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Augustine,Martyrs,andMisery
PeterIverKaufman
ChurchHistory/Volume63/Issue01/March1994,pp114 DOI:10.2307/3167829,Publishedonline:28July2009

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Augustine, Martyrs, and Misery

PETER IVER KAUFMAN Augustine said that Rome fell frequently, all too often into "utter moral depravity," occasionally into the hands of the city's enemies. Maybe Aeneas was to blame. He had shown poor judgment, hauling to Italy the gods that failed to save Troy. Subsequently, when the Gauls came to Rome's gates, those divine and purportedly vigilant protectors did remarkably little protecting. They later offered no resistance when Nero reduced Rome to rubble. Augustine held Aeneas's eulogist responsible for the terribly inflated expectations that made the city's humiliations all the more demoralizing; Virgil misled citizens, suggesting that Rome would stand forever. Christians should have known better. They had it on higher authority that heaven and earth would pass away.1 Yet Christians expected Rome to prosper with their God. News of Rome's "passing" in 410 reached Jerome in Palestine as he was preparing his commentary on Ezechiel. He paused, momentarily waxed inconsolable ("the whole world is lost"), and returned to his project. When Augustine heard about Rome's fate, he started something new. More than fifteen years later, he completed his monumental and comprehensive City of God. To this day, it defies simplifiers, the most successful of whom ponder its political theology and generally conclude that the City was Augustine's effort to replace the infectious enthusiasm and triumphalism of the likes of Eusebius and Lactantius with a more modest and balanced assessment of the empire's place in God's plans for redemption. I want to discuss a related matter in this paper, to interrogate the pastoral effectiveness of the City's political theology.

1. Sermones 105.7.10, citing Luke 21:33; Sermones 81.9; and De civitate Dei 1.3 and 2.22 (hereafter DCD). For the sermons, I have used J. P. Migne's Patrologiae cursus completus, Series Latina (Paris, 1844-); for DCD and other works cited, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vienna, 1866). All translations are mine. I have consulted Jean Doignon's careful commentary on the sermons in "Oracles, propheties, 'on-dit' sur la chute de Rome (395-410): Les reactions de Jerome et d'Augustine," Revue des etudes augustiniennes 36 (1990): 135145; but see also Rudolph Arbesmann, "The Idea of Rome in the Sermons of St. Augustine," Augustiniana 4 (1954): 308-324; and Otto Zwierlein, "Der Fall Roms im Spiegel der Kirchenvater," Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik 32 (1978): 5876. For "Vergilianism," consult diaries Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (Oxford, 1957), pp. 27-30, 61-73; and, for Augustine's remarks on fifth-century nostalgia for protective deities, see Gaetano Lettieri, // senso
della storia in Agostino d'Ippona: II 'saeculum' e la gloria nel 'De civitate Dei' (Rome, 1988),

pp. 248-253. Mr. Kaufman is professor of religious studies in the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 1

CHURCH HISTORY

Averil Cameron, borrowing from Bellah, recently proposed to measure effectiveness in terms of Christianity's success in "implantfing] habits of the heart." Hearts being hard for historians to monitor and probe, we will have to settle, as Cameron did, for inferring effectiveness from discursive strategies and for appraising Christianity's "capacity to create its own intellectual and imaginative universe." We begin by considering Augustine's attempts to encourage Christians to exchange one set of "habits" for another, to rid themselves, that is, of expectations likely to limit the victory of faith over fact. They expected that their virtues and martyrs would save them from misery and keep Rome from passing. Augustine was determined to sweep the shards of those expectations into the rest of the debris left by Rome's humiliation and to rebuild their optimism on a firmer foundation, on God's promises relayed in the church's instruction. But my paper stretches beyond the City and the sermons and correspondence easily incorporated into its imaginative universe. I want to suggest that if we concentrate on how effectively Augustine broke the "fall" of Rome and review his remarks on martyrs, misery, and Christian ministry, we will want to qualify Robert Markus's conclusions about his "vindication of Christian mediocrity" and place his early fifth-century controversies with Donatists and Pelagians in a different context.2 1. In happier times, Rome was full of tombs. "[H]ow full Rome is with buried saints and how rich the city's soil with sacred graves!" Visitorsflockedto the old capital to see the latest construction undertaken to honor Peter, Paul, and other martyrs interred in or around the city. Prudentius was all awe, envy, and admiration: "thrice, four times, even seven times blessed [are] the inhabitants" of Rome who routinely worshipped at those "sacred graves."3 Their reverence was misinterpreted. Manicheans, for example, thought Christians were trying to appease ghosts hovering over the gravesites. Augustine could hardly prevent willful misunderstanding, but he did explain to Manichean critics that offerings were not left for Peter or Paul but for God, as countenanced in the psalms. Christians "pay religious honor" to martyrs, he said, by worshipping the God that martyrs had worshipped and by offering thanks where they had offered up their lives. Much later, probably after 410, he made the same point to the worshippers themselves. "Value your martyrs. Praise them; love, honor, and tell others about them. But

