MIGETIUS. — Spanish heretic of the late 8th century. He is little known and only through documents hostile to him (letters of Elipandus to M. himself: PL 96, 859-67, and to the abbot Fidelis: ibid., 914-19; letter of the Spanish episcopate to the Frankish bishops: ibid., 1330), which present him as ignorant and visionary.
A determined assertor of the customs and rights of the Roman Church, he gave his collaboration to Bishop Egila, whom Archbishop Vicarius of Sens had appointed as his delegate in Spain with the task of promoting the reform of that Church. But with his indiscreet zeal and his heterodox doctrines M. irritated the Spanish episcopate and its primate Elipandus (v.). Condemned by a Council assembled at Seville (782) and rejected also by Pope Adrian I (cf. Jaffé-Wattenbach 2479), M. disappeared while the nascent controversy over the adoptionism of Elipandus drew all attention.
Besides accusations of an ethical and disciplinary order (moral rigorism and differences in the computation of Easter) Elipandus charges M. with an extravagant Trinitarian doctrine: M. is said to have identified the Person of the Father with David, that of the Son with the man Jesus, that of the Holy Spirit with the apostle Paul. Criticism has sought in this reminiscences of Sabellianism, of Priscillianism (v.) or even of Muslim conceptions regarding prophetism. Today it is not excluded that a polemical procedure of Elipandus may have considerably deformed the conceptions of M., whose Christological formula, admissible by virtue of the "communication of idioms," could not please the father of Spanish adoptionism.
Bibliography3 works
Agostino Mayer