Schisms | Theologica Latino Americana

Summary

1 Conceptual Definition

2 Schismatic Act in the History of the Church

3 Schism as a Power Struggle in the Church

3.1 First Example: The Novatian Schism in Rome (251)

3.2 Second Example: The Schism of the North African Churches in the 4th Century

4 Schism, Heresy, and Violence: The Limits of Orthodoxy

5 Conclusion

6 Bibliographic References

1 Conceptual Definition

From an etymological point of view, the term schism, originating from Greek, means the act of separation, division, or rupture that affects a community, particularly within Christianity, where a group of members of a given community decides to experience aspects of faith or worship in a way different from their initial community. To this end, this group distances itself from common practice to seek a more specific or particular experience of faith, sometimes asserting different doctrinal aspects (as in the case of Arianism or Pelagianism), sometimes defending a different disciplinary or moral stance (as in the case of Novatianism or Donatism) (STARK, 2007, p. 54).

However, from a historical point of view, it is very difficult to sustain a fixed and universal understanding of schism, as it is observed that religious communities develop the concept of schism according to their own traditions and particular interests, which can broaden, harden, or flexibilize the real meaning of rupture or separation. Thus, it is not easy for the contemporary scholar to identify the schismatic act in its empirical sense in the past, as the understanding of schism was often guided by power plays within communities and became an instrument of delegitimizing specific ecclesial subjects that were intended to be removed from the official scene. This observation will force us, in this text, to inquire into the historical construction of the concept of schism from the point of view of Church History, taking it as part of the institutional development of Christian communities. Therefore, we will make a broad and general historical discussion of the concept, taking into account the concrete manifestations of schismatic acts without, however, particularizing or isolating them as atypical or circumstantial events.

2 Schismatic Act in the History of the Church

Being an act of rupture derived from a situation of rebellion, schism is particularly felt when the religious community affirms unity as a fundamental nature, visible in a doctrinal, disciplinary, sacramental, and liturgical body shared by the members of the community; in this case, schism is interpreted as the secession of a part of this community that, from a given moment, takes a particular path, distancing itself from the common tradition. This rupture is then experienced as a trauma, an event of enormous magnitude that is often accompanied by violent conflicts, sometimes mortal, practiced by the majority community that, in the intent to safeguard unity, invests all its persuasive forces to keep the group considered dissident within the original unity (GADDIS, 2005).

In the Christian case, the community experience of schism is especially traumatic due to a particular consideration of unity which, in the case of the Gospel of John, is proclaimed by Jesus during the farewell discourse, especially in the high priestly prayer: “Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one” (John 17:11); in the First Letter to the Corinthians (12:12-14), Paul identifies the Church with the mystical body of Christ which, by analogy, must be one, like him, despite the diversity of its members. Thus considered, the schismatic act becomes an attack not only against the community but above all against the mystery of the Body of Christ that the one Church represents.

Summary

1 Conceptual Definition

2 Schismatic Act in the History of the Church

3 Schism as a Power Struggle in the Church

3.1 First Example: The Novatian Schism in Rome (251)

3.2 Second Example: The Schism of the North African Churches in the 4th Century

4 Schism, Heresy, and Violence: The Limits of Orthodoxy

5 Conclusion

6 Bibliographic References

1 Conceptual Definition

2 Schismatic Act in the History of the Church

As can be seen, the early Christian communities did not view schisms as probable and understandable events according to the social logic that governs human groups, whose development often favors separations and dismemberments to allow the survival of heteronomies that, over time, were assumed as part of the identity of specific communities within a large federation of communities. On the contrary, the communities, despite the diversity of cities, languages, and ethnic backgrounds from which they were composed, professed a unity, confused with a supposed homogeneity, which in practice concealed their natural divergences of practices and beliefs (BROWN, 1999, p. 22).

In a period when an elaborate symbol of faith was not yet required and there was not yet an exclusive canon of biblical texts valid for all communities, it is almost impossible to delineate where the tolerated diversity (which still expresses unity) ended and the intolerable diversity (this indeed defined as schism) began. An example of this complicated understanding is found in Acts of the Apostles, chapter 15, when its author, depicting the divergence between the mother community of Jerusalem, led by James, and the daughter community of Antioch, led by Paul and Barnabas, chose to silence the deep disagreements between the two churches (and between James and Paul), giving the episode an easy resolution that affirmed a very fragile and threatened unity, as revealed by the apostle Paul himself in his Letter to the Galatians, chapter 2. It can be argued that Luke, as a historian of nascent Christianity, was guided more by theology and the providentialist view of History than by the canons of Hellenic historiography, which he must have known (MARGUERAT, 2003, p. 31); however, his theological position on the facts, centered on the pneumatic guidance, led to the predominance of a conciliatory vision of ecclesial diversities. Since the Acts of the Apostles became a kind of prototype of what came to be called Ecclesiastical History, a term coined by Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea (263-339), it can be said that this Lucan conciliatory vision was established as an original paradigm for ancient Christian authors and remained strong even later, with the general systematization of faith with the Council of Nicaea (325).

Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon (130-202), in his treatise Against Heresies (Book I, 10.2), reinforced the unity of the Church which, according to him, was already spread throughout the East and West, attributing to it the uniformity of faith, tradition, and teaching despite the linguistic variation that characterized the regions of the Roman world where the churches were established. Although his own work denounced the existence and persuasive force of Christian communities that followed another theology, which he called heretical or Gnostic, Irenaeus believed that the unity of belief was the seal of authenticity of the Church to which he belonged. In the same sense, the theologian Origen (185-254), in his Homilies on Ezekiel (9.1), considered that unity and communion derived from virtue, while diversity or multiplicity originated from sins, hence schisms, heresies, and dissensions being necessarily read as an expression of that original rebellion that caused the downfall of the order of creation.

In light of both ancient testimonies, it is seen that the historical diversity and disputes among the churches, evident since the so-called Jerusalem Agreement (Acts 15; Gal. 2), were covered up by a spiritualizing reading, that is, one that minimized the historical and social data, aiming at the defense of an orthodoxy that, as we know, was not formed without struggles and dissensions. For the ecclesial current represented by Irenaeus and Origen, schisms were not understood merely as something much graver than the separation or individualization of communities but mainly as a tremendous continuation of sin in the world. By associating diversity with sin and uniformity with grace, ecclesiastical discourses twisted the manifestations of heteronomies and local identities, making them an obstacle to the uniformization that was supposed to authenticate the community; thus, diversity came to be seen as risky and probably an attack against the supposed original uniformity. The case of Irenaeus’s Against Heresies allows us to see how the safeguarding of an incarnate and historical Christology employed a certain plastification of uniformity which, in the future, made the accusation of schism out of what was merely a local response to apostolic faith.

Summary

1 Conceptual Definition

2 Schismatic Act in the History of the Church

3 Schism as a Power Struggle in the Church

3.1 First Example: The Novatian Schism in Rome (251)

3.2 Second Example: The Schism of the North African Churches in the 4th Century

4 Schism, Heresy, and Violence: The Limits of Orthodoxy

5 Conclusion

6 Bibliographic References

1 Conceptual Definition

2 Schismatic Act in the History of the Church

This Irenaean understanding of the unity of the Church, in a way, conditioned the so-called History of Dogmas. The stages of the formation of Christian doctrine are usually interpreted based on specific generative phases, often labeled with the name of controversies: Trinitarian controversy, Christological controversy, Pneumatological controversy, Iconoclastic controversy, among others. Historians and theologians usually believe that these controversies constitute chronological, therefore, historical and real (one might even say natural) stages of a two-thousand-year march of Christianity through history. The curious thing is that this marking is, in fact, an explanatory abstraction created a posteriori, without the due foundation of reality, provided one looks at the historical sources without the lenses of an evolutionary controversialist interpretation of Church History. This observation teaches us that, when doing the history of theology, it is necessary to avoid the seduction of the Theology of History.

Thus, if schism arises from a controversy, we must then redefine the role of schism in the History of the Church, for controversy (in its various manifestations) constitutes the very ethos of this history: assuming a “normative Christianity” from the origins is more an act of faith than of historiographic investigation which, on the contrary, highlights the extreme heteronomies of the communities, whether juridical, doctrinal, or liturgical (JOHNSON, 2001, p.58). However, attention is needed: not every different understanding of theological matters results in an ecclesial conflict, which leads us to propose the question: why do certain differences in understanding generate conflicts and ruptures while others do not? Why do some conflicts result in agreements (assimilation of the difference) and others in schisms (elimination of deviants)? A non-generative reading of Church History (which does not assume unavoidable and naturalized stages of growth) leads us to realize that, in a theological dispute, at least in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, generally what was at stake was the defense of the power of those who established the doctrine and not necessarily the doctrine itself, or the deviation from the doctrine.

In other words, dogmatic controversies were part of the expressions of clashes between communities or leaders of these communities to assert the superiority of a given ecclesial culture over the culture of another church, as seen so often in the confrontations of the churches of Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome between the 3rd and 5th centuries. In the view, for example, of Eusebius of Caesarea, the guarantee of the unity of the Church did not lie in the fixation of ideas but in apostolic succession, that is, in the continuity of persons: this choice seems indicative to us that communities negotiated leadership and power by using controversies as a reason for the opposition of “true” to “false” ministers (CAMERON, 2005, p. 133).

3 Schism as a Power Struggle in the Church: Two Examples

3.1. The Novatian Schism in Rome (251)

Eusebius of Caesarea, in Book VI of his Ecclesiastical History, narrates the events derived from the so-called persecution of Emperor Decius in 249; the imperial decree required all Christians to offer sacrifices to the imperial gods, under the risk of condemnation to death. The sacrifice had to take place before a Roman authority in the capacity of a witness to the act. After the sacrifice, which could simply consist of burning a small stone of incense, without any need to believe in the gods, the Christian received a legal certificate, called in Latin libellus, which is why those who offered the sacrifice were pejoratively nicknamed libellatici (FREND, 1982, p. 98). To avoid death and at the same time offering sacrifices, many wealthy Christians bribed the authorities so that their names were inscribed in the libellus without them making the sacrifice. For many Christians, this procedure was scandalous because it meant that such people were very cowardly and, worse still, had apostatized and, therefore, could no longer participate in the life of the Church. To make matters worse, it was suspected that the libellatici collaborated with the empire, providing information about community members who were not willing to commit to the empire. In this case, the schismatic act would be explicit both in the offering of the sacrifice and in the cowardice in the face of martyrdom, and its condemnation was justified in the face of the betrayal of some members of the community.