2. Compare Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, U.K., 1992), pp. 50-53. Also consult Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire (Berkeley, Calif., 1991), pp. 4-6, 26-27, 42; and, for relevant remarks on Augustine's "pastoral spirituality" and the Donatist controversy, Felix Genn, Trinitdt und Ami nach Augustinus (Einsiedeln, Switzerland, 1986), pp. 32-42. 3. Prudentius, Peristephanon 2.465^168, 2.529-584, 12.1-66.

AUGUSTINE AND MARTYRS

worship [only] the martyrs' God." In the same sermon, he declared that martyrs and apostles "hate" extravagant celebrations, feasting, and drinking at their tombs, a declaration which signals Augustine's growing apprehension. He had assured critics of something he could no longer count on: observances similar to those chronicled by Prudentius apparently were intended and attended to appease martyrs and keep trouble at bay. Augustine increasingly took it upon himself to underscore what was wrong with that purpose and what had gone wrong with the observances. God, he insisted, could not be persuaded to safeguard cities or regions or empires. God promised solace in heaven, not security on earth. Christians preoccupied with worldly hopes, fears, and monuments, Christians, that is, who "build" on earth, were likely to be disappointed. "[T]he Lord disciplines whom he loves" (Hebrews 12:6). Augustine disputed the very premises on which the hopeful built ever more impressive basilicas and baptisteries to honor their martyrs. Builders, admiring bystanders, and streams of dazzled sightseers expected safety or prosperity in return for their homage. And what most disturbed Augustine was that such credulous Christians cursed God when their premise proved groundless, their homage ineffectual, their monuments defenseless, their cities pregnable.4 Bishop Paulinus of Nola was a regular visitor to the tombs and shrines of Rome. He well understood, then, why a widow in his diocese, desiring protection for her deceased son, asked permission to have him buried in the basilica of Felix the Confessor. Paulinus acquiesced but wrote Augustine for a second opinion. Augustine may have meant to sound stern. He echoed Paul's second letter to the Corinthians (5:10): "we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body." It mattered what was done in the body not to the body, post mortem. Yet the piety of Paulinus and that of his bereaved petitioner were precious commodities, so Augustine found a way to draw the exacting implications from the apostle's statement without directly condemning cherished practice. "When one thinks of where a dear friend is buried and when the place of burial is associated with the name of an esteemed
4. Sermones 296.5, 8-9; and compare Sermones 273.7-9 with Contra Faustum 20.21. Augustine marvelled that so much was expected in Rome from Saint Peter's tomb. Alive, Peter lacked courage; he disobeyed Christ, repeatedly denied him, and was caught dissimulating by Paul. Scripture yielded ample evidence against the granite character of Peter's commitments, so much so that Augustine could not finally decide whether Peter was the rock on which Christ pledged to build his church (Retractationes 1.21.1, discussing Matthew 16:18). Augustine conceded that Peter was strong as well as weak, and the church contained both the firm in faith and the infirm. But one conclusion was inescapable after 410: neither Peter nor his tomb protected the stones and citizens of
Rome. Consult Victor Saxer, Morts, martyrs, reliques en Afrique chretienne aux premiers

siecles (Paris, 1980), pp. 128-129; and Robert Eno, "Forma PetriPetrus, Figura Ecclesiae," in Collectanea Augustiniana, 2 vols., eds. B. Bruning, M. Lamberigts, and J. Van Houtem (Louvain, 1990) 2:675-676.

