2016 NAPS Presidential Address New Romans: Salvian of Marseilles On the Governance of God

Even though Salvian of Marseilles wrote in the relative security of Southern Gaul, his treatise On the Governance of God, composed between 440 and 450 c.e., reverberates with the shock-waves caused by Gaiseric’s capture of Carthage and the devastation of the Western Roman Empire during the preceding decades. Salvian’s treatise is a sustained criticism of the way in which the Christian Roman elites had failed and thus brought on God’s immediate judgement themselves. As such, the text has been mined by social historians for information of the state of the later Roman Empire, but it has rarely been analyzed for its own sake. Reading On the Governance of God and its narrative of the progress of the barbarian invaders under the perspective of travel writing, it becomes evident that Salvian considers Carthage the true heart (anima) of the (Catholic) Christian Roman Empire, now captured by the Vandals, the new Romans, as the just successors of a failed Rome, even though that Rome remains the caput and could be saved if all were to heed Salvian’s admonitions to embrace a true (Catholic) Christian life.