The Donatist Church in an Apocalyptic

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OXFORD EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

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THE OXFORD EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES series includes scholarly volumes on

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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 18/4/2018, SPi

The Donatist Church in

an Apocalyptic Age

JESSE A. HOOVER

1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 18/4/2018, SPi

3
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 18/4/2018, SPi

Preface

This book began life as a Ph.D. dissertation at Baylor University under the
direction of Dr. Daniel Williams. I am deeply grateful for his continued
involvement through every stage of the project, from his careful critiques of
my initial manuscript chapters, which were returned to me nearly as quickly as
I had submitted them, to his active encouragement to consider reworking
the completed dissertation into a full-length book. I would also like to thank
Dr. David Wilhite of Truett Seminary, who graciously consented to serve as
an outside reader on my defense committee and whose suggestions both
academic and grammatical have greatly affected the final form of this work.
My project has also been significantly influenced by ongoing conversations
with fellow scholars with interests in North African Christianity and Donatism
including, but certainly not limited to, Robin Jensen, Maureen Tilley (now
sadly deceased), Eric Fournier, Frank Gumerlock, and Alden Bass. From
allowing me access to pre-published versions of their own books and articles
to pointing me in the direction of newly discovered Donatist primary sources,
their perceptive insights have been invaluable to me. Given the practical
difficulties of transforming an academic dissertation into a manuscript suit-
able for publication, I have particularly appreciated the careful guidance of
Karen Raith, the Senior Assistant Commissioning Editor at Oxford University
Press. Special thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers contracted by
OUP for their painstaking critiques and suggestions regarding my Latin
translations and other stylistic areas of concern. Any remaining faults are, of
course, my own.
This book is dedicated above all to my wife and family. Cliché though it may
sound, the litany of weekends holed up writing and late nights spent revising
is real. I am grateful to my wife, Katie, for her patience and encouragement
during this long process—and to my children, Isaac and Natalie, for remind-
ing me that there is more to life than the next academic deadline!
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Contents

List of Abbreviations ix

Introduction 1
1. The Apocalypse that Never Was: External Impressions of
Donatist Eschatology 25
2. “The World has Grown Old”: The Roots of Donatist Eschatology 65
3. “Woe to You, World, for You are Perishing!” Early Donatists
at the End of the Age 98
4. “God Will Come from the Afric”: Mainstream Donatism and
Remnant Theology 116
5. “As We Have Already Seen in Africa”: The Tyconian Alternative 161
6. “His Name Means ‘Ever-Increasing’”: Donatist Eschatology
after 411 182
Conclusion 209

Appendix A: Was Commodian a Donatist? 221

Appendix B: Were the Circumcellions a Millenarian Movement? 228

Bibliography 237
General Index 251
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 18/4/2018, SPi

List of Abbreviations

ACW Ancient Christian Writers series. New York: Paulist Press, 1946–
CCCM Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medievalis. Turnhout: Brepols, 1966–
CCSL Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina. Turnhout: Brepols, 1954–
CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum. Vienna: Tempsky, 1866–
FOTC Fathers of the Church. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America
Press, 1948–
Maier Le Dossier du Donatisme, Tomes 1–2. Edited by Jean-Louis Maier. Berlin:
Akademie-Verlag, 1989
MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Auctores Antiquissimi. Berlin, 1826–
Musurillo The Acts of the Christian Martyrs. Edited and translated by Herbert
Musurillo. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972
OSA Oeuvres de saint Augustin. Edited by Guy Finaert. Paris: Descleé de
Brouwer, 1936–
PG Patrologiae cursus completus, series graeca. Edited by Jacques Paul Migne.
161 vols. Paris: Editions Garnier Frères, 1857–66
PL Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina. Edited by Jacques Paul Migne.
222 vols. Paris: Editions Garnier Frères, 1844–66; second edition, 1878–90
PLS Patrologiae Latinae Supplementum. Edited by Adalbert Hamman et al.
4 vols. Paris, Editions Garnier Frères, 1958–74
SC Sources chrétiennes. Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1942–
WSA The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century. Edited
by John Rotelle and Boniface Ramsey. New York: New City Press, 1990–

