Jesse Hoover
I am a recent graduate of Baylor University’s doctoral program in Religion specializing in ancient Christianity. Within that broad arena, I tend to concentrate on the historical development of marginalized or minority traditions in late antiquity. In my dissertation, for instance, I examine the ways in which apocalyptic motifs were utilized within the Donatist movement in fourth-century North Africa.
My dissertation is in the process of publication and so cannot be uploaded. My MA Thesis, however, “The Contours of Donatism,” is available under “Papers,” as are the pre-print editions of my most recent publications, including “They Bee Full Donatists: The Rhetoric of Donatism in Early Separatist Polemic,” which has been printed in Reformation and Renaissance Review (July 2013): 154-176, and “False Lives, False Martyrs: ‘Pseudo-Pionius’ and the Redating of the Martyrdom of Polycarp," in Vigiliae Christianae 67.5 (2013): 471-498. I am a regular presenter at the North American Patristics Society (NAPS) and will be presenting a paper at the annual meeting in Chicago this year. I hope to see you there!
Currently, I live in Waco with my wife and when not teaching as a full-time lecturer at Baylor University I’m active in manuscript transcription and translation for Baylor’s Green Project, leading a bible study at my church, and singing lullabies to my one year old son.
Supervisors: Daniel Williams
My dissertation is in the process of publication and so cannot be uploaded. My MA Thesis, however, “The Contours of Donatism,” is available under “Papers,” as are the pre-print editions of my most recent publications, including “They Bee Full Donatists: The Rhetoric of Donatism in Early Separatist Polemic,” which has been printed in Reformation and Renaissance Review (July 2013): 154-176, and “False Lives, False Martyrs: ‘Pseudo-Pionius’ and the Redating of the Martyrdom of Polycarp," in Vigiliae Christianae 67.5 (2013): 471-498. I am a regular presenter at the North American Patristics Society (NAPS) and will be presenting a paper at the annual meeting in Chicago this year. I hope to see you there!
Currently, I live in Waco with my wife and when not teaching as a full-time lecturer at Baylor University I’m active in manuscript transcription and translation for Baylor’s Green Project, leading a bible study at my church, and singing lullabies to my one year old son.
Supervisors: Daniel Williams
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Papers by Jesse Hoover
This is a topic which will require some nuance. The dominant tendency within early and mid-twentieth century academic discussions of Donatist apocalypticism – when it is mentioned at all – have been to portray it as evidence of an anachronistic inclination within Donatist theology or as a symptom of simmering national or economic dissatisfaction, a religious warrant for social unrest. Reacting to such interpretations, more recent discussions of Donatism which emphasize its theological viability have tended to avoid the topic altogether.
In this project, in contrast, I portray Donatist apocalyptic exegesis as an essentially dynamic, adaptive theological phenomenon. As befits an ecclesiastical communion which once formed the majority church in North Africa, Donatist interaction with apocalypticism was neither monolithic nor static. Rather, it evolved significantly throughout the roughly sesquicentennial years of the movement’s literary existence, capable of producing such diverse expressions of eschatological thought as the strident denunciations of the emperor Constans as “Antichrist” encountered in Macarian-era Donatist martyrological acta, the gematric calculations of the Liber genealogus – or the spectacular apocalyptic vision of Tyconius, as sophisticated as it is unique. In the various apocalyptic narratives still traceable within extant Donatist writings, I submit, we are given an invaluable window into the inner life of the North African communion.
This paper is an attempt to survey the various responses to that question from within the premillennialist camp. After surveying early attempts to situate the United States within an apocalyptic milieu—whether positively, as the fulfillment of prophecies concerning eschatological Israel, or negatively, as the dark paradigm of eschatological Babylon—I will focus on what appears to be the dominant interpretation among premillennialist forecasters at present: the United States is not mentioned in biblical apocalypse scenarios because it has somehow been erased from the halls of geopolitical power prior to that time. Such a seemingly pessimistic approach, however, paradoxically allows its proponents significant freedom in predicting the future history of the American empire. As I will argue, premillennialism’s very failure to find the United States U.S. within the pages of Revelation invests the nation with chameleon-like agency, freeing it from the fatalism often implied in apocalyptic speculation—and creating the conceptual space for meaningful engagement with the political process.
