| ### A HISTORY OF THE CHURCH To the Eve of the Reformation ### by Philip Hughes ### Vol. 2: 313-1274 ### CHAPTER 1: THE CHURCH IN THE WEST DURING THE LAST CENTURY OF THE IMPERIAL UNITY, 313-30 ###  |

| #### 1. THE DONATIST SCHISM, 311-393 |

| #### #### Let us begin by making clear what we mean by " The West." It is the western half of the Roman Empire as Gratian reorganised it in 379, the Pretorian Prefectures of Italy and the Gauls, the dioceses of Italy, Rome, Africa, Gaul, Spain and Britain, all Europe west of the Rhine, south of the Danube and west, roughly, of the meridian of 20 deg. E. with, in Africa, the modern Morocco, Tunis and Tripoli. The West had not been created a separate empire by Diocletian's far-reaching reforms in the administration. It was, in his time, simply the sphere of jurisdiction of the junior of the two partners who, henceforward, were jointly to share the indivisible imperium?. #### This new system was only more or less preserved in the next hundred years. For thirteen years (324-337), under Constantine the Great, the Empire had but a single emperor; and after a short interval it was again united under his son Constantius II (351-361). Valentinian I divided it once again in 364, and so it remained until the assassination of Valentinian II nearly thirty years later. This emperor left no heir, and his eastern colleague, mastering the usurper who had murdered Valentinian, now became sole emperor of the Roman world. This was Theodosius, called the Great, destined, though he could not know it, to be the last man to rule effectively the vast heritage in which, since the days of Augustus, the lands that encircle the Mediterranean had been politically and culturally united. Theodosius died (January 28, 395) prematurely, only a few months after his final establishment, and within ten years the forces, to ward off which the best efforts of every great mind in the last hundred years had been directed, surged up yet once again, this time to have their will. They were destined -- these forces which, carelessly and none too accurately, we have come to lump together as the Barbarian Invasions -- so to transform the West that, in the end, it became a new thing, politically and culturally. In that long process political unity disappeared and the Western Emperor, too, who was its symbol and its source. The Catholic Church survived. #### To understand what this meant we need to recall how much of Catholicism there was to survive; we must survey the Catholic achievement in the West at the moment when the Barbarian Invasions began, describe the history of the Church in the West between the act of Constantine which definitely gave it legal security and the death of the last great personality whom that new age of the Christian Empire produced, St. Augustine. It is the story of Catholicism in Africa, perhaps the most Catholic province of the West, slowly shaken to pieces by the terrible experiences of the long Donatist schism; the story of Spain similarly disturbed but in less degree by the friends and the enemies of Priscillian; the story of the first attempts to evangelise what was the least Catholic part of all -- the countrysides of Gaul -- and of the Roman See's careful organisation of new means through which to develop the exercise of its traditional primacy. It is the story, too, of a great dogmatic conflict about the fundamentally important truth of the nature of the divine activity in the soul’s progress towards God. It is the story, finally, of the life work of St. Augustine, the greatest mind as yet given to the Church. #### The Donatist Schism, which, in the fourth century, wrought as much damage to the Church in Africa as did the contemporary Arian trouble to the Church in the East, was a legacy from the persecution of Diocletian. Africa, on that emperor's partition of the State, fell within the jurisdiction of Maximian and although with Maximian's abdication (305) the persecution practically ceased, it had been, for the two years it lasted, a very bitter reality indeed. The Church had suffered particularly from a very stringent inquisition after the sacred books and vessels; and a very great proportion of the numerous nominal apostasies which occurred, had taken the form of surrendering the sacred books and vessels for profanation and destruction. #### Against such traditores, now more or less repentant, there was the same indignant feeling that had shown itself fifty years before in the time of St. Cyprian against the semi-apostates of the persecution of Decius. In Egypt, too, and in Rome, the Church was experiencing a similar period of strain. And, in Africa, as elsewhere, amongst those accused, or suspected, of thus throwing the holy things to the Pagans were a number of the bishops. #### One such episcopal suspect was the Bishop of Carthage, the Primate of Africa himself, Mensurius. Whatever the degree of his apostasy, [ ] Mensurius