MIGETIUS. – A Spanish heretic of the late 8th century. He is little known and only through hostile documents (letters from Elipandus to Migezius himself: PL 96, 859-67, and to Abbot Fidelis: ibid., 914-19; a letter from the Spanish episcopate to the Frankish bishops: ibid., 1330), which present him as ignorant and a visionary.
A staunch defender of the customs and rights of the Roman Church, he collaborated with Bishop Egila, whom Archbishop Venerius of Sens had appointed as his delegate in Spain with the task of promoting reform in that Church. But with his indiscreet zeal and heterodox doctrines, Migezius irritated the Spanish episcopate and its primate, Elipandus (v.). Condemned by a council held in Seville (782) and rejected even by Pope Hadrian I (cf. Jaffé-Wattenbach 2479), Migezius disappeared as the nascent controversy over Elipandus’s adoptionism drew all attention.
In addition to accusations of an ethical and disciplinary nature (moral rigorism and differences in the calculation of Easter), Elipandus attributes to Migezius a fanciful Trinitarian doctrine: Migezius would have identified the Person of the Father with David, that of the Son with the man Jesus, and that of the Holy Spirit with the Apostle Paul. Critics have sought to find in this reminiscences of Sabellianism, Priscillianism (v.), or even Muslim conceptions of prophecy. Today it is not ruled out that a polemical procedure by Elipandus may have greatly distorted Migezius’s own conceptions, whose Christological formula, admissible by virtue of the communicatio idiomatum, could not but displease the father of Spanish adoptionism.