VIGILANTIUS. - A Gallic priest, b. at Calagurris at the foot of the Pyrenees, d. after 406. In the year 394-95 he went with a letter from Paulinus of Nola to Bethlehem to St. Jerome (St. Jerome, Ep., 58), who received him in a friendly manner. V. had a discussion with Paulinianus, Vincent and Oceanus (Jerome, Ep., 61, 3; cf. 58, 11).
Having returned to the West, V. spread the rumor that St. Jerome was an Origenist and therefore a heretic. Jerome protested in a letter (Ep. 61) to V. against this calumny (beginning of the year 396), alluding to the fact that V., as the son of an innkeeper, did not have a preparation suited to the study of theology. In the year 404 V. was denounced to Jerome by a consecrated man named Riparius, as a new heretic of Aquitaine, who in a book had attacked the cult of the saints and of relics. Jerome responded in the form of an invective (Ep., 109) and when he had received, two years later (autumn 406), the books of V., he dictated in one night the Contra Vigilantium (PL 23, 1, 354-68).
V. had not only attacked abuses in the cult of the saints, but denied the efficacy of their intercession. He had also turned against asceticism and celibacy and advised against sending alms to the monks in Palestine. The last motives of this polemic are not known, because the pamphlets of V. are not preserved, nor is the letter of the correspondents of St. Jerome. It appears that V. after the attack of St. Jerome withdrew to his parish in Barcelona (or in Gaul?; cf. Gennadius, De vir. ill., XXXV: PL 58, 1078 B). Only Protestantism has given him a certain importance.
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Erik Peterson