A dispute over doctrine ends at Trier with five beheadings

TRIER, Gaul, 385 AD — The emperor’s court here has begun putting people to death this year over a dispute about what Christians should believe. Priscillian, bishop of Ávila, was beheaded with two of his clerks, Felicissimus and Armenius, a layman named Latrocinius, and a woman named Euchrocia. They were convicted not of heresy but of magic, and the judge was not a bishop but a civil officer the emperor put in charge of the case.

Saint Martin of Tours came to this court while the case was still pending and argued against it.

The emperor is Maximus, proclaimed by the Roman legions in Britain two years ago and now master of the West. He took Gaul after the Emperor Gratian was defeated near Paris. Gratian’s own troops betrayed him, and Andragathius killed him at Lyons on August 25, 383 AD. Maximus has made Trier the seat of his empire. Sulpicius Severus, the biographer of St. Martin, describes the state of the reign. Earlier rulers had drained the treasury, and Maximus is always either expecting a civil war or preparing for one. Sulpicius adds that for all his good qualities the emperor cannot master his own greed.

The case that reached him was five years old. A synod at Saragossa in 380 AD summoned four leaders of a rigorist Spanish party — Instantius, Salvianus, Helpidius and Priscillian — and excommunicated them when they refused to appear. Baring-Gould lists what the party was charged with holding: that the human soul is divine in its essence, that Christ’s body was only an appearance, that marriage is to be condemned and the resurrection of the body denied.

Priscillian’s supporters answered by ordaining him and making him bishop of Ávila. His accusers, Idacius of Emerita and Ithacius of Ossanova, took the matter to the imperial authorities, and Gratian sentenced the group to exile. Priscillian went to Rome to ask Pope Saint Damasus to lift the sentence and was refused an audience. Saint Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, refused him too. Priscillian had the sentence reversed at court instead, and his party came back to its churches in Spain strong enough to drive Ithacius out of the country.

Ithacius was waiting at Trier when Maximus arrived. The emperor ordered a fresh synod. It met at Bordeaux in 384 AD. The Catholic Encyclopedia says he wanted two things from it: favour with the orthodox party, and confiscations to refill his treasury. The synod tried Instantius first and deposed him. Priscillian did not wait his turn. He appealed over the bishops’ heads to the emperor, and that is how a church case arrived in a civil court.

Bishops filled the court. Sulpicius Severus writes that everyone remarked on the flattery around the emperor, and that the bishops let themselves be put below the royal retinue. Those who came for the case stayed on in the city and were in communion with Ithacius day by day.

St. Martin told Maximus that a church case had no business before a secular judge, and that excommunication by the bishops was punishment enough. Butler records that the emperor put the trial off as long as St. Martin stayed in the city, and promised him the accused would not be put to death.

Then St. Martin left, and the promise did not hold. Maximus appointed as judge Evodius, prefect of the praetorium. Sulpicius Severus, listing the guests at the emperor’s own table, calls Evodius “one of the most righteous men that ever lived”. Evodius convicted Priscillian of magic. Butler says the conviction rested on Priscillian’s own confession — that he had held assemblies at night with immoral women and had prayed naked. Ithacius was the accuser, and he was there while Priscillian was tortured; he withdrew before the condemnation. Sulpicius Severus’s Chronicle gives Ithacius’s reason for pulling out: he saw the ill-will that standing forth as accuser would raise against him among the bishops. Baring-Gould’s judgment on the confession is that torture wrung it out of him and that it was probably false.

Evodius laid the whole proceeding before Maximus. The emperor declared Priscillian and his accomplices worthy of death, and Evodius passed the sentence. Instantius, already deposed at Bordeaux, was banished to the isles of Scilly beyond Britain, and others have been punished since in the same cause.

The executions were not the end of the programme. The emperor has determined to send tribunes with absolute power into the two Spains, to search out heretics and take their lives or goods. St. Martin, deeply grieved, has refused to communicate with Ithacius.

The judgment on the men who obtained the executions has been severe. The Pope, whom the sources do not name here, censured Ithacius and censured the emperor with him, and St. Ambrose was equally stern. One bishop at Trier, Theognitus, has publicly declared against the Ithacians. The Catholic Encyclopedia records that Ithacius was afterwards deposed from his see. Baring-Gould’s verdict on the day is flat: “It was the first infliction of death for heresy which had stained with blood the annals of the Church.” The Catholic Encyclopedia holds that the case gives no ground for the charge that the Church invoked the civil power to punish heretics. It was tried and decided as a civil matter, on a charge of magic, before a civil judge, over St. Martin’s objection.

The Catholic Encyclopedia records what the sentence did to the party it was meant to end: the numbers and zeal of the Priscillianists increased, and the men put to death were venerated among them as saints and martyrs. Sulpicius Severus writes that among the followers it came to be thought the highest exercise of religion to swear by Priscillian.