Being Christian in Vandal Africa: The Politics of Orthodoxy in the Post-Imperial West
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Being Christian in Vandal Africa: The Politics of Orthodoxy in the Post-Imperial West
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520968684 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2017 |
| Series: | Transformation of the Classical Heritage , #59 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
African Churches
"THEY ARE NOT THE CHURCHES OF GOD, BUT THE CAVES OF BRIGANDS"
In a basilica in the episcopal complex of Ammaedara (modern-day Haidra, Tunisia), a city in the south of the Roman province of Byzacena, stands a funerary notice advertising the burial of a Victorinus episcopus in an enclosure at the east end (see figures 1 and 2). Had it remained in its original state, this inscription would simply have been added to the extensive catalogue of undated epitaphs for late-antique African bishops. Instead, in 568–69, some three and a half decades after the Byzantine reconquest of Africa, a bishop Melleus dedicated the church to Cyprian of Carthage, and the martyr's relics were placed beneath a new, western altar. Ten years later Melleus was buried beside those relics, supplanting Victorinus through interment in a more prominent tomb. Most likely at this time, an extra qualifier was added to Victorinus's epitaph: "VICTORINVS EPISC(OPVS) IN PACE *VANDALORVM*" (Victorinus, bishop *of the Vandals*, in peace). Engraved in a much cruder hand, the addition, Vandalorum, is a godsend, providing him a context: the period of Vandal rule. Given the common Byzantine association of Vandals and Arians in the mid-sixth century, it almost certainly identifies Victorinus as a Homoian bishop. The Nicene Melleus's inscription places a similarly telling emphasis on Catholic "unity": "MELLEVS, EP(IS)C(OPVS) VN(I)T(A)T(I)S, REQVIEBIT INP(A)C(E)" (Melleus, the bishop of unity, has found rest in peace). Melleus's project of refurbishment, rededication, and interment required careful distinction of his own status from that of the bishop who had already taken up posthumous residence in the church.
These privileged burials capture two African bishops (or their devotees) using familiar strategies of episcopal self-aggrandizement. They hold an important implication. The later Byzantine addition to Victorinus's epitaph at Ammaedara attempted to mark the Homoian bishop out as clearly "different" from his later Nicene counterpart. For modern observers it has the opposite effect, demonstrating the difficulty of distinguishing the activities and self-presentation of Nicene and Homoian bishops, or of their two ecclesiastical institutions. Here was an urban church in use in the Vandal period by a Homoian bishop. On his death, that Homoian bishop received a prominent burial within its walls of the sort that influential bishops in Africa and across the Mediterranean procured throughout the period. Were it not for a later polemical scrawl, Victorinus would be (at least to us) indistinguishable from hundreds of other ordinary African bishops. The identification of his church as one used by Homoians is equally exceptional. The doctrinal affiliation of churches in Vandal Africa (as elsewhere) can rarely be read from the material evidence, precisely because there were no major differences between them (at least as far we know). Of course, there are fundamental limitations to the material record of late-antique African churches, due to both early prescientific archaeology and broader methodological problems of reading cultural meaning into material evidence. Yet the impression of a deep-rooted similarity that it provides may not be so misleading. Nicene and Homoian churches may not have looked all that different to contemporaries.
The degree to which these two sets of churches and communities might seem interchangeable worried Nicene churchmen from the beginnings of Vandal rule. Quodvultdeus, the Nicene bishop of Carthage during Geiseric's conquest of the city and its immediate aftermath, spent the conclusion of a sermon warning his congregation offhis Arian rivals. After evoking classic ecclesiological images of the church as the bride of Christ and mother of the faithful, Quodvultdeus contrasted his heretical opponents in equally traditional — and equally gendered — terms:
Do not let the strange, invented name seduce you from that mother, do not let the strange appearance of the church deceive you. The bride of Christ is not the one who does not know her husband. Disgraceful is she who contends to dishonor the appearance of such a husband with her words. In vain does she assign herself the name "church." I see you, O treacherous cave, deceiving, because you have been deceived. I see that you change your shape to the appearance of another. Why do you adorn yourself? Why do you embellish yourself so? Why do you spread your skirts? Why do you contend that you are equal, against the true bride? The bridegroom does not look upon you, because you are not the bride. But you say that you are beautiful, and you often glory in your gold and ornaments.
Quodvultdeus used the trope of heretical church-as-prostitute to caution his congregation about the Homoian church in Carthage. This church apparently looked deceptively similar to his own, to the extent that he feared members of his audience might attend it. This unnerving plausibility led Quodvultdeus to reconfigure its potential appeal as an illicit seduction. The Nicene bishop of Carthage's anxieties about the "appearance" (species) of this rival church, his repeated allusions to its embellishments and adornments, and his direct address to it as a physical space (o spelunca subdola) suggest he had an actual building in mind — perhaps one of several churches in the city moved into Homoian hands by Geiseric. Who Quodvultdeus's Arians were is unknowable. They simply appear in his sermons as individuals professing a non-Nicene form of Trinitarian doctrine. It is unclear whether the Homoian ecclesiastics active in the first years of the Vandal kingdom were individuals who had traveled with the Vandal war band since Spain (or perhaps earlier), figures who were already present in Africa at the time of the conquest, or both (as seems most likely) — and if both, when and how any shared institutional recognition developed between them. What is certain is that they posed no end of problems for the Nicene bishop of Carthage.
