Eric Fournier - Victor of Vita and the Conference of 484: A Pastiche of 411

In 411 CE, following a century of religious conflicts within the North African provinces of the Roman Empire, Nicene bishops succeeded in declaring their opponents — African Christians, or “Donatists” — heretics and thus liable to legal punishments. The Nicene bishops managed to reduce their religious opponents to silence through a council of bishops, the conference of 411, which in fact was more a trial to convict African Christians than an honest debate. The crucial factor in the Nicenes’ triumph was their success in obtaining the support of civil authorities, first and foremost the Emperor Honorius, as his edict of convocation to the conference indicates. Honorius wrote with the exasperated tone of one eager to put this annoying conflict behind him, and looking forward to the conclusion of this trial, the issue of which was already clear in his mind (Gesta coll. Carth. 1.4). African Christians, realizing they had been trapped, resorted to all kinds of “diversion maneuvers.” But they could not divert the outcome and were condemned.

Victor of Vita’s depiction of a conference between Nicene and Homoean — Vandal — bishops in 484 presents uncanny similarities to the 411 conference. But in this case, the roles were reversed and the Nicenes were in the position that African Christians had found themselves in 75 years earlier. This paper will argue that comparison between these two accounts, taken as representative of these two great religious conflicts of late antique North Africa — Nicenes vs. African Christians and Vandals vs. Nicenes — reveals a great deal of continuity in the methods of coercion used to impose religious conformity, on the one hand, and, on the other, in the strategies employed by the victims of these policies of religious unification. 

Indeed, Victor (3.3) included the edict of the Vandal king Huneric following the conference of 484, in which the king admitted to “recycling” older anti-Donatist laws. Conversely, Victor depicted the Nicene bishops as having recourse to “diversion maneuvers” similar to the ones that African Christians had used in 411. This strategy was a way for Victor to cast the Vandals in a persecuting role and functioned as a tool of boundary maintenance, in order to assert and reinforce distinctions between Nicenes and Vandals which were constantly being eroded by the Vandal religious policy.