Sermons & Letters 219

1. The sanctions of the Council of Toledo, the decrees of St Innocent the Roman pontiff, and the other sanctions of the Catholic bishops for the hatred and destruction of the Priscillianist heresy, could by no means obtain strength and force, because—the state of civil affairs being suddenly changed—the barbarian nations by their incursions plundered the provinces of the Gauls and of the Spains. For in the year 409 Gaul and Spain were oppressed by innumerable calamities, when the Alans, Vandals, and Sueves, the Gauls being laid waste, crossed the Pyrenees and occupied the Spains. Idatius in his Chronicle is the authority. Indeed Petavius, in the same manner as that kingdom was divided into diverse provinces,

and how it endured also the tyranny of diverse Barbarians, described it under the same year of Christ in these words: 'The Vandals and Sueves invade Gallaecia; the Alans, Lusitania and the Carthaginian province; the Silingi, who were another race of the Vandals, Baetica.' In such great calamities and disturbances of that kingdom, therefore, it was utterly impossible for the Catholic bishops to gather into one assembly, to vindicate the rights of the metropolitans, to animadvert upon the sacrilegious, to remove from the sacred ministries those wrongly and unlawfully ordained, and faithfully to fulfil the rest of the things which Pope Innocent I had commanded to be carried out, both for abolishing the schism and for overthrowing the Priscillianist heretics. 2.

But that those Barbarians, besides the plunderings and destructions of cities, attempted everything for the full extinction of the Catholic religion—that they strove to destroy the churches, the priests, the relics of the holy martyrs, and vexed the whole clerical service even to death—most certain monuments make plain. For, to pass over in the first place the Acts of the Council of Braga, in which marks of forgery have been detected by the learned, it is nevertheless most certain that temples were overthrown by the Barbarians, servants of Christ were slain by the edge of the sword, and the memorials of the saints, their bones, sepulchres, and cemeteries were profaned, the forces of the empire were shattered, and all things underwent commotion, 'like stubble before the face of the wind.'

That in this way Pancratianus, or Pancratius—perchance the president of that pseudo-synod and bishop of the Church of Braga—truly began his preface, the architect of those Acts narrates; whose fiction, if there be any, ought by no means to be referred to the deeds done by the Barbarians then in the Spains, but rather to the primacy there asserted of the see of Braga over the Gallaecian and Lusitanian bishops—a right which, in the year 411 or thereabouts, the metropolitan of Braga could by no means claim for himself, as Antonius Pagi has more expressly noted at the year of Christ 411. For the rest, that the Spains were then afflicted with these most grievous evils,

Orosius—a Spaniard, not ignorant of his native affairs—teaches, as do Cassiodorus and Prosper in their Chronicles, at the eighth consulship of Honorius and the third of Theodosius, which the Roman consular tables themselves show to have fallen in the year of Christ 409. But Augustine described the most unhappy state of those Churches in his letter, formerly the 180th, but now in the newest edition of the Maurist Fathers the 228th, to Honoratus, chapter 5, saying: 'For there is no one who says that the ministers ought to remain where there are no longer those for whom it is necessary to minister.' Thus indeed the holy bishops fled from Spain, the peoples having partly slipped away in flight, partly been slain, partly consumed by siege, partly scattered in captivity.

Salvian of Marseilles affirms that the foulest lusts of the flesh of the Spaniards gave occasion to this most great destruction. But that these base and unbridled turpitudes of all lusts, in every gathering both of men and of women, were propagated by the zeal and dogmas of the Priscillianists, especially among the Aquitanians and the Spaniards—not only did the same Salvian, then a presbyter of Marseilles, describe in eight books, but Prosper of Aquitaine bewailed in a most sad and mournful poem. Wherefore he, recounting both the long duration of the disaster and the fury of the Barbarians, affirms that it lasted ten years, and that the Vandals with so great an onslaught plundered those once most flourishing regions, that they brought even rough and difficult places to ruin...