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 18/4/2018, SPi

Introduction

This is a book about an apocalypse that never happened, seen through the
eyes of a dissident church that no longer exists. My conversation-partners
are Donatists, members of an ecclesiastical communion that for a brief
moment formed the majority church in Roman North Africa—modern Tunisia,
Algeria, and Libya—before fading away sometime between the fifth and
seventh centuries.
At the outset, this may seem like a rather odd choice of topic, given the
characterization of the Donatist movement among its contemporaries. Unlike
other religious alternatives like the long-dead Cerinthians, whom Augustine
denounced as pleasure-addicted Chiliasts in his heresy-book,¹ or the proto-
monastic Hieracites, who denied the resurrection of the body,² Donatism was
not usually characterized by its opponents as an apocalyptic cult. Rather,
taking Augustine as our guide once more, “The Donatists are those who first
created a schism because Caecilian was ordained bishop of Carthage contrary
to their wishes . . . and claimed that the Church of Christ had perished from
the whole face of the earth where God promised it would be.”³
There is an eschatological dimension here, but it is subtle. Donatism is
usually defined as a question of ecclesiastical purity which evolved out of a
rift over the status of bishops who had compromised during the Diocletianic
persecution. The “original sin” of their opponents—Mensurius, bishop of
Carthage, his successor Caecilian, and those who followed him—was the
crime of traditio: “handing over” the scriptures to the authorities to be burned.
Anyone who heeded the siren-call of these traditores (the root etymology of
our English word traitor) was culpable in their sin. “Tell us therefore, traditor,
when you received the power of imitating the mysteries!” the Donatist bishop

¹ Augustine, De haeresibus 8. ² Augustine, De haeresibus 47.

³ Augustine, De haeresibus 69.1, in WSA 1.18, 50 (CCSL 46.332: “Donatistae sunt qui primum
propter ordinatum contra suam uoluntatem caecilianum ecclesiae carthaginensis episcopum
schisma fecerunt . . . tamquam ecclesia christi . . . de toto terrarum orbe perierit, ubi futura
promissa est”).
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2 The Donatist Church in an Apocalyptic Age

Petilian thundered: the true church could not be built upon such a
foundation.⁴
So why should we care about a topic that at first glance appears to be
tangential to the conflict, the failed apocalyptic predictions of a long-dead
sect? The reason, it turns out, is that studying a given ecclesiastical move-
ment’s apocalyptic self-perception is a very good way to understand its
internal dynamics. By its very nature, apocalyptic theology encapsulates the
driving concerns of its proponents, highlighting in stark relief both their
dreams and their nightmares. It gives, as Paul Boyer states, “a grand, over-
arching shape to history, and thus ultimate meaning to the lives of individuals
caught up in history’s stream.”⁵ In his book Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory
of Millennial Rhetoric, Stephen O’Leary characterizes apocalypticism in terms
of theodicy: “The unique feature of apocalyptic myth is that it offers a
temporal or teleological framework for understanding evil.”⁶ In apocalyptic
theodicies,⁷ the eschatological landscape is populated by the specific enemies
and allies of the appropriating community. In so doing, such narratives offer
us an intimate glimpse into the inner life of a given ecclesial communion: how
it defines its place in history, what it values, whom it fears. Perhaps more
explicitly than in any other area of theological enquiry, apocalyptic thought
captures the core concerns of its adherents.

A NE G L EC TE D TOP I C

Donatism has been extensively studied in the past: as a relic of the old pre-
Constantinian paradigm that stubbornly persisted in the age of the Christian
emperors,⁸ as a clash between the indigenous North African religious tradition

⁴ Petilian, Epistula ad presbyteros et diaconos in Augustine, Contra litteras Petiliani 2.31.70

(OSA 30.314: “Doce igitur, traditor, simulandi mysteria quando acceperis potestatem”).
⁵ Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), xi.
⁶ Stephen O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 6. See also Brian Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of
Patristic Eschatology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 2: “Eschatology includes,
among other things, the attempt to construct a theodicy: a justification of faith in God, a hope in
the final revelation of God’s wise and loving activity throughout history, with a longing for final
reckonings.”
⁷ Within this project, “theodicy” may be defined as the attempt from within the theistic
perspective of Donatist exegetes to determine why God has permitted a particular “evil”—
persecution, for instance—rather than a philosophical argument which assesses the probability
of the existence of God in light of the problem of evil.
⁸ Robert Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of Saint Augustine
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 55; Gerald Bonner, “Quid Imperatori
Cum Ecclesia? St. Augustine on History and Society,” Augustinian Studies 2 (1971), 237.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 18/4/2018, SPi