But what was “Donatism” in the context of Elizabethan England? What were its characteristics, its subversive doctrines? In this article, I will examine the portrait of the ancient sect as painted by both the opponents of separatism and the early separatist leaders themselves in order to assess what aspects of the Donatist label resonated with the polemical presuppositions of each side.
Conference Presentations by Jesse Hoover
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Much could be said about the uniqueness of this text. The issue I wish to discuss in this session, however, revolves around a prophecy that the Prophetiae attributes to Joshua, the son of Nun. The figure of Joshua had been revered as a prophet as far back as the deuterocanonical book of Sirach (46.1), and Joshua’s status as a divine spokesman was firmly established within the Christian tradition. But what, exactly, did the “prophet” Joshua prophesy? The lack of a specific prediction about the future in the biblical texts encouraged much creativity among later Jewish and Christian writers. Unlike any text before or after it, however, the Prophetiae offers a specific prophecy allegedly spoken by the mouth of Joshua: “Then Joshua son of Nun, who was called Hoshea,” it tells us, “prophesied, saying: Because the testimony of the law is not only for the Jews, but also for you nations.” In this paper, I wish to probe the origin, rationale, and ultimate fate of this apocryphal prophecy attributed to Joshua as it is preserved sui generis in the text of the Prophetiae ex omnibus libris collectae, and in so doing, to shed more light on a vibrant period of exegetical activity in North African—and specifically Donatist—history.
In the resulting clashes, both sides repeatedly invoked apocalyptic motifs to characterize their opponents. This maneuver was especially tempting for Nicenes, given the phrasing of 1 John 2.22: “He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son,” but was also picked up by Homoian bishops. In surviving writings such as the Opus Imperfectum in Matheum, we find evidence for an apocalyptic interpretation of growing Nicene political power: for these Homoian writers, such an ascendency had been predicted in Matthew 24.10 as a time of “falling away” from the faith.
My goal in this presentation, then, is to survey the role that apocalyptic interpretations played in the growing rupture between the “Arian” and Nicene sides. I will be limiting my research to the western, Latin-speaking Mediterranean in the fourth and fifth centuries, primarily because it is here that we find a more stable “Arian” identity in the Homoian churches that counted themselves the heirs of the twin councils of Rimini and Seleucia in 359. Assessing the Nicene/Homoian divide through an apocalyptic lens, I submit, has the potential to shed new light on a critical and highly-charged period of Christian history.
Accordingly, in this presentation I propose to extend Mayor’s observations about the ancient world’s encounter with deep time to the world of the early Christians. Some of my observations are to be expected: like their pagan counterparts, for instance, early Christians tended to interpret the presence of fossilized fish on mountaintops as evidence of a global flood, though the extent to which first-hand accounts play a role in these early Christian descriptions is surprising. Other observations, however, are more unique: witness Tertullian’s appeal to the fossilized bones of “giants” as a proof of the resurrection of the dead, or Ambrose’s reinterpretation of what are almost certainly prehistoric remains as the bodies of martyrs! Early Christian interaction with the fossilized remnants of the deep past is, I submit, both a fascinating topic in its own right and a worthy addendum to Mayor’s survey.
When we probe into its actual usage among early exegetes, however, we notice something odd. While Irenaeus warns that “some, in their simplicity... have ventured to seek out a name which should contain the erroneous and spurious number [i.e., 616],” the only evidence we have for its use in practice comes from Donatist sources: Tyconius and those Catholic writers dependent on him, and the independent witness of the Liber genealogus (Sangallensis 614 + Florentini and Lucensis). To this number I will introduce a third Donatist source, which to my knowledge has not been recognized before: capitula 16 of the Donatist chapter-titles for Daniel (found in Biblia Sacra Vulgatam 16.23). After demonstrating the legitimacy of this new witness to 616 in Donatist exegesis, I will then reflect on its implications. The fact that we now have three Donatist texts which incorporate the 616 variant warrants a closer look at the significance of this number within the Donatist community – and the version of the Vetus Latina it used.
