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chapter five Exile In the very period that he would later characterize as one of discontent and disaffection, Augustine had become a veritable Manichaean insider. After nearly a decade of proselytizing, entering into public disputation, and forming discussion groups in support of the Manichaean cause, Augustine was now hobnobbing with Faustus himself, the supreme authority of the faith in Augustine’s African homeland. However frustrated he may have been with the dismissal of his curiosity over cosmological questions, he evidently drew close to Faustus. He served his Manichaean superior as a literary tutor, reading with him the books that Faustus had heard merited attention, as well as making a few recommendations of his own (Conf 5.7.13). To all of Augustine’s peers at the time, he must have seemed to be well embedded in the Manichaean community , a confidant of the bishop himself.1 Suddenly, in the summer of 383 c.e., Augustine left Carthage for Rome. He left behind his family, his pedagogical wards (among them his patron Romanianus ’s son, Licentius, Acad 2.2.3), and most famously his mother (Conf 5.8.15). “What sudden impulse or sudden circumstance drove him to do this thing to them?” John O’Meara asks. “Impulse it must have been, for no circumstance that we can reasonably conjecture could explain his sudden and irresponsible deceit. It looks as if he wanted to escape from everybody and everything he knew.”2 The suddenness and abandonment involved in Augustine ’s departure belie his own explanation of the decision as one motivated primarily by personal ambition and petty disgruntlement with conditions in the Carthaginian classrooms—reasons fitted to the psychological themes and 136 chapter five the apologetic purpose of the Confessions, and just perhaps to a studied deniability of even less honorable motivations. The coincidence of his departure with a major shift in government policy toward Manichaeans was too strong to ignore. Petilian, Donatist bishop of the city of Constantine, later accused him of having fled Africa at a time of persecution of the Manichaeans (CLP 3.25.30).3 It is almost certain that Petilian based his charge on earlier questioning of Augustine’s actions by the latter’s own colleagues in the emergent African “Catholic” community he had joined.4 The evidence supporting this accusation, though largely circumstantial, is substantial. It seems likely that Augustine, at some risk as an outspoken if idiosyncratic member of the Manichaean community at Carthage, fled into exile when new imperial edicts were published against adherents of his sect. Crackdown Augustine mentions experiencing the restraining conditions of antiManichaean edicts in The Morals of the Manichaeans, when he says that meetings were prohibited, and so held in secret, in Carthage (MM 19.69). The old executive order of Valentinian I (Cod. Theod. 16.5.3)5 against Manichaean meetings, issued on 2 March 372, is unlikely to stand directly behind the restrictions Augustine describes, since it was not issued to a Praetorian Prefect for provincial publication, but only to the prefect of Rome, Publius Ampelius, for local application. Wherever an assembly of Manichaeans or such a throng is found, their teachers shall be punished with a heavy penalty. Those who assemble shall also be segregated from the company of men as infamous and ignominious, and the houses and habitations in which the profane doctrine is taught shall undoubtedly be appropriated to the resources of the fisc. (Cod. Theod. 16.5.3) Nonetheless, these provisions may have been incorporated into a lost rescript issued by Gratian from Sirmium sometime in 378, which excepted the Manichaeans (as well as “Photinians” and “Eunomians”) from a general allowance of assembly to all other Christian groups (Sozomen, Hist. Eccl. 7.1.3; Socrates, Hist. Eccl. 5.2; Theodoret, Hist. Eccl. 5.2). Even the allowances of the rescript Exile 137 were revoked by Cod. Theod. 16.5.5, issued by Gratian in Milan the following year, on 3 August 379. In an apparent effort to establish a uniform policy for the entire empire that, with the catastrophic death of Valens, had fallen to his responsibility, Gratian renewed the general ban on meetings for “all heresies,” that is, most marginal schismatic and heretical groups outside the still unsorted Christian mainstream. It has been argued with good reason that Gratian addressed specific provisions of this edict to the Donatist situation in Africa,6 and it certainly found publication there. By its invocation of the prior enactments of both Valentinian and Gratian...

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