Quodvultdeus was not alone in feeling the need to prevent Nicene Christians from attending Homoian churches by slighting the buildings themselves. Almost a century later, Fulgentius, the Nicene bishop of Ruspe, a small town on the eastern coast of Byzacena, conveyed a similar message in the final stanza of a polemical psalm he wrote to educate contemporaries about Arian heresy: "Brothers, guard yourselves carefully, / that you might never enter their churches to pray. / They are not the churches of God, but the caves of brigands." Both Quodvultdeus and Fulgentius sought to make Homoian churches into something decidedly other. But in so doing, they implied that, from the perspective of individual Christian adherents, Nicene and Homoian cult sites, communities, and services did not look all that different. Such basic similarities required these two Nicene bishops and countless other contemporary Christian authority figures in Vandal Africa to emphasize that one church was the right place; the other, the wrong one.
Texts like Quodvultdeus's sermon and Fulgentius's psalm demonstrate that the Nicene and Homoian Churches of Vandal Africa were in direct competition for the loyalties of African Christians. They lay out in exquisite detail the intellectual basis for this competition: the many arguments used to justify the designation of one or the other as the true Christian institution and community in the kingdom. The next three chapters explore in depth these arguments and the debates they inspired. What these texts do not straightforwardly provide is a means to gauge the frequency and scope of that competition. Most of what can be known about Homoian churches is derived from Nicene polemical writings, which were not concerned to provide an accurate and detailed picture of the careers of their Homoian counterparts, nor of the size and structure of this rival institution. Quodvultdeus and Fulgentius do not locate the churches they discuss. Even the precious evidence of Victorinus's epitaph is, in effect, the result of Nicene polemical discourse. Somewhat more surprisingly, Nicene texts are patchy even in the coverage of their own institution. Few episcopal careers can be tracked in detail, and even texts written by influential Nicene bishops circulate under assumed names. As a result, it is not possible to assemble more than a superficial and somewhat misleading narrative of the two churches, their most prominent representatives, and the actions they took. At the same time it is vital to locate Nicene and Homoian clerics within fifth- and sixth-century Africa, to establish a framework in which the practical consequences of their competition might be understood.
This chapter pursues the implications of Victorinus's epitaph. It follows the lead of Quodvultdeus and Fulgentius's (supposedly) confused coreligionists in identifying basic similarities between the two ecclesiastical institutions of Vandal Africa. These two churches have often been portrayed as decidedly different in terms of size, profile, and personnel. The Homoian Church is generally seen as much smaller than its Nicene rival and its institutional formation as a reflection of dependence upon the Vandal war band and the Hasding regime. The following sections argue that Nicene defamation has led to these misleading portrayals. While it is likely that the Homoian Church could not rival the full strength of its Nicene opponent, the disparity between them was less pronounced than is generally assumed. Contemporary references to the liturgical use of some form of Vandalic language — the moments most likely to convey some sense of distinct ecclesiastical practice designed for Vandals — in fact show a diversity of languages and practices in both Homoian and Nicene Christian communities. The impression of Homoian bishops as essentially secular political actors derives from their portrayal by the History of the Persecution and the Life of Fulgentius as Machiavellian "court bishops." Other episodes reveal a composite picture of Homoian churchmen performing the familiar roles of late-antique bishops. Once passages that describe the Homoian Church and its representatives are read in terms of the aims of their Nicene authors, that institution begins to look much less peculiar.
Ironically, the fragmentary attestation of the careers of Nicene bishops also makes their Homoian counterparts look less odd. For these bishops too it is rare to find a felicitous combination of texts and biographical contexts; their advantage lies in an absence of character assassination. This deficiency of lives (and Lives) thwarts the examination of the material consequences of Christian difference in one carefully delineated social environment, an approach taken in many studies of late-antique ecclesiastical politics. At the same time, it checks the unintended contrast that can form even in the most evenhanded treatments of (high-resolution) "orthodox" bishops and (fuzzy) "heretical" opponents. Moreover, it facilitates the integration of a set of anonymous and pseudonymous texts written in the kingdom that provide fascinating perspectives on this controversy and its concrete manifestations. All in all, probing the supposed differences between the Nicene and Homoian Churches of Vandal Africa provides a basis for taking these two institutions on equal terms.
