How the Roman Patrician Class Purified their $$$ by Giving it to the Church
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Listen to an audio version of this post or read the text below.
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In the year 394, a super-rich, famous Roman abandoned his wealth.
His name was Paulinus of Nola.
He was a contemporary of guys like Ambrose of Milan and St. Augustine.
Now, when I say Paulinus abandoned his wealth, I don’t mean he didn’t have it anymore. He still totally had it. He just stopped using it to make his villa look fancy and stuff.
Instead, Paulinus used his money to renovate the burial shrine of Saint Felix—who never bathed and was said to watch over pigs in the nearby hills. He sounds like a good time.
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Saints, you say? But wasn’t Rome pagan?
This was after Rome had decided Christianity was not only allowed to exist, but was the Only Legal Religion of the Roman Empire. So saints were a thing, and they were pretty big forkin’ deal. (Or in the case of St. Felix, should I say a big porkin’ deal? No. No, I should not. Because Felix is not the patron saint of pigs.)
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Now about Paulinus giving his money to a dead saint. Why was it such a big deal?
I mean, it wasn’t exactly innovative. In the late 4th century, it was kind of vogue for Christians to give their money to the church.
The younger generations of Christians were a bit snobby about this. Also, Ambrose of Milan and Martin of Tours. They weren’t young anymore, but they had been talking up poverty for years and they were happy to see someone important—Paulinus—finally taking them seriously.
And Paulinus WAS important. He was a big win for them.
You see, Paulinus was part of the Roman patrician class. We’re talking Old Money.
Christianity had been the religion of the empire for several generations—Constantine the Great had legalized Xtianity* about 70 years ago, and then Theodosius came along in 380 and outlawed everything but Roman Catholicism—so Christianity was not new by any means. Paulinus had grown up with it.
But the Roman upper class had always interpreted things in their own way.
They looked at the abundance all around them—the fertile fields, the fat goats and cows in their flocks, their fancy villas and all the money and art and other bling they surrounded themselves with and put on display to impress other rich people—they looked at all this and they said, “Well, this is a sign of God’s goodness. He wants us to be happy and prosper. He wants us to enjoy life.”
God has given us these ripe vines and fat cows that we may eat, drink and be holy!
It was a very worldly take on God. They found God in nature. In the material things of the world. They interpreted all these things as blessings from a loving Creator.
And this new wave of Xtians came along and were like, “Nope.”
They had a more transcendent point of view. For them, God wasn’t found in the world. God was spirit and the world was earthly. Fallen. To indulge in earthly things was to be unGodly.
These were the ascetics.
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No patrician had gone Full Ascetic until Paulinus of Nola.
And even he didn’t go 100% Full Ascetic. Cause remember, he kept his wealth. He kept his lands and estates, his revenue, his clients. He still had all that income coming in. He just stopped flashing it around.
Instead, he got real humble-braggy.
Like instead of flashing around his bling, he flashed his poverty. He moved into the shrine of Felix and lived there with some monks—though I should note he kicked out some people who had been renting land and living there and he turned that land into a vegetable garden that fed him and the monks! Lol, so still very Roman Patrician in some ways. He also kept his wife with him.
In other ways, he went against Roman upper class tradition. He stopped wearing colorful clothes—which was something the rich were known for. He wore really drab, dirty, boring clothes. He ate really bland food, like bowls of porridge and bread and plain veggies—not the abundant banquets the rich were known for feasting on. He even got theatrical and adopted slow, somber movements. Like shuffling around slowly with his hands folded, head down, dust in his bad haircut. You know, Dark Ages movie monk style.
And Paulinus stopped bathing.
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The bathing thing was a big deal. Just as it would be today, it was back then.
Although it had a different meaning.
Most of us these days are aware of how passionate the Romans were about their baths. It was about more than hygiene, too. A luxurious bath was a sign of rich splendor. It meant you had the time to bath, and could afford perfumed oils and masseuses and stuff. For the older generations of Xtians, the body was a temple. Keeping it clean and healthy was a sign of respect for God’s creation. They also had this idea of microcosm-macrocosm. The body was the microcosmic reflection of the macrocosmic universe.
Keeping your body in order was kind of like bringing order to the universe.
Like cleaning your room. What does Jordan Peterson say? Clean your room.
Clean your room and you’ll keep your mind in order. With a well-ordered mind, you’ll be better equipped to keep your life in order. And that means you’re better positioned to bring order to your world. But if you can’t do something as simple as cleaning your room, how are you ever going to build a life that matters? How are you ever gonna do anything that brings positive change to our polluted, war-ridden planet?
