Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
Against the Donatists 243
Donatists as the Pure Church
The Donatists saw themselves as the pure Church, but, as Peter Brown has noted, they were not Puritans in the moralistic sense; "the Donatist idea of 'purity' drew its strength from a different source. It was the purity of a group in its relationship to God, that mattered. . . . The anxiety that genuinely haunted the Donatist bishops was that, by tolerating any breach in a narrow and clearly defined order of ritual behavior, they might alienate God from His Church. . . . Anyone who reads a Donatist pamphlet, or indeed, a work of S. Cyprian, will be struck by the power of the idea of ritual purity that stemmed straight from the Old Testament: the fear of a sudden loss of spiritual potency through contact with an 'unclean thing,' and the elemental imagery of the 'good' and the 'bad' water."21 That sense and worldview is reflected in Petilian's letter above; it is also reflected in Augustine's report below. From To the Catholic Members of the Church (also known as On the Unity of the Church):
(5.9) So one of their bishops, when he was here in Hippo and was giving a sermon to their people, said—according to what we heard—that this ark of Noah had been caulked with pitch both on the inside, so as not to let the water inside out, and on the outside, so as not to let the water outside in. By this, he wanted to stress in this way a definite interpretation: that it must be believed that baptism cannot be given outside the Church nor can one from the outside be received who was given it on the outside. One would guess that when he had said this, there was a lot of applause from those who loved hearing it without reflecting very well on what they had come to understand.22
Alphabetical Psalm
Augustine's earliest work against the Donatists was not a learned treatise; it was a pop song, composed around 393, while he was still a presbyter. Its genre is an abecedarian psalm; that is, the first stanza begins with A, the second with B, etc. Augustine wanted to make it easy to memorize. He also wanted it easily intelligible to the unlearned within his congregation, and thus avoided the strict metrics of classical Latin poetry. At the end of his career, he reflected back on its composition and stated what had been his goal at the time. From Reconsiderations, Book 1:
21. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 218. 22. Ad Catholicos fratres 5.9 (BA 28:542–26); my trans. While generally accepted as an authentic work of Augustine, some scholars have pointed to its less elegant style and attribute its authorship to one of his disciples. Whoever the author, it accurately reflects Donatist self-understanding.