Introduction 3
and the theological sensibilities of overseas provinces,⁹ even as an incipient
social movement which aimed at overturning Roman hegemony in favor of a
native dynasty.¹⁰ But while such studies have at times appealed to apocalyptic
motifs within Donatist theology in order to further their case, there has been
little sustained interaction with the topic itself.¹¹
The reason for this lacuna is likely twofold. First, we live in an era charac-
terized by a strong suspicion that apocalyptic prognostications constitute
an invalid, or at least improper, subspecies of exegesis. Proponents of an
imminent end are far more likely to be found in the world of roadside
theology and popular bestsellers than prestigious pulpits or university reli-
gious studies departments. The topography of the apocalypse seems disturb-
ing, alien to us—in Boyer’s words, “too bizarre or atavistic to merit the time
and attention . . . expended on it.”¹² Given these ingrained biases, the pres-
ence of a vibrant apocalyptic theology within Donatist communion is easy to
sideline as tangential, a mere distraction from the real issues at hand.
The second reason, I suspect, has to do with the desire within recent
scholarship to rehabilitate the Donatist church as a viable hermeneutical
community. As we shall see in Chapter 1, early studies of Donatism tended
to highlight the presence of apocalyptic exegesis within the dissident move-
ment as evidence that Donatism was theologically more “primitive” than its
opponents, maladapted to the Constantinian era. According to the claims of
the consistent eschatology school of the late nineteenth century, for instance,
apocalyptic thought was considered one of the most primitive strata of the
original Jesus movement: as an expression of mainstream theology, it was
not supposed to have survived the existential crisis allegedly posed by the delay
of the parousia and the beginnings of a Christian imperium.¹³ Always more
at home in the age of martyrs than the tempora Christiana, Donatist appeals
to the apocalyptic were often portrayed as anachronistic holdouts from an
earlier time. The alleged shortcomings of Donatist eschatology thus served as
a convenient shorthand for the “backward” theology of the movement as a
whole: in true Darwinian fashion, the dissident church had failed to survive

⁹ For example, Brent Shaw, “African Christianity: Disputes, Definitions, and ‘Donatists,’ ”
in Rulers, Nomads, and Christians in Roman North Africa (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1995),
8–9.
¹⁰ See in particular W. H. C. Frend, The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman
North Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 60–1; S. L. Greenslade, Schism in the Early
Church (London: SCM Press, 1953), 58.
¹¹ This despite occasional calls for more research into the area. See, for instance, Bernard
McGinn, “Early Apocalypticism: The Ongoing Debate,” in Apocalypticism in the Western
Tradition (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1994), 29.
¹² Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, x.
¹³ See Martin Werner’s classic formulation of the theory in The Formation of Christian
Dogma: An Historical Study of Its Problem, trans. S. G. Brandon (New York: Black,
1957 [1941]).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 18/4/2018, SPi

4 The Donatist Church in an Apocalyptic Age

because it was fundamentally obsolete, a living fossil out of place in an age of
Christian emperors.
The renewed attention given to Donatist apocalyptic concerns by later
writers such as W. H. C. Frend or Jean-Paul Brisson proved little better, at
least in terms of taking the dissident movement’s exegetical concerns seriously.
According to these and similar authors, the presence of eschatological elem-
ents embedded in Donatist writings were signs of deep economic or nationalist
dissatisfaction, their religious trappings a thin veneer for more basic social
concerns. In short, Donatism became the poster-child for what British histor-
ian Norman Cohn called “revolutionary millenarianism,” in which “tradition-
al beliefs about a future golden age or messianic kingdom came to serve as
vehicles for social aspirations and animosities.”¹⁴ Despite the increased atten-
tion given to apocalyptic motifs within Donatist thought, it was not their
specific theological content that mattered as much as the underlying social
aspirations they represented.
In her 1997 work The Bible in Christian North Africa, Maureen Tilley offers
us a glimpse into the less than favorable associations that the “apocalyptic”
label conjured among scholars who sought to reassess Donatist theology:

When I first began to investigate Donatism, no matter what source I read, I kept
encountering the identical assertions. That the comments were so uniformly
censorious made me very curious. Finding the same assertions in text after text
was not in itself terribly remarkable. What I did find extremely suspicious was
the monotonous use of the same words, the identical phrases (even from French
to German, to English, to Spanish, etc.), “millennialist,” “Church of the pure,”
and so on.¹⁵

In contrast, Tilley’s portrait of the Donatist communion was dynamic, adap-

tive: “not the traditional one of a static-martyr-bound, millennialist move-
ment, but one that shows the movement responding to the larger world in a
variety of ways over the course of its history.”¹⁶ Such a suspicion of Donatist
eschatology appears to be widely shared, and for good reason: given its
prominent role in supporting earlier hypotheses about the backwards or
socialist nature of the dissident church, more recent studies of Donatist
theology have been noticeably reticent to analyze the apocalyptic topography
of our subjects.

