The Donatist Christians of North Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries have been treated variously throughout history according to the interpreter: selfish schismatics, vile heretics, controversy mongers, or even as victims of belligerent Roman policies. It seems, however, that a more accurate summation of the late antique phenomenon can be located within the writings of W.H.C Frend; that is that being more than just a run-of-the-mill sectarian group; Donatism was actually “part of a revolution.”
Every revolution has its causes and Donatism is no different. The Donatist revolution was initiated and sustained by a potent mixture of religious fervor, economic and social tensions that pitted native North Africans against colonial Romans, as well as the idiosyncratic traditions from being one of the oldest forms of Latin Christianity.
But what makes Donatism unique among so-called revolutions is the way in which its constitutive elements coalesced into a prolonged and easily-evolving political theology that enabled that form of North African Christianity to channel the socio-political yearnings and cultural influences of its native population into a theological-behavioral paradigm that was dynamic and potent. Donatist political theology, the combination of the North African theological tradition and social context, is that which can be said to underlie and influence the multifaceted, and seemingly inconsistent, evolution of the life, thought, and secular interactions of Christians in Late Roman Africa.
It was this political theology that partly explains the myriad complexities of Donatist maneuvers in interacting with the Roman Empire and Roman Catholics. What seems to have been a disparate network initiating an amalgam of blindly-driven activities in history is decipherable through comprehension of their composite creedal-political orientations.

Matthew Alan Gaumer
DBOF Scholar, Research Assistant
Doctoral School for the Humanities
and Social Sciences
K.U. Leuven

Augustiniana 2008, vol. 58, no3-4, pp. 201-233.

M. A. Gaumer. The evolution of Donatist Theology as response to a changing late antique milieu.