Summary

1 Conceptual definition

2 Schismatic act in the History of the Church

3 Schism as a power struggle in the Church

3.1 First example: the schism of Novatian in Rome (251)

3.2 Second example: the schism of the North African churches in the 4th century

4 Schism, heresy, and violence: the limits of orthodoxy

5 Conclusion

6 Bibliographical references

1 Conceptual definition

From an etymological point of view, the term schism, originating from Greek, means the act of separation, division, or rupture that befalls a community, particularly within Christianity, whereby a group of members of a given community decides to experience aspects of faith or worship in a way different from their initial community. To this end, this group distances itself from common practice in order to seek a more specific or particular experience of faith, sometimes affirming different doctrinal aspects (as in the case of Arianism or Pelagianism), sometimes defending a different disciplinary or moral stance (as in the case of Novatianism or Donatism) (STARK, 2007, p. 54).

However, from a historical point of view, it is very difficult to sustain a fixed and universal understanding of schism, as it is perceived that religious communities elaborate, in their own way, the concept of schism guided by their traditions and particular interests, which can broaden, harden or soften the real meaning of rupture or separation. Thus, it is not easy for the contemporary scholar to identify the schismatic act in its empirical sense in the past, as the understanding of schism was often guided by power plays within the communities and became an instrument of delegitimization of specific ecclesiastical subjects that were intended to be removed from the official scene. This observation will force us, in this text, to inquire into the historical construction of the concept of schism, from the point of view of Church History, taking it as part of the institutional development of Christian communities. Therefore, we will make a broad and general historical discussion of the concept, taking into account the concrete manifestations of schismatic acts without, however, particularizing or isolating them as atypical or circumstantial events.

2 Schismatic act in the History of the Church

Being an act of rupture derived from a situation of rebellion, schism is particularly felt when the religious community affirms unity as a fundamental nature, visible in a doctrinal, disciplinary, sacramental, and liturgical body shared by the members of the community; in this case, schism is interpreted as the secession of a part of this community that, from a given moment, takes a particular path, distancing itself from the common tradition. This rupture is then experienced as a trauma, an event of enormous magnitude that is often accompanied by violent, sometimes deadly, conflicts practiced by the majority community which, in order to safeguard unity, invests all its persuasive forces to keep the group considered dissident within the original unity (GADDIS, 2005).

In the Christian case, the communal experience of schism is especially traumatic due to a particular consideration of unity that, in the case of the Gospel of John, is proclaimed by Jesus during the farewell discourse, especially in the priestly prayer: “Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one” (John 17:11); in the First Letter to the Corinthians (12:12-14), Paul identifies the Church with the mystical body of Christ which, by analogy, must be one, like him, despite the diversity of its members. Thus considered, the schismatic act becomes an attack not only against the community but above all against the mystery of the Body of Christ that the one-Church represents.

As can be seen, the early Christian communities did not see schisms as probable and understandable events according to the social logics that govern human groups, whose development often favors separations and dismemberments in order to allow the survival of heteronomies that, over time, were assumed as part of the identity of specific communities within a large federation of communities. On the contrary, the communities, despite the diversity of cities, languages, and ethnic backgrounds from which they were framed, professed a unity, confused with a supposed homogeneity, which, in practice, hid their natural divergences of practices and beliefs (BROWN, 1999, p. 22).

At a time when there was not yet a precise symbol of faith and there was not yet an exclusive canon of biblical texts valid for all communities, it is almost impossible to delimit where the tolerated diversity (which still expresses unity) ended and where the intolerable diversity (this indeed defined as schism) began. An example of this complicated understanding is found in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 15, when its author, in portraying the divergence between the mother community of Jerusalem, led by James, and the daughter community of Antioch, led by Paul and Barnabas, preferred to silence the deep disagreements between the two churches (and between James and Paul), giving the episode an easy resolution that affirmed a very fragile and threatened unity, as revealed by the apostle Paul himself in his Letter to the Galatians, chapter 2. It can be argued that Luke, as a historian of nascent Christianity, was guided more by theology and the providentialist view of History than by the canons of Hellenistic historiography, which he must have known (MARGUERAT, 2003, p. 31); however, his theological position of the facts, centered on pneumatic guidance, led to the predominance of a conciliatory view of ecclesial diversities. Once the Acts of the Apostles became a kind of prototype of what came to be called Ecclesiastical History, a term coined by Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea (263-339), it can be said that this Lucan conciliatory view asserted itself as the original paradigm for ancient Christian authors and remained strong even later, when the general systematization of faith with the Council of Nicaea (325) took place.

Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon (130-202), in his treatise Against Heresies (Book I, 10,2), reinforced the unity of the Church which, according to him, was already spread throughout the East and West, attributing to it the uniformity of faith, tradition, and teaching despite the linguistic variation that characterized the regions of the Roman world where the churches were established. Although his own work denounced the existence and persuasive power of Christian communities that followed another theology, which he called heretical or gnostic, Irenaeus believed that the unity of belief was the seal of authenticity of the Church to which he belonged. Similarly, the theologian Origen (185-254), in the Homilies on Ezekiel (9,1), considered that unity and communion derived from virtue, while diversity or multiplicity originated in sins, hence schisms, heresies, and dissensions being necessarily read as expressions of that original rebellion that caused the misfortune of the order of creation.

In light of both ancient testimonies, it can be seen that the historical diversity and disputes between churches, evident since the so-called Jerusalem Agreement (Acts 15; Gal 2), were covered up by a spiritualizing reading, that is, one that minimized the historical and social fact, with a view to defending an orthodoxy that, we know, was not formed without struggles and dissensions. For the ecclesial current represented by Irenaeus and Origen, schisms were not understood only as something much more serious than the separation or individualization of communities but mainly as a tremendous continuation of sin in the world. By associating diversity with sin and uniformity with grace, ecclesiastical discourses twisted manifestations of heteronomies and local identities, making them an obstacle to the uniformity that should authenticate the community; thus, diversity came to be seen as something risky and, probably, an attack on the supposed original uniformity. The case of Irenaeus’s Against Heresies allows us to see how the safeguard of an incarnate and historical Christology made use of a certain plasticization of uniformity which, in the future, became the reason for the accusation of schism in what was no more than a local response to apostolic faith.

This Irenaean understanding of the unity of the Church, in a way, conditioned the so-called History of Dogmas. The stages of the formation of Christian doctrine are usually interpreted based on specific generative phases, generally labeled with the name of controversies: Trinitarian controversy, Christological controversy, Pneumatological controversy, Iconoclastic controversy, among others. Historians and theologians usually believe that these controversies constitute chronological, therefore historical and real (one might even say natural) stages of a bimillennial march of Christianity through History. The curious thing is that this marking is, in fact, an explanatory abstraction created a posteriori, without the due foundation of reality, provided that one looks at the historical sources without the lenses of an evolutionary controversial interpretation of Church History. This observation teaches us that when doing the history of theology, it is necessary to avoid the seduction of the Theology of History.

Thus, if schism arises from a controversy, we must then redefine the role of schism in the History of the Church, as the controversy (in its various manifestations) constitutes the very ethos of this history: supposing a “normative Christianity” from the origins is more an act of faith than of historiographic investigation, which, on the contrary, evidences the extreme heteronomies of the communities, whether juridical, doctrinal, or liturgical (JOHNSON, 2001, p.58). However, attention is needed: not every different understanding of theological matters results in an ecclesial conflict, which leads us to propose the question: why do certain differences in understandings generate conflicts and ruptures and others do not? Why do some conflicts result in agreements (assimilation of difference) and others in schisms (elimination of deviants)? A non-generative reading of Church History (which does not suppose unavoidable and naturalized stages of growth) leads us to realize that, in a theological dispute, at least in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, what was usually at stake was the defense of the power of those who established the doctrine and not necessarily the doctrine itself, or the deviation from the doctrine.

In other words, dogmatic controversies were part of the expressions of clashes between communities or leaders of these communities to affirm the superiority of a given ecclesial culture over the culture of another church, as can be seen so often in the confrontations of the churches of Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome between the 3rd and 5th centuries. In the view, for example, of Eusebius of Caesarea, the guarantee of the unity of the Church did not lie in the fixation of ideas, but in apostolic succession, that is, in the continuity of persons: this choice seems indicative to us that the communities negotiated leadership and power by making use of controversies as a reason for opposing “true” to “false” ministers (CAMERON, 2005, p. 133).

3 Schism as a power struggle in the Church: two examples

3.1. The schism of Novatian in Rome (251)

Eusebius of Caesarea, in Book VI of his Ecclesiastical History, narrates the events derived from the so-called persecution of Emperor Decius in 249; the imperial decree required all Christians to offer sacrifices to the imperial gods, under the threat of death. The sacrifice had to take place before a Roman authority as a witness to the act. After the sacrifice, which could simply consist of burning a small stone of incense, without any need to believe in the gods, the Christian received a legal certificate, called, in Latin, libellus, which is why those who offered the sacrifice were pejoratively nicknamed libellatici (FREND, 1982, p. 98). To avoid death and, at the same time, offering a sacrifice, many wealthy Christians bribed authorities so that their names would be registered in the libellus without them performing the sacrifice. For many Christians, this procedure was a scandal, as it meant that such people were very cowardly and, worse still, had apostatized and, therefore, could no longer participate in the life of the Church. To make matters worse, it was suspected that the libellatici collaborated with the empire, providing information about members of the community who were not willing to comply with the imperial decree. In this case, the schismatic act would be explicit both in the offering of the sacrifice and in the cowardice in the face of martyrdom, and its condemnation was justified in the face of the betrayal of some members of the community.

