'But should the nature of the person administering detract from the sanctity of the sacrament itself?'

Matthew Graham looks at the heretics throughout history whose name begins with D, E and F

There is something awkward about receiving communion from someone whom you have seen naked.

You find your focus drifting from the body of Christ to that of the celebrant. But should the nature of the person administering detract from the sanctity of the sacrament itself?

This question was at the heart of a heresy that dominated fourth and early fifth century Christianity – Donatism.

Donatus (? – c. 355) was a Carthaginian bishop and led a group that refused to recognize priests (known as traditores) who had avoided martyrdom during the Diocletian persecution by surrendering their holy books.

By submitting to secular authority, the traditores were clearly damned. Any act they performed, such as consecrating bishops or celebrating communion, was invalid and any one who communicated with them was infected.

Guerilla peasants

Unfortunately the Donatists became linked with marauding bands of socially disenfranchised guerrilla peasants (known as circumcellions) who pursued their beliefs with suicidal fervour.

They dressed in rough habits like monks, had their own rituals and a battle cry, Deo laudes (‘God be praised’). They believed that martyrs went straight to heaven and so would attack passers-by with large clubs (known as Israelites) in the hopes of provoking a response and their own martyrdom.

Failing that they would throw themselves off cliffs or drown themselves en masse.

Ultimately St Augustine of Hippo (an erstwhile heretic in his own right) saw off the threat by arguing that suicide was not martyrdom but a sin and that the sacraments automatically confer the grace of God by their own inherent quality and so remain holy even when the person administering them is not.

This doctrine (known as ex opere operato, “from the work itself”) was actually only formalized in 1547 at the Council of Trent when it became an issue in the Reformation.

A thousand years later, another band of socially disenfranchised guerilla peasants – the Dulcinians – were marauding through Northern Italy preaching a gospel of liberty, egality and fraternity.

Without sin

Fra Dolcino (c. 1250 – 1307) argued that his followers were without sin as they were trying to redeem the people they murdered and whose properties they pillaged and burnt: “To the pure all things are pure”.

Unfortunately the authorities disagreed with him and he was finally caught and burnt at the stake as a heretic for his antithetical views on social justice in 1307. In spite of this, he has been regarded as one of the progenitors of the ideals and spirit of revolution that swept through Europe half a millennium later.

It actually seems to be the rule in the Middle Ages that any group attempting social reform in some fashion would be linked to a fanatical heresy.

The Flagellants were a movement in the 13th and 14th century who would literally whip themselves up into a mystical frenzy as an act of penance.

However, they became rather too popular and were accused of questioning ecclesiastical authority and looking for social justice. The Inquisition stepped in and dealt with them in their own inimitable fashion, including burning 300 in a single day in Germany in 1416.

Dawkins

We’ll end this time with a brief mention of two more heretics and one non-heretic: Eutyches (380-456) whose arguments that Jesus’ nature was purely divine were received rather too zealously; the Ebionites ( 1st century), a Jewish Christian vegetarian sect who regarded Jesus as the most righteous human, only used the Gospel of Matthew and considered St Paul a heretic; and Richard Dawkins (technically an apostate and not a heretic) who would probably like to see all religious leaders defrocked and scourged.

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