Total civilizational collapse is unusual. In the West, continuity exists between the Roman past and our contemporary states, despite the invasions of “barbarian” groups. The Franks, that ancient people who settled Roman Gaul, were shaped by Roman culture into the people we now know as the French. But what about instances in which there is no continuity—in which a civilization vanishes, and all that is left is a layer of ash? This is what happened to Roman North Africa, a high civilization, distinctive but immersed in the broader Roman world. The heartbeat of this civilization, the African Church, has no living descendant.
The African Church was among the most intellectually formidable of early Christianity. Carthage is said to have had Christians in its streets during the Apostolic age. And no wonder: Carthage was a hub of the Western empire, perhaps second only to Rome in its cosmopolitanism. The early Church found it fertile soil. Carthage gave us Tertullian and St. Cyprian, intellectual giants who helped define the orthodoxy of the emerging Church.
Unlike much of the Latin-speaking Roman empire, North Africa blended conflicting cultural influences. The dominant Roman culture was always present, but so was the older Punic civilization upon which Rome had built some centuries before St. Augustine of Hippo exemplified this cultural split, with his Roman father, Patricius, and his Punic mother, St. Monica.