PARMENIAN. - Donatist bishop of Carthage. St. Optatus (I, 5; III, 3) calls him a "foreigner" (peregrinus) and therefore not well informed about African affairs; from another polemical passage (II, 7) it has been thought that P. was of Spanish or Gallic birth. In any case, he was bishop at the time of Julian the Apostate and devoted himself to reorganizing the schismatic Church and winning adherents to it, with a very intense activity that was also literary.
Indeed, around 362 he wrote a work in 5 books, or tractatus, against the Catholics, of which it is possible to reconstruct at least the general outline through the refutation of St. Optatus. The title could have been Adversus Ecclesiam traditorum (Monceaux) or perhaps (because of its derivation from St. Cyprian) De catholica Ecclesia (or De Ecclesiae unitate) adversus traditores. The five books must have dealt with: Baptism, which P. praised, comparing it to the flood and to circumcision; the unity of the Church, according to the excessively rigorist conception of his sect; the Catholics, as traditores or accomplices of or connivers with them; again the Catholics, accusing them of having had recourse to the civil authority, which had used force amid accusations of cruelty against the "operarii unitati" Paul and Macarius; the passages of Scripture that sounded like a condemnation of the Catholics (v. DONATISMO). Treating of the true Church, he enumerated its dotes, which it must have, as the bride of Christ: cathedra (that is, apostolic succession), angelus (of Baptism), Spiritus, fons, sigillum, altare; but he lumped together, without distinguishing, true heretics and schismatics, considering their sacrifices equally sacrilegious.
It does not appear that P. responded to the refutation of St. Optatus. He was instead keenly concerned about what a layman of his sect, Tyconius (v.), was saying and writing, to whom he addressed an open letter reaffirming the by then traditional principles of his sect, that is, the necessity of breaking every relationship with sinners, even at the cost of isolating oneself from the universal Church. This letter, written around 378, came after P.'s death to the knowledge of St. Augustine, who refuted it around 400, in the three books Contra epistolam Parmeniani.
Bibliography
Alberto Pincherle