Priscillian

Priscillian of Ávila (died 385) was a Spanish theologian and the founder of a party which advocated strong asceticism. He is still a mysterious figure, this first person in the history of Christianity to be executed for heresy (though the civil charges were for the practice of magic). His party, in spite of severe persecution for heresy, continued to subsist in Spain and in Gaul until after the middle of the 6th century. The first writings attributed to him, which had seemed securely lost, were recovered in 1885.

Priscillian's career

The principal and almost contemporary source for the career of Priscillian is the Gallic chronicler Sulpicius Severus, who characterized him (Chronica II.46) as noble and rich, a layman who had devoted his life to study, vain of his classical pagan education, already being looked on with misgivings (see Gregory of Tours). He was an ascetic mystic and regarded the Christian life as continual intercourse with God. His favourite idea is that which St Paul had expressed in the words "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God?" and he argued that to make himself a fit habitation for the divine a man must, besides holding the Catholic faith and doing works of love, renounce marriage and earthly honour, and practise a hard asceticism. It was on the question of continence in, if not renunciation of, marriage, that he came into conflict with the authorities, and his influence among growing numbers of followers threatened the authority of the church when the bishops Instantius and Salvian were won over by his eloquence and his severely ascetic example.

His notable opponents in Hispania were Hyginus, bishop of Cordoba, and Hydatius, bishop of Mérida. Their complaint to Pope Damasus I resulted in a synod held at Saragossa in 380, in the absence of Priscillian or any of his followers. The canons issued by the synod shed light on Priscillian's practices, by condemnation: women were forbidden to join with men during the time of prayer; fasting on Sunday was condemned; no one was to retreat at home or in the mountains during Lent; the Eucharist was to be taken in church and not brought home; excommunicated persons were not to be sheltered by bishops; a cleric was forbidden to become a monk on the motivation of a more perfect life; no one was to assume the title "doctor"; women were not to be accounted "virgins" until they had reached the age of forty.

Through the exertions of Idacius of Emerita, the leading Priscillianists, who had failed to appear before the synod of Spanish and Aquitanian bishops to which they had been summoned, were excommunicated at Saragossa in October 380, according to Sulpicius, a conclusion that was emphatically denied in a letter to Damasus, Liber ad Damasum episcopum (McKenna, note 14).

Among the more prominent of Priscillian's friends were two bishops, Instantius and Salvianus,; Hyginus of Cordova also joined the party. After a Priscillianist delegation to Hydatius was turned away, they appointed Priscillian bishop of Ávila, and the orthodox party found it necessary to appeal to the emperor (Gratian), who issued an edict threatening the sectarian leaders with banishment. Consequently, the three bishops, Instantius, Salvian, and Priscillian, went in person to Rome, to present their case before Damasus. But neither the Pope nor Ambrose, bishop of Milan, granted them an audience. Salvian died in Rome, but through the intervention of Macedonius, the imperial magister officiorum and an enemy of Ambrose, they succeeded, in procuring the withdrawal of Gratian's edict, and the attempted arrest of Ithacius of Ossonuba.

On the murder of Emperor Gratian in Paris and the accession, at Treves at least, of the usurper Magnus Maximus (383) Ithacius fled to Treves, and in consequence of his representations a new synod was held (384) at Bordeaux, where Instantius was deposed. Priscillian appealed to the emperor, with the unexpected result that, with six of his companions, he was beheaded at Treves in 385, the first Christians martyred by Christians. This act had the approval of the synod which met at Treves in the same year, but Ambrose of Milan, Pope Siricius and Martin of Tours protested against Priscillian's execution, largely on the jurisdictional grounds that an ecclesiastical case should not be decided by a civil tribunal, and worked to reduce the persecution.

