Throughout his anti-Donatist writings, Augustine disparaged his ecclesiastical rivals as insania. The portrayal of Donatists as violent, fanatical and irrational has dominated accounts of the movement up to the twentieth century, when scholars began to investigate the Donatist Church using their own documents and descriptions. Maureen Tilley's 1996 The Bible in Christian North Africa was the first major attempt to sketch a Donatist theology which was independent of Augustine's polemic, which assumed the movement to be rational and coherent, and which respected the theological diversity within the Donatist Church. Building on her work, Hoover articulates how the Donatists' ‘biblical worldview’ (to use Tilley's language) grew out of their apocalyptic exegesis of Scripture. Much Donatist ‘insanity’, he argues, is perfectly sensible when viewed within their own interpretative framework rather than that imposed by Augustine and later critics.
Yet even scholars who have recognised the apocalyptic framework have tended to marginalise it, in at least two ways. First, Donatism has been described as a conservative movement which retained a primitive Christian millenarianism into the Constantinian age (Monceaux, Markus). Alternatively, Donatism has been understood as a progressive socio-economic movement which tactically deployed apocalyptic motifs to motivate social transformation (Brisson, Frend). Hoover counters that their apocalyptic stance was not an outlier, but an acceptable and relatively common option in the ‘apocalyptic age’ of the fourth and fifth centuries.
Donatist eschatology, he argues in the second chapter of his book, was an outgrowth of the proto-orthodox biblical interpretations of Irenaeus and Tertullian. From the persecuted Cyprian they adopted the concept of the ‘Age of Sorrows’, a modification of the Stoic concept of senectus mundi, and with it an imminent sense of the end. Hoover's latter four chapters trace how these motifs were developed in Donatist sources in three periods: before the Marcarian persecution of 347, between the persecution and the Conference of 411, and after 411. The earliest Donatist works are all anonymous and martyrological: a handful of sermons and passiones which connect their ongoing tribulations as a sign of the coming AntiChrist. While the martyrological form itself does hearken back to the pre-Constantinian period, the apocalyptic content parallels the rhetoric of contemporary Pro-Nicene and Homoian Christians who were likewise being harassed by ‘apostate’ Arians and Homoousians.
The post-Macarian age, which is richest in extant sources, is treated in two chapters, the first dealing with ‘mainstream Donatism’ and the second with the seeming anomaly of Tyconius. The mainstream, represented by Parmenian, Fortunius and some anonymous writers, viewed the Donatist communion in Africa as the faithful survivors of a great apostasy initiated by Caecilianist traditores. The apostasy was a harbinger of the end. Again, Hoover finds that other persecuted groups were making similar exegetical moves throughout the empire. Unique to Donatism was its claim that the faithful remnant was confined to their communion in Africa.
Tyconius, the Donatist theologian with the most enduring influence, shared with the mainstream an apocalyptic ‘remnant’ theology which privileged Africa in the divine plan. Yet Tyconius denied their provincialism, claiming that there were faithful in every land. The Donatist schism was only a ‘prequel’ of the coming apocalyptic separation, the dividing of wheat and tares, which would soon occur throughout the world. Tyconius was the first to suggest that the ‘mystery of iniquity’ which restrained AntiChrist was not Rome but the Church itself. Previous scholars of Tyconius have painted him as dissident who threw off the millenarianism of his confrères and embraced an immanent eschatology, later accepted by Augustine and rest of the West. Yet Hoover places him firmly in the Donatist exegetical tradition; if anything, Tyconius conserved the apocalyptic spirit of the previous generation. This recovery of Tyconius' Donatist bona fides is one of the most significant contributions of Hoover's study.
The early fifth century saw a return of Caecilianist repression and the conquest of the Homoian Vandals. Unsurprisingly, Donatists of this period sought to make sense of their ecclesial losses using familiar apocalyptic motifs. Hoover reframes Augustine's Contra Gaudentium, noting how his rhetoric masks Gaudentius' apocalyptic assumptions; he similarly unearths the apocalyptic interpretations within Adversus Fulgentium, a Donatist apologetic for rebaptism. Most of the final chapter analyses the various Donatist chronologies, particularly the multiple recensions of the Liber genealogus. An analysis of the shrill AntiChrist rhetoric of the Acts of Abitinian Martyrs, now recognised as an early fifth-century text, would have been welcome in this chapter, though the monograph never claims to be exhaustive.
The Donatist Church has set a new standard for the study of Donatist theology, which has been hemmed in for over a century by Augustine's fifth-century agenda and by tired scholarly tropes such as ‘Church of the Pure’ and ‘Church of the Martyrs’. By attending to the dissident voices preserved in Augustine's work and by utilising the witness of relatively new sources such as the Liber genealogus, the ‘Donatist Dossier’ and the Vienna Homilies, Hoover reconstructs a vibrant and viable strand of late ancient Christianity. His method of carefully analyaing these minor texts, if used to investigate other areas of Donatist theology, promises a still greater harvest.
