Paulinus the Impenitent: A Study of the Eucharisticos

Critics have felt safe with Paulinus of Pella and his Eucharisticos. The poet's catalogue of his eighty-three years is disarmingly prosaic. He proceeds from his birth in 376/7 to the details of his pampered upbringing in Gaul as a grandson of the celebrated Ausonius, then to his misadventures with barbarian invaders in the early fifth century and the travails of his old age: all this in verses which move "as regardless of rhythm as a slow train over an ill-laid line."² "Our honest Paulinus" duly appears in modern studies as an engaging mediocrity, giving a truthful account of a typical set of experiences.³ He sees regular service as a witness to the lifestyle of the Gallic aristocracy to which he belonged, and the type of Christianity that his class practised.⁴ His apparent ordinariness has thus made Paulinus seem a ready-made historical source, a purveyor of "facts rather than rhetoric."⁵

Such judgements underestimate the Eucharisticos profoundly. A certain complexity is advertised in the paradoxical structure of the poem, which presents what looks like a chronicle of frustration and failure as a hymn of thanksgiving. Critics have minimized the tension between form and content by instinctively privileging one or the other, but the diametrically opposite readings that have resulted (with the poet expressing either "spiritual peace" or "profound pessimism")⁶ indicate the inadequacy of any simple identification between Paulinus' poetry and his supposed personality. The curious structure of the poem should instead invite questions about the poem's purpose. So too should the care which was evidently expended upon it. Even the clumsiness of Paulinus' prosody, which has so often been used to dismiss his claims to detailed analysis, suggests the labour it cost him to squeeze his life into hexameters.⁷ Why, we must ask, should a man in his eighties have resorted to so intractable a means of self-presentation?

An answer will ultimately depend on an assessment of the circumstances of composition. This will form the subject of Part III of this paper. To understand Paulinus' situation in his old age it is first necessary to review his previous career, the details of which will be considered in Part II. As an essential preliminary to this, however, we must clarify what sort of text the poem is.

I. The Character of the Eucharisticos

The Eucharisticos is presented as a confessional meditation addressed to God. Nevertheless, it was clearly designed to be overheard. In the prose preface that introduces the work (and, incidentally, denotes its "publication") Paulinus nowhere suggests that he had originally written it as a private devotional exercise, declaring instead his wish to "exhibit" certain facets of his life.⁸ The preface also betrays Paulinus' keen awareness of an audience. He dismisses his work as a trifle tossed off in idleness; deprecates its exposure to the attention of learned critics; and negotiates the terms of its transmission to posterity.⁹ It seems clear that he was much concerned about reactions to his "exhibition."

Paulinus gives a further important clue to the character of the work with his confident assertion, in the body of the poem, that although the page which he "put forward to be read" was "ill-considered," the facts that he was "attempting to put down in writing" were not disgraceful.¹⁰ The expression is doubly significant. Nowhere else in his long poem does Paulinus fail to sustain the fiction of an address to God; powerful evidence, again, against any assumptions of artless straightforwardness.¹¹ Moreover, the potent themes of fame and shame that occasion this single lapse recur at several other key points.¹² Paulinus' ready recourse to the traditional language of elite competition again indicates his concern for the reception of his work, and locates the poem firmly in the public domain.

Such a reading, it must be noted, runs counter to the modern consensus. The Eucharisticos is conventionally treated as a fundamentally private document, the versification of extracts from an intimate diary.¹³ Central to such views—and to the concomitant reluctance to recognize any...