. A burst of imperial suppression in 347 had temporarily given the Caecilianist party an advantage, but Julian had, among his other cheerful mischief-making, undone that imperial preference. By the time Augustine came to the church at Hippo, the community he joined embraced the minority group, the Caecilianists. His church defined itself by allegiance to the kind of Christianity sponsored by the emperor and obedient to imperial dictates. The Donatists attacked both emperors and Caecilianists as persecutors of the true church, arguing that nothing had truly changed with Constantine if emperors were still sending soldiers to harass and suppress the true followers of Christ.
The upshot of the controversy marked the high point of Augustine’s public influence and position. In 411, he managed to arrange for an imperial commissioner to be sent to Carthage to review the dispute between Donatists and Caecilianists. A formal public debate between the two parties was held, with hundreds of bishops present for each side, in June 411, in the grand city baths of Carthage. We have the stenographic transcript of most of the proceedings. The fix was firmly in and the imperial commissioner found for the Caecilianists, ordering the Donatists to submit to Caecilianist leadership and discipline, even to the point of giving up their church property to the other side. The threat and, when needed, fact of imperial force was effective and the Donatist church went largely away or at least into abeyance, whatever resentments and resistance lurked beneath the surface. The Caecilianists called themselves Catholic in the new fashion the better to show their alignment with the emperors and the imperial church. Modern historians have let them use it, granting them a tacit marker of their success in defining western Christianity. Whatever it meant now to be the de facto leader of all Christians in Africa, that was the position Augustine had achieved at age fifty-seven.