Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine by Brent D. Shaw (review)

Sectarian Violence in Augustine’s Africa

Violence is as violence does. To understand how violence functions one must understand not only physically violent actions and their immediate physical and mental effects but also the ways in which violence impacts on the thoughts and actions of persons who see occurrences or even simply hear about then, whether past or present. In Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine, Brent Shaw explores the ways in which secular violence impacted on sectarian violence, which in turn affected ecclesiastical politics of Augustine’s time, specifically the Catholic-Donatist or, as he prefers to call it, the Catholic-dissident controversy.¹ He says that “Our interest is directed as much to the question of how acts of sectarian violence were thought about and represented in words as it is to the actual threats, beatings, burnings and killings” (1).

As James O’Donnell does when writing on the same period,² Shaw begins in medias res, here with Augustine’s debate with the Donatist bishop Emeritus of Caesarea in 418, in the waning years of the controversy, when appeals to imperial authorities have brought Roman troops to the Catholic side and to their own governmental reasons for enforcing anti-Donatist legislation.³ No longer was the rationale for imperial violence against Donatists the requests of Catholic bishops for protection from dissidents with circumcellion allies, but it was an attempt to assert imperial authority in a dispute threatening provincial peace.⁴

Shaw then moves to the deep background of the religious controversies of the early fifth century. He explores the roles violence and reports of violence played in North Africa from the anti-tax rebellion of Gordianus in 238 to the eve of the Vandal invasion in the fifth century. Wisely he points out that North Africa was not a violent society in terms of the number of events, though there was plenty of street fighting, but was surely so in terms of the effects of literary representations of violence. Chapters follow on the charge of traditio,⁵ splits among the Donatists,⁶ how the memory of violence functioned in Africa, how imperial legislation and enforcement complicated issues, how words generated violence (scriptural interpretation, anti-Jewish rhetoric turned against deviant Christians), the role of the government, and the function of suicide in fact and propaganda.

The text is augmented by appendices on: the numbers of bishops and bishoprics (updating Serge Lancel’s work⁷), chronological issues at the origin of the schism, several appendices on renewed persecution in 347 (the persecution itself, the mission of Paul and Macarius, the Catholic council of 348); the evolving role of the bishop; a historical survey of interpretations of the circumcellions; a discussion of suicide in antiquity; and finally a list non-Augustinian sermons pertinent to his investigations. Maps, an extensive bibliography, and a detailed index round out the volume.

While this is not a book about the theology of the Donatist controversy, it does provide necessary background for understanding the resort of both Catholics and Donatists to state force in their disagreements on the nature of baptism and the boundaries of the true church. Before Donatists were declared heretics, there would have been little reason for imperial officials to be involved in intra- Christian squabbles on ritual and ecclesiology. The state had no simple or even complex juridical mechanisms for adjudicating such theological disagreements, at least none with real force: witness the ineffectiveness of imperial authority to settle issues arising from the Arian controversy. However, as Shaw points out, there were plenty of laws and precedents for state adjudication of property disputes that were, indeed, the cause of most appeals to state authority during the entire history of the Catholic-dissident quarrels.

Shaw also writes convincingly about the role of suicide in the Donatist controversy...