Christian Cicero; Damasus, maker of lapidary epigrams; Jerome,
translator of the Vulgate, and his adversary Vigilantius, who attacks
the cult of saints and the abuse of miracles and fastings, and already
preaches, with arguments which future ages were to repeat, against the
monastic vows and celibacy of the priests.

Finally, in the fifth century came Augustine, bishop of Hippo. Des
Esseintes knew him only too well, for he was the Church's most reputed
writer, founder of Christian orthodoxy, considered an oracle and
sovereign master by Catholics. He no longer opened the pages of this
holy man's works, although he had sung his disgust of the earth in the
_Confessions_, and although his lamenting piety had essayed, in the
_City of God_, to mitigate the frightful distress of the times by
sedative promises of a rosier future. When Des Esseintes had studied
theology, he was already sick and weary of the old monk's preachings
and jeremiads, his theories on predestination and grace, his combats
against the schisms.

He preferred to thumb the _Psychomachia_ of Prudentius, that first
type of the allegorical poem which was later, in the Middle Ages, to
be used continually, and the works of Sidonius Apollinaris whose
correspondence interlarded with flashes of wit, pungencies, archaisms
and enigmas, allured him. He willingly re-read the panegyrics in which
this bishop invokes pagan deities in substantiation of his
vainglorious eulogies; and, in spite of everything, he confessed a
weakness for the affectations of these verses, fabricated, as it were,
by an ingenious mechanician who operates his machine, oils his wheels
and invents intricate and useless parts.

After Sidonius, he sought Merobaudes, the panegyrist; Sedulius, author