The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Gaudentius of Brescia
died c. 410Patristic
He went east on pilgrimage to escape his own reputation and came home with relics of the Forty Martyrs to find he had been elected bishop in his absence.
Summary
- Lived died c. 410.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Western.
The life
Gaudentius grew up in the church at Brescia in northern Italy under Bishop Filastrius, the cataloguer of heresies, who taught him and whom he called father. Some time around 387, wanting to escape the reputation he had already gained, he went east on pilgrimage.
He got as far as Caesarea in Cappadocia, where the nieces of Basil the Great gave him relics of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, the soldiers who were left to freeze on a lake in Armenia for refusing to sacrifice. While he was away, Filastrius died and the people of Brescia elected Gaudentius in his place. He did not want it. He was informed that if he did not come home he would be excommunicated, and that the neighboring bishops would consecrate no one else. He came home, and Ambrose of Milan consecrated him.
He built a church for the relics he had brought back and called it the Assembly of the Saints. His dedication sermon for it survives.
His great test came in 405. John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople, had been deposed by a rigged synod and exiled, and the Western church did not accept it. Pope Innocent I and the emperor Honorius sent a delegation east to demand a proper council. Gaudentius was one of the three bishops chosen to go.
The embassy was a disaster. The delegates were intercepted in Thrace, held under guard in a fortress, denied any audience with the eastern emperor Arcadius, and had their letters taken from them. They were threatened, offered bribes, and finally put on an unseaworthy ship and sent home; the voyage nearly killed them. They never reached Constantinople and never saw Chrysostom.
Chrysostom, in exile in the mountains of Armenia, learned what they had attempted and wrote to Gaudentius to thank him. The letter survives. Palladius, who wrote the defense of Chrysostom's life, recorded the whole failed mission in detail.
About twenty-one of Gaudentius's sermons survive, most of them a course of Easter-week preaching delivered to the newly baptized, taking them through the Passover, the Exodus and the Eucharist. He also wrote against the Manichaeans. He died about 410.
Sources: John Chrysostom, Letters; Palladius, Dialogue on the Life of St John Chrysostom; Gaudentius of Brescia, Tractatus (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 68); The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "St. Gaudentius".
What was happening while he lived8 moments · AD 313–600
- 335Athanasius is exiled for the first timeThe bishop of Alexandria, who had been at Nicaea as a young deacon, was banished to Trier in Germany after a rigged synod. Four more exiles followed; he spent roughly seventeen of his forty-five years as bishop away from his city.
- 367Athanasius's Easter letter lists the twenty-sevenHis thirty-ninth Festal Letter names exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament we use today, the earliest surviving list that matches ours. Councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed the same list in the West.
- 380Nicene Christianity becomes the empire's official religionThe Edict of Thessalonica, issued by Theodosius I, commanded all his subjects to hold the faith of Nicaea. Legal protection had become legal privilege, and pressure on everyone else.
- 381The Council of ConstantinopleAround a hundred and fifty bishops confirmed Nicaea and expanded its article on the Holy Spirit, who "proceeds from the Father" and "together with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified." This 381 text is the creed most churches actually recite as the Nicene Creed.
- 386Augustine converts in a Milan gardenA thirty-one-year-old professor of rhetoric, weeping under a fig tree, heard a child's voice chanting "take up and read," opened Paul's letter to the Romans, and stopped running. His mother Monica had prayed for him for years; Bishop Ambrose's preaching had already broken his objections.
- c. 397–400Augustine writes the *Confessions*He told his whole story, theft, ambition, a long affair, a slow surrender, as one long prayer addressed to God. Nothing quite like it had been written before, and it invented the spiritual autobiography.
- c. 405Jerome finishes translating the Old Testament from HebrewCommissioned by Bishop Damasus in 382, Jerome worked for decades in Bethlehem, learning Hebrew so he could go behind the Greek to the original. His Latin Bible, later called the Vulgate, was the Bible of the West for a thousand years.
- 410Rome is sacked; Augustine begins *The City of God*Alaric's Goths took the eternal city, and pagans blamed the Christians for abandoning the old gods. Augustine answered across thirteen years (413–426) with a book about two cities, one built on love of self, one on love of God, and only one of them permanent.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Gaudentius of Brescia at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Traveled all the way to Constantinople to plead Chrysostom's case, and was turned back at the gates.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Fathers & the Creeds · 130 on this stretch of wall
Exiled five separate times for refusing to say the Son was anything less than God, they called it Athanasius against the world.
Made a Roman emperor stand outside the church door until he repented of a massacre.
Heard 'sell what you have' read aloud in church, walked into the Egyptian desert, and started monasticism.
A brilliant, restless sinner whose mother prayed for him thirty years; his Confessions still read like a man talking straight to God.
Built an entire town for the sick and the poor outside his city, and wrote the rule Eastern monks still live by.
Preached five sermons in a tiny borrowed chapel that settled how the whole church speaks about the Trinity.