ELIPANDO. — Archbishop of Toledo, father of Spanish Adoptionism in the eighth century. According to the recent investigations of Rivera, E. was born in 717 and, at a very young age, became a monk, probably at Cordova, where, besides the theological sciences, he also familiarized himself with Arabic literature and philosophy. After directing the monastery school, in 755 (therefore much earlier than 780, the date commonly accepted until now) he was elevated to the primatial see of Toledo, perhaps with the support of the Muslim authorities, toward whom E. always showed sympathy. E. died around 807, at the time of the general massacre of the Mozarabs.
E.’s doctrine may be deduced from his letters (PL 96, 839-82) and from the polemical treatise of Beato and Eterio (PL 96, 893-1030), in which a sort of creed of E. has been transmitted to us. It appears that the metropolitan of Toledo had propagated his Christological ideas as early as 770 (cf. M. Del Alamo, Los comentarios de Beato al Apocalipsi y Elipando, in Miscellanea Giou. Mercati, II, Città del Vaticano 1946, pp. 30-33), but the decisive occasion for expressing them presented itself to E. only in the controversy with an obscure figure named Migeitus, whose confused Trinitarian doctrine was condemned by E. at a council convened at Seville (probably in 782). Desiring to distinguish in Christ the operations proper to each of the natures, E. further declared that Christ, according to his humanity, is not the natural but only the adoptive Son of the Father, and consequently conceived as strictly parallel the relationship between the humanity of the Word and the heavenly Father, on the one hand, and that between the grace of adoption enjoyed by every soul justified before God, on the other. It is not probable that this manner of speaking was influenced by Nestorian theology, then undergoing a vigorous revival at the other extremity of the Arab empire; E. himself rather invoked the testimony of the Mozarabic liturgy, which spoke of the adoption by the Word of the concrete nature, of this man (though in an orthodox sense; cf. J. F. Rivera, La controversia adopsianista del siglo VIII y la ortodoxia de la liturgia mozdrába, in Ephemerides liturgicae, 47 [1933], pp. 506-36). Declaring that to reject the idea of adoption was to deny Christ’s true humanity, E. remained obstinately attached to his doctrine, even after the letter of condemnation sent by Pope Adrian I (cf. Jaffé-Wattenbach, 2479); he remained unmoved in the face of the condemnations promulgated at Regensburg (792), where his principal collaborator Felice di Urgel was obliged to retract, and at Frankfurt am Main (794); nor did he yield to the arguments of Alcuin (Adversus Elipandum libri IV: PL 101, 231-300).