THE CHURCH IN AFRICA
[Sidenote: The Church in North Africa.]
In the middle of the fifth century the Christian power in North Africa
fell under the domination of the Arian Vandals. S. Augustine died in
430 while the foe was at the gates of his city. In 439 Carthage fell,
and Roman civilisation was extinguished. The rule of the Vandals was
not only Arian but barbarous. It is not unlikely that their victory
was won with the aid of the remaining Donatists and the heathen Moors.
With the reign of Gaiseric some degree of toleration was allowed to the
Catholic Church, but the persecution which had marked the earlier days
of the Arian power now took the form of confiscation and the
suppression of public worship. The Church suffered grievously, and not
least in the class of persons ordained to the ministry and consecrated
to the episcopate. But still the Catholics were the great majority,
and it was seen that the Arian Vandals were in danger of absorption by
the subtle influence of the truth. It was a last effort of Gaiseric's
to deprive the Catholics of their leaders, which eventually brought
about their restoration. The Bishop of Carthage and several of his
clergy were put on board a ship and told to escape whither they could.
They reached Naples, {104} and their piteous plight and the news they
brought helped to direct the attention of the imperial power to its
lost heritage. [Sidenote: The Vandal persecution.] Meanwhile the
suffering Church, enjoying now a scanty toleration, now suffering a
severer persecution, continued to make converts and to produce martyrs.
In 477 Gaiseric died. A year before his death he had allowed the
Catholics to reopen their churches and to bring back their bishops and
clergy from exile. And still their missionary efforts had never been
relaxed. Church life still continued; inscriptions remaining to-day
preserve the epitaphs of men buried in the darkest days with Catholic
rites; and in the interior ancient monasteries remained undisturbed.
Hunneric, the next Vandal king, though nominally an Arian, set himself
to extirpate heresies which he did not accept: Manichaeans under his
sway received treatment more severe than Catholics. Indeed, the
Catholics began to raise their heads under the leadership of Eugenius,
who was elected in 479 to the see of Carthage, the only bishopric in
the country which held metropolitan rank. The Bishop of Carthage was
the spiritual head of the whole province, held a superiority over the
bishops outside the limits of Proconsularis, and was, as it were, the
patriarch of the African Church. For twenty-three years the see had
had no pastor, and the restoration marked a distinct step towards the
ending of the Vandal domination. But there was a final effort;
Hunneric, unable to decoy the Catholics, determined to exterminate
them; a writer of the time tells that nearly five thousand clergy were
banished to the desert, where their fate was a practical martyrdom. A
conference was {105} summoned in 484, at which it was endeavoured to
make the Catholic clergy abate the strictness of their orthodoxy, but
Eugenius stood firm. Persecution again followed. The writer already
mentioned, Victor Vitensis, says, "The Vandals did not blush to set
forth against us the law which formerly our Christian emperors had
passed against them and other heretics for the honour of the Catholic
Church, adding many things of their own as it pleased their tyrannical
power." Thus evil deeds bring their necessary consequences. A bitter
persecution swept over the land, and till the death of Hunneric, at the
end of the year, atrocities of the most terrible kind were perpetrated.
It was a brief age of martyrs, and rooted the Church more firmly in the
affections of its children. It was an age, too, of saints, and
Fulgentius shines out by the side of Eugenius as a pattern of Christian
devotion and asceticism. In the years that followed king succeeded
king, and the condition of the Church became gradually more tolerable,
till under Hilderic much of the old organisation was restored and the
monastic houses were established in a condition of considerable
independence. When Gelimer usurped the Vandal throne, the power of
Justinian was able to intervene, and in 533 Belisarius recovered North
Africa for the Empire. [Sidenote: Reconquest of Africa by Belisarius,
533.] The restoration of the direct rule of the emperors was of
necessity the restoration of Catholicism to dominance. But materially
the Church had received blows from which she never fully recovered.
Her possessions, buildings, treasures had for the most part passed from
her hands: and many sees, many parishes, {106} still remained without
pastors. Such was the result of "the violent captivity of a century."
[Sidenote: The revival of the North African Church.]