CHURCH HISTORY

martyr one affectionately commends the soul of the departed to that martyr in one's thoughts and prayers. And when the piety of their dear and faithful friends is shown them, the deceased doubtlessly benefit, to be precise, the deceased who, while they lived, merited that such should benefit them after this life.5 The condition was crucial. Proximity to the tombs of martyrs and the solemn prayers of friends could not comfort the soul of the reprobate. Only the regenerate benefit. But because no one alive could tell with certainty whether the deceased was reprobate or regenerate, Augustine allowed that well-wishers ought to make arrangements that might console the departed. Better to do what could be unavailing than to omit what would have comforted the righteous. The bishop was also aware that proximity and elaborate funerary rites comforted mourners' faith and hope in the resurrection.6 But Augustine asserted openly and often that the righteous were not disadvantaged by having been interred without fanfare or far from the graves of martyrs. Saints and angels find and assist the souls of the righteous wherever they left their bodies. The corpses of the martyrs of Lyon were devoured by animals. The pious and innocent victims of the Goths' savagery were left to rot where they fell. No one should imagine that such blessed dead would be overlooked. There was no room in Christianity for pagan superstitions about the unburied. Too much paganism, Augustine charged, had already warped Christians' expectations and had transformed Christians' funerals into raucous celebrations.7 Pagans looked for rewardsprosperity, securityfor their enthusiastic, if disorderly, expressions of reverence; should Christians ask for less? Christians and pagan critics alike wanted to know why God had let Rome "fall" during Christian times. Augustine answered that the first decade of the fifth century could scarcely qualify as a Christian time, what with revels and riotous conduct at Christians' gravesites.8 In 392, 397, and 401, Augustine prevailed on church councils to prohibit indecent displays during funerals and funerary anniversaries. He boasted some success, yet his persistent complaints after 410 suggest that the goal of sobriety receded farther and farther as he pressed ahead. To shame local revelers, he claimed that North Africa lagged behind the rest of Christendom which had suppressed such disorder. But Augustine had to voice his dissatisfaction dexterously. He did not want to imply that neighboring executives had been remiss. He wrote to his friend Alypius that circumstances some-

5. 6. 7. 8.

De curapro mortuis 4.6 (hereafter Cura). Cura 18.22. Cura 2.4-3.5, 9.11; and Z)C/> 1.13. Sermones 296.6.

AUGUSTINE AND MARTYRS

times dictated tolerance. Prompt censure and suppression of boisterous, even boozy behavior at gravesites could cost the North African church many Christians. It was wise for a while to accommodate recent converts. They had come to think that "sociability and effective supplication" went together. Shrewd officials realized that pagans, upon adopting Christianity, could not as easily abandon their pleasures as their illusions. The concession was provisional; all Christians, Augustine said, must eventually conform to "the saving principles of sobriety." After exonerating officials, therefore, he turned to, and on, incorrigible converts and their descendants who continued their feasting and drinking, scoured the Old Testament for precedents, and defended themselves by referring to Rome, where pilgrims and city residents were reputed to drink excessively after offering toasts to Peter and Paul at the sites of their martrydoms. Augustine as good as admitted that his proclamation about widespread suppression had been premature but went on to explain that Rome was a special case, an administrator's nightmare. The city was too big to police effectively. Waves of immigrants and pilgrims made the population unmanageably diverse. The bishop of Rome, then, had some excuse; drunkards (ebriosi) who disgraced their religion had none. Peter had explicitly forbidden what Roman ebriosi were doing and what their North African counterparts were defending (1 Peter 4:3).9 Rome was punished in 410. Divine retribution might have been far more devastating, for five years before Alaric and the Goths stormed into Italy, the pagan Radagaisus threatened to take the city. With God's aide, adjuvante Domino, according to Augustine, the more barbarous barbarian was defeated. Whatever else could be said of Alaric, he was, after all, a Christian; he spared the basilicas of saints Peter and Paul. Rome suffered, to be sure, but not the fate of Sodom. Roman Christians suffered, yet they endured nothing that Christ had not suffered for them: capture, hardship, humiliation, anguish, and death. God's "ineffable clemency" broke bodies, those of the martyrs and that of the city of martyrs. But the pilgrim city of souls was undamaged and undiminished.10 Augustine's City of God is concerned with two cities. It exposes the fiction that the pagans' gods had been trustworthy protectors of Troy, Rome, and the like. It discredits related hopes that the Christians' martyrs would alertly guard earthly cities. Martyrs were not gods. They ought to be honored temperately, soberly. They invited emulation, not adoration. And to emulate them, Christians must offer the single "sacrifice" still "acceptable to God."
9. For ebriosi, see inter alia, Enarrationes in Psalmum LIX 15, although here, as elsewhere, Augustine blames Donatist fanaticism as well as paganism. For "sociability and supplication," Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (New Haven, Conn., 1984), pp. 75-76, 84-85. The letter to Alypius is particularly informative, Epistolae 29.3-6, 9-10, but also consult Epistolae 17.4 and 22.4. 10. De excidio urbis Romae 8.9. For Radagaisus, DCD 5.23 and Sermones 105.10, 13.

