Eutropius of Valencia

Eutropius of Valencia was a churchman of Visigothic Hispania in the later sixth century, attested first as a monk and abbot and later as bishop of Valencia. Nothing reliable is known of his birth, parentage, or education. He is associated with the monastery of Servitanum, a house founded in eastern Spain by Donatus, an abbot who had arrived from North Africa with a large company of monks and a considerable library. That African monastic colony is one of the documented channels by which late antique books and ascetic traditions reached the Iberian church. As abbot of Servitanum, Eutropius belonged to a network of Catholic clergy in the provinces of Carthaginensis and neighboring territories during the reign of the Visigothic king Reccared I.

While Eutropius was still abbot, Licinianus, the metropolitan bishop of Cartagena, addressed a letter to him on liturgical and sacramental matters, including questions connected with baptism and the use of chrism. Licinianus was among the more cultivated Spanish bishops of his generation and also corresponded with Pope Gregory the Great. The letter to Eutropius places the abbot among the non-Arian, Nicene leaders of the eastern Iberian church in the years around the Third Council of Toledo (589), at which Reccared and much of the Visigothic aristocracy professed Catholic Christianity. Surviving subscription lists do not clearly show Eutropius at that council; the bishop of Valencia named in some reconstructions of the Toledo III attendance is another prelate, and the sequence of sixth-century bishops of Valencia remains incomplete.

Eutropius subsequently became bishop of Valencia. Isidore of Seville, writing in the early seventh century in his De viris illustribus, states that Eutropius, bishop of the church of Valencia, wrote a letter to a bishop named Peter on the eight principal vices and another letter on the strictness of monastic discipline and on the injury done to monasteries by certain bishops. Isidore adds that Eutropius flourished in the time of King Reccared. A work circulating as De octo vitiis under Eutropius’s name treats the eight capital sins in the tradition of Evagrius Ponticus and John Cassian—gluttony, fornication, avarice, anger, dejection, acedia, vainglory, and pride—and applies that scheme to pastoral and monastic correction. The second theme named by Isidore, episcopal interference with monasteries, is independently attested as a problem in sixth-century Gaul and Spain and gives the letters a concrete institutional setting.

No contemporary chronicle, epitaph, or council act records the year of Eutropius’s consecration, the length of his episcopate, or the date and place of his death. Later notices that assign his death to about the beginning of the seventh century are conventional estimates, not documentary facts. He does not appear with a stable cult, feast day, or patronage in the early martyrologies, and claims of formal canonization or beatification cannot be verified. What can be said with confidence is that he was a monastic superior and then a bishop in Catholic Spain at the moment of the Visigothic conversion, that he took part in the epistolary culture of his peers, and that Isidore regarded his moral and disciplinary letters as worth recording among the illustrious writers of the Spanish church.