Gregory of Elvira

Gregory was bishop of Illiberis, Elvira, near modern Granada, in Roman Spain, and he is remembered for a refusal that lasted the rest of his life.

In 357 the emperor Constantius held a council at Sirmium that produced a formula banning the words substance, of one substance and of like substance from discussion of the Father and the Son. Hosius of Cordoba, the aged Spanish bishop who had presided at Nicaea more than thirty years earlier, was detained, pressured and beaten, and finally signed it. Two years later at Rimini the Western bishops were worn down into a similar surrender.

Gregory would not sign anything. Jerome records the story that when the imperial agent Lucius came to remove him from his see, Gregory told him to do what he had come to do, and that the man collapsed and died before he could carry it out. What is certain from the record is that Gregory held Elvira and held the Nicene faith through the whole imperial campaign, and afterward refused to accept the settlement that let the bishops who had signed remain in office as if nothing had happened.

That put him with the Luciferians, the party of Lucifer of Cagliari, who held that a bishop who had subscribed to Arian language had forfeited his standing and could be received back only as a penitent layman. The wider church took the more lenient path, restoring the lapsed bishops in the interest of peace. Gregory did not follow it, and he became the most prominent figure of the rigorist party in Spain, ending his life outside the communion of most of his fellow bishops. Jerome notes him as still living, old, in the 390s.

His writing was substantial and was long attributed to other men. Twenty homilies on the books of Scripture, transmitted for centuries under the heading Tractates of Origen, were reassigned to Gregory in the twentieth century on the evidence of style and doctrine. He also wrote On the Orthodox Faith against the Arians, a treatise on the Song of Songs, and a work on Noah's ark.

His exegesis is thoroughly typological, the Old Testament read as one long anticipation of Christ, and his Latin is plain and forceful. He is one of the earliest substantial Christian writers of Spain.

He died after 392.

Sources: Jerome, On Illustrious Men, 105; Gregory of Elvira, Tractatus de libris sacrarum scripturarum (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 69); Athanasius, De synodis, on the Sirmium formula; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "Gregory of Elvira".