Elipandus, who boasted of having refuted and stamped out the Migetian errors, and who also took up so independent an attitude with regard to the See of Rome, was not the man to endure being dictated to in the matter of what was, or what was not, sound doctrine, and, in the letter quoted above, he scornfully remarks that he had never heard that it was the province of the people of Libana to teach the Toledans.  Here, as in the defiant attitude taken up towards the Pope, we may perhaps see a jealousy, felt by the old independent Church of Spain under its own primate, towards the new Church, that was growing up in the mountains of the North, the centre of whose religious devotion was soon to be Compostella, and its spiritual head not the primate of Spain, but the bishop of Rome.

It is now time to explain what the actual heresy advocated by Elipandus and Felix was.  Some have held the opinion that Adoptionism was merely a revival of the Bonosian errors, which had long taken root in Spain;[1] others, that it was a revival of the Nestorian[2] heresy, a new phase of the controversy between the schools of Antioch and Alexandria;[3] or that it was an attempt to reform Christianity, purging it from later additions.[4] Alcuin, however, speaks of its followers as a new sect, unknown to former times.[5] Stated briefly, the new doctrine was that Jesus, in so far as His manhood was concerned, was son of God by adoption.  This error had been foreseen and condemned in advance by Cyril of Alexandria (348-386):[6] by Hilary of Arles (429-449).[7] The Eleventh Council of Toledo had also guarded against this same error a hundred years before this (675), affirming that Christ the Son of God was His Son by nature, not by adoption.

    [1] Enhueber, Diss., sec. 25.  The errors of Bonosus were
    condemned at Capua in 389.  For their development in Spain, see
    “Isidore of Seville.”

    [2] Condemned at Ephesus, 431.  For connection of Adoptionism
    with this, see letter of Adrian to bishops of Spain (785?).

    [3] Neander, v., p. 216.

    [4] Ibid., vi., p. 120, see letter of Alvar to Speraindeo.

[5] Alcuin contra Felicem, i., sec. 7.  Elipandus denied that it had anything to do with other heresies.  “Nos vero anathematizamus Bonosum, qui filium Dei sine matre genitum, adoptivum fuisse adfirmat.  Item Sabellium, qui ipsum esse Patrem, quem Filium, quem et Spiritus sanctus (sic) et non ipsud, delirat.  Anathematizamus Arium, qui Filium et Spiritum Sanctum creaturas esse existimat.  Anathematizamus Manichaeum qui Christum solum Deum et non hominem fuisse praedicat.  Anathematizamus Antiphrasium Beatum carnis lasciviae deditum, et onagrum Etherium, doctorem bestialem ...,” etc.

    [6] “Lectures on the Catechism,” xi.  “Christ is the Son of God
    by nature, begotten of the Father, not by adoption.”

    [7] De Trinit, v., p. 7, “The Son of God is not a false God—­a
    God by adoption, or a God by metaphor (nee adoptivus, nec
    connuncupatus).”