'Alas, by a ten-year slaughter she is laid low by Vandal swords and by Gothic ones. Not fortresses set upon rocks, not towns set upon high mountains, nor cities girt about with waters, availed to overcome the wiles of the Barbarian, and the arms of his fury: all of us have suffered the uttermost.' 5. But in what manner that barbarian incursion and invasion befell, I judge to be sufficiently plain to all the learned. For there is no one who is ignorant that they, joined by treaty with Attalus, as friends and auxiliaries, were at first received into the bosom of the Aquitanians; but suddenly, Attalus being spurned, being made ministers of the divine vengeance, they betook themselves wholly to rapine and burnings—as Paulinus the consular also narrated in his Eucharistic poem.

But this Paulinus, sprung from the noble consular family of Ausonius, sets forth two things concerning himself, the latter of which I judge to pertain wonderfully to our matter. In the first place he confesses that he dissented from Attalus, who had created him count and curator of the largesses, when now he knew that this office could subsist with no perception whatever. For then Paulinus, the party of the tyrant Attalus being spurned, followed the Gothic side. But the other thing was worse—which, wrongly done, he bewailed with bitter penitence; and that was, says Baronius, that a Christian man had turned aside to disapproved dogmas of the faith.

But that he clung to wicked doctrines for a full span of fifteen years the following verses openly disclose, in which he records that he was restored to Catholic communion: 'But afterward, when the fifth three-year period had now run its course, and Easter came round again at its appointed season, returning to thy holy altars, O Christ my God, by thy pity I rejoiced to receive thy sacraments.' But by what bonds of heresy Paulinus remained so long fettered, Baronius inquires, and reckons it probable that he was defiled and entangled in the shameful errors of the Priscillianists. For, by the testimony of Sulpicius Severus and others, we have already seen that in that province men and women of the highest rank were seduced by Priscillian and his followers as they set out for Rome;

upon whom divine vengeance rightly followed, since to abolish the obscenities of that heresy neither sacred, nor ecclesiastical, nor civil laws had obtained any force. And indeed the Christian emperors of the world too, that they might best provide for the affairs of the Catholic faith, a little before the Vandals, Goths, Alans, and other Barbarians ravaged Gaul and Spain, framed various laws in hatred of this Priscillianist heresy. For Honorius Augustus enacted a law against them in the West, by which he orders Senator, the praetorian prefect, to make diligent inquiry after the Manichaeans and the Phrygians, that is, the Priscillianists, and to restrain them by various kinds of punishments.

But that these too might be wiped out in the parts of the East, the Emperor Theodosius Augustus applied his zeal; namely, when in two rescripts issued to Anthemius, the praetorian prefect, he decreed for the Montanists, Priscillianists, and Eunomians every punishment short of death. But what happened? When, through the sloth, wickedness, avarice, or false religion of the imperial officials, obedience to those laws had been neglected, by the working of divine vengeance the Roman Empire in those regions was utterly destroyed, and the peoples themselves, deprived of their goods, their liberty, and even their life, paid the due penalties of heresy and of their obscenities.

Since therefore so many and so great disturbances vexed the civil and ecclesiastical affairs of the kingdoms of the Spains and of Gallaecia, those Innocentian decrees could in no wise be carried into execution, especially because the peoples of Spain and Gallaecia were then constrained to obey not one prince only, but two, both stained with the pollution of the Alans. For in the Spains Athaulf, in the year of Christ 414, was the first to reign of the Gothic race. But scarcely had one year of his rule been completed when he was slain by a certain Goth, and Segeric, succeeding him, is himself likewise killed after six months. To these fourteen other Arian kings of the same stock succeeded down to the year 468. But in Gallaecia and Lusitania princes of the Suevic stock reigned, of whom

the first was Hermeric, who, dying after thirty-two years of rule, had Rechila as his successor in the year 440. He, however, having spent only seven years in his reign, left the reins of the kingdom to Rechiar, who, being instructed in the Catholic religion, allowed the affairs of the Church to be settled by the holy bishops without difficulty.