Pacian of Barcelona
Bishop of Barcelona in the later fourth century, remembered chiefly for three letters to a Novatianist layman named Sympronian that defend the church's power to forgive sins committed after baptism. The first of these letters contains the sentence for which he is best known, in which he calls Christian his name and Catholic his surname. His surviving writings, which also include an Exhortation to Penance and a Sermon on Baptism, form one of the clearest fourth-century Western defenses of penance against the rigorism of the Novatianists.
Biography
Pacian was bishop of Barcelona, a city in the Roman province of Hispania Tarraconensis, during the second half of the fourth century. Almost nothing is recorded of his life beyond his office and his writings. He is known principally from a single notice in Jerome's On Illustrious Men, and the framework of his dates rests on what Jerome says there. Writing during the reign of Theodosius, Jerome reports that Pacian had died not long before, in extreme old age, which places his death in the years between 379 and 392 AD.
Jerome's notice, the hundred and sixth chapter of On Illustrious Men, praises Pacian for his eloquence and for the chastity of his life and lists several of his works. Among them Jerome names a piece called Cervus, or Little Stag, written against a pagan custom observed at the new year; this work has not survived. The same chapter is the source for most of what can be said about Pacian's standing among his contemporaries, since no other early account of him is extant.
The connection that fixes Pacian in the history of his period runs through his son. Jerome dedicated On Illustrious Men to Flavius Dexter, whom he identifies as Pacian's son and who held the office of praetorian prefect under Theodosius. Jerome knew the son, a figure of standing at the imperial court, and it is through this relationship that the bishop of a provincial Spanish see came to be recorded at all. Dexter is also credited with a lost chronicle that Jerome mentions.
Three of Pacian's works survive, all bearing on the discipline of penance and the standing of the church. The first is a set of three letters addressed to Sympronian, a layman who held Novatianist views. Sympronian had written to challenge the catholic position, and Pacian answered in three successive letters that defend the church's authority to forgive sins committed after baptism and dispute the Novatianist claim that such sins place the offender permanently outside the reach of the church. The opening letter contains the sentence most often quoted from him, in which he writes that Christian is his name and Catholic his surname, a formula he uses to distinguish the wider Christian name from the mark of communion with the universal church.
The other two surviving works are an Exhortation to Penance, which urges the lapsed to submit to the church's discipline and seek restoration, and a Sermon on Baptism, which sets out the effect of the sacrament. Both belong to the same pastoral concern that runs through the letters to Sympronian: the question of how sin after baptism is dealt with, and the church's power to receive back those who have fallen. Beyond these works and the few facts in Jerome, nothing further about Pacian is securely known.
Why Pacian Matters
Pacian is read first for the formula in his letter to Sympronian, in which he calls Christian his name and Catholic his surname. The sentence has been cited ever since as a compact statement of what the word catholic was taken to mean in the fourth century: not a rival name to Christian, but the mark that distinguished the wider communion of the universal church from the separated groups that also claimed the Christian name. As a definition of catholicity drawn from within the period itself, it has a weight out of proportion to the small body of work that contains it.
His letters to Sympronian are among the clearest surviving defenses from the fourth-century Latin West of the church's power to forgive sins committed after baptism. The Novatianists held that those who had lapsed, particularly under persecution, could not be restored to communion, and that the church had no authority to readmit them. Against this Pacian argued that the power to bind and loose extends to sins after baptism and that the church may receive the penitent back. His case takes up the same question that Cyprian had faced in Africa over the lapsed and that the Novatianist movement had carried into the following century.
He is also one of the few voices to survive from the church of fourth-century Spain, a region from which little contemporary theological writing has come down. His works give a direct view of how the penitential discipline and the controversy with Novatianism appeared in a Western provincial see, rather than at the major centers whose literature is better preserved.
His theology is pastoral rather than speculative. The surviving works are occupied with the discipline of penance, the effect of baptism, and the standing of the church to forgive, and they address these as practical questions of how the lapsed are to be treated and restored. He does not develop a systematic doctrine so much as defend the church's existing practice against those who denied its authority to forgive.
Complete Works in English
Free to readEvery surviving work, translated in full and free to read, from our Patrologia Latina project.
