05 — Martin and the Priscillianist Affair

In the mid-380s the ascetic teacher Priscillian of Avila, condemned as a heretic by a faction of Spanish bishops, was tried before the usurping emperor Magnus Maximus at Trier and executed by the secular sword — the first time a Christian was put to death by a Christian state for heresy. St. Martin of Tours went to Trier and pleaded against the executions, opposed the intrusion of the army and the imperial power into a doctrinal matter, and broke communion with the bishops complicit in the bloodshed. This section sets out the controversy and Martin’s protest, and then weighs, with genuine both-sides care, the question of Church and coercion that the affair forced open for the Latin Church.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism West; father of Western monasticism)

The Priscillianist affair is the episode in which the gentle, miracle-working bishop of Tours stepped onto the stage of imperial politics and ecclesiastical hardball — and lost, in a sense, but in losing left a witness that later generations would remember. The bare facts are not seriously contested: a Spanish ascetic movement gathered around Priscillian; a counter-party of bishops accused it of Manichaean and Gnostic error; the dispute, having exhausted synodal and papal channels, was carried before Magnus Maximus, the general who had seized the Western provinces; and around 385 Priscillian and several companions were beheaded at Trier on charges that, in the event, amounted to sorcery (maleficium) — the first executions of Christians for heresy at the hands of a Christian government (Sulpicius Severus, Chronica II.46–51; Chadwick 1976).

What is contested — and what makes this a sensitive topic requiring both-sides treatment under METHODOLOGY §4 — is almost everything around those facts: whether Priscillian was in truth a heretic or an over-zealous but orthodox ascetic destroyed by his enemies; whether Martin’s intervention was a principled rejection of religious coercion or a more limited protest against a particular abuse; and how the whole episode should be read against the Orthodox ideal of symphonia between Church and empire, which in these same decades was hardening, under Theodosius, into something far more coercive than Martin could accept. This collection treats Martin as the early Church’s most conspicuous opponent of the death penalty for heresy — a landmark in the history of Church–state relations — while presenting the case of his opponents fairly and naming the modern scholarship on every disputed point.

Files in This Section

File Description
the-priscillian-controversy.md Priscillian of Avila and his ascetic movement; the charges of Manichaeism, Gnosticism, and sorcery (and the modern dispute over them); the synods, the appeal to Rome and Milan, and the fatal appeal to Magnus Maximus; the trials at Trier c. 385 and the executions; Martin’s journey to Trier, his plea, and his broken-then-restored communion with the prosecuting bishops, with his later regret in the Dialogi.
church-and-coercion.md The broader question the affair raised, treated with genuine both-sides care: the position Martin embodied (heresy is the Church’s spiritual concern, not the executioner’s) set against the position of Ithacius and the Spanish bishops and the Augustinian–Theodosian drift toward enforced orthodoxy; the modern scholarly debate (Chadwick, Burrus, Stancliffe, Brown); and the Orthodox tension between symphonia and the rejection of coercion in faith.

See Also

  • Bishop of Tours (371) — the office Martin held when he went to Trier, and the reluctance with which he wielded its public weight
  • The Dialogues and Letters — the Dialogi of Sulpicius Severus, our principal source for Martin at Trier
  • The Miles Christi — the soldier of Christ who laid down carnal arms, and what that ideal implied for the sword in matters of faith
  • Legacy and Sources — how Martin’s stand was remembered and what it owes to the witness of Sulpicius Severus
  • St. Ambrose of Milan — the contemporary Western bishop who likewise condemned the Trier executions and refused communion with their authors
  • St. Leo the Great — the later Western view of heresy and public order, against which Martin’s protest can be measured
  • The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church of the fourth century, of which Martin is a Western father
  • Orthodox vs. Catholic — the divergent later trajectories of Church–state relations in East and West

References

  • Sulpicius Severus. Chronica (Historia Sacra / The Sacred History) II.46–51. Trans. Alexander Roberts, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 11. Oxford and New York: Christian Literature Company, 1894.
  • Sulpicius Severus. Dialogi (Dialogues) 3.11–13. Trans. Alexander Roberts, NPNF 2nd ser., Vol. 11. 1894.
  • Chadwick, Henry. Priscillian of Avila: The Occult and the Charismatic in the Early Church. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.
  • Burrus, Virginia. The Making of a Heretic: Gender, Authority, and the Priscillianist Controversy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
  • Stancliffe, Clare. St. Martin and His Hagiographer: History and Miracle in Sulpicius Severus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
  • Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.