In this presentation, I will focus on a long-known but rather neglected relic of Donatist exegetical activity: the production of chapter divisions (capitula) for the biblical text. Prior to the advent of modern chapter and verse divisions, capitula were designed to render the biblical narrative more easily accessible, and those which derive from Donatist sources are among our earliest known examples of the genre. Four sets of capitula from the Old Testament, keyed to the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and one from the New Testament on the book of Acts, have been conclusively identified as originating within a Donatist milieu. Others are suspected, including a capitula set for the Gospel of John, but remain unproven.
The importance of these capitula for the study of Donatist exegesis lies in the fact that descriptions of the biblical narrative are never theologically neutral. Indeed, they serve as keys to the self-perception of the communities that produce them: which passages they view as polemically useful or worthy of commentary, the particular interpretation they overlay upon the prophetic or apostolic witness. By examining these capitula in closer detail, we will gain a better appreciation of how Donatist hermeneutics functioned at its most basic level: the cataloging of the biblical text itself.
In this presentation, I will focus on the ways in which heretics outside the Caecilianist communion are addressed within Donatist writings. In doing so, I believe we can discover two important points about the dissident communion. First, Donatist concerns about heresy illustrate the fact that the movement was more well-rounded than we often give it credit for: far from merely fighting for its life against Caecilianist opponents, it was actively concerned with other threats to the life of the church. In particular, anti-Manichaean hysteria appears to have been as widespread among Donatist Christians as their Caecilianist counterparts. Second, understanding the perception of heresy within the Donatist communion may help us navigate the tricky question of how Donatists understood the phenomenon of Caecilianism itself. Several texts illustrate that one concern that Donatists had about Caecilianist baptismal theology was its troubling tendency to accept Manichaean baptisms as valid. Whether these anxieties are real or polemically-convenient, they illustrate the relevance of the wider concept of heresy to the Donatist-Caecilianist debate.
In this paper, I want to examine the origin and development of this motif within Donatist literature. Is it unique to the Donatist communion, or can we find antecedents in the writings of earlier North African exegetes? How do Donatist treatments of Cain compare to those of their contemporaries? Perhaps most importantly, what varieties of meaning can we pull from Donatist sources themselves – how, for instance, does Tyconius’ view of Cain compare to that of the Liber genealogus? By peering into the inner workings of this particular instance of Donatist exegesis, we may better understand the evolution of the dissident communion as a whole.
Landmark Baptists were distinguished by their often vehement insistence on “closed communion” even to the point of excluding from the table anyone who was not a member of the particular local congregation. In their defense of this practice, some Landmark Baptists developed surprisingly robust views of the nature of the Supper. The tern “substantial” in my title is exaggerated: at no time do we find Landmark leaders espousing a variation of real presence within of the rite. Yet at the same time, we do find couched within such sternly memorialistic interpretations an increased appreciation of its significance: Communion becomes something more than a “mere” memorial, even if it always retains that essential characteristic.
In this paper, I want to set aside the framing question of open or closed communion in order to look deeper into the spiritual significance of partaking in the Eucharist in the minds of two prominent early Landmark leaders, J. R. Graves and J. M. Pendleton, and prominent Landmarkist sympathizer B. H. Carroll (an especially fitting subject for the present NABPR meeting, as Carroll served as pastor of the First Baptist Church in Waco for 27 years). My purpose is to recover from their writings a constructive theology of Communion with surprisingly strong latent connections to other Christian traditions. As odd as it may sound, the Eucharistic interpretations that developed out of the deliberately insular Old Landmark movement may in fact serve as bridges to bring Baptists into interdenominational dialogue with other, more “substantialist” traditions.
