SELEUCIANI. — The 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 St. Augustine. The S. were so called after Seleucus, their first leader and principal exponent.
The main points of their doctrine are: a) God is a corporeal being who did not create matter, since it is eternal like Himself, nor did He create human souls, which originate from fire and air through the agency of angels. Evil is said to come sometimes from God and sometimes 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 His ascension He abandoned His body in the sun. In this sense must be understood the words of Psalm 18:16, “In sole posuit tabernaculum suum”; c) they rejected water baptism on the grounds that the disciples of St. John the Baptist were baptized “in the Holy Spirit and in fire” (Mt 3:11); d) they denied the existence of an invisible paradise; hell is this world; the resurrection of the body consists in the procreation of children.
Seleucus left two apostles, Hermias and Proclinus, who added new errors to the master’s teaching, for example, that Jesus Christ had no bodily birth. The S. in many respects recall the followers of Hermogenes, who lived at the end of the 2nd and beginning of the 3rd century and was directly attacked by Tertullian in his Adversus Hermogenem. Some, indeed, on the basis of the supposed identification of Hermias with Hermogenes, advanced the theory that they were the same sect; but this is inadmissible, especially since the doctrine of Hermogenes is in open contrast with certain errors of the S., e.g., the idea of a corporeal God as author of evil. Since anything known about the S. comes solely from the scanty and rather late notices of Filastrius (De haeresibus, 55–60: PL 12, 469–71) and St. Augustine (De haeresibus, 59–60: PL 42, 41–42), it is impossible to determine more precisely the history of this sect, whose importance, moreover, was not very considerable.