PAOLINO, patriarch of AQUILEIA, saint. — Born in the Lombard Duchy of Friuli in the first half of the 8th century, he died at Cividale on 11 January 802. As an artis grammaticae magister, acquainted with Virgil and Ovid, Sedulius and Boethius, he was summoned by Charlemagne, after 774, to the Palace School in France, where he formed a friendship with Alcuin and the others in that circle. From Ivrea, on 17 June 776, Charles granted him properties confiscated from rebellious Lombards, and in 787 appointed him patriarch of Aquileia; P. played a major role in the events of those years, above all in the struggle against the Adoptionist errors of Elipandus of Toledo and Felix of Urgel.
He took part in the Council of Regensburg (792) and in the more solemn Council of Frankfurt in 794, for which he wrote the Libellus sacrosyllabus contra Elipandum; at Charles’s invitation, in 799–800 he wrote the Libri III contra Felicem (a new arrangement of these was presented by dom A. Wilmart in his L'ordre des parties dans le traité de Paulin d'Aquilee contre Felix d'Urgel, in The Journal of theological studies, 39 [1938], no. 153, pp. 22–37). He addressed an ascetic Liber exhortatorius to his friend Erich, duke of Friuli. Following the conclusion of Charles’s wars against the Avars in the years 791–96, P. took part with Armone (v.), archbishop of Salzburg, in the Conference on the Danube convened to provide for the conversion of those peoples. Then, in the autumn of 796, he held a provincial council at Cividale, where he proposed an explanation of the Creed, dealt with the question of the Filioque, and promulgated 14 important canons of reform. P. readily displays the rhetorical devices of the schools of his time, with affected language, images, and grandiloquent phrases; he knew classical metre and used it, albeit with frequent licenses. Around 798 he compiled a
Regula fidei in 151 hexameters, and Alcuin mentions poetic works that he had sent him; the two poems on the ruins of Aquileia and on the death of Erich are known. Walafrid Strabo (d. 849) reports that P. “often, and especially at private Masses, at the moment of the immolation of the Sacraments, had hymns composed by himself or by others sung” (PL 114, 954), and P. himself mentions this in canon VI of the Council of Friuli; but what is attributed to him in this field remains controversial. More certain are the hymn on Christmas and the verses on Lazarus; the hymn on the Resurrection, praised by Carducci, is of high poetic value.
Works: PL 114, 100. For the verses, cf. E. Dummler, in MGH, Poëtae lat. aevi Carol., I, pp. 123 ff.; K. Strecker, ibid., IV, p. 462; A. Wilmart, L'hymne de Paulin sur Lazare dans un manuscrit d'Autun, in Rev. bénédictine, 34 (1922), pp. 27–45, who also attributes to him the versus de Jacob et Joseph; K. Strecker, Der Lazarus rythmus des P. V. A., in Neues Archiv ecc., 47 (1927), pp. 143–58.