The Donatist Church in an Apocalyptic Age by Jesse A. Hoover

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Donatist Church in an Apocalyptic Age by Jesse A. Hoover James T. Palmer Jesse A. Hoover The Donatist Church in an Apocalyptic Age Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018 Pp. x + 254. $90.00. Jesse Hoover’s new study of Donatist apocalypticisms is a most welcome contribution to the fields of late antique religion and apocalypse studies. It proceeds from a historiographical conundrum: the North African movement has been characterized in modern scholarship as both driven by fanatical apocalyptic traditionalism and by forward-looking anti-apocalypticism. Surely it cannot be both. Except, of course, it can, but only if one is prepared to embrace complexity, to accept that people and ideas change over time, and to understand that movements are rarely strictly homogeneous. Thankfully, Hoover embraces precisely these things. In doing so, he lands yet another blow against the modeling of pre-modern apocalyptic movements that are rooted almost exclusively in the kind of millenarian movements sketched by Norman Cohn (e.g., Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001]) and refined by Richard Landes (Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011]). Belief that the end of the world might be imminent could take many forms, did not have to dominate all discourse, and could (against the expectations of some, now and then) be mainstream and highly intellectualized. Donatist apocalypticisms, in the end, have much in common with the complex apocalypticisms we have seen increasingly in recent publications on late antiquity and the Middle Ages more generally. The first two chapters outline the background for the study. Chapter One surveys the impression that Donatism made on both contemporary critics and modern scholarship. In the first part, Hoover shows that Augustine and others often added to and miscontextualized Donatist thought deliberately to make it seem less coherent and more dangerous. The end result was a vision of a schismatic sect that viewed itself as special within a millenarianist worldview. From this conclusion, Hoover is able to show the ways in which modern scholars have accepted elements of the critique to portray the Donatists as unsophisticated, fervent, and as anachronisms in the late antique church, especially where the wandering Circumcellions have wrongly been taken as illustrative of the whole. [End Page 467] Within the revisionist views of recent scholarship, however, Hoover identifies a more subtle interpretation: of Donatism as an adaptive movement that shared much theologically and socially with other groups, but which lost its PR battle, particularly for the refusal of its followers to adapt successfully to the increased harmony of Christendom and Empire. In Chapter Two, Hoover sketches effectively some of the key intellectual influences on the Donatists: Tertullian, if indirectly, for his “Irenaean synthesis” of motifs and his literal millenarian model, early martyr stories such as that of Perpetua for establishing a sense of eschatological direction, Cyprian for developing the idea of the world growing old, and Lactantius—again indirectly—for preparing some of the groundwork for apocalyptic calculations. The remaining four chapters investigate apocalyptic motifs and models in the writings of Donatists and their critics, moving broadly in chronological order. Chapter Three outlines the use of apocalyptic rhetoric in early sources to heighten a sense of opposition, particularly after the Macarian suppression (347–61). In particular, it shows the use of rhetoric claiming the Donatists’ principal Caecilianist opponents foreshadowed Antichrist in their beliefs and actions—but also that such a strategy was widespread at the time, occurring in arguments over Arianism too. A long Chapter Four interrogates the idea, waved around by Augustine, that the Donatists thought of themselves as particularly special and isolated. Hoover takes each of his key sources in turn to show that opinion among the Donatists varied when it came to whether they should engage with the transmarine churches. There was clearly a significant number who believed Christianity had been preached across the whole world—a condition for the end times—and that therefore references to a “falling away” in the Bible suggested the church had lost its way, leaving the Donatists in a “Remnant Ecclesiology.” For Chapter Five, we turn to perhaps...