¹⁴ Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical
Anarchists of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 17. See Chapter 1 for an
extended discussion of the “millenarian” interpretation of Donatist apocalypticism.
¹⁵ Maureen Tilley, The Bible in Christian North Africa: The Donatist World (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1997), 2.
¹⁶ Tilley, The Bible in Christian North Africa, 8.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 18/4/2018, SPi

Introduction 5

A N A P O C A LYP TI C AGE

My own perspective on the Donatist church is deeply indebted to scholars like

Maureen Tilley, James Alexander, and Robert Eno: Donatism was, in their
words, a highly adaptive theological community every bit the match of its
Catholic opponents.¹⁷ In this book, however, I will argue that the way in which
Donatists interpreted the end should itself be seen as an example of such
adaptation. If we ignore its apocalyptic aspect, we miss something important
about Donatism—and its embeddedness in the larger theological landscape of
late antiquity.
Donatism flourished in an age characterized by apocalyptic anxiety: the
Latin Christian world of the fourth and fifth centuries was a society obsessed
with the end. Belief in an imminent eschaton was not restricted to the
credulous, nor did its exponents hail from the outskirts of society. In part,
this was due to the unique historical milieu created by the Constantinian
revolution. The empire, the center of the known world, had converted; for the
first time, it was legitimately plausible to claim that the Gospel might indeed
have already spread to all nations, a critical prerequisite for the end. No less an
exegete than Jerome could claim, “The sign of the Lord’s coming is the
proclamation of the Gospel in the whole world . . . this is either already
completed or will be completed in a short time. For I do not think any nation
remains that is ignorant of the name of Christ.”¹⁸
The new cultural situation was only one of several remarkable apocalyptic
convergences that characterized the world of late antiquity. Indeed, the very
chronological calculations which the church had inherited from its pre-
Constantinian past implied a coming end somewhere within the bounds of
the fifth century. The world had grown old; its age, as calculated by early
Christian chronographers such as Theophilus of Antioch or Julius Africanus
on the basis of biblical genealogies, was nearly six millennia.¹⁹ By the fourth
century, this method of reckoning, which Richard Landes has titled an

¹⁷ See the positive assessment of Donatist exegetical strategy contained in Robert Eno, “Some
Nuances in the Ecclesiology of the Donatists,” Revue des Études Augustiniennes 18 (1972), 46–50
and James Alexander, “Aspects of Donatist Scriptural Interpretation at the Conference of
Carthage of 411,” Studia Patristica 15 (1984), 125–30. More comprehensive theological inter-
pretations of the Donatist phenomenon include James Alexander’s “Donatism,” in The Early
Christian world, Vol. 2, ed. Philip Esler (New York: Routledge, 2000), 952–74, and Maureen
Tilley’s The Bible in Christian North Africa.
¹⁸ Jerome, Commentariorum in Matheum 24.14 in FOTC 117.271 (CCSL 77.225: “Signum
aduentus dominici est euangelium in toto orbe praedicari . . . quod aut iam completum aut in
breui cernimus esse complendum. Non enim puto aliquam remansisse gentem quae christi
nomen ignoret”).
¹⁹ See Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Autolycum 3.28 (in Robert Grant, Theophilus of Antioch:
Ad Autolycum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970, 142–5)); Julius Africanus, Fragment T92 (in
Julius Africanus Chronographiae: The Extant Fragments (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007, 274)).
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 18/4/2018, SPi

