Introduction

Summary

This is not a nice book. It begins with betrayal and ends with suicide. Set on this sad trajectory, the narrative suggests a mundane parallel to the city of God, a fallible human city. If the ideas created by its actors were transcendent, the story itself was enacted in an imperfect human way. The problem confronted in the following investigation is the meaning of religious violence. This story of violence happened in the age of Augustine in his native Africa, when its lands were provinces of the Roman empire. The events begin in the last decade of the fourth century and they end with the armed incursions of foreign Vandal invaders into Africa about the year 429. The spate of killing and destruction that accompanied the arrival of these “barbarian” outsiders put an end to the small story of sectarian violence that is our focus. The new Vandal lords of Africa swept away the cultural underpinnings of institutions and thought that had sustained the special hatreds of the generations that concern us here. There were now to be new dislikes, as one kind of violence decisively trumped another.

The diminutive tradition of sacred violence that I am considering served to create and to confirm intimate values and personal relationships in Africa. The war brought by the Vandals erased these rich meanings that had been created by sectarian conflict. Our attention is focussed on the earlier church struggles that were an integrating force of a social and religious world that disappeared in 430. Our interest is directed as much to the question of how acts of sectarian violence were thought about and represented in words as it is to the actual threats, beatings, burnings, and killings. In this light, it is perhaps disappointing that our narrative diminishes rather than exalts. Events claimed as peasant rebellions and revolutionary social struggles turn out, on closer inspection, to be smaller and meaner things. The principal actors were moved by the logical, if fulfilling, credulities of religious faith and by not much more. What I have encountered is a history of hate – a story of intimate dislike that was motivated by the profound love for one's own people, beliefs, communities, and traditions.