In the meantime, rigorist currents began to preach that any Christian who became a libellaticus lost the grace of baptism and, if they wanted to return to the community after the persecution, needed to be rebaptized. Others would not even accept reinsertion, even by new baptism. This communal drama, which affected the churches of Rome, Alexandria, and even Carthage, in North Africa, testifies to the existence of an internal exclusion framework within the church that could be as or more violent than the imperial persecution; the exclusion of the libellatici or lapsi (that is, those who fell out of fear of martyrdom) became the flip side of a true intra-ecclesial persecution in which rigorists sought to expel undesirable members from the churches. The attitude of the rigorist sectors in these churches could be described as a kind of “witch hunt”, which obviously caused great turmoil among the faithful and the clergy.

This is what happened in Rome, at the time of the martyrdom of the bishop/pope Fabian (†250), the first victim of Decius’s decree. The contest for Fabian’s succession attests to how divided the ecclesial community of Rome was between two tendencies: the rigorists, who considered the lapsi schismatics, pointed to Novatian (†258) as their candidate; the others, whom we can call “moderates”, that is, those who were willing to admit the lapsi, indicated Cornelius (†253) who ended up winning the election. In response to the trust of his supporters, Cornelius endeavored to reconcile the lapsi without requiring rebaptism, but obliging them to public penance. The rigorists allied with Novatian did not swallow the defeat and, since then, began the rivalry between the new bishop and his presbyter.

Novatian led an internal revolt in the Roman church, which even led him to be ordained bishop outside the canonical procedures and to demand the deposition of Cornelius – it is no wonder that many historians consider Novatian the first antipope. In narrating this event, Eusebius of Caesarea does not hide his indignation for Novatian. It is noticeable, however, that this indignation stemmed, in the first place, from the fact that, for him, it was truly inconceivable that a presbyter would think differently from his bishop and, worse still, that he would be insubordinate to him. Rebelling against his bishop was Novatian’s unforgivable crime, his true schism, not his rigorist doctrinal position. Cornelius, in turn, by defending a more inclusive or merciful view regarding the lapsi, sought to ensure the superlative authority of the bishop of Rome.

The followers of Novatian, known as Novatianists, were not reintegrated into the Roman church after the conflict, but formed an autonomous church, unrelated to a specific city, and its members spread to various regions of the Roman world; at the Council of Nicaea (325), the Novatianists subscribed to the Nicene Creed and, therefore, came to be seen as orthodox in faith but dissidents in discipline. In short, the controversy around the libellatici and the schism of Novatian do not immediately point to a doctrinal problem, but to a power struggle between rival groups within the same community, and to a confrontation between hierarchical authorities, such as the bishop and his presbyter, in the face of an unassimilated electoral defeat. Novatian’s quarrel with Cornelius allowed the latter to show the place of a presbyter and the strength of the Roman episcopate.

Eusebius of Caesarea, an ardent defender of episcopal authority against, say, more presbyteral or collegial tendencies, leads us to detest Novatian and consider him a perfidious schismatic. The expulsion of Novatian’s memory, after his act of proclaiming himself bishop without canonical election, leaves us without answers to many questions about Cornelius’s position in defending the lapsi. Despite the poor portrait drawn by Eusebius, Novatian and his movement cannot, with impunity, be seen as minor and defenseless victims of a stronger majority community, as both manifest exclusionary behaviors and seek, with the resources they possess, to elevate their theology to the category of Theology, threatening and persecuting the different.

3.2. The schism of the North African churches in the 4th century

The North of Africa experienced all the consequences of the Decian persecution, including the problem of the lapsi and the difficulties for their ecclesial reintegration. Despite knowing that a large part of the African churches were composed of lapsi (FREND, 1982, p.100), during and after the repression, a deep-rooted devotion to the martyrs who had given testimony of constancy and strength spread. The immense amount of martyrial accounts related to African Christians gives us a good proportion of how much the churches in that region were attached to their heroes and how much martyrdom was important in the constitution of a Christian identity in Africa. It is not difficult to imagine that this martyrial identity soon turned against the acceptance of laypeople and clergy who, for various reasons, preferred to resist death.

The situation worsened when, in 303, the imperial authority launched a new offensive against Christians. This time, the aim was to destroy all copies of the Holy Scriptures, liturgical objects, and burn all churches so that the faithful would not have anywhere to celebrate their mysteries (FREND, 1982, p. 116). These waves of persecution driven by the Roman state can be explained as a socio-political reaction to the Empire’s inability to overcome its fiscal and military problems, which caused continuous struggles between the Roman army and non-Roman armies, called barbarians, who rose against imperial authority. For the Roman elites, this crisis resulted from the abandonment of the ancestral cult to the gods and the popular adherence to Christianity, hence the persecutions during Diocletian’s time (244-311) counted on the participation of municipal and provincial elites, this time complicit in the punishment of Christians.

This new imperial repression in Africa maximized the division between Christians who adhered to a martyrial identity and those, more moderate, who accepted negotiation in the face of danger. The latter were labeled traditores (traitors) because they allegedly handed over copies of the scriptures to the authorities and denounced their fellow believers. With the imperial ascent of Constantine in 311, the persecutions ceased, but in the African area, the result continued to be negative, as an internal struggle within the churches began to prevent the traditores from continuing to participate in the life of faith, especially if they were clergy, since, in this case, it was considered that the sacraments celebrated by them were invalid.

In the city of Carthage, this group, which we can call radical, was led by the presbyter, later bishop, Donatus of Casae Nigrae (†c.355). His stance of total exclusion of the traditores, considered collaborators of the Roman state, originated a conception that the true Church of Christ, being holy and immaculate, should be formed only by those who resisted the Empire and did not fear death: a Church of the pure and the saints who did not compromise with the enemy. Therefore, the liturgical assemblies could not admit the communion of Christ’s traitors nor the ministry of clergy who had apostatized. For all these, if they wished to return to the community, a new baptism was required, and for the clergy, a new ordination. It is worth noting that, by denying the validity of the ordinations, the Donatists found a way to dismantle the hierarchical organization of the North African churches, replacing it with their own hierarchy.

On the other side was the more moderate group, led by the archdeacon (the first among the deacons), later bishop, Caecilian (†c.345), who denied rebaptism and reordinations and considered that the Church, while a pilgrim in this world, comprised both saints and sinners and that it would be impossible to exclude the latter to leave only the former. This wing of the Carthaginian church defended that the validity of the sacraments did not depend on the personal holiness of the minister, but on the ministry received from the Church, which was holy because of Christ.

The case of Donatism in North Africa confronts us with the problem: which was the schismatic community, the Donatist, constituted by the majority of the African episcopate, or the Catholic, represented by the few bishops aligned with the moderate proposal of Caecilian and later Augustine of Hippo? Who separated from whom? From the Donatist point of view, the Catholic community had lost fidelity to Christ’s proposal and, in this sense, had ceased to be a true church. The schismatic act, therefore, would have come from the Catholics. For the Donatists, the corrupt Catholic clergy were not capable of administering valid sacraments, as the action of the Holy Spirit did not benefit the gesture of sinners, even if celebrated in the name of Christ.

With the end of imperial persecutions in 311, resulting from the so-called Constantinian peace, the spirits of the North African bishops did not soften, as Constantine, in an attempt to pacify the region, took the side of Caecilian and his followers, giving them not only the support of the Empire but also economic incentives and prominent political positions. The Donatists saw this as confirmation that the pro-Roman Catholic community was in collusion with the Empire and could not, in any way, be an authentic church. It is worth noting that, in the Donatist accusation against the Catholic community, there is a certain Donatist disdain for the Roman cultural references that marked a part of the North Africans residing in the highly Romanized coastal cities.

The Catholic stance professed by Caecilian’s group was, in fact, aligned with the cultural openness of the Mediterranean Roman world, which postulated universalism, which, in this case, fit well with the idea of the Church’s catholicity. This is why Constantine supported the Catholics, as his government project aimed precisely to assert the universality of the Empire against fragmenting regionalisms. The Donatists, on the other hand, formed by individuals and communities that defended a local North African culture, less Romanized and more exclusivist, did not tolerate the connection between the Church and the Empire, even if only in cultural terms. What can be learned from this North African schism is that ecclesiological and sacramental arguments concealed, beneath them, a socio-political problem that afflicted society as a whole and included an acute discrepancy and rivalry between rural communities, generally aligned with the Donatists, and urban communities, more aligned with the Catholics. If this complex web of relationships is not taken into account, the history of the African schism cannot be understood, and consequently, neither can the History of the Church (BROWN, 2005, p. 251; FIGUINHA, 2009, p. 16; FREND, 1982, p. 126).

4 Schism, heresy, and violence: the limits of orthodoxy

Regarding the relationship between churches, the fifth century was no less turbulent; it may have been even worse, as read, for example, in the Ecclesiastical History by Socrates of Constantinople (380-440), the main witness of the so-called Nestorian schism of 431. Nestorius (386-451) was an Antiochian monk elected bishop of Constantinople in 428. Famous for his piety and eloquence, Nestorius began his mandate by exhorting Emperor Theodosius II (401-450) to purge the land of all heretics if he wanted God to give him victory over the enemy Persian Empire. Socrates’ text (7.29.5 or 7.29.10) shows how, by the generation of 430, there was a faction of clergy in the Church convinced that the Roman State was a good instrument of God to uproot, with the force of arms, the weeds of heresy and schism. The State must use force in the Church to rid it of the error of some, and the Church must help the State in its political needs.

This opinion was not new in itself, as Eusebius of Caesarea (Ecclesiastical History VII, 27.29) held the same view when he narrated the fate of Bishop Paul of Samosata (200-275) at the See of Antioch, who, around 260, decided to express himself, as a bishop, in a way that annoyed the other bishops of Syria. They then turned to the imperial authority to forcibly remove Paul from the bishopric – let us not forget that in 260, the Empire was still persecuting the Church; therefore, this recourse to the pagan Empire shows that, when it came to defending their interests, the bishops saw no problem in approaching the persecutor. Ancient ecclesiastical historians, such as Eusebius and Socrates, mention acts of violence committed both by bishops considered bad and lost, like Nestorius, and by bishops revered today as saints, like Cyril of Alexandria. In the Ecclesiastical History (7.13), Socrates narrates the violence with which Bishop Saint Cyril expelled all Jews from the city and ordered the burning of their synagogues, as well as the episode of the assassination of the Alexandrian philosopher Hypatia (7.15.7). Despite Socrates not having sympathies for Cyril, his account was not fanciful, as he took care not to mix the bishop’s fury and his followers’ actions with the just and admissible zeal demonstrated by those whom the historian calls “holy men” of the Church (GADDIS, 2005, p. 222). Despite this, the destruction of the Serapeum and the persecution of Hypatia were supported by the anti-pagan legislation promulgated by Emperor Theodosius I between 391-392 (CAMERON, 1998, p. 60).

