PRISCILLIANO and PRISCILLIANISM. – Heresiarch, intruder bishop of Avila (ca. 345–85), whose tragic history criticism is progressively clarifying. The accusations of heresy against him derive more from the accusations of his contemporaries and the certain heterodoxy of his disciples than from the content of his writings known thus far.
A Spanish nobleman, of broad culture and practiced in the magical arts, P., while still a layman, propagated ca. 370, chiefly in the regions of Mérida and Córdoba, an esoteric doctrine of Gnostic-Manichaean origin. In secret assemblies, by means of certain ascetic practices, he promised the initiated a gradual perfection. With his persuasive eloquence he seduced many nobles and commoners, as well as certain bishops, such as Instantius and Salvianus. They conferred upon their leader the priesthood and then episcopal consecration for the see of Avila, thereby increasing the prestige of the sect. It soon spread through Lusitania, Baetica, Galicia, and southern Gaul.
A fanatical reaction, led by the bishops Hydatius of Mérida and Ithacius of Ossonoba, soon arose to oppose II. The ecclesiastical and civil authorities, the Spanish Councils, such as those of Saragossa in 380 and Toledo in 400, as well as St. Damasus and St. Ambrose of Milan, St. Martin of Tours, and the emperor Maximus, became involved in the controversy.
As for the heresiarch, his fortunes occupied fifteen years of varying success until, convicted of sorcery and immorality before the imperial tribunal and condemned according to the laws, he was executed at Trier in 385 (Sulpicius Severus, Chron., 2, 50, 8). The condemnation, which St. Martin of Tours had vainly opposed and which was disapproved by Pope Siricius and St. Ambrose, crowned the heretic among his followers with the halo of the martyrs; and the sect, chiefly in Spain, thereby acquired a splendor that lasted until the anathemas of the Council of Braga in 563 dealt it a fatal blow, without, however, extinguishing it completely.
Until the end of the last century, nothing was known of P.’s personal writings except for an epistolary fragment preserved by Orosius and the Canones in Epistolas V. Pauli, a brief Pauline theology in ninety sentences assembled by the unknown Spanish bishop Peregrinus; until, in 1889, P.’s treatises discovered at Würzburg were published. Great was the surprise at finding in them neither the intellectual gifts that Sulpicius attributed to P. nor the bizarre accumulation of errors that tradition imputed to him. Some denied that these treatises belonged to the heretic and attributed them to Instantius, one of his disciples (thus Dom G. Morin, Pro Instantio contre l'attribution de Priscillien des opuscules du manuscrit de Wurzbourg, in Rev. bén., 30 [1913], pp. 153–173; to the contrary, J. Martin, Priscillien oder Instantius, in Hist. Jahrb., 47 [1927], pp. 237–51). Others, such as G. Scheps, F. Paret, and E.-Ch. Babut, sought to rehabilitate P.’s person, whose condemnation would have been unjust and unfounded. Today criticism agrees with tradition, basing itself on the testimonies of St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, Philaster, Sulpicius Severus, Ithacius, Innocent I, St. Isidore, and the Councils of Saragossa, Toledo, and Braga, as well as on the guilt of Priscillianist heresy, which filled the history of Spain for more than a century. Nor are there decisive reasons for denying the authenticity of the apologetic treatises, which are not, on the other hand, devoid of traces of Priscillianism. Reduced to an outline, the principal tenets of the heresy are as follows: a modalist theory denying the Trinity; Christ, the angels, and the human soul would be Gnostic emanations; the devil, the principle of evil, would be the cause of the body as well as of storms and droughts; marriage is condemned and extramarital union admitted; the resurrection of the flesh is denied, etc. In Spain, Priscillianism provoked an entire cycle of refutations. The most significant are the following. After Tiberianus of Baetica and his friends, authors of a profession of faith to which P. alludes (Liber apologeticus, 3), and Latronianus, a “poet comparable with the ancients,” according to St. Jerome (De vir. inl., chap. 122), whose works have disappeared, the most important figure is that of Dictinius, bishop of Astorga, who abjured his errors at the First Council of Toledo. The heretical treatises, however, were still read with veneration in the time of St. Leo the Great, which is why
the Council of Braga in 563 condemned them anew. One of them, entitled Libra, denounced from the Balearic Islands to St. Augustine around 420 by Consentius (St. Augustine, Epist. 119), justified lying, a typical recourse of the Priscillianists: «iura, periura, secretum prodere noli» and provoked St. Augustine’s refutation, Contra mendacium. Nothing remains of the mordant accusations of Hydatius and Ithacius. The Symbol of the faith and the anathemas of the First Council of Toledo were refuted by the Galician bishop Pastor: Libellus in modum symboli (cf. J. A. de Aldama, El Simbolo Toledano, I, Rome 1934); Siagrius, bishop of the same region, distinguished himself in the controversy with certain Regulae definitionum contra haereticos (cf. G. Morin, Pastor et Syagrius, deux écrivains perdus du Ve siècle, in Rev. bén., 10 [1893], pp. 385–94). Of the vigorous controversy stirred up by Toribius of Astorga (a. 440), two letters remain, while a Commonitorium and a Libellus by the same author, now lost, are reflected in the reply of Pope Leo I in 447. Through his Commonitorium de errore Priscillianistarum et Origenistarum, Orosius involved St. Augustine in the dispute, and the latter responded with his work Contra Priscillianistas et Origenistas. Finally, a large part of the symbolic production, abundant in Spain until the end of the Visigothic period, displays this anti-Priscillianist tendency, not without anti-Arian concerns.