CHURCH HISTORY

God, of course, needed no sacrifice, Augustine hastened to add, idealizing divine plenitude, yet the City suggests that "a broken spirit" was a welcome and acceptable sacrifice. For contrition and humility enabled Christians to abjure expectations which exhibited lesser loves and attachments to cities of earth and stone, then to love God unconditionally, to submit to God's will, and to take hold of the sacred fellowship of the pilgrim city.11 Talk of sacrifice in the City is usually subdued but occasionally overpowering. The tenth book emphatically matches "the sacrifice of humility" against the arrogance of those who "build" on earth. Humility is the mortar for the pilgrim city, which in the remaining books of Augustine's text, becomes the foil to the terrestrial city with its monuments and mounting expectations, its unrestrained confidence that enterprise, skill, virtue, and faith would earn earthly rewards. On earth, the pilgrim city was austere, alien; its journey through time, troubled and wretched (aerumnosa). However settled they mt/ seem, genuine Christians were citizens of this other, transcendent realm. They must expect only hardship here but may expect reward hereafter. Noah's ark perfectly symbolized the pilgrim city. To Augustine, its proportions called to mind those of the human body that Christ assumed; its timber, the cross from which Christ left this world. Its ordeals in rough seas prefigured the pilgrim city's passage through time. No better reminder that the genuine Christian was not at home here, that Christ's kingdom was not of this world, could have been set before the faithful, save perhaps the Christian martyr.12
2.

Too much and not enough were expected of Christian martyrs. Too much, Augustine maintained, because many Christians presumed martyrs would protect them, their properties, and their cities; not enough, because most Christians failed to appreciate that martyrs were reliable guides on the exacting journey from res to spes, from trust in the things of this world to confidence in the blessings of the next. Moreover, the martyrs were irrefutable proof that God's compassion was not incompatible with hardship and human misery. Miracles at their tombs attested the power of humility and underscored their exemplary heroism as well as God's abiding love. No wonder, then, that Augustine warmly welcomed the relics of Saint Stephen when they came to rest near Hippo.

11. DCD 8.26-27, 10.1-7, 19. 12. DCD 12.9, 15.26, 17.3, 13, and 19.27. I agree with Basil Studer who urges, against received opinion, that the tenth book, belongs with "confirmation[s]" such as these rather than with the refutation of philosophers in the City's previous four books. See
Studer's "Zum Aufbau von Augustins De Civitate Dei," in Collectanea Augustiniana (see

note 4), 2:941-943.

AUGUSTINE AND MARTYRS

The welcome spilled into the last book of the City where it mixes easily with Augustine's arraignment of Christians who hesitated to circulate stories of miraculous cures at martyrs' gravesites.13 Peter Brown suspects that Augustine cheered the arrival of Saint Stephen and urged greater publicity because he meant to overcome "the privatization of religious practice." Christians had been too tight-lipped; their confidential, off-the-record stories about miracles and cures and other "centripetal" elements such as intimate gatherings and meals at martyrs' tombs may have pulled families together but they definitely pulled churches apart. Brown proposes that Augustine selfconsciously waged a campaign against "reticence." He pressed for public disclosures and labored, on this reading, to replace centripetal with congregational commemorations. In the process, Augustine and other officials (Brown's "impresarios" of martyr cults) "rewired" piety to place their executive authority in the foreground. Each martyr became "the invisible, heavenly concomitant of the patronage exercised palpably on earth by the bishop. . . . [T]he bishop entered with greater certainty into his role as the visible patronus beneath the invisible patronus." But if Brown's account is an anthem to the prowess of ecclesiastical administrators, it is also a tribute to the persistent influence of patron-client relationships that characterized late Roman social and religious practice. And, I fear, it is also something of afistin the face of my interpretation, for Brown pairs patronage with intimacy and amnesty, inferring that Augustine believed that "men who had shown themselves, as martyrs, to be true servants of God could bind their fellow men closer to God than could the angels." But some nuggets simply cannot be mined from the City's nearly inexhaustible treasure. The passage to which Brown refers in this instance is emphatically theocentric. It declares only that God made martyrs and angels companionable, and it criticizes practices that honored martyrs as mediators. Christians commemorate martyrs' sacrifices, Augustine explained, to thank God for martyrs' "victories" and to appeal for God's unflagging support so that they might imitate whom they admire. The passage in question conspicuously values imitation over intimacy.14 In De cum pro mortuis, where Augustine did write about martyrs' patronage and meditation, he gingerly and skeptically considered common assumptions about intimacy. Maybe martyrs did remain close by, foraging for souls and assisting the afflicted at their tombs. Augustine could not disprove it, but tales of phantom figures, extraordinary visions, and sudden cures could not tempt him into the camp of the credulous. He preferred the idea that martyrs were with God, removed from commerce with their admirers yet assisting them with prayers, much as Christians on the other side of the grave prayed
13. DCD 22.8. 14. Compare DCD 8.27 and Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago, 1981), pp. 32-39, 61.

