Paulinus of Nola

Origins, wealth, and the world renounced

He was born about the year 354 at Bordeaux (Burdigala) in Aquitaine, of one of the richest senatorial families of Gaul, with vast estates in Gaul, Italy, and Spain. Given the best education of his age — his teacher and lifelong friend was the poet Ausonius — he rose swiftly through the honours of the Roman state: he was a senator, held a suffect consulship while still young, and about 381 governed Campania in Italy as its consularis. It was there, at Nola, that he first came under the influence that would remake his life: the tomb and cult of the local martyr-confessor Felix of Nola, to whom he conceived a deep and lasting devotion.

Returning to Gaul and then to Spain, Paulinus married Therasia, a noble and devout Spanish woman who became the companion of his conversion. Under the influence of Felix, of the bishops Delphinus and Amandus of Bordeaux, of Martin of Tours (who, the tradition says, healed him of an eye affliction), and of Ambrose of Milan, Paulinus and Therasia turned wholly to Christ. The death of their only child, an infant son named Celsus, some days after his birth, deepened the turn. Baptised at Bordeaux, Paulinus resolved on the renunciation the age reckoned astonishing in a man of his rank: he and Therasia sold or gave away their immense estates, distributing the proceeds to the poor and to the redemption of debtors and captives, and embraced a life of continence, poverty, and prayer. The renunciation caused a sensation across the Empire; Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome all wrote of it with wonder, and Augustine held it up as a pattern of Christian detachment.

Priest, and monk at the shrine of Felix

While Paulinus was in Spain, the Christians of Barcelona, seizing on his presence at their Nativity liturgy, acclaimed him and pressed him to ordination; he consented to be ordained priest (about 394) only on condition that he be bound to no particular church. He and Therasia then withdrew to Nola in Campania, to the place he loved best, and settled by the basilica of Saint Felix, over whose shrine Paulinus built and adorned churches, laid out a hospice, and gathered a small ascetic community. There he lived as a monk for the rest of his life, keeping the annual feast of Felix (January 14) with a great poem each year — the Natalicia — so that his verse is at once his devotion and, incidentally, our best source for the cult of the martyr and for his own mind.

Bishop of Nola

About the year 409–410, on the death of the city's bishop, Paulinus was chosen Bishop of Nola, and governed the see through the terrible years of the barbarian invasions of Italy — the sack of Rome by Alaric (410) and its aftermath — until his death. As bishop he was famed for his mercy to the poor and the captive: he continued to spend all that came to him on the redemption of those carried off in the wars and on the relief of the destitute, keeping nothing back. The later tradition — told most fully by Gregory the Great in the fourth book of his Dialogues — crowns this with the story that gave him his surname: when a widow came begging the ransom of her only son, taken captive to Africa (the tradition says by the Vandals or their allies), and Paulinus had already given away everything, he answered, "Such as I have I give thee," and went in the young man's place — surrendering himself as a slave and serving as a gardener to his captor's household — until the master, learning that his gardener was the great bishop of Nola, set him free, and with him, the story adds, all the captives of Nola. Whatever its precise historical value — the chronology of the Vandal raids sits awkwardly with Paulinus's own lifetime, and the account is a devout one — the story crystallises the man the Church remembers: Paulinus the Merciful, who gave first his wealth, then himself.

Poet, correspondent, and repose

Paulinus stood at the centre of the Christian literary world of his age. He corresponded with Augustine of Hippo, Jerome, Ambrose, Sulpicius Severus (the biographer of Martin, and Paulinus's close friend), Melania the Elder, Nicetas of Remesiana, and Victricius of Rouen; his surviving letters and poems are a monument of early Christian Latin literature and a prime witness to the piety, friendships, and controversies of the turn of the fifth century. The medieval West credited him — probably wrongly, but tellingly — with the introduction of church bells, deriving their Latin names nola and campana from his city and province.

He reposed at Nola on 22 June 431, and was buried at the shrine of Felix he had served for forty years. His relics were later translated (in the medieval period to Benevento, and eventually, in 1909, restored to Nola).