NOVATIONISM

NOVATIONISM. This schism (q.v.) was named for the Roman presbyter, Novatian (d. ca. 257/8), and began in the mid-3rd c. Unsuccessful in his candidacy for the see of Rome in 251, Novatian quarreled with Bishop Cornelius over the possibility of readmitting apostate Christians into the Church, i.e., believers who had renounced Christ under the pressure of the Emperor Decius’s persecution (250/1). He argued instead that serious sins could not be forgiven after Baptism (q.v.), and that the Church could only properly be of the “pure.” He was consecrated bishop despite Cornelius’s disapproval and initiated a parallel group of his own. The communities he began spread to North Africa, as well as to Asia Minor and even Constantinople (qq.v.), where they were known as katharoi (“the pure ones”).