Augustine and Catholic Christianization: The Catholicization of Roman Africa, 391–408 by Horace E. Six-Means (review)

This book presents St. Augustine as the primary force behind efforts to make Roman North Africa Catholic (as opposed to pagan or Christian of a non-Catholic kind). Six-Means employs the (to this reviewer, unhelpful) term spin doctor to describe Augustine’s role as Africa’s arbiter of all things Catholic, whether they are in the realm of rhetoric, law, or theology. Despite the author’s insistence that Augustine worked in concert with his episcopal colleagues, we actually see very little of them in this book. Augustine is indisputably the star of the show. Although the book initially seems to have as its ambition an explanation for Catholicism’s ultimate dominance over all other forms of belief, it quickly settles into a discussion focusing mostly on the Donatists. The dates of investigation (391 to 408) aid in pushing the narrative in this direction, but do not necessarily force its hand. Although 391 is understandable for commencing a study (it is the year Augustine was ordained as a priest), 408 is problematic. In this year Stilicho was executed. Six-Means believes that with Stilicho’s death came a “chill” in the fruitful relationship that the Catholics in Africa had cultivated with the imperial court while Stilicho enjoyed power. This is oversimplification. The book all but ignores what is happening in Africa itself. Real and sustained resistance by administrators in Africa (of whatever level) to imperial support for “Catholicization” places Augustine’s assumed role (and Six-Means’s thesis) in jeopardy. The date of 408 also feels somewhat arbitrary, for although this is largely a book about Augustine’s relationship with the Donatists, the cut-off date enables the author to avoid analysis of the 411 Conference and its aftermath, which, in fact, could have lent support to Six-Means’s arguments.

There are a number of bright spots in this volume. The author does a good job tracing Augustine’s intellectual evolution as he transforms himself from a professional rhetor associating with the elite of the empire to a Catholic bishop who must care for all people’s spiritual well-being. The best part of the book is a discussion of Augustine’s use of Genesis 22:18 (on the blessed seed of Abraham) to argue for a Catholic universality. Six-Means articulates well how Augustine adopts the Genesis passage, filtered through St. Paul as well as Tyconius, to make a sustained argument against real and perceived notions of Donatist purity and separatism.

The book also raises many interesting and important questions. What were the intellectual influences on Augustine? How did Augustine’s knowledge and understanding of the self translate into action and activity as a bishop? What, for Augustine, constituted the relationship between rhetoric and theology? How did Augustine persuade the people of North Africa to embrace Catholic Christianity? The answers given, however, are largely unsatisfactory for two basic reasons. First, the author is hesitant to strike out on his own, preferring to present problems and their possible solutions as already adumbrated by well-known contributors to the fields of Augustinian and late-antique studies. The work of Peter Brown, William H. C. Frend, Henry Chadwick, Averil Cameron, J. Patout Burns, and Ramsay MacMullen is very well represented. Second, the narrative follows a perplexing trajectory. The author will present a crucial and tantalizing problem, thereby elevating the reader’s expectations to pleasing heights, but then the same reader must immediately descend into very basic introductory material, which probably is meant to provide context for the question just raised, but it only interrupts the flow. When Six-Means eventually returns to the question at hand, very often he inserts block quotes from the primary (or even scholarly) sources with little explanation or interpretation. We then proceed right on to the next issue wherein this same kind of...