Augustine in His Own Words
Against the Donatists 235 support to a rebellion against imperial authorities led by a local aristocrat, Count Gildo. This imprudent politics rebounded badly on the Donatist cause after the rebellion was crushed.
The tide began to turn in the 390s, in part, because of robust new leadership on the Catholic side. Augustine was part of that new generation. So too was Aurelius of Carthage, whose political savvy did much to challenge Donatist hegemony. Augustine had little patience with the fervent but narrow-minded theology of the Donatists, who had severed all ties with Christians worldwide and who claimed that in Africa alone and among them alone did Christianity exist. Augustine had converted to Christianity overseas and, in Milan, had seen with his own eyes how the Christian Church had spread across the known world. The Christianity he admired and converted to was Ambrose's, an intellectually robust and politically sophisticated brand. Donatists seemed, by comparison, narrow sectarians. Particularly offensive to him and his Catholic colleagues was the Donatist policy of rebaptizing any Christians who joined their ranks.
Confronting Donatism had been on his agenda from his earliest days as a presbyter, but Augustine's campaign moved into full swing around 400 and occupied his best pastoral and literary energies over the next decade. During these years, he authored lengthy polemical treatises, notably, Against the Letter of Parmenian (Contra epistulam Parmeniani), On Baptism (De baptismo), and Against the Letters of Petilian (Contra litteras Petiliani). Donatist issues also took center stage in frequent sermons, most famously, in a series of sermons he gave in 407 on the Gospel of John and on the First Epistle of John. One-fifth of Augustine's voluminous correspondence is devoted to the controversy.6 His letters from these years offer both vivid glimpses of pastoral realities he faced and cogent expositions of his theology. Augustine's anti-Donatist writings gravitate around two main issues: the theology of Church and the theology of baptism.7 These two issues will be the focus of much of this chapter. Augustine's views on both would indelibly shape Christian theology for the next millennium, and when kindred controversies surfaced during the Reformation, Reformers and Catholics alike turned to Augustine's writings for guidance and for ammunition.
A third theological issue came to the fore as the decade progressed: religious coercion. In 405, Catholic lobbying, combined with Circumcellion violence, prompted the Emperor Honorius to issue an Edict of Unity, which
6. Pierre Monceaux, Histoire littéraire de l'Afrique chrétienne (Paris: Leroux, 1923), 7:130. Vol. 7 of Monceaux's work, while dated, offers a detailed overview of Augustine's anti-Donatist corpus.
7. On Augustine's anti-Donatist theology, see especially Yves Congar, "Introduction générale," BA 28:71– 124, and R. A. Markus, "Afer scribens Afris: The Church in Augustine and the African Tradition," Saeculum: History and Thought in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 105–32.