Augustine and the Donatist Controversy

I want to look at Augustine through the two major controversies he took on as Bishop of Hippo:  the Donatist Controversy and the Pelagian Controversy.

Donatist Controversy (from Alister McGrath):  Under the Roman emperor Diocletian (284-313), the Christian church was subject to various degrees of persecution.  Under an edict of February 303, Christian books were ordered to be burned and churches demolished.  Those Christian leaders who handed over their books to be burned came to be known as traditores—those who handed over.  One of the traditors was Felix of Aptunge, who later consecrated Caecilian as Bishop of Carthage in 311.  The hierarchy of the Catholic church was now tainted and invalid because bishops and priests had been ordained by those who earlier had lapsed in faith.  By the time Augustine returned to Africa in 388, a breakaway faction had established itself as the leading Christian body in the region, known as the Donatists, so named after their leader Donatus.  The Donatists believed that the entire sacramental system of the Catholic church had become corrupted by bishops who had committed the sin of apostasy.  They had placed themselves outside the bound of the church, and therefore could no longer be regarded as administering the sacrament of ordination, or any other sacrament, validly.  Those who joined the Donatist church from the North Africa Catholic church had to be re-baptized.  For the Donatists the church must be kept clean of sin.  The church is a holy place without blemish.

To combat the Donatists, first Augustine emphasized the sinfulness of Christians.  The church is not meant to be a society of saints but a mixed body of saints and sinners.  For Augustine the holiness in question was not that of its members but of Christ.  The sacraments do not depend on the holiness of the clergy but on the faith of the receiver.  For Augustine, the Donatists were avoiding sin and evil and therefore ignoring the very words of Christ, It is not the healthy who need a doctor but the sick.  I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

Second, Augustine argued that whereas schism and traditio were both sinful, schism is by far the more serious sin.  The Donatists were thus guilty of serious sin and Donatism fatally flawed.  Yet the schism which Augustine feared eventually came about in the sixteenth century at the time of the Reformation.