The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Gaudentius of Rimini
died c. 360Patristic
A Greek sent west to preach, who founded the church at Rimini and ordained the stonecutter that San Marino is named for.
Summary
- Lived died c. 360.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers and The Martyrs.
- Tradition: Patristic / Western.
The life
The record of Gaudentius of Rimini is short, and much of what survives comes through later tradition rather than contemporary documents. What is handed down is this.
He was born about 280, and the tradition makes him an Ephesian, a Greek from Asia Minor who came west. He was consecrated a bishop at Rome and sent north to Ariminum, the port city on the Adriatic that Italians call Rimini, to preach there. He founded the Christian community in that city and is credited with ordaining a deacon named Marinus, the stonecutter who according to legend withdrew to Monte Titano and gave his name to the republic of San Marino.
He was bishop of Rimini through the worst years of the Arian struggle, and in 359 his own city hosted one of its decisive moments. The emperor Constantius summoned the Western bishops to a council at Ariminum, over four hundred of them, while the Eastern bishops met at Seleucia. The council at Rimini began by reaffirming the Nicene faith and rejecting the imperial creed. Constantius then refused to let the bishops go home.
They were kept there for months, worn down, and a delegation was finally pressured at Nike in Thrace into signing a formula that called the Son merely "like" the Father, dropping the word that had settled the matter at Nicaea. Most of the rest eventually signed too. It is the episode Jerome had in mind when he wrote that the whole world groaned and marveled to find itself Arian.
Gaudentius did not go along. The tradition is that he stood with the Nicene party, and that on 14 October 360, not long after the council, he was set upon and killed, by Arian partisans, or by imperial guards, depending on which account is followed. The sources are late, and the details cannot be checked. He has been venerated as a martyr in both the Catholic and Orthodox churches ever since, and his feast is kept on 14 October.
His relics are preserved at Rimini. He is the city's patron, and the cathedral holds his memory.
What can be said without hedging is the setting. Rimini in 359 is where the fourth-century church learned how an empire breaks bishops: not by killing them, but by keeping them in a hall until they sign. Gaudentius is remembered as one who did not.
Sources: Jerome, Dialogue against the Luciferians and Chronicle, on the Council of Ariminum; Athanasius, De synodis; the Roman Martyrology; Alban Butler, Lives of the Saints, 14 October.
What was happening while he lived3 moments · AD 313–600
- 313The Edict of Milan makes Christianity legalConstantine and Licinius agreed that everyone in the empire could worship as they chose, and ordered confiscated church property returned. After nearly three centuries of being an illegal religion, the church woke up protected.
- 325The Council of NicaeaAbout three hundred bishops met in a lakeside town in what is now Turkey to answer Arius, an Alexandrian pastor who taught that the Son was God's first and greatest creature, glorious, but made, so that "there was when He was not." The council answered with one word: the Son is *homoousios* with the Father, of the very same being, begotten, not made.
- 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.
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 Rimini at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
An Italian bishop remembered for standing against the Arians in his own city and paying for it.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received. Hangs on The Martyrs: The witnesses who paid with their lives, from the arena at Carthage to the present day, and the confessors who paid with everything short of their lives.
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.