Nevertheless, by the early 390s we find Augustine reading the works of Tyconius, eagerly asking Bishop Aurelius of Carthage for his opinion on the man. This is the start of a life-long engagement with the writings of an author whose ecclesial identity was directly opposed to Augustine’s own. Indeed, no other North African source was so influential on the development of Augustine’s own theology than Tyconius. But why was Augustine so enamored with the theology of, in his own words, a “heretic”? In this paper, I would like to trace the evolution of Augustine’s perception of Tyconius as a person, as opposed to his appropriation of Tyconian theology. What was it about the rogue Donatist that allowed his works, in Augustine’s eyes, to transcend their schismatic affiliation?
This is a topic which will require some nuance. The dominant tendency within early and mid-twentieth century academic discussions of Donatist apocalypticism – when it is mentioned at all – have been to portray it as evidence of an anachronistic inclination within Donatist theology or as a symptom of simmering national or economic dissatisfaction, a religious warrant for social unrest. Reacting to such interpretations, more recent discussions of Donatism which emphasize its theological viability have tended to avoid the topic altogether.
In this project, in contrast, I portray Donatist apocalyptic exegesis as an essentially dynamic, adaptive theological phenomenon. As befits an ecclesiastical communion which once formed the majority church in North Africa, Donatist interaction with apocalypticism was neither monolithic nor static. Rather, it evolved significantly throughout the roughly sesquicentennial years of the movement’s literary existence, capable of producing such diverse expressions of eschatological thought as the strident denunciations of the emperor Constans as “Antichrist” encountered in Macarian-era Donatist martyrological acta, the gematric calculations of the Liber genealogus – or the spectacular apocalyptic vision of Tyconius, as sophisticated as it is unique. In the various apocalyptic narratives still traceable within extant Donatist writings, I submit, we are given an invaluable window into the inner life of the North African communion.
This paper is an attempt to survey the various responses to that question from within the premillennialist camp. After surveying early attempts to situate the United States within an apocalyptic milieu—whether positively, as the fulfillment of prophecies concerning eschatological Israel, or negatively, as the dark paradigm of eschatological Babylon—I will focus on what appears to be the dominant interpretation among premillennialist forecasters at present: the United States is not mentioned in biblical apocalypse scenarios because it has somehow been erased from the halls of geopolitical power prior to that time. Such a seemingly pessimistic approach, however, paradoxically allows its proponents significant freedom in predicting the future history of the American empire. As I will argue, premillennialism’s very failure to find the United States U.S. within the pages of Revelation invests the nation with chameleon-like agency, freeing it from the fatalism often implied in apocalyptic speculation—and creating the conceptual space for meaningful engagement with the political process.
But what was “Donatism” in the context of Elizabethan England? What were its characteristics, its subversive doctrines? In this article, I will examine the portrait of the ancient sect as painted by both the opponents of separatism and the early separatist leaders themselves in order to assess what aspects of the Donatist label resonated with the polemical presuppositions of each side.
.
Much could be said about the uniqueness of this text. The issue I wish to discuss in this session, however, revolves around a prophecy that the Prophetiae attributes to Joshua, the son of Nun. The figure of Joshua had been revered as a prophet as far back as the deuterocanonical book of Sirach (46.1), and Joshua’s status as a divine spokesman was firmly established within the Christian tradition. But what, exactly, did the “prophet” Joshua prophesy? The lack of a specific prediction about the future in the biblical texts encouraged much creativity among later Jewish and Christian writers. Unlike any text before or after it, however, the Prophetiae offers a specific prophecy allegedly spoken by the mouth of Joshua: “Then Joshua son of Nun, who was called Hoshea,” it tells us, “prophesied, saying: Because the testimony of the law is not only for the Jews, but also for you nations.” In this paper, I wish to probe the origin, rationale, and ultimate fate of this apocryphal prophecy attributed to Joshua as it is preserved sui generis in the text of the Prophetiae ex omnibus libris collectae, and in so doing, to shed more light on a vibrant period of exegetical activity in North African—and specifically Donatist—history.
