A church council held at Vannes (north-western Gaul) between 461 and 491 condemns the use of the Sortes sanctorum. Written in Latin at Vannes.
E08513
Canonical and legal texts
Council of Vannes, canon 16
Ac ne id fortasse uideatur omissum, quod maxime fidem catholicae religionis infestat, quod aliquanti clerici student auguriis et sub nomine confictae religionis, quas sanctorum sortes uocant, diuinationis scientiam profitentur, aut quarumcumque scripturarum inspectione futura promittunt, hoc quicumque clericus detectus fuerit uel consulere uel docere, ab ecclesia habeatur extraneus.
'And so that we do not perhaps seem to have omitted what very much vexes the faith of the catholic religion, [namely] that some clerics, are preoccupied with auguries, and, under a name of specious piety, what they call the Saints' Lots (sanctorum sortes), they profess the science of divination, or predict future things by inspecting certain kinds of texts, any cleric detected either seeking out or teaching this should be held a stranger to the church.'
Text: Munier 1963, 156.
Translation: David Lambert.
Condemnation of other activity associated with cult
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesEcclesiastics - bishops
Source
The council was held between 461 and 491 (but most probably in the 460s) on the occasion of the consecration of Paternus as bishop of Vannes (Munier 1963, 150). Six bishops are listed in the acts as taking part.Discussion
This is the earliest condemnation of the text known as the Sortes sanctorum, and also the earliest testimony to the existence of the Latin version (Klingshirn 2002, 84). The Sortes sanctorum (Lots of the Saints) was a divinatory text, originally composed in Greek but translated into Latin by the 5th century. The text provided numbered responses, which people selected by rolling dice, in order to foretell the future (for a brief summary, see Luijendijk and Klingshirn 2019, 42-44, and for a more detailed discussion Klingshirn 2002). The Sortes sanctorum text does not contain any reference to saints except in its title, described in the canon as 'a name of specious piety' (note that sortes sanctorum can also be used as a more generic term for an oracle text, as in E01365).The Sortes sanctorum was repeatedly condemned by Gallic church councils in the later 5th and 6th centuries: subsequently to this one by the councils of Agde in 506 (E08392), Orléans in 511 (E08509), and Auxerre in the late 6th century (E05897), as well as by the Decretum Gelasianum, under the name Sortes apostolorum (E03338).
Bibliography
Edition:Munier, C., Concilia Galliae, a. 314-a. 506 (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 148; Turnhout, 1963).
Further reading:
Klingshirn, W., "Defining the Sortes Sanctorum: Gibbon, Du Cange, and Early Christian Lot Divination," Journal of Early Christian Studies 10:1 (2002), 77-130.
Luijendijk, A., and Klingshirn, W., "The Literature of Lot Divination," in: A. Luijendijk, W. Klingshirn, and L. Jenott (eds.), "My Lots are in Thy Hands": Sortilege and its Practitioners in Late Antiquity (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 19-59.
David Lambert
10/11/2023
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00518 | Saints, unnamed | Certain |
|---|
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