AS PEEVED AS CONSTANTINE might have been from time to time with Maximus, there was no aspect of governing during these years that tried his patience so unremittingly as did the controversy that was tearing the church in Africa apart even as he was taking power in Britain.1
Carthage, which was the focal point of the dispute, had produced a number of notable Christian writers in the previous century—and for many of them the issue of the way a Christian should behave in time of persecution was of crucial importance. One of the most eloquent of these authors was a young woman named Vibia Perpetua, whose diaries, written in Greek in the days leading up to her execution on March 3, 207 AD, were joined with two other accounts of the day and rapidly translated into Latin, becoming a model for later African persecution narrative. Perpetua was crystal clear on the point that in dying she was following the path set out for her by God, a view confirmed by a series of visions she experienced while in prison. These caused her to abandon her newborn child and to reject the desperate pleas of her mother and father that she relent from her path. For Perpetua, martyrdom, death giving witness to her faith, was central to her sense of what it was to be a Christian. It is quite likely that she knew her immensely eloquent contemporary, Tertullian, who memorably asserted that the blood of martyrs was seed for the church and that persecution, coming as it did from God, could not be escaped (oddly he never experienced martyrdom himself). Very different was the view of Cyprian, bishop of Carthage at the time of Decius’ edict on sacrifices (250) and during the persecution of Valerian (257–60), to which he fell victim. Cyprian, while condemning those who collaborated with the persecuting authorities either by sacrificing as the edict demanded, or by purchasing a fake certificate of sacrifice, saw no reason to put himself in the way of the persecuting authorities. He went into hiding and would later claim that the fact that a crowd in the amphitheater called for his execution was a sort of virtual martyrdom that was more than good enough. What he found deeply troubling was the group of “confessors,” people who publicly refused to sacrifice as the edict required but were not punished (though they may have been threatened), who allied with actual martyrs, a category which now included people who had been tortured but survived as well as those who had died to undermine his authority as bishop. Cyprian’s response was to redefine the position of martyrs, who in the past had been thought to have special power to intercede with God independently of the Church so that they could only exercise this power with the approval of the bishop. The obvious evidence of suffering at the hands of the authorities, such as scars, were no longer a sufficient condition to claim the authority of a martyr. One had to have the significance of one’s experience confirmed by the bishop!2
When Valerian’s edict was promulgated, Cyprian could no longer hide. He was arrested and held on a private estate until the order came for his execution. As a man of high status he was spared the gross indignity of death in the amphitheater and simply beheaded in a garden. It is perhaps ironic that his own death at the hands of the persecuting authority gave his views the authority of a martyr, and possibly significance in later generations that they might not otherwise have had. One of those views—one very different from that of a Tertullian or Perpetua—was that persecution was God’s punishment for the sins of his community and that one should learn from the experience and become a better person. This would remain one view among many. Lactantius, for instance, took a somewhat different tack as he saw persecution as stemming from the action of the Devil through evil men and believed that it was wrong to provoke the imperial authorities.
If Lactantius had been living in North Africa in 313 he would probably have found himself aligned with a man named Caecilian, who claimed the position of bishop of Carthage, and could assert that his position on persecution and martyrdom aligned with that of Cyprian. He would have been opposed to a man named Donatus, who would soon be claiming the position of bishop of Carthage in succession to a man named Majorian. Both Donatus and Majorian asserted that Caecilian was a traitor to their faith who had performed abominable deeds during 303 when Diocletian’s persecution edict was promulgated in North Africa. Although the story of the quarrel involved many subsidiary factors, the roots of their dispute lay in the very different understandings of persecution represented in the works of Cyprian and Tertullian or Perpetua. The great church that Caecilian occupied as bishop contained the relics of Perpetua and her companions, a powerful statement of the centrality of martyrdom to Christian self-definition in the North African Church.
