PRISCILLIAN (d. 385), Spanish theologian and the founder of a party which, in spite of severe persecution for heresy, per sisted in Spain and in Gaul until after the middle of the sixth century. He was a student of the occult sciences and of philosophy. He was a mystic, and regarded the Christian life as continual intercourse with God. He argued that to make him self a fit "temple of God," a man must, besides holding the Catholic faith and doing works of love, renounce marriage and earthly honour, and practise asceticism. On the question of con tinence in, if not renunciation of, marriage, he came into conflict with the authorities. Priscillian and his sympathizers, who were organized into bands of spiritales and abstinentes, like the Cathari of later days, refused the compromise which by this time the Church had established. (See MARRIAGE: Canon Law.) This ex plains the charge of Manichaeism levelled against Priscillian and to this was added the accusation of magic and licentious orgies. Priscillian's friends included two bishops, Instantius and Sal vianus, and Hyginus of Cordova ; but, through the exertions of Idacius of Emerita, the leading Priscillianists, who had failed to appear before the synod of Spanish and Aquitanian bishops to which they had been summoned, were excommunicated at Sara gossa in October 380.
Meanwhile, however, Priscillian was made bishop of Avila, and the orthodox party appealed to the emperor (Gratian), who issued an edict (afterwards withdrawn) threatening the sectarian leaders with banishment. On the murder of Gratian and accession
of Maximus (383) Idacius fled to Treves, and secured the sum moning of a synod (384) at Bordeaux, where Instantius was deposed. Priscillian appealed to the emperor, with the unexpected result that with six of his companions he was burned alive at Treves in 385.
The heresy, notwithstanding severe repressive measures con tinued to spread in France as well as in Spain. As an openly pro fessed creed it only disappeared after the second synod of Braga in 563.
At the Council of Toledo in 400, fifteen years after Priscillian's death, when his case was reviewed, the most serious charge that could be brought was the error of language involved in rendering Cryivnros by innascibilis. It was long thought that all the writings of the "heretic" himself had perished, but in 1885, G. Schepss discovered at Wiirzburg eleven genuine tracts, since published in the Vienna Corpus. "They contain nothing that is not orthodox and commonplace, nothing that Jerome might not have written." See E. Ch. Babut, Priscillian et le Priscillianisme (Paris, 19o9).