Summary

1 Conceptual Definition

2 Schismatic Act in the History of the Church

3 Schism as a Power Struggle in the Church

3.1 First Example: Novatian Schism in Rome (251)

3.2 Second Example: The Schism of the North African Churches in the Fourth Century

4 Schism, Heresy, and Violence: The Limits of Orthodoxy

5 Conclusion

6 Bibliographic References

1 Conceptual Definition

From an etymological point of view, the term schism, originating from Greek, means the act of separation, division, or rupture that affects a collectivity, particularly within Christianity, by which a group of members of a given community decides to experience aspects of faith or worship in a way different from their initial community. To this end, this group distances itself from common practice in search of a more specific or particular experience of faith, either affirming different doctrinal aspects (as in the case of Arianism or Pelagianism) or advocating a different disciplinary or moral stance (as in the case of Novatianism or Donatism) (STARK, 2007, p. 54).

However, from a historical point of view, it is very difficult to sustain a fixed and universal understanding of schism, as it is observed that religious communities develop, in their own way, the concept of schism guided by their particular traditions and interests, which can expand, harden, or soften the real meaning of rupture or separation. Thus, it is not easy for the contemporary scholar to identify the schismatic act in its empirical sense in the past, as the understanding of schism was often guided by power plays within the communities and became a tool for delegitimizing specific ecclesial subjects intended to be removed from the official scene. This observation forces us, in this text, to inquire about the historical construction of the concept of schism from the point of view of Church History, taking it as part of the institutional development of Christian communities. Therefore, we will conduct a broad and general historical discussion of the concept, considering the concrete manifestations of schismatic acts without, however, particularizing or isolating them as atypical or circumstantial events.

2 Schismatic Act in the History of the Church

As an act of rupture derived from a situation of rebellion, schism is particularly felt when the religious community asserts unity as a fundamental nature, visible in a doctrinal, disciplinary, sacramental, and liturgical body shared by the members of the community; in this case, schism is interpreted as a secession of a part of this community that, from a given moment, takes a particular path, distancing itself from the common tradition. This rupture is then experienced as a trauma, an event of enormous magnitude that is often accompanied by violent conflicts, sometimes deadly, carried out by the majority community that, in an attempt to safeguard unity, invests all its persuasive forces to keep the group considered dissident within the original unity (GADDIS, 2005).

In the Christian case, the communal experience of schism is especially traumatic due to a particular consideration of unity which, in the case of the Gospel of John, is proclaimed by Jesus during the farewell discourse, especially in the high priestly prayer: “Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one” (John 17:11); in the First Letter to the Corinthians (12:12-14), Paul identifies the Church as the mystical body of Christ which, by analogy, must be one, like him, despite the diversity of its members. Thus considered, the schismatic act becomes an attack not only against the community but especially against the mystery of the Body of Christ which the one Church represents.

As can be noted, the early Christian communities did not see schisms as probable and understandable events according to the social logics that govern human groups, whose development often favors separations and dismemberments to allow the survival of heteronomies that, over time, have been assumed as part of the identity of specific communities within a large federation of communities. On the contrary, the communities, despite the diversity of cities, languages, and ethnic backgrounds from which they were composed, professed a unity, confused with a supposed homogeneity, which, in practice, concealed their natural divergences in practices and beliefs (BROWN, 1999, p. 22).

In a period when a developed symbol of faith was not yet necessary and there was not yet an exclusive canon of biblical texts valid for all communities, it is almost impossible to delineate where tolerated diversity (which nevertheless expresses unity) ended and where intolerable diversity (this indeed defined as schism) began. An example of this complicated understanding is found in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 15, when its author, portraying the divergence between the mother community of Jerusalem, led by James, and the daughter community of Antioch, led by Paul and Barnabas, preferred to silence the deep disagreements between the two churches (and between James and Paul), giving the episode an easy resolution that affirmed a very fragile and threatened unity, as revealed by the apostle Paul himself in his Letter to the Galatians, chapter 2. It can be argued that Luke, as a historian of nascent Christianity, was more guided by theology and a providentialist view of History than by the canons of Hellenic historiography, which he should have known (MARGUERAT, 2003, p. 31); however, his theological position of the facts, centered on pneumatic guidance, led to the predominance of a conciliatory view of ecclesial diversities. Since the Acts of the Apostles became a kind of prototype of what came to be called Ecclesiastical History, a term coined by Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea (263-339), it can be said that this Lucan conciliatory view established itself as an original paradigm for ancient Christian authors and remained strong even later, with the general systematization of faith with the Council of Nicaea (325).

Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons (130-202), in his treatise Against Heresies (Book I, 10.2), reinforced the unity of the Church which, according to him, was already spread throughout the East and West, attributing to it the uniformity of faith, tradition, and teaching despite the linguistic variation that characterized the regions of the Roman world where the churches were established. Although his own work denounced the existence and persuasive force of Christian communities that followed another theology, which he called heretical or Gnostic, Irenaeus believed that the unity of belief was the seal of authenticity of the Church to which he belonged. Similarly, the theologian Origen (185-254), in his Homilies on Ezekiel (9.1), considered that unity and communion derived from virtue, while diversity or multiplicity originated from sins, hence schisms, heresies, and dissensions were necessarily read as expressions of that original rebellion that caused the misfortune of the order of creation.

In light of both ancient testimonies, it is evident that the historical diversity and disputes between churches, evident since the so-called Jerusalem Agreement (Acts 15; Gal 2), were covered by a spiritualizing reading, that is, one that minimized the historical and social data, in order to defend an orthodoxy that, we know, did not form without struggles and dissensions. For the ecclesial current represented by Irenaeus and Origen, schisms were not understood simply as something much graver than the separation or individualization of communities, but mainly as a tremendous continuation of sin in the world. By associating diversity with sin and uniformity with grace, ecclesiastical discourses twisted the manifestations of heteronomies and local identities, making them an obstacle to the uniformization that should authenticate the community; thus, diversity came to be seen as something risky and probably an attack on the supposed original uniformity. The case of Irenaeus’s Against Heresies allows us to see how the safeguarding of an incarnate and historical Christology employed a certain plastification of uniformity which, in the future, became a reason for the accusation of schism against what was merely a local response to apostolic faith.

This Irenaean understanding of the Church’s unity, in a way, conditioned the so-called History of Dogmas. It is customary to interpret the stages of the formation of Christian doctrine based on specific generative phases, usually marked with the name of controversies: Trinitarian controversy, Christological controversy, Pneumatological controversy, Iconoclastic controversy, among others. Historians and theologians usually believe that these controversies constitute chronological, therefore historical and real (one might even say natural) stages in the two-thousand-year march of Christianity through History. Curiously, this marking is, in fact, an explanatory abstraction created a posteriori, without the due foundation of reality, provided one looks at historical sources without the lenses of an evolutionary controversialist interpretation of Church History. This observation teaches us that, in writing the history of theology, one must avoid the seduction of Theology of History.

Thus, if schism arises from a controversy, we must then redefine the role of schism in Church History, as controversy (in its various manifestations) constitutes the very ethos of this history: assuming a “normative Christianity” from the origins is more an act of faith than of historiographical investigation which, on the contrary, evidences the extreme heteronomies of the communities, whether juridical, doctrinal, or liturgical (JOHNSON, 2001, p.58). However, attention is needed: not every different understanding on theological matters results in an ecclesial conflict, which leads us to propose the question: why do certain differences in understandings generate conflicts and ruptures while others do not? Why do some conflicts result in agreements (assimilation of difference) and others in schisms (elimination of deviants)? A non-generative reading of Church History (which does not assume unavoidable and naturalized growth phases) leads us to perceive that, in a theological dispute, at least in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, what was generally at stake was the defense of the power of those who established doctrine and not necessarily the doctrine itself, or the deviation from doctrine.

In other words, dogmatic controversies were part of the expressions of clashes between communities or their leaders to assert the superiority of a given ecclesial culture over the culture of another church, as seen, so often, in the confrontations of the churches of Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome between the third and fifth centuries. For example, in the view of Eusebius of Caesarea, the guarantee of the Church’s unity did not lie in the fixation of ideas but in apostolic succession, that is, in the continuity of persons: this choice seems indicative that communities negotiated leadership and power by using controversies as a reason for opposing the “true” to the “false” ministers (CAMERON, 2005, p. 133).

3 Schism as a Power Struggle in the Church: Two Examples

3.1. The Novatian Schism in Rome (251)

Eusebius of Caesarea, in Book VI of his Ecclesiastical History, narrates the events derived from the so-called persecution by Emperor Decius in 249; the imperial decree required all Christians to offer sacrifices to the imperial gods under penalty of death. The sacrifice had to take place before a Roman authority acting as a witness to the act. After the sacrifice, which could simply consist of burning a small stone of incense without any need to believe in the gods, the Christian received a legal certificate, called in Latin libellus, hence those who offered the sacrifice were derogatorily nicknamed libellatici (FREND, 1982, p. 98). To avoid death and, at the same time, offering the sacrifice, many wealthy Christians bribed authorities to have their names inscribed in the libellus without performing the sacrifice. For many Christians, this procedure was a scandal, as it meant that such people were very cowardly and, even worse, had apostatized and, therefore, could no longer participate in the life of the Church. To make matters worse, it was suspected that the libellatici collaborated with the empire, providing information about community members who were not willing to make the imperial commitment. In this case, the schismatic act would be explicit both in offering the sacrifice and in the cowardice before martyrdom, and its condemnation was justified in the face of the betrayal of some community members.

