PAULINUS OF NOLA, Saint. - Meropius Pontius P., b. at Bordeaux of an illustrious Roman and Christian family in 352, d. at Nola on 22 June 431. He completed his studies in rhetoric at Bordeaux under distinguished masters, among them the poet Ausonius, to whom he remained bound by affectionate friendship. Through his gifts of intellect, his great wealth and his numerous protections, he pursued a successful political career: he was consul in 378 and governor of Campania in 379.
But P. was drawn, like Prudentius, rather to the contemplative life and to giving his heart comfort through the vivid sense he had of the fleetingness of life and the uselessness of earthly things. He therefore distributed his vast patrimony to the poor and lived in prayer and penance, in chaste union with his wife Therasia, first in Spain and then at Nola, near the tomb of his patron St. Felix, for whom he had a basilica built with the remainder of his patrimony. He also abandoned, to the keen disappointment of Ausonius, who had placed many hopes in his young disciple, every profane literary activity in order to turn his muse to the sole purpose of his life: the celebration of Christianity. Bishop in 409, he carried out his apostolate with the utmost zeal until his death.
P. occupies a place of notable importance in the history of ancient Christian poetry, because he contributed to the assimilation of classical literature, brought to completion in the 5th century, also through the work of those poets who, like P., saw in it only an enemy to be fought.
Hostile by now to the art of the rhetoricians and to the fictions of the poets, which "fill the heart with vain and lying things," he wished to give "the truth," that is, the search for God, as the content of poetry, and he set himself the goal of "instructing the hearts of men with sweetness," harmonizing his own art with the word of God, "the sole arbiter and modeler 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, simple religiosity, his enchanted faith in the supernatural, his trembling self-abandonments to Christ in fear of the afterlife, his lofty spirit of love and charity, give his verses a fluid and limpid intimacy, which is lacking even in the greatest of the poets of ancient Christian Latinity.
The fifty letters, the only documentation of P.'s activity as a prose writer, arouse keen historical interest, sent as they mostly are to distinguished personages such as Augustine, Martin of Tours, Sulpicius Severus, etc., and rich in information about the religious and liturgical life of the time, but they do not bear comparison with the Christian prose that, with Jerome and Augustine, was giving such luminous examples.
The conversion, despite his theoretical preoccupations, made P.'s poetic world more coherent and warmer: of this the Carmina natalicia, which the poet composed beginning in 395 to celebrate 14 January, the anniversary of the death of St. Felix, are works of fresh and fluid poetry. They were written one each year, and must therefore have been more than the 14 that survive (the last of them, according to Fabre, goes back to 409), since P. continued until his death, which occurred in 431, to celebrate each year the life and the prodigies of the Saint, the splendor of the Basilica he himself had raised, the great concourse of rejoicing people.
A varied work, rich in complex motifs, it brings back the echo of sad and happy events that took place in Italy at the end of the 4th century and the beginning of the 5th. There comes into it, among other things, the fearful echo of the approach of the Goths and of Alaric, and the great trust that the bishop placed in his Saint, who would certainly have saved Italy from the invaders, and who would have obtained from God, just as was narrated in the Old Testament, "to stop the sun and the moon" in order to give the Romans the means to complete their own victory.
As for the other Carmina, goodness and sweetness dominate in X and XI, addressed in 410 to his master Ausonius, grieved at his disciple's abandonment. Christ - writes P. - 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 best carmina is placed the Propempticon (carmen 17), addressed to the bishop of Remesiana, who had come to the tomb of St. Felix from remote Serbia: the Sapphic stanzas bend to sing with composed fluidity, rarely clouded by awkwardness, the intimate sweetness of P.'s sentiments.
Also in the epithalamium for the marriage of Julian and Titia (carmen 15), P. succeeds in Christianizing, without making the weight of artifice felt, the ancient pagan genre, substituting, with natural spontaneity, for the ancient gods protectors of marriage, for Cupid, for Juno and for Venus, Christ, who has transformed the conjugal bond into a modest source of piety and of consoling spiritual peace.
Bibliography23 works
Emanuele Rapisarda