On Fri, 26 Jul 1996, Michael F Hynes wrote:

> It is a Donatist argument only if we assume that simony is not a heresy--
> Humbert believed it was. His was a minority opinion.

the difference btw your and my approach is right here. you take the
aristotelian approach: it is either a or non-a; i use a fuzzier logic:
Gregory VII may protect himself from specific charge of donatism (coming
after Augustine and being part of Augustine's church, one wd assume he wd)
by not proclaiming it a heresy. but his affinities for Humbert's position
and his call for a boycott of the priests that he designated as simoniac
bring him very close to the edge. what commoners like the Paterines who
were tar-and-feathering simoniac priests thought suggests that they were
not attuned to the fine print. that is why i call it functional donatism.
if i understand your remark above, Humbert is in fact "guilty" of
donatism; that, in itself, shd make a discussion of how the papacy itself
cd come so close to so old and inacceptable a heresy part of the vast
discussion of this turning point in the religious and political history of
the west (which, i believe, was the point of my first post on the
subject).  by the way, Damian is the real Augustinian in all this --
specifically in the context of dealing with the Patarines -- and his
displeasure with Hildebrand is well known. 

> Scism has always been treated as a serious sin and contoumacious heresy as
> a heresy. 

you will agree that in cases of schism, both sides consider the other 
schismatic, right? (certainly true of the donatists.) who imposes their 
definition? the winners.

> Your assertion of modified Donatism simply doesn't hold water.
> Yes there were winners and losers in the 11th cent. reform, but not the 
> ones on which you speculate. In G VII's day the ecclesiology of papal
> monism (not even conceivable in A's time) won over an ecclessiology of
> imperial monism and over the traditional alternative to both--
> conciliarism. Now this is a topic (i.e. how one defines the pwr structure
> and one's place in it) that to me at least is far more fruitful than
> chasing after chimeras of neo-Donatism in the 11th cent.

i guess that what i am suggesting is that in pursuing this issue of power 
structures, the role of a quasi-/ functional donatism, and the kind of 
crowd rabble-rousing that donatists were well-known for, played a key 
role in the process. the question of how a heresy that was so explicitly 
and emphatically condemned cd exert so strong a gravitational pull on 
papal politics in the 11th cn seems like both a legitimate and fruitful one.

> If it walks, talks, smells, feels, tastes  and acts like a duck, then I
> guess we have a duck. If you want speculation, try metaphysics; if you
> want to do history be true to the sources. 

"true"? 

> Post-mo cannot become an excuse
> for avoiding the hard task of evaluating the evidence under the guise that
> noone knows the truth. If you believe that, write fiction instead.

mine is not a post-modern position. it has been articulated by many fine
historians for a very long time, including Collingwood.  as you know from
my book, i am very much committed to evaluating evidence. my point is that
if you insist on reading the sources as they present themselves rather
than see them as the product of a multi-faceted situation in which you
only get a (generally carefully fashioned) fragment of one side of that
situation, then the picture you get is rather flat and occasionally (as 
with ademar of chabannes and early medieval chiliasm) the exact 
opposite of what actually happened.  in this case, i'm
suggesting that donatism (with a small d) is lurking behind the texts we
see, exerting a gravitational pull that explains a good deal of the
interaction btw the papal reformers and aroused lay reformers. why is that 
so offensive a position?  your definition of staying true to the text 
strikes me as staying prisoner to the text: if the texts don't mention 
it, we can't. (for that matter, i bet some of the anti-gregorian texts 
probably do mention donatism.)

rlandes


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