Priscillien

Priscillien , born (?) and died with Trier in 395, is a bishop of Avila, condemned for heresy, and the first Christian condemned to died and carried out for this reason. The Priscillianisme is one of the first Hérésie S condemned by the young person Église of Rome. Some bring it closer to the paulicians.

Teaching

Its teaching is very influenced by the gnostic theories :

the heart is created by God, the body and the matter by the principle of the Evil;
the stars and the Zodiaque determine the destiny of the heart;
the three names of the Holy Trinity nominate only one person.

These beliefs push it with practices considered to be suspect: Fast Sunday, and especially abandonment of the church for retirements in shift. The sect authorizes Femmes to be taught in her center.

Judgment and persecution

This Heresy also inspired by the Manicheism and the pantheist is called the priscillianism. She is condemned first once to the Concile of Saragossa, on October 4th, 380. Two bishops, Ithace, bishop of OS, and Hydace, bishop of Mérida, requires of the emperor Gratien to prevail, which constitutes a first intervention of the secular Pouvoir in the businesses of the Église. Priscillien and its disciples are Exil are; they go to Rome to obtain a grace of the pope Damase I {{er}}, who refuses. An imperial civil servant the exemption of their exile by a Rescrit. Priscillien returns triumphantly to Spain at the end of 382.

Hydace flees Spain then, and will find the new emperor Maxime, of Spanish origin, with Trier. This one convenes Priscillien in front of a council in Bordeaux, but the bishop prefers being judged by a secular court in Trier. He nevertheless is condemned with his disciples (seven capital punishments and several judgments with the exile are marked) and Euchrétia , woman who would have accommodated it with too much eagerness in Bordeaux.

Saint Ambroise of Milan refuses to help the sect into 382, when Priscillien passes to Milan, on the way for Rome. Saint Martin de Tours is present in Trier when Hydace and Ithace ask for Maxime the judgment of Priscillien. This one is condemned (on civil grounds) to the chief of magic. Joined by Ambroise of Milan (delegate by the young emperor Valentinien II), holy Martin de Tours asks for the grace of life for Priscillien. Ambroise gives up, death threat by the emperor; Martin obtains that the disciples of Prisicillien are not continued. The pope Sirice protested against the processes of Maxime.

Thereafter, Martin de Tours always refused to take part in the episcopal assemblies, which, with its efforts to save Priscillien death, did it suspecter heresy. The emperor Théodose declared null the decisions of Maxime in this business; Ithace is deposited a few years later, and Hydace resigns its load of itself.

The bishops priscillianists make their tender with the I {{er}} council of Tolède (400), and the doctrines are condemned definitively into 563 to the I {{er}} council of Braga. Its déterminisime astrological is still evoked in a Homélie of the pope Gregoire Large the, after 600.

Prolongations

Paul Orose in his writings reconsiders this heresy, which he also condemns. Saint Augustin d' Hippone, at the end of his life, condemns it firmly, like saint Jerome de Stridon, present in Rome in 382 (but out of Holy Land following years).

The heresy continues to extend as well as a Gaulle as well as in Spain, in spite of the measurements taken against it. In 412, Lazare, bishop of Aix-en-Provence, and Hérode, the bishop of Arles, are revoked of their seat on charge of Manichéisme. Proculus, the subway of Marseilles, and the métropolitans of Vienna and de Gaulle Narbonnese, were also close to the rigorous doctrines for which Priscillian had died.

Turibius, the bishop of Astorga acts to make repress this heresy, while making convene new a council in Tolède 447; the profession of faith priscillianist is condemned once again to Braga, proof of the rooting of the doctrines. The official Church, according to Conybeare, has to integrate the ascetic tendencies by imposing the celibacy to the priests. But the official teaching of Rome did not make it possible to impose this asceticism like ideal and to have with each Christian. Priscillian perished to insist on this ideal.

It is difficult to today separate the proper assertions from Priscillien of those which its enemies allotted to him (thus that of Manichéisme, which perhaps rests on a bad interpretation of one of its letters, quoted by Orose), and of the sects which later were described as priscillianists . The ascetic teaching of Priscillien left a major print in the north of Spain and the south of Gaulle, where mystical asceticism then often carried to extremes in various forms (see Cathares), all currents condemned by the political power like heretics.

Priscillien was honoured a long time like martyr, in particular in Galicia, and in the North of Portugal, where it is claimed that its body would have returned. Some claim that the body found at the 8th century and identified as that of Jacques saint - of Compostelle - was in fact that of Priscillien.

Writings

Some writings of Priscillien found orthodoxe were not flarings. For example, it divides the epistles pauliniennes (including the Épître with the Hebrews) in a series of texts according to their theological point of view of, by adding an introduction to each series. These guns were published by Peregrinus. They contain a strong incentive with personal piety and the Ascétisme, in particular with the celibacy, and the deprivation of meat and wine. He also affirms that the Esclavage is abolished between Christians, and that the differences founded on the sex do not take place to be, which did not go from oneself in the Christendom of then. He also affirms that the divine Grace is spread on all the believers, and that the study of the Writings precedes. As much of Christians of the 4th century, Priscillien worked much on writings later considered as Apocryphe S.

It was believed a long time that all the writings heretics of Priscillien had disappeared, but in 1885, Georg Schepss discovered with the Université of Wurzbourg eleven originals, published in the Corpus of Vienna in 1886. Although they all are signed of the name of Priscillien, four of them which describe the tests of Priscillien are probably with the hand of one of its disciples.

According to Raymond Brown, the source of the Comma Johanneum must be the " Apologeticus" liber; of Priscillien.

See too

The destiny of the priscillianists inspired the realizer Luis Buñuel, in the film the Milky Way in 1969.

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