Donatism: The Priests Must be Pure

If Pelagianism was an utter rejection of the Pauline Doctrine of Original Sin, then the Donatist heresy (named after its most articulate proponent, a Berber cleric called, "Donatus") was its polar opposite. Donatism took Paul's concept of the fundamentally fallen state of human beings to obsessive extremes of thought. The basic principle of the Donatists was this: a person could not obtain salvation simply through accepting Christ as his or her savior and repenting of his or her sins. A person must thenceforward live an absolutely sinless life in thought, word and deed. How this is even humanly possible is another question entirely. However, the greatest anxiety Donatists had following this line of reasoning was the horrific implication of "spiritually impure" priests administering the sacraments. The Donatists concluded that such sacraments so administered, whether it be baptism, communion, extreme unction, or what have you, would be not only non-efficacious but sources of spiritual contamination. So Donatists demanded that any priest found to be engaged in perceived sinful practices, or suspected of such, be defrocked for the protection of the flock. The Church's response to this petition was rather clever: the sacraments, if properly performed according to the established ecclesiastical strictures and instructions, were inherently efficacious as mechanistic connections to Divine Benediction, regardless of the condition of the soul of the priest performing such rites. This counter-argument satisfied many (most of whose adherents came from western North Africa), for indeed the heresy gradually died out after a brief schism between the Church in Mauritania and the Church in Rome. However, this heresy was a warning to the Church that, if it ever chose to over-emphasize the Stain of Adam in its catechism, it could arouse a spiritual neurosis among its congregations with reflexively destructive effects in terms of the fundamental tenets of trust and faith. As it was, the puritanical spiritual bent of the Berber people, evidenced in their particularly stubborn schismatic adherence to Donatism, would later make them a militant fundamentalist arm of the Islamic Empire, when the Berbers converted from Christianity to Islam in the 7th century, CE. Indeed, religiously puritanical Berbers were responsible in the 11th century, CE, for destroying by force of arms and dictatorship the multicultural unity that had flourished in the Moorish Emirate of Spain since the 8th century, CE, wherein Christian, Muslim and Jew had formerly lived in harmony and mutual enrichment.