other · 517 · Sardinia
Fulgentius had been a provincial tax official, which he hated, before he became a monk and then bishop of the small see of Ruspe. He held it for about twenty-five years and spent most of them out of the country: Thrasamund deported the Nicene episcopate of Africa to Sardinia, recalled Fulgentius alone to argue with him in person at Carthage, found the answers too effective to leave in circulation, and sent him back. He is the most capable Latin theologian between Augustine and Gregory, and almost entirely an expositor of Augustine — on grace, on predestination, on the Trinity — which is how a great deal of Augustine reached the middle ages, in the form Fulgentius gave it. The exile is the shape of the whole African church in this period, and worth having on a page for that reason: a hierarchy legislated against and deported by an Arian government, still functioning, still writing, and still being read a thousand miles away.
The Vandal kings are Arians and the African church is Nicene. What happens to its bishops?
Sixty of them are put on a boat to Sardinia, and the best of them keeps writing.