The question of the authorship of The Life of the Blessed Bishop Fulgentius remains a matter of dispute. No manuscript of the work indicates the Carthaginian deacon Ferrandus as the author. Yet this was the hypothesis of the seventeenth-century Jesuit scholar and editor of Fulgentius, Pierre-François Chifflet,¹ who brought the name of Ferrandus forward in this connection. His suggestion has been taken for granted by the great majority of scholars since then. However, Antonino Isola,² a recent translator of the Life into Italian, takes a more hesitant view to the extent that he lists the author as Pseudo-Ferrandus. Isola grants...

This is probably the most popular of the works of Fulgentius, a relative term, to be sure. In the Middle Ages, it was widely attributed to St. Augustine. In the twentieth century, it has been translated into French, German, Italian, and Polish. Peter, probably a layman, intended to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. But he found the same problem which had kept Fulgentius himself from journeying to Egypt to visit the monks there, namely, the growing reality of the divisions in the eastern Church brought about by the widespread rejection of the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon in 451....

At the request of Euthymius, a pious layman, Fulgentius produced this treatise during his second period of exile in Sardinia (c. 517–523). It may well rank among the most repetitive of his works. Surprisingly, it does not discuss technical questions about the system of canonical penance then prevalent, though perhaps little used, in the Church. This treatise provides a more general treatment of the question of repentance for sins. In the first book, Fulgentius discusses the issues of to whom God forgives sins and where he forgives them. The answer is that God forgives sins only to those in...

This work too is the product of Fulgentius’s second exile in Sardinia c. 517–23. While it is not ranked among the letters, it is not essentially different in form from some of the later letters translated in this volume, lengthy and devoted to doctrinal questions submitted by a correspondent. Monimus is otherwise unknown.

The first and longest section defends the Augustinian view of predestination. God predestines some to eternal blessedness, but he does not predestine others to damnation, in the sense that he predestines them to evil. The latter choose evil (or at least the lesser good) themselves, and...

The first seven letters of Fulgentius deal with questions of spirituality. It is probable that the letters given here are the sole remaining examples of other letters written to the same correspondents. Letters 8 to 14, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with doctrinal issues, especially, of course, of the doctrines at issue with the Arian Vandals. Two of this group, letters 11 and 13, are letters of the Carthaginian deacon, Ferrandus. They are probably kept separate because Ferrandus is an author and theologian of note in his own right. (They are letters 1 and 2 within the Ferrandan...