Donatus Magnus

The persecution under Diocletian required the handing over of scriptures and vessels, and clergy who complied were called traditores, those who handed over. When it ended, African Christians disagreed about whether such men could still function as clergy. The trigger was the consecration of Caecilian as bishop of Carthage in 311 or 312: his opponents held that one of the consecrating bishops had been a traditor, so the consecration was void and every act flowing from it was void too.

A rival was elected, and on his death Donatus succeeded him. He was an organiser of unusual force, and within a generation the church that took his name was the majority in Numidia and strong throughout the African provinces, with its own bishops in most towns and its own councils. Its position was not eccentric. It was the older African view, running back through Cyprian, that the holiness of the church is compromised by an unworthy minister.

What made it a lasting schism rather than a debate was the state. Constantine, newly favouring Christianity, referred the matter to a synod at Rome in 313 and then to the council of Arles in 314, both of which found for Caecilian, and imperial coercion followed the judgement. The African church was now divided along a line running through every town, and it stayed divided for three hundred years.

Nothing Donatus wrote survives. He is reported to have written on the Holy Spirit in terms his opponents thought subordinationist, and letters of his circulated, but no text has come down. Everything we can say about him comes from two hostile witnesses: Optatus, bishop of Milevis, writing around 365, and Augustine, writing from the 390s, both arguing a case against a living movement.

That shapes the picture in predictable directions. Both report that his followers used his name where they should have used a title, that he asked what the emperor had to do with the church, and that he behaved with the pride of a man who thought himself above other bishops. Whether these are quotations, paraphrases or constructions is not recoverable. The general facts of his career are better attested than his character, because the imperial and conciliar record carries them independently of the polemic.

He was exiled in 347, after the mission of Paul and Macarius turned into an armed suppression, and he died in Gaul around 355 without returning. His people continued to regard him as their bishop in absence. The church he led was still substantial when the Vandals arrived and survived until the Arab conquests, which is a long afterlife for a man of whom no sentence survives that he certainly wrote.