Religious Intolerance in the Later Roman Empire - Bad request ...

“heresy and schism proceeds from the devil, who is the fount of evil.” 153 As such, the
Donatists were evil, ‘of the devil’ and incapable of receiving salvation. Salvation may
come from God, but here at least, it flows through the emperor; the will of God is the
exercised through, and is the same as, the will of the emperor.
Conclusion
Constantine ultimately failed in his ambition to secure ‘right worship’ and unity
of faith for his empire; despite his best efforts, carried out exhaustively over several
years, the Donatist schism, then heresy, persisted into the eighth century when the
Arab armies conquered the region and imposed new ‘facts on the ground.’ In the years
before the persecution, when Constantine went to great lengths to convene councils
and reach a settlement, it is unclear what more he could have done to placate the
Donatists. Even when he finally ordered a persecution, there is no direct evidence that
the orders went beyond confiscation of Church and elite property. Of course,
evidence from the Passio Don ati indicates that the effects were apparently worse than
Constantine had intended. Possibly because of that, and certainly with an appreciation
that the benefits to the Donatists of dying outweighed any benefits to the Catholics or
to the authorities that their deaths might produce, Constantine issued his letter of 321,
which appropriated the benefits of such suffering and articulated a new policy which
sought to avoid confrontation and provide a means through which the two
communities could co-exist, whilst at the same time maintaining the superiority and
correctness of the Catholics’, and Constantine's, religion.
Certainly Constantine's final letter on the issue offered only small hope to the
Donatists. In the light of this final, condemnatory letter, we may appreciate just how
tolerant Constantine was in the years 312-316 as evidenced in his correspondence of
that period. However, the failure to achieve a settlement was used by Constantine to
his advantage; the recalcitrance of the Donatists in refusing to come (back) to the
153 Opt. App. 10; Ziwsa 214; Edwards 198: non dubium est haeresis et schism a a diabolo, qui caput est
m alitiae processisse;
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