Meanwhile, rigorist currents began to preach that every Christian who became libellaticus lost the grace of baptism and, if they wished to return to the community after the persecution, needed to be rebaptized. Others would not even accept reintegration, even by new baptism. This community drama, which affected the churches of Rome, Alexandria, and even Carthage in North Africa, bears witness to the existence of a framework of internal exclusion in the church that could be as or more violent than imperial persecution; the exclusion of the libellatici or lapsi (those who fell out of fear of martyrdom) became the counterpart of a true intra-ecclesial persecution in which rigorists sought to purge the churches of undesirable members. The attitude of the rigorist factions in these churches could be described as a kind of “witch hunt,” which obviously caused great turbulence among the faithful and the clergy.

This is what happened in Rome after the martyrdom of Bishop/Pope Fabian (†250), the first victim of Decius’ decree. The contention for Fabian’s succession attests to how divided the Roman ecclesial community was between two tendencies: the rigorists, who considered the lapsi schismatics, pointed to Novatian (†258) as their candidate; the others, whom we can call “moderates,” that is, those willing to admit the lapsi, indicated Cornelius (†253), who ended up winning the election. In response to the trust of his supporters, Cornelius endeavored to reconcile the lapsi without requiring new baptism, but obliging them to public penance. The rigorists allied with Novatian did not swallow the defeat and, since then, the rivalry between the new bishop and his presbyter began.

Novatian led an internal revolt in the Roman church, which led him to be ordained bishop outside canonical procedures and to demand Cornelius’ deposition – not surprisingly, many historians consider Novatian the first antipope. Narrating this event, Eusebius of Caesarea does not hide his indignation with Novatian. It is noticeable, however, that this indignation derived primarily from the fact that, for him, it was truly inconceivable that a presbyter would think differently from his bishop and, even worse, that he would rebel against him. Revolting against his bishop was Novatian’s unforgivable crime, his true schism, not his rigorist doctrinal stance. Cornelius, in defending a more inclusive or merciful view towards the lapsi, sought to ensure the superlative authority of the bishop of Rome.

Novatian’s followers, known as Novatians, were not reintegrated into the Roman church after the conflict but formed an autonomous church, detached from a specific city, and its members spread throughout various regions of the Roman world; at the Council of Nicaea (325), the Novatians subscribed to the Nicene creed and, therefore, came to be seen as orthodox in faith but dissenters in discipline. In short, the controversy over the libellatici and the Novatian schism do not immediately point to a doctrinal problem but to a power struggle between rival groups within the same community and to a confrontation between hierarchical authorities, such as the bishop and his presbyter, in the face of an unassimilated electoral defeat. Novatian’s rift with Cornelius provided an opportunity for the latter to show the place of a presbyter and the strength of the Roman episcopate.

Eusebius of Caesarea, a fervent defender of episcopal authority against more presbyterial or collegial tendencies, leads us to detest Novatian and consider him a perfidious schismatic. The erasure of Novatian’s memory after his act of proclaiming himself bishop without a canonical election obliges us to remain without answers to many questions about Cornelius’ position in defending the lapsi. Despite the bad portrait painted by Eusebius, Novatian and his movement cannot be seen as impunely as minority and defenseless victims of a larger and stronger community, for both one and the other manifest exclusionary behaviors and seek, with the resources they possess, to elevate their theology to the category of Theology, threatening and persecuting the different.

3.2. The Schism of the North African Churches in the Fourth Century

North Africa experienced all the consequences of Decius’ persecution, including the problem of the lapsi and the difficulties for their ecclesial reintegration. Although we know that a large part of the African churches were composed of lapsi (FREND, 1982, p.100), a deep devotion to the martyrs who had given testimony of constancy and strength spread during and after the repression. The immense number of martyrdom accounts linked to African Christians gives us a good proportion of how much the churches in that region were attached to their heroes and how important martyrdom was in the constitution of a Christian identity in Africa. It is not difficult to imagine that this martyrial identity would soon turn against the acceptance of laypeople and clerics who, for various reasons, preferred to resist death.

The situation worsened when, in 303, the imperial authority launched a new offensive against Christians. This time, it aimed to destroy all copies of the Sacred Scriptures, liturgical objects, and burn all churches so that the faithful had nowhere to celebrate their mysteries (FREND, 1982, p. 116). These waves of persecution driven by the Roman State can be explained as a political-social reaction to the Empire’s inability to address its fiscal and military problems, resulting in continuous struggles between the Roman army and non-Roman armies, called barbarians, who rebelled against imperial authority. For the Roman elites, this crisis stemmed from the abandonment of ancestral worship of the gods and the popular adherence to Christianity, hence the persecutions of Diocletian’s era (244-311) counted with the participation of municipal and provincial elites, this time complicit in punishing Christians.

This new imperial repression in Africa maximized the division between Christians who adhered to a martyrial identity and those, more moderate, who accepted negotiation in the face of danger. The latter were labeled traditores (traitors) because they supposedly handed over copies of the scriptures to authorities and denounced their fellow believers. With the rise of Emperor Constantine in 311, the persecutions ceased, but in the African area, the result remained negative, as an internal struggle began within the churches to prevent the traditores from continuing to participate in the life of faith, especially if they were clerics, since in this case, it was considered that the sacraments they celebrated were invalid.

In the city of Carthage, this group, which we can call radical, was led by the presbyter, later bishop, Donatus of Casae Nigrae (†c.355). His stance of total exclusion of the traditores, considered collaborators with the Roman State, originated a conception that the true Church of Christ, being holy and immaculate, should be formed only by those who resisted the Empire and did not fear death: a Church of the pure and holy who did not compromise with the enemy. Therefore, liturgical assemblies could not admit the communion of Christ’s traitors nor the ministry of clerics who apostatized. To all these, if they wished to return to the community, a new baptism was required, and for clerics, a new ordination. It is worth noting that by denying the validity of ordinations, the Donatists found a way to dismantle the hierarchical organization of the North African churches, replacing it with their own hierarchy.

On the other side was the more moderate group, led by the archdeacon (the first among the deacons), later bishop, Caecilian (†c.345), who denied rebaptism and reordinations and considered that the Church, while pilgrimaging in this world, comprised both saints and sinners and that it would be impossible to exclude the latter to leave only the former. This faction of the Carthaginian church argued that the validity of the sacraments did not depend on the personal holiness of the minister but on the ministry received from the Church, holy because of Christ.

The case of Donatism in North Africa confronts us with the problem: which was the schismatic community, the Donatist one, constituted by most of the African episcopate, or the Catholic one, represented by the few bishops aligned with Caecilian’s moderate proposal and later with Augustine of Hippo? Who separated from whom? From the Donatist point of view, the Catholic community had lost fidelity to Christ’s proposal and, in this sense, ceased to be a true church. The schismatic act, therefore, would have originated from the Catholics. For the Donatists, the corrupt Catholic clergy was not capable of administering valid sacraments because the Holy Spirit’s action did not benefit the gestures of sinners, even if performed in the name of Christ.

With the end of the imperial persecutions in 311, the result of the so-called Constantinian peace, the spirits of the North African bishops did not subside, as Constantine, in an attempt to pacify the region, sided with Caecilian and his followers, giving them not only the support of the Empire but also economic incentives and a prominent political position. The Donatists saw this as confirmation that the pro-Roman Catholic community was colluding with the Empire and could not, in any way, be an authentic church. It is worth noting that the Donatist accusation against the Catholic community conceals a certain Donatist disdain for the Roman cultural references that marked a part of the North Africans residing in the highly Romanized coastal cities.

The Catholic stance professed by Caecilian’s group aligned with the cultural openness of the Mediterranean Roman world, which postulated universalism, which in this case, aligned well with the idea of the Church’s catholicity. This is why Constantine supported the Catholics, as his government project aimed precisely to affirm the universality of the Empire against fragmenting regionalisms. On the other hand, the Donatists, composed of individuals and communities defending a local North African culture, less Romanized and more exclusivist, could not tolerate the connection between the Church and the Empire, even if only in cultural terms. What can be gleaned from this North African schism is that the ecclesiological and sacramental arguments concealed, underneath, a socio-political problem that afflicted society as a whole and included a sharp discrepancy and rivalry between rural communities, generally aligned with the Donatists, and urban communities, more aligned with the Catholics. If this complicated web of relations is not considered, it is impossible to understand the history of the African schism and, consequently, even the History of the Church (BROWN, 2005, p. 251; FIGUINHA, 2009, p. 16; FREND, 1982, p. 126).

4 Schism, Heresy, and Violence: The Limits of Orthodoxy

Regarding the relationship between churches, the fifth century was no less turbulent; it may have been even worse, as read, for example, in the Ecclesiastical History by Socrates of Constantinople (380-440), the main testimony of the so-called Nestorian schism of 431. Nestorius (386-451) was an Antiochene monk elected bishop of Constantinople in 428. Famous for his piety and eloquence, Nestorius began his mandate by exhorting Emperor Theodosius II (401-450) to purge the land of all heretics if he wanted God to grant him victory over the enemy Persian Empire. Socrates’ text (7.29.5 or 7.29.10) shows how, by 430, there was already a faction of clerics convinced that the Roman State was a good instrument of God to uproot, by force of arms, the weeds of heresy and schism. The State’s role is to use force in the Church to rid it of the error of some, and the Church’s role is to help the State in its political needs.

This opinion, after all, was not new, as Eusebius of Caesarea (Ecclesiastical History VII, 27.29) held the same view when he narrated the fate of Bishop Paul of Samosata (200-275) in the See of Antioch, who, around 260, decided to express himself, as bishop, in a way that displeased the other bishops of Syria. These then turned to imperial authority to forcibly remove Paul from the bishopric – let us not forget that in 260, the Empire was still persecuting the Church; therefore, this appeal to the pagan Empire shows that, when it came to defending their interests, the bishops saw no problem in approaching the persecutor. Ancient ecclesiastical historians, like Eusebius and Socrates, mention acts of violence committed by both bishops considered bad and lost, like Nestorius, and also by bishops venerated today as saints, like Cyril of Alexandria. In the Ecclesiastical History (7.13), Socrates narrates the violence with which Bishop Saint Cyril expelled all the Jews from the city and ordered the burning of their synagogues, as well as the episode of the murder of the Alexandrian philosopher Hypatia (7.15.7). Although Socrates did not sympathize with Cyril, his account was not fanciful, as he took care not to confuse the bishop’s fury and that of his followers with the just and admissible zeal shown by those whom the historian calls “holy men” of the Church (GADDIS, 2005, p. 222). Despite this, the destruction of the Serapeum temple and the persecution of Hypatia are based on the anti-pagan legislation promulgated by Emperor Theodosius I between 391-392 (CAMERON, 1998, p. 60).