6 The Donatist Church in an Apocalyptic Age

“AM (Anno Mundi) I chronology,”²⁰ had become the dominant dating
system within the western church.²¹ But it came with a price: for biblical
exegetes such as Hippolytus of Rome or Lactantius, the duration of the
world was linked to a “cosmic week,” at the end of which loomed the
apocalypse.²² As Lactantius would note,
Someone may now ask when these things will happen which we have spoken of.
I have already pointed out that the change should occur at the end of six thousand
years, and that the supreme day of final conclusion is already approaching . . . The
timing of it is set forth by those who have written upon timing; they have
searched in holy literature and in various histories for the number of years
gone by since the beginning of the world. They differ; their numbers vary
somewhat; nevertheless, the universal expectation appears to be for a maximum
of two hundred years more.²³
Richard Landes argues that Lactantius wrote these words as a way to push the
date of the apocalypse outside the range of the immediate future. By the turn
of the fifth century, however, such predictions had shifted “from delaying
technique to countdown.”²⁴
It was thus all the more significant that the world of late antiquity was
characterized by unprecedented turmoil both within and without the empire.
For much of the fourth century, the so-called “Arian” controversy seethed and
bubbled, creating deep fault-lines between rival Christian theologies. In such a
conflict, many on both sides interpreted the “heresy” of their opponents as

²⁰ Richard Landes, “Lest the Millennium be Fulfilled: Apocalyptic Expectations and the
Pattern of Western Chronography, 100–800 CE,” in The Use and Abuse of Eschatology in the
Middle Ages, ed. Werner Verbeke, Daniël Verhelst, and Andries Welkenhuysen (Louvain:
Louvain University Press, 1988), 137–8.
²¹ Landes, “Lest the Millennium be Fulfilled,” 139. Despite the calculation of an alternate
dating system (which Landes calls AM II) by Eusebius in 303, AM I chronology would prevail in
the western world of late antiquity well into the fifth century.
²² For the classic definition of a “world” or “cosmic” week, see Jean Daniélou, The Theology of
Jewish Christianity, trans. John Baker (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1977 [1958]), 390–402.
“World week” chronologies posited that just as the world was created in six days, after which
came the divine “day of rest,” so the world would last for six millennia, after which would come
the apocalypse. Although many early adherents of world week chronology assumed that a
millennial “age of rest” would comprise the final thousand years, Daniélou cautions that
millennialism and the concept of a world week are not necessarily synonymous.
²³ Lactantius, Divinae institutiones 7.25.3, 5, in Lactantius: Divine Institutes, trans. Anthony
Bowen and Peter Garnsey (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003), 437 (L. Caecilius
Firmianus Lactantius: Divinarum Institutionum Libri Septem, fasc. 4: Liber VII, ed. Eberhard
Heck and Antonie Wlosok (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), 726–7: “Fortasse quispiam nunc requirat,
quando ista quae diximus sint futura. iam superius ostendi completis annorum sex milibus
mutationem istam fieri oportere et iam propinquare summum illum conclusionis extremae
diem . . . quando tamen compleatur haec summa, docent ii qui de temporibus scripserunt,
colligentes ex litteris sanctis et ex uariis historiis, quantus sit numerus annorum ab exordio
mundi. qui licet uarient et aliquantum numeri eorum summa dissentiant, omnis tamen expec-
tatio non amplius quam ducentorum uidetur annorum”).
²⁴ Landes, “Lest the Millennium be Fulfilled,” 148.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 18/4/2018, SPi

Introduction 7
part of an apocalyptic rift, the predicted apostasy by which, as Christ had
warned, “even the elect will be deceived.”²⁵ Outside the empire, the forces of
Gog and Magog stirred uneasily. In addition to chronological calculations,
western Christians of late antiquity had inherited something else from their
ancestors: a strong belief that the empire itself was that which, in the writings
of Paul, worked to “restrain” the onslaught of Antichrist.²⁶ This was an ancient
doctrine; first explicitly propounded by Irenaeus in the late second century,²⁷ it
had become a theological axiom by the third. “We realize,” Tertullian wrote in
his Apologeticum, “that the tremendous force which is hanging over the whole
world, and the very end of the world with its threat of dreadful afflictions, is
arrested for a time by the continued existence of the Roman Empire.”²⁸ Nor
was Rome’s identification as the final kingdom before the rise of Antichrist
limited to the pre-Constantinian past. In his Commentariorum in Danielem,
Jerome insisted that Rome was coterminous with the present age:
We should therefore concur with the traditional interpretation of all the com-
mentators of the Christian Church, that at the end of the world, when the Roman
Empire is to be destroyed, there shall be ten kings who will partition the
Roman world amongst themselves. Then an insignificant eleventh king [the Anti-
christ] will arise²⁹
Even Augustine, albeit somewhat more reluctantly, would admit the plausi-
bility of such an interpretation: “When the apostle says, ‘Only he who now
holds back, let him hold, until he is taken out of the way,’ it is not absurd to
believe that this statement is a reference to the empire of Rome.”³⁰

²⁵ Matt. 24.24 (NRSV).