CHURCH HISTORY

for the welfare of deceased coreligionists.15 Possibly Augustine favored this second idea because it was less likely to confound the impression left by his Confessions, the impression that Christians could search for and be found by God's vast mercy without the patronage of "invisible friends" and intermediaries. The City certainly supposes that Christians will search in time rather than in particular places, in history rather than exclusively at gravesites and shrines. True, God's traces {vestigia) could be discovered alibi magis, alibi minus, in some places more than in others. But history and the narratives it inspired told the faithful what to expect from their faith, once they learned to see God's presence or providence in chronicles of the pilgrim city's ordeals, in Cain's fratricide and all that followed, including, of course, the events of 410 and their aftermath.16
3.

At least one reason for Augustine's attention to martyrs and miracles had nothing to do with patronage and intimacy. The martyrs' most important legacy was the insight that life on earth was miserrima, most miserable, compared with life everlasting. Were Christians never confronted with truths about the martyrs' misery and about their own, they might never come to terms with their estrangement from God. Misery drove them inward, upward, and forward. The task that misfortune and grief set for introspection, according to Augustine, was a sublime self-rediscovery tantamount to the prodigal's return in Jesus's parable. The faithful returned to themselves and to their heavenly father, acknowledged their former alienation from God and their actual alienation (as citizens of the pilgrim city) from this world, showed contempt for their old hopes for security and worldly prosperity, and devoted themselves to new expectations compellingly articulated in stories of the martyrs' courage and faith. The great danger was that calamity sometimes sent individuals scampering for imaginary consolations. That may be why Augustine so resolutely associated grief with transcendence and why, as Gaetano Lettieri pointed out, he stressed expectations {la dimensione dell'attesa) in all his explanations.17 If his Confessions can be trusted, Augustine knew from personal experience how consciousness responds to long pulls from grief, how the aggrieved come to indict the times {mala tempora) and to doubt divine sovereignty. The death of a dear friend, he confided, left him preoccupied with misery and meaninglessness. He realized that he had been miserable for some time; morbid reflections on temporality and mortality had merely chased misery
15. Cum 20. 16. DCD 10.3, 11.28, 16.2. 17. Lettieri, Senso della storia, pp. 169-171, citing Enarrationes in Psalmum LXVII31, and pp. 313-314. Also see DCD 11.28, 19.20; and Sermones 96.2, 169.9, 11.

AUGUSTINE AND MARTYRS

from the lair from which it had secretly and deftly ruled his life. Augustine regretted that his hopes had been shackled for years to perishable things (and persons). But it took several years more to undermine those hopes altogether and to put new ones in their place.18 Grief was not a false start. It led nowhere, if the aggrieved held tenaciously to prospects for some worldly recovery or compensation, but it worked well, if they could be induced to jettison their old expectations and take hold of God's promises. For Augustine, much depended on the church's instruction, and instruction amounted to the elaboration of Romans 8:24, "in this hope ["for adoption as sons"] we are saved." Augustine was persuaded that the apostle addressed persons who had already confronted the persistence of villainy in this world and had admitted the unreality of ever completely overcoming evil. They were not hopeless. They neither cursed the times nor quarreled with God. They were hopeful; from tragedy and misery, they learned humility, without which every setback would seem an offense. Unwilling to blame themselves, however, the arrogant blamed others, even God. By contrast, humble and hopeful citizens of the pilgrim city, caught in the coils of disappointment and grief, offered their contrition, their "broken spirits," as sacrifices, much as the martyrs had offered their lives.19 Grief and misery, then, were not impediments. What encumbered humility and hope was "the flesh," broadly conceived. The flesh kept expectations earthbound and prevented Christians from capitalizing on their misery. Where the psalmist wrote of being stuck "in mire" (69:2), Augustine, annotating, proposed that the faithful were stuck in the flesh. The spirit "sighed" upward and forward; the flesh tethered Christians to worldly ambitions. If calamity failed to cut them loose, that very predicamentthe tension betweenfleshand spiritshould have occasioned the kind of desperation which in Augustine's estimation, the apostle most memorably described, "I can will what is right but I cannot do it" (Romans 7:15-24).20 Some Christians, continentes, seemed to have overcome theflesh.Augustine applauded their chastity, yet he could not abide their sense of superiority. They bragged that they were better than their parents whose intimacies produced them. Augustine's repeated preference for continence might suggest that he would have overlooked some degree of impertinence, but he took continentes as examples of the influence of the flesh on those who appeared to have conquered it. For arrogance and uncharitable gestures eclipsed chastity. Augustine preached that humility was paramount. If upon
18. Confessiones 4.4-6. 19. DCD 19.4 and Sermones 80.8. Also see Basil Studer, "Augustine and the Pauline Theme of Hope," in Paul and the Legacies of Paul, ed. William S. Babcock (Dallas, Tex., 1990), pp. 212-214; and Norbert Fischer, "Augustins Weg der Gottessuche," Tnerer theologische Zeitschrift 2 (1991): 96-98. 20. Ennarationes in Psalmum LXVIII18; LXXXIII9.