Justinian aimed at restoring all things to their first estate. "We
would be the guardians and defenders of the ancient traditions," he
wrote in 542 to the primate of Byzacene. He confirmed the Bishop of
Carthage in his metropolitan dignity; he restored sees, allowed synods
to meet, gave special privileges to the clergy. An era of church
building set in, and fine monasteries were erected, in all the
impressive solidity of the Byzantine style, even in distant parts of
the Roman territory. Tebessa remains a marvellous example of the
wealth and dignity which came anew to the North African Church. The
literary power of the Church revived with her material prosperity: a
school of writers arose again in the land of Augustine. Primasius,
Facundus, Liberatus, Victor of Tonnenna, were among those who restored
the activity and knowledge of the Church in history, theology, and
apologetic. Over all the emperor Justinian kept his watchful eye,
directing, interfering, exhorting, as seemed to him good. The
controversy of the Three Chapters had its echoes in Africa, and the
deacon Ferrand, a learned theologian, represented a very wide feeling
when, in his _Defensio_, he deprecated any condemnation of the dead
theologians; and in Facundus, Bishop of Hermiane, the unhappy
hesitating pope Vigilius found an adviser who, if anyone, might have
given him firmness. In the result, the emperor, by the pen at least as
much as the sword, overpowered resistance, and Africa accepted the
decisions of Constantinople. Reparatus, Bishop of Carthage, who
resisted, was deposed, Liberatus {107} preserves the record of bitter
persecution, and Victor of Tonnenna, who equally refused to accept the
decision against the Three Chapters, is especially bitter in his
denunciation of Justinian. But the pope Pelagius was able, in 560, to
announce the assent of Africa to the statements of the Fifth General
Council. The Church from the death of Justinian settled down in
peaceable habitations, strong in the imperial support and the affection
of the people. But as, in the relaxation which set in as time went on,
the power of the imperial administration decayed, the power of the
popes in Africa was gradually strengthened, and the power of the
bishops rose equally. But this was not all. In time relaxation set in
in the Church as well as in the State. There are tales of immoral and
corrupt bishops, of disobedience to authority, of a recrudescence, from
591 to 596, of Donatism. It was the pope Gregory the Great who took in
hand the needed reformation. [Its relation to Gregory the Great.] His
letters are full of African affairs: his keen attention, his
instructions to Hilarus, the administrator of the Roman Church's
possessions in Italy, his minute knowledge, his wise understanding of
the many difficult problems which beset the Church, are prominent in
his correspondence. It was he who reversed the conception of Justinian
in regard to the Church of North Africa. The emperor had striven for
orthodoxy, without the supremacy of the pope. Gregory was determined
to secure the latter, and the history of North Africa affords an
excellent example of how the papal power grew. It was by continual
intervention, in affairs small as well as great, and by constant
solicitude: it was by the use of prudent {108} and sympathetic agents,
and the firm adherence to a policy of charity, orthodoxy and
discretion, that the great pope enforced his views on the bishops, the
Church, the imperial representatives. While he sternly rebuked all
abuse of the political authority which had fallen into the hands of the
bishops, he tenaciously clung to the right of hearing appeals in cases
between churchmen and public officials which circumstances had placed
in his hands. From a right of control he passed to a right of direct
intervention; and in State as well as Church the administrators felt
the power of his indomitable will. While disorganisation was spreading
in the civil order the Church was growing in concentration and
authority.
[Sidenote: The Monothelite controversy.]
But the Monothelite controversy went far to shatter the power which the
labour of Gregory had built up, and with it the Christianity of
Northern Africa. The orthodox felt less and less bound to emperors who
supported heresy, and the Arab invasion drew near without the people
perceiving the full extent of their danger. Fortunatus, Bishop of
Carthage, declared himself a Monothelite, but in every other province
besides his the Church formally repudiated the heresy. In 646
Fortunatus was deposed and Victor succeeded him; and this is almost the
last recorded incident in the history of the North African Church. As
the Arab invader advanced, refugees from Syria and Egypt poured into
the land, and, since many of them were heretical, added to the
religious diffusions of the country. The abbat Maximus upheld the
banner of orthodoxy against all comers. The victory which he won over
the heresiarch Pyrrhus in 645, followed by the declarations of {109}
provincial synods in 646, was the last expression of African orthodoxy.
John, the Jacobite bishop of Nikiu, whose contemporary account of the
Saracen conquest is of the first value, declares that "everyone said
that the expulsion of the Romans and the victory of the Mussulmans were
brought about by the tyranny of the emperor Heraclius and the troubles
which he made the orthodox suffer." A general discontent with the
Byzantine government arose, and Rome, which was more in sympathy with
the people, was unable to help them. In 646 the patrician Gregory, the
imperial governor, orthodox and a protector of the Church, declared
that the Monothelite Constans II. had forfeited the throne, and assumed
for himself the title of emperor. Within a year he was defeated and
slain by the Saracens at Sbeitla, and Byzantine Africa was placed at
the mercy of the Muhammadan invader. The Copts long resisted, but
their resistance was overcome in the autumn of 646. Alexandria fell a
second time and finally into the hands of the Arabs.