In looking at the dispute from Caecilian’s perspective, we have the benefit of a book by Optatus of Milevis, a later fourth-century Christian. According to Optatus, Caecilian’s supporters attributed the outbreak of the quarrel not to the persecution edict but rather to a dispute of a somewhat earlier date between the then archdeacon Caecilian and a woman named Lucilla, whom Caecilian had reprimanded for kissing a relic before taking communion.3 As this version of the story has it, Lucilla would become the leader of a faction that would try to prevent Caecilian from becoming bishop of Carthage after the death of his patron, the bishop Mensurius of Carthage, who had died in the course of a principled stand against imperial authority. According to this story, a man named Felix who had written a slanderous letter about “the tyrant emperor” is said to have taken refuge with Mensurius, and when Mensurius refused to turn him over, an imperial order arrived stating that if he did not surrender Felix, he would be arrested. Mensurius realized that he would have to go, but he worried a great deal about what would happen in his absence to the mass of gold and silver that was in his church. So before departing, he handed the treasure over to the elders of the community and left an inventory with an old woman who was instructed, in the event that he did not return, to hand it over to the next bishop.4 The identity of the emperor to whom Mensurius was ordered to plead his case is unknown, but since the original offense concerned Maximian—who is described as a “tyrant emperor,” and Maxentius is later mentioned by name, it is likely that the unnamed emperor in this passage is a third figure. That would most likely be Severus.
Mensurius died before he could return home, and the nearby bishops of Numidia, acting in concert with their senior bishop, Secundus, overturned the election of a man called Donatus (not to be confused with the Donatist’s later champion) in favor of another cleric, Silvanus, in return for a large bribe. As his rivals alleged in later years, Silvanus was an avowed traditor—guilty of having handed over Scripture in the persecution and thus of collaboration with the persecuting authorities—so his election undermined any moral force that Secundus possessed because of his strong stand against Diocletian’s persecution edict of 303 and his assertion that there was something morally wrong with Mensurius’ less extreme position.5
When news came of the accession of the emperor Maxentius in 306, two senior members of the Carthaginian Church, Botrus and Celestius, who were allegedly withholding the church plate that Mensurius had placed in their care, summoned a synod of the neighboring bishops in the hope that they might secure the election of one of themselves. But the will of the people thwarted their dastardly plot, proclaiming Caecilian as their bishop.
Bishop Felix of Abthungi then consecrated Caecilian. Summoned to produce an account of the treasures that had been left with them, Botrus and Celestius broke communion with the church, allied themselves with Lucilla, and summoned Secundus with his gang of corrupt Numidian bishops to their aid. The Numidians tried to invalidate the election of Caecilian, and, failing that, elected one Majorian as bishop, “and that was the cause of the schism.”6 To further damage Caecilian’s claim to the episcopal seat, they accused Felix of Abthungi of having been a traditor. And so the situation remained until, after his defeat of Maxentius, Constantine ordered the return of church property. The result of the order to restore property was that both Majorian and Caecilian showed up before the governor, claiming everything for themselves and asserting that their rivals had no standing.
The position of Caecilian’s party appears unassailable in the narrative of Optatus of Milevis. Sadly, Optatus’ selective collection of documents completely ignores the position of their rivals. Instead of trying to refute the powerful charges against them, the supporters of the Caecilianist position simply tried to quietly bury those charges.
The Donatist position had virtually nothing to do with the issues adduced by Caecilian’s party and reveals a very much more sinister pattern of behavior. The thrust of the case against Caecilian was not simply that he associated with a traditor named Felix but that he had collaborated with the persecuting authorities and was a murderer. The real story, from their point of view, involved a level of brutality on Caecilian’s part that may explain the dogged determination of the Donatists to have nothing to do with him.
The essence of the Donatist position emerges from an exchange of letters that they produced at a council held at Carthage in 411, along with a text known as the Acts of the Abitinian Martyrs. According to the Donatists, Mensurius had written to Secundus telling him that he had refused to hand scriptures over to the persecuting authorities; instead, he had hidden them in his house, leaving some heretical works (why he kept such things lying around is a mystery) in his church to be discovered by the people sent to find the sacred books. The authorities at Carthage had actually complained that bishop Mensurius had not turned over the relevant works, but the governor, who had his own reasons for not believing that Mensurius was a problem, declined to investigate. Mensurius went on to point out in his letter that some disreputable “debtors” had gotten themselves thrown into prison, so that as martyrs they could wash away their sins and receive the continuing support of the Christian community. His view on this matter seems to follow Cyprian’s that people could only be regarded as martyrs if the bishop approved their status, and in this case Mensurius was crystal clear that these people should not gain that status.
