Donatus and the Problem of Disgust

Donatus (270?—355?) was a North African bishop who gave his name to a fourth-century split in Christianity, which came to be known as Donatism.

Donatism has traditionally been viewed as an intellectual disagreement about the validity of sacraments. However, rather than viewing it in that limited way, perhaps we should also see it as an emotive disagreement? Perhaps it was driven by feelings of disgust, rather than by intellectual claims about sacraments?

1. Donatus

Donatus was a bishop in the North African city of Carthage (in modern-day Tunisia). He rose to prominence following the end of the last great Roman persecution of Christianity: the Diocletian Persecution.

That persecution was particularly severe in Africa between 303 and 305. During that time many Christians were arrested and tortured. Some were steadfast in confessing their faith and they were martyred. (See Diocletian martyrs.) Others pleaded for their lives and compromised with the demands of the Roman authorities, thereby lapsing from their faith.

When clergy were arrested, the Romans demanded that they should hand over church vestments, chalices and copies of Scriptures. Sometimes they also asked for the names of other Christians. Some clergy lapsed and willingly cooperated with the Romans.

Other Christians referred to those who lapsed as traditores (the “hand-overers”). That Latin word gives us the English word “traitor,” which expresses how the traditores were viewed.

The African persecution of Christians came to a close around 306, when Constantine became emperor.

With the arrival of peace, the North African Church began to pick up the pieces. They ordained new priests and consecrated new bishops to replace those who had been martyred. However, there was a serious problem to resolve: what should be done with those laity, priests and bishops who were traditores.

The mainstream Catholic Church decided that traditores should confess, do penance and be forgiven. That response reflected the Church’s doctrine of forgiveness. It may also have reflected the serious pastoral need to replace clergy.

However, that response did not reflect the strong emotions which many North African Christians felt towards the traditores. Many Christians had suffered grievously in the persecution and they were undoubtedly disgusted with the traditores. They felt that the sin of the traditores was so great that it could only be removed by drastic action, like re-baptism or re-ordination.

As the mainstream Catholic Church did not re-baptize or re-ordain traditores, that led to groups of Christians beginning to separate themselves from the mainstream Church.

Matters came to a head in 311 when Caecilian was consecrated as a new bishop for the see of Carthage. He was consecrated by Felix of Aptunga, who had been a traditor. As Felix had not been re-ordained, some Christians refused to accept the validity of his consecration of Caecilian.

By 313 the disagreement had escalated into a schism. Those refusing to accept Caecilian arranged for Donatus to be consecrated, as an alternative bishop of Carthage.

Donatus was bishop from 313 to his exile in 347. The 34-year length of his episcopate, combined with his high-profile position in Carthage, meant that the movement insisting on repeating sacraments for traditores, came to be known as Donatism.

2. Donatism: Schism or Heresy?

Donatism grew rapidly across the fourth century, reaching almost 400 bishops in North Africa by the year 400.

Donatism was a schism, as Donatist bishops set their altars against the Catholic Church’s altars, claiming to be the “real” Church. As well as refusing to recognize the validity of some Catholic bishops, Donatists also rejected their authority, accusing the Catholic bishops of compromising with sin when they refused to re-baptize or re-ordain the traditores.

When matters were referred to Pope Miltiades (d. 314) in Rome, he ruled against the Donatists. But the Donatists refused to accept his judgment. They continued consecrating their own bishops, even though it meant that they were no longer in communion with the pope.

Donatism can also be viewed as a heresy because it involved a doctrinal disagreement. The Donatists claimed that sacraments like baptism and ordination could be repeated. They appealed to the earlier tradition of the Church, as Novationists (around the year 251) had also insisted on re-baptism when dealing with Christians who lapsed in the Decian persecution. Donatists also appealed to the theology of St. Cyprian (d. 258) who had implied that the validity of a sacrament could depend upon the sinfulness of the cleric administering it, and so sometimes sacraments might need to be repeated.

The mainstream Catholic Church took a different doctrinal position, insisting that sacraments (like baptism and ordination) could not be repeated. They insisted that the validity of a sacrament did not depend on the sinfulness of the person conferring it. However, some of these doctrinal positions were only finally settled after Donatism. So, there is a question about whether it is fair to accuse the Donatists themselves of heresy.

