The Diocletianic Persecution

Diocletian had ruled for eighteen years without moving against the Christians, and the persecution that began in 303 was late, systematic and, in the event, futile. The first edict ordered churches demolished, scriptures surrendered and burned, Christians of rank stripped of privileges and Christian slaves barred from freedom. Further edicts imprisoned the clergy, then required them to sacrifice, then extended the requirement to everyone.

Enforcement varied enormously by region, and the variation matters. In the East, and especially in Egypt and Palestine, it was severe and prolonged. In the western provinces under Constantius it was light, largely limited to the demolition of buildings. The persecution therefore fell hardest exactly where the Christian population was largest, and produced the martyr literature that shaped Christian memory of the whole imperial period.

It ended, remarkably, with an admission of failure. In 311 Galerius, dying of a painful illness, issued an edict acknowledging that the policy had not returned the Christians to the old religion and had left many worshipping nothing at all, and permitting them to exist again and to rebuild their meeting places, asking their prayers in return. That document, two years before the arrangement usually called the Edict of Milan, is the legal end of persecution as imperial policy.

The persecution's longest consequence was not the martyrs but the survivors. Clergy who had handed over the scriptures to be burned, the traditores, were widely despised, and when the persecution ended the church had to decide what their standing was. In North Africa a rigorist party held that a bishop who had handed over the books had forfeited his office, and that sacraments performed by such a man, including the ordination of other bishops, were void.

The dispute became a schism when the election of a bishop of Carthage was contested on precisely this ground, and the rigorists elected their own, from whose successor Donatus the movement takes its name. Councils, an imperial hearing and eventually force were used against them, and none of it worked. The Donatist church remained the majority in parts of North Africa for a century and was still there when Augustine of Hippo spent much of his career arguing against it.

The theological question the schism forced is one the whole Western church answered through it: whether the efficacy of a sacrament depends on the worthiness of the minister. The answer that prevailed, that it does not, because the sacrament is Christ's act and not the priest's, is now standard in Catholic, Orthodox and most Protestant teaching. It was worked out because a persecution had left a church full of clergy whose conduct under pressure was known to their congregations.