Exiles on Main Street

This chapter reconsiders the relationship between the Vandal kings and the Nicene Church, which has often been seen as an obstacle to effective Vandal rule. The self-portrayal of Nicene bishops as martyrs suffering in an age of heretical persecution—and the self-portrayal of Hasding dynasts as pious defenders of true (Homoian) Christianity—seems to commit them to mutual antagonism. Yet both parties also had interests in compromises, which are revealed by recurrent interactions between bishops and the court at Carthage. Even as they decried heretical Vandal tyranny, Nicene bishops petitioned their rulers to improve their church’s lot, using obsequious courtly language and the appropriate bureaucratic channels to do so. Vandal kings sometimes granted these petitions; even when refused, the possibility of compromise was retained for as long as possible. The result was tacit or even explicit acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the other parties, whether as rulers or Christian authority figures.

In Dialogue with Heresy

This chapter argues that a sophisticated culture of Christian disputation continued in Vandal Africa. It explores an understudied cache of heresiological literature, written in all the genres that underpinned late-antique ecclesiastical controversies (letters, sermons, tractates, florilegia, question-and-answer texts, and dialogues). Their authors used familiar tropes to present their opponents as heretics and themselves as orthodox. Particularly significant are a (rather surreal) series of imaginary debate texts that presented Nicene church fathers like Athanasius and Augustine triumphing over historical Arian heretics like Arius and Pascentius. These virtual dialogues both mirrored and modeled various forms of real debate between Nicene and Homoian authority figures. The striking resemblance between these texts and those written by earlier Christian controversialists was not merely a continuity of literary form. These works suggest that the practical implications of controversy for Christian clerics remained the same.

Christianity, Ethnicity, and Society

This chapter tackles the interaction of ethnic and Christian identities in Vandal Africa. Its premise is that the dominant paradigm of dual ethnic and Christian affiliations—rooted in Victor of Vita’s fundamental dichotomy between Vandal Arians and Roman Catholics—does justice neither to the variety and subtlety of contemporary perspectives nor to the insights of recent critical work on group identities in late antiquity. Each form of identity was, at most, intermittently important for the inhabitants of post-imperial Africa. Ethnic affiliation does not seem to have mattered all that much to the kings and clerics who sought to police their orthodox communities, whether Homoian or Nicene: if any group was singled out, it was the service aristocracy of the kingdom, whatever their ethnicity. Beyond Victor of Vita, when ethnic-group formation and ethnographic perspectives shaped contemporary ideas of Christian community, it was in surprisingly subtle, varied, and even sympathetic ways.

African Churches

This chapter sets the stakes for Vandal Africa’s ecclesiastical controversy. Taking its cue from the anxieties of contemporary Nicene bishops, it suggests that the Nicene and Homoian churches were not so dissimilar from one another, whether in size, personnel, language use, or ecclesiastical culture. It also presents the (surprisingly scanty) information on the careers of key Nicene clerics and argues that pseudepigraphic texts must be integrated into any analysis of this period, not least since the works of better-known figures were often transmitted under assumed names in the early Middle Ages.

Ecclesiastical Histories

This chapter examines the fundamental Nicene response to their opponents’ claim to Christian orthodoxy: they made them into Arians. It shows the intellectual effort this (deceptively difficult) move required. Nicene controversialists drew on the history and heresiology of both the Arian Controversy and the Donatist Schism to portray contemporary Homoians as heretics. To establish the link between their opponents and the Arians of the past, Nicene authors imaginatively rewrote fourth-century ecclesiastical history, reworking what they saw as an authoritative past to match the needs of the present. In so doing, they made the contemporary controversy into a reenactment of earlier conflicts—one from which they, as the heirs of Athanasius and Augustine, would inevitably emerge triumphant. Of course, Homoian clerics were exploiting the same histories of the church to support their own ecclesiological claims. For both sides, this controversy was not new, but rather an extension of fourth-century Trinitarian debates.

Epilogue

After a brief consideration of the end of Vandal rule and a summary of the book’s conclusions, this epilogue treats Homoian Christianity across the successor kingdoms. It compares the ecclesiastical politics of post-imperial Africa with those of Italy, Gaul, and Spain, focusing on three central issues: efforts toward Christian uniformity, the relationship between ethnic and Christian identity, and the conduct of ecclesiastical controversy through heresiology and debate. It argues that Homoian Christianity had a similar range of potential consequences across the Visigothic, Burgundian, and Ostrogothic kingdoms. What separates the Vandal kingdom from its transmarine neighbors are crucial differences of degree, which manifested themselves most clearly in those moments where ecclesiastical controversy was made to matter. Vandal Africa was not an outlier in the post-imperial West.

Elite Christianity, Political Service, and Social Prestige

This chapter explores the limits to the importance of heresiological distinctions in the kingdom’s social and political life. It argues that elite individuals could use their Christian piety to display their social status in spite of contemporary ecclesiastical controversy. Apart from specific moments that required a courtier or aristocrat to define their Christian faith more exactly, the nature of courtly and aristocratic social interaction and the limits of government enforcement provided ample scope for artful dissimulation regarding doctrinal or ecclesiastical affiliation. The evidence of Christian martyrology, poetry, letters, and tombs is adduced to demonstrate that elite Christians, both Vandal and Romano-African, found ways to claim a determinedly Christian prestige that was nonetheless potentially acceptable to other members of the religiously heterogeneous elite.

“What They Are to Us, We Are to Them”

This chapter argues that the balance of power in Vandal Africa’s ecclesiastical controversy has consistently been misunderstood. It reconstructs the self-presentation and heresiological polemic of African Homoian clerics. These authors appropriated the legitimizing standards of the late-antique Christian community to portray themselves as members of the one true Christian Church, while painting their Nicene opponents as Homoousian heretics, whose beliefs were similar to other heresies and tantamount to paganism. The sophistication of this heresiology, its effective use of legal precedent, and the furious Nicene responses it received should force contemporary perceptions of the African Christian community to be rethought. For at least some Christians in Vandal Africa, Homoian Christianity would have been orthodox; the Nicene Church, a heretical sect.

Introduction

This introduction summarizes recent work on Vandal Africa and sets out the fundamental problem with the kingdom. The Vandals’ arrival in North Africa provoked a conflict between groups described by most surviving texts as Catholics and Arians. This conflict led Victor of Vita, the author of the sole detailed contemporary historical account of the kingdom, to portray Vandal rule as persecution, a reign of terror by heretical barbarians. Recent revisionist historiography has salvaged a functioning post-imperial polity from Victor’s apologetic narrative; this introduction shows how the same critical analysis can reshape our understanding of the kingdom’s ecclesiastical controversy.