The Donatists were a North African schismatic church who separated from the Catholics over the validity of SACRAMENTS administered by traditores (“betrayers”), those who had offered sacrifices to the emperor and pagan gods during the Diocletian persecution (303–05) or who had obtained libelli (“certificates”) to that effect. The SCHISM started when sacramental purists refused to accept Caecilian (d. c. 345) as BISHOP of Carthage after he was consecrated around 311 by Felix of Aptunga (d. c. 318), a traditor. Numidian objectors to Caecilian consecrated the rival bishop, Majorinus (d. c. 314), who was succeeded by Donatus (d. 355), who gave his name to the movement. The schism lasted until the Muslim conquest of North AFRICA in the seventh and eighth centuries.

The Donatists appealed for support to local African feeling, but the emperor CONSTANTINE assigned Mitiades, bishop of Rome (r. 310–14), to rule on the matter. Mitiades decided ...

(Gk.: hairesis, “party,” “sect,” “faction”; schizmos, “split”)

Heresy and schism are often confused in popular understanding, although to be sure, in the early stages of Christianity, the terms were not radically distinct. Today heresy is a division between those holding false beliefs and those having orthodox beliefs, while schism is a division between two parts of the church not on the basis of belief but on the basis of authority. ARIANISM and DONATISM are classic heresies; the split between Roman Catholicism and EASTERN ORTHODOXY, which does not recognize the primacy of the pope, is a classic schism.

In ancient Rome, if one did not honor the civil gods of the state and partake in the emperor cult, one was guilty of “superstition,” meaning impiety or atheism, but not heresy, as the state was not interested in citizens’ theological beliefs. In New Testament times the term hairesis had less theological weight ...

If Origen of Alexandria (186–255) was the most influential theologian of the early Greek Church—and he was—why have you never heard of “Saint Origen”?

In the early sixth century, when some of Origen’s brilliant theological deductions about the nature of men and angels were gaining renewed popularity in Palestinian monasteries, anti-Origenist monks from Jerusalem took action. They conspired with a Roman deacon named Pelagius, a papal legate who exercised ungodly influence over the weak-willed Pope Vigilius.

Pelagius convinced the powerful Byzantine emperor Justinian to promulgate an imperial edict anathematizing certain of Origen’s teachings in 543. Pope Vigilius endorsed the move.

Justinian’s despotic control over the Church was such that priests, bishops, and even the pope were essentially powerless to resist his imperial doctrinal decrees. Justinian believed he and his wife, the power-mad ex-prostitute Theodora, were the elect of God to whom He had entrusted ...

By 1212 there were examples of the failures of the knights nearer to home. In the south of France a Crusade was under way, supposedly against the heretical Cathars, but some commentators noted that the purpose was equally to dispossess the count of Toulouse and to annex his land for the king of France. Some people complained that the knights who participated in this Crusade expropriated the belongings of the vanquished and took possession of their estates.

The worldliness of the Church gave rise to regular criticism that manifested itself in the form of heresy. These heresies typically called for the Church and society as a whole to return to the simplicity and poverty of the apostolic life. Since, in their time as in ours, divisions of wealth mirrored the division of society into castes, criticism of wealth implied criticism of the existing social order and the avarice of Church ...

The Medieval Catholic Church upheld belief in the apostolic succession of bishops, including the primacy of the pope (bishop of Rome) on matters of faith and doctrine; at least it did so other than in periods such as the 14th–15th-century Great Schism, which ended when the Council of Constance decreed (‘‘Sacrosancta’’) that Church Councils were superior to popes, deposed three contending popes, and elected a new one. The Medieval Church maintained a vast scheme of moral and theological doctrine, much of it actively debated and challenged from within by clerical dissidents and other reformers. On matters of abstract doctrine the hierarchy was often ferocious, as during the Albigensian Crusade and Hussite Wars. The Medieval Church also evolved formal moral teaching that essentially upheld saintly lives and clerical piety and celibacy as idealized models for the laity. However, in practice the Church tolerated corruption in the sale of benefices and ...

