The Catechumenate in Late Antique Africa (4th–6th Centuries): Augustine of Hippo, His Contemporaries and Early Reception by Matthieu Pignot

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Catechumenate in Late Antique Africa (4th–6th Centuries): Augustine of Hippo, His Contemporaries and Early Reception by Matthieu Pignot Adam Ployd Matthieu Pignot The Catechumenate in Late Antique Africa (4th–6th Centuries): Augustine of Hippo, His Contemporaries and Early Reception Leiden: Brill, 2020 Pp. xi + 414. $159.00. Matthieu Pignot’s The Catechumenate in Late Antique Africa provides a necessary and fruitful reevaluation of the mechanics and significance of catechesis in early Christianity. The book is a reworking of Pignot’s doctoral thesis from Oxford. While many presses are becoming more hesitant to publish such theses/dissertations as monographs, Pignot’s work proves that such early work has the potential to make substantial contributions to the field and should not be dismissed for its scholarly youth. The Introduction lays out the author’s main thesis: “[C]atechumens were at the crossroads between potential converts and baptized Christians. I argue in this book that they provide a key to understand concretely how Christian membership was gradually acquired by individuals and experienced at the communal level” (5). Pignot, following Harmless and Rebillard, pushes back against the assumption that there was a widespread delay of baptism among would-be Christians in the post-Constantinian period and instead emphasizes the way in which the liminal space was rhetoricized for polemical purposes. Chapter One, “Augustine the Catechumen: Patterns and Narrative,” explores Augustine’s description of his own experience as a catechumen, from boyhood to baptism. Pignot incorporates the expected texts, such as the Confessions, as well as less studied passages from On Two Souls and On the Usefulness of Believing. He argues that Augustine’s accounts are reliable even as they reflect changing polemical contexts. In Pignot’s persuasive reading, Augustine becomes a catechumen as a boy and remains one, in one way or another, throughout his Manichaean period. Emphases of distance between Augustine and Christianity tell us more about the polemical context of his writing than about any formal break with Christianity. Chapter Two, “The Practices and Status of catechumeni in Augustine’s Community,” considers Augustine’s evidence not for his own catechesis but for those he served as priest and bishop. Pignot moves beyond the standard discussions of preparation for baptism and initial catechesis and examines the larger lifespan of a catechumen. He particularly attends to the signing of the forehead with the cross and the disciplina arcani, i.e., the dismissal of catechumens ahead of the Eucharist, practices that represent the ambiguous liminal place of catechumens in the community. Again highlighting the various polemical contexts of the evidence, Pignot argues that Augustine both fights to maintain catechumens’ allegiance and references practices related to the catechumenate in his fight against Donatists and Pelagians. In Chapter Three, “Catechumens Taking the Step: The Negotiation of Baptism in Augustine’s Pastoral Care,” Pignot pushes beyond the perennial scholarly concern with Augustine’s Lenten appeals to enroll for baptism and considers the ways in which Augustine’s wider encouragement to baptism represented a [End Page 306] theological—and often polemical—concern to solidify that practice’s place in Christian life as essential. This involved constructing an image of the catechumenate as inherently temporary. Chapter Four, “From catechumenus to fidelis: The Lenten Preparation for Baptism in Hippo,” treats the most widely covered aspect of the catechumenate. Focusing not on the well-trod themes of catechesis, Pignot instead analyzes “the ‘scrutinies’ and the significance of exorcism, the disciplina arcani, the role of sponsors, and the dating of the rites of transmission of the creed and the Lord’s prayer” (179). The upshot is a vision of diverse practices that evade easy anachronistic systematization. Chapter Five, “Councils, Preaching and the Catechumenate in Fourth- and Fifth-Century Africa,” moves beyond Augustinian sources to consider the relationship of his texts to that of wider evidence from the same region in roughly the same period. While he is not afraid to acknowledge diversity, Pignot makes clear the larger lines of continuity within the African tradition. Nevertheless, as in Augustine, this common tradition becomes weaponized in specific ways for the sake of anti-Pelagian, anti-Arian, and other polemics. Finally, Chapter Six, “From Carthage to Rome: Debating...