In these ancient narratives, it is difficult to separate the concept of heresy from that of schism; both are behaviors flagrantly contrary to the unity of the Church and the authority of its pastors. Therefore, we see that bishops almost always resort to State action to eradicate from the Church all forms of different ecclesial expression: from a strictly historical point of view, the maintenance of unity and the eradication of error stem from the use of violence, both by the State and the Church itself. It is important to note that the radicalization of certain clerical sectors (which were not few) happened during, but mainly after, the end of the persecutions against faith: what would explain this? Hadn’t the churches suffered enough over three centuries? Didn’t they preach peace? Weren’t they the brides of Christ, the prince of peace? It is curious to observe that this radicalization, initially directed at Jews, pagans, and heretics, also turned against the bishops and clerics themselves (initially not heretical) and, through a lasting struggle for power within the Christian ecumene, the violence against Jews, pagans, and heretics diminished somewhat to concentrate forces against bishops among themselves.

It was believed that the use of violence was just because the effect of error present in schisms, heresies, and idolatries was much worse. The Egyptian monk Shenoute (or Shenouda) of Atripe (385-466), abbot of the White Monastery of Sohag, once invaded the house of a non-Christian aristocrat and destroyed all the idols he found. Accused of committing violence and the crime of invasion and banditry, he replied, “there is no crime for those who possess Christ” (GADDIS, 2007, p. 1). Shenoute’s solution, besides being illegal, reveals that Christians could also forge their own understanding of what crime, violence, error, schism, and heresy were. The latter were not objective things but the result of a particular interpretation that could vary according to more radical or moderate positions. Thus, instead of being shocked to see that ancient ecclesial communities could be extremely violent (GADDIS, 2007; JENKINS, 2013), we need to rethink the sociological meaning of conflict and understand it in light of the historical horizon of the characters involved.

Conflict or conflict management in the fourth and fifth centuries was an important mechanism in defining episcopal authority (let us remember the quarrel between Novatian and Cornelius in Rome or Donatus and Caecilian in Carthage): fighting against Novatian, considered by Catholics a schismatic and heretic, made Cornelius an even stronger bishop because he was a defender of the faith, and helped him to define his role as the head of the Roman church much more clearly and, moreover, placed him at the forefront of the Italian churches, as the episode justified the deposition of the bishops who illicitly ordained Novatian. In Carthage, Donatus’s position was aligned with the majority opinion of the Numidian bishops who, dissatisfied with the situation of their colleagues considered collaborators, invalidated their ordination, showing that combating the so-called traitors was part of the bishop’s office in the true Church, that of the pure and immaculate Donatists. In other words, episcopal conflicts, when effectively managed, conferred enormous consolidation of their authority on their managers on the one hand, and on the other, their personal charisma. The condemnatory declaration of heresy or schism was part of the rhetorical and political repertoire mobilized by bishops in their efforts to sustain their power by contesting the power of their competitors.

5 Conclusion

Given the exposed framework, it is concluded that, historically speaking, schism may be a sectarian act, but it is more properly a way of managing differences – social, cultural, doctrinal, and liturgical – within a given ecclesial community or between two or more local churches. Moreover, schism alludes to the multiple regional, political, and social differences that marked the Roman Empire and, by extension, also marked the Christian communities that developed on its soil. It is misleading to assume that churches, past and present, respond only to their own demands and that their histories run parallel to the social history of their environment. In this case, schism needs to be reinterpreted in a key that understands that diversity, not uniformity, is consubstantial with the very identity of Christianity.

Summary

1 Conceptual definition

2 Schismatic act in the History of the Church

3 Schism as a struggle for power in the Church

3.1 First example: the Novatian schism in Rome (251)

3.2 Second example: the schism of the North African churches in the fourth century

4 Schism, heresy, and violence: the limits of orthodoxy

5 Conclusion

6 Bibliographic references

1 Conceptual definition

From an etymological point of view, the term schism, originating from Greek, means the act of separation, division, or rupture that affects a community, particularly within Christianity, by which a group of members of a given community decides to experience aspects of faith or worship in a different way from their original community. To do so, this group distances itself from common practice to seek a more specific or particular experience of faith, sometimes affirming different doctrinal aspects (as in the case of Arianism or Pelagianism), or defending a different disciplinary or moral stance (as in the case of Novatianism or Donatism) (STARK, 2007, p. 54).

However, from a historical point of view, it is very difficult to sustain a fixed and universal understanding of schism, as it is perceived that religious communities elaborate, in their own way, the concept of schism guided by their traditions and particular interests, which can expand, harden or flexibilize the real meaning of rupture or separation. Thus, it is not easy for the contemporary scholar to identify the schismatic act in its empirical sense in the past, as the understanding of schism was often guided by power games within communities and became an instrument for delegitimizing specific ecclesial subjects that were intended to be removed from the official scene. This observation will force us, in this text, to inquire about the historical construction of the concept of schism from the point of view of Church History, taking it as part of the institutional development of Christian communities. Therefore, we will make a broad and general historical discussion of the concept, taking into account the concrete manifestations of schismatic acts without, however, particularizing or isolating them as atypical or circumstantial events.

2 Schismatic act in the History of the Church

Being a rupture act derived from a situation of rebellion, schism is particularly felt when the religious community affirms unity as a fundamental nature, visible in a doctrinal, disciplinary, sacramental, and liturgical body shared by community members; in this case, schism is interpreted as the secession of a part of this community that, from a given moment, takes a particular path, distancing itself from the common tradition. This rupture is then experienced as a trauma, an event of enormous magnitude that, not rarely, is accompanied by violent conflicts, sometimes mortal, practiced by the majority community that, in order to safeguard unity, invests all its persuasive forces to keep the group considered dissident within the original unity (GADDIS, 2005).

In the Christian case, the communal experience of schism is especially traumatic due to a particular consideration of unity which, in the case of the Gospel of John, is proclaimed by Jesus during the farewell discourse, especially in the priestly prayer: “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one” (Jn 17:11); in the First Letter to the Corinthians (12:12-14), Paul identifies the Church with the mystical body of Christ which, by analogy, must be one, as he is, despite the diversity of its members. Thus considered, the schismatic act becomes an attack not only against the community but especially against the mystery of the Body of Christ which the one Church represents.

As can be noted, the primitive Christian communities did not see schisms as probable and understandable events according to the social logics that govern human groups, whose development often favors separations and dismemberments to allow the survival of heteronomies that, over time, were assumed as part of the identity of precise communities within a large federation of communities. On the contrary, the communities, despite the diversity of cities, languages, and ethnic origins from which they were framed, professed a unity, confused with a supposed homogeneity, which, in practice, concealed their natural divergences of practices and beliefs (BROWN, 1999, p. 22).

In a period when there was not yet an elaborate symbol of faith and there was not yet an exclusive canon of biblical texts valid for all communities, it is almost impossible to delineate up to where tolerated diversity (which nevertheless expresses unity) went and where intolerable diversity began (this one indeed defined as schism). An example of this complicated understanding is found in the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 15, when its author, portraying the divergence between the mother community of Jerusalem, led by James, and the daughter community of Antioch, led by Paul and Barnabas, preferred to silence the profound disagreements between two churches (and between James and Paul), giving the episode an easy resolution that affirmed a very fragile and threatened unity, as revealed by the apostle Paul himself in his Letter to the Galatians, chapter 2. It can be argued that Luke, as a historian of nascent Christianity, was guided more by theology and a providentialist view of History than by the canons of Hellenic historiography, which he should know (MARGUERAT, 2003, p. 31); however, his theological position on the facts, centered on pneumatic guidance, led to the predominance of a conciliatory view of ecclesial diversities. Once the Acts of the Apostles became a kind of prototype of what came to be called Ecclesiastical History, an expression coined by Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea (263-339), it can be said that this Lucan conciliatory view asserted itself as the original paradigm for ancient Christian authors and continued strong even later, when the general systematization of faith with the Council of Nicaea (325).

Bishop Irenaeus of Lyon (130-202), in his treatise Against Heresies (Book I, 10,2), reinforced the unity of the Church which, according to him, was already spread throughout the East and West, attributing to it the uniformity of faith, tradition, and teaching despite the linguistic variation that characterized the regions of the Roman world where churches were established. Although his own work denounced the existence and persuasive force of Christian communities following another theology, which he called heretical or Gnostic, Irenaeus believed that the unity of belief was the seal of authenticity of the Church to which he belonged. Similarly, the theologian Origen (185-254), in his Homilies on Ezekiel (9,1), considered that unity and communion derived from virtue, while diversity or multiplicity originated in sins, hence schisms, heresies, and dissensions were necessarily read as expressions of that original rebellion that caused the disgrace of the order of creation.

In light of both ancient testimonies, it is seen that the historical diversity and disputes between churches, evident since the so-called Agreement of Jerusalem (Acts 15; Gal 2), were covered by a spiritualizing reading, that is, which minimized the historical and social fact, with a view to defending an orthodoxy that, we know, was not formed without struggles and dissensions. For the ecclesial current represented by Irenaeus and Origen, schisms were not understood as just something much more serious than the separation or individualization of communities, but primarily as a tremendous continuation of sin in the world. By associating diversity with sin and uniformity with grace, ecclesiastical discourses contorted manifestations of heteronomies and local identities, making them an obstacle to the uniformization that should authenticate the community; thus, diversity came to be seen as something risky and, probably, an attack against the supposed original uniformity. The case of Against Heresies by Irenaeus allows us to see how the safeguard of an incarnate and historical Christology made use of a certain plasticity of uniformity that, in the future, became a reason for accusing of schism what was merely a local response to apostolic faith.

