Confessor Chromatius

Saint Chromatius of Aquileia, commemorated as Confessor Chromatius, was bishop of Aquileia in northern Italy in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Surviving sources do not record an exact year of birth. He is generally held to have been a native of Aquileia, then a major Roman city of Venetia et Histria at the head of the Adriatic. He came from a Christian family: his brother Eusebius also served in the Aquileian clergy, and their mother and sisters lived a life of notable piety, later praised by Jerome. Chromatius was ordained priest of Aquileia and, while still a presbyter, took part in the Council of Aquileia in 381. That synod, held under the presidency of Ambrose of Milan, deposed the Illyrian Arian bishops Palladius of Ratiaria and Secundianus of Singidunum and confirmed the see as a stronghold of Nicene orthodoxy in the West.

After the death of Bishop Valerian he was consecrated bishop of Aquileia, most probably in 387 or 388; later tradition associates Ambrose with the consecration. As metropolitan he governed a church whose influence extended toward the Alps and the Danubian provinces. He maintained the anti-Arian course of his predecessors and sought to strengthen Catholic faith and clerical discipline. Chromatius became a patron of biblical and patristic scholarship and a mediator among leading churchmen of his generation. Together with other Aquileian clergy he sent material support to Jerome in Bethlehem, and Jerome dedicated scriptural work to him. He likewise encouraged his fellow citizen Rufinus of Aquileia in translating Greek theological writings, including Origen, into Latin. When the Origenist controversy divided Jerome and Rufinus, Chromatius tried to keep peace with both. He also wrote to the Western court of Honorius and to Pope Innocent I in defense of John Chrysostom after Chrysostom’s deposition and exile.

Chromatius was himself a preacher and exegete. A series of Tractatus on the Gospel of Matthew and other homilies survive; some were recovered or more fully edited only in modern times. They show a Nicene pastor concerned with moral conversion, the liturgical year, and a moderately spiritual reading of Scripture in the Latin tradition, with references to local worship and to the martyrs of Aquileia. He is not a speculative theologian on the scale of Ambrose or Augustine, but a representative metropolitan of the Theodosian age: orthodox, well connected to the wider church, and attentive to a frontier region soon exposed to Gothic and other incursions.

He died at Aquileia, according to the usual reckoning in 407, in the years when Alaric and other barbarian leaders were moving through the Balkans and Italy. He was venerated as a holy bishop and confessor. The Roman Martyrology records his feast on 2 December at Aquileia. The later patriarchal title of Aquileia arose only in subsequent centuries, after the Three Chapters controversy, and was not held by Chromatius. His memory has been kept especially in Friuli and the former Aquileian territory, and modern patristic study has restored him a place among the Latin homilists of late antiquity.