Heresies:DONATISM
A History Of The Church
by Philip Hughes
Volume II: The Church And The World The Church Created
Chapter I - The Church In The West During The Last Century Of The Imperial
Unity, 313-430
Part I - The Donatist Schism, 311-393
Let us begin by making clear what we mean by "The West." It is the western half of the Roman Empire as Gratian reorganised it in 379, the Pretorian Prefectures of Italy and the Gauls, the dioceses of Italy, Rome, Africa, Gaul, Spain and Britain, all Europe west of the Rhine, south of the Danube and west, roughly, of the meridian of 20 deg. E. with, in Africa, the modern Morocco, Tunis and Tripoli. The West had not been created a separate empire by Diocletian's far-reaching reforms in the administration. It was, in his time, simply the sphere of jurisdiction of the junior of the two partners who, henceforward, were jointly to share the indivisible imperium.
This new system was only more
or less preserved in the next hundred years. For thirteen years (324-337), under
Constantine the Great, the Empire had but a single emperor; and after a short
interval it was again united under his son Constantius II (351-361). Valentinian
I divided it once again in 364, and so it remained until the assassination of
Valentinian II nearly thirty years later. This emperor left no heir, and his
eastern colleague, mastering the usurper who had murdered Valentinian, now
became sole emperor of the Roman world. This was Theodosius, called the Great,
destined, though he could not know it, to be the last man to rule effectively
the vast heritage in which, since the days of Augustus, the lands that encircle
the Mediterranean had been politically and culturally united. Theodosius died
(January 28, 395) prematurely, only a few months after his final establishment,
and within ten years the forces, to ward off which the best efforts of every
great mind in the last hundred years had been directed, surged up yet once
again, this time to have their will. They were destined -- these forces which,
carelessly and none too accurately, we have come to lump together as the
Barbarian Invasions -- so to transform the West that, in the end, it became a
new thing, politically and culturally. In that long process political unity
disappeared and the Western Emperor, too, who was its symbol and its source. The
Catholic Church survived.
To understand what this meant we need to recall how much of Catholicism there
was to survive; we must survey the Catholic achievement in the West at the
moment when the Barbarian Invasions began, describe the history of the Church in
the West between the act of Constantine which definitely gave it legal security
and the death of the last great personality whom that new age of the Christian
Empire produced, St. Augustine. It is the story of Catholicism in Africa,
perhaps the most Catholic province of the West, slowly shaken to pieces by the
terrible experiences of the long Donatist schism; the story of Spain similarly
disturbed but in less degree by the friends and the enemies of Priscillian; the
story of the first attempts to evangelise what was the least Catholic part of
all -- the countrysides of Gaul -- and of the Roman See's careful organisation
of new means through which to develop the exercise of its traditional primacy.
It is the story, too, of a great dogmatic conflict about the fundamentally
important truth of the nature of the divine activity in the soul's progress
towards God. It is the story, finally, of the life work of St. Augustine, the
greatest mind as yet given to the Church.
The Donatist Schism, which, in the fourth century, wrought as much damage to the
Church in Africa as did the contemporary Arian trouble to the Church in the
East, was a legacy from the persecution of Diocletian. Africa, on that emperor's
partition of the State, fell within the jurisdiction of Maximian and although
with Maximian's abdication (305) the persecution practically ceased, it had
been, for the two years it lasted, a very bitter reality indeed. The Church had
suffered particularly from a very stringent inquisition after the sacred books
and vessels; and a very great proportion of the numerous nominal apostasies
which occurred, had taken the form of surrendering the sacred books and vessels
for profanation and destruction.
Against such traditores, now more or less repentant, there was the same
indignant feeling that had shown itself fifty years before in the time of St.
Cyprian against the semi-apostates of the persecution of Decius. In Egypt, too,
and in Rome, the Church was experiencing a similar period of strain. And, in
Africa, as elsewhere, amongst those accused, or suspected, of thus throwing the
holy things to the Pagans were a number of the bishops.
One such episcopal suspect was the Bishop of Carthage, the Primate of Africa
himself, Mensurius. Whatever the degree of his apostasy,(1) Mensurius had had to
face from a number of those whose loyalty won them imprisonment -- the
confessors -- the same kind of trouble that had marked the beginning of St.
