Elipandus

ELIPANDUS. - Archbishop of Toledo, father of Spanish Adoptionism in the 8th century. According to the recent investigations of Rivera, E. was born in 717, and while still very young became a monk, probably at Cordova, where in addition to theological sciences he also made himself familiar with Arabic literature and philosophy. After having directed the school of the monastery, in 755 (much earlier, therefore, than 780, the date hitherto commonly accepted) 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.

The doctrine of E. can be inferred from his letters (PL 96, 839-82) and from the polemical treatise of Beatus and Etherius (PL 96, 893-1030), in which a kind of creed of E. is handed down to us. It seems that the metropolitan of Toledo had already propagated his Christological ideas from 770 (cf. M. Del Alamo, Los comentarios de Beato al Apocalipsi y Elipando, in Miscellanea Giov. Mercati, II, Vatican City 1946, pp. 30-33), but the decisive occasion for manifesting them presented itself to E. only in the controversy with an obscure figure named Migeitus, whose confused Trinitarian doctrine was condemned by E. in a council assembled at Seville (probably in 782). Desirous of distinguishing in Christ the operations of 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 he consequently conceived as strictly parallel the bonds between the humanity of the Word and the heavenly Father on the one hand, and the grace of adoption that unites every justified soul with God on the other. It is not probable that this manner of speaking was influenced by Nestorian theology, then in vigorous rebirth at the other extremity of the Arab empire; E. himself rather invoked the testimony of the Mozarabic liturgy, which spoke of the adoption of the concrete nature, of this man, by the Word (though in an orthodox sense; cf. J. F. Rivera, La controversia adopcionista del siglo VIII y la ortodoxia de la liturgia mozárabe, in Ephemerides liturgicae, 47 [1933], pp. 506-36). Declaring that to reject the idea of adoption is to deny the true humanity of Christ, E. remained obstinately attached to his own 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 issued at Regensburg (792), where his principal collaborator Felix of Urgel had to recant, and at Frankfurt am Main (794); nor did he yield to the arguments of Alcuin (Adversus Elipandum libri IV: PL 101, 231-300).

Agostino Mayer