Plan and Scope of This Work

Chronology and shifts in labeling strategies shape the organization of this exploration of the social and cosmological differences underlying the Priscillianist controversy. The first three chapters examine the chain of events that led from the earliest recorded opposition to Priscillian's movement at the Council of Saragossa (380) to the final condemnation and execution of Priscillian and his closest associates circa 386. An initial divergence of social and theological orientation within Spanish Christianity will be seen to have evolved quickly into violent conflict, as polemical discourse shifted from vague innuendo to explicit charges of heresy and Manichaeism, and finally to the still more damning accusation of sorcery, which resulted in Priscillian's death. That death itself may be interpreted as a victory of sorts for the more publicly oriented and culturally accommodating stream of Christianity. Later, Priscillian enjoyed an afterlife in polemical rhetoric, and here two distinct streams of tradition can be discerned.

Chapter 4 explores the early-fifth-century portrayal of Priscillian as the founder of an independent heretical sect, highlighting the use of the label of Priscillianism to define the boundaries of Spanish orthodoxy, and chapter 5 ranges further afield to consider the more subtle and abstract rhetorical function of the portrayal of Priscillian as a gnostic by the western ascetics Sulpicius Severus and Jerome in works spanning the years from 392 to 415. In both of these later traditions, alienated cosmologies and lifestyles were brought under control and privately centered expressions of Christianity were reshaped, further renegotiating and clarifying the earlier "victory" of an accommodating, public Christianity.