Cyprian's episcopate. History was repeating itself; the confessors, once again,
were endeavouring to subordinate episcopal authority to their own personal
prestige. The bishop had to take disciplinary action. He made careful
distinction between the real victims of the persecution and those who, in danger
of the law for other, less avowable, reasons, now used their faith to win alms
and help from the charity of the faithful, or who were in prison as the
inevitable result of their own acts of bravado. Whereupon the self-created and
self-glorified "confessors" declared him cut off from communion with them and
therefore from the Church.
Mensurius died in 311. In his place the Church elected the deacon Cecilian who
had been his chief ally in the recent troubles, and to whom there had fallen the
unpleasant task of carrying out the details of the late bishop's policy in
respect of the rebellious "confessors." Immediately all the latent hatreds
fused. There were the "confessors," now long freed from prison, and their
cliques; there were Cecilian's rivals, embittered since his election; there were
his predecessor's trustees whom Cecilian had, at the eleventh hour, just been
able to foil in a scheme of embezzlement; there was a pious and wealthy woman --
Lucilla -- mortally offended by Cecilian's refusal to enthuse over her private
cult of her own privately canonised "confessor"; there were the bishops of
Numidia, already embittered with Mensurius and very willing to embarrass his
successor. Finally, there was Donatus, Bishop of Casae Nigrae in Numidia, but
living now in Carthage, a born leader of men with a genius for organisation and
propaganda. He it was who organised the party, and from him it has its name.
The discontented appealed, then, against Cecilian's election; and the Primate of
Numidia, whom it in no way concerned, came into Carthage with seventy bishops to
try the case. Cecilian ignored the "council's" summons; he was declared to be an
intruder. As "successor" to Mensurius the assembled bishops, and their motley of
cranks and fanatics, elected one of Lucilla's clerics, half-chaplain,
half-secretary, the lector Maiorinus. But the most serious feature of the affair
was not the mere fact that a second Bishop of Carthage had been intruded, but
the theological basis by which the intrusion was justified and Cecilian
condemned.
Cecilian's consecrator had been the Bishop of Aptonga, Felix; and Felix of
Aptonga, it was alleged, had in the recent persecution been among the traditores.
Such apostasy, declared the electors of Maiorinus, a fall from grace, entailed
necessarily the loss of all spiritual power in the apostate. Felix could no
longer be a means of grace: he could no longer baptise, no longer ordain, nor
consecrate. It was the old theory of St. Cyprian which Rome had condemned so
vigorously, which he had died without retracting, and which had survived him as
a peculiar tradition of the African Church, to be used now against his own
legitimately elected successor. Cecilian was, then, no bishop, according to this
theory; the priests he ordained were no priests; the sacrifices they offered a
mere parade, their baptisms a ceremony only. Whoever depended on Cecilian ceased
by the fact, necessarily, inevitably, to be in the Church at all. Whence from
the very beginning of the schism a terrible aggressive bitterness on the part of
the schismatics; and within a very short time the quarrel within the Church had
become a problem of public order. The civil authority could not but intervene.
Cecilian was elected in 311, Maiorinus in 312 -- in the October of which year,
Africa, by the battle of the Milvian Bridge, came under the control of
Constantine. It was the very moment of the emperor's conversion, and to arrange
the religious troubles of the province was one of his first concerns. He decided
in favour of Cecilian, and the letter to the imperial Vicar of Africa, notifying
this decision, is interesting witness to the emperor's high conception of his
new role as the Church's protector. "I must admit," he wrote, "that I do not
feel free to tolerate or to ignore these scandals, which may provoke the
Divinity not only against the human race but against myself. For it is an act of
the divine good pleasure which has chosen me to rule the world. Should I provoke
Him, He may choose another. True and lasting peace I can never achieve, nor can
I indeed ever promise myself the perfect happiness which comes from the good
will of God Almighty, until all men, united in brotherly love, offer to the most
holy God the worship of the Catholic faith."
Constantine, thirty years of age, had marched from victory to victory ever
since, on his father's death, he had forced himself on the other emperors as his
successor. He was now, thanks to the unfamiliar nature of the problem, to meet a
decisive check. His dual role of head of the State and protector of the Faith,
his double anxiety for public order and the unity of the Church were to be his
undoing.