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searching one's soul, one found any boast or exaggerated self-esteem (inflatio), one could be certain that too little love for God lodged there. And the place where such love should have been was as good as an invitation to the devil to cultivate insolence and bring forth a crop of wickedness.21 Pride tripped up the continentes, but Augustine thought the Pelagians far more culpable, because they programmatically underestimated the extent to which every Christian was stuck in or covered with "mire." They trusted their virtues and had forgotten that salvation was earned only by Christ for the Christian. Augustine flailed at Pelagian arrogance in 412 in his defense of infant baptism.
The good that one does comes to light when one knows that justification is due to God's grace and is not a reward for virtue [non ad sua merita.] The apostle said that "God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure" [Phillipians 2:13]. All who come from carnal generation to spiritual regeneration come therefore through Christ. Christ made it clear, when he was asked, that the question of remission could not be resolved by reason. But infants are surely not exempt from the grace of remission, and there is no other way to cross to Christ. And no one can be reconciled to God or come to God except through Christ.22

Virtues counted for little or nothing. One came "to spiritual regeneration" only "through Christ." Neither the priest nor the child's parent or presenter brought the baptized to (and "through") Christ. Responsibility for that and for regeneration rested ultimately with God and, more proximately, with the entire church, with those living and dead who took pleasure in the child's or catechumen's presentation.23 Hence it was important to get the faithful into the right church. To that end, after 410, Augustine continued to exchange insults with Donatist secessionists who, for nearly a hundred years, had trumpeted the virtues of the wrong church, the collection of their churches. Donatists placed great stock in baptism. Their contention was that salvation in the church Augustine defended was nearly impossible because no one could be certain that the priest who baptized, or the bishop who ordained that priest, or the bishops who consecrated that bishop had not been indelibly stained by the sins of long-dead clerics. It seemed senseless to Donatists to turn the quest for God into a game of chance, absurdly so inasmuch as it was altogether avoidable. For early in the fourth century, only some officials capitulated to authorities; others, Donatists' ancestors, seceded. Their heirs' sacramentsbaptisms, ordinations, consecrationswere still valid, inasmuch as Donatists and their ancestors chose to suffer, as had the martyrs, rather than to succumb to the wickedness of this world.24

21. 22. 23. 24.

Sermones 354.8-9; DCD 10.29 and 19.25. De peccatorum meritis et remissione 1.33.62. Epistolae 98.5. Actes de la conference de Carthage en 411, 3 vols., ed. Serge Lancel (Paris, 1972) 3:1198-1202; Contra litteras PetUiam 2.17.14 and 3.38.44; and Contra epistolam Parmeni-

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11

Augustine was struck by the irony that Donatists, who were so quick to compare themselves and their puritanical predecessors to martyrs, had completely misconstrued the meaning and message of martyrdom. He agreed that martyrs had been "genuine lovers of righteousness," but he charged that Donatists had forgotten that martyrs were preeminently paragons of humility. Measured by any standard, martyrs possessed a surplus of virtue. That alone made their humility all the more admirable. But Donatists, at the start of the schismthe moment of secessionboasted of their righteousness. They then said they suffered as the martyrs had suffered, but in the saying they showed how little they understood the martyrs' legacy and their own experience. Had they been more perceptive, Augustine held, they would have been more humble, charitable, and forgiving of their less steadfast brethren. Moreover, had the Donatists of his time learned from the martyrs to forego temptations of the flesh (calca carnem), they would not have been found drinking, dancing, and carousing at sacred gravesites while he preached about the martyrs' sobriety and humility.25 "How will you dissolve the glacier of [Donatist] iniquity unless you burn with charity?" At first, Augustine hoped to melt resistance by publicly disclosing and debating Donatist error and pretension. After 400, he gradually reconciled himself to the use of force, suspecting and then suggesting that charity could require coercion, that "burn[ing] with charity" might, under some circumstances, require scalding one's critics. The tactics would take some explaining, for Augustine simultaneously maintained that Christians who suffered persecution symbolized the pilgrim city of God. So, to keep Donatists from claiming close affinity with those emblems and first citizens of the pilgrim city, Augustine distinguished between persons persecuted for the sake of righteousness (Matthew 5:10) and others hounded because of their obstinacy and fanaticism. As for Christians duped by Donatism yet less fanatically committed to Donatist causes, he argued that would-be rescuers must pinch (vellicat) and occasionally strike (pulsat) those ignorant of the dangers and treachery that surround them, regardless of the criticism that coercion would attract.26

