I'm John Datscher with Professor Catherine Coneybear. Her new book is Augustine the African.

We spent those several years in Rome and Milan, chiefly in Milan. That's it. It's over with.

Augustine is seeing everything he's going to see outside of his immediate hometown,

Tagosti, and Hippo. There'll be some trips in North Africa, but he's never going back to

Italy until, of course, he's dead. However, right now, there's a dispute in Africa that

dominates the Christian world. It's something I was supposed to learn in seminary and didn't conquer, but Catherine's reintroduced me, and I realized 50 years after seminary, I now have the ability to ask, what was Donatism, Catherine?

Donatism was the distinctively North African church.

And when Augustine converted and came back to Africa, he probably had very little idea that he was baptized into the wrong church for Africa.

He was baptized in Milan by Ambrose into the Roman church.

The Donatists were the dominant church.

They believed the same as the Roman church.

They said the Nicene Creed.

They believed in the Christian Trinity,

but they told a different story about their history,

and particularly their history relative to the persecutions.

They felt that they had resisted the persecutions while the Roman church had accommodated.

And it was by this time a hostility, a different tradition of a hundred years standing.

Yes, they accused the people who had cooperated with the persecution as traitors.

Tritore.

We used that word.

Is that our word, traitor?

Exactly.

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