Sulpicius Severus

Sulpicius Severus was born about 363 in Aquitaine, in southwestern Gaul, into a noble family. He was educated at Bordeaux, trained as a lawyer, and made a reputation at the bar. He married a wealthy woman and then, quite young, she died.

Her death and the influence of his friend Paulinus of Nola turned him. Around 392 or 394 he gave up his career, sold or gave away much of his property against his father's furious objections, and retired to an estate at Primuliacum in southern Gaul, where he lived a monastic life with a small community. He was ordained priest at some point. Gennadius says that late in life he was drawn for a time toward the Pelagians, recognised the error, and imposed silence on himself for the rest of his days as a penance. He died about 425.

Somewhere in there he met Martin, bishop of Tours, an old soldier turned monk who had founded the first monasteries in Gaul, torn down rural shrines, and lived in a hut of branches outside his own cathedral city. Sulpicius visited him, questioned him, questioned the people around him, and wrote his life while Martin was still alive; it was in circulation before Martin died in 397.

The Life of Martin was an immediate and lasting sensation. Sulpicius says copies sold in Rome as fast as they could be made. It gave the Latin West something it did not have: a full portrait of a Christian saint who was not a martyr. The age of persecution was over, and the question of what holiness looked like without an arena had no settled answer. Sulpicius answered it with Martin, the soldier who cut his cloak in half for a beggar at the gate of Amiens and dreamed that night of Christ wearing the half; the bishop who dressed like a peasant and would not sit in the seat of honour; the man who confronted the emperor Maximus about the execution of Priscillian.

That model, the confessor-saint, the ascetic bishop, the miracle-worker in the countryside, became the template for hagiography for the next thousand years. Sulpicius followed it with three Letters and two books of Dialogues, comparing Martin's deeds with those of the Egyptian desert fathers and arguing, gently, that Gaul had produced his equal.

His other book is very different. The Chronicle, in two books, is a sacred history from creation to the year 400, written in clean, compressed Latin. Its last section is the fullest surviving contemporary account of the Priscillianist affair in Spain, the first execution of Christians for heresy by a Christian state. Sulpicius records it and calls it what he thinks it is: a bad business, in which bishops procured a death sentence and Martin alone had the sense to be appalled.

His Latin was admired enough that later ages called him the Christian Sallust.

Sources: Sulpicius Severus, Life of Martin, Letters, Dialogues, and Chronicle (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series volume 11); Paulinus of Nola, Letters; Gennadius, De viris illustribus.