Middle English, from the Dutch ‘‘Lollaerd’’ or ‘‘mutterer.’’ A Christian sect with a distinct pacifist tendency that grew out of the teachings of the Oxford teacher (Master of Balliol College) and reformer John Wycliffe (1320–1384). He made sharp criticism of widespread scandals of the clergy and of mechanical substitution of public ritual in the Church for true inner piety. He upheld the right of the secular arm to control the clergy, an idea later called Erastian. That attracted elements of the nobility (‘‘Lollard Knights’’) but alienated the episcopacy and papacy. The Church hierarchy mobilized to condemn the Lollards as ‘‘heretics.’’ In 1377, Pope Gregory XI issued a papal bull calling for Wycliffe’s arrest. But when Gregory died in 1378 a papal succession crisis led instead to the Great Schism that produced two, then three rival popes and deeply undermined Church authority. Wycliffe and the Lollards used the respite ...

‘‘Burning Chamber.’’ Instituted by Henri II in October 1547 immediately upon his ascension, this was a court of royal inquisition into ‘‘heresy’’ set up in the Parlement of Paris. Its punishments ranged from torments and fines to death by hanging (for repentant heretics), to execution by burning (for unrepentant heretics). Extant records show that the chambre ardente was principally concerned with the spread of heresy among the clergy, which was the class most directly responsible for the early direction of the Protestant Reformation.

Flagellants in the Netherlands town of Tournai (Doornik), 1349. Flagellants, known as the Brothers of the Cross, scourging themselves as they walk through the streets in order to free the world from the Black Death (Bubonic Plague). Chromolithograph after Chronica Aegidii Li Muisius.

Self-flagellants annually performed displays of corporal ‘‘piety’’ as a key part of the shi’ia tradition within Islam, in pilgrimages to the holy cities of Iraq, site of Caliph Ali’s murder in the first century A.H. In Europe, mass processions of flagellants appeared in the late Middle Ages mainly in response to war and plague. Their displays of corporal penitence were intended to expiate widespread sin, including—even especially—that of the clergy, believed to have brought such calamities of divine wrath down on the heads of men. The Catholic Church eventually came to see flagellants as heretics, though in some periods it encouraged and ...

Girolamo Savonarola by Fra Bartolomeo, c. 1498.

Italian religious reformer. He was trained as a Dominican monk. He moved among several church postings in northern Italy without exhibiting a particular talent for religious oratory. In 1489 he was posted to Florence, where he was received by the devout as an inspired moralist. In 1493 he led a reformation of the Dominicans in Tuscany. His preaching became overtly political—essentially, apocalyptic and theocratic— that year. At first he greeted the French invasion at the start of the Italian Wars (1494–1559) as an opportunity for civic redemption. In the chaos that followed the French withdrawal, Savonarola and his followers (‘‘Weepers’’) set up a radical, puritanical theocracy in the guise of a ‘‘Christian commonwealth.’’ Clothing and ornaments deemed temptations to sexual vice were destroyed in a ‘‘bonfire of the vanities,’’ public burnings of forbidden things that presaged subsequent burning of people who ...

The Early Protestants of the East.

AN ATTEMPT TO RESTORE SOME LOST LEAVES OF
PROTESTANT HISTORY.

BY
L. P. BROCKETT, M. D.,

Author of
"The Cross And The Crescent," " History Of Religious Denominations," etc.

_________________

PHILADELPHIA:
AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY,
1420 CHESTNUT STREET.

Entered to Act of Congress, in the year 1879, by the
AMERICAN BAPTIST PUBLICATION SOCIETY,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

CONTENTS

_______

SECTION I.
Introduction.—The Armenian and other Oriental churches

SECTION II.
Dualism and the phantastic theory of our Lord's advent
in the Oriental churches.—The doctrines they rejected.—They held to baptism

SECTION III.
Gradual decline of the dualistic doctrine.—The holy and exemplary lives of the Paulicians

SECTION IV.
The cruelty and bloodthirstiness of the Empress Theodora.—The free state and city of Tephrice

SECTION V.
The Sclavonic development of the Catharist or Paulician churches.—Bulgaria, Bosnia, and ...