| #### 5. PRISCILLIAN |

| #### #### Of the history of the Church in Spain in the first three centuries after Christ we know almost nothing. St. Paul was, in all likelihood, one of its first evangelists. It gave martyrs to the Church in the persecution of Decius. Fifty years later than Decius, on the eve of the greater persecution of Diocletian, its bishops, to judge from what we know of the Council of Elvira (c. 300-305), were preoccupied with the problems of a Catholicism so extensive and so universally popular that in many respects it had become gravely relaxed. There were Catholics who, even in time of peace, continued to make their offerings to the pagan gods. Marriages between Christians and the heathen priests were not unknown. The clergy showed too keen an inclination to engage in commerce -- bishops no less than priests and deacons. Others practised as moneylenders. The habit or example of idolatry was still strong and, lest they should be worshipped, all pictures were now ordered to be removed from the churches Clerics who are married are to live with their wives as with their sisters, under pain of deposition. Rules are laid down for the cases of conversion from such special classes as the charioteers of the circus, and the comedians from the theatre who, once converted, are strictly forbidden to return to their unhallowed profession. With this council, held in the first ten years of the fourth century, the veil falls once more on our knowledge of the early Spanish Church. When it lifts, some seventy years later, it is to disclose a Church torn by internal controversy, and to reveal one of the most curious figures of all Church history. This was Priscillian. He was a man of great distinction, well-born, cultivated, wealthy, gifted with eloquent speech, with a genius for propaganda, and he was wholly devoted to the cult of the ascetic life. #### The different churches in Spain already by this time had each of them its circle of ascetics -- men and women who had specially dedicated themselves by a vow of continency in a spiritual union with Our Lord. They would continue to live in their own homes, but all follow a more or less universal rule, which prescribed special daily prayers, daily reunions in the church, additional fasts, and abstinences, and a sober manner of dress -- the women for example were veiled, wore no jewellery, used no cosmetics. They would be, in Spain as elsewhere, the local church's agents in the organised charities that played so great a part in the primitive Christian life, care of the sick, of widows and orphans, relief of the indigent poor. Priscillian was not in any sense a pioneer in this ascetic movement, but his powerful personality gave it a new impetus and speedily began to transform it. #### Gradually, the multitudes whom he influenced -- and his disciples grew in number very speedily indeed -- looked to Priscillian for direction and not to the head of the local church, to Priscillian and his private inspirations. And Priscillian was not limited by the traditional sources of Christian Asceticism. The myths of the Gnostically-inspired, apocryphal gospels served him with ideas no less than the genuine Scriptures. The basis of his ascetic practices again was not Christian, but the old oriental theories of the radical badness of matter, and of the inevitable fundamental opposition between matter and spirit. This showed itself in the exaggerated abstinences to which he was given and which he recommended, condemnation of marriage, of the use of wine, and the use of flesh meats as things bad and to be shunned. Little by little his followers began to have the appearance of a sect apart, to whom other members of the Church were as an inferior race. The Priscillianists -- to anticipate a later name for them-habitually went barefooted. Periodically, at fixed times, they withdrew themselves from the world to give themselves to their own peculiar religious observance in a kind of "retreat." They had their own use of the Holy Eucharist. Women, especially, had an important place in the movement. #### It was not long before the genius of Priscillian had completely disturbed the Spanish Church, especially in the west and northwest, in Portugal and Galicia. His ascetic reputation and what was known of the severity of his life, were, for many people, decisive. Thousands joined him and among them even some of the bishops. Other bishops began to question the tendencies of the movement, to suspect the principles that inspired it and then to organise against it. In 379 they sent to consult the pope, Damasus I, and the following year, in a great council at Saragossa, a number of the practices to which the followers of Priscillian were said to be given, were forbidden under the strictest penalties. #### How strong, by this time, the movement had grown may be judged from the next event in the story -- the election of Priscillian himself as Bishop of Avila on the very morrow of the Council of 380. Immediately he assumed the offensive, and made a great effort to oust his superior, the Metropolitan of Lusitania. But that bishop, Idace, was not to be easily overthrown. He had an influential friend at the imperial court -- no other indeed than St. Ambrose -- and the only result of Priscillian's manoeuvre was an edict from the emperor, Gratian, in general terms, against "false bishops and Manichees." Already there was, in this, menace of what the future might hold for Priscillian, for the Manichee-to whose anti-social morality his own alleged customs bore so striking a resemblance -- had been under the ban of the empire since long before the conversion of Constantine. Priscillian, with some friends, then set out for Italy, for Rome and Milan to assure himself of the support of both pope and emperor. The pope would not receive them; but