Priscillian - Priscillian's Career

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 was Saint Paul`s "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God?" (I Corinthians 6:19) 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 (also from Hispania) resulted in a synod held at Zaragoza 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. That is, much of what was forbidden was condemned because the Priscillianists were practicing it. 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" (Latin for teacher); women were not to be accounted "virgins" until they had reached the age of forty.

Through the exertions of Hydatius of Emerita, the leading Priscillianists, who had failed to appear before the synod of Hispanic and Aquitanian bishops to which they had been summoned, were excommunicated at Zaragoza 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 Gratianus, who issued an edict threatening the sectarian leaders with banishment. Consequently, the three bishops, Instantius, Salvianus 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. Salvianus 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 Gratianus' edict, and the attempted arrest of Ithacius of Ossonuba.

On the murder of Emperor Gratianus in Lyon and the accession, at Trier (Trèves, in Germany) at least, of the usurper Magnus Maximus (383), Ithacius fled to Trier, 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 Trier in 385, the first Christian heretics to be put to death by Christians. This act had the approval of the synod which met at Trier 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.