Religion and Violence in Late Roman North Africa

The articles in this special section had their origin in a seminar held at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association in Seattle in January 2013. The aim of the seminar was to pay homage to Brent Shaw’s Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine, which had been published not long before.¹ Shaw’s volume is more than a monumental study of the conflict of Catholic and Donatist that came to a head during the episcopate of Augustine. It is a reminder that the literary and material evidence for North Africa between the Great Persecution and death of Augustine is more voluminous than that for any other region of the empire–save perhaps northern Syria–and a call, a summons, even, to use the massive corpus of North African Latin not just for biographies of Augustine, but for social historical inquiry.² In that spirit, the contributors, all of whom publish their seminar papers here, were asked not to review or critique Shaw’s work but to evaluate and explore the social history of violence in late Roman North Africa in light of his achievement.

Catherine Conybeare, Hal Drake, Cam Grey and Noel Lenski responded to this challenge by broaching topics and offering theorizations that build upon Shaw’s work but also qualify it and in important ways assess and address some of its lacunae. Conybeare demands that we identify violence to bodies in particular as an ethical problem and observes the startling unwillingness of Augustine to describe such violence. She then takes up two features of his texts, his interest in the spaces where violence occurs and the power he seeks to assign to communal norms and public speech to constrain it, and finds echoes of this conjunction in Arendt’s concern for the geography and publicness of political action, articulated in Arendt’s work on the space of appearance. But while Conybeare’s close readings reveal how much profit might still be gleaned by close attention to Augustine’s language, she ends, like Shaw, in ethical lament and epistemic aporia. For though Conybeare provides significant resources for giving moral description to what she terms “the shift from words to blows,” her respect for an enduring antinomy between speech and violence might just foreclose a properly historical-sociological account of particular crossings of that divide.

For his part, Grey worries that shock and horror, to wit, ethical and aesthetic responses to violence, too often work to estop inquiry into the historical particularities of contexts for violence. Although he cites Shaw’s concern that violence is undertheorized, he declines to name violence a thing in itself. Rather, following Walter Pohl and Ari Bryen, Grey urges that we ask “what violence [was] doing in the societies” we study.³ Although, like Shaw, Grey addresses this question in part by exploring the normative codes available at the time for evaluating particular instances of violent action, he imports two distinctions toward that end that enable more fine-grained analysis: one between violence and force, the other between vertical and horizontal registers of normative evaluation. Whereas violence is irrational and illegitimate and demands ethical (and often violent) response, force is sanctioned, legitimate, and follows rationally upon authorized forms of deliberation. (Grey very usefully declines to name only physically destructive action as violent and shies from himself employing distinctions sanctioned by his objects of study, instead using the term force–violence as a catch-all.) In a vertical conversation, those in power seek to draw and enforce distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate force–violence, as between legitimate and illegitimate purveyors of such. In horizontal conversations, individuals and groups within particular localized communities evaluate and respond to violent action. Scholars in other fields engaged with legal and ethical pluralisms might analyze these dynamics somewhat differently, but Grey’s terms, which he adopts from Guy Halsall, are very well suited to a context of empire.⁴ Much light is thereby shed on their ethical quandaries. As Grey acutely observes, in so operating one risks collaborating in the elision of forms of violence that were noncontroversial then...