ani 3.22.12. For general assessments of Donatism, W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church, 3d ed. (Oxford, 1985); and Bernhard Kriegbaum, Kirche der Traditoren oder Kirche der Mdrtyrer: Die Vorgeschichte des Donatismus (Innsbruck, Austria, 1986). For Donatists' fascination with martyrdom, Jean-Paul Brisson, Autonomisme et christianisme dans I'Afnque romaine (Paris, 1958), pp. 292-294, 307, 311; and Ernst Ludwig Grasmiick, Coercitio: Staat und Kirche im Donatistenstreit (Berlin, 1964), pp. 120-130. 25. Epistolae 29.11 and 159.8 Emin Tengstrom's discussion of the Circumcellions is relevant, for, as the name suggests (circum cellos), they were Donatist partisans particularly attatched to the shrines and cults of martyrs yet prone to anarchy. See Tengstrom's
Donatisten und Katholiken: Soziale, wirtchaftliche und politische Aspekte einer nordafri-

kanischen Kirchenspaltung (Goteborg, Sweden, 1964), pp. 6578. 26. De utilitatejejunii 9.11-10.12; Epistolae 88 and 185.13-14.

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Among Donatists and Pelagians, spirituality was mistakenly equated with moral superiority. Legislation, confiscation, incarceration could go only part way to break the equation. If "habits of the heart" were to change, Augustine would have to add compelling argument to coercive policy. While writing about the compatibility of compassion and coercion, he came again to explain the compatibility of divine mercy and human misery.
4.

Robert Markus writes about Augustine's "vindication of Christian mediocrity," speculating that "the passionate intensity" of his assault on Pelagian and Donatist perfectionism was one of the many examples in religious history of converts' implacable and ferocious opposition to positions they had deserted. "For some years Augustine's neo-Platonically inspired philosophical views and his ascetically colored Christianity blended harmoniously in his mind . . . [producing] confidence in man's rational and moral capabilities." Although Markus admits that it would take a first-class piece of sleuthing to find traces of confidence in Augustine's work after 400, he maintains that the memory propelled and intensified the polemic against perfectionism when "pastoral responsibility brought [Augustine] a deepened sense of community with the half-educated, the superstitious, and the sensual Christians of Hippo." 27 I submit that an equally, if not more, plausible connection between "pastoral responsibility" and "passionate intensity" presents itself if we start with the wistful, what-if passage Augustine composed for his City of God.
Let the Romans read our sacred books and discover what is abundantly written in the prophets, gospels, acts of the apostles, and epistles against greed and extravagance. It was written for people everywhere who assemble to hear it written, to be read compellingly, not as the report of a philosophers' colloquy but as an oracle from the clouds . . . Instead, Romans defame Christianity. They blame it for their distress. Yet if the rulers of this world and those they ruled, young men, maidens, and the elderly with the young . . . had listened to the principles of Christianity concerning justice and morality, the state would have arrayed all the earth with its happiness and then climbed to the summit ofeternal life and reigned blissfully.28

Rome's chance had passed by the time Augustine had written this. Inasmuch as God's sovereignty was incontestable, one could only conclude political failures were divinely predestined. The church's challenge was to make sense of the failure and miseryto teach Christians to abandon false hopes and unrealistic expectations and to trust God not to cheat them, whatever disappointments they experienced. Augustine said nearly as much

