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St. Augustine's first official connection with Donatism was his
attendance at the Council of Carthage in 393. He was then a man close
on forty [ ]; he had been a priest two years, and a Catholic for six.
He was, like many another in this century of religious transition, the
child of a mixed marriage in which the mother was Catholic and the
father Pagan. From that mother he had gained, in earliest infancy and
childhood, his first notions of Catholicism, a knowledge and love of
God and of Jesus Christ which remained, despite the Pagan education of
boyhood and adolescence, to be the source of never-ceasing self-
questioning and discontented criticism of whatever system of thought
attracted his mind. He was intellectually precocious, with the
temperament of the artist, and all the frank sensuality of the Pagan.
From his very schooldays, in the matter of sexual morality he ran amok,
to settle down at the age of eighteen to something like sobriety with
the girl who bore him the child Adeodatus.
Meanwhile, amidst all his dissipated recreations and the financial
anxieties that accompanied them, the thought of God and the attraction
of Christ never left him, and with this, an ever-growing anxiety for
intellectual security about God's nature and about the nature and
origin of evil. The Church's doctrine on these problems, like many
another since, he partly misunderstood and wholly disliked. Catholics,
he thought, had an anthropomorphic idea of God (whence their retention
of the Old Testament); and a doctrine which made man's free will
responsible for evil, not only conflicted with his philosophical creed
(which made evil to be a thing material), but conflicted also with his
desire to possess Christ and yet follow his own way of life. Cicero's
Hortensius set once more aflame his old desire for wisdom -- though he
grieved that the wonder book lacked the savour of Christ; and then, at
nineteen, he gave himself to the Manichees.
St. Augustine's adherence to Manicheeism is one of the earliest, and
perhaps the most noteworthy, of all the contacts between Catholicism
and a religion that harassed it for a good thousand years. Mani, its
founder, was a Persian, and it was about the year 240 that he began to
publish his supplement to the world's revealed religion. Mani, it is
his own account of himself, is the herald of a doctrine in which all
revelation is summed up and completed, the successor of Buddha,
Zoroaster and Our Lord Himself. The Paraclete promised by Our Lord has
appeared, revealing all truth to Mani, past and future equally with the
present, and Mani is now one body and one soul with the Paraclete. But
there is nothing of the Montanist ecstatic about this Persian prophet.
Clear, cool-headed reflection marks all his writings. The chief
influences upon his thought are eastern. There is in it nothing
directly Hellenistic. The prophet never himself crossed the frontiers
of the Roman Empire. His religion is not a product of Paganism, but a
kind of bastard Christianity, the outcome of Mani's ambition to
complete Christianity, and of the accident that his own life coincided
with the flood tide of the syncretist movement observable in the
religious world since the death of Alexander the Great. It is this
Syncretism that is responsible for the curious juxtaposition of
Christian and anti-Christian elements in the work. It is responsible,
too, for the presence in Manicheeism of a particularly disgraceful
mythology. In some respects the system recalls those of the Egyptian
Gnostics, and in others Marcionism.
Mani was a capable organiser. He not only prophesied that his religion
would conquer the world, but, like Marc ion, he set it in a strong
close-knit framework. Like Marcionism it taught a dual origin of life
and the universe, and the perpetual antagonism of the two supreme
principles, the one good and the other evil. It advocated much the same
kind of materially inspired austerity, prohibitions of certain foods
and drinks and of marriage. On the other hand the sect was twofold.
There were the Elect, bound to all observances, and the Hearers who
accepted the system and would one day qualify for salvation by passing
into the ranks of the Elect, but who, until then, had no more onerous
obligation than to hold fast to their resolution to do so.
For St. Augustine the system had the same general attraction that all
Gnostic systems held for the educated mind. It professed, ultimately,
to give a purely rational explanation of the riddle of life, of man and
his destiny, the nature of God, the problem of evil. It did not, like
the Church, offer a teaching which, very often, was above the power of
reason to understand. The Manichees knew; and they would, in time,
teach the disciple all. There was about the system a great parade of
learning, philosophical and astrological; it had all the appearance of
being the academic thing it seemed. It had the further advantage, for
Augustine, that it offered a way to be at rest intellectually without
first regulating the moral disorder of his life.
For nine years he remained in the sect -- never quite so secure as he
would have liked; and then came Scepticism, and enough of Aristotle to
shake to bits what security he had; and, the great Manichee of the day
failing to restore his confidence in the system, Augustine abandoned
it. He was back once more in the chaos of conflicting doubts and then,
in 383, there came a nomination to the chair of rhetoric in the western
capital, Milan.
Augustine accepted it gladly and, with the sermons of the city's
bishop, St. Ambrose, at which he most assiduously assisted, his
intellectual life passed into another and richer phase. In the first
place St. Ambrose, too, was a rhetorician -- though by genius and not
profession; and through his oratory something of the thought of the
greatest of Christian philosophers hitherto, Origen, came to influence
Augustine. Catholicism and philosophy were, then, by no means
incompatible. The religion of the Church could survive the test of
philosophical discussion, could possibly be the shrine of that Wisdom
so long sought. Also the sermons at Milan enlightened Augustine's
prejudiced ignorance. Catholics, he knew now, had not an
anthropomorphic idea of God.
Nevertheless, Augustine was still far from Catholicism. There still
remained his old difficulty that all is matter; and since it was
impossible to explain materially the God of the Catholic Theology how
could the Church's religion be true? Deliverance came through
Neoplatonism, [ ] with its insistence that the spiritual world is a
reality, that it is self-sufficient, immutable, its truths necessarily,
universally valid, and that to the spiritual the material is, and must
be, subject. God then, his reason now acknowledged, was Spirit -- and
spirit, too, the soul; evil was no creature but lack of being. The last
barrier between Augustine's intellect and the Church was down. There
still remained the facts of sense, and the legacy in his soul of the
years of moral disorder.
