The Donatist Controversy
The Donatist Controversy
In the end, it was the western church that forced the pace of theological reflection on the nature and identity of the church. It seems to be a general rule of the development of Christian doctrine that development is occasioned by controversy. A stimulus seems to have been required to provoke sustained theological reflection. In the case of ecclesiology, that stimulus was provided by a controversy centering upon Roman North Africa which has passed into history as “the Donatist controversy.”
Under the Roman emperor Diocletian (244–311; reigned 284–305), the Christian church was subject to various degrees of persecution. The origins of the persecution date from 303; it finally ended with the conversion of Constantine and the issuing of the Edict of Milan in 313. Under an edict of February 303, Christian books were ordered to be burned and churches demolished. Those Christian leaders who handed over their books to be burned came to be known as traditores – “those who handed over [their books].” The modern word “traitor” derives from the same root.
One such traditor was Felix of Aptunga, who later consecrated Caecilian as bishop of Carthage in 311. Many local Christians were outraged that such a person should have been allowed to be involved in this consecration and declared that they could not accept the authority of Caecilian as a result. The new bishop's authority was compromised, it was argued, on account of the fact that the bishop who had consecrated him had lapsed under the pressure of persecution. The hierarchy of the Catholic church was thus tainted as a result of this development. The church ought to be pure and should not be permitted to include such people.
By the time Augustine of Hippo (354–430) returned to Africa in 388, a breakaway faction had established itself as the leading Christian body in the region, with especially strong support from the local African population. Sociological issues clouded theological debate; the Donatists (so named after the breakaway African church leader Donatus, died c.355) tended to draw their support from the indigenous population, whereas the Catholics drew theirs from Roman colonists.
The theological issues involved are of considerable importance and relate directly to a serious tension within the theology of a leading figure of the African church in the third century – Cyprian of Carthage. In his Unity of the Catholic Church (251), Cyprian had defended two major related beliefs. First, schism is totally and absolutely unjustified. The unity of the church cannot be broken, on any pretext whatsoever. To step outside the bounds of the church is to forfeit any possibility of salvation. Second, it therefore follows that lapsed or schismatic bishops are deprived of all ability to administer the sacraments or act as ministers of the Christian church. By passing outside the sphere of the church, they have lost their spiritual gifts and authority. They should therefore not be permitted to ordain priests or bishops. Any whom they have ordained must be regarded as invalidly ordained; any whom they have baptized must be regarded as invalidly baptized.
But what happens if a bishop lapses under persecution and subsequently repents? Cyprian's theory is open to two quite different lines of interpretation:
The Donatists adopted the first such position, the Catholics (as their opponents came to be universally known) the second.
Augustine responded to the Donatist challenge by putting forward a theory of the church which he believed was more firmly grounded in the New Testament than the Donatist teaching. In particular, Augustine emphasized the sinfulness of Christians. The church is not meant to be a “pure body,” a society of saints, but a “mixed body” (corpus permixtum) of saints and sinners. Augustine found this image in two biblical parables: the parable of the net which catches many fishes, and the parable of the wheat and the weeds. This second parable (Matthew 13: 24–31) is of especial importance, and requires further discussion.
The parable tells of a farmer who sowed seed and discovered that the resulting crop included both wheat and weeds. What could be done about it? To attempt to separate the wheat and the weeds while both were still growing would be to court disaster, probably involving damaging the wheat while trying to get rid of the weeds. But, at the harvest, all the plants – whether wheat or weeds – are cut down and sorted out, thus avoiding damaging the wheat. The separation of the good and the evil thus takes place at the end of time, not in history. For Augustine, this parable refers to the church in the world. It must expect to find itself including both saints and sinners. To attempt a separation in this world is premature and improper. That separation will take place in God's own time, at the end of history. No human can make that judgment or separation in God's place.
A related biblical passage concerns John the Baptist's prediction that Jesus of Nazareth will bring a judgment that can be compared to a threshing floor (Matthew 3: 11–12). Both the wheat and the chaff lie on the threshing floor, and are to be separated. So how is this to be interpreted? Two very different approaches emerged. For the Donatists, the threshing floor referred to the world at large, containing both wheat and chaff. The process of separation led to the emergence of the church as the community of the pure; the chaff remained in the world. For Augustine, the church itself was the threshing floor, in that its members included both wheat and chaff.
So in what sense can the church meaningfully be described as “holy”? For Augustine, the holiness in question is not that of its members but of Christ. The church cannot be a congregation of saints in this world, since its members are contaminated with original sin. However, the church is sanctified and made holy by Christ – a holiness which will be perfected and finally realized at the Last Judgment. In addition to offering this theological analysis of holiness, Augustine slyly noted that the Donatists failed to live up to their own high standards of morality. They were, he suggested, just as capable as their opponents of moral lapses.
Augustine made a similar point in connection with the theology of the sacraments. For the Donatists, sacraments – such as baptism and the Eucharist or Lord's Supper – were only effective if they were administered by someone of unquestionable moral and doctrinal purity. This attitude can be seen in a letter written in 402 by Petilian, the Donatist bishop of Cirta, to Augustine, which sets out at some length the Donatist insistence that the validity of the sacraments is totally dependent upon the moral worthiness of those who administer them. We shall consider this point further in Chapter 16 (pp. 386–8).
Responding to this, Augustine argued that Donatism laid excessive emphasis upon the qualities of the human agent and gave insufficient weight to the grace of Jesus Christ. It is, he argued, impossible for fallen human beings to make distinctions concerning who is pure and impure, worthy or unworthy. This view, which is totally consistent with his understanding of the church as a “mixed body” of saints and sinners, holds that the efficacy of a sacrament rests not upon the merits of the individual administering it but upon the merits of the one who instituted them in the first place – Jesus Christ. The validity of sacraments is thus independent of the merits of those who administer them. There may be a pastoral advantage to the sacraments being administered by someone of unblemished reputation, but there is no theological necessity for this. Christ is the ultimate guarantor of the efficacy of the sacraments; the minister plays only a secondary and subordinate role.
Donatus and his followers insisted that the efficacy of the church and its sacramental system was dependent upon the moral or cultic purity of its representatives. The grace and healing power of the Christian gospel were thus understood to be contingent upon the purity of the church and its ministers. For Augustine, this amounted to making salvation indirectly dependent upon human purity, rather than the grace of Christ. Ministers and sacraments were merely the channels, not the cause, of the grace of God. Donatism threatened to make the salvation of humanity dependent upon holy human agents, rather than upon the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Christ thus plays a secondary role in both the securing and sustaining of salvation, whereas the human agent plays a primary role of crucial importance.
We see here a major theme of Augustine of Hippo's understanding of the Christian faith: that human nature is fallen, wounded, and frail, standing in need of the healing and restoring grace of God. The church, according to Augustine, is rather to be compared to a hospital than to a club of healthy people. It is a place of healing for people who know that they stand in need of forgiveness and renewal. The Christian life is a process of being healed from sin, rather than a life of sinlessness, as if the cure were completed and the patient restored to full health. The church is an infirmary for the sick and for convalescents. It is only in heaven that we will finally be righteous and healthy.
Augustine thus argued that Donatism was fatally flawed. The church is, and is meant to be, a mixed body. Sin is an inevitable aspect of the life of the church in the present age, and is neither the occasion nor the justification for schism. Yet precisely the schism that Augustine feared and detested so much would eventually come about in the sixteenth century, with the formation of breakaway Protestant churches in western Europe as a result of the Reformation. It is to these major developments that we now turn.