Thursday, November 16, 2006
(6:10 PM) | Anonymous:
A Response to Fr. Hart: On Donatism, History and Theology
This is a guest post from JD in response to some comments at The Anglican Continuum arising from my earlier post. -APSFr. Robert Hart,
I do not know why you feel the need to mock your audience? It is interesting that you did not address that aspect of my observations. But, on to more substantive issues.
First of all, I did not say enough about the Donatist controversy for you to make the assumptions that you do. Second, I never said that Augustine said that anything that merely approached the semblance of a sacrament was a sacrament.
Since, I agree with your teacher's assessment of a theologian, let's back up and really do some history, shall we?
What is really at issue in the Donatist controversy is how to interpret Cyprian's writings in the midst of the controversies surrounding the immediate aftermath of the Decian persecution. The specific text in question is On the Unity of the Catholic Church, which has its own problems of interpretation because Maurice Bévenot isolated two different versions of the text, which also suggest a third.
As best we can tell, the original received text was most likely written by Cyprian in the Spring of 251 and was intended to exhort the faithful of his congregation and rebuke the lapsed in their midst. The point of this version was to combat the growing notion that a written statement from an imprisoned, and soon to be executed martyr, could circumvent the bishop and provide forgiveness and reinstatement to the lapsed. Cyprian's point is that only the bishop can forgive sins.
Now, the second manuscript, found by Bévenot, varies the argument. And, as Bévenot notes, it appears to be a different version of the same argument sent to the bishops in Rome in the Summer of 251. This latter version emphasizes, not simply the prerogative of any single bishop, but the unity of the episcopal college itself as the locus of forgiveness. The argument, however, throughout both is for the unity of first the local, then the global church, and this in the face of both "laxists" and "rigorists" in North Africa. (The third revision of the text was most likely produced during the rebaptism controversy of 256, and I may make a few notes about it, but not presently.)
Now, all that needs to be noted here, for our purposes, is that Cyprian comes to see, even in the midst of this one argument, that the power to forgive sins does not reside in the single, local bishop, but is a "unified power" passed on directly from Christ and shared by the episcopate as a whole. (Cf. Cyprian's "Letter 33," e.g.)
Now, all of this is only important insofar as it is rooted in a logic of ritual purity. Cyprian did not believe that secret sins or improper performance of rituals contaminated the community, but he did insist that schism was a form of idolatry, and as such all rituals performed therein were contaminating. (You can see the sense in which your own logic tracks quite close to this; we will see the significance of it momentarily.) Thus, the importance of the matter lies with the fact that Cyprian did not consider a schismatic minister to be able to sanctify the flock because that minister had abdicated his share in the unified power of the episcopate. Hence, Cyprian requires a great vigilance about adherence to structural forms, precisely for reasons of ritual purification.
Now, when Augustine began to write against the Donatists, this Cyprianic legacy was sacrosanct: he had upheld the unity of the North African Church after the Decian persecution and overcome the difficulties associated with both the laxist and rigorist schisms. And, the fact that he died a martyr under the Valerian persecution only sealed the deal. Thus, it was within this Cyprianic framework that the Donatist controversy even became a possibility.
So, when the Diocletian persecution ended, the North African church was in a situation similar to that surrounding the immediate aftermath of the Decian persecution. And, through a series of events associated with an alleged lapsing of bishop Caecilian, the North African church was forced to revisit the problem of schism. Cyprian’s writings had given the North African Church an understanding of the bishop as a ‘conduit’ for either purity or contamination, in essence. And the Donatists, outraged by the possibility of a faulty conduit, insisted that any Christian united with an apostate bishop must be understood to be ritually contaminated. As such, the Donatists believed themselves to be obliged to withdraw from the larger (contaminated) communion, which had affirmed the validity of Caecilian’s seat. What they sought was a purified line of apostolic succession.
So, taking up Cyprian’s emphasis on purity, but – note this specifically – compromising his insistence on unity, the Donatists continued the practice of rebaptism that had been championed by Cyprian and affirmed by the North African synod (against the bishop of Rome, mind you) in 256. Augustine emerged into this debate as the leader of the catholic party, and he developed his entire argument against the Donatist by turning Cyprian on his head, basically. That is, he more fully developed the logic of sacramentality, away from the notion of ritual purity (the Donatist platform), and emphasized ecclesial purity. (You will note, Augustine’s theory of the Real Presence, ecclesial unity, and the Holy Spirit all converge on this point of unity: it is an interior, loving intentionality that binds the church together; as such, it is “invisible” even while it is visibly manifest.)