Here, too, alas, his primary deliverer was Neoplatonism -- alas, for
just as truly as the Neoplatonic speculation about spirit ran easily to
Pantheism, so, in the practical order, it ran to a wrongly ordered
asceticism, an asceticism based on the idea of the radical opposition
of spirit and matter. The divine in man, the soul, is the prisoner of
the material. The soul can never be free, never realise its
possibilities until the body is broken by systematic constraint, the
sense-nature ruthlessly destroyed. In nothing is the opposition of
spirit and matter so evident as in what relates to sex, and after a
life of sexual disorder Augustine verged on desperation. faced with the
habits that threatened to keep him permanently exiled from the Church
and Christ. To the Church he came but, in morals as in intellectual
assent, by way of Neoplatonism -- whence the violently- phrased
reaction, the language, for example, about sex that is almost a
denunciation, the statements that even Christian marriage involves a
contamination of spirit. It is a reaction whose colour here is
Neoplatonic and not Christian at all. but from it derived a tradition
that lived on among Christian writers for centuries. [ ]
The immediate effect upon Augustine of his new discoveries was to drive
him yet nearer to despair. Despite the very evident urge of his senses
-- Adeodatus' mother had gone, and he had taken a mistress in her place
-- he refused to marry. There was a last most violent struggle of all,
and then it ended as the saint himself describes in the most famous
passage of all his writings-the reading of the heroism of the Christian
ascetics, the ensuing hour of despair broken by the child's voice "
Tolle, lege" and the happening on the words of St. Paul. "Not in
rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in
contention and envy: But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not
provision for the flesh in its concupiscences." [ ] Grace alone can set
man free from the slavery to sin. Thenceforward he knew only peace, and
giving in his name he was prepared for the sacrament, and at Easter,
387, St. Ambrose baptised him.
Since that time Augustine had lived with his friends the life of a monk
on what property he retained at Tagaste, the little town in Proconsular
Numidia where he was born. He was no doubt the most famous man of the
place when, in 391, an accidental circumstance of a visit to Hippo
compelled his acceptance of the priesthood. Two years later, and with
the Council of Hippo he made his first entry into the history of
Donatism.
In the June of that year (393) the domestic quarrels of the Donatists
had come to a head and a great council of their bishops at Cabarsussi
had deposed the primate, Primian, and installed Maxim Ian in his place.
There seemed a chance of appeals from the defeated party for admission
to the Catholic Church. One of the matters for which this Council of
Hippo was called was to decide the conditions on which such
reconciliation should be effected, and at the council St. Augustine,
simple priest though he was, was asked to preach to the bishops. Three
years later he was himself Bishop of Hippo, in the very heart of the
Donatist country, the stronghold of the party of Primian, where the
Circumcellions had it all their own way; and where once he came himself
very near to death at their hands. He was soon the recognised leader of
the Catholics. By his tireless activity, his innumerable letters, his
sermons, his treatises, songs he wrote for the people, and
anti-Donatist placards to cover the walls, he was gradually putting new
life into the laity, while the sudden apparition of a first class mind
among the bishops was transforming the hierarchy also.
To win victories in controversy, however, was far indeed from
Augustine's aim. It was the re-union of the Church and the convincing
of the Donatists that he desired; and side by side with the controversy
there went on a persistent effort, maintained with a patience and
charity that never tired, to open up negotiations with the Donatist
bishops. The council of Catholic bishops decided for this policy in
401, and again in 403. But each time the Donatists held aloof. On the
other hand the anti-Catholic violence steadily increased, and after the
failure of the last attempt at negotiation the bishops appealed to the
emperor, Honorius, (395-423) for protection. The edict of February,
405, was his reply. The Donatists were to be considered as heretics, to
be proscribed as such and rooted out.
The new edict was undoubtedly a severe blow. The realisation that the
State would now protect the Catholics, lost to the Donatists all those
converts whom they had gained through the terror, and it doubtless lost
them also a great number of their own more indifferent members. But the
edict was by no means so consistently applied as to destroy the sect
outright. With the assassination of the all-powerful minister Stilico
(408) there came a change of policy. But the bishops appealed, and the
edict of 405 was renewed. In 410 the policy was a second time reversed,
and an edict of tolerance published. The situation was by this time
easily worse than at any time for twenty years.
Once more the bishops appealed, and this time the emperor adopted the
often discussed plan of a conference between the two episcopates. It
was to take place at Carthage under the presidency of a high imperial
official; the procedure was carefully drawn up; official stenographers
were appointed, and on June 1, 411, the rival armies of bishops -- 286
Catholics and 279 Donatists, two bishops to almost every see in the
country -- came together. It was a weary encounter, as all who knew the
history of the controversy could no doubt have foretold. The Donatists
had no case in theology, in law or in history. They had no argument
except the fact that they had survived for a hundred years. Naturally
and necessarily they made the greatest possible use of the only tactics
open to them -- obstruction and delay. The president decided that they
had no case and must submit, and the following January (412) a new
imperial decree confirmed his judgement. All Donatists were ordered to
return to the Catholic Church under pain of banishment; their churches
and other property were confiscated and handed over to the Catholics.
Commissioners appeared everywhere to carry out the decree; and since,
this time, there was no reversal of the policy, the end of Donatism
seemed assured. But before the Catholics could flatter themselves that
the double influence of Catholic propaganda and the imperial laws had
converted the mass of the schismatics, the Vandal invasion came (429)
to wrest Africa for a century from the rule of Rome and subject it to
barbarians who were militant Arians, fanatically anti-Catholic.
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