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A Church ‘Without Stain Or Wrinkle’: the Reception and Application of Donatist Arguments in Debates Over Priestly Purity

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A Church ‘Without Stain Or Wrinkle’: the Reception and Application of Donatist Arguments in Debates Over Priestly Purity A Church ‘without stain or wrinkle’: The Reception and Application of Donatist Arguments in Debates Over Priestly Purity Helen Parish* University of Reading This article examines the reception and application of arguments devel- oped during the Donatist controversy in later debates over clerical celibacy, marriage and continence in the medieval and early modern church. It explores the collision of inspiration and institution in this context, argu- ing that the debates over sacerdotal celibacy in the medieval Latin church and Reformation controversy over clerical marriage and continence both appropriated and polemicized the history of Donatism. The way in which the spectre and lexicon of Donatism permeated the law and practice of the medieval and early modern church, particularly when it came to the dis- cipline of clerical celibacy, is a prime example of the process of imbrication by which the history of heresy and the history of the church were constructed. As such, it exemplifies the ways in which forms of religious inspiration that manifested as dissent, such as Donatism, became embedded in the histories and self-fashioning of the institutional church. The history and meaning of ‘Donatism’ in the later Western church were not the result of direct encounter with a community of believers who used such a vocabulary to describe themselves. Rather, the use of this term represented the outworking of a language that originated in the condemnation of Donatism by its opponents, and in the appro- priation of that same condemnation by subsequent generations of theologians and history-writers who sought to polemicize an increas- ingly unfamiliar language to their own ends. This process was at work both during the period of the Gregorian reform in the Latin church and in the construction of an evangelical history of the medieval church at the hands of Reformation polemicists and martyrologists. * Department of History, University of Reading, Whiteknights, Reading RG6 6AH. E-mail: [email protected]. Studies in Church History 57 (2021), 96–119 © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Ecclesiastical History Society. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creative commons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.1017/stc.2021.6 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.22, on 01 Oct 2021 at 23:24:00, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/stc.2021.6 A Church ‘without stain or wrinkle’ The search for an answer to the question ‘Where was your church before Luther?’ was the driver behind the reimaging of the history of heresy in order to provide a location for evangelicalism within what Bruce Gordon has described as ‘the expanse of Christian his- tory’.1 The creation of a chain of ‘godly witnesses’ to the faith was a vital component in the construction of a history, identity and col- lective memory for the nascent evangelical churches, bringing the past into the present and the present into the past.2 This was a narrative of history that was distinctive in its anchor in doctrine, testimony to the long ancestry of true belief. In John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, each martyr was a link in a chain, a member of a community that existed in past and present and within which there was a commonality of belief. Those individuals who had been condemned by the church as here- tics were ‘the bricks and mortar with which he construct[ed] an image of the church and the lives of faithful Protestants’.3 The writing of medieval heresy was contoured by the confessionalized histories of the church produced in the same period. Representations of heresy, schism and dissent in such a schema were simultaneously more nuanced and more normative, dependent upon the exploitation of surviving sources (themselves far from objective) to enable the polemicization of the past.4 1 Bruce Gordon, ‘The Changing Face of Protestant History and Identity in the Sixteenth Century’, in idem, ed., Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe, 2 vols (Aldershot, 1996), 1: 1–22, at 3; S. J. Barnett, ‘Where was your Church before Luther? Claims for the Antiquity of Protestantism Examined’, ChH 68 (1999), 14–41. 2 John R. Knott, ‘John Foxe and the Joy of Suffering’, SCJ 27 (1996), 721–34. 3 I. Ross Bartlett, ‘John Foxe as Hagiographer: The Question Revisited’, SCJ 26 (1995), 772; Susan Royal, ‘English Evangelical Histories on the Origins of “the Reformation”’, Études Épistémè 32 (2017), [online journal], at: <https://doi.org/10.4000/episteme. 1859>, accessed 15 November 2020. 