The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship
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The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship
312Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview
Revisiting Jerome with the analytical tools of recent cultural history—including the work of Bourdieu, Foucault, and Roger Chartier—Williams proposes new interpretations that remove obstacles to understanding the life and legacy of the saint. Examining issues such as the construction of Jerome’s literary persona, the form and contents of his library, and the intellectual framework of his commentaries, Williams shows that Jerome’s textual and exegetical work on the Hebrew scriptures helped to construct a new culture of learning. This fusion of the identities of scholar and monk, Williams shows, continues to reverberate in the culture of the modern university.
"[Williams] has written a fascinating study, which provides a series of striking insights into the career of one of the most colorful and influential figures in Christian antiquity. Jerome's Latin Bible would become the foundational text for the intellectual development of the West, providing words for the deepest aspirations and most intensely held convictions of an entire civilization. Williams's book does much to illumine the circumstances in which that fundamental text was produced, and reminds us that great ideas, like great people, have particular origins, and their own complex settings."—Eamon Duffy, New York Review of Books
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226215303 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 10/07/2014 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Monk and the Book Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship
By MEGAN HALE WILLIAMS
The University of Chicago Press Copyright © 2006 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-89900-8
Chapter One The Making of a Christian Writer
JEROME appears in the literary record as a young Latin ascetic resident in Antioch and its hinterland in the 370s. The letters he wrote during these years show a curious combination of burning enthusiasm for asceticism and self-conscious striving after literary effect. Jerome was both a passionate convert to the new models of Christian renunciation then emerging from the deserts of Egypt and Syria, and a proud product of the best education the Latin West could provide. There are signs that he felt some tension between these two cultures. The general impression, however, is one of harmony, if not of settled purpose. The young Jerome seems very much at ease in the field of Christian learning. His devotion to the scriptures is entirely compatible with a tendency to cite Horace whenever an opportunity presents itself. There is no evidence that the effort to define a persona as a Christian writer had, as yet, set Jerome at odds with his own Latin classical culture.
This view of Jerome's early years depends on overcoming the temptation to read back onto his first, hesitant essays as a writer the evidence of later, far more vivid and compelling self-descriptions. In a letter written more than a decade after the events it purports to recount, Jerome portrays himself during his years in Syria as an ascetic tortured by his inability to live up to his own ideals. He first describes how, despite his intention to renounce the world and his success in abandoning not only his family but, "what was more difficult than all these, the habit of delicate food," he could not go without reading the Latin classics. The uncultured style of the prophets horrified him, and he returned again and again to his volumes of Plautus and Cicero. In the story's climax, Jerome falls seriously ill. In his fevered state, he experiences a terrifying vision. "Seized in the spirit," he finds himself "hauled before the tribunal of the Judge." Questioned as to his condicio, his legal status, he professes that he is a Christian. The terrifying figure who confronts him responds that he lies: he is no Christian but a "Ciceronian." This "judge" orders Jerome scourged. Begging for mercy, the wretched young man throws himself to the ground. Bystanders intercede for him and a concession is granted: upon swearing an oath that he will never read secular literature again, he is released to return "to the upper world." 5 Those who stand grieving by his sickbed marvel to watch him open tear-filled eyes. His shoulders, he avers, long bore the marks of the beating he had received, although he had not moved from his bed. The account of this startling episode is telegraphic, leaving ambiguous the identity of the "judge" whom Jerome confronts, the location of the action, and even the status of the events recounted as dream or (miraculous) reality. Yet the narrative's power is undeniable.
But Jerome's writings from the 370s know nothing of this incident. Nor do they betray any trace of the tortured mentality of the ascetic unable to give up reading the classics that later letters would capture so vividly. Instead, not only did the young Jerome show no discontent with his Christian literary diet, but he seems to have seen no conflict in a regimen that juxtaposed such sustenance with non-Christian reading. At the same time, in writings elaborately adorned with classical allusions, he attempted to define for himself a persona as a Christian writer that explicitly depended on his excellent traditional education and his undeniable literary talents.
In the face of this evidence, it seems likely that the story of the dream is a fiction. At best, it may be a literary elaboration of an incident that had originally borne none of the heavy freight of meaning it later acquired. The tale, and the language in which it is told, fit all too well with the mentality of the other letters Jerome wrote at the same time, and with the self-presentation that he developed in them. Furthermore, the description of the dream is a tissue woven of literary allusions, especially to Virgil. We ought, therefore, to read this narrative as a stylized reinterpretation of Jerome's younger self, governed by a sense of the incompatibility of Latin literary culture and Christian ascetic piety that he had not felt a decade or more earlier.
Another passage from a later letter has also been read back onto the period that Jerome spent in Syria in the 370s to produce an even more distorted effect. In 412, Jerome wrote that in his youth, while a hermit in the desert, he had begun to study Hebrew with a converted Jew who had become a monk. From the perspective of forty years later, he represents Hebrew study in terms of a sharp contrast with rhetorical culture, couched entirely in aesthetic terms. Hebrew is harsh and guttural, the antithesis of the literary pleasures of Quintilian, Cicero, Fronto, and Pliny, which had been his favored reading before his conversion to asceticism.
