That particular article of faith was denied by other sects, which rejoined that the history of the world must be acted out in every man. Most men, like Pythagoras, will have to transmigrate through many bodies before obtaining their liberation; some, the Proteans, "within the period of a single life are lions, dragons, wild boars, are water and are a tree." Demosthenes tells of the purification by mud to which initiates were subjected as part of the Orphic mysteries; analogously, the Proteans sought purification through evil. It was their belief, as it was Carpocrates', that no one shall emerge from the prison until the last obolus is paid (Luke 12:59: "I tell thee, thou shalt not depart thence, till thou hast paid the very last mite"), and they often hornswoggled penitents with this other verse: "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly" (John 10:10). They also said that not to be an evildoer was an act of Satanic arrogance. ... The Histrioni wove many, and diverse, mythologies; some preached asceticism, others license—all preached confusion. Theopompus, a Histrion from Berenice, denied all fables; he said that every man is an organ projected by the deity in order to perceive the world.
The heretics in Aurelian's diocese were not those who claimed that every act is reflected in heaven but rather those who claimed that time does not tolerate repetitions. The circumstance was peculiar; in a report to the authorities at Rome, Aurelian mentioned it. The prelate who received the report was the empress's confessor; everyone knew that this demanding minister forbade her the private delectations of speculative theology. His secretary—formerly one of John of Pannonia's collaborators, now fallen out with him—was famed as a most diligent inquisitor of heterodoxies; Aurelian added an explanation of the Histrionic heresy, as it was contained in the conventicles of Genoa and Aquileia. He wrote a few paragraphs; when he tried to write the horrible thesis that no two moments are the same, his pen halted.
He could not find the necessary words; the admonitions of the new doctrine were too affected and metaphorical to be transcribed. ("Wouldst thou see what no human eyes have seen? Look upon the moon. Wouldst thou hear what no ears have heard? Hearken to the cry of the bird. Wouldst thou touch what no hands have touched? Put thy hand to the earth. Truly I say unto thee, that the moment of God's creation of the world is yet to come.") Then suddenly a sentence of twenty words came to his spirit.
With joy he wrote it on the page; immediately afterward, he was disturbed by the sense that it was someone else's. The next day, he remembered: he had read it many years ago in the Adversus Annulares, composed by John of Pannonia. He ferreted out the quotation—there it was. He was torn by uncertainty. To alter or omit those words was to weaken the force of the statement; to let them stand was to plagiarize a man he detested; to indicate the source was to denounce him. He pleaded for divine aid. Toward the coming of the second twilight, his guardian angel suggested a middle way. Aurelian kept the words, but set this disclaimer before it: That which the heresiarchs howl today, to the confusion of the faith, was said during this century, with more levity than blameworthiness, by a most learned doctor of the church. Then there occurred the thing he had feared, the thing he had hoped for, the thing that was inevitable. Aurelian was required to declare the identity of that doctor of the church; John of Pannonia was accused of professing heretical opinions.
Four months later, a blacksmith on the Aventinus, driven to delusions by the misrepresentations of the Histrioni, set a great iron ball upon the shoulders of his little son so that the child's double might fly. The man's child died; the horror engendered by the crime obliged John's judges to be irreproachably severe with him. The accused would not retract; time and again he repeated that to deny his proposition was to fall into the pestilential heresy of the Monotoni. He did not realize (perhaps refused to realize) that to speak of the Monotoni was to speak of a thing now forgotten. With somehow senile insistence, he poured forth the most brilliant periods of his old jeremiads; the judges did not even listen to what had once so shocked them. Rather than try to purify himself of the slightest stain of Histrionism, he redoubled his efforts to prove that the proposition of which he was accused was in fact utterly orthodox. He argued with the men upon whose verdict his very life depended, and he committed the supreme faux pas of doing so with genius and with sarcasm. On October 26, after a debate that had lasted three days and three nights, he was condemned to be burned at the stake.
Aurelian witnessed the execution, because to have avoided it would have been to confess himself responsible for it. The place of execution was a hill on whose summit stood a stake pounded deep into the ground; all around it, bundles of firewood had been gathered. A priest read the tribunal's verdict.
Under the midday sun, John of Pannonia lay with his face in the dust, howling like a beast. He clawed at the ground, but the executioners seized him, stripped him, and tied him to the stake. On his head they put a crown of straw sprinkled with sulfur; beside him, a copy of the pestilential Adversus Annulâtes. It had rained the night before, and the wood burned smokily. John of Pannonia prayed in Greek, and then in an unknown language. The pyre was about to consume him, when Aurelian screwed up his courage to raise his eyes. The fiery gusts fell still; Aurelian saw for the first and last time the face of the man he hated. It reminded him of someone, but he couldn't quite remember whom. Then, the flames swallowed him; he screamed and it was as though the fire itself were screaming.
Plutarch reports that Julius Caesar wept at the death of Pompey; Aurelian did not weep at the death of John, but he did feel what a man cured of an incurable disease that had become a part of his life might feel. In Aquileia, in Ephesus, in Macedonia, he let the years pass over him. He sought out the hard ends of the empire, the floundering swamps and the contemplative deserts, so that solitude might help him understand his life. In a Mauritanian cell, in the night laden with lions, he rethought the complex accusation against John of Pannonia and for the millionth time he justified the verdict. It was harder for him to justify his tortuous denunciation. In Rusaddir he preached that anachronistic sermon titled The Light of Lights Lighted in the Flesh of a Reprobate. In Hibernia, in one of the huts of a monastery besieged by forest, he was surprised one night, toward dawn, by the sound of rain. He recalled a Roman night when that same punctilious sound had surprised him. At high noon, a lighting bolt set the trees afire, and Aurelian died as John had.