Possidius of Calama: A Study of the North African Episcopate (review)

Hiding in a cubbyhole of his church in Calama in June 408, Possidius heard rioters seeking to burn the place down and expressing frustration that arson would be in vain if they didn't kill the bishop (Augustine, Ep. 91). Not the bishop's finest hour, not least because misreading local sentiment had probably provoked the riot. Even Christian gentlemen in the town were unsympathetic. Horatio, not Rosencrantz, to Augustine's Hamlet, Possidius lived just close enough to the spotlight on his mentor to be known and interesting, but lived just independently enough to make telling its story a good way of revisiting Augustine's world. Possidius is closer to the top than to the bottom of any league rankings of African bishops of his time, but stands far behind Augustine and thus shows us what real life in that church was like.

Possidius's Roman world was anything but ready for laws banning "paganism," and an Africa already torn between a minority state church and a majority contumacious church was less ready than most. But the laws and encouragement rained down from above. The deft survived, while the inept—like Possidius—were at risk.

One part of Erika Hermanowicz's welcome and highly successful study depends on its roots in meticulous study of the social realities of the African church during the Augustinian moment. The rest captures Possidius in his Horatio's garb: ally, enabler, acolyte, and biographer of Augustine. To be equally deft and thorough at considering social realities and literary strategies is an unusual and welcome gift for a study of this sort.

Possidius was not one of the bright young men around Augustine, like Alypius and Severus, who knew a greater world and chose to serve in a lesser one—or at least a newer one. All churchman, with no fancy education, Possidius stayed closer to Augustine than the others, survived him, and did more than anyone else to ensure Augustine's reputation and literary fame. Like his master, he has for long disappeared into his writerly role.

He remains a somewhat thin figure for full biography, and Hermanowicz does not try to make of him or her book what it cannot be. There are moments in the book when we have to let him be Zelig, the man who was around when things were happening. But he had his moments, even if not all of them were good. (Hermanowicz ventures the pleasing but unverifiable guess that Possidius was the agens in rebus whose dithering over a religious vocation brought Augustine to Hippo in 391, where he was ordained against his will.) There are consequently four foci of the study.

First in time, we have Possidius's role in the broader controversy with Donatists, especially his quarrels with his Donatist opposite number in Calama, Crispinus, quarrels that took them together to court and Possidius to victory tainted by the anti-Donatist bias of imperial justice.

Second we have the riots of 408 and the consequences. Among the excellences of the book is Hermanowicz's recognition that the transparent "pagan"-Christian account that Augustine gives is entirely self-serving and heavily misleading. Nectarius, the leading citizen of Calama who signally failed to support Possidius and remonstrated with Augustine, was undoubtedly (I would go further here than Hermanowicz's assertion of probability) a perfectly ordinary and acceptable Christian, probably even of Augustine's own state church party (the quality folk usually were), while some at least of the rock-throwing and arson that Possidius had to face must have come from local citizens who simply could not stand the sight of the man, whether because he offended them as "pagans" or as Donatists or both.

Third we come to the council of Carthage of 411 and Augustine's great, if stage-managed and hollow, victory before an imperial judge against hundreds of Donatist bishops. Possidius, the trusted ecclesiastical gunslinger for Augustine, was much involved in...