SELEUCIANI. — Term used to denote the followers of a Gnostic sect of the 3rd century, widespread in Galatia and mentioned by Filastrius of Brescia (4th century) and by St. Augustine. The S. were so called after Seleucus, their first leader and foremost representative.
The principal points of their doctrine are: a) God is a corporeal being, who did not create matter, since it too is eternal like him, nor human souls, which originate from fire and air through the agency of the Angels. Evil at times comes from God and at times 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 at the Ascension he abandoned his body in the sun. In this sense the words of Psalm 18:16 are to be understood: « In sole posuit tabernaculum suum »; c) they also rejected water Baptism, on the grounds that the disciples of St. John the Baptist were baptized « nello Spirito Santo e nel fuoco » (Mt. 3:11); d) no invisible paradise exists; 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 their master’s doctrine, teaching, for example, that Jesus Christ had no bodily birth. The S. recall in many respects the followers of Hermogenes, who lived at the end of the 2nd century and the beginning of the 3rd, and whom Tertullian directly attacked in Adversus Hermogenem. Indeed, on the basis of the supposed identification of Hermias with Hermogenes, some advanced the thesis that they were one and the same sect; but this is untenable, not least because the doctrine of Hermogenes is in open conflict with certain errors of the S., for example, the idea of a corporeal God, the author of evil. Since whatever is known about the S. is owed solely to the sparse and rather late information provided by Filastrius (De haeresibus, 55-60: PL 12, 469-71) and St. Augustine (De haeresibus, 59-60: PL 42, 41-42), it is impossible to give a more precise account of the history of this sect, whose importance, moreover, was not very considerable.