In the resulting clashes, both sides repeatedly invoked apocalyptic motifs to characterize their opponents. This maneuver was especially tempting for Nicenes, given the phrasing of 1 John 2.22: “He is antichrist who denies the Father and the Son,” but was also picked up by Homoian bishops. In surviving writings such as the Opus Imperfectum in Matheum, we find evidence for an apocalyptic interpretation of growing Nicene political power: for these Homoian writers, such an ascendency had been predicted in Matthew 24.10 as a time of “falling away” from the faith.
My goal in this presentation, then, is to survey the role that apocalyptic interpretations played in the growing rupture between the “Arian” and Nicene sides. I will be limiting my research to the western, Latin-speaking Mediterranean in the fourth and fifth centuries, primarily because it is here that we find a more stable “Arian” identity in the Homoian churches that counted themselves the heirs of the twin councils of Rimini and Seleucia in 359. Assessing the Nicene/Homoian divide through an apocalyptic lens, I submit, has the potential to shed new light on a critical and highly-charged period of Christian history.
Accordingly, in this presentation I propose to extend Mayor’s observations about the ancient world’s encounter with deep time to the world of the early Christians. Some of my observations are to be expected: like their pagan counterparts, for instance, early Christians tended to interpret the presence of fossilized fish on mountaintops as evidence of a global flood, though the extent to which first-hand accounts play a role in these early Christian descriptions is surprising. Other observations, however, are more unique: witness Tertullian’s appeal to the fossilized bones of “giants” as a proof of the resurrection of the dead, or Ambrose’s reinterpretation of what are almost certainly prehistoric remains as the bodies of martyrs! Early Christian interaction with the fossilized remnants of the deep past is, I submit, both a fascinating topic in its own right and a worthy addendum to Mayor’s survey.
When we probe into its actual usage among early exegetes, however, we notice something odd. While Irenaeus warns that “some, in their simplicity... have ventured to seek out a name which should contain the erroneous and spurious number [i.e., 616],” the only evidence we have for its use in practice comes from Donatist sources: Tyconius and those Catholic writers dependent on him, and the independent witness of the Liber genealogus (Sangallensis 614 + Florentini and Lucensis). To this number I will introduce a third Donatist source, which to my knowledge has not been recognized before: capitula 16 of the Donatist chapter-titles for Daniel (found in Biblia Sacra Vulgatam 16.23). After demonstrating the legitimacy of this new witness to 616 in Donatist exegesis, I will then reflect on its implications. The fact that we now have three Donatist texts which incorporate the 616 variant warrants a closer look at the significance of this number within the Donatist community – and the version of the Vetus Latina it used.
In this presentation, I will focus on a long-known but rather neglected relic of Donatist exegetical activity: the production of chapter divisions (capitula) for the biblical text. Prior to the advent of modern chapter and verse divisions, capitula were designed to render the biblical narrative more easily accessible, and those which derive from Donatist sources are among our earliest known examples of the genre. Four sets of capitula from the Old Testament, keyed to the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, and one from the New Testament on the book of Acts, have been conclusively identified as originating within a Donatist milieu. Others are suspected, including a capitula set for the Gospel of John, but remain unproven.
The importance of these capitula for the study of Donatist exegesis lies in the fact that descriptions of the biblical narrative are never theologically neutral. Indeed, they serve as keys to the self-perception of the communities that produce them: which passages they view as polemically useful or worthy of commentary, the particular interpretation they overlay upon the prophetic or apostolic witness. By examining these capitula in closer detail, we will gain a better appreciation of how Donatist hermeneutics functioned at its most basic level: the cataloging of the biblical text itself.