²⁶ 1 Thess. 3.7: “For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work: only he which now restrains
will do so until he is taken out of the way” (NRSV).
²⁷ See Irenaeus, Adversus haereses 5.26, 30.
²⁸ Tertullian, Apologeticum 32.1 in FOTC 10.88 (CCSL 1.142–3: “Qui uim maximam uniuerso
orbi imminentem ipsam quae clausulam saeculi acerbitates horrendas comminantem romani
imperii commeatu scimus retardari”). See Ad Scapulum 2 and De resurrectione mortuorum 24 for
further references to Rome as the “thing that restrains.”
²⁹ Jerome, Commentariorum in Danielem 7.8 in Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel, trans.
Gleason Archer (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1958), 77 (CCSL 75A.844: “ergo dicamus quod
omnes scriptores ecclesiastici tradiderunt: in consummatione mundi, quando regnum destruen-
dum est romanorum, decem futuros reges qui orbem romanum inter se diuidant, et undecimum
surrecturum esse paruulum regem”).
³⁰ Augustine, De civitate Dei 20.19 in R. W. Dyson, The City of God Against the Pagans
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 1009 (CCSL 48.732: “Quod ait apostolus:
Tantum qui modo tenet teneat, donec de medio fiat, non absurde de ipso Romano imperio
creditur dictum.” As Augustine will immediately make clear, however, this is not his preferred
interpretation of the passage: “However, there are others who think that ‘Ye know what with-
holdeth’ and ‘the mystery of iniquity’ refer simply to the wicked and to the false believers who are
in the church, until they reach so great a number as to become a great people for Antichrist. This,
they contend, is ‘the mystery of iniquity’ because it is seen to be concealed.” (“Alii uero et quod
ait: Quid detineat scitis et mysterium operari iniquitatis non putant dictum nisi de malis et fictis,
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 18/4/2018, SPi

8 The Donatist Church in an Apocalyptic Age

By the early fifth century, the prediction of the empire’s fall seemed in
imminent danger of fulfillment. The forces of Gog and Magog—Ambrose of
Milan’s term for the Goths³¹—had crossed the Rhine and begun dividing up
former Roman territories among themselves. The age of the prophesied “ten
kings” seemed at hand. For Sulpicius Severus, the empire had entered a critical
stage: “In short, it is the future mingling together of human peoples who are
mutually at odds with each other that is signified by the clay and iron
intermingling, yet never quite uniting themselves together; accordingly,
Roman soil has been occupied by foreign or insurgent tribes or consigned to
those who seem to hand themselves over by a show of peace.”³² Jerome agreed:
in a despairing letter to the widow Ageruchia dated to 409, he lamented, “But
wait—what am I doing? I’m arguing about the cargo while the ship is breaking
up! That which holds back is taken from the midst, and we do not recognize
the approach of Antichrist! . . . everything between the Alps and the Pyrenees,
all the lands between the Rhine and Ocean, the Quadi, Vandals, Sarmatians,
Gepids, Heruli, Saxons, Burgundians, Alemanni, and—O poor Republic!—the
hostile Pannones have devastated.”³³ By the middle of the fifth century, even
such an Augustinian protégé as the North African bishop Quodvultdeus could
see in the “Arian” Goths and Moors the sign of Gog and Magog.³⁴
My point is that this was an era in which the shadow of the apocalypse
loomed very large indeed. It was an axial period for early Christian apocalypti-
cism, the culmination of centuries of calculation and exegesis: while earlier
scares had come and gone, never had an imminent end seemed so plausible. If
we wish to situate Donatist theology within its contemporary milieu, therefore,
we must enter into the presuppositions of an apocalyptic age. We need not
downplay evidence of Donatist apocalypticism in order to free the movement
from claims of anachronism; indeed, the dissident church would prove some-
thing of an outlier in the western empire of late antiquity if it had failed to evolve
some form of apocalyptic scenario in order to narrate its present situation.