Secundus responded, in what was described as a collegial tone, by describing the behavior of the persecutors in his own province, giving a list of people who had been killed or tortured and recommending that these people be honored as martyrs. When the local curator (mayor) and town council had sent a centurion along with a beneficarius (police officer) to see him, he went on, he had told them he was a Christian bishop, not a traditor, and that when they had asked him for something to take away he had declined to give them anything for he would neither lie nor provide an example of lying to others.7 The thrust of this exchange, which both sides later admitted was not overtly hostile, was that Mensurius was unsympathetic to martyrs. It might also be read as a confession to the acts with which he would be charged in the Acts of the Abitinian Martyrs.
The Abitinian martyrs—very likely the people about whom Mensurius had written so disparaginingly to Secundus—were a group of Christians who had been arrested for openly defying Diocletian’s edict by celebrating the Eucharist.8 They were brought before Anullinus, who subjected them to severe torture to make them recant. When they refused, he ordered them to be imprisoned under harsh conditions. According a passage, retained in only one of the six manuscripts preserving a copy of the text, the origins of the schism are to be found in their incarceration. In this version, Mensurius, “polluted by his recent handing over of the Scriptures,” ordered Caecilian to stand guard with a collection of thugs before the prison to beat anyone trying to bring food to the martyrs within. The account ends with the words “for this reason the holy Church follows the martyrs and detests the treason of Mensurius.”9
The fact that Caecilian’s faction avoided the issue of Mensurius’ conduct lends credence to the tale told by his adversaries, and later generations of anti-Donatists would attempt to dissociate their cause from that of Mensurius.10 Unfortunately for the Donatists, Mensurius’ behavior as they described it also made it very difficult to assail him before a Roman magistrate: few, if any, imperial officials would agree that a man who had supported the action of one of their own had acted incorrectly. The Donatist case against Caecilian stems from his having been elected illegally according to the laws of the church rather than for assisting the persecuting authorities, a situation that can be attributed to the imperial government’s willingness to allow the church to establish its own rules for episcopal succession. If it could be shown that Caecilian had not been elected according to the rules of the church, that would cause his removal, while a claim, years after the fact, that he had attacked some of his fellow Christians who were thought by the imperial government to be criminals and on the orders of his bishop, was unlikely to gain any traction.11
Constantine’s preference for Caecilian’s cause can first be traced in a letter he sent to Anullinus—possibly the son of the Anullinus just mentioned, persecutor of the Abitinian martyrs and now urban prefect at Rome—at the end of 312 or early in 313 stating that properties that had once belonged to “the Universal [Catholic] Church of the Christians” should be restored to them. Caecilian asserted that he was the representative of the “Universal Church,” and he had stolen a march on his adversaries by contacting Ossius the bishop of Cordoba who had been with Constantine during the campaign against Maxentius. Ossius plainly helped him, for in a separate letter to Caecilian, dispatched at about the same time as the letter to Anullinus, Constantine ordered the rationalis (chief financial official) of Africa to give money to priests loyal to Caecilian.12
The letter to Caecilian was followed shortly afterward by another to Anullinus in which Constantine ordered that all priests loyal to Caecilian should receive immunity from civic liturgies, which simply seems to be a restatement of his decision earlier in the year (and perhaps occasioned by a query from Anullinus as to whether all clerics should have immunity or merely some).13 At this point he may not have grasped how serious the situation was. He would soon find out as Majorian, the bishop of the anti-Caecilianist faction came forward, presenting a powerful refutation of his rival’s position in April 313.