What did Augustine say? Well, in On Baptism, the Cyprianic stakes are made clear. The Donatists are arguing that any apostate minister cannot exercise the episcopal power to forgive sins. And (just as the anglicancontinuum argues), they were mostly concerned with the fact that an apostate minister was practicing idolatry. Now the first parts of Book I are concerned with rebaptism, and are not completely important for our present discussion. But there is one decisive point of note: namely, Augustine argued that even Cyprian was wrong for “not distinguishing the sacrament from the effect or use of the sacrament” (On Baptism 6.1.) Their error lies then in the fact that they argue that “[the sacrament’s] effect [here both ordination and baptism] and use were not found among heretics in freeing them from their sins and setting their hearts right, the sacrament was also thought to lacking among them” (Ibid.)
Now, the most important part of the argument pertains to the notion of purity. Augustine argued that even the Donatists could not maintain their own standards of purity precisely because those standards are incorrect. If they were right, then no Christian could ever be certain of the minister’s holiness. But, he says, we are certain that the forgiveness of sins does not rest on such a feeble foundation, and therefore this capacity for forgiveness cannot be understood as a capacity inhering to the minister. Rather, Christ is always the minister of the sacrament “however polluted and unclean its ministers might be” (ibid, 3.15.)
Thus, Augustine demonstrated that sacramental efficacy could not be a matter of the minister’s ritual or moral purity; and, he also separated sacramental validity from any essential unity with episcopal authority (this is the reason, we do not rebaptize.) Augustine says then that even schismatic groups must be understood to have genuine sacraments, even going so far as to say that they can genuinely confer them. What he does not say is that those sacraments are effective for salvation, but note carefully that this argument has absolutely nothing to do with the authority or status of the bishop; rather, it has everything to do with the unity of the church itself, in charity, which the Donatists have broken! Let me say a bit more about this.
Augustine basically reconfigured how a sacrament’s efficacy was to be judged. He did this by conceiving the function of the episcopate as an extension of the church, by subsuming it into the church, and thereby associating the efficacy of a sacrament directly with the universal church as such, operating in the unity of charity (cf. On Baptism 1.16-22.) The efficacy of the sacrament was then to be correlated to the intentions of the recipient; it was not to be a matter of the community within which the ritual was performed, nor was it to be a matter of the moral or ritual condition of the minister. Ritual pollution was solely a matter of the recipient’s intentionality: “because its inherent sanctity cannot be polluted, the divine excellence abides in the sacrament, whether to the salvation of those who use it aright, or to the destruction of those who use it wrongly” (ibid., 3.15.) This meant that ‘true church’ had to be understood henceforth as a matter of internal, charitable intention, rather than external ritual behavior. As such, the Eucharist is the most decisive Christian sacrament insofar as it is the locus where the intention of unity in charity is displayed; and, thus schismatics are de facto, not participating in that union, not manifesting that charity. Beyond this, Augustine insisted that what constituted a true member of the body of Christ was one’s will being united to the saints in love.
And, this incidentally corresponded to Augustine’s realization that John 20:18, which Cyprian had interpreted as referring to the apostles, actually spoke of conferring the Holy Spirit on the disciples. As such, bishops and ministers were simply those endowed with the authority to exercise the communal power operative within the community itself, as the Body of Christ. Note, this authority was tied, not to a power ritually conferred on them by Christ, but to the minister’s status as an instrument of Christ. In this way, the standard of ritual purity is of no real consequence with regard to the minister as such, but rather refers to the society of saints themselves (who are not to be facilely equated with the visible church as such.) Purity is henceforth a matter of intentional charity, and not a matter of ritual purity.
This is what I was noting in my prior comment. And, this is what undermines your most basic arguments against Schori. If you wished to follow the suggestion of my friend, Anthony, and indict her for being a wishy-washy liberal, that is quite ok; and, I would agree. But, indeed, let us actually be clear on what we are claiming when we are charging our leaders with “idolatry.” The consequences, as I have tried to show, could be quite “unorthodox.”
And, thus, if you are not a theologian until you are an historian, then it is I, Fr. Hart, who give you an “F.”