He began (313) by recognising Cecilian and ordering the local authorities to
effectuate the dispossession of the Donatists where these were in power. The
Donatists appealed against the decision, alleging the invalidity of Cecilian's
ordination and asking for judges from among the bishops of Gaul; and Constantine
agreed that the question should be reopened. He chose three Gallic bishops,
ordered others, Italians, to be added to them and with the pope at the head of
the tribunal the affair was solemnly judged at Rome (October, 313). This
episcopal court, sitting in the Lateran (the first appearance in ecclesiastical
history of that famous palace), heard both sides and declared that Donatus had
not proved his case. Cecilian was, undoubtedly, the lawfully elected Bishop of
Carthage.
The Donatists appealed once more. The affair was spreading rapidly, and already,
in most of the African sees, the Catholic bishop had a Donatist competitor.
Constantine ordered a new enquiry. Its subject this time was not Cecilian but
his consecrator, the alleged traditor Felix of Aptonga, and the enquiry was an
affair of State, conducted by the imperial officials in the courts. The police
books of the time of the persecution were produced; the magistrate who had
ordered the search and the arrest of Felix appeared to give evidence. It was
proved that Felix was innocent, that he had in fact never even been arrested
during the persecution, and also it transpired that the Donatists had been busy
forging an official certificate of Felix's guilt. This evidence the emperor sent
to Gaul where, at Arles, a great council from all the West had been convoked to
adjudicate on the matter once more. The council (August, 314) examined the whole
affair and, noting the Donatists as "crazy fanatics, a danger to Christianity,"
it declared for Cecilian.
The Donatists appealed yet again, and for a third time Constantine listened to
them. He summoned both Cecilian and Donatus(2) to Brescia, and while he kept
them there, sent to Carthage a commission to see if, with both of the leaders
away, the rival factions could not be reconciled. Only when this was found
impossible and the commission had reported that a decision must be given, did he
judge. And once more, after another examination, he decided for Cecilian
(November, 316). This decision Constantine followed up by an order that the
churches which the Donatists held were to be restored to the Catholics, and that
the Donatists were to be forbidden to meet.
Constantine's unwillingness to enforce the judgements of the different judges to
whom he had referred the matter and his readiness, time and again, to reopen it,
are to be put down to his anxiety for the preservation of public order. He knew
his Africa, and knew that this was no mere question of a theologians' quarrel.
It was, then, with the greatest reluctance that he issued the orders which were
the logical consequence of the judgement, and the reception which met them must
have seemed to justify his hesitation. Everywhere there were riots, destruction
and bloodshed; and nowhere more of it all than in Numidia where, in the five
years of the agitation, the Donatists had gained the upper hand and had driven
the Catholics under.
The movement, like Monophysitism a century later in Egypt, was beginning to draw
to itself all that survived of the native tradition below the veneer of Roman
civilisation, all that life so long exploited for the benefit of the
cosmopolitan capitalist and adventurer, ancient social hatreds which would find
in this religious crusade a long awaited opportunity, and which would turn it
very soon into a peasants' war of rapine and murder. Wherever the Donatists
gained ground, indeed, there soon appeared, as the militant auxiliaries of their
bishop, the organised bands of the Circumcellions.
It is not easy to find, in later history, a parallel which would serve to
explain them. They were nominally Christian, fanatically attached to their own
interpretation of the Gospel's social teaching, self-appointed judges and
avengers of social inequality, rigorist in matters of morality in the narrow
sense, and wholly unconcerned with its obligations where these stood in the way
of their customary procedure. Armed with bludgeons they roamed the countrysides,
ravaging the estates of the wealthy, compelling assent by outrage and terror,
with forever on their lips the incongruous war cry of Deo Laudes. Their dearest
aspiration was to die for the Faith, and if, since there were no longer any
persecutors, this was now a matter of some difficulty, then to die at any rate
and to seek death at the hands of the chance passer-by. So the tragicomic
spectacle, at times, of the peaceful citizen bidden to murder the fanatic under
the menace of the like fate for himself. Donatism did not invent the
Circumcellions. Their extravagance was a local product of the spirituality of
the century, akin to the extravagances of the undisciplined pioneers of
monasticism in the deserts further to the East. But Donatism, with its
insistence that the Catholics were laxists, the descendants of traditores, and
with its profession of a higher and more rigorous sanctity, rallied these bands
to the schism. As long as the schism lasted they were the picked agents of its
propaganda, terrorists who came to hold whole provinces in their grip. Wherever
they gained the upper hand the Catholics who held firm were massacred, those who
yielded, re-baptised, and, if clerics, re-ordained. The churches which escaped
destruction were washed and re-washed to purify them from the effects of the
rites of the traditores, the Blessed sacrament consecrated by Catholics thrown
to the dogs. In the lays of the Donatist power whole provinces laboured under
this tyranny.