27. Markus, The End ofAncient Christianity, pp. 50-53. 28. DCD 2.19.

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before 410. Perhaps as early as 400, in his treatise on catechesis, he acknowledged that the church prospered in times of relative peace. That empires or emperors could secure lasting peace, however, was the longest of long shots, despite the swagger of political rhetoric. A far better bet, he confided, was that public officials would rank with scoundrels seeking domination rather than with the pious who humbly seek God. Augustine made no single official his target. He divided the world into two camps: in one, persons trusted their own virtues and powers; in the other, they trusted God's promises.29 After 410, Augustine reintroduced the distinction. Perhaps it would have been unobjectionable and inspiriting to have identified the second camp with the church, but Augustine sensed that churches would always encompass capricious and wayward Christians. On earth, they would forever be mixed congregations of the reprobate, the rogues, and the righteous. The reprobate were lost. The bishops' pastoral responsibility was to make rogues (adhuc carnales) righteous and the righteous more so.30 Righteousness, in this context, required straight and sobering talk about virtue, talk that emphasized the persistence of misery rather than emancipation from it. In the City, Augustine advised that prudence did not eliminate evil. The best that one could claim was that prudence put prudent people on guard against evil. Earthly justice could never extinguish inordinate desire. It could only try to contain the effects of misrule. And no one could become perfectly virtuous, although Christians resolved to endure what God wanted the faithful to endure (feramus quod deus nosferre voluerit) might be resourcefully virtuous, if they shunned fraudulent consolations, steeled themselves to Hebridean hardships, and were warmed and saved "in hope." The expectation that martyrs would intervene on earth and spare or save worshippers was one specious consolation. The expectation that the city of martyrs, a monument to Romans' self-reliance, would never be compromised was another. Both had to be cleared before saving expectations could take root.31
29. De catechizandis rudibus 31. 30. De baptismo 1.2325. Also see Cornelius Mayer, "Augustins Lehre von homo spiritales," in Homo Spiritales, ed. Cornelius Mayer and Karl Heinz Chelius (Wiirzburg, Germany 1987), pp. 45-50; and Johannes Van Oort, Jerusalem and Babylon (Leiden, Netherlands, 1991), pp. 123-229. 31. DCD 19.4; and De excidio 8.9. Others celebrated "Roman peace," but Augustine saw ceaseless war on the empire's frontiers (and in Christians' souls) and gathered that the very conditions of earthly existence precluded lasting peace, which came only to the regenerate and only after death, DCD 19.10-11. He denied that he ever went out of his way to insult Rome, either the city or the empire. He understood that the imperial expansion improved Christianity's prospects, yet he could not forget what underlay the eradication of old frontiers, the relative reduction of tribal hostilities, and the remarkable network of roads, over which Christianity's itinerant preachers as well as Rome's soldiers had marched. Behind it all was the Romans' lust for domination (libido dominandi). See DCD 3.10,3.14,4.5-7,8.24,15.7;and Sermones 105.9,12. For Augustine's
"patriotism," see Franois Paschoud, Roma Aeterna: Etudes sur le patriotisme romain dans I'Occident latin a iepoques des grandes invasions (Neuchatel, Switzerland, 1967), pp.

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CHURCH HISTORY

Augustine lumped perfectionisms with false expectations, for they all made it difficult on earth to people the pilgrim city, the destiny of which could only be represented by "a rhetoric of paradox." Augustine probably thought the apostle had some premonition of this when he calculated that God deliberately made the wisdom of the world look foolish (1 Corinthians 1:18-25). For his part, Augustine, breaking and, one might say brokering the "fall" of Rome, read all history through the cross, the resurrection, and the expectation of salvation. The City makes Rome's fate paradigmatic. It turns the tables on those who appealed nostalgically to Rome's former glory and on those who cited the Roman church's permissiveness which allegedly licensed riotous behavior at the tombs of Rome's martyrs. Augustine turned to Rome to extract a very different lesson. Any earthly triumph or happiness, if it obscures the expectation for the pilgrim city's celestial victory and beatitude, promptly occasions fresh misery and the increase of misery which was always there (quae inerat augeatur). Each "fall" or failure deflates the wrong kind of hope and gives the Christian ministry a chance to retrain perfectionists, reaffirm paradox, reorient expectations, and people the pilgrim city of God.
234-236, 249, 256-258; and, for securitas or lasting peace in the City, see Wilhelm
Kamlah's still useful Christentum und Geschichtlichkeit: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung des Christentums und zu Augustins 'Biirgerschaft Gottes', 2nd ed. (Stuttgart, Germany, 1951), p.

266. I discuss other literature on the topic in Redeeming Politics (Princeton, N.J., 1990), pp. 130-148, 196-200. 32. DCD 15.4; Cameron, Christianity, pp. 158160 (on "the rhetoric of paradox"); and Luigi
Alici, "Interiorita e speranza," in Interioritd e intenzionalitd nel 'De civitate Dei' di

Sant'Agostino, ed. Remo Piccolimini (Rome, 1990), pp. 60-67.