Priscillian and Priscillianism

PRISCILLIAN AND PRISCILLIANISM. - Heresiarch, intruded bishop of Avila (ca. 345-85), whose tragic fortunes criticism is progressively clarifying. The accusations of heresy against him derive from the accusations of his contemporaries and from the certain heterodoxy of his disciples, rather than from the content of his writings known up to now.

A Spanish nobleman, of wide culture and practiced in the magical arts, P. while still a layman propagated, around 370, chiefly in the regions of Merida and Cordova, an esoteric doctrine of Gnostic-Manichaean origin, and in secret gatherings promised, by means of certain ascetic practices, a gradual perfection to the initiated. By his persuasive eloquence he seduced many nobles and commoners and some bishops, such as Instantius and Salvian. These conferred the presbyterate and then episcopal consecration for the see of Avila upon the leader, thereby increasing the prestige of the sect. This soon spread through Lusitania, Baetica, Galicia and southern Gaul.

A fanatical reaction led by the bishops Hydatius of Merida and Ithacius of Ossanova soon arose to oppose it. The ecclesiastical and civil authorities occupied themselves with the controversy, as did the Spanish councils, such as those of Saragossa in 380 and of Toledo in 400; St. Damasus and St. Ambrose of Milan, St. Martin of Tours and the emperor Maximus.

As for the heresiarch, his fortunes occupied 15 years of varying outcomes, 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, to which St. Martin of Tours had vainly opposed himself, and which was disapproved by Pope Siricius and by St. Ambrose, crowned the heretic, among his followers, with the halo of martyrs; and the sect, principally in Spain, acquired from it a splendor that lasted until the anathemas of the Council of Braga in 563 gave it the fatal blow, without however extinguishing it entirely.

Until the end of the last century nothing was known of P.'s personal writings, with the exception of a fragment of a letter preserved by Orosius and of the Canones in Epistolas v. Pauli, a brief Pauline theology in 90 sentences collected by the unknown Spanish bishop Peregrinus; until in 1889 the treatises of P. discovered at Würzburg were published. Great was the surprise at finding in them neither the gifts of intellect that Sulpicius acknowledged in P. nor the bizarre accumulation of errors that tradition imputed to him. There were those who denied these treatises to the heretic in order to attribute 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; on the opposite side J. Martin, Priscillien oder Instantius, in Hist. Jahrb., 47 [1927], pp. 237-51). Others, such as G. Scheps, F. Paret, E.-Ch. Babut, sought to rehabilitate the person of P., 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 of the Councils of Saragossa, Toledo and Braga, and on the guilt of the Priscillianist heresy that fills the history of Spain for more than a century. Nor are there decisive reasons for denying the authenticity of the treatises of an apologetic tendency, not devoid, on the other hand, of Priscillianist traces. Reduced to a schema, the heads of the heresy are the following: a modalist theory, which denies the Trinity; Christ, the angels and the human soul would be Gnostic emanations; the devil, principle of evil, would be the cause of the body as well as of storms and droughts; marriage is condemned and extramarital union is admitted, the resurrection of the flesh is denied, etc. Priscillianism in Spain provoked a whole cycle of confutations. Here are the most significant. After Tiberianus Beticus and his friends, authors of a profession of faith to which P. alludes (Liber apologeticus, 3) and of 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 were, however, read with veneration even in the time of St. Leo the Great, for which reason the Council of Braga in 563 condemned them anew. One of them, entitled Libra, denounced from the Balearic Islands to St. Augustine, ca. 420, by Consentius (St. Augustine, Epist. 119), justified lying, a recourse typical of the Priscillianists: «iura, periura, secretum prodere noli» and provoked the confutation of St. Augustine: Contra mendacium. Nothing remains of the biting accusations of Hydatius and Ithacius. The Symbol of the faith and the anathemas of the First Council of Toledo were confuted by the Galician bishop Pastor: Libellus in modum symboli (cf. J. A. de Aldama, El Simbolo Toledano, I, Rome 1934); Syagrius, bishop of the same region, distinguished himself in the polemic 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 lively polemic aroused by Toribius of Astorga (a. 440) two letters remain, while a Commonitorium and a Libellus by the same, today lost, are reflected in the reply of Pope Leo I of 447. With his Commonitorium de errore Priscillianistarum et Origenistarum, Orosius interested St. Augustine in the dispute, who replied with his work Contra Priscillianistas et Origenistas. A great part, finally, of the symbolic production, abundant in Spain until the end of the Visigothic era, has this anti-Priscillianist tendency, not without anti-Arian preoccupations.

Giuseppe Madoz