ABSTRACT
In the first book of De civitate Dei [contra paganos] (I, 8-9), the best-known of Western bishops Aurelian Augustine of Hippo (354-430) leaves us with one of the most profound theoretical statements in all antiquity about the nature of human existence. It is not a dilation upon the properties of God or the soul, or upon the relationship between faith and reason, or the true nature of reality; nor is it an episcopal pronouncement upon correct dogma or received moral precepts. It is a plainly stated Christian explanation as to why the vicissitudes and typical events of human affairs unfold as they do. It is the succinct formulation of a retributive logic to account for the outcome of every set of changes that ever occurred in humanity's temporal life-from the sudden personal acquisition of fame and riches to the tragic ending of a young life in death, from the blessings of material security experienced by societies, including succour in times of collective disaster, to the destruction of whole empires. It is the distillation of a historical theodicy, a use of the past to 'justify the ways of [the Christian] God to mortals' by placing all events under Providence - sub specie aeternitatis. And when compared to prevailing canons of interpretation in Christian histories written both before and after him, it is a theodicy with a difference. 1 Out of Africa in the West, in fact, comes a maturer, subtler approach to God's retributive justice than prevails even in the highly developed tradition of Church history in the East. And this at the hands of a faithful Berber woman's son, a recent convert from Manichaean dualism and Plotinian monism in turn (387) who had earlier reckoned the Catholic faith so hopelessly unphilosophicaJ.2