The fact that there was a doctrinal element to the Donatist position makes it easy to view Donatism as an intellectual disagreement with the mainstream Catholic Church.

But we should remember that there was also a strong emotional component to the disagreement. The Donatists were disgusted by the behavior of the traditores who had selfishly betrayed the Church for personal gain (i.e., saving their lives).

Once we recognize that emotional disgust may have played a role in the Donatist position, then it raises a question. Was Donatism mainly an intellectual disagreement about sacramental validity, or was it mainly an emotional reaction of disgust, which was later justified (as a post-hoc rationalization) by an appeal to intellectual issues about sacraments?

To explore that question we need to look at the nature of disgust.

3. Disgust

Disgust is one of the six most fundamental emotions, which appear in cultures worldwide. This means that every culture recognizes the nose-wrinkling and eye-narrowing of the strong dislike, which we call “disgust.”

At its most basic, disgust seems to be linked to health and well-being. Disgust seems to be a reaction that recognizes and rejects potential sources of risk, which can imperil well-being. For example, people typically tend to show disgust towards sources of potential infection, such as faeces, rotten meat, vomit, etc.

There are some aspects of cultural diversity in what triggers disgust. For example, while cannibalism disgusts most people today, it has clearly not disgusted all people throughout history, as it has been a tribal behavior in some specific contexts.

This suggests that there is a basic emotional reaction of disgust which is common to everyone, but there is also an intellectual (or cognitive) component to the emotion, which can identify different reasons and rationales for triggering disgust.

If we recognize that intellectual cognition can be an aspect of emotion, then that means that emotion and rationality should not be viewed as if they are completely separate. To use the terminology of Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), the mind may follow both “fast” (emotive) and “slow” (reasoning) routes to its conclusions. If so, then that means that if the Donatists were motivated by disgust, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that they were acting irrationally. It might just mean that they took a non-rational route to what might otherwise have been a rational conclusion.

These considerations lead to an obvious question: how can it be rational to be disgusted by traditores, if that means viewing them as a source of infection? To answer that question, we need to distinguish between different types of disgust.

4. Moral Disgust

Moral disgust is a particular type of disgust which is less focused upon physical harms to well-being, like disease pathogens. Instead, it involves an association with an “evil,” which may represent a more abstract moral or spiritual risk to a person’s well-being.

We can see those more abstract kinds of ideas in popular language, when murderers or rapists are described as “disgusting.”

There have been some classic psychology experiments which have shown that moral disgust plays a role in how most people look at the world, even when they are not aware of it. For example, a group were invited to wear a freshly laundered sweater. People were perfectly happy to do so, until they were also told that the sweater had originally belonged to Adolf Hitler. (See Contagion Heuristic.) The association of the sweater with the mass-murdering Hitler immediately raised thoughts of “evil” in people’s minds. It triggered a reaction of moral disgust which meant that many people did not want anything to do with the sweater.

If the Donatists were motivated by moral disgust, then their insistence upon the need for re-baptism and re-ordination was due to the seriousness with which they viewed the evil of the traditores’ sin. The sin was so grievous that it could only be removed by the extraordinary ritual of re-baptism (and re-ordination).

5. Religious Disgust

An argument against viewing Donatism as a form of disgust might be that doing so amounts to reading history through a lens of modern psychology, thus distorting history by reading modern preoccupations back onto historical figures.

While it is true that historical sources do not typically attribute “disgust” to schismatics and heretics, that doesn’t mean that the Donatists were not motivated by disgust. It may just mean that ancient writers did not understand the way that disgust can contribute to what might otherwise seem to be just an intellectual position.

We know that it is not unreasonable to view ancient Christian actions through a lens of disgust, as that same lens was used in the Scriptures. Alongside Old Testament references to “evil” and “wrongdoing,” some dietary and sexual actions are rejected by using the language of “disgust.” They are described as “loathsome” or “abominations,” as we can see in the following examples where the text states:

all those that lack either fins or scales are loathsome for you [to eat]. (Leviticus 11:10)

If a man lies with a male as with a woman, they have committed an abomination. (Leviticus 20:13)

It is also the case that when we look at other historical schisms and heresies, we can often see issues of purity and disgust lurking in the details of what was at stake. For example, thirteenth-century Albigensianism (also called Catharism and Manichaeism) was led by people who explicitly called themselves “the pure ones.”