had had to face from a number of those whose loyalty won them imprisonment -- the confessors -- the same kind of trouble that had marked the beginning of St. Cyprian's episcopate. History was repeating itself; the confessors, once again, were endeavouring to subordinate episcopal authority to their own personal prestige. The bishop had to take disciplinary action. He made careful distinction between the real victims of the persecution and those who, in danger of the law for other, less avowable, reasons, now used their faith to win alms and help from the charity of the faithful, or who were in prison as the inevitable result of their own acts of bravado. Whereupon the self-created and self- glorified " confessors" declared him cut off from communion with them and therefore from the Church. #### Mensurius died in 311. In his place the Church elected the deacon Cecilian who had been his chief ally in the recent troubles, and to whom there had fallen the unpleasant task of carrying out the details of the late bishop's policy in respect of the rebellious " confessors." Immediately all the latent hatreds fused. There were the " confessors," now long freed from prison, and their cliques; there were Cecilian's rivals, embittered since his election; there were his predecessor's trustees whom Cecilian had, at the eleventh hour, just been able to foil in a scheme of embezzlement; there was a pious and wealthy woman -- Lucilla -- mortally offended by Cecilian's refusal to enthuse over her private cult of her own privately canonised " confessor"; there were the bishops of Numidia, already embittered with Mensurius and very willing to embarrass his successor. Finally, there was Donatus, Bishop of Casae Nigrae in Numidia, but living now in Carthage, a born leader of men with a genius for organisation and propaganda. He it was who organised the party, and from him it has its name. #### The discontented appealed, then, against Cecilian's election; and the Primate of Numidia, whom it in no way concerned, came into Carthage with seventy bishops to try the case. Cecilian ignored the " council’s " summons; he was declared to be an intruder. As " successor " to Mensurius the assembled bishops, and their motley of cranks and fanatics, elected one of Lucilla's clerics, half-chaplain, half-secretary, the lector Maiorinus. But the most serious feature of the affair was not the mere fact that a second Bishop of Carthage had been intruded, but the theological basis by which the intrusion was justified and Cecilian condemned. #### Cecilian’s consecrator had been the Bishop of Aptonga, Felix; and Felix of Aptonga, it was alleged, had in the recent persecution been among the traditores. Such apostasy, declared the electors of Maiorinus, a fall from grace, entailed necessarily the loss of all spiritual power in the apostate. Felix could no longer be a means of grace: he could no longer baptise, no longer ordain, nor consecrate. It was the old theory of St. Cyprian which Rome had condemned so vigorously, which he had died without retracting, and which had survived him as a peculiar tradition of the African Church, to be used now against his own legitimately elected successor. Cecilian was, then, no bishop, according to this theory; the priests he ordained were no priests; the sacrifices they offered a mere parade, their baptisms a ceremony only. Whoever depended on Cecilian ceased by the fact, necessarily inevitably, to be in the Church at all. Whence from the very beginning of the schism a terrible aggressive bitterness on the part of the schismatics; and within a very short time the quarrel within the Church had become a problem of public order. The civil authority could not but intervene. #### Cecilian was elected in 311, Maiorinus in 312 -- in the October of which year, Africa, by the battle of the Milvian Bridge, came under the control of Constantine. It was the very moment of the emperor's conversion, and to arrange the religious troubles of the province was one of his first concerns. He decided in favour of Cecilian, and the letter to the imperial Vicar of Africa, notifying this decision, is interesting witness to the emperor's high conception of his new role as the Church's protector. " I must admit," he wrote, " that I do not feel free to tolerate or to ignore these scandals, which may provoke the Divinity not only against the human race but against myself. For it is an act of the divine good pleasure which has chosen me to rule the world. Should I provoke Him, He may choose another. True and lasting peace I can never achieve, nor can I indeed ever promise myself the perfect happiness which comes from the good will of God Almighty, until all men, united in brotherly love, offer to the most holy God the worship of the Catholic faith." #### Constantine, thirty years of age, had marched from victory to victory ever since, on his father's death, he had forced himself on the other emperors