Under these circumstances the policy of repression speedily developed into a
local civil war, which another war of propaganda kept active and alive for
years; and at last when, in 321, the Donatists made an appeal for toleration,
Constantine granted it. He did so in letters which make no secret of his disgust
and contempt for the sect. They are not to enjoy the privileges which the
Catholics have; nevertheless they may live, and live as Donatists; the Catholics
he exhorts to remember the Gospel and the duty of pardoning, and even of loving,
those who hate them; the Donatist bishops were freed from prison: and the
movement proceeded to consolidate what it had gained.
The regime of tolerance inaugurated by Constantine lasted for just over
twenty-five years until his son, Constans, in 347, felt himself strong enough to
pick up the long-standing challenge. For that quarter of a century had been for
the Donatists -- especially in Numidia -- a period of licence, in which their
violence had had full play. Now at last the Government proposed to come to the
aid of the oppressed Catholics. It needed an army to execute the edict. Once
more there were riots and massacres, but finally the Donatist bishops were
rounded up and exiled, their churches handed over to the Catholics, and for
fifteen uneasy years there was peace.
That peace endured until Julian the Apostate, in the acknowledged hope of
embarrassing Catholicism, recalled the exiles. Their return was the signal for a
renewed reign of terror, and although Julian died the next year (363), his
successor, Valentinian I, did not reverse this part of his policy. Valentinian
was indeed a Catholic, but his religious belief was most carefully kept out of
his public policy. Religious disputes, he held, were the bishops' affair, and he
declined to take official notice of them. With his accession there set in for
the African Church the worst period of its history so far. From the State it no
longer received the protection of a privileged party. Donatist and Catholic were
alike in the State's regard.
The Church was dependent entirely on its own resources and unhappily these, at
the moment, were not great. Notably it suffered from a lack of leaders, and from
a hierarchy in which the proportion of nullities was unduly high. Restitutus,
the Catholic primate, had even played a prominent part in that Council of Rimini
which a few years earlier (359) had capitulated to the Arian Constantius II,
while the Donatist primate -- Parmenian -- was a man of real ability, an
organiser, a scholar and a good controversialist. His one competent Catholic
opponent was the Bishop of Milevis, Optatus. But despite the logic of Optatus,
and despite the jealousy that tore the Donatists into rival factions, and
despite the differences which led to the expulsion of their greatest writer
Tyconius, the schism maintained its gains. In 372 there was a great native
rising against the Roman power. Many of the Donatists were implicated, and
henceforward the government of Valentinian was a little less neutral; but for
all that, and especially in Numidia, the Donatist supremacy was far from
destroyed.
Then, as the century came to an end, three things happened which promised to
reverse the history of the thirty years since Julian. In 390 Parmenian died,
after ruling his church for thirty-five years, and the Donatists were never
again able to produce a leader of his ability. Two years later, by the death of
Valentinian II, Africa came under the rule of Theodosius the Great, a convinced
and enthusiastic Catholic, a stern Spaniard for whom compromise and half
measures had no meaning. But more important, by far, than either of these events
was the entry into Catholic life of St. Augustine, ordained priest in 391,
Bishop of Hippo from 396.
(1) - What Mensurius had done was to remove the sacred books and leave heretical
works in their place. When the persecutors carried these off he did nothing to
hinder them, nor to deceive them.
(2) - Who by this time had succeeded Maiorinus as the party's primate.
Copyright © 1935 Sheed And Ward, Inc.
Online Digital Edition Copyright © 1999 by Michael A. Gallagher