PAOLINO, bishop of NOLA, saint. - Meropio Ponzio P., born at Bordeaux of an illustrious Roman
and Christian family in 352, died at Nola on 22 June 431. He pursued his studies in rhetoric at Bordeaux under distinguished teachers, among them the poet Ausonio, to whom he remained bound by affectionate friendship. Owing to his intellectual gifts, his great wealth, and numerous patronages, he successfully pursued a political career: he was consul in 378 and governor of Campania in 379.
But P., like Prudenzio, was drawn rather to the contemplative life and to giving his heart solace for the keen sense he had of the fleetingness of life and the vanity of earthly things. He therefore distributed his vast patrimony among the poor and lived in prayer and penance, in chaste union with his wife Terasia, first in Spain and then at Nola, near the tomb of his protector St Felice, for whom he had a basilica erected with what remained of his patrimony. To the lively displeasure of Ausonio, who had placed many hopes in his young disciple, he also abandoned all secular literary activity in order to devote his muse to the sole aim of his life: the celebration of Christianity. Made bishop in 409, he exercised his apostolate with the utmost zeal until his death.
P. occupies a place of considerable importance in the history of early Christian poetry, because he contributed to the assimilation of classical literature, brought to completion in the fifth century also through the work of those poets who, like P., saw in it only an enemy to be fought.
Now hostile to the art of rhetoricians and to the fictions of poets, which “fill the heart with vain and false things,” he wished to give poetry as its content “truth,” that is, the search for God; and he set himself the aim of “instructing men’s hearts through sweetness,” harmonizing his art with the word of God, “the sole arbiter and fashioner of every harmony.”
Despite his theoretical errors, due above all to the ancient prejudice that separated form from content, P. occupies a very notable place as a Christian poet: his native and simple religiosity, his enchanted faith in the supernatural, his trembling abandonment to Christ in fear of the hereafter, his lofty spirit of love and charity, give his verses a flowing and limpid intimacy lacking even in the greatest of the poets of ancient Christian Latinity.
The fifty letters, the sole documentation of P.’s activity as a prose writer, arouse keen historical interest, since they were for the most part sent to distinguished figures such as Agostino, Martino di Tours, Sulpicio Severo, etc., and are rich in information concerning the religious and liturgical life of the time; but they do not withstand comparison with Christian prose, which, in Girolamo and Agostino, produced such luminous examples.
Conversion, notwithstanding theoretical concerns, made P.’s poetic world more coherent and more ardent: in this respect the Carmina natalicia, which the poet composed from 395 onward to celebrate 14 Jan., the anniversary of the death of St Felice, are works of fresh and fluent poetry. One was written each year, and they must therefore have numbered more than the 14 that are extant (the last of them, according to Fabre, dates from 409), since P. continued until his death in 431 to celebrate each year the life and miracles of the Saint, the splendor of the Basilica which he himself had erected, and the great gathering of a rejoicing people.
A varied work, rich in complex themes, it conveys the echo of sad and happy events that took place in Italy at the end of the fourth century and the beginning of the fifth. It includes, among other things, the fearful echo of the approach of the Goths and Alarico, and the great trust which the bishop placed in his Saint, who would certainly save Italy from the invaders and would obtain from God, as was related in the Old Testament, “to stop the sun and the moon” in order to enable the Romans to accomplish their victory.
As for the other Carmina, goodness and sweetness prevail in X and XI, addressed in 410 to the master Ausonio, distressed at the abandonment by his disciple. Christ—P. writes—does not break affections, but makes them more sacred, since all human values acquire in Christ a depth unknown
to the pagan world. Among the finest poems is the Propempticon (poem 17), addressed to the bishop of Remesiana, who had come to the tomb of St Felice from distant Serbia: the Sapphic stanzas bend to sing, with composed fluency, only rarely clouded by impediments, the intimate sweetness of P.’s feelings.
Even in the epithalamium for the marriage of Giuliano and Tizia (poem 15), P. succeeds in Christianizing the ancient pagan genre without making the weight of artifice felt, naturally and spontaneously replacing the ancient gods who protected marriage—Cupido, Giunone, and Venere—with Christ, who transformed the marital bond into a chaste source of piety and consoling spiritual peace.