ABSTRACT
In Milan Augustine was busy accumulating students, cultivating powerful friends, and arranging a "proper" marriage, all of which would have eventually landed him a political appointment, a provincial governorship, he dared to hope. This was precisely the position Ambrose resigned more than ten years before to assume the leadership of Milan's community of Christians. Ambrose apparently took no direct interest in Augustine's self-incrimination. Nearly a dozen men "graduated" from Augustine's community of priests in Hippo to become bishops elsewhere, including those two Thagastan friends who had accompanied him from Milan: Alypius and Evodius. Augustine pressed, was the nature of the church, whether the Catholic Church was a regional, North African network of self-declared saints or a school for sinners and a universal communion. Augustine suspected that neopagans, Pelagians, and Donatists never came to grief, so to speak, never even approached the profound self-dissatisfaction that preceded the redemptive reorientation he hoped all Christians would experience.
