Agonists

As circumcellions ( Latin agonistici , from ancient Greek ἀγών Agon , German , fight ' ) or soldiers of Christ was a subset of the Donatists called. Their opponents called them circumcellions (after Augustine , because they roamed circum cellas 'around the martyr chapels / storehouses' ). Theodora Büttner uses the term agonites in her work on circumcellions .

The agonists first appeared in the thirties of the fourth century. They combined social with religious protest. To realize the biblical principle of equality, they joined the anti-Roman Donatists and formed paramilitary groups that roamed the North African landscape. Initially, they did not use swords, but clubs with which they beat their victims and then left them to die.

Their movement was triggered by a poverty revolt by the Colons in 320. They called themselves “saints” and their leaders “heads of saints” and were sworn to pursue any perceived injustice with a kind of counter-terror. They saw the government, landowners, moneylenders, and the possessing class as the devil's means of persecuting the saints of God as well as the poor in general, as well as big farmers who oppressed poor farm workers.

They saw the Catholic Orthodox Church as a particular opponent. In their raids, they focused in particular on Catholic Orthodox clergy, whose houses they looted, who blinded them by throwing lime in their eyes and forcing them to be rebaptized . The Catholic-Orthodox lay people, men, women and children, were also persecuted, churches desecrated and altars destroyed.

It is narrated that the Circumcellions stopped wagons on the highways, took the owners out and forced them to leave while their slaves took the master seat in the wagon.

The other side of the circumcellions was their martyrdom and the pursuit of martyrdom. They danced at the graves of their martyrs at night. Each circumcellione hoped and prayed to be martyred himself. The circumcellions sought death because they believed they were doing God's work and thus claiming the martyr's crown.

Some went so far as to attack fully armed Roman legionaries or to throw themselves off city walls or cliffs as a last resort. On a rock group in Central Numidia there is a row of rocks marked with names and the date of death, from which circumcellions fell in search of martyrdom.

Depending on their point of view, the Circumcellions are regarded as the first Christian revolutionary group to publicly strive to eliminate and overcome the existing unjust social order, or as fanatical religious terrorists .

The uncompromising willingness and use of violence of the circumcellions and the resulting general legal uncertainty made a purely theological dispute between Donatists and Catholic Orthodox impossible.

The Circumcellions survived persecution by Romans and Vandals . Their history is lost in the Islamic epoch.

literature

• Theodora Büttner : The social-religious movement of the circumcellions (agonites) . In: Hellmut Kretzschmar : From the Middle Ages to the Modern Era: On the 65th birthday of Heinrich Sproemberg . Rütten & Loening , Berlin 1956, DNB 455301425 , (= research on medieval history , volume 1).
• Theodora Büttner: The Circumcellionen, a social-religious movement , Leipzig 1957, DNB 480701229 , dissertation University of Leipzig , September 14, 1957.
• Theodora Büttner, Ernst Werner : Circumcellionen and Adamiten, 2 forms of medieval heresy . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1959, DNB 450691853 (=  research on medieval history , volume 2).
• Catherine Nixey: Holy Wrath. How the early Christians destroyed antiquity. Translated from the English by Cornelius Hartz . 2nd Edition. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-421-04775-5 (English original edition: The Darkening Age. The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. Macmillan, London 2017).

Web links

• Agonistici in the Catholic Encyclopedia
• Before they committed suicide, they had drinking and sex orgies

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Circumcellions . In: Brockhaus Encyclopedia . 19th edition. tape 4 . F. A. Brockhaus GmbH, Mannheim 1987, ISBN 3-7653-1104-9 , p. 586 .