In this presentation, I will focus on the ways in which heretics outside the Caecilianist communion are addressed within Donatist writings. In doing so, I believe we can discover two important points about the dissident communion. First, Donatist concerns about heresy illustrate the fact that the movement was more well-rounded than we often give it credit for: far from merely fighting for its life against Caecilianist opponents, it was actively concerned with other threats to the life of the church. In particular, anti-Manichaean hysteria appears to have been as widespread among Donatist Christians as their Caecilianist counterparts. Second, understanding the perception of heresy within the Donatist communion may help us navigate the tricky question of how Donatists understood the phenomenon of Caecilianism itself. Several texts illustrate that one concern that Donatists had about Caecilianist baptismal theology was its troubling tendency to accept Manichaean baptisms as valid. Whether these anxieties are real or polemically-convenient, they illustrate the relevance of the wider concept of heresy to the Donatist-Caecilianist debate.
In this paper, I want to examine the origin and development of this motif within Donatist literature. Is it unique to the Donatist communion, or can we find antecedents in the writings of earlier North African exegetes? How do Donatist treatments of Cain compare to those of their contemporaries? Perhaps most importantly, what varieties of meaning can we pull from Donatist sources themselves – how, for instance, does Tyconius’ view of Cain compare to that of the Liber genealogus? By peering into the inner workings of this particular instance of Donatist exegesis, we may better understand the evolution of the dissident communion as a whole.
Landmark Baptists were distinguished by their often vehement insistence on “closed communion” even to the point of excluding from the table anyone who was not a member of the particular local congregation. In their defense of this practice, some Landmark Baptists developed surprisingly robust views of the nature of the Supper. The tern “substantial” in my title is exaggerated: at no time do we find Landmark leaders espousing a variation of real presence within of the rite. Yet at the same time, we do find couched within such sternly memorialistic interpretations an increased appreciation of its significance: Communion becomes something more than a “mere” memorial, even if it always retains that essential characteristic.
In this paper, I want to set aside the framing question of open or closed communion in order to look deeper into the spiritual significance of partaking in the Eucharist in the minds of two prominent early Landmark leaders, J. R. Graves and J. M. Pendleton, and prominent Landmarkist sympathizer B. H. Carroll (an especially fitting subject for the present NABPR meeting, as Carroll served as pastor of the First Baptist Church in Waco for 27 years). My purpose is to recover from their writings a constructive theology of Communion with surprisingly strong latent connections to other Christian traditions. As odd as it may sound, the Eucharistic interpretations that developed out of the deliberately insular Old Landmark movement may in fact serve as bridges to bring Baptists into interdenominational dialogue with other, more “substantialist” traditions.
Nevertheless, by the early 390s we find Augustine reading the works of Tyconius, eagerly asking Bishop Aurelius of Carthage for his opinion on the man. This is the start of a life-long engagement with the writings of an author whose ecclesial identity was directly opposed to Augustine’s own. Indeed, no other North African source was so influential on the development of Augustine’s own theology than Tyconius. But why was Augustine so enamored with the theology of, in his own words, a “heretic”? In this paper, I would like to trace the evolution of Augustine’s perception of Tyconius as a person, as opposed to his appropriation of Tyconian theology. What was it about the rogue Donatist that allowed his works, in Augustine’s eyes, to transcend their schismatic affiliation?
In this presentation, I will offer a translation of this short letter and a new interpretation of its provenance. My argument is that Cyprianus plebi Cartagini is not in fact a Donatist forgery, but rather a long-lost witness to the origins of the Donatist controversy. Its attachment to Cyprian, I believe, is evidence of medieval misattribution rather than intentional fakery. By reclaiming this letter, we may be able to add one more Donatist primary source to our rather limited collection, one which likely dates to the beginnings of the schism.
-Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 8.51
“For Arius agrees with the Donatists and they with him.”
-Epiphanius, Panarion, 13.8
For Isidore of Seville and Epiphanius of Salamis, ancient Christian writers separated both temporally and by the width of the Mediterranean, the Donatist communion was defined principally as a hazy subset of the “Arian” menace. Such a presupposition was not idiosyncratic: many heresiological texts originating beyond North African shores will condemn the dissident communion more for its alleged trinitarian heterodoxy than for its steadfast refusal to reunite with the hated “Caecilianists.”
