El conflicto donatista y el criterio dialógico de la ciudad

Abstract

The Donatist conflict, of high incidence in Roman Africa of the IV and V centuries, brought to light the assumptions on coexistence that owned the antagonistic parties.The Donatist position is sustained in historical events (the delivery of the Sacred Books to the authorities), but also in the ecclesiologies of Tertullian and Cyprian of Cartago. They are influenced by the conception of the church as a church of martyrs and the presumption of the imminent end of time. This conception performs a hermeneutics of the place, since Africa is affirmed as the only place of Christianity, as opposed to all the other places where and Christianity does not longer exist, and a hermeneutics of time, for history and its possibility of freedom seems to have been stopped by the acts that have occurred. Saint Augustine proposes the dialogic criterion of the city as a practical possibility of coexistence and freedom.