Chapter 20: Donat and the Circoncellions

From the moment that Constantine agreed to support the Christian communities in 313, he took hold of the Church and treated it as an instrument of his State power. To the bishops he recognized, he accorded the license to promulgate sentences under imperial protection [caution]. His politics of great works (in Rome, Saint Peter, Saint John of Lateran and Saint Agnes; in Jerusalem, Saint Sepulcre), which honored a faith that he openly mocked if it did not cement his own absolutism, aroused the reprobation of a popular Christianity that had been impregnated by asceticism and martyrdom ever since the end of the Second Century.

An old contention opposed the party of the tortured, the Christians who remained unshakable in their convictions [even] when faced with their executioners, and the party of the lapsi or traditores, the renegades, the traitors, who were more numerous and, due to their very pragmatism, better accustomed to accede to the clerical responsibilities thenceforth conferred by the State.

In Carthage, the bastion of Tertullianism, the most significant incident exploded, precipitated by the anti-Montanist reaction that took place underneath the goblets [la coupe] of a corrupted clergy.

During the persecution of Diocletian, which was brief but cruel (303–305), the majority of the clergy abjured. A small group of priests from Abitina (Tunisia), imprisoned in the expectation of torture, denounced the traditores. They proclaimed that only those who, following their example, remained loyal to belief would reach paradise. Their intransigence would irritate the clergy of Carthage and, in particular, the Archdeacon Caecilianus (Cecilian), much later accused of preventing other Christians from bringing food and comfort to prisoners.[291]

When Cecilian succeded the bishop of Carthage, who died in 311, the majority of the faithful reacted with indignation. A young bishop named Donatus led the movement of contestation.

Born in Numidia, Donat had already attracted attention as a young bishop in Casa Nigra by demanding, at the conclusion of the persecutions, a new baptism for the lapsed clergy. Concerning these pleas, a council of 70 bishops who met in 312 deposed Cecilian and replaced him with Majorinus, chaplain of Lucilla, a rich Spaniard executed under the reign of the collaborating bishop.

That same year, Constantine crushed his rival, Maxence, and seized North Africa, which had until then been subjected to the fallen emperor. With the sanction [jugement] of the Roman clergy, in which apostasy was dominant, he restored Cecilian to his responsibilities, allotted him an important subsidy and exempted from all taxes the clergy who obeyed the renegade.

Meanwhile, upon the death of Majorinus, Donat succeded him with the consent of Cecilian’s enemies, who sent the emperor a list of the crimes imputed to his protege. Donat went to Rome to plead his legitimacy, but Militiades, a Roman bishop whom Constantine consulted because of his African origins, took sides against him, which caused his condemnation by the emperor.

Essentially careful to unify his empire, Constantine moved from threats to conciliation. In 321, he repealed the decree of exile that struck Donat, whose influence had not ceased to grow. In 336, two-hundred and seventy bishops controlled the communities in a territory that today stretches from Tunisia to East Algeria, in which the lax party of Cecilian was in the minority. In Egypt, the Donatist bishop Melece enjoyed great popular support.

No doubt Donat benefited from the tacit tolerance of imperial power, that is, until the peasant revolt of the Circoncellions was grafted on to his movement, thereby forming its popular wing.

In 346, a commando group of Circoncellions attacked the commission sent to North Africa by the emperor. Despite their disapproval of this action, Donat and his principal partisans were exiled to Gaul, where the bishop of Casa Nigra died in 355.

The Circoncellion movement allied with religious fanaticism (hostile to the laxity of the wealthy) the demands of the disinherited of the countryside: laborers, shephards, slaves, poor peasants. Their name came from circum cellas, those who wander around the barns (cellae).

They called themselves “saints” and “fighters” (agonistes), terms issued from Essenism and Judeo-Christianity. Armed with the billy club that they called Israel, the Circoncellions attacked large property owners and functionaries, liberating slaves to whom they entrusted the task of treating their [former] masters as they had been treated in servitude. They combated the Devil in the person of his representatives: terrestrial owners, tax collectors, magistrates and anti-Donatist priests. They acted under the leadership of two men, Axide and Phasir, “duces sanctorum” (leaders of saints), who, according to Optat (340), “made owners and creditors tremble.”[292] The Circoncellions supported the cult of the martyrs and opposed the sanctification of asceticism to the lazy and hedonistic existence of the rich.

Disavowed by the Donatists, the Circoncellions could not resist the imperial army and ended up massacred around 348.

Nevertheless, Donatism would survive until 429. It rejected the principal demands of the Circoncellions, so often reprized by the [various] millenarianist movements: the reign of the saints; universal equality under the sole power of God; moratoria on debts; judgments and executions of the rich; and the suppression of slavery.

Donat, who at the beginning cautioned against the zeal of the Circoncellions in their hunt for apostates, would approve of their suppression but would not recover his credit with the emperor.

The party of the lapsi and the laxists retook the upper hand. Optat attacked his adversaries in Against the Donatists. From 399 to 415, Augustine of Hippone undertook to chase them from Carthage. Moreover, they were outlawed, starting in 411.

Thanks to one of the many ironies of history, Donatism would disappear in 429, at the same time that Roman colonization was swept by the invasion of the Vandals, who imposed as the religion of the State the very Arianism that had been condemned as heresy.

The social and political components that had assured the success of Donatism also conducted it towards its downfall. The nationalistic demands of Numidia and Mauritania uncovered motifs of satisfaction in Donat’s opposition to Rome and in his project of creating an African Catholic Church. When he demanded (according to Optat’s Against the Donatists)[293] “What has the emperor to do with the Church?” the response was doubly articulated. His Church — beyond which, as with the Church of Rome, “there was no salvation” — refused to submit to the imperial power of an emperor who was at once the head of State and the leader of the clergy. He defended the principle of national churches, independent of a central power.

But Donat also contested the preeminence of temporal power over spiritual power. Such would be the opinion of the papacy, starting from the Seventh Century. Augustine, an enemy of Donatism and a partisan of spiritual preeminence, was not deceived; he borrowed from the Donatist theologian Tychonius the doctrine of the two cities, the terrestrial city and the city of God.

On the other hand, Donat’s Montanism and Tertullianism went against the attempts of the Church of Rome to reconcile itself with a Latin aristocracy that was little inclined to asceticism and puritanism. His church wanted to be the “Virgin Church” of Tertullian, in opposition to the temporal church of the lapsi. It was to be a “closed garden,” a refuge for the people suffering for God, a place in which the perjured priests could have no part.

The Donatists did not allow — and [here] one finds again the arguments of the Elenchos against Callixte, bishop of Rome — that a dignitary who had lost his celestial existence so as to save his terrestrial life had the right to pursue his ministry. The sacraments accorded by such a bishop were deprived of value. The sacred character of the function did not accommodate itself to a forfeiture. The clergy of Rome, in which the lapsi were in the majority, thought otherwise. For them, any bishop was invested with the right to give the sacraments, even if, as a man, he showed himself unworthy of the sacredness that he distributed. This was an endemic conflict, one that clarified — from a certain angle — the very notion of heresy: provided that he did not put aside dogma, a priest, bishop or pope could surrender himself to debauchery and infamy without losing the grace that the Church accorded him, insofar as he remained an obedient son. But practicing virtue by contravening orthodoxy in his discourse brought upon him damnation in the beyond and the here-below.

Against Donat, Augustine would formulate his doctrine concerning the nature of the Church and the sacraments. Not only did he summon police repression against individuals and groups that put Catholic orthodoxy aside, he also made precise the point that the sacraments act ex opere operato,[294] through the sacred character of the [Church] official.