Paulinus of Nola

Pontius Meropius Anicius Paulinus (c. 354–431) was a Roman aristocrat, poet, and Bishop of Nola who renounced a brilliant senatorial career to embrace Christian asceticism. Educated by the poet Ausonius at Bordeaux, he rose to suffect consul at Rome (c. 377) and then governor of Campania (c. 380–381), during which posting he first encountered the martyr Felix's shrine at Cimitile and widened the road to it. After the assassination of his patron Gratian, he withdrew from public life, was baptized by Bishop Delphinus of Bordeaux, and settled in Iberia with his wife Therasia, a Christian noblewoman from Barcelona. Ordained presbyter on Christmas Day 393 or 394 by Lampius, Bishop of Barcelona — an ordination disputed at Rome as per saltum, lacking the customary minor orders — he and Therasia moved to Cimitile near Nola in 395, where he built a monastic community around the shrine of Felix and composed his celebrated annual Natalicia poems in Felix's honor. His surviving corpus of some thirty-three Latin poems and fifty-one letters — addressed to Augustine, Jerome, Sulpicius Severus, and Ausonius among others — makes him one of the most amply documented Latin Christians of his era and a vital witness to the spiritual and literary culture of the late Roman West. Elected Bishop of Nola around 409, following the death of his wife Therasia, he guided his community through the Visigothic devastation of Campania and is credited in later tradition with introducing bells to Christian worship, though that claim first appears in ninth-century sources written long after his death.