This is CBSI on the world. I'm John Batchelor. Professor Catherine Coneybear of Brinmore College.

Her new book is Augustine, the African, a man who spent his entire life in North Africa,

what is now Algeria, was his part of the world, except for three or four

years in Rome and Milan, chiefly in Milan, when he converted to Christianity at the

blessing of Ambrose, St. Ambrosia, who is the patron saint of Milan, very important figure

in the Roman church.

But Augustine from the humble Roman town of Hippo, and not even Carthage, hippo outside of Carthage,

was in correspondence with all of the bright lights of Christianity.

Ambrose in Milan, Jerome now and again in the Holy Land. Everybody knew Augustine, especially because he took on his opponent in the North African church, the Donatism, Donatists. However, there were other kinds of Christians in the world at the time, and one were the Aryans who tended to be the court version of Christianity.

And, Catherine, what did the Aryans believe? Because I don't think it bothered Augustine,

and I'm not sure why not. The Aryans believed that Christ was fully human, not a combination

of God and man as Orthodox Christianity believed.

Augustine didn't get actively involved in battle against the Arians, not because he didn't care.

He would have cared deeply, but because it did not touch him directly.

And the one way in which he engages Aryanism, he's not explicit about it.

At the beginning of City of God, he talks about Alaric, who was Aryan, sparing

refugees in the temples, sorry, in the churches, not killing people who took refuge in the

churches at the time of the sac of Rome. In the sac of Rome in August in the sac of in the sac of room

and you would and you would never know from the way

he describes it that

alaric was

arian yes it's a very neat

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