4 Luke Racaut, Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot, 2002); Yves Krumenacker, ‘The Use of History by French Protestants and its Impact on Protestant Historiography’, in Bernd-Christian Otto, Susanne Rau and Jörg Rüpke, eds, History and Religion: Narrating a Religious Past (Berlin and Boston, MA, 2015), 189–202; Bertrand van Ruymbeke, ‘Minority Survival: The Huguenot Paradigm in France and the Diaspora’, in idem and Randy J. Sparks, eds, Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora (Columbia, SC, 2003), 1–25; Bethany Hume, ‘The Idea of Medieval Heresy in Early Modern France’ (PhD dissertation, University of York, 2019); Deborah Shulevitz, ‘Historiography of Heresy: The Debate over “Catharism” in Medieval Languedoc’, History Compass 17/1 (2019), [online journal], at: <https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3. 12513>, accessed 15 November 2020; Antonio Sennis, ed., Cathars in Question 97 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.22, on 01 Oct 2021 at 23:24:00, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/stc.2021.6 Helen Parish In this context, it is hard to separate the early history of Donatism, or indeed any heresy, from the inescapable tendency of doctrinal devi- ance to become first a label and then a pejorative slur. Ali Bonner’s recent analysis of the history of Pelagianism treats that heresy as a con- struct of Augustine rather than Pelagius; the same process is also seen at work in the construction of Arianism and Gnosticism.5 Any history of Donatism and its legacy is similarly non-linear and untidy, but despite (or perhaps because of) that, it provides an illuminating illustration of the ways in which a rhetoric of dissent, opposition and separatism could become embedded in the structures of the vis- ible, institutional church. The existence or otherwise of a fundamen- tal connection between doctrinal and sacramental purity was a critical component in the solidification of the Donatist schism. In the eyes of the Donatists, those bishops and clergy who during periods of imperial persecution had renounced their faith and handed over the Scriptures to the authorities (and were therefore criticized by the Donatists as traditores) had been rendered impure by their actions; to allow such impurity to intermingle with the purity of the Donatist sect was to tolerate sin, and the presence of sin in the sacra- ments that lay at the very heart of the true church. If the ordination of clergy by the traditor bishops was invalid, then their errors also per- meated the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist, casting doubt upon their validity and efficacy. In the Donatist schism (and the responses to it) we can see elements of what was to become an enduring debate about the relationship between the sacraments and the personal moral and spiritual standing of the celebrant, a debate that was eventually to crystallize around the assertion that the validity (Woodbridge, 2016); R. I. Moore, The War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe (London, 2012). 5 John Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia, PA, 2001); Caterina Bruschi, ‘“Magna diligentia est habenda per inquisitorem”: Precautions before Reading Doat 21–26’, in eadem and Peter Biller, eds, Texts and the Repression of Medieval Heresy (Woodbridge, 2003), 81–110; Shulevitz, ‘Historiography’;MoniqueZerner,Inventer l’hérésie? Discours polémiques et pouvoirs avant l’Inquisition (Turnhout, 1998); Ali Bonner, The Myth of Pelagianism (Oxford, 2018); David M. Gwynn, ‘From Iconoclasm to Arianism: The Construction of Christian Tradition in the Iconoclast Controversy’, Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 47 (2007), 225–51; idem, The Eusebians: The Polemic of Athanasius of Alexandria and the Construction of the ‘Arian Controversy’ (Oxford, 2006), 169–244, ‘The “Arianism” of the “Eusebians”’. 98 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.22, on 01 Oct 2021 at 23:24:00, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/stc.2021.6 A Church ‘without stain or wrinkle’ of the sacraments was not anchored in the conduct and conscience of the priest, but existed rather ex opere operato, by virtue of the work car- ried out.6 The debates unleashed both within Donatism and between Donatists and their critics were woven into the fabric of the medieval Catholic Church, providing a language of priestly purity and pollution that remained with the church in the centuries that followed.7 But if the debate was enduring, its origins remained opaque. References to Donatism in medieval and Reformation sources dem- onstrate the extent to which the term ‘Donatist’ could be imbued with a meaning that was far from specific. The Donatism that existed within the pages of medieval and early modern controversy was far broader than that which had been described by St Augustine, indicat- ing that the term had become a polemical shorthand for a set of beliefs that were far from consistent.
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