ASCARICO. — Bishop of Asturias in the second half of the eighth century. He addressed to a certain Tuseredo an acrostic on the uncertainty of eternal salvation, formed from passages of the final verses of Prudentius’s Hamartigenia. To the same man he also wrote a letter inquiring into the state in which the dead rose at the death of Jesus (Mt. 27:51–53). Around 785, A. again turned to Elipando of Toledo for information about his doctrine concerning the relations of the Son with the Father. It seems that he was thereby won over to adoptionism (v.).
BIBL.: The acrostic in G. B. De Rossi, Inscriptiones christianae urbis Romae, II, II, Rome 1888, p. 295; the correspondence with Tuseredo in PL 99, 1231–40. On the relations with Elipando: PL 96, 893 ff., especially 918, and the Codex Carolinus edited by Gundlach in MGH, Epist., III, Berlin 1892, p. 637. Cf. also A. Lambert, s. V. in DHG, IV, cols. 881–84. Antonio Ferrua