This Irenaean understanding of the unity of the Church, in a way, conditioned the so-called History of Dogmas. It is customary to interpret the stages of the formation of Christian doctrine based on specific generative phases, usually labeled with the name of controversies: Trinitarian controversy, Christological controversy, Pneumatological controversy, Iconoclastic controversy, among others. Historians and theologians usually believe that these controversies constitute chronological, therefore historical and real (one might even say natural) stages of Christianity’s bimillennial march through History. Curiously, this marking is actually an explanatory abstraction created a posteriori, without the proper foundation of reality, as long as one looks at historical sources without the lenses of an evolutionary controversial interpretation of Church History. This observation teaches us that when doing the history of theology, one must avoid the seduction of Theology of History.

Thus, if schism arises from a controversy, we must then redefine the role of schism in the History of the Church, as controversy (in its various manifestations) constitutes the very ethos of this history: assuming a “normative Christianity” from the origins is more an act of faith than of historiographical investigation which, on the contrary, evidences the extreme heteronomies of communities, whether legal, doctrinal, or liturgical (JOHNSON, 2001, p.58). However, attention is needed: not every different understanding of theological matter results in ecclesial conflict, which leads us to propose the question: why do certain differences in understandings generate conflicts and ruptures while others do not? Why do some conflicts result in agreements (assimilation of difference) and others in schisms (elimination of deviants)? A non-generative reading of Church History (which does not assume unavoidable and naturalized phases of growth) leads us to realize that, in a theological dispute, at least in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, generally what was at stake was the defense of the power of those who established doctrine and not the doctrine itself or its deviation.

In other words, dogmatic controversies were part of the expressions of clashes between communities or their leaders to assert the superiority of a given ecclesial culture over the culture of another church, as seen many times in the confrontations of the churches of Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome between the third and fifth centuries. In the view, for example, of Eusebius of Caesarea, the guarantee of the unity of the Church did not reside in the fixation of ideas but in apostolic succession, that is, in the continuity of people: this choice seems indicative that communities negotiated leadership and power by using controversies as a reason for opposing the “true” to the “false” ministers (CAMERON, 2005, p. 133).

3 Schism as a struggle for power in the Church: two examples

3.1. The Novatian schism in Rome (251)

Eusebius of Caesarea, in Book VI of his Ecclesiastical History, narrates the events derived from the so-called persecution of Emperor Decius in 249; the imperial decree required all Christians to offer sacrifices to the imperial gods, under penalty of death. The sacrifice had to take place before a Roman authority as a witness to the act. After the sacrifice, which could simply consist of burning a pebble of incense without any need to believe in the gods, the Christian received a legal certificate, called, in Latin, libellus, hence those who offered the sacrifice were pejoratively nicknamed libellatici (FREND, 1982, p. 98). To avoid death and, at the same time, the offering of sacrifice, many wealthy Christians bribed the authorities so that their names were inscribed in the libellus without them making the sacrifice. For many Christians, this procedure was a scandal as it meant that such people were very cowardly and, worse still, had apostatized and, therefore, could no longer participate in the life of the Church. To worsen the situation, it was suspected that the libellatici collaborated with the empire by providing information about community members who were not willing to make the imperial commitment. In this case, the schismatic act would be explicit both in offering the sacrifice and in cowardice in the face of martyrdom, and its condemnation was justified in the face of the betrayal of some community members.

In the meantime, rigorist currents began to preach that every Christian who became a libellaticus lost the grace of baptism and, if they wanted to return to the community after the persecution, they needed to be rebaptized. Others would not even accept reintegration, even by new baptism. This community drama, which affected the churches of Rome, Alexandria, and even Carthage, in North Africa, testifies to the existence of an internal exclusion framework in the church that could be as violent as imperial persecution; the exclusion of the libellatici or lapsi (that is, those who fell out of fear of martyrdom) became the reverse of a true intra-ecclesial persecution in which rigorists sought to expel undesirable members from the churches. The attitude of rigorist sectors in these churches could be described as a kind of “witch hunt”, which evidently caused great turmoil among the faithful and the clergy.

This is what happened in Rome when Bishop/Pope Fabian (†250), the first victim of Decius’s decree, was martyred. The struggle for the succession of Fabian attests to how divided the ecclesial community of Rome was between two tendencies: the rigorists, who considered the lapsi schismatics, appointed Novatian (†258) as their candidate; the others, whom we can call “moderates”, that is, those who were willing to admit the lapsi, indicated Cornelius (†253) who ended up winning the election. In response to the trust of his supporters, Cornelius made efforts to reconcile the lapsi without requiring new baptism, but obliging them to public penance. The rigorists allied with Novatian did not swallow the defeat and, from then on, the rivalry between the new bishop and his presbyter began.

Novatian led an internal revolt in the Roman church, which even led him to be ordained bishop outside canonical procedures and to demand Cornelius’s deposition – not surprisingly, many historians consider Novatian the first antipope. In narrating this event, Eusebius of Caesarea does not hide his indignation at Novatian. It is perceived, however, that this indignation stemmed, first of all, from the fact that, for him, it was truly inconceivable that a presbyter thought differently from his bishop and, worse still, that he would insubordinate to him. Revolting against his bishop was Novatian’s unforgivable crime, his true schism, not his rigorist doctrinal position. Cornelius, in turn, defending a more inclusive or merciful view towards the lapsi, sought to ensure the superlative authority of the bishop of Rome.

The adherents of Novatian, known as Novatianists, were not reintegrated into the Roman church after the conflict, but formed an autonomous church, not linked to a specific city, and its members spread to various regions of the Roman world; at the Council of Nicaea (325), the Novatianists subscribed to the Nicene creed and, therefore, came to be seen as orthodox in faith but dissenters in discipline. In short, the controversy around the libellatici and the Novatian schism does not immediately point to a doctrinal problem, but to a power struggle between rival groups within the same community, and to a confrontation between hierarchical authorities, such as the bishop and his presbyter, in the face of an unassimilated electoral defeat. The feud of Novatian against Cornelius gave rise to the latter showing the place of a presbyter and the strength of the Roman episcopate.

Eusebius of Caesarea, an ardent defender of episcopal authority against tendencies, let us say, more presbyterian or collegial, leads us to detest Novatian and consider him a wicked schismatic. The purge of Novatian’s memory, after his attitude of proclaiming himself bishop without canonical election, leaves us without answers to many questions about Cornelius’s position in defending the lapsi. Despite the poor portrait drawn by Eusebius, Novatian and his movement cannot, with impunity, be seen as minority and defenseless victims of a stronger majority community, as both manifest exclusionary behaviors and seek, with the resources they have, to elevate their theology to the category of Theology, threatening and persecuting the different.

3.2. The schism of the North African churches in the fourth century

North Africa experienced all the consequences of Decius’s persecution, including the problem of the lapsi and the difficulties of their ecclesial reintegration. Despite knowing that a large part of the African churches was composed of lapsi (FREND, 1982, p.100), during and after the repression, a deep devotion to the martyrs who had given testimony of constancy and strength spread. The immense amount of martyrdom accounts linked to African Christians gives us a good proportion of how much the churches of that region were attached to their heroes and how important martyrdom was in constituting a Christian identity in Africa. It is not difficult to imagine that this martyrial identity would soon turn against the acceptance of laypeople and clergy who, for various reasons, preferred to resist death.

The situation worsened when, in 303, the imperial authority launched a new offensive against Christians. This time, it was intended to destroy all copies of the Sacred Scriptures, liturgical objects, and burn all churches so that the faithful would not have a place to celebrate their mysteries (FREND, 1982, p. 116). These waves of persecution driven by the Roman State can be explained as a political-social reaction to the Empire’s inability to overcome its fiscal and military problems, which caused continuous struggles between the Roman army and non-Roman armies, called barbarians, who rebelled against imperial authority. For Roman elites, this crisis stemmed from the abandonment of ancestral worship of the gods and the popular adherence to Christianity, hence the persecutions during Diocletian’s reign (244-311) had the participation of municipal and provincial elites, this time complicit in the punishment of Christians.

This new imperial repression in Africa maximized the division between Christians adhering to a martyrial identity and those, more moderate, who accepted to negotiate in the face of danger. The latter were labeled traditores (traitors) because they supposedly handed over the scriptures to the authorities and denounced their brothers in faith. With the imperial ascension of Constantine in 311, the persecutions ceased, but in the African area, the result remained negative, as an internal struggle within the churches began to prevent the traditores from continuing to participate in the life of faith, especially if they were clergy, since, in this case, it was considered that the sacraments celebrated by them were invalid.

In the city of Carthage, this group, which we can call radical, was led by the presbyter, later bishop, Donatus of Casae Nigrae (†c.355). His stance of total exclusion of the traditores, considered collaborators of the Roman State, originated a conception that the true Church of Christ, being holy and immaculate, should be formed solely by those who resisted the Empire and did not fear death: a Church of pure and holy who did not compromise with the enemy. Therefore, liturgical assemblies could not admit the communion of Christ’s traitors nor the ministry of clergy who apostatized. To all these, if they wished to return to the community, new baptism was required and, for the clergy, new ordination. It is worth noting that by denying the validity of ordinations, the Donatists found a way to dismantle the hierarchical organization of North African churches, replacing it with their own hierarchy.

On the other side was the more moderate group, led by the archdeacon (the first among deacons), later bishop, Cecilian (†c.345), who denied rebaptism and reordinations and considered that the Church, while a pilgrim in this world, comprised both saints and sinners and that it would be impossible to exclude the latter to leave only the former. This wing of the Carthaginian church defended that the validity of the sacraments did not depend on the personal holiness of the minister, but on the ministry received from the Church, which was holy because of Christ.

The case of Donatism in North Africa places us in front of the problem: which was the schismatic community, the Donatist, constituted by the majority of the African episcopate, or the Catholic, represented by the few bishops aligned with Cecilian’s moderate proposal and later by Augustine of Hippo? Who separated from whom? From the Donatist point of view, the Catholic community had lost fidelity to Christ’s proposal and, in this sense, had ceased to be a true church. The schismatic act, therefore, would have come from the Catholics. For the Donatists, the Catholic clergy, corrupted, were not able to administer valid sacraments, since the action of the Holy Spirit did not benefit the gesture of sinners, even if celebrated in the name of Christ.

