Fulgentius

Fulgentius of Ruspe, known in full as Fabius Claudius Gordianus Fulgentius, was a North African monk-bishop and theologian of the late fifth and early sixth centuries, and the most prominent Catholic writer of the Vandal kingdom in Africa after the age of Augustine. He was born at Thelepte in the province of Byzacena to a family of senatorial standing. His grandfather Gordianus, a senator of Carthage, had been driven into exile in Italy by the Vandals; his father Claudius returned to Africa and died while Fulgentius was still young, so that the boy was raised by his mother, who saw that he received a careful education in Latin and Greek. As a young man he held the civil post of procurator, collecting taxes in Byzacena, before a reading of Augustine’s expositions of the Psalms turned him from public life toward monasticism.

He entered a monastery whose abbot, Faustus, had already suffered under Arian pressure, and later shared the life of another house under Abbot Felix. Seeking a harsher desert discipline, he set out for Egypt, but at Syracuse Bishop Eulalius warned him against entering a region then divided by Christological controversy, and he abandoned the plan. He visited Rome around the turn of the sixth century and then went back to Africa, where he founded a monastery. Against his own resistance he was chosen bishop of the small see of Ruspe, probably in the first decade of the sixth century. The Arian Vandal king Thrasamund shortly afterward exiled the Catholic bishops of Africa; Fulgentius was sent to Sardinia with some sixty colleagues. There he established monastic communities, kept up a wide correspondence, and wrote a large part of his surviving work.

Thrasamund later summoned him to Carthage to dispute with Arian clergy, then, finding the encounter politically inconvenient, returned him to Sardinia. After Thrasamund’s death in 523, King Hilderic allowed the Catholic hierarchy to come home. Fulgentius resumed the government of Ruspe and of his monasteries and continued to write until his death on 1 January, the year commonly given as 533. A Life was composed soon afterward by his disciple Ferrandus, deacon of Carthage, which remains the principal narrative source for his career.

His theology is strongly Augustinian. Among works securely associated with him are replies to Thrasamund and to Arian interlocutors, treatises on the Trinity and on the rule of faith (including De fide ad Petrum, long circulated under Augustine’s name), discussions of the remission of sins, and De veritate praedestinationis et gratiae Dei, together with letters, among them correspondence connected with the Scythian monks and the theopaschite formula. He argued for the consubstantial Trinity against Arianism and for grace and predestination against what he took to be remnants of Pelagian or semi-Pelagian teaching. He was never pope or patriarch; he lived as a monk and bishop without marriage or children. His cult is ancient and his feast is kept on 1 January; no extensive, securely documented list of later patronages is attached to his name, and he should not be confused without evidence with the late-antique mythographer Fabius Planciades Fulgentius or with Fulgentius of Cartagena.