The Bible in Christian North Africa: The Donatist World (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Bible in Christian North Africa: The Donatist World Michael Heintz Maureen A. Tilley. The Bible in Christian North Africa: The Donatist World. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997. Pp. vii + 232. $32.00 (pb). Tilley has written an interesting and informative book. Based upon a dissertation directed by Elizabeth Clark, this volume provides an introduction to the Donatist “world” by examining precisely how they made use of the Scriptures in “constructing” and “maintaining” that world. The book begins with an important methodological preface. Utilizing methods found in the sociology of religion and some trends in New Testament scholarship (the work, e.g., of W. Meeks and H. Clark Kee), Tilley offers a hermeneutic of “suspicious retrieval”—hoping to steer a safe course between the Scylla which accepts as unbiased the characterizations of the Donatists found in writers such as Optatus and Augustine, and the Charybdis of a hermeneutical suspicion which sees the Catholic record of the Donatists as completely unreliable. By carefully sifting through the data from Donatist and Catholic sources, and drawing upon theories of “world-construction,” Tilley attempts to paint a portrait of the Donatist movement more sociologically nuanced than Monceaux yet more sensitive to the religious dimensions of the movement than Frend, to both of whom she is nonetheless admittedly indebted. It is the religious sensibilities of the Donatist movement (rather than Donatism as a social phenomenon) which most interest Tilley, and it is the Donatist use of the scriptural texts to which she devotes her study. It is worth noting that while she is methodologically reliant upon sociology, her prose is clear and largely free from the technical language of the social sciences. Tilley locates the decisive event which gave shape to Donatist hermeneutics in the refusal of the Carthaginian bishop, Mensurius, to allow food to be brought to the imprisoned Abitinian confessors in 304 (an action which may bear a more benign interpretation, cf. p. 58). The Abitinians became the proto-martyrs of the [End Page 472] Donatist movement and were viewed by subsequent Donatist writers as representative of the true church, in contradistinction to the less devout and nominally Christian Mensurius (and his deacon Caecilian). The record of these events, and the North African propensity for typological interpretation of the Scriptures (which Tilley lays out in chapter 1) gave initial shape to Donatist hermeneutics. In opposition to a view of Donatism as “monolithic and one-dimensional” (p. 9), Tilley traces the development of North African hermeneutics from Tertullian and Cyprian through the persecutions of the third century to the toleration of Christianity under Constantine. She then attempts to point out how this altered status of Christianity affected the understanding and use of biblical texts. No longer a persecuted and eschatologically oriented minority who emphasized the confession of faith and gloried in martyrdom, they came to see themselves as the collecta of Israel, set apart and chosen by God, the victims of harassment by the Catholics (who had various typological referents in the Old Testament): “the temptation was not to apostasy in the face of death, but to assimilation in the face of daily social and financial pressure” (p. 55). Chapter 2 presents the various Donatist accounts of martyrdom from the mid-fourth century, and Tilley shows how the emphases differed from earlier North African accounts of martyrdom. Chapter 3 is an analysis of Donatist apologetics, with particular reference to their use of scriptural texts. Chapter 4 examines the nuances provided to Donatist self-understanding by Parmenian and Tyconius (particularly in terms of “evil” within the church), and includes a discussion of the different uses of Scripture in Parmenian and Optatus (again, however, carefully employing a hermeneutic of “suspicious retrieval”). Augustine’s relations with the Donatists are the subject of chapter 5. This book is attractively produced and well-bound, and there are relatively few errors in the text (e.g., Jean-Paul (?) Monceaux, p. 8; Constans, not Constan-tius, had exiled Donatus in 347–48, p. 97; several Latin titles are misprinted, e.g., Augustine’s Contra epistulam Parmeniani, p. 100; Enarrationes, p. 218; Quinti Septimii [Florentis Tertulliani], p. 220). Helpful as a companion volume is Tilley’s Donatist Martyr Stories: The Church...