Priscillian's contemporary following

Priscillian and his sympathizers included many women, who were welcomed as equals of men. They were organised into bands of spirituales and abstinentes. This insistence on celibacy explains some the charge of Manichaeism levelled against Priscillian. (Even Jerome, for his talk of the sordes nuptiarum, had been similarly accused, and to escape popular indignation had retired to Bethlehem). To this charge was added the accusation of magic and licentious orgies (a particularly preposterous charge, given the nature of Priscillian's doctrines) that the Christian churches have levelled against critics in every age.

Continued Priscillianism

The heresy, notwithstanding the severe measures taken against it, continued to spread in France as well as in Spain; in 412 Lazarus, bishop of Aix-en-Provence, and Herod, bishop of Arles, were expelled from their sees on a charge of Manichaeism. Proculus, the metropolitan of Marseille, and the metropolitans of Vienne and Narbonensis Secunda were also followers of the rigorous tradition for which Priscillian had died.

Something was done for its repression by a synod held by Turibius of Astorga in 446, and by that of Toledo in 447; as an openly professed creed it had to be declared heretical once more by the second synod of Braga in 563, a sign that Priscillianist asceticism was still strong long after his execution. "The official church," says F. C. Conybeare, "had to respect the ascetic spirit to the extent of enjoining celibacy upon its priests, and of recognizing, or rather immuring, such of the laity as desired to live out the old ascetic ideal. But the official teaching of Rome would not allow it to be the ideal and duty of every Christian. Priscillian perished for insisting that it was such".

The long prevalent estimation of Priscillian as a heretic and Manichaean rested upon Augustine, Turibius of Astorga, Leo the Great and Orosius (who quotes a fragment of a letter of Priscillian's), although at the Council of Toledo in 400, fifteen years after Priscillian's death, when his case was reviewed, the most serious charge that could be brought was the error of language involved in a misrendering of the word innascibilis ("unbegettable").

It is not always easy to separate the genuine assertions of Priscillian himself from those ascribed to him by his enemies, nor from the later developments taken by groups who were labelled "Priscillianist." Priscillian casts a long shadow in the north of Spain and the south of France, where mystic asceticism has repeatedly been carried to extremes that the political mainstream has denounced as "heretical."

Priscillian was long honored as a martyr, not heretic, especially in Galicia, where his body was reverentially returned from Triers. Some claim that the remains found in the 8th century at the site rededicated to Saint James the Great— Santiago de Compostela— which even today are a place of pilgrimage belong not to the apostle James but to Priscillian.

Writings and rediscovery

Some writings by Priscillian were accounted orthodox and were not burned. For instance he divided the Pauline epistles (including the Epistle to the Hebrews) into a series of texts on their theological points and wrote an introduction to each section. These "canons" survived in a form edited by Peregrinus. They contain a strong call to a life of personal piety and asceticism, including celibacy and abstinence from meat and wine. Slavery is abolished in Jesus Christ, and gender differences also, ideas that did not go down well anywhere in Christendom. The charismatic gifts of all believers are equally affirmed. Study of scripture is urged. Like all 4th century Christians, Priscillian placed considerable weight on works later considered apocrypha.

It was long thought that all the writings of the "heretic" himself had perished, but in 1885, Georg Schepss discovered at the University of Würzburg eleven genuine tracts, published in the Vienna Corpus 1886. Though they bear Priscillian's name, four describing Priscillian's trial appear to have been written by a close follower. "They contain nothing that is not orthodox and commonplace, nothing that Jerome might not have written," and go far to justify the description of Priscillian as "the first martyr burned by a Spanish Inquisition". Unsympathetic historians and folk tradition have built upon facts like these what is known as the "Black Legend" of alleged Spanish fanaticism.

According to Raymond Brown's Epistle of John, the source of the Comma Johanneum appears to be the Latin book "Liber Apologeticus" by Priscillian.

Reference

McKenna, Stephen, "Priscillianism and Pagan Survivals in Spain" in Paganism and Pagan Survivals in Spain up to the Fall of the Visigothic Kingdom on-line The present account depends on this thoroughly cited chapter.

External links

Analysis of Priscillian and Priscillianism
This entry adapts some information originally from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.