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Christian Preaching in Fourth-Century Spain

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Christian Preaching in Fourth-Century Spain 430 Westra Chapter 19 Christian Preaching in Fourth-Century Spain Liuwe H. Westra 1 Introduction Only three authors can be presented as clear examples of early Christian Spanish, or rather Iberian preachers: Potamius of Lisbon, Pacianus of Barce­ lona, and Priscillian of Ávila. A possible fourth is Gregory of Elvira (second half of the 4th century), to whom no fewer than 20 tractatus, transmitted under the name of Origen, may be ascribed (CPL 546). However, not only is the ascription to Gregory far from certain, the content of the sermons also relies heavily on earlier Christian authors, so that the collection can hardly be said to represent original Spanish preaching.1 For this reason, no further attention is paid to it in this chapter. The remaining threesome of Potamius, Pacianus, and Priscillian are also far from free of difficulties. However, the authorship of their works has apparently been confirmed in the 19th and 20th centuries, and all three seem to have left us one or more original sermons. In my opinion, Christian sermons do not dif­ fer fundamentally from pagan speeches, and that means that the rules of classical rhetoric should apply to them.2 Therefore, we shall pay particular 1 See Schulz­Flügel, “Gregor von Elvira”, pp. 257­58. Moreover, the tractatus as a body seem to derive from a running commentary on Scripture, transmuted into a number of homilies by inserting a short address at the beginning and a doxology at the end of each sermon. A third argument against discussing this collection here, is that it bears signs of being translated from a Greek original: see Bulhart, Gregorii Illiberritani episcopi quae supersunt, LII­LIV and Batiffol/ Wilmart, Tractatus Origenis, XIV­XXIV. All in all, it seems to me that Gregory’s tractatus have been composed rather as a series of lectures than as sermons in a liturgical context: see for this distinction in the homiletical literature Schäublin, “Zum paganen Umfeld der christlichen Predigt”, pp. 25­49, in particular 41­43. Nevertheless, Olivar, La predicación, pp. 424­28 still treats Gregory as the most important source for our knowledge of early Christian sermons from Spain. 2 Apart from the historical roots of the Christian sermon, albeit not exclusively, in the pagan diatribe and the Jewish synagogical sermon, which at least in its Greek form had already been influenced by classical rhetorical theory (see the classical overviews by Capelle/Marrou, “Diatribe”, pp. 990­1009 and Sachot, “Homilie”, pp. 148­75), this conviction seems inevitable when one realizes that in the Roman Empire, any kind of linguistic and literary instruction was equivalent to some years of intensive rhetorical schooling: see Schäublin, “Zum paganen Umfeld”, pp. 28­29 and Gemeinhardt, Das lateinische Christentum und die antike pagane © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004363564_021 Christian Preaching in Fourth­Century Spain 431 attention to their composition and the use of rhetorical devices in order to assess both the quality and purpose of these texts as precisely as possible. 2 Potamius of Lisbon and His Sermon De Lazaro (CPL 541) The literary legacy of Potamius of Lisbon is small and consists of two letters, a fragment of another, one sermon, and another fragment. Of his letters, only his Epistula ad Athanasium (CPL 542) has been transmitted under Potamius’s own name. The other one, his Epistula de substantia patris et filii et spiritus sancti (CPL 544), has come down to us under the pseudonym of Jerome. Further, Phoeba dius of Agen has preserved a fragment of a letter by Potamius (CPL 544a). All these letters are directly concerned with the mid­4th­century Arian controversy. The one complete sermon De Lazaro has been preserved in two versions, each of which contains considerable passages that are lacking in the other, one under the name of Zeno of Verona, and one under the name of John Chrysostom. Finally, the fragment De martyrio Esaiae prophetae (CPL 543) may well stem from a sermon, but may also have been part of some other kind of work. All of Potamius’s works are now available in an edition with English translation by Marco Conti in the Corpus Christianorum series.3 Not much is known of Potamius’s life and career, but we meet him as a bishop of Lisbon attending the Council of Sirmium in 357. Here, he seems to have played a prominent part either in issuing or in promoting the Arian for­ mula that was the fruit of this council. However, according to the violently anti­Arian Libellus precum, written by the presbyters Faustinus and Marcellinus in 383­84, Potamius’s pro­Arian activities were the consequence of a deliberate move on the author’s part, and there seems to be no reason to doubt this testi­ mony. However, his Epistula ad Athanasium seems not only to represent an anti­Arian position, but also to have been written after the synods of Sirmium Bildung, pp. 320­49. However, I disagree with Schäublin, who tends to classify the Christian sermon as a special subspecies of the genus deliberatiuum (pp. 29­46), in firmly connecting the Christian sermon to the genus demonstratiuum. The ritual, metaphysical, communal, and ethical functions of this genus have been highlighted by Carter, “The Ritual Functions of Epideictic Rhetoric: The Case of Socrates’ Funeral Oration”, pp. 209­32. 3 Hillgarth/Conti, Altercatio ecclesiae et synagogae – Potamii episcopi Olisponensis opera omnia. De Lazaro is presented in its various recensions on pages 165­95. An earlier bilingual edition together with a historical study of Potamius and a concise commentary on his works by the same author is Conti, The Life and Works of Potamius of Lisbon. A Biographical and Literary Study with English Translation and a Complete Commentary on the Extant Works of Potamius, pp. 142­47..
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