Eva-Maria Kuhn: Religious Legal Practice in Context – Augustine’s Episcopal Court

Augustine’s declared goal in writing about the civitas Dei was to teach his “son” Marcellinus, the imperial high commissioner and appointed judge in the Donatist controversy of 411, how to live in this world. The idea being of course that Marcellinus should “live by faith”, while “awaiting the (re)turn of justice in the heavenly court”. By writing his magnum opus Augustine took on being the advocate of what he perceived to be the fragile earthly branch of the divine city. Famously, he called this an arduous task. And no doubt a task he only completed over a decade and twenty-two books later, when the godly city was mapped out in entirety. According to his biographer, Augustine pursued his daily judicial duties with similar perseverance, although he regarded hearing cases as burdensome and all too profane duty. Augustine himself used similar language for the administerial and judicial aspects of his office. However one should look beyond all the fine use of traditional topoi and hidden Captationes benevolentiae. In fact, nowhere else were ‘the care for divine things and the concern for human matters’ – so well distinguished by emperor Justinian (Nov.6) – more profoundly jumbled together as in a bishop’s courthouse. The legal sources concerned with the so called “episcopalis audientia” reflect but an outsider’s, i.e. the imperial legislator’s perception of the clerical institution attached to each bishopric. They tell only little about what actually went on there or how religion interacted with judicial decision-making.

The paper addresses religious legal practice of bishops from the perspective of Augustine’s judicial entanglements in the worldly city of Hippo. It explores the connections between the bishop’s work as judge and his deployment of the pending heavenly court with regard to Christian obligations. Augustine’s strategies of legitimisation, his philosophical views and his biographical tracings provide an understanding of the general impact religious legal practice could have in a late Roman city. In light of synodal networking and lobbying at the imperial court to sanction heresy and schism, religious instruction and civic privilege overlapped. Considering also the theological institutionalisation of religious visions with forensic imagery, local episcopal legal practice must be viewed as yet little mapped out key enhancer for the evolution of Christianity.