qui sunt in ecclesia, donec perueniant ad tantum numerum, qui Antichristo magnum populum
faciat; et hoc esse mysterium iniquitatis, quia uidetur occultum”).
³¹ See Ambrose, De Fide 2.16.135–8.
³² Sulpicius Severus, Chronica 2.3 (CSEL 1.58–9: “Denique commisceri testum atque ferrum
numquam inter se coeunte materie commixtiones humani generis futurae a se inuicem dis-
sidentes significantur, siquidem Romanum solum ab exteris gentibus aut rebellibus occupatum
aut dedentibus se per pacis speciem traditum constet”).
³³ Jerome, Letter 123.16 (To Ageruchia) (PL 22.1057: “Uerum quid ago? Fracta naui de mercibus
disputo. Qui tenebat, de medio fit, et non intelligimus Antichristum appropinquare . . . quidquid
inter Alpes et Pyrenaeum est, quod Oceano et Rheno includitur, Quadus, Wandalus, Sarmata,
Halani, Gipedes, Heruli, Saxones, Burgundiones, Alemani, et, o lugenda respublica! hostes
Pannonii uastarunt”).
³⁴ Quodvultdeus was also willing to accept the alternate interpretation that “Magog” referred
to the quasi-mythical “Massagetes.” Under either interpretation, the Gog/Magog prophecy of
Ezekiel 38 was seen as having contemporary relevance. See Quodvultdeus, Liber promissionum et
praedictorum Dei D.13.22.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 18/4/2018, SPi

Introduction 9

THE P RESENT STUDY

Scope

Reconstructing the internal theology of an ecclesiastical communion that

ultimately lost out is often tricky—most ancient minority sects are only
known through the polemical writings of their opponents. In the case of
Donatism, however, we are fortunate indeed: a surprising number of docu-
ments written by members of the dissident communion themselves have
survived to the present day, either by being incorporated wholesale into the
pugnacious “dialogues” of their enemies or preserved on their own merit
(often through misattribution). From martyrologies and polemical letters to
biblical commentaries, chronographies, and sermonic materials, a rich and
diverse harvest awaits the would-be researcher. Many of these writings
incorporate apocalyptic material, enough for us to adequately reconstruct
the broad—and in some cases quite specific—outlines of not one but several
Donatist eschatological trajectories.
We are limited, however, by the relatively narrow window within which
these texts were produced. The documents under consideration in this book
tend to cluster around the late fourth- to early fifth-century mark, with a fair
number of martyrologies and exegetical writings dating from the 360s and
several sermonic materials, letters, and chronographical recensions extending
into the 430s. It is an unfortunate fact that despite the persistence of the
schism throughout the Vandal and later Byzantine period, we do not possess
any Donatist records beyond the 438 recension of the Liber genealogus. After
the Vandal conquest, their erstwhile opponents were themselves undergoing
persecution; unlike the plethora of sources that characterize the preceding
Augustinian era, references to Donatism are few.³⁵ While “Donatism,” or at
least something like it, reappears in the sixth century in the polemic of

³⁵ Outside of the Liber genealogus, we find references to Donatist refugees in the fifth century
in the correspondence of Avitus of Vienne (Letter 26, trans. Danuta Shanzer and Ian Wood in
Avitus of Vienne: Letters and Selected Prose (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), 302–3)
and Leo I (Letter 12.6, in PL 54.662: “Maximum quoque ex laico licet reprehensibiliter ordina-
tum, tamen si Donatista iam non est, et a spiritu schismaticae prauitatis alienus, ab episcopali,
quam quoquo modo adeptus est, non repellimus dignitate; ita ut et ipse libello ad nos edito
catholicum se esse manifestet”). We also find mention of a Donatist convert to “Arianism”
in Victor of Vita’s Historia persecutionis Africanae Provinciae 3.71 (History of the Vandal
Persecution, trans. John Moorhead (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1992) and a short
notice of the intentions of the North African bishop Asclepius Afer, to produce an anti-Donatist
tract in Gennadius (De viris inlustribus 74). In the sixth century, a dispute between the Homoian
priest Fastidiosus and Fulgentius of Ruspe over whether the former had plagiarized Fulgentius’
own critique of Donatism seems to indicate that the movement was still viable (Fastidiosus:
Sermo Fastidiosi Ariani 2 in CCSL 91.281; Fulgentius: Contra sermonem Fastidiosi 10 in
CCSL 91.296). See Antonio Isola, “Note sulle eresie nell’Africa del periodo vandalico,” Vetera
Christianorum 34 (1997), 231–49.
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