Augustine in His Own Words
Against the Donatists 237 ing in mind the strict demands that dictated them, but, in their time, never caused, either directly or indirectly, any physical attack, still less any death. Augustine was not the father of [medieval] Augustinianism, nor was he responsible for Torquemada."11
Since the late nineteenth century, scholars have sought to understand the tenacity of the Donatist movement, the loyalty and violence it inspired. Some have suggested that religion was simply a veneer for what was, in reality, a sort of African nationalism, a native resistance movement to Roman colonialism. Others have applied economic and sociological analyses to Donatism, highlighting reports of clashes between rich and poor, town and country, Latin-speaking and Punic-speaking.12 These interpretations have faced withering criticism, at least as global explanations.13 The current consensus acknowledges social, economic, and political factors in the mix, but insists on the centrality of the religious. The Donatists tenaciously clung to an oldfashioned view of Church, famously articulated by the great hero of North African Christianity, Cyprian, the bishop-martyr of Carthage (d. 258), who drew strict lines between Church and world, famously insisting: "there is no salvation outside the Church."14 It is no accident that Augustine felt compelled to address not only Donatists, but also the venerated grandfather of North African theology. On the far side of Constantine, the Church had grown large and messy, and Cyprian's old-fashioned view of a Church "without wrinkle or spot" did not match reality. The reality was a discomfiting mix of good and bad, of fervent and lukewarm. This corpus permixtum Church was one Augustine came to defend. It is not without irony that Augustine took some exegetical cues on this from a maverick Donatist theologian, Tyconius, whose own views on this very point led his Donatist bishop, Parmenian, to excommunicate him.
11. Lancel, Saint Augustine, 304. 12. See W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952); Jean-Paul Brisson, Autonomisme et christianisme dans l'Afrique romaine de Septime Sévère à l'invasion vandale (Paris: Boccard, 1958). For a survey, see Congar, BA 28:25–48.
13. Brown, "Religious Dissent in the Later Roman Empire: The Case of North Africa," in Religion and Society in the Age of St. Augustine, 237–59; R. A. Markus, "Christianity and Dissent in Roman Africa: Changing Perspectives in Recent Works," Studies in Church History 9 (1972): 21–36.
14. Cyprian, ep. 73.21.2. See Brent Allen, trans., St. Cyprian of Carthage: On the Church: Select Letters, Popular Patristics Series 33 (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2006).