Rome and the African Church in the Time of Augustine (review)

For those of us who read Augustine mainly for his philosophical and theological thought, it is easy to forget that he was a busy bishop and that as bishop he was involved as judge in many—and in some instances messy—cases of canon law as it was emerging in the African church in the late fourth and fifth centuries. For those of us who were coerced into some formal study of canon law, it is easy to forget that the various canons were often developed as the result of quite interesting concrete cases. Jane Merdinger focuses upon several examples of cases before ecclesiastical courts in Augustine’s Africa as a means of illustrating the evolving relationship of the African church and the Apostolic See, not in doctrinal matters on which they generally agreed, but in practical matters of law on which there was often enough conflict.

The book is very well written and provides a fascinating insight into the development of canon law in the African Church and into the relations between the African Church and the Apostolic See in those years in which the authority of the papacy was just beginning to emerge. In this area which has been the grounds of dispute between Catholic and Protestant scholars, Merdinger moves with skill and even-handedness without, as far as I can tell, any partisan agenda. The discovery in the mid-1970’s by Johannes Divjak of seventy-seven new letters of Augustine, which were first published in 1981 in CSEL and were re-edited in 1987 in BA, provides new evidence for the topic of Merdinger’s research.

Her book is divided into two parts. The first part begins with a sketch of the history of early Christianity and then focuses upon the relations between Rome and Africa as seen from the writings of Tertullian, Cyprian, and Optatus as historical background for the second part in which the author examines the emergence of African appellate law and a series of ecclesiastical court cases. I had not expected to find this sort of topic so interesting, but Merdinger says of her work, “I take canon law down from the shelf, blow off the dust, and try to demonstrate just how lively the background for any particular issue could be” (xiii). And she does that most successfully!

The second part of the volume begins with the Council of Hippo in 393 at which Aurelius of Carthage, the primate of Africa, and his brilliant young colleague, Augustine of Hippo, established a program of reform for the African Church which entailed annual councils of bishops from the six provinces of Africa. In chapters six and seven Merdinger sketches the legislation regarding ecclesiastical appeals within Africa and that regarding overseas appeals. Chapters eight through eleven take up the particular cases of Apiarius, of Honorius, of Anthony of Fussala, and of Apiarius once again.

In 418 Apiarius, a priest of the town of Sicca Veneria, committed certain unspecified offenses, and when his bishop took action against him, he appealed to the bishop of Rome. Pope Zosimus sent to Africa Faustinus, an Italian bishop, along with two presbyters, to deal with the case, and they did so in a such a high-handed way that the African bishops balked—mainly because Faustinus rested his case upon canons supposedly from Nicaea, but actually from Sardica, as the records of the Africans showed.

The case of Honorius is known only through three of the Divjak letters. When the bishop of Caesarea in Mauretania died, the lower clergy and the people wanted to elect Honorius who was bishop of a nearby town, but the bishops of Mauretania refused to go against the canons of Nicaea which forbade the transferal of a bishop from one see to another. In this case the African bishops appealed to Rome, and Pope Zosimus appointed three African bishops as his envoys, namely, Augustine, Alypius, and Possidius.

Anthony was a...