In North Africa itself, however, such a view was virtually unknown. Augustine will twit his Donatist opponents for their alleged association with the “wrong side” at the 343 Council of Serdica, but he does so under the assumption that such a link would prove deeply embarrassing. Donatist polemicists such as Cresconius and Vincent of Cartenna will serenely denounce Arius and his followers, apparently unaware of their own alleged association with the condemned heretic. Donatism as an “Arian” phenomenon is thus an outside imposition almost unknown among its principal combatants.
Where then did this alternate heresiological tradition come from? In this paper, I will examine this question by carefully assessing portraits of Donatism we find in heresiological texts originating outside the confines of North Africa in order to determine both the genesis and subsequent evolution of such a polemical trope.
When the culture wars of the United States are held up as a barometer for the proximity of the End, however, a severe paradox arises. Despite the nearness of the eschaton and the critical role that the United States seems to play in foreshadowing it, the Mediterranean-based apocalypse scenario that lies at the heart of most premillennialist exegesis seems to leave little room for the Western hemisphere. How could the most powerful nation in the world be a non-entity at the time of the End?
This paper is an attempt to survey the various ways that premillennialists have answered such a question. After surveying early premillennialist attempts to situate the United States within an apocalyptic milieu, I will focus on what appears to be the dominant interpretation among premillennialist writers today: the United States is not mentioned in prophecy because it has somehow been erased from the halls of geopolitical power prior to that time. Such a seemingly pessimistic approach, however, paradoxically allows its proponents significant freedom in predicting the future history of the country. As I will argue, their very failure to find the U.S. within the pages of Revelation invests the nation with chimeric possibility, allowing it to conform to whatever position the writer wishes to advocate.
It has long been demonstrated that the bishop of Hippo overstates his case by a considerable margin. In spite of himself, Augustine has done modern researchers a favor by transmitting snippets of Donatist writings that tell a different story, an ecclesiology more nuanced than Augustine would like to admit. We know, for instance, that Donatists did not simplistically view congregational contamination as a mechanistic corollary of a fallen hierarchy: when Petilian angrily accuses Augustine of omitting the word “knowingly” from the Donatist leader’s phrase “He who has knowingly received faith from the faithless receives not faith, but guilt” (C. Litt. Petil. 3.22.26), he is not being pedantic.
In this presentation, I would like to extend the existing conversation by contextualizing Donatist perceptions of ritual contamination within the broader ecclesiastical milieu in which they are set. I will argue that in many ways, Donatist ecclesiology represents more an intensification of existing ecclesial presuppositions than a rejection of them. Augustine is certainly not alone in his doctrine of the church – but his is not the only theology in play. Donatist beliefs about the essential nature of the church, the possibility of ritual contamination, and, perhaps unexpectedly, even the necessity of rebaptism are mirrored to a certain extent within the transmarine provinces the dissident communion allegedly defied.
It is important to remember the inherently eristic context of such characterizations: in the battle of words between Caecilianists and their Donatist opponents, critical qualifications could be conveniently misplaced, exegetical constructs imbued with an alien logic. This paper will probe Augustine’s depictions of his opponents as apocalyptic harbingers in order to expose the somewhat complex polemical strategies that undergird them. At times Augustine seeks to maximize the apocalyptic implications of Donatist arguments in order to reify his claim of a creeping madness infecting the dissident communion. On other occasions, however, he actively suppresses certain aspects of Donatist eschatology in order to undermine its implicit challenge to Caecilianism. In doing so, I hope to recover a more nuanced picture of Donatist eschatology – and a better understanding of Augustine’s rhetorical tactics in countering it.
