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Against the Donatists
St Optatus of Milevis, tr. Vassall-Phillips, 1917
Book 2, The Wickedness of the Donatists in Scraping the Heads of Anointed Priests
O sacrilege heaped upon impiety! You gladly listen to men swearing by you, but refuse your ears to the voice of God in the hundred and fourth Psalm, when He says:
‘Touch not Mine Anointed and cast not your hands on My prophets.’1
That both kings and priests are God’s Anointed is shown by the books of Kings and also by David, saying in the hundred and thirty-second Psalm:
‘As the precious ointment on the head, that ran down unto the beard of Aaron.’2
You, on the contrary, have striven against God to despise His precepts, as earnestly as they who fear God strive to keep His Commandments. Tell us, where is your authority for scraping the heads of priests,3 when there are so many examples to the contrary, showing that this may not be done? Saul, before he sinned, received the grace of being anointed.4 After his anointing, he sinned grievously. God, when He saw this, wishing to give us an example not to touch the Oil, professed His repentance. For we read that the Lord spoke thus:
‘It repenteth Me to have anointed Saul to be a king.’5
Yet surely God might have taken away the Oil which He had bestowed; but, since He wished to teach that the Oil should not be touched even in a sinner, He who had given it, declared that it repented Him. If then God, in order to teach you, could not (because He would not) take away that which He had given, who are you to take away what you did not give?
And when you ought to have opened your ears to listen, you prepared your razor for sin. When you ought to have been the sons of God, you preferred to be the sons of men, and, in order to bite into other men’s offices, turned your teeth into arrows and arms. You sharpened your tongues into swords; you fulfilled that which was written of you in the fifty-sixth Psalm:
‘Sons of men----their teeth are arms and arrows; their tongue is a sharp sword.’6
Notes
- Ps. civ, 15: Ne tetigeritis unctos Meos, neque in prophetas Meos manum miseritis. The Vulgate reads: in prophetas Meos nolite malignari.
- Ps. cxxxii, 2.
- ubi vobis mandatum est radere capita sacerdotum? This is really important. From this passage in Optatus it is plain that the Donatist sacrilege was no other than the wrongful use of the Rite of Degradation as it is now prescribed in the Roman Pontifical. ‘Cum cultello aut vitro abradit leviter caput degradandi dicens: Consecrationem et benedictionem atque unctionem tibi traditam radendo delemus.’ So Optatus, with special reference to an unction bestowed upon priests, here accuses the Donatists of scraping the heads of the Catholic priests whom, without any regard for the sanctity of the Holy Oil, they ventured to degrade. (Cf. ii, 25 ad fin.: ‘oleum suum defendit Deus,’ etc.)
But until now no one seems ever to have imagined that oil was used in any part of the Catholic world either in the ordination of priests or the consecration of Bishops until the sixth century. Thus Duchesne writes (Origines du culte, x, ad fin.): ‘L’onction propre au rit Gallican aura été suggérée par l’Ancien Testament. Elle ne paraît pas très ancienne. Quelques indices porteraient à en chercher l’origine dans les Eglises de Bretagne [in fact Gildas alludes to it] qui la pratiquaient dès le sixième siècle.’ Similarly the learned Dr. Hatch writes as follows (Article on Ordination in Smith and Cheetham’s Dictionary of Christian Antiquities):----‘This rite [anointing of the hands of priests] is mentioned by two French liturgical writers of the ninth century, Amalarius of Metz (837) and Theodulphus of Orleans (821); the earliest canonist who speaks of it is Burchard of Worms (1025), but the recognised body of canon law distinctly disallows it, quoting a response of Pope Nicholas I to the Archbishop of Bourges in 864, who says that it is not a custom of the Roman Church, and that he has never heard of its being practised in the Christian Church. This must be held conclusive, at any rate as to its not being a general practice in the ninth century; but afterwards it no doubt became general, for Innocent III insists upon it, and objects to the Greeks for their omission of it. It is important to note that even the Pseudo-Isidorian authorities for the rite refer only to Bishops; at the same time they clearly show that the origin of the rite was the growing tendency to institute an analogy of ceremonies between the Old and New Testament.’ Dr. Hatch proceeds to remark:----‘ In addition to the anointing of the hands a group of English and Norman pontificals direct the anointing of the head; so Pontif. Ecgb., S. Dunstan, Caturic, Rotom., Becc, but not elsewhere.’ In contradiction to this we see clearly from St. Optatus that the heads of Bishops and probably of priests (the word Sacerdotum here----as we may judge from the context----probably includes Presbyteri as well as Episcopi) were universally anointed in Africa in the fourth century (cf. ii, 25: ‘Ne tetigeritis, inquit, unctos meos ‘). - ungi meruit.
- 1 Kings xv, 11.
- Ps. lvi, 5.