It may also be no coincidence that Martin Luther launched the Reformation in 1517, after a 1510 trip to Rome in which he had been thoroughly disgusted by the corruption and immorality which he saw in the city.

What this all means is that just because schisms and heresies like Donatism have not traditionally been viewed as involving a reaction of disgust, that does not mean that disgust did not in fact play a significant role in Donatism (and possibly in other schisms and heresies).

6. Were the Donatists Actually Disgusted?

Modern psychology is increasingly showing that heresy can trigger disgust, and that criticizing a person’s religion can trigger that person’s disgust. This shows that it is possible that the Donatists were motivated by disgust. But can we go further and say that disgust did indeed motivate aspects of Donatism?

When we look at the features of disgust and the characteristics of Donatism, there are some suggestive similarities.

We know that disgust is “relatively insensitive to rational assessments” (“The Negative Side of Disgust”). This means that dialogue and argument will only have a very limited impact upon people whose position is motivated by disgust.

Historically, arguments do seem to have had a relatively limited impact on Donatists. St. Augustine (d. 430) spent almost thirty years preaching and writing against Donatism. (See Augustine Anti-Donatist Writings.) While he undoubtedly changed some minds, one of the factors that made a big difference to Donatism was co-opting the state to use force to close Donatist churches. Even then, Donatism was never entirely suppressed. It only disappeared when the seventh-century Muslim Conquest destroyed Christianity in the North Africa region.

We also know that people who experience a moral disgust also often experience a “moral dumbfounding,” which is an inability to give a clear rational justification for the disgust. One of the signs of dumbfounding is incoherence and constantly changing arguments.

When St. Augustine wrote about Donatism, one of the things which he complained about was that their arguments were irrational and that they kept shifting their position. (See On Baptism, Against the Donatists, Bk II.) Why were the Donatists unable to clearly express their position, especially as the schism had been occurring for more than 80 years when Augustine wrote about it? Perhaps Donatists were experiencing a degree of moral dumbfounding?

Another feature of disgust is that it often triggers a strong in-group vs. out-group reaction, which manifests as a tribalism of “us” against “them.” Modern researchers are increasingly realizing that disgust plays a significant role in modern Fundamentalism, and it may be a driving force in the way that communities separate themselves from the world around them.

One of the things which ancient writers tell us about Donatists was that they did indeed have strong community bonds. Even when their arguments were refuted, they would typically just fall back upon vague claims that Donatism was still “better” or “purer” or “more faithful to tradition” (etc.). (See St. Optatus of Milevis (d. 387?), Against the Donatists.) Those kinds of claims are not reasons for an intellectual position; they are explanations of a tribal membership.

Examples like these above do not prove that Donatism involved a disgust reaction, but they do show similarities which are at the very least, suggestive.

7. Conclusion

It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the specific motivations of a group of people who died fifteen hundred years ago. However, there are unmistakable similarities between the way that Donatists behaved and what modern psychology has shown to be features of disgust-reactions. Unless we dismiss those similarities as just random coincidences, then they suggest that disgust probably did play some kind of role in prompting and sustaining Donatism.

If that is so, then it helps us to understand why attempts at reconciliation between Donatists and mainstream Catholics were sometimes ineffective. It was because the mainstream Church approached Donatism as an intellectual error, which could be dealt with by preaching and teaching to correct the error. But if Donatism was partially an emotional disgust, then that emotive aspect would not have been addressed by a strategy of preaching and teaching. To some extent, the Church may have been misdiagnosing the problem, and so its solution was less effective.

When the Church’s solution did not produce the expected results, the Church turned to the state and asked for military support in suppressing Donatism. If Donatism was motivated by disgust, then turning the state against it may have been another misunderstanding, as it likely deepened an already existing disgust, thus making reconciliation still harder.

Perhaps it is tempting to dismiss these issues with the Donatists as irrelevant historical curiosities? But schisms and heresies have arisen throughout history, and they will undoubtedly occur in the future. Understanding the motivational role which emotions like disgust have played in past disagreements, may be important if the Church is to improve the effectiveness of how it responds to disagreements in the future.