Majorian’s case was based on two documents, one being a sealed denunciation of Caecilian as a person, the other an open statement that he was not the legal bishop in terms of church custom. Majorian petitioned Constantine to appoint a church council in Gaul to decide the case, naming the bishops he would like to hear it. Constantine granted his appeal, writing to Miltiades, the bishop of Rome, asking him to sit with the three bishops from Gaul. Miltiades was a holdover from the time of Maxentius, creating a difficult political situation; compounding the difficulty was Miltiades’ interest in not having the Italian hierarchy coopted by Gallic bishops. Constantine seems to have recognized the delicacy of the situation and felt it politically important to let Miltiades have his way, allowing him to pack the council with an additional fifteen bishops of his own choosing. Constantine was adhering to imperial precedent in that his choice of bishops recalled Aurelian’s, when, in a comparable circumstance he called for a council of Italian bishops; Miltiades’ role was that of a iudex vice Caesaris (judge in the place of Caesar), and the issue was to be dealt with as one of civil law. But at some point in the months leading up to the council, Majorian died. So it was that on September 30, 313, the Donatus who would give his name to the anti-Caecilianist movement presented the case.14
The council of Rome was a diplomatic disaster, in large part because Miltiades took the council as an opportunity to gain control of the African church by making it clear that Caecilian owed his survival to Miltiades’ own patronage. In order to do this, the bishops sidestepped the main issues and simply condemned Caecilian’s opponents for insisting on the rebaptism of people who had been communicants of Caecilian—a completely unrelated issue that recalled the conduct of African schismatics condemned in the wake of Decius’ edict on sacrifices in the mid-third century. In failing to address the main issues and or recognize that Donatus needed to be able to take away something that would please his supporters if there were to be any chance of settlement, the council guaranteed that the trouble would continue. Indeed, the first thing that Donatus did was to accuse Miltiades himself of having been a traditor; and he urged members of his party to resist Miltiades’ attempt to unify the church by suggesting that Caecilian recognize all the bishops who had been appointed by Majorian. Constantine accepted the council’s advice to forbid Donatus’ return to Carthage. It may not have helped Donatus’ position that three Gallic bishops who had accompanied Constantine on the campaign of 312 were at the council, and that the Donatists had earlier cast aspersions on the integrity of Ossius, who had also been on that expedition.15
From Constantine’s actions after the council of Rome we can deduce that he realized things had not gone well and that he wished to be seen favoring compromise and consensus rather than having to resort to the use of force. In 314 he allowed a second council to be convened to hear further charges against the Caecilianist faction.16
That council convened at Arles on August 1, with Constantine sitting as a layman in the audience. Among the rules that it issued were three directly concerning the controversy in Africa. One was the statement that clerics who can be proven on the basis of public documents to have turned over scripture, communion vessels, or the names of fellow Christians to the authorities would be removed from their positions, but that any ordinations they had performed would not be invalid. They recognized the situation had become so poisonous that “there are many who seem to oppose the church, and through bribed witnesses think that they should be allowed to bring accusations.” The bishops reiterated their view that such charges should not be allowed unless there is documentary support.17 Implicit here is a fundamental distrust of the Donatist way of doing business, and the ruling that ordinations could not be invalidated even if performed by proven traditores looks like a plea to both sides to allow bygones to be bygones; and it paralleled their decision regarding rebaptism (the second of the three relevant rulings), asserting, as they did, that it didn’t matter who had baptized an individual so long as that person proved that he or she was an orthodox believer.18 In the third, the bishops at the council held that “those who falsely accuse their brethren… are not to communicate [take holy communion] until the day of their death.” This reiterated the view taken by the bishops who had convened at Elvira (in present day Spain) in or around 305.19 The council did not so much defend Caecilian as it demanded that people act respectably.
