Paulinus of Milan

Paulinus was a deacon of the church of Milan who served as notary and personal secretary to Bishop Ambrose. He was with him at the end — he says he was present at Ambrose's death in April 397 — and afterward he went to North Africa, where he was still active in the 420s. He wrote the Life of Ambrose around 412 to 422, and he says plainly at the start why: Augustine of Hippo asked him to. Augustine had been converted and baptised under Ambrose's preaching at Milan in 386, and he wanted the man's life set down before the people who remembered it died. The result is the earliest biography of Ambrose and one of the main sources for the western church of the late fourth century. Paulinus tells the famous scenes as an insider. The bees that settled on the infant Ambrose's mouth. His election as bishop of Milan in 374 while he was still an unbaptised provincial governor, sent to keep order at a contested election — a child in the crowd calls out 'Ambrose bishop,' the crowd takes it up, and the governor tries to escape the city by night and finds himself back at the gate in the morning. He was baptised and consecrated within a week. Paulinus records the confrontations that made Ambrose's reputation: standing against the empress Justina when she demanded a basilica in Milan for the Arian court, with soldiers surrounding the church and the congregation inside singing hymns through the siege; refusing the emperor Theodosius communion after the massacre at Thessalonica, and making him do public penance for it; the finding of the bones of the martyrs Gervasius and Protasius. The biography is not neutral. Paulinus writes as a devoted servant, includes a number of miracles and portents, and treats Ambrose's enemies harshly. Historians read it accordingly and still rely on it, because the man was in the room. He wrote one other surviving work. In Africa in 411 he brought formal charges against Caelestius, the associate of Pelagius, before Bishop Aurelius of Carthage — the Libellus adversus Caelestium, a list of the propositions he thought heretical, chiefly on original sin and infant baptism. Caelestius was condemned at that synod, and the case became the opening move of the whole Pelagian controversy that occupied Augustine for the rest of his life. Paulinus was still defending his charges in a document to Pope Zosimus in 417. He died sometime after 422; nothing is recorded of it. Sources: Paulinus of Milan, Vita Ambrosii and Libellus adversus Caelestium; Augustine, Confessions (for Ambrose at Milan); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.