Quodvultdeus

His name means 'what God wills', a real African Christian name of the period, not a title. He was born in North Africa around 390 and was a deacon at Carthage while Augustine was still alive.

The two corresponded. Quodvultdeus wrote to Augustine, twice, pressing him to compose a short handbook listing all the heresies with brief refutations, because the clergy of Carthage needed something they could actually use. Augustine protested that he was old and busy, then did it: the treatise On Heresies, one of his last works, exists because a deacon would not stop asking.

Quodvultdeus became bishop of Carthage about 437. Two years later the city fell.

Geiseric and the Vandals had crossed from Spain in 429 and spent a decade taking Africa. They entered Carthage in October 439. They were Arians, and their policy toward the Nicene clergy was expulsion. The contemporary historian Victor of Vita records what happened to the bishop: Quodvultdeus and a large number of his clergy were put aboard ships that were unseaworthy, stripped, according to the account, and loaded onto broken vessels, and pushed out into the Mediterranean to sink.

They did not sink. The ships reached Naples in Campania. Quodvultdeus lived out his exile there and died about 450. He was buried in the catacombs of San Gennaro at Naples, and a fifth-century mosaic portrait of him survives there.

His sermons survive too, though for centuries they circulated under Augustine's name and were only sorted out by modern editors. About a dozen are now confidently his, and they are the voice of a bishop preaching to a city that knows an army is coming.

They are catechetical sermons, mostly, addressed to candidates preparing for baptism at Easter, walking them through the Creed line by line. He explains what renouncing the devil means in a city full of theatres and games, and tells them plainly what it will cost. Several were preached while the Vandals were closing in, and the anxiety is in them.

His larger work is the Book of the Promises and Predictions of God, a survey of Scripture organised around the promises God made and how each was fulfilled, the promises before the law, under the law, and in the age of grace, with a final section on what is still to come. It is one of the earliest sustained attempts to read the whole Bible as a single unfolding covenant, and for a long time it too was printed as Augustine's.

What he leaves is a plain picture of a pastor in a collapsing province: teaching converts the Creed one clause at a time, badgering a famous theologian for a usable manual, and going aboard a rotten ship rather than sign what the Arians wanted.

Sources: Quodvultdeus, Sermons and Liber promissionum et praedictorum Dei (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 60; English translation of the sermons in Ancient Christian Writers 60); Victor of Vita, History of the Vandal Persecution; Augustine, De haeresibus and Letters 221–224.