as his successor. He was now, thanks to the unfamiliar nature of the problem, to meet a decisive check. His dual role of head of the State and protector of the Faith, his double anxiety for public order and the unity of the Church, were to be his undoing. #### He began (313) by recognising Cecilian and ordering the local authorities to effectuate the dispossession of the Donatists where these were in power. The Donatists appealed against the decision, alleging the invalidity of Cecilian's ordination and asking for judges from among the bishops of Gaul; and Constantine agreed that the question should be reopened. He chose three Gallic bishops, ordered others, Italians, to be added to them and with the pope at the head of the tribunal the affair was solemnly judged at Rome (October, 313). This episcopal court, sitting in the Lateran (the first appearance in ecclesiastical history of that famous palace), heard both sides and declared that Donatus had not proved his case. Cecilian was, undoubtedly, the lawfully elected Bishop of Carthage. #### The Donatists appealed once more. The affair was spreading rapidly, and already, in most of the African sees, the Catholic bishop had a Donatist competitor. Constantine ordered a new enquiry. Its subject this time was not Cecilian but his consecrator, the alleged traditor Felix of Aptonga, and the enquiry was an affair of State, conducted by the imperial officials in the courts. The police books of the time of the persecution were produced; the magistrate who had ordered the search and the arrest of Felix appeared to give evidence. It was proved that Felix was innocent, that he had in fact never even been arrested during the persecution, and also it transpired that the Donatists had been busy forging an official certificate of Felix's guilt. This evidence the emperor sent to Gaul where, at Aries, a great council from all the West had been convoked to adjudicate on the matter once more. The council (August, 314) examined the whole affair and, noting the Donatists as " crazy fanatics, a danger to Christianity," it declared for Cecilian. #### The Donatists appealed yet again, and for a third time Constantine listened to them. He summoned both Cecilian and Donatus [ ] to Brescia, and while he kept them there, sent to Carthage a commission to see if, with both of the leaders away, the rival factions could not be reconciled. Only when this was found impossible and the commission had reported that a decision must be given, did he judge. And once more, after another examination, he decided for Cecilian (November, 316). This decision Constantine followed up by an order that the churches which the Donatists held were to be restored to the Catholics, and that the Donatists were to be forbidden to meet. #### Constantine's unwillingness to enforce the judgements of the different judges to whom he had referred the matter and his readiness, time and again, to reopen it, are to be put down to. his anxiety for the preservation of public order. He knew his Africa, and knew that this was no mere question of a theologians' quarrel. It was, then, with the greatest reluctance that he issued the orders which were the logical consequence of the judgement, and the reception which met them must have seemed to justify his hesitation. Everywhere there were riots, destruction and bloodshed; and nowhere more of it all than in Numidia where, in the five years of the agitation, the Donatists had gained the upper hand and had driven the Catholics under. #### The movement, like Monophysitism a century later in Egypt, was beginning to draw to itself all that survived of the native tradition below the veneer of Roman civilisation, all that life so long exploited for the benefit of the cosmopolitan capitalist and adventurer, ancient social hatreds which would find in this religious crusade a long awaited opportunity, and which would turn it very soon into a peasants' war of rapine and murder. Wherever the Donatists gained ground, indeed, there soon appeared, as the militant auxiliaries of their bishop, the organised bands of the Circumcellions. #### It is not easy to find, in later history, a parallel which would serve to explain them. They were nominally Christian, fanatically attached to their own interpretation of the Gospel’s social teaching, self-appointed judges and avengers of social inequality, rigorist in matters of morality in the narrow sense, and wholly unconcerned with its obligations where these stood in the way of their customary procedure. Armed with bludgeons they roamed the countrysides, ravaging the estates of the wealthy, compelling assent by outrage and terror, with forever on their lips the incongruous war cry of Deo Laudes. Their dearest aspiration was to die for the Faith, and if, since there were no longer any persecutors, this was now a matter of some difficulty, then to die at any rate and to seek death at the hands of the chance