from Milan they obtained, in the end, a decree which in effect annulled that from whose execution they had fled. #### Once more Priscillian was free to take the offensive, this time with the civil authority behind him. The leaders opposed to him, menaced now by the State as disturbers of the peace, took themselves to Treves, the seat of the pretorian prefecture of the Gauls in which Spain lay. There they found support in the bishops and the high officials, but Priscillian's influence in Milan was still too great to be overthrown. Suddenly the whole situation changed when, in 383, Maximus, the imperial commander in Britain, declared himself emperor. He landed in Gaul with an army and Gratian, marching north to meet him, was assassinated at Lyons. Maximus was master of Britain, of Gaul and of Spain. Of this empire Treves became the capital, and still at Treves was the bishop who was Priscillian's chief enemy -- Ithacus, a man of loose life, worldly, ambitious and, as the enemy of the bishop who had found protectors at the court of Milan, likely to find a favourable hearing with the victorious Maximus. #### Maximus was sufficiently won round by Ithacus' charges to order that Priscillian and a like-minded colleague, Instantius, should be arrested and tried at Bordeaux by a council of bishops. Instantius was deposed, but Priscillian, refusing a trial, appealed from the bishops to the emperor. The scene changed to Treves and this time it was to the criminal courts, on criminal charges, that Ithacus denounced his rival. Priscillian was tried on an indictment accusing him of sorcery, of diffusing obscene doctrines, of presiding at midnight reunions of women, and of stripping himself naked to pray. With six associates he was condemned; and, since sorcery was a capital offence, executed. #### The sentences and their execution caused a sensation. St. Martin, Bishop of Tours, had protested in advance against any sentence of death. Ithacus, in his plea against Priscillian, had made the most of his congenial opportunity to demonstrate publicly against all asceticism and all ascetics, even to the extent of denouncing St. Martin himself as a Manichee. The saint, undismayed, had continued to urge his plea that in an affair which concerned questions of Catholic doctrine, the lay court had no jurisdiction. The emperor had promised that there should be no question of a death sentence and the bishop returned home. Then, influenced by the anti-Priscillianist bishops, Maximus had ordered an enquiry and, on the prefect's report that Priscillian was guilty of sorcery, had ordered the trial that resulted in the conviction and the executions. Nor was this the end. Commissioners were sent to Spain to deal similarly with Priscillian's adherents. #### St. Martin returned to Treves and broke off all relations with the Bishop of Treves and those who had shared in the enquiries and the trial. Nor did he cease to protest against the iniquity of the death sentences, until the emperor promised, as the gauge of his communion, to halt the persecution then beginning in Spain. The pope, too (Siricius, 384-396), asked for an explanation of the proceedings and, fully informed by the emperor, excommunicated Ithacus and his associates. Nor would St. Ambrose when, in the course of the year, a political embassy brought him to Treves, give any recognition to the bishop, "not wishing to have anything to do with bishops who had sent heretics to their death." #### For three years, however, despite St. Martin, the repression continued until in 388 Maximus was slain and the West was once more ruled from Milan. With this restoration of Valentinian II, Priscillian came, posthumously, into something like his own. With the other supporters of the late usurper the persecutors of Priscillian paid the inevitable penalty. Ithacus and the others were deposed and exiled. The remains of Priscillian were brought back from Germany with all manner of ceremony to become the centre of a popular cultus, and soon Spain was once more given over to the bitter fights of religious factions, Galicia and the West ever more strongly Priscillianist, Betica and Carthaginia just as strongly orthodox. For years the episcopate was divided. A council at Saragossa (395) excommunicated the Priscillianist bishops and these, reverting to the manoeuvre of their master, fled to Milan to enlist the support of the court. St. Ambrose showed himself sympathetic, but insisted on an abjuration of Priscillian's distinctive doctrines and on the renunciation of the cult of his memory and his remains. The exiles consented, and thereby gained the support not only of St. Ambrose but also of the pope. They returned to Spain only to break their promises, and at a new council (Toledo, 400) they were yet again condemned. This time the condemnation broke the unity of the party, for while some of the bishops submitted, others remained obstinate. Curiously enough the submission was the cause of yet another division. Rome, consulted as to the procedure to be adopted towards the repentant bishops, gave its traditional advice that they should be shown every consideration. Whereupon, as always, a faction ""more Catholic than the pope" showed itself, declining to re-admit the repentant Priscillianists to communion and breaking off all relations with those who did so. There were now three kinds of Christians in Spain, the Priscillianists, the moderate Catholics with whom, thanks to Rome, the repentant Priscillianists were now united, and the fanatical Catholic opponents of the reunion -- a lamentable state of affairs after thirty years of controversy. Before any real improvement could take place there came, in 406, the flood of the great barbarian invasion to submerge for a time, with much else, these evidences of religious weakness and dissension. ####  |