Optatus of Milevis

Almost nothing is known about the life of Optatus apart from his office and his book. He was bishop of Milevis, a city in the Roman province of Numidia in North Africa, and he wrote during the reigns of the emperors Valentinian and Valens, which Jerome uses to place his activity in the years around 364 to 375 AD. A later, revised edition of his work refers to Pope Siricius, who became bishop of Rome in 384 AD, so Optatus was still living, or his text was still being updated, after that date. Beyond this frame, his birth, his death, and the events of his career are unrecorded.

The two external witnesses to Optatus are Jerome and Augustine. Jerome names him in On Illustrious Men, noting that he wrote six books against the Donatists and assigning his activity to the reigns of Valentinian and Valens. Augustine cites him repeatedly and with respect, ranking him among the authorities of the Catholic side alongside Ambrose and Cyprian. It is largely through Augustine's use of him that Optatus was remembered, since Augustine took up the same controversy a generation later and drew on his predecessor's arguments and materials.

His one surviving work is Against the Donatists, also known as Against Parmenian (Adversus Parmenianum) because it was written to answer Parmenian, the Donatist bishop of Carthage. It was issued first in six books; a seventh was added in the later revised edition. The Donatist schism, which the work addresses, had divided the African church since the early fourth century. It began in a disputed episcopal election at Carthage, where the party that consecrated Caecilian and the party that consecrated Majorinus each claimed to be the true church, and it turned on the charge that certain bishops had been traditores, men who had handed over the Scriptures to the authorities during the persecution under Diocletian. The Donatists held that ordinations performed by such men, and the sacraments flowing from them, were void.

Optatus set out to answer this on several points. Against the Donatist claim to be the church, he argued that the church is catholic, spread through the whole world, and cannot be confined to one region: in his phrase, the church cannot be shut up in a corner of Africa. Against the Donatist doctrine that a sacrament administered by an unworthy minister is invalid, he argued that the sacraments belong to God and not to the person who administers them, so that their validity does not depend on the minister's standing. This was the position that Augustine later developed at length and that became the settled teaching of the Western church on the point.

A further feature of the work is its tone toward the opposing party. Optatus addresses the Donatists as brothers, treating the division as a schism among Christians rather than a separation from the faith itself, and he frames his case as an argument for reunion. Alongside the six books, he attached a collection of documents bearing on the origin of the schism, including records connected with the dispute over Caecilian. This dossier preserves source material for the early history of the controversy that survives nowhere else and that underlies much of the later Donatist literature.

That is nearly the whole of what can be said about him. No account of his upbringing, his education, or his relations with other African bishops has come down, and the dates of his life cannot be fixed beyond the reigns named by Jerome and the reference to Siricius in the revised text. He is, in effect, a single book and the office of a single see.