The Donatist Schism

The Donatist schism is a slippery beast. It began in the late 300s or early 310s with a contested election for the see of Carthage between two claimants—Caecilian and Maiorinus (replaced, on his death, by the eponymous Donatus). By the second decade of the fifth century, when the imperial state under Honorius sought to unify them once and for all, the rival churches had grown to over 300 bishops each, operating in communities across the Roman province of Africa (the modern-day Maghreb). This ecclesiastical dispute affected Christians at all levels of society in late Roman Africa. And yet observers elsewhere in the empire were hardly animated by the schism; few even seem to have noticed its existence. Pinning the schism down—was it representative of broader trends in late antique Christianity? Was it the outcome of a peculiar Christian environment?—has been all the more difficult in the absence of a synthetic English-language account to replace W.H.C. Frend’s essential (but now rather outdated) The Donatist Church (1952), and to supplement Brent Shaw’s brilliant (but forbidding) Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine (2011). This volume, stemming from a 2014 conference at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and edited by Richard Miles—full disclosure: I participated as a respondent—is not intended as that book: ‘the essays in this volume do not claim to offer the final word’ (p. 12). Instead, the contributors are given the space to display convivial disagreement on numerous key questions of interpretation. Nevertheless, by drawing on their previous work on parallel issues across the late antique Mediterranean, these authors set out with impressive clarity various ways in which we might understand the Donatist schism against the broader backdrop of the later Roman Empire

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