With the end of imperial persecutions in 311, the result of the so-called Constantinian peace, the spirits of the North African bishops did not cool, as Constantine, in an attempt to pacify the region, sided with Cecilian and his followers, giving them not only the support of the Empire but also economic incentive and a prominent political position. The Donatists saw in this the confirmation that the pro-Roman Catholic community was in collusion with the Empire and could not, in any way, be an authentic church. It is worth noting that in the Donatist accusation against the Catholic community lies a certain Donatist disdain for the Roman cultural references that marked a part of the North Africans residing in the highly Romanized cities of the coast.

The Catholic stance professed by Cecilian’s group aligned, in fact, with the cultural openness of the Mediterranean Roman world which postulated universalism which, in this case, matched well with the idea of the catholicity of the Church. That is why Constantine supported the Catholics because his government project sought precisely to affirm the universality of the Empire against fragmenting regionalisms. The Donatists, on the other hand, formed by individuals and communities defending a local North African culture, less Romanized and more exclusivist, did not tolerate the connection between the Church and the Empire, even if only in cultural terms. What can be learned from this North African schism is that the arguments of an ecclesiological and sacramental nature hid, underneath, a socio-political problem that afflicted society as a whole and which included an acute discrepancy and rivalry between rural communities, generally aligned with the Donatists, and urban communities, more aligned with the Catholics. If this complicated web of relationships is not taken into account, it is impossible to understand the history of the African schism and, consequently, even the History of the Church (BROWN, 2005, p. 251; FIGUINHA, 2009, p. 16; FREND, 1982, p. 126).

4 Schism, heresy, and violence: the limits of orthodoxy

Regarding the relationship between the churches, the fifth century was no less turbulent; it may have been even worse, as can be read, for example, in the Ecclesiastical History by Socrates of Constantinople (380-440), the main testimony of the so-called Nestorian schism of 431. Nestorius (386-451) was an Antiochene monk elected bishop of Constantinople in 428. Famous for his piety and eloquence, Nestorius began his mandate by exhorting Emperor Theodosius II (401-450) to purge the land of all heretics if he wanted God to give him victory over the Persian enemy Empire. Socrates’ text (7.29.5 or 7.29.10) shows how, already in the generation of 430, there was a wing of clergy in the Church convinced that the Roman State was a good instrument of God to uproot, with the force of arms, the weeds of heresy and schism. The State must use force in the Church to rid it of the error of some, and the Church must help the State in its political needs.

This opinion, moreover, was not, in itself, new, as Eusebius of Caesarea (Ecclesiastical History VII, 27.29) held the same opinion when he related the fate of Bishop Paul of Samosata (200-275) in the See of Antioch, who, around 260, decided to express himself, as bishop, in a way that displeased the other bishops of Syria. These then resorted to imperial authority to forcibly remove Paul from the bishopric – let us not forget that in 260, the Empire still persecuted the Church; therefore, this recourse to the pagan Empire shows that when it came to defending their interests, the bishops saw no problem in approaching the persecutor. Ancient ecclesiastical historians, like Eusebius and Socrates, mention acts of violence committed by both bishops considered bad and lost, like Nestorius, and by bishops venerated today as saints, like Cyril of Alexandria. In Ecclesiastical History (7.13), Socrates narrates the violence with which Bishop Saint Cyril extirpated all the Jews from the city and ordered their synagogues to be burned, as well as the episode of the assassination of the Alexandrian philosopher Hypatia (7.15.7). Although Socrates did not sympathize with Cyril, his account was not fanciful, as he took care not to mix the bishop’s fury and his supporters with the just and admissible zeal demonstrated by those the historian calls “holy men” of the Church (GADDIS, 2005, p. 222). Despite this, the destruction of the Serapeum and the persecution of Hypatia were sustained by the anti-pagan legislation promulgated by Emperor Theodosius I between 391-392 (CAMERON, 1998, p. 60).

In these ancient narratives, it is difficult to separate the concept of heresy from that of schism; both are behaviors flagrantly contrary to the unity of the Church and the authority of its pastors. Therefore, we see that bishops almost always resort to the State’s action to eradicate from the Church any form of different ecclesial expression: from a strictly historical point of view, maintaining unity and eradicating error result from the use of violence, both by the State and the Church itself. It is important to note that the radicalization of certain clerical sectors (which were not few) occurred during, but mainly after, the end of persecutions against the faith: what would explain this? Had the churches not suffered enough over three centuries? Did they not preach peace? Were they not the spouses of Christ, the prince of peace? It is curious to observe that this radicalization, initially aimed at Jews, pagans, and heretics, also targeted bishops and clergy (initially not heretics), and through a lasting struggle for power within the Christian ecumene, the violence against Jews, pagans, and heretics decreased a little to concentrate forces against bishops among themselves.

It was believed that the use of violence was just because the effect of the error present in schisms, heresies, and idolatries was much worse. The Egyptian monk Shenoute (or Shenouda) of Atripe (385-466), abbot of the White Monastery of Sohag, once invaded the house of a non-Christian aristocrat and destroyed all the idols he found. Accused of having committed violence and the crime of invasion and banditry, he replied: “there is no crime for those who possess Christ” (GADDIS, 2007, p. 1). Shenoute’s solution, besides being illegal, reveals that Christians could also forge their own understanding of what was crime, violence, error, schism, and heresy. The latter were not objective things, but the result of a particular interpretation that could vary according to more radical or more moderate positions. Thus, instead of being astonished to see that ancient ecclesial communities could be extremely violent (GADDIS, 2007; JENKINS, 2013), we need to rethink the sociological meaning of conflict and understand it in the light of the historical horizon of the characters involved.

The conflict or the management of conflict in the fourth and fifth centuries was an important mechanism in defining episcopal authority (let us remember the case of the quarrel between Novatian and Cornelius in Rome, or Donatus and Cecilian in Carthage): fighting against Novatian, considered by Catholics a schismatic and heretic, made Cornelius an even stronger bishop, as a defender of the faith, and helped him define his role as head of the Roman church much more clearly and, moreover, placed him at the forefront of the Italian churches, as the episode justified the deposition of the bishops who illicitly ordained Novatian. In Carthage, Donatus’s position was articulated with the majority opinion of the Numidian bishops who, dissatisfied with the situation of their colleagues considered collaborators, invalidated their ordination, which shows that fighting the considered traitors was part of the bishop’s office of the true Church, that of the pure and immaculate Donatists. In other words, episcopal conflicts, when effectively managed, conferred enormous consolidation of their authority on their managers, on one side, and their personal charisma, on the other. The condemnatory declaration of heresy or schism was part of the rhetorical and political repertoire mobilized by bishops in the effort to sustain their power by contesting the power of their competitors.

5 Conclusion

Given the presented framework, it is concluded that, historically speaking, schism may indeed be a sectarian act, but it is more properly a way of managing differences – social, cultural, doctrinal, and liturgical – within a given ecclesial community or between two or more local churches. Furthermore, schism alludes to the multiple regional, political, and social differences that marked the Roman Empire and, by extension, also marked the Christian communities that developed on its soil. It is misleading to suppose that churches, yesterday and today, respond only to their own demands and that their histories run parallel to the social history of their environment. In this case, schism needs to be reinterpreted in a key that understands that diversity, not uniformity, is consubstantial with the very identity of Christianity.

This does not mean, as previously stated, that the experience of rupture within the churches was not experienced as something painful and scandalous, however, we cannot forget that the ecclesial communities themselves, when defining and condemning schisms, sought to affirm their idiosyncrasies and, in this sense, defended their perspective as winners, as we find, for example, in the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius of Caesarea. This bishop, when writing his work, knew that he was a member of an empire led by a Christian emperor and that bishops, successors of the apostles, were also true Roman magistrates who occupied the seats of the cities of a universal empire and, therefore, were men of power. His History reflects this highly privileged situation of the monarchical episcopate, a type of ecclesial government that slowly imposed itself over other more collegial forms of government. When writing the Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius praised the episcopal tradition and elevated it to the condition of a paradigm of the very apostolicity of the Church, which he saw as the true Church, the good remnant of all the sects and schisms of the previous period. Not that he ingeniously manipulated history in favor of his party, but it is hard not to notice that, as a bishop and ally of the Empire, his view of the facts matched his position in the world.

From the observation that the historical sources we have are products of Christian currents that emerged victorious from their clashes and, therefore, are depreciative discourses of differences, it is very difficult to understand the real meaning of schisms, especially for the groups that opted for them as a condition for the survival of their own faith. Thus, historiography and theology are invited to overcome the teleological vision that marked the History of the Church, from yesterday and today, to find, beneath the rubble of damnatio memoriae (the condemnation of aspects of the past) the most convenient elements to elaborate their own reading of the History of the Church.

André Miatello, UFMG/FAJE – Brazil, Original Portuguese

6 Bibliographic references

BROWN, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom. Trans. Eduardo Nogueira; Rev. Saul Barata. Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 1999.

__________. Augustine of Hippo: A Biography. Trans. Vera Ribeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2005.

CAMERON, Averil. The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity, 395-600. Trans. Teófilo de Lozoya. Barcelona: Crítica, 1998.

CAMERON, Euan. Interpreting Christian History. The Challenge of the Churches’ Past. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

FIGUINHA, Matheus Coutinho. Servants of God. Monasticism, Power and Orthodoxy in Augustine. São Paulo: Annablume, 2009.

FREND, W. H. C. The Early Church. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1982.

GADDIS, Michael. There is no crime for those who have Christ. Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 2005.

IRVIN, Dale; SUNQUIST, Scott W. History of the World Christian Movement. Volume I: Early Christianity to 1453. São Paulo: Paulus, 2004.

JENKINS, Philip. Holy Wars. How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years. Trans. Carlos Szlak. Rio de Janeiro: LeYa, 2013.

JOHNSON, Paul. A History of Christianity. Trans. Cristiana de Assis Serra. Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 2001.

MARGUERAT, Daniel. The First Christian Historian. The Acts of the Apostles. Trans. Fredericus Antonius Stein. São Paulo: Paulus; Loyola, 2003.

STARK, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity. How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries. Turin: Lindau s.r.l., 2007.

Países	Acessos
Brazil	278.404
Colombia	85.978
Mexico	90.041
United States	29.436
Panama	9.007
Guatemala	17.244
Outros Países (170)	247.273
Total	815.401