For the Romans, it was the same for bathing. Clean your body and you’re better equipped to keep yourself healthy and your life in order.
The ascetics disagreed.
For them, the body was not a temple. The body was earthly, divorced from spirit.
But remember, God was also human for a time. What about that?
Well, when God was human—he suffered.
The ascetics took this to heart in a big way.
They were like, “God gave up his splendor and status in heaven to be a weak, powerless dude. The least we can do is give away our wealth (though Paulinus didn’t), stop dressing well, stop enjoying good food, drink shitty wine, have bad haircuts, walk everywhere really slowly like decrepit old guys, and stop bathing. It honors God’s sacrifice for us.”
So you see, the ascetics still had that microcosm, macrocosm thing going on.
They were, in a way, reflecting the life of Christ. My life is the microcosm, Christ is the macrocosm. I will live in a way that honors his sacrifice.
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So Paulinus moved into the temple of St. Felix. He and the monks lived on the second story, so the upper floor. And below, there were the pigs. Sacred to Felix.
There were also the poor.
The Shrine of Felix must have been like a homeless shelter. The poor and needy could come to the shrine to offer prayers and ask for blessings. They could receive food from Paulinus and his monks. They not only took up the entire first floor of the building, but they camped on the surrounding grounds and on the road leading up to it (which Paulinus paid to have restored).
And along with the unwashed poor, there were the pigs. Because St. Felix had to have his pigs. He was said to guard the wild pigs that lived in the nearby hills. And once a year (I think), people would hunt down these pigs and slaughter them for the nearby townsfolk. A gift from Felix to the people. Or from God, THROUGH Felix, to the people.
And people would sometimes give pigs back to Felix, too. They would bring their pigs to the shrine and slaughter them there. It reminds me of a pagan temple where sacrifices were performed outside.
I keep thinking of Paulinus’s wife. Hopefully she was on board with all of this. Otherwise, damn—talk about sticking with your husband for better or worse. This was probably not what she signed up for when she got married.
And that’s not all. Remember when I said Felix was not the patron saint of pigs? Did you happen to click that link and read about what he IS the patron saint of?
I’ll just tell you. It’s spiders.
Yeah, there’s this story about Felix and his friend hiding from soldiers in a vacant building, and a spider wove a web across the door. And this made the soldiers—who had Lois Lane level observational skills—think the building was abandoned. Thus was our hero saved.
The same thing happened a second time to Felix. I mean, wow! Saved by spiders twice! It’s a sign, dude. It’s gotta be.
So if you can imagine a homeless shelter/slaughterhouse, with pigs running everywhere (and probably a lot of spiders too) where unwashed monks live upstairs—you’ve got the Shrine of Felix.
Except you don’t, really. Because this building was a lot fancier than a homeless shelter.
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Let’s talk about all that money Paulinus had.
Wasn’t he an ascetic? Didn’t he believe in the whole dirty, unwashed, poverty lifestyle?
Yes.
So what to do with all his money?
Give it away somehow, clearly. But how?
The Roman patrician class was accustomed to giving to the people via public works. A rich guy would pay for a new temple, or a new library, or a bathhouse, or triumphal arch. Or he would pay for games for his city. They were giving THINGS and EVENTS to people. The Romans didn’t really give money to the poor in the way that we currently think of charitable giving. That kind of charity was a very Xtian innovation, and it had its own implications (which I don’t have time to get into here). Suffice to say that Paulinus didn’t just toss out handfuls of coins to the poor unwashed masses who swarmed the lower level of Felix’s shrine.
He poured the money into the shrine itself. Like a fucking Roman, bitches.
The Shrine was decked out the same way that a lot of guys did their villas. Paulinus had no interest in making his villa the talk of the town. Instead, the shrine of Felix had the mosaics. The brightly colored walls. The porticoes. Fountains. A pig sty. A freakin basilica. A disco hall. A zipline. This place was NICE.
Giving his money to the shrine had another benefit, too.
Because Paulinus was pretty troubled by something he read in the scriptures. He’d read that a rich man could not enter heaven. That kind of freaked him out.
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But good news! Paulinus found a loophole!
If he gave his money to GOD . . . then it was all good. After all, if (as the older generations claimed) wealth was from God . . . then it only made sense to give it BACK to God. Via Felix. Because, you know, God was transcendent and not part of this worldly world. Felix was the go-between.
It’s kind of a mind-fuck, trying to reconcile the ascetic belief that God is not of this world with the belief that he wants all your money. The idea was that the money had a spiritual counterpart.
