Paulinus of Nola

Pontius Meropius Anicius Paulinus was born about 354 at Bordeaux in Gaul, into one of the richest senatorial families in the western empire, with estates in Aquitaine, Spain, and Italy. His tutor was Ausonius, the leading Latin poet of the age, who loved him like a son.

His public career was brilliant and short. He held the consulship, or at least a suffect consulship, while still young, and about 381 he was made governor of Campania in southern Italy. His official residence was near Nola, where the tomb of a third-century confessor named Felix drew crowds of pilgrims. Paulinus, still nominally pagan or at best nominal in his Christianity, was struck by it. He paved a road, built a hostel for the poor, and never got over the place.

He married a Spanish Christian woman named Therasia. Around 389 they were baptised, Paulinus by Bishop Delphinus at Bordeaux. Then their only child, a son named Celsus, died eight days after birth. Something in them broke loose. Over the next few years the couple sold nearly everything they owned across three provinces and gave the money to the poor and to the churches.

The reaction was violent. Ausonius wrote poem after poem begging his pupil to come back to the world, to literature, to his rank, and finally wrote in bewilderment that Paulinus had been bewitched. Paulinus answered in verse, courteously, immovably, that a man's affections had been transferred, not destroyed. The exchange is one of the most personal documents to survive from the ancient world about what conversion cost socially.

In 394 at Barcelona a congregation seized him and forced ordination on him. He and Therasia then moved to Nola and settled beside the tomb of Felix, living in the upper floor of a hospice they built, with the poor and the sick housed below them. He became bishop of Nola around 409 and served until his death on 22 June 431.

He wrote steadily. About fifty letters survive, to Augustine, Jerome, Sulpicius Severus, Ambrose, Delphinus, and Nicetas of Remesiana. And every year on 14 January, the feast of Felix, he wrote a poem, the natalicia, fourteen of which survive. They describe the crowds coming down from the hills with their animals, the sick sleeping at the shrine, the peasants' offerings, the buildings he put up and the pictures he had painted on the walls so that illiterate pilgrims would have something to read. Nobody else in antiquity described a pilgrimage site from the inside like that.

Therasia died before him. Augustine, who never met him face to face, called him a light of the church.

Sources: Paulinus of Nola, Letters and Poems (English translation by P. G. Walsh, Ancient Christian Writers 35, 36, 40); Ausonius, Epistles; Augustine, Letters; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church.