Un esempio di rappresentazione mediata: l’immagine del donatismo nel Sermo 46 di Agostino

Roman Africa was a theater for over a century of one of the greatest regional religious controversies of late antique Christianity: the Donatist schism. During this long period, the Donatists, repeatedly dismissed by the Cecilianist counterpart and the Imperial power, underwent a radicalization process which led them to identify themselves as the only real Christians and to consider the African territory as a place chosen by God. In the year 411 A.D. a conference held in Carthage marked the final defeat of the Donatists. The consequence of this defeat was the disappearance of the abundant Donatist literary catalogue, which was mostly handed down through Catholic polemical works, so thus skewed by the thoughts of those who had beaten the Donatists: the Catholic bishops of Africa. The sermo 46, held at the beginning of the fifth century AD by one of the most eminent of these bishops, Augustine of Hippo, provides an example of this misrepresented knowledge. The discourse allows us to have a direct image of how a Catholic bishop represented the Donatist counterpart, as well as insight into some of the exegesis used by the Donatists to support their thoughts and how this exegesis was reported, confuted and denigrated by Augustine in front of their listeners.