UC Riverside

The so-called Luciferians were a community of Christians that flourished in the late 4th century. They emerged following the Council of Alexandria in 362 as a rigorist Nicene community. However, by the early 5th century, they had apparently completely dissipated. The classic interpretation of how the Luciferians emerged is that they were led by a bishop named Lucifer of Cagliari. A more modern approach has seen the ‘Luciferians’ as a community constructed by rigorists in Rome in the 380s, reaching out to other dissatisfied Christians. I instead argue that this community was neither led by Lucifer nor a later coalescing of dissident Christians, but rather emerged in the 360s out of a network of clerics dissatisfied with the decisions of the Council of Alexandria.

Furthermore, no convincing explanation has yet been provided for this brief florescence and sudden disappearance. This dissertation draws upon the Libellus precum, an understudied petition written by two Luciferian presbyters, in order to examine the internal mechanisms of the community and propose an explanation as to why they dissolved so suddenly. The community is examined in comparison with two other rigorist Nicene communities, the Novatians and the Donatists, who remained vibrant over a much longer period of time.

I argue that the Luciferians dissolved not for any one reason, as some scholars have suspected, but owing to a combination of factors. These factors included the consequences of their initial geographic distribution; a lack of clear doctrinal differences with their opponents; a failure to define their opponents as doctrinally deviant while they themselves fell prey to such attempts; a promotion of asceticism while lacking male ascetics; and an insistence upon suffering as a means of proving one’s faith combined with an end of persecution of Luciferians. These factors in combination, not individually, led to the dissolution of the Luciferian community.