Fulgentius of Ruspe

Fulgentius was born about 462 at Telepte in the North African province of Byzacena, into a senatorial family that had already lost its house in Carthage to the Vandal conquest. The Vandals were Arians, and their kings taxed, exiled and occasionally tortured the Catholic bishops of Africa for the better part of a century.

He was well educated, his mother had him learn Homer by heart in Greek before Latin, and as a young man he was appointed procurator, the tax collector for his district. He found the work loathsome. Reading Augustine's exposition of Psalm 36 finished it for him, and he left public office for a monastery over his mother's fierce objections.

His monastic life was not quiet. An Arian priest had him and a companion seized, beaten, and their hair and beards torn out; the local Arian bishop, embarrassed, offered to punish the man, and Fulgentius declined to press it. He set out for Egypt to join the monks there, got as far as Sicily, and turned back on learning that the Egyptian monks were in schism over Chalcedon. He went on to Rome instead, around 500, and saw Theodoric the Ostrogoth enter the city in state.

About 507 he was made bishop of Ruspe, a small coastal town, at a moment when the Vandal king Thrasamund had forbidden the consecration of new Catholic bishops. Shortly after, Thrasamund exiled roughly sixty African bishops to Sardinia. Fulgentius went with them, and became their spokesman.

He was so effective in writing that the king had him brought back to Carthage for a debate, and then, after he answered too well, sent him back to Sardinia. He spent most of his episcopate in exile. He organized the exiled bishops at Cagliari into a working community with a library, and wrote steadily.

His subject was grace. Fulgentius is the most careful Augustinian of his generation: To Monimus, On the Truth of Predestination and Grace, To Thrasamund, On the Faith to Peter, and a stack of letters. He defended Augustine's teaching on election while insisting God does not predestine anyone to sin, and he took a hard line, harder than many later readers accept, on the fate of the unbaptized. His On the Faith to Peter circulated for centuries as a compact summary of Latin doctrine.

King Hilderic allowed the exiles home in 523. Fulgentius returned to Ruspe to crowds in the streets, spent a final year in retreat on an island, and died in 533.

Sources: The Life of Fulgentius, attributed to Ferrandus of Carthage; Fulgentius of Ruspe, Selected Works (Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 91–91A); The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "St. Fulgentius".