Priscillian - Continued Priscillianism

Continued Priscillianism

The heresy, notwithstanding the severe measures taken against it, continued to spread in Gaul as well as in Hispania; 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 rigorist 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 Hispania and the south of Gaul, 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 Gallaecia (modern Galicia and northern Portugal), where his body was reverentially returned from Trier. 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.