passer-by. So the tragicomic spectacle, at times, of the peaceful citizen bidden to murder the fanatic under the menace of the like fate for himself. Donatism did not invent the Circumcellions. Their extravagance was a local product of the spirituality of the century, akin to the extravagances of the undisciplined pioneers of monasticism in the deserts further to the East. But Donatism, with its insistence that the Catholics were laxists, the descendants of traditores, and with its profession of a higher and more rigorous sanctity, rallied these bands to the schism. As long as the schism lasted they were the picked agents of its propaganda, terrorists who came to hold whole provinces in their grip. Wherever they gained the upper hand the Catholics who held firm were massacred, those who yielded, re-baptised, and, if clerics, re-ordained. The churches which escaped destruction were washed and re-washed to purify them from the effects of the rites of the traditores, the Blessed Sacrament consecrated by Catholics thrown to the dogs. In the days of the Donatist power whole provinces laboured under this tyranny. #### Under these circumstances the policy of repression speedily developed into a local civil war, which another war of propaganda kept active and alive for years; and at last when, in 321, the Donatists made an appeal for toleration, Constantine granted it. He did so in letters which make no secret of his disgust and contempt for the sect. They are not to enjoy the privileges which the Catholics have; nevertheless they may live, and live as Donatists; the Catholics he exhorts to remember the Gospel and the duty of pardoning, and even of loving, those who hate them; the Donatist bishops were freed from prison: and the movement proceeded to consolidate what it had gained. #### The regime of tolerance inaugurated by Constantine lasted for just over twenty-five years until his son, Cons tans, in 347, felt himself strong enough to pick up the long-standing challenge. For that quarter of a century had been for the Donatists- especially in Numidia -- a period of licence, in which their violence had had full play. Now at last the Government proposed to come to the aid of the oppressed Catholics. It needed an army to execute the edict. Once more there were riots and massacres, but finally the Donatist bishops were rounded up and exiled, their churches handed over to the Catholics, and for fifteen uneasy years there was peace. #### That peace endured until Julian the Apostate, in the acknowledged hope of embarrassing Catholicism, recalled the exiles. Their return was the signal for a renewed reign of terror, and although Julian died the next year (363), his successor, Valentinian I, did not reverse this part of his policy. Valentinian was indeed a Catholic, but his religious belief was most carefully kept out of his public policy. Religious disputes, he held, were the bishops' affair, and he declined to take official notice of them. With his accession there set in for the African Church the worst period of its history so far. From the State it no longer received the protection of a privileged party. Donatist and Catholic were alike in the State's regard. #### The Church was dependent entirely on its own resources and unhappily these, at the moment, were not great. Notably it suffered from a lack of leaders, and from a hierarchy in which the proportion of nullities was unduly high. Restitutus, the Catholic primate, had even played a prominent part in that Council of Rimini which a few years earlier (359) had capitulated to the Arian Constantius II, while the Donatist primate -- Parmenian -- was a man of real ability, an organiser, a scholar and a good controversialist. His one competent Catholic opponent was the Bishop of Milevis, Optatus. But despite the logic of Optatus, and despite the jealousy that tore the Donatists into rival factions, and despite the differences which led to the expulsion of their greatest writer Tyconius, the schism maintained its gains. In 372 there was a great native rising against the Roman power. Many of the Donatists were implicated, and henceforward the government of Valentinian was a little less neutral; but for all that, and especially in Numidia, the Donatist supremacy was far from destroyed. #### Then, as the century came to an end, three things happened which promised to reverse the history of the thirty years since Julian. In 390 Parmenian died, after ruling his church for thirty-five years, and the Donatists were never again able to produce a leader of his ability. Two years later, by the death of Valentinian II, Africa came under the rule of Theodosius the Great, a convinced and enthusiastic Catholic, a stern Spaniard for whom compromise and half measures had no meaning. But more important, by far, than either of these events was the entry into Catholic life of St. Augustine, ordained priest in 391, Bishop of Hippo from 396. ####  |