Iberian Fathers, Volume 3

Introduction

1. By far the most thorough modern biography is by Paul A. Onica, “Orosius” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 1987). 2. On Christian Braga, see José Augusto Ferreira, Fastos episcopales de Igrejia primacial de Braga (Braga: Edicão de Mitra Bracerense, 1950). 3. He is called compresbyter meus by Avitus of Braga, iuvenis presbyter by Augustine of Hippo, and presbyter hispanus genere by Gennadius. INTRODUCTION Like Pacian of Barcelona, Orosius was an active and prominent participant in the ecclesiastical affairs of his time, but like Pacian, too, his life’s story is known only in its most basic features. Orosius himself provides few autobiographical details in his extant writings, and there are only scattered references to him in the contemporary sources.1 Even the surname “Paulus” traditionally attributed to him is possibly inauthentic. From all indications Orosius was born sometime between 380 and 390 at Bracara Augusta in Hispania Citerior (now Braga, in northern Portugal). This city was the capital of the province of Gallaecia (Galicia) and after the Germanic invasions of the early fifth century, capital of the Suevian kingdom.2 Although our first explicit reference to a Christian presence in Braga does not come until the middle of the fourth century, we know of flourishing Church communities in nearby cities at least a century before that. By the time of Orosius , Braga and Galicia were deeply involved in the Priscillianist dispute. Indeed, Braga’s Bishop Paternus (fl. ca. 400), Orosius’s contemporary, had actually been consecrated originally by the Priscillianist Symposius, bishop of nearby Astorga, but had later returned to orthodoxy after reading works of Ambrose. (2) Judging by Orosius’s own writings and the literary evaluations of his contemporaries, he received a good classical and Christian education as a youth. Whether he was schooled formally by professional teachers or informally at home by family members is not known. As a young man he entered the priesthood,3 and 97 4. Orosius’s account of his own escape from the invaders perhaps hints at his own active opposition to their takeover: “And yet, if I may speak of my own story, how for the first time I saw the strange barbarians, how I avoided my enemies and flattered those in authority, how I guarded myself against the pagans, fled from those who lay in wait for me, and how finally, enveloped by a sudden mist, I slipped through the clutches of those who with stones and spears pursued me over the seas, I would wish that I could move all my audience to tears” (Historia 3.20). 5. For example, Fabrizio Fabbrini, Paolo Orosio, uno storico (Rome: Edizione de storia e letteratura, 1979), 84–85, notes that at the close of the fourth century all the Galician bishops except one were Priscillianists. 6. Braulio, bishop of Saragossa (631–51), writes, “Beware, moreover, of the poisonous doctrine of Priscillian of that country in former times, by which we found both Dictinius and many others to have been infected—the blessed Orosius himself, also, although he was corrected by the blessed Augustine” (Ep. 44). 7. Hereafter, Commonitorium. 8. Augustine in 415 characterizes Orosius as “a religious young man, a brother in the Catholic fold, in age a son, in dignity a fellow priest” and “a certain very pious and studious young priest” (Ep. 166.2, 169.13). Since the bishop of Hippo was sixty-one years of age at that time, Orosius was probably in his early thirties. 9. “I do recognize why I have come. It was not by choice, not by necessity, and not by common agreement that I departed from my native land. Rather, I was soon was actively involved in both the orthodox Church’s struggle against Priscillianism and, possibly, Roman resistance to the Germanic invaders who swept into the Iberian peninsula in the autumn of 409.4 The Priscillianists were a force to be reckoned with in Spain, especially in Orosius’s native province of Galicia where they dominated the Church hierarchy—this despite numerous conciliar and imperial injunctions issued against them.5 Even Orosius in his early career is said to have been attracted to this heresy, according to one late source.6 Origenist ideas, too, were seen by some as a growing threat to the integrity of teachings of the Church in Spain. Indeed, it is clear from the text as well as the title of Orosius’s first polemical treatise, Consultatio sive commonitorium Orosii ad Augustinum de errore Priscillianistarum et Origenistarum,7...