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The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Paulinus of Milan
died c. 422Patristic
Ambrose's secretary, who wrote down his bishop's life because Augustine asked him to.
Pictured: the era he stood in — The First Council of Nicaea — Vasily Surikov (1876), public domain
Summary
- Lived died c. 422.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Western.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived7 moments · AD 313–600
- 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 Paulinus of Milan at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
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.