Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity, North Africa, 200-450 CE

3. Being Christian in the Age of Augustine

61 •Chapter 3 Being Christian in the Age of Augustine Our study resumes with Augustine’s ordination as bishop of Hippo in 395 (for the date,see Lancel 2002:184–185). The status of Christians in the Roman Empire has changed greatly in the interim. By this time Christianity has been legal in North Africa for nearly a hundred years, a fact that, as Augustine reminds his audience (serm. 62.15), makes a crucial difference to Christians’ standing in the Empire. In several texts, he derides the pagans as now being only a tiny minority that lives in fear and shame (serm. 198auct [Dolbeau 26].8; serm. 306B [Denis 18].6; cons. euang. 1.14.21; see Madec 1992: 28–29). In a sermon preached in Bulla Regia, he goes so far as to assume that there are no longer any pagans in the city (serm. 301A [Denis 17].7). These statements cannot be taken as evidence on the actual number of pagans, but they do suggest that “Christian” is not, by this period, a marked category, that of the “special” or the “other,” but an unmarked category, that of the taken-for-granted, while “pagan” has now become a marked category (on marked and unmarked categories, see Brubaker et al. 2006: 211–212). We will see that this is, in fact, an accurate assessment in some senses, but erroneous in others. The Theodosian age is traditionally presented as the period of the triumph of Christianity and the death of paganism. However, as Peter Brown warns us, we need to be mindful of the fact that this “representation” was the construct of “a brilliant generation of Christian writers” (Brown 1998: 633; see 62 CHAPTER 3 also 1995). Likewise, the series of laws (or rather their extracts preserved in the Theodosian Code) that outlaw paganism and pagans and order the closing of temples and the destruction of statues have also been interpreted by modern scholars as the result of a general religious policy, but most of these laws are in fact reactive and address local situations (Errington 1997, 2006). As a preliminary observation, we should note that the closure of temples and the ban on all ritual practices associated with traditional Greco-Roman cults did not amount to a Christianization of public life. As Claude Lepelley has demonstrated most clearly, not only did the clergy have no hold over municipal institutions, but these institutions remained unchanged (Lepelley 1979–81: vol. 1, 371–376). Augustine did not live in a Christian world, but in a world in which Christians and non-Christians shared the city—both its space and, for the most part, its values. The multifaceted aspects of the “secular” in late antiquity have been thoroughly examined in recent years (see Rebillard and Sotinel 2010). This “secular” should not be seen as a mere byproduct of Christianization, since religious pluralism had been a de facto situation for years before Christianity was a legal religious option (North 1992). The idea that the fourth and fifth centuries saw the development of a secular realm before its contraction in the sixth century is one of the major contributions of Robert Markus (1970, 1990) to the understanding of the period. However, the division of everyday life between sacred and secular, or between religious and nonreligious, presupposes a model of behavior that is both too rigid and too dependent on a Christian theological point of view.1 The situational approach that I sketched in the introduction is a model that seems to account for the evidence more satisfactorily:it better accommodates both individual variations and variations within each individual’s behavior. Augustine’s Letters and Sermons: The Evidence and Its Limitations The core of the evidence used in this chapter is selected letters and sermons of Augustine.2 The dialogic nature of letter writing is self-evident, and ancient theorists of epistolography have consistently presented the letter exchange as a dialogue. Drawing from literary approaches to letter writing (Rousset 1962; Altman 1982), Jen Ebbeler has recently emphasized that, since dialogue is constitutive to it, the letter exchange is a “performative space,” and that we need to pay attention to “strategies for managing epistolary relationships,” as the letter exchange can be “manipulated to script a textual identity for oneself and for one’s correspondent” (Ebbeler 2001: 163, 167–168). Analysis of a few letter exchanges preserved in Augustine’s correspondence,in particular BEING CHRISTIAN IN...