So the verdict of the council of Arles was that whatever merit there might have been to the Donatist case had been invalidated by their representatives’ rebarbative conduct and evidence for violation, on Donatist’s part, of standing church practice.20 Most important, it established that the matter remained entirely within the church. Constantine was present, but he affected nothing. The independence of the church from imperial control was formally maintained. This was underscored by the formal letter from the council to the emperor informing him of its decision, to which Constantine responded at length, equally formally and supporting the bishops against the appeal that the Donatists lodged with him immediately afterward.21 The language with which he describes the Donatists is notable for its ferocity of expression, and equally notable is the openness with which the emperor asserts his own faith—this is the same letter in which Constantine revealed his encounter with the God who sits at the watchpost of heaven and identified that God as the Christian God:
In very truth it was not without good cause that the mercy of Christ withdrew from these, in whom it is clear as day that their madness is of such a kind that we find them abhorrent even to the heavenly dispensation; so great a madness persists in them when, with incredible arrogance, they persuade themselves of things that it is not right either to say or hear, repudiating the equitable judgment that had been given by the will of heaven.… They demand my judgment, when I myself await the judgment of heaven.22
Does the emperor’s vehemence of expression in this letter hint at the possibility that one of the weaknesses he admits to recognizing in himself was a ferociously bad temper? Perhaps he was impatient with those who didn’t see the world his way—a trait that certainly appears in his correspondence with Maximus, despite his obvious respect for the man. Marcus Aurelius once had written to himself that it was crucially important for an emperor to control his emotions. Constantine seems to have striven toward the same goal, and his dealings with Donatus would prove a mighty test.23
Constantine had a good deal to say on his own account about the outcome of the council, writing letters (of which two have been preserved) condemning the Donatists.24 And there the matter would have remained if the Donatists had not returned with fresh complaints at the beginning of 315, producing documents, as the bishops assembled at Arles said they must, to prove that Felix of Abthungi, the man who had ordained Caecilian, was a traditor. When the governor of Africa heard the case, he found that the evidence against Felix was forged.25 This did not stop the Donatists. They lodged yet another complaint with Constantine, who equivocated, first allowing the Donatist bishops who had been held in Gaul to return to Africa, then changing his mind and summoning them to a fresh hearing at which Caecilian would be present.
The business dragged on into the fall of 315, when Constantine, now at Milan, and with much else to concern him (not least, the birth of a son to his brother-in-law Licinius), again pronounced in favor of Caecilian. The Donatists accepted his decision with the same grace that they had shown in response to all previous decisions, continuing to spark riots at Carthage as they had throughout the year. Constantine finally lost patience. On November 10, 316, having left Cibalae in Croatia at that point in pursuit of Licinius’ army, he wrote to the vicarius of Africa outlining the history of the dispute and, possibly, ordering Donatist churches to be confiscated.26 In 319, he would write to the Etruscan senator Verinus, telling him that when slanderous pamphlets turn up, the person slandered should suffer no harm, but, rather, the slanderer should be apprehended and made to prove his case in court. The ruling would have applied to the Donatists, for Constantine now banished the controversy from the realm of religion and placed it in the remit of civil and criminal law.27 This could explain how it came about that on March 12, 317, imperial troops burst into a Donatist church at Carthage and slaughtered the congregation.28 For the Donatists, they would be martyrs. For Constantine, they were people engaging in an illegal assembly.
The direct assault on the Donatists lasted until 321, when Constantine suddenly relented, ordering the vicarius of Africa to restore Donatist exiles and writing to the bishops of Africa: “When vengeance is left to God, a harsher penalty is exacted from one’s enemies.”29 Both he and the Donatists appear to have learned from the experience. Donatus had learned that direct provocation of the imperial government didn’t work; and after the return of the exiled bishops, which signaled that Constantine might be content to live and let live, he flourished. By 337, Caecilian appears to have dwindled into insignificance, while Donatus was able to assemble a council at Carthage that included no fewer than 270 bishops.30 Constantine had shown that although he could defeat any opponent on the battlefield, he now understood that attempting to defeat an opponent whose cause was conscience-driven was an altogether different undertaking.
The foundational tale of the Donatist movement, one of courage in the face of oppression, murder, and persecution, was a far more compelling tale than the Caecilianist story of theft and corruption. The Donatist narrative appealed to a basic sense of justice in ways that the opposition’s, which asserted the worst about human nature, did not. Perhaps, in the end, Constantine too had come to believe this. Perhaps he also reflected on the lessons of his youth, not least that sweeping efforts to compel conformity were unlikely to work.