Philastrius of Brescia

Philastrius was bishop of Brescia in northern Italy in the second half of the fourth century. He died before 397, since in that year his successor Gaudentius preached the sermon on the fourteenth anniversary of his death that is the main source for his life.

Gaudentius describes a travelling man. Philastrius, he says, went through Italy, Gaul, and Spain before he was a bishop, arguing with pagans, Jews, and heretics wherever he found them, and at Rome he contended with the Arians. At Milan he worked alongside Ambrose against the Arian bishop Auxentius. Only afterward did he settle at Brescia. Augustine, who met him once at Milan in the company of Ambrose, mentions the encounter.

His one surviving book is the Diversarum hereseon liber, the Book of Various Heresies, written around 385. It lists a hundred and fifty-six heresies: twenty-eight before Christ, from the Jewish sects and the Samaritans onward, and a hundred and twenty-eight after.

The book has an obvious limitation and an obvious use. The limitation is that Philastrius counts almost anything as a heresy. He includes not just Marcion and Arius and Mani but also, for instance, people who hold that the stars are fixed in the sky rather than placed nightly by God, people who think the earthquakes at the crucifixion were natural, and those who date the world's creation differently than he does. Augustine, who wrote his own catalogue of heresies about thirty years later, noticed this and said so tactfully: Philastrius and Epiphanius were both worth reading, but Epiphanius exercised more judgment.

The use is that Philastrius wrote down things nobody else recorded. Several of the sects he names appear in no other source, and historians of the fourth-century church mine the book precisely because he was so undiscriminating. It also shows what a working Italian bishop, with no great learning and no library to speak of, thought was dangerous, and what the ordinary Christians of Brescia were likely to hear at the market.

His purpose was pastoral rather than scholarly. He wrote for people who could not tell one teacher from another, and he wrote to give them names and warnings. Gaudentius says he preached daily and that the people would not let him stop.

He was buried at Brescia; his relics were moved into the cathedral in the ninth century, and his feast is kept on 18 July.

Sources: Philastrius, Diversarum hereseon liber (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 9); Gaudentius of Brescia, Sermon 21, on the anniversary of Philastrius; Augustine, De haeresibus and Letter 222; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.