Tractates on the Gospel of John (continued)
INTRODUCTION 19 (23) The dogmatic and almost fanatical insistence by Donatists that holiness was a requisite mark of the individual Christian character and that the true Church was a Church of saints, led to an extensive development in Augustine's thought concerning the mixed or progressive character of the living Church, a concept most congenial to his Neo-Platonic predilection.^' This appears in both formal writings and sermons. The Church is a body composed of the holy and the sinful, both the wheat and the tares, and only in the end are the final results determinable; the Church struggles with the impurities within it as a part of its mission, as a characteristic of its very nature. The objective holiness which is a mark of the one.
Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic church is a growth of the mixed congregation toward the perfection of holiness, not an absolute condition requisite for membership in the Church.
(24) From this insistence on holiness as an essential requirement for the individual Christian, the Donatists argued that the validity of the sacraments, baptism in particular, was dependent upon the hohness of the minister. Augustine responded that the minister is only the vehicle through whom Christ confers the sacrament and that, desirable as holiness in the minister is, it is no requirement for the validity of the sacrament, since Christ, not the minister, confers and Christ, not the minister, baptizes. So when a Donatist joins the Catholic church he need not be rebaptized. It is true, however, that the Catholic church has been given special graces that enable the valid sacraments to become effective; that is, outside the Catholic church the sacrament is valid but inefficacious.
(25) Pelagianism came late into Augustine's life and challenged some ideas he had thought well-founded. Pelagius himself came briefly to Africa along with the flood of refugees who fled Rome in 410 after it was sacked by Alaric and the Visigoths who subsequently invaded southern Italy. The theological ideas of Pelagius were spread in Africa primarily through his radical disciple, Caelestius.*^^ These ideas
61. See Brown, Augustine, 221—22. 62. See Brown, Augustine, 340—375; and BatifFol, 349—472. On Pelagius and his teachings see G. de Plinval, Pelage. Ses ecrits, sa vie et sa reforme.