Vigilius of Thapsus

Vigilius was bishop of Thapsus, a coastal town in the African province of Byzacena, in the second half of the fifth century. He was alive and active in 484, and the date of his death is not recorded; he is generally placed about 484 or shortly after.

Africa in his lifetime was ruled by the Vandals, who had taken Carthage in 439 and who were Arian, holding that the Son is not eternally God with the Father. Under Geiseric and then his son Huneric the Nicene church was harassed, its bishops exiled, its property seized, its clergy forbidden to hold office.

In February 484 Huneric summoned the Nicene bishops of Africa to Carthage for a public disputation with the Arian clergy. Something like four hundred and sixty attended. The conference was a trap: the Nicene bishops were not permitted a fair hearing, and within months Huneric issued an edict of persecution, exiling and torturing those who would not conform. Contemporary accounts describe tongues cut out and communities driven into the desert. Vigilius was among the bishops present, and he seems to have escaped to Constantinople.

What he wrote came out of that. His principal work is a dialogue Against Arius, Sabellius, and Photinus, in which the three heretics and Athanasius of Alexandria argue before a judge named Probus, who at the end gives sentence for Athanasius. It is a teaching device, a way of laying out the Arian case, the opposite error of collapsing Father and Son into one, and the Nicene position, in a form an ordinary reader could follow. He also wrote five books against Eutyches, on the two natures in Christ, and works against the Arian bishop Palladius.

The curious thing about him is his name on other men's books. In a province where writing against Arianism was dangerous, Vigilius appears to have published under borrowed names, and later copyists returned the favour, attaching his work to more famous authors and other men's work to him. A long list of pseudonymous anti-Arian tracts circulated under the names of Athanasius, Augustine, and Idacius, and scholars have argued for centuries over which of them are his. He has been proposed, on and off, as the author of the Athanasian Creed and of the disputed verse about the three heavenly witnesses in the First Letter of John; neither attribution is established, and both are still argued.

What is not in doubt is the situation his books belong to: a Latin bishop, in an occupied province, under a government whose theology he could not accept, writing arguments for a church that had lost its buildings and its legal standing, and putting them out however he could.

Sources: Vigilius of Thapsus, Contra Arianos dialogus and Contra Eutychetem (Migne, Patrologia Latina 62); Victor of Vita, History of the Vandal Persecution; Isidore of Seville, De viris illustribus; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.