Paulus Orosius

Paulus Orosius, a Spanish presbyter from Braga, is best known for his History Against the Pagans in seven books written in 416/7 AD. He lived between the fourth and fifth centuries AD.

Entering the Church at an early age, he was ordained and set off for Africa. He arrived in Hippo in 414, where he addressed a Consultation to Augustine about the Errors of the Priscillianists and Origenists, setting out the dangers that Priscillianism posed to Spanish Christianity.

He became a friend of St. Augustine, who sent him to Palestine in the hopes of gaining the support of St. Jerome against the Pelagians. The council of Diaspolis in Palestine however sided with the latter. That led Orosius to write a piece in defense of his own views. By 417, he had return to the west.

His Latin History Against the Pagans, unlike the work of the Greek ecclesiastical historians of the period viewed history through the perspective of Augustine’s City of God and attacked the pagans on Augustine’s grounds.

Orosius strongly believed in the necessary of the monarchic from a government for the welfare of mankind.
Paulus Orosius