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O'Donnell is consistent in his mistrust of Augustine's telling of events. The Donatists, he tell us, were actually a more locally rooted African version of Christianity, whose popular support Augustine envied and which he could only dispel by arranging for its brutal suppression at the hands of the imperial authorities. O'Donnell calls Augustine's favored brand of Christianity the "Caecilianists," after an earlier bishop who opposed Donatus—even though no one else in Augustine's day or since has called the Catholics that. O'Donnell is out to puncture stereotypes, to show us that one can slap a name on a group one dislikes and dismiss it as evil—and that he can do it no less effectively than Augustine. The supposed "theology" in this controversy is a mere pretext; this is a political quarrel, plain and simple, in which Augustine effectively "invents" a notion of "Catholicism" to "help him win a local war of punishing intensity." Because O'Donnell's book is meant to have popular appeal he often turns to contemporary parallels, and the one used here is telling: "Augustine resembles nothing so much as one of those pious churchmen of Francoist times, leader of a state-promoted church, followed prudently by many, despised quietly by some, and opposed fiercely by a remnant quite sure of its own fidelity to a truer church."
O'Donnell's historical account continues in this vein: show Augustine in the worst light possible, his enemies in the best, and dispatch him with a final zinger in the form of an ad hominem slur or what's taken to be a devastating analogy. In truth, Augustine was simply "jealous" of Pelagius and Pelagius' skilled protégé Julian. He was not only a social climber but also connivingly acquisitive—despite his pious claims that he wanted people's wealth for his church and not for himself. Every one of his famous polemical disputes is described as a fight Augustine needlessly picked, with disastrous consequences. His fight with the Donatists needlessly weakened the African church and prepared the way for the later Islamic conquest. His unnecessary pouring of vitriol on the Roman Empire in City of God anticipates later church divisions between insiders and outsiders, paving the way for the Crusades, endless heresy hunts, and modern fundamentalism. Augustine is "Don Quixote in a world that really takes him and his obsessions seriously," that is, a world too gullible to know this figure deserves mirthful pity.
And that's not even Augustine's theology—merely his political machinations. "Augustine's god was off the charts," O'Donnell tells us, giving us a glimpse of a professor trying to appeal to undergraduates with hip language. That is to say, Augustine's god was "powerful, knowing, arbitrary yet ultimately just and fair" (the lowercase "g" alerts us that Augustine knew, deep down, there were many gods to choose from but tried to pretend there was only one). His god was "high, unapproachable, ineffable" and finally the "unsayable Other," before whom the individual stands alone in dread of a capricious judgment that produces "anxious, depressive, lonely, and distraught" believers. This arbitrary god naturally produced an arbitrary vision of the church. As O'Donnell puts it,
The notion that what one sees today on an evangelist's television program, in the cave monasteries of the Pechersk Lavra in Kiev, and in an African cathedral welcoming a papal visit, to say nothing of an upper Manhattan Episcopalian Sunday service regularly attended by house pets and their owners, are all of a piece with what happened in Augustine's lifetime in the Syrian desert, in farming villages in Africa, and among perfumed socialites in Rome is to make a quite extraordinary theological assertion in the guise of history.
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