And that all the grand, beautiful things of the world belonged to Heaven. While earth was meant to be the domain of suffering. As Christ suffered in his earthly form.
There was an earlier time in Paulinus’s life when his wealth and estates were under review by the Imperial Treasury. It was a very real possibility that vast amounts of his fortune would be confiscated by a greedy emperor. He fortunately avoided that fate (haha, I am so funny)—which he considered a blessing from God.
It was only later that he realized he’d been blessed to keep his wealth . . . so he could give it to God.
I guess when God protected the estates, he was just guarding his own stuff.
As historian Peter Brown wrote: “Preserved by God through Felix, Paulinus’s wealth was given back to God by being spent on Felix.”
Felix is kind of like the banker holding onto God’s wealth.
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This episode—-of Paulinus giving his money to the church—-is emblematic of an entire era.
Because the late 4th century is when we start seeing the ancient Roman wealth begin to filter into the Roman Catholic church. The church had historically been a very impoverished community. But as rich Romans converted, they brought their money.
And if scripture said a rich man could not enter heaven, what were they supposed to do with this money?
Give it to the church.
They were kind of buying their way into heaven.
There’s something so pagan about this to me. They claimed to be different from the “cults” that existed before the one true religion. They looked down on tombs of kings buried with treasure. They knew the dead could never bring their gold with them. It seemed silly to the Xtians.
But they were doing much the same thing.
Storing up their treasure in heaven.
The Vikings buried their treasure hordes so they could enjoy a rich afterlife. The wealth would be waiting for them there.
The ascetic Xtians gave their wealth to the church. So they could enjoy a rich afterlife. Their wealth wouldn’t be waiting for them there . . . but it would buy their way in. It was a way to purify your dirty, worldly fortune.
A kind of spiritual money laundering.
Peter Brown writes, “Wealth—worldly wealth, wealth that stood for all that was most brittle in this world, most unspiritual, most stubbornly rebellious to the will of God, and most heavy with death—could be transmuted through the act of pious giving into all that was most glittering and glorious in an eternal world beyond the stars.”
So Paulinus gave what he had to Felix. And he lived with Felix. And every year on the Festival of St. Felix (dear god, what a shitshow that must’ve been… pigs running everywhere, pig carcasses hanging up, the poor and unwashed people eating pork and walking somberly around while they chant dour prayers . . . it’s like an early medieval Halloween Town.) I digress. Every year on the Festival of St. Felix, Paulinus wrote a poem about how he served St. Felix.
Lord, even the poems are bleak af.
So much about this is hilarious. First of all, the name Felix is just funny. I’m sorry, it makes me laugh a little, I don’t know why. Then there’s the fact that he never bathes and he’s a protector of pigs and the patron saint of spiders. Then we have this rich eccentric Roman deciding that his life’s purpose is to serve St. Felix.
Then Paulinus renovated the shrine and wrote long letters to all his friends detailing exactly how he was upgrading things. Riveting reads, I’m sure. “Uhh, another letter from Paulinus, he won’t stop talking about this stupid mosaic of pigs . . .”
Then there’s Paulinus reciting poems to all the filthy poor like “I was always destined to leave my life of luxury, stop bathing, and serve the tomb of St. Felix the Unwashed. I wrote a poem about it! Like to hear it, here it goes…”
And guess where Paulinus was buried? At the shrine of Felix.
And guess what he did with his vast wealth? Did he give it to the poor?
No. He gave it to St. Felix.
I bet you already guessed that.
A lot of other Xtians at the time thought Paulinus was a great role model. Ambrose of Milan was overjoyed. He’d been trying to get people to give their money to the church for years.
But I just can’t get over how funny it is. It’s like when Tesla became obsessed with a pigeon and fell in love with it. So freaking weird.
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* Xtian is a real way to write “Christian.” Some modern Xtians think it’s disrespectful, but they’re missing some info about their faith’s history. The “X” isn’t a Latin letter “x.” It’s a Greek “chi,” the first letter in the Greek word for “Christ.” Ancient Christians would use the Chi Ro (an X with a P through the center) as a symbol for Christ—a Christogram—and sometimes it got shortened to just “X.”
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I’ve read a lot about this topic, but relied on one source for this post: Peter Brown’s THROUGH THE EYE OF A NEEDLE: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD.
Even though I have done a LOT of reading and research, I have a pretty unimpressive memory. So I like to write posts about what I read. It’s a way to engage more fully with the material, hopefully remember more of it, and maybe even share it with others.
Love,
L.