A Church ‘without stain or wrinkle’: The Reception and Application of Donatist Arguments in Debates Over Priestly Purity

Abstract

This article examines the reception and application of arguments developed during the Donatist controversy in later debates over clerical celibacy, marriage and continence in the medieval and early modern church. It explores the collision of inspiration and institution in this context, arguing that the debates over sacerdotal celibacy in the medieval Latin church and Reformation controversy over clerical marriage and continence both appropriated and polemicized the history of Donatism. The way in which the spectre and lexicon of Donatism permeated the law and practice of the medieval and early modern church, particularly when it came to the discipline of clerical celibacy, is a prime example of the process of imbrication by which the history of heresy and the history of the church were constructed. As such, it exemplifies the ways in which forms of religious inspiration that manifested as dissent, such as Donatism, became embedded in the histories and self-fashioning of the institutional church.