Augustine in His Own Words
One time-consuming task was serving as a judge or legal arbiter. He spent long hours, much to his chagrin, listening to lawsuits between members of his congregation, typically over disputed wills. When his congregation ran afoul of the law, he was expected to lobby city officials or beg for mercy from imperial judges. As head of the Catholic community, he was automatically a civic notable. He was expected to play the patron and required to stake out his community's claims in the routine rough-and-tumble of city politics, rubbing shoulders with aristocratic landowners who oversaw vast estates in the nearby countryside and transported their harvests to Hippo's markets, or with shipping magnates whose fleets sailed goods into and out of Hippo's harbor and to ports around the Mediterranean and beyond, or with military officers whose legions guarded the Empire's porous frontiers and whose personal ambitions could spark uprisings and bloody civil wars. Paganism was alive and well in certain locales, and rivalry with Christians could, on occasion, turn violent. Augustine put his vast oratorical energies into combating local groups he regarded as heretics or schismatics. He publicly faced off with both Manichees and Arians. He was such a formidable controversialist that local Donatists (wisely) refused to debate him face to face. So he skewered them in sermons and bombarded them with pamphlets. Later chapters will detail these individual controversies, but we need to bear in mind that these disputes sprang from Augustine's pastoral work as a bishop.
Not all tasks were local. North African bishops had, since the time of Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258), worked intensely through regional councils. This meant that Augustine had to travel extensively, especially between Hippo and Carthage, but on occasion west along the coast or inland.5 His ecclesiastical superior was a good friend, Aurelius, bishop of Carthage and primate of Africa Proconsularis and, for all intents and purposes, head of the North African church. Augustine, in both regional and international disputes, often served as both theoretician and spokesman for the policies of the North African bishops. Augustine often partnered with Alypius, who was an old friend and who had been baptized with him in Milan. Alypius officially served as bishop of Augustine's hometown of Thagaste but spent extended stints in Italy, lobbying on behalf of the North African bishops in their dealings with the imperial court at Ravenna.6
In this chapter, I draw on three main sources. First is the brief Life of
5. See the classic study by Othmar Perler, Les voyages de saint Augustin, CEASA 36 (Paris: Institut d'Études Augustiniennes, 1969); this needs to be updated in light of recent discoveries of new letters and sermons.
6. On this, see Serge Lancel, "Africa: Organisation ecclésiastique," Aug-Lex 1:205–19; Jan Michael Joncas, "Clergy, North African," AugEncy, 213–17. On Aurelius of Carthage, see Anne-Marie LaBonnardière, "Aurelius episcopus," Aug-Lex 1: 550–66. On Alypius of Thagaste, see Erich Feldmann, Alfred Schindler, and Otto Wermelinger, "Alypius," Aug-Lex 1:245–67.