Paulinus of Nola

Saint Paulinus of Nola
Bishop of Nola, Italy
Born 354 AD
Bordeaux, France
Died June 22 431
Campania, Nola, Naples, Italy
Venerated in Roman Catholicism, Orthodox Church
Feast June 22

Paulinus of Nola (also known as Paolino di Nola; full name, Pontius Meropius Anicius Paulinus)[1] (ca. 354 Bordeaux – 22 June 431 Nola) was a Latin poet and letter-writer, and a convert to the Christian faith. His renunciation of wealth and a senatorial career in favour of a Christian ascetic and philanthropic life was held up as an example by many of his contemporaries, including Augustine, Jerome, Martin of Tours, and Ambrose. After his conversion he wrote to his friend and teacher, the poet Ausonius, affirming his friendship but insisting on the priorities of his new life. He and his wife settled at Nola near Naples, where he wrote poems in honor of St. Felix and corresponded with Christian leaders throughout the Roman Empire. After his wife's death he became Bishop of Nola, and was invited to help resolve the disputed election of Pope Boniface I.

He was recognized as a saint in the undivided Church and is commemorated on 22 June.

Life

Statue of St. Paulinus in Nola

Pontius Meropius Paulinus was born ca. 352 at Bordeaux, in southwestern France. He was from a notable senatorial family with estates in the Aquitaine province of France, northern Spain, and southern Italy. He was educated in Bordeaux, where his teacher, the poet Ausonius, also became his friend. At some time during his boyhood he made a visit to the shrine of St Felix at Nola near Naples.[1]

His normal career as a young member of the senatorial class did not last long. In 375 the Emperor Gratian succeeded his father Valentinian. Gratian made Paulinus suffect consul at Rome ca. 377, and appointed him governor of the southern Italian province of Campania ca. 380-1, but in 383 Gratian was assassinated at Lyon, France, and ca. 384 Paulinus returned to Bordeaux. There he married a Spanish Christian woman named Therasia.[2] Paulinus himself became a Christian and was baptized ca. 389 by Bishop Delphinus of Bordeaux. Shortly afterwards, his wife and he moved to their estates in Spain. When they lost their first child, a boy, only eight days after birth, the couple decided to live a secluded religious life.

In 393 or 394, after some resistance from Paulinus, he was ordained a presbyter on Christmas day by Lampius, Bishop of Barcelona.[3] (This was similar to what had happened with St. Augustine of Hippo, who had been ordained against his protestations in the year 391 at the behest of a crowd cooperating with Bishop Valerius in the north African city of Hippo Regius.) However, there is some debate as to whether the ordination was canonical, since Paulinus received ordination "at a leap" (per saltum), without receiving minor orders first.[1]

Paulinus refused to remain in Barcelona, and in late spring of 395 he and his wife moved from Spain to Nola in Campania where he remained until his death. Paulinus credited his conversion to St. Felix, who was buried in Nola, and each year would write a poem in honor of the saint. He and Therasia also rebuilt a church commemorating St. Felix. During these years Paulinus engaged in considerable epistolary dialogue with St. Jerome among others about monastic topics.

Therasia died some time between 408 and 413, and shortly afterwards Paulinus received episcopal ordination.

Paulinus died at Nola on 22 June 431. The following year the presbyter Uranus wrote his De Obitu Paulini, an account of the death and character of the saint.

Influence

Bas-relief of St. Paulinus in Torregrotta

Already during his governorship Paulinus had developed a fondness for the 3rd-century martyr, St. Felix of Nola.[3] Felix was a minor saint of local importance and patronage whose tomb had been built within the local necropolis at Cimitile, just outside the town of Nola. As governor, Paulinus had widened the road to Cimitile and built a residence for travelers; it was at this site that Paulinus and Therasia took up residence. Nearby were a number of small chapels and at least one old basilica. Paulinus rebuilt the complex, constructing a brand new basilica to Felix and gathering to him a small monastic community. Paulinus wrote an annual hymn (natalicium) in honor of St. Felix for the feast day when processions of pilgrims were at their peak. In these hymns we can understand the personal relationship Paulinus felt between himself and Felix, his advocate in heaven. His poetry shares with much of the work of the early 5th century an ornateness of style that classicists of the 18th and 19th centuries found cloying and dismissed as decadent, though Paulinus' poems were highly regarded at the time and used as educational models.

Many of Paulinus's letters to his contemporaries, including Ausonius and Sulpicius Severus in southern Gaul, Victricius of Rouen in northern Gaul, and Augustine in Africa, are preserved.

Paulinus may have been indirectly responsible for Augustine's Confessions: Paulinus wrote to Alypius, Bishop of Thagaste and a close friend of St. Augustine, asking about his conversion and taking up of the ascetic life. Alypius's autobiographical response does not survive; St. Augustine's ostensible answer to that query is the "Confessions."

Around 410 Paulinus was chosen Bishop of Nola. Like a growing number of aristocrats in the late 4th and early 5th centuries who were entering the clergy rather than taking up the more usual administrative careers in the imperial service, Paulinus spent a great deal of his money on his chosen church and city.

We know about his buildings in honor of St. Felix from literary and archaeological evidence, especially from his long letter to Sulpicius Severus describing the arrangement of the building and its decoration. He includes a detailed description of the apse mosaic over the main altar and gives the text for a long inscription he had written to be put on the wall under the image. By explaining how he intended the visitors to understand the image over the altar, Paulinus provided rare insight into the intentions of a patron of art in the later Empire.

In later life Paulinus, by then a highly respected church authority, participated in multiple church synods investigating various ecclesiastical controversies of the time, including Pelagianism.

Relics

About 800 Prince Grimoald III of Benevento removed Paulinus's bones as relics.

From the 11th century they rested at the church of Saint Adalbert, now Saint Bartholomew, on the island in the Tiber in Rome. In 1908 Pope Pius X permitted them to be translated to the new cathedral at Nola, where they were reinterred on 15 May 1909.[4]

The bones are now found in the small Sicilian city of Sutera, where they dedicate a feast day, and conduct a procession for the saint at Easter each year.

Modern devotion to St. Paulinus

The people of modern day Nola and the surrounding regions remain devoted to St. Paulinus. His feast day is celebrated annually in Nola during "La Festa dei Gigli" (the Feast of the Lilies), in which Gigli and several large statues in honor of the saint, placed on towers, are carried upon the shoulders of the faithful around the city.

In the United States the descendants of Italian immigrants from Nola and Brusciano continue the tradition in Brooklyn[5] and as well as in Manhattan's East Harlem neighborhood, where beginning in the early 1900s, the Giglio Society of East Harlem holds its annual dancing of the Giglio on Pleasant Avenue on the second Sunday in August.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Löffler, Klemens. "St. Paulinus, Bishop of Nola." The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 11. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911. 13 Jan. 2014
  2. ↑ Foley O.F.M., Leonard. Saint of the Day, Lives, Lessons, and Feast, (revised by Pat McCloskey O.F.M.), Franciscan Media
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Bardenhewer, Otto. Translated by Thomas J. Shahan (2006). Patrology: The Lives and Works of the Fathers of the Church. Kessinger Publishing. p.447.
  4. ↑ Trout, Dennis E. (1999). Paulinus of Nola: Life, Letters, and Poems. Berkeley: University of California Press. p.267.
  5. ↑ Posen, I. Sheldon; Sciorra, Joseph; Kahn, David M. (1989). The Giglio: Brooklyn's Dancing Tower. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Brooklyn Historical Society. OCLC 22905350.

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "St. Paulinus, Bishop of Nola". Catholic Encyclopedia. Robert Appleton Company.

Bibliography