[Sidenote: The conquest by the Muhammadans.]
For fifty years the Byzantine power maintained a foothold, precarious
and nominal. Inch by inch, and with intervals of repose and even of
reconquest,--as when John the Patrician, under Leo the Isaurian,
recaptured Carthage,--the infidels advanced, and the Berber tribes of
the interior pressed, too, upon the Christians. Carthage was again
taken by the Muhammadans in 698: the native tribes joined the invaders,
and by 708 Roman Africa was wholly in their hands. Toleration was at
first allowed; but from 717 the Christians had only the choice of
banishment and {110} apostasy. Still many held out: Christian villages
remained, Christian communities, as late as the fourteenth century; and
even now it is said that in some parts Christian customs survive. The
Church at Carthage existed certainly in some organised form till the
eleventh century, and it was not till 1583 that the Church of Tunis was
utterly destroyed.
Meanwhile events in other parts of Africa had run a different course.
The patriarchate of Alexandria had a long and distinguished history,
and from it had spread missions far into the south.
[Sidenote: The Jacobites.]
The Monophysite controversy led to the founding of the Jacobite sect.
Secret consecrations at Constantinople by bishops in prison during
Justinian's severe rule sent a bishop to Hira for the Arabian
Christians in Persia, and another to the borders of Edessa, who founded
the Jacobites and with the assistance of Egyptian Monophysite bishops
continued the episcopal succession. In Egypt there arose the division
between the Melkites, who followed the imperial orders and accepted the
decisions of the Councils, and the Copts, who dissented. The
Monophysites of Syria, Egypt, and Armenia, with temporary and
superficial differences, remained practically at one. National
differences confirmed their divergence from the Roman Empire and the
Catholic Church. Thus while in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere the Church
was still powerfully represented, though side by side with strong
sectarian organisations, there were, when the followers of Muhammad
came to add to the confusion, three nationalistic and heretical bodies,
separate from the Church--those of Persia and Armenia and Ethiopia. Of
the last something must now be said.
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[Sidenote: The Abyssinian Church.]
South of Egyptian territory, properly so called, lay the Ethiopians,
vassals of Egypt, tracing in a dim fashion their Christianity back to
one of those queens who bore the title of _Candace_. These wild and
warring tribes kept up continual conflict, and among the Blemmyes men
still worshipped Isis in the temple of Philae. In 548 began the
conversion of the Nobadae of the Soudan, of whose reception into the
Christian fold the great Monophysite missionary, John of Ephesus, gives
an account. Churches were built, and one inscription at least survives
with the name of a Christian king. Beyond them the Alodaei learnt the
faith from the same preacher, Longinus. Nubia, or Mugurrah, was also
visited by Christian missionaries at the same time. Under Justinian,
the temple of Philae was turned into a church, and the Blemmyes became
Christian. Christian remains long existed, even down to the
neighbourhood of Khartoum; and it was long before the Muhammadan
conquerors swept all the worship of Christ away. Further south
Christianity spread on both sides of the Red Sea. In Arabia Felix was
the kingdom of the Homerites or Himyarites, whose chief city was Safar,
and at different times they were ruled by the same king as the land of
Axum, "the farthest Ind" of the Greek chronicler Theophanes. After the
dispersion, Jewish colonies settled in Arabia, and in the fourth
century Christianity followed. At the end of the fifth century a
bishop is found among the Homerites, and a Trinitarian inscription is
dated 542-3. About the same time the Church in Abyssinia, founded in
the time of S. Athanasius, received the national religion of the
country through the conversion of the Negus at the end {112} of the
fifth century. While the land of Safar at times relapsed into
heathenism and massacred Christians, the Abyssinians remained firm in
the faith. Procopius tells that Ellesthaeos, an Ethiopian king, during
the reign of Justin I., invaded the land of the Homerites to avenge
their persecutions and to suppress the Jewish predominance and set up a
Christian king. With him and his successors Justinian entered into
treaties, as also with the kings of Axum or Abyssinia. While the
Muhammadan conquest swept away the Christianity of the Arabians and
drove those who clung to it northward to the banks of the Euphrates,
the Church in Abyssinia, which had accepted Monophysitism, remained
independent, just as its mother church of Egypt obtained toleration.
It still continues separate, Monophysite, and in communion with the
Coptic Church of Egypt.
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