Among the earliest Christian apologists, the myth of Deucalion provided a critical bridge between the world of Greek prehistory and the biblical narrative of a universal deluge. Directly conflating Deucalion with the biblical figure of Noah was a common apologetic tactic during the first two centuries of the Christian faith, a useful identification that could be used to convince educated pagans of the historical veracity of the Hebrew Bible. As we shall see, however, such a one-to-one correlation between Noah and Deucalion was not to remain the dominant interpretation of the flood story. During the second and third centuries, Christian chronographers would increasingly insist on a separation between the two figures, downgrading Deucalion to the far inferior status of surviving a later, more localized Thessalian deluge.
Why did such a shift take place? In this paper I argue that three related trajectories led to the ultimate rejection of Deucalion as the “Greek Noah” by the ancient Church. The detrimental toll exacted by rival claims to antiquity played its part: a positive correlation between the two deluge accounts could just as easily lead to the incorporation of the Noah story into Greek myth, an argument utilized by the influential anti-Christian apologist Celsus. Insufficient attention to the Deucalion legend by ancient Jewish authorities such as Philo and Josephus also likely contributed to the reluctance by late third-century Christian chronographers to allow substantial parallels between the two deluge myths. Finally, there was the role played by polemical warfare: the enthusiastic incorporation of Deucalion into the deluge myths of several Gnostic strands likely turned their rivals away from capitalizing on its apologetic possibilities.
I propose that such an enfleshment of Kierkegaard’s ethic of love may be found in the writings of the Catholic novelist Flannery O’Connor. Like Kierkegaard, O’Connor does not shy away from the essential strangeness of the divine encounter: the Christianity exemplified in her stories is a grotesque, scandalous affair in the eyes of the world. O’Connor is well-known (perhaps infamous?) for the “violence” by which Grace strikes her characters. The advent of Grace is vicious and horrifying; it is simultaneously salvific. Grace occurs in moments when, from a temporal standpoint, all seems lost: it incarnates on the horns of a raging bull, or the barrel of a gun, and its iconography is characterized by eyes seared with lime, or a shirt made of razor-wire. From a temporal perspective, Grace makes no sense: it has no material reward, no sagacious card up its sleeve.
Grace and love, however, though intimately related, are not the same thing. If we are to accurately relate O’Connor to Kierkegaard, we must find within her corpus scenarios in which the moment of Grace is invoked by an act of love. Such occasions are relatively rare. Nevertheless, there are times when what Kierkegaard would call a “work of love” is essential to the unveiling of Grace. If we concentrate on O’Connor’s second novel, The Violent Bear It Away, I believe we can find an ethic of love in action which both embodies and extends Kierkegaard’s paradoxical model of a love marked by hatred. The novel is fundamentally concerned with the difference between a true and false idea of love, between the world’s “sensible” love and its irrational, horrifying antithesis, divine love. While O’Connor’s portrayal of love in The Violent Bear It Away is fictional, deliberately provocative, I submit that it illustrates what might be considered the theoretical limits of a Kierkegaardian ethic of love within a narratival structure.
Recent reassessments of this motif have revealed that the dissident communion was not as monolithic with regards to transmarine validity as Augustine or Optatus liked to claim. Nevertheless, it is clear that the characterization of Donatism as a “remnant church” was not merely a Caecilianist slur. Existing alongside with, and often overpowering, more universalist overtones within the dissident communion was a strong belief that the true church had been preserved only in North African Donatism.
What has often been overlooked, however, is the extent to which this common “remnant” motif is overtly eschatological in orientation. To some within the Donatist communion, the reduction of the church to Africa implied that a prophesied worldwide apostasy had already occurred; in this way, it could serve as a useful polemical weapon against those who claimed that the universality of the church invalidated Donatist parochialism. This paper will trace the eschatological implications of this remnant motif as it is found in two trajectories: its eristic use, attested to most explicitly in Augustine’s Epistula ad Catholicos contra Donatistas, and its modified form in Tyconius’ recently-reconstructed Commentary on Revelation, which utilizes remnant exegesis to validate the Donatist schism as a necessary eschatological foreshadowing of the final separation from the “mystery of iniquity.”