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Messalians

Messalians

Messalians

An heretical sect originating in Mesopotamia, 360. They denied that the Sacraments give grace and declared that the only spiritual power is prayer. Prayer, they said, drives out the evil spirit and brings into the soul the Holy Spirit, and thus unites the soul to God and gives perfect control over the passions. The fervor of their prayers was supposed to bring them into immediate contact with God; so they neglected everything but prayer and conformed to the religious and civil customs of a place only in order to escape persecution. They said that after a period of constant prayer they saw the Trinity; that the Three Divine Persons became one and dwelt within them; and that they were then able to stamp upon the evil spirits that they saw prowling about the world. On account of their belief in their possession by the Holy Spirit, they were called Enthusiasts (Greek: enthous, full of the god). They were also called “Praying Folk” or Euchites from the Greek translation (euchomai, pray), of their Oriental name. In some places in later centuries they were identified with the Marcianists because they held some of the same doctrines. Their first leader, Adelphius, also gave his name to the sect, sometimes called Adelphians. They were condemned in 376 by Flavian, Bishop of Antioch; in 388 by the Synod of Side; in 426 by a Council of Constantinople; and in 431 by the Third General Council of Ephesus. In Armenia and Syria they were accused of immorality, were called “The Filthy,” and were banished. They revived under the name of Bogomili but perished in the 9th century.

Fuente: New Catholic Dictionary

Messalians

(Praying folk; participle Pa’el of the Aramaic word meaning “to pray”).

An heretical sect which originated in Mesopotamia about 360 and survived in the East until the ninth century. They are also called Euchites from the Greek translation of their Oriental name (euchetai from euchomai, to pray); Adelphians from their first leader; Lampetians from Lampetius, their first priest (ordained about 458); Enthusiasts from their peculiar tenet of the indwelling of the Holy Ghost by Whom they thought themselves inspired or possessed (enthous). The non-Christian sect of the Euphemites were also called Messalians, and Epiphanius (Haer., lxxx), our sole informant about these, considers them the forerunners of the Christian Messalians. The non-Christian Messalians are said to have admitted a plurality of gods, but to have worshipped only one, the Almighty (Pantokrator). They were forcibly suppressed by Christian magistrates and many of them put to death. Hence they became self-styled Martyriani. The Christian Messalians were a kind of Eastern Circumcellions or vagrant Quietists. Sacraments they held to be useless, though harmless, the only spiritual power being prayer, by which one drove out the evil spirit which baptism had not expelled, received the indwelling of the Holy Ghost, and arrived at union with God, becoming so perfect that the passions ceased to trouble. They disregarded discipline in the matter of fasting, wandered from placa to place, and in summer were accustomed to sleep in the streets. To avoid persecution they would conform to ecclesias6tical usages, profess orthodoxy, and deny any heretical doctrines ascribed to them. They engaged in no occupations, were solely occupied in prayer, as they said, or rather in sleep, as Theodoret sarcastically remarks. The intensity of their prayer brought them into immediate communication with the Godhead. When they had reached the passionless state (apatheia, “apathy”), they saw the Trinity, the three Divine Persons becoming one and dwelling within them. They likewise saw the evil spirits that go through the world for the ruin of souls, and trod them under foot. In fact every man had within him a demon, who could only be replaced by the Holy Ghost. Even Christ’s body was full of demons once.

Flavian, the Bishop of Antioch, tried to suppress them in his city about 376. By feigning sympathy he made Adelphius disclose his real doctrines; and then he banished him and his followers. They then wandered to the south-east of Asia Minor. Amphilochius of Iconium caused them to be again condemned at the Synod of Side (388 or 390). Letoius, Bishop of Melitene, finding some monasteries tainted with this Quietism, burnt them and drove the wolves from the sheepfold, as Theodoret narrates. The “Asceticus”, “that filthy book of this heresy”, as it is called in the public acts of the Third General Council (431), was condemned at Ephesus, after it had already been condemned by a Council of Constantinople in 426 and by the local council at which Amphilochius of Side presided. Yet the sect continued to exist. At first it included only laymen. Lampetius, one of the leaders after the middle of the fifth century was a priest, having been ordained by Alypius of Cæsarea. He was degraded from his priesthood on account of unpriestly conduct. He wrote a book called “The Testament”. Salmon refers to a fragment of an answer by Severus of Antioch to this work of Lampetius (Wolf, “Anecdota Grfca”, III, 182). In Armenia in the middle of the fifth century strict decrees were issued against them, and they were especially accused of immorality; so that their very name in Armenian became the equivalent for “filthy”. The Nestorians in Syria did their best to stamp out the evil by legislation; the Messalians ceased to exist under that name, but revived under that of the Bogomili. In the West they seem hardly to have been known; when the Marcianists, who held somewhat the same tenets as the Messalians, were mentioned to Gregory the Great, he professed never to have heard of the Marcian heresy.

Bibliography. EPIPHANICUS, Haer., lxxx; THEODORET, Hist. Ec., IV, x; IDEM, Haer. fab., IV, xi; CYRIL OF ALEX., De Adorat. in Spir. et Verit., III in P.G., LXVIII, 282; TIMOTHEUS in Eccles. Grfc. mon., III, 400 sqq.; TER-MKRTTSCHIAN, Die Paulikianer im byz. Kaiserreich (Leipzig, 1893); PHOTIUS in P.G., CIII, 187 sqq.

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J.P. ARENDZEN Transcribed by Paul T. Crowley Dedicated to the Sacred Heart

The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XCopyright © 1911 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightNihil Obstat, October 1, 1911. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., CensorImprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York

Fuente: Catholic Encyclopedia

Messalians

(from Chald. ), or EUCHITES (from , to pray) is the name borne by two heretical sects of Christian mendicants.

(1.) An ancient sect, composed of roaming mendicant monks, flourished in Mesopotamia and Syria towards the end of the 4th century (dating from 360) as a distinct body, although their doctrine and discipline subsisted in Syria, Egypt, and other countries before the birth of Christ. They were a sort of mystics, who believed that two souls exist in man, the one good, the other evil. They were anxious to expel the evil soul, and hasten the return of the good Spirit of God, by contemplation and prayer, believing that only prayer could save them, and therefore taught the duty of every Christian to make life a period of unintermitted prayer. They despised all physical labor, moral law, and the sacraments, and embraced many opinions nearly resembling the Manichaean doctrine, derived from Oriental philosophy. When their heretic principles became fully known towards the end of the 4th century, the persecution of both the ecclesiastical and civil authority fell upon them; yet they perpetuated themselves to the 7th century, and reappeared in the Bogomiles and Messalians (2) of the Middle Ages.

(2.) Another sect of this name arose in the 12th century, in which there appears a revival or extension of the opinions held by those of the same name in the 4th century. They are charged with holding heterodox views respecting the Trinity. They rejected marriage, abstained from animal food, treated with contempt the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and the various ordinances of external worship, placing the essence of religion in prayer, and maintaining the efficacy of perpetual supplications to the Supreme Being for expelling the evil. genius which dwells in the breast of every mortal. The term Euchite, or Messalian, became an invidious appellation for persons of piety in the Eastern churches, just as the terms Albigenses, Waldenses, and Bogomiles were used subsequently to designate all enemies of the Roman pontiff. See Neander, ,Ch. Hist. 3:589; Haweis, Ch. Hist. 2:222; Mosheim, Ch. Hist. bk. iii, ch. xii; pt. ii, ch. v; Schaff, Ch. Hist. 2:199 sq. (J. H. W.)

Fuente: Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature