UBC Community, Partners, and Alumni Publications

Donatism Hoover, Jesse

Description

The Donatist controversy erupted in early fourth century Roman North Africa in the immediate aftermath of the Diocletianic persecution. The North African church was heir to the legacy of Cyprian of Carthage, whose belief that lapsed bishops were ineligible to administer the sacraments would prove crucial in the events that followed. During the Diocletianic persecution, a rift developed within the church over the status of bishops who had complied with the authorities and handed over their copies of the scriptures to be burned, an action referred to as traditio. In response to rumors that the newly-elected bishop of Carthage, a man named Caecilian, had been ordained by such a compromised bishop, a group of seventy bishops from Numidia denounced his ordination as illegitimate and elevated an alternate candidate to the Carthaginian bishopric. After their candidate was rejected at the councils of Rome in 313 and Arles in 314, the dissidents, called “Donatists” by their opponents after their charismatic second leader, Donatus of Carthage, were considered schismatic by the wider Christian church. Within Roman North Africa proper (modern Tunisia, Algeria, and parts of Morocco), congregations that viewed Donatus and his successors as the legitimate bishops of Carthage seem to have been in the majority throughout the fourth century. Failed repressions by the emperors Constantine in the 320s and Constans in the late 340s created a strong self-narrative among the dissidents that theirs was the church that “suffers persecution but does not cause it” (Gesta Carth. 3.258), though violent reprisals by Donatist partisans known as Circumcellions against their Caecilianist opponents tarnished this claim. Despite their “schismatic” status, Donatist writers were influential among Latin Christian communities outside of North Africa, especially the maverick theologian Tyconius, whose Book of Rules and Commentary on the Apocalypse dominated Western Christian approaches to exegesis and eschatology well into the Carolingian era. The Cyprianic position that schismatic bishops could not legitimately perform the sacraments led many Donatist communities to require converts from the rival church to be baptized upon entry, a practice their opponents decried as “rebaptism.” The decline of the dissident communion can be attributed in large part to the efforts of Caecilianist opponents like Augustine of Hippo and Aurelius of Carthage in the 390s, which culminated in an imperial edict in 405 imposing heavy fines and confiscation of property on adherents. This edict was reified in 411 at an imperially-sanctioned debate between the two sides at Carthage. Donatism survived as a coherent movement long after the Vandal invasion of the 430s, and was last referenced as a contemporary phenomenon in the letters of Pope Gregory I late in the sixth century.

Item Media

Item Citations and Data

Rights

Attribution 4.0 International