Donatism

In 311 or 312 — the sources support both years and this record does not choose between them — Caecilian was elected bishop of Carthage and consecrated by Felix of Aptungi, a man accused of surrendering the Scriptures to be burned under the recent persecution. A rival party would not accept a bishop ordained by a traditor's hand: they consecrated Majorinus beside him instead, not in his place, and from Majorinus's successor Donatus the movement took its name. The doctrine at stake was narrow and absolute: a sacrament's validity rises and falls on the giver's own unbroken purity, so a tainted ordination gives nothing, and everyone it touches must be washed again by a hand that can be trusted. This was never a dispute over the Trinity or Christ's divinity — both parties held the same Nicene faith — but over who could validly give what the church gives, and for a century, across much of Roman Africa, this was simply the larger of the two churches, with its own bishops, its own basilicas, and its own councils contesting the same towns as its rival.

The empire did not stay neutral. In 347, imperial commissioners sent to force the two churches into one communion met resistance in Numidia; a bishop named Marculus was seized, paraded through several towns, and thrown from a cliff called Novapetra, and this communion has kept his name, and the names of others killed with him, read aloud at their graves every year since. A rural movement called the circumcellions is attested in this same period by an imperial fine — a real, legally distinct group — though almost everything claimed about what they actually did survives only in the writing of opponents who had reason to make them look like a mob. What the record will support is existence and a name; what it will not support, cleanly, is character.

The same communion that refused any emperor's standing to say which church was the true one turned to imperial power three times when it served the case — appealing to Constantine in 313, to Julian in 361, and, in the 390s, to the same machinery it condemned everywhere else, against its own breakaway Maximianist bishops. In 411 the emperor finally ordered the whole dispute settled at law: two hundred and seventy-nine of this communion's bishops met roughly two hundred and eighty-six of the rival church's before an imperial judge at Carthage, refused the chairs he offered them, and argued for three days. The verdict went against them, and the laws that followed took their churches by name. The communion survived under Vandal and then Byzantine rule for a further century and a half, still contested and still legislated against — the last word any surviving record has on it is a set of letters Pope Gregory the Great wrote in the 590s, pressing for an inquiry into Donatist rebaptism in Numidia.