Peter Chrysologus

Peter was born about 380 at Imola in northern Italy, and was made deacon there by Bishop Cornelius, whom he always called his spiritual father. Around 433 he became bishop of Ravenna, and he held the see until about 450.

Ravenna at that moment was the most important city in the western empire. The imperial court had moved there from Milan in 402 because it was defensible, marsh on three sides and a harbour behind, and it was where the emperor Valentinian III and his mother Galla Placidia, who effectively ruled the West, kept their household. Peter preached to that court. Galla Placidia was his patron; the mosaics she built are still standing in the city.

He is known almost entirely through his sermons. About a hundred and eighty survive, collected in the eighth century by a later archbishop of Ravenna, and they gave him his name: Chrysologus, the golden-worded, a Latin answer to Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed of the Greek East.

They are short. He says himself, more than once, that he is cutting it off, that a preacher who goes long loses the people, that he would rather leave them hungry than sated. Some of them would take five minutes to deliver. He preaches on the Gospel readings, on the Creed and the Lord's Prayer for candidates preparing for baptism, on Christmas and Easter, on the parables. His style is quick, packed with short antitheses and repeated phrases, built to be heard once and remembered.

He preaches practically. He attacks the New Year's festivities that his congregation would not give up, with their masks and their dancing. He tells the rich what almsgiving is actually for. He handles the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan as stories about the people in front of him.

One letter of his survives, and it put him in the middle of the century's great doctrinal fight. The monk Eutyches, condemned at Constantinople in 448 for teaching that there was only one nature in Christ after the incarnation, wrote around the West looking for support. Peter answered him briefly and firmly: he would not take up the case, the matter belonged to the bishop of Rome, and, in the sentence always quoted, 'we exhort you, honourable brother, to give obedient attention to what has been written by the most blessed pope of the city of Rome.' Leo's Tome followed, and Chalcedon after it.

Peter died about 450, apparently back at Imola, where he was buried. He was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1729.

Sources: Peter Chrysologus, Selected Sermons and the Letter to Eutyches (English translation in Fathers of the Church, volumes 17, 109, 110); Agnellus of Ravenna, Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.