JULIAN OF ECLANUM. - So called from his episcopal see (now vanished; ruins near present-day Mirabella Eclano, east of Benevento), he was the most tenacious and combative supporter of the Pelagian doctrines (ca. 380-455). His father Memorius, a bishop, was bound in friendship with Sts. Augustine and Paulinus of Nola. Instructed in the divine Scriptures and already distinguished among the Doctors of the Church, according to Gennadius (Vir. ill., 45), J., having just been elevated to the episcopal chair of Eclanum in 418, when Pope Zosimus in his Tractoria confirmed the condemnation issued by his predecessor Innocent I against Pelagius and his abettor Caelestius, placed himself at the head of the opposition, which was especially strong in southern Italy. Therefore, deposed from his see and driven into exile by imperial decree, he went wandering through the eastern provinces of the Empire, for a long time the guest of Bishop Theodore of Mopsuestia in Cilicia; nor could he ever return to his Eclanum, despite all the efforts he made at the court of Constantinople, until he died obscurely, it is said, in a village of Sicily.
He wrote in defense of the Pelagian doctrines two letters to Pope Zosimus and two others, after his deposition, to his partisans in Thessalonica and Rome; then, an exile in the East, two large works against the Catholic theses upheld by St. Augustine, namely four books to Turbantius and eight books to Florus, to which St. Augustine replied respectively with the six books Contra Iulianum (PL 44, 461) and the so-called Opus imperfectum (PL 45, 1040); furthermore a book De bono constantiae, still known to Bede (PL 91, 1072). Of all this, only the first six books to Florus survive intact, cited in full by St. Augustine in his reply; of the rest only a few fragments.
He also commented on various books of Holy Scripture. A widely circulated commentary on the Song of Songs in 7 books was still in the hands of Bede, who cites some passages from it. An allusion to this commentary and at the same time to Proverbs and Ecclesiastes is to be seen in the work composed Salomonic voluminibus disserendis, which attests of its author a commentary on the minor prophets (PL 21, 960), an author who, as G. Morin has demonstrated with strong arguments, is precisely J. With even more reason there must be attributed to him an Expositio of the Book of Job published in the Spicilegium Casinense, III, since to the same philological arguments are added the Pelagian doctrines, barely discernible in the commentary on the Prophets, but asserted in the crudest form and repeatedly in the exposition of Job. Finally he translated from Greek the commentary of Theodore of Mopsuestia on the Psalms; extensive fragments of it remain in manuscripts formerly of Bobbio.
In his polemical writings J. carried the fundamental principles of the Pelagian heresy to their extreme consequences, and defended them with the utmost acrimony, armed above all with stubborn dialectic and inexhaustible eloquence. In the biblical commentaries he took as his basis the new version of St. Jerome, toward whom, moreover, he did not spare his criticisms, and explained the literal sense with the hermeneutical principles of the Antiochene school, unique in this genre among the Latins. In all his works he gives proof of great culture and literary ability, good and rich language, a robust personal style.