SELEUCIANS. - Term used to denote the followers of a Gnostic sect of the 3rd century, widespread in Galatia and mentioned by Philastrius of Brescia (4th century) and by St. Augustine. The S. were so called from Seleucus, the first head and chief exponent.
The main points of their doctrine are: a) God is a corporeal being, who did not create matter since it is eternal just like him, nor human souls, which originate from fire and air through the work of the Angels. Evil now comes from God, now from matter: "Malum autem asserunt esse aliquando a Deo, aliquando a materia" (St. Augustine, De haeresibus, 59); b) Jesus Christ does not sit at the right hand of the heavenly Father, because in the ascension he left his body in the sun. In this sense the words of Psalm 18, 16 must be understood: "In sole posuit tabernaculum suum"; c) they further rejected the Baptism of water, for the reason that the disciples of St. John the Baptist were baptized "in the Holy Spirit and in fire" (Mt. 3, 11); d) there is no invisible paradise; hell is this world; the resurrection of bodies consists in the procreation of children.
Seleucus left two apostles, Hermias and Proclinus, who added new errors to the doctrine of the master, teaching, for example, that Jesus Christ had no corporeal birth. The S. recall in many points the followers of Hermogenes, who lived at the end of the 2nd century and the beginning of the 3rd, whom Tertullian attacked directly in the Adversus Hermogenem. Some indeed, on the basis of the presumed identification of Hermias with Hermogenes, advanced the thesis that it was one and the same sect; but this is not admissible, also because the doctrine of Hermogenes stands in open contrast with certain errors of the S., for example, with the idea of a corporeal God, author of evil. Since whatever is known of the S. is due solely to the scanty and rather late notices of Philastrius (De haeresibus, 55-60: PL 12, 469-71) and of St. Augustine (De haeresibus, 59-60: PL 42, 41-42), it is not possible to define more precisely the history of this sect, whose importance, moreover, was not very considerable.
Bibliography3 works
Emanuele Chietini