David Ungvary (Bard College)
This paper offers a fresh historical reading of the concluding prayer to Paulinus of Pella’s confessional poem, Eucharisticos Deo sub ephemeridis meae textu, composed at Marseille around 460 CE, in which Paulinus claims that petitions for financial and reputational restoration have been answered by God (Euch. 579ff.).
The Eucharisticos presents episodes from Paulinus’s life, apparently drawn from a personal journal, and addressed in gratitude to God. Its first-person narrative runs from the author’s birth in Pella around 377, through nostalgic reveries, onto dispossession among the barbarians, before culminating in deliverance from financial hardship through an unknown donor in 459. Interspersed throughout these events, and concluding the poem, are reflections on the operations of divine providence in the poet’s life.
Critics continue to debate the central argument of the Eucharisticos: whether it records a private exercise of prayer (Courcelle 1964; Moussy 1974; Coskun 2006), or stages a failed aristocrat’s attempt to justify himself publicly “by appeal to favor shown by God” (McLynn 1995). Neither has consensus formed around how to read the contradictions of Paulinus’s voice in the text, which oscillates between that of a proud nobleman, and that of a poor and penitent convert.
This paper attempts to resolve disputes surrounding the “social logic” (Spiegel 1997) of the Eucharisticos by resetting it within the site of its articulation—the competitive world of Provencal asceticism, which engendered many rival expressions of Christian life. Marseille, where Paulinus wrote, proved a hospitable environment for this reform movement. A thriving Christian literary community, and monasteries founded by ascetic "expert" John Cassian, turned the city into a “forcing-house of Christian thought” (Loseby 1992; cf. Markus 1990; Brown 2012) focused on problems of spiritual discipline and purity.
Ventured in this context, Paulinus’s endeavor to retell his life as prayer, I argue, represented the most controversial aspect of his experiment. In the struggle to define Christian sanctity, no questions were more pressing than those of how to pray, and how to discern whether a prayer had been heard (Brown 1971). In reshaping his lay aristocratic experience into versified thanksgiving, Paulinus offered contentious solutions to these problems. By collapsing the distinction between prayer and life, he manipulated the authoritative teachings of Cassian, who equated prayer with monastic existence, and explained thanksgiving as a transcendent experience accessible only to a perfect few (Conferences 9).
By juxtaposing the Eucharisticos with Cassian’s theories, this paper reveals the force of Paulinus’s claim to divine fulfillment. In their shared world, answered prayer testified to the devotee’s trust in God and confirmed a degree of holiness. Paulinus’s own case suggested, against the judgement of austere ascetics like Cassian, that God might yet enrich votaries with cash and the restoration of reputation. Christians did not need to renounce all concern for the material exigencies and social norms of noble Roman life. To a society in which answered prayers spoke to the sanctity of intention and utterance, the Eucharisticos communicated that a converted aristocrat might persist in praying in noble language with hope of being heard.