At the same time Constantine wrote to Probianus, the successor of Ælianus in the governorship of Africa, instructing him to send under guard to Italy certain witnesses who had been imprisoned for forging documents purporting to shew that Felix of Aptunga was a traditor. Cæcilianus failed to appear at the appointed time, for some reason which is unknown to St. Augustine, who gives a brief account of the sequence of events.[[85]] The Donatists demanded that judgment should be given against the absent bishop by default, but Constantine refused and ordered them to follow him to Milan, where affairs of state necessitated his presence. If Augustine is to be trusted, the Emperor secured the attendance of the Donatists by clapping them under guard (ab officialibus custoditos). This time Cæcilianus did not fail his patron. Constantine, who was strongly averse from taking upon himself to revise, as it were, the judgments passed by so many bishops in council, deprecated their possible resentment by assuring them that his sole desire was to close the mouths of the Donatists.
After hearing the case all over again, Constantine pronounced judgment on Nov. 16, 316. St. Augustine says that the Emperor’s letters prove his diligence, caution, and forethought. The praise may be deserved, but it is evident that he had made up his mind beforehand. He re-affirmed the absolute innocence of Cæcilianus and the shamelessness of his accusers. In an interesting fragment of a letter written by the Emperor to Eumalius, one of his vicars, occurs this sentence: “I saw in Cæcilianus a man of spotless innocence, one who observed the proper duties of religion and served it as he ought, nor did it appear that guilt could be found in him, as had been charged against him in his absence by the malice of his enemies.” The publication of the Emperor’s verdict was followed by an edict prescribing penalties against the schismatics. St. Augustine speaks of a “most severe law against the party of Donatus,”[[86]] and, from other scattered references, we learn that their churches were confiscated and that they were fined for non-obedience. The author of the Edict of Milan, who had promised absolute freedom of conscience to all, was so soon obliged to invoke the arm of the temporal authority for the correction of religious disunion!
But the Donatists, whose only raison d’être was their passionate insistence upon the obligation of the Christian to make no compromise with conscience, however sharp the edge of the persecutor’s sword, were obviously not the kind of people to be overawed by so mild a punishment as confiscation of property. The Emperor’s edicts were fruitless, and in 320, only four years later, we find Constantine trying a change of policy and recommending the African bishops to see once more what toleration would do. Active repression only made martyrs, and martyrdom was the goal of the fanatical Donatist’s ambition. Hence the terms in which the Emperor addresses the Catholic Church of Africa. After enumerating the repeated efforts he has made in order to restore unity, and dwelling upon the deliberate and abandoned wickedness of those who have rendered his intervention nugatory, he continues:
“We must hope, therefore, that Almighty God may shew pity and gentleness to his people, as this schism is the work of a few. For it is to God that we should look for a remedy, since all good vows and deeds are requited. But until the healing comes from above, it behoves us to moderate our councils, to practise patience, and to bear with the virtue of calmness any assault or attack which the depravity of these people prompts them to deliver.
“Let there be no paying back injury with injury: for it is only the fool who takes into his usurping hands the vengeance which he ought to reserve for God.[[87]] Our faith should be strong enough to feel full confidence that, whatever we have to endure from the fury of men like these, will avail with God with all the grace of martyrdom. For what is it in this world to conquer in the name of God, unless it be to bear with fortitude the disordered attack of men who trouble the peaceful followers of the law!
“If you observe my will, you will speedily find that, thanks to the supreme power, the designs of the presumptuous standard-bearers of this wretched faction will languish, and all men will recognise that they ought not to listen to the persuasion of a few and perish everlastingly, when, by the grace of penitence, they may correct their errors and be restored to eternal life.”
Patience, leniency, and toleration, however, were as futile as force in dealing with the Donatists, who bluntly told the Emperor that his protégé, Cæcilianus, was a “worthless rascal” (antistiti ejus nebuloni), and refused to obey his injunctions. Donatus, surnamed the Great in order to distinguish him from the other Donatus, who had been Bishop of Casæ Nigræ, had by this time succeeded to the leadership of the schism on the death of Majorinus, and the extraordinary ascendency which he obtained over his followers, in spite of the powerful Imperial influence which was always at the support of Cæcilianus, warrants the belief that he was a man of marked ability. Learned, eloquent, and irreproachable in private life, he is said to have ruled his party with an imperious hand, and to have treated his bishops like lackeys. Yet his authority was so unbounded and unquestioned that his followers swore by his name and grey hairs, and, at his death, ascribed to him the honours paid only to martyrs.
Under his leadership the Donatists rapidly increased in numbers. They were schismatics rather than heretics. They had no great distinctive tenet; what they seem to have insisted upon chiefly was absolute purity within the Church and freedom from worldly taint. That was their ideal, as it has been the ideal of many other wild sectaries since their day. They claimed special revelations of the Divine Will; they insisted upon rebaptising their converts, compelling even holy virgins to take fresh vows on joining their communion, which they boasted was that of the one true Church. Such a sect naturally attracted to itself all the fanatical extremists of Africa and all those who had any grievance against the Catholic authorities. It became the refuge of the revolutionary, the bankrupt, and the criminal, and thus, inside the Donatist movement proper, there grew up a kind of anarchist movement against property, which had little or no connection with religious principles.
Constantine, during the remainder of his reign, practically ignored the African Church. He had done what he could and he wiped his hands of it. There soon arose an extravagant sect which took the name of Circumcelliones, from their practice of begging food from cell to cell, or cottage to cottage. They renounced the ordinary routine of daily life. Forming themselves into bands, and styling themselves the Champions of the Lord (ἀγωνιστικόι), they roamed through the countryside, which they kept in a state of abject terror. St. Augustine, in a well-known passage, declares that when their shout of “Praise be to God!” was heard, it was more dreaded than the roar of a lion. They were armed with wooden clubs, which they named “Israels,” and these they did not scruple to use upon the Catholics, whose churches they entered and plundered, committing the most violent excesses, though they were pledged to celibacy. Gibbon justly compares them to the Camisards of Languedoc at the commencement of the 18th century, and others have likened them to the Syrian Assassins at the time of the Crusades and the Jewish Sicarii of Palestine during the first century of the Christian era. They formed, it seems, a sort of Christian Jacquerie, possessed in their wilder moments with a frantic passion for martyrdom and imploring those whom they met to kill them. The best of them were fit only for a madhouse; the worst were fit only for a gaol. Probably they had little connection with the respectable Donatists in the cities, whose organisation was precisely the same as that of the Catholics, and their operations were mainly restricted to the thinly populated districts on the borders of the desert.
On one occasion, however, Constantine was obliged to interfere. The Donatists in Cirta,—the capital of Numidia,—which had been renamed Constantina in honour of the Emperor, had forcibly seized the church of the Catholics, that had been built at Constantine’s command. The Catholics, therefore, appealed to the Emperor, and knowing that he was pledged to a policy of non-interference, they did not ask for punishment against the Donatists, or even for the restoration of the church in question, but simply that a new site might be given them out of public moneys. The Emperor granted their request, ordering that the building as well as the site should be paid for by the State, and granting immunity from all public offices to the Catholic clergy of the town. In his letter Constantine does not mince his language with respect to the Donatists.