THE NUMBERS GAME
Size mattered in late-antique ecclesiastical controversy. It also counted ideologically, as superior numbers justified ecclesiological claims within a Christian culture whose ideal was Catholic universality. The spread and specific locations of rival ecclesiastical institutions were often crucial. On those terms, the Homoian Church has generally been seen as much weaker. This is to some degree a commonsensical supposition, given that, on the eve of the Vandal conquest, the Nicene ecclesiastical body was theoretically in command of the resources and manpower of the Catholic and Donatist institutions merged by Emperor Honorius's edict of unity of 30 January 412. Its continuing presence in the sees contested by those ecclesiastical factions is suggested by the Register of the Provinces and Cities of Africa, an African Nicene episcopal list produced in association with the ecclesiastical conference of 484. The Register names 459 Nicene bishops resident across all the provinces of the region in that year.
Scant appearances of Homoian clerics and churches convey a similar geographical spread. Churches in Numidia and Mauretania Sitifensis (by 437), in Carthage (after 439), and then all across the Vandal kingdom (in 484) were supposed to have passed into the hands of Homoian clerics on royal orders. The framing of Hasding prohibitions of Nicene worship in the sortes Vandalorum (the province of Africa Proconsularis) similarly assumes Homoian communities beyond the capital. Moreover, the terms of Huneric's edict of 24 February 484 suggest that his regime at least thought it plausible that Christians could participate in Homoian services all across the kingdom. The problem is that there can be nothing like the same confidence in terms of the density of these communities and thus the size of the Homoian Church. Pinning down Homoian churchmen is difficult, especially as Nicene narratives normally present them at Hasding courts in Carthage. Nevertheless, Homoian bishops can be seen at Ammaedara and Th amalluma in the far south of the kingdom (in southern Byzacena) and at Tipasa in the far west (in Mauretania Caesariensis, modern-day Tipaza in western Algeria). A presbyter, Felix, was also active at the turn of the sixth century on the fundus Gabardilla, an estate on the provincial frontier between Proconsularis and Byzacena; it is unclear whether he was there as part of the formal Homoian ecclesiastical institution or operating in a more private capacity. The only certain locations of church buildings used by Homoian clerics are in Carthage and Ammaedara. As a result, it is unclear how common it was to have Homoian and Nicene bishops, churches, or congregations in the same city — in the manner so vividly attested for the Donatist schism — or if the norm was a church or churches solely occupied by one or the other. What can be said is that urban competition happened often enough for the politics of church use to be important: Nicene authors complain about Homoian possession of church buildings and celebrate their return. Yet given the paucity of evidence for their presence, it seems unlikely that Homoian churchmen had the same tally or distribution as their Nicene rivals.
Th at said, the imbalance between the Homoian and Nicene churches should not be overplayed. It may not have been as great as the Register (an apologetic document) suggests. The practical outcomes of both Honorius's edict and the transition to Vandal rule would have been more complicated than the continuing self-identification of the African "Catholic" Church implies. Catholic and Donatist congregations in some settlements combined as Honorius had prescribed, but in other places the status quo may have persisted until the Vandal conquest; certainly, ongoing tensions are evident into the 420s. There is a jarring absence of evidence for Donatists from the 430s. Under Vandal rule, individuals and groups previously labeled Donatists could have assimilated to either side of the new conflict, on the basis of a host of potential factors (on the one hand, shared Trinitarian views, Homoian heresiological categorization, and possible coercion; on the other, shared hatred of the party of Caecilian and rebaptism of the members of that party). Some, of course, may simply have refused to define themselves according to the terms of the new dispute and thus faded from view. The same can be said more broadly. Other clerics and communities, whatever their communion, may have played little active role in ecclesiastical controversy, whether because the issues did not matter to them or because they were not closely connected to the other constituent communities.
Those bishops who did play an active role within the Nicene Church were not infrequently absent from their sees because of exile and prohibitions on ordination. The province of Proconsularis was particularly badly hit, with a drop from 154 bishops in 457 to just 54 in 484; before a spate of new ordinations around 480, this tally may have been as low as three. Byzacena similarly lost its entire episcopate to exile for most of Thrasamund's reign. Yves Moderan's persuasive interpretation of a gnomic abbreviation in the Register of 484 suggests that eighty-eight African bishops transferred their allegiances to the Homoian side. It may be telling that Nicene writers seeking to belittle their opponents emphasized their weakness outside Africa (a classic anti-Donatist argument) rather than inside the kingdom. The Homoians were sufficiently numerous and widespread for their universalist claims to worry their opponents. Whatever their physical spread and distribution, in the crucial battle to gain recognition as the kingdom's legitimate ecclesiastical institution, there is no good reason to suppose a significant disparity between these two African churches.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations and TablesAcknowledgments
Time Line
Introduction
PART I. CONTESTING ORTHODOXY
1. African Churches
2. In Dialogue with Heresy: Christian Polemical Literature
3. “What Th ey Are to Us, We Are to Them”: Homoian Orthodoxy and Homoousian Heresy
4. Ecclesiastical Histories: Reinventing the Arians
PART II. ORTHODOXY AND SOCIETY
5. Exiles on Main Street: Nicene Bishops and the Vandal Court
6. Christianity, Ethnicity, and Society
7. Elite Christianity, Political Service, and Social Prestige
Epilogue: Homoian Christianity in the Post-Imperial West
Bibliography
Index