But this calculated evocation of the revulsion produced by Hebrew study in the cultivated soul of a well-educated young man finds no resonance in anything Jerome wrote before he arrived in Rome in 382. There is no contemporary evidence that Jerome studied Hebrew, or any other Semitic language, while he was in Syria in the 370s. In a letter written from Constantinople in 381, he does refer to a teacher of Hebrew, but this man shares little with the one who figures in his much later, retrospective construction of his early career. Just as we ought to be suspicious of the accuracy of the dream narrative's depiction of Jerome's anguished attempts to renounce secular literature, so too the representation of Hebrew study as the harsh remedy appropriate for the self-indulgent tastes instilled by that literature cannot be taken as a straightforward reflection of reality.
Rather than telling the story of Jerome's early life from the retrospective point of view he created in his later letters, then, this chapter will move forward from the evidence of Jerome's earliest writings, then build upon that foundation to analyze the self-presentation he developed at Rome in the 380s. The evidence reveals a transformation on two levels: at once in terms of social networks and in terms of intellectual horizons, from participation in an inward-looking circle of Latin-speaking ascetics to engagement in the intellectual life, and the high ecclesiastical politics, of the Greek East.
When he traveled to Antioch in late 373, Jerome's social ties were exclusively Latin; so were the books he read. From his early letters, we learn that he had been engaged in serious Christian study as early as about 368, when he was at Trier with his boyhood friend Bonosus. For the dozen or so years from that time until he traveled to Constantinople in 380, we have no direct, contemporary evidence that he studied Christian literature in Greek. In 382, Jerome returned to the West, as the protégé of prominent-or at least controversial-Greek bishops attending a church council. Immediately, he presented himself to Rome as the self-appointed ambassador to the West of Greek Christian learning. The transformation is striking, and its intermediate stages are difficult to trace.
The first person to bridge the gap that separated Jerome from the far more vital and contentious Christian culture of the Greek-speaking world was Evagrius of Antioch, his first patron. Through Evagrius, Jerome met other prominent ecclesiastics from Syria and Palestine: Paulinus, the ultra-Nicene bishop of Antioch; and, fatefully, Epiphanius of Salamis, whose truculence would incite the outbreak of the Origenist controversy in 393. Perhaps, too, Jerome studied with Apollinaris of Laodicea at Antioch and with Gregory of Nazianzus at Constantinople, as he would later claim: there is no compelling reason to disbelieve him.
But from the works that Jerome wrote in the early 380s we gain no explicit information about his exposure to the social world of Greek Christian learning, or about his ties to the Nicene Church of the East. Those to whom he addressed his letters and his other writings remained exclusively Latin. What changes, instead, are the range of his own reading and the terms of his self-presentation. Whatever Jerome did and whomever he met at Constantinople, he made a fateful encounter there-with the literary legacy of Origen. It was under Origen's banner that he began, at Rome, to advance a new model for Christian scholarship as an ascetic practice, and to invoke the authority of the Hebrew text of scripture.
A LATIN LITERARY LIFE IN THE EAST
Late in the year 373, Jerome arrived in Antioch, the metropolis of Syria, after an arduous journey from the West. There, he spent much of the next seven years as the guest of the prominent-not to say notorious-priest and littérateur Evagrius, whom he had met in Italy. His life in Evagrius's household was broken only by a stint of no more than eighteen months as a hermit in the arid hinterlands of Antioch, in 375 and early 376.12 Jerome produced no major literary or scholarly works in Syria. What he did write, however, makes clear that he was a young man of great ambition as well as substantial literary gifts. In his surviving letters and other brief works, we see him casting about for ways to combine the new kinds of Christian asceticism, then arousing so much enthusiasm, with modes of literary production typical of late antique elites; to be both a desert hermit and, in a phrase that Henri-Irenée Marrou, in an earlier era of scholarship, famously applied to Augustine, a lettré de la décadence. Needless to say, he was not wholly successful.
Jerome's letters-some from the 370s, others much later-provide only scattered and allusive evidence for the reasons he moved to the East in 373. He had perhaps been drawn to the ascetic movement as early as his stay in Trier in the 360s. Leaving Trier, he moved to Aquileia, where he became part of a loose association of ascetics. The group included Jerome's friend from Stridon, Bonosus; his schoolmates from Rome, Rufinus and Heliodorus; and several local clergy and wealthy lay Christians, including the city's future bishop, Chromatius, and his family. But after less than two years, the ascetic circle at Aquileia fragmented. Bonosus became a hermit on an uninhabited Adriatic island. Many of the others departed for the East. Jerome's schoolmate Rufinus traveled to Egypt where he sat at the feet of the desert monks and studied with the learned Didymus the Blind, successor to Clement and Origen as the foremost Christian teacher at Alexandria.
In moving from Aquileia to Antioch, Jerome made the transition from a wealthy provincial center to one of the four great metropoleis, the "mother cities" of the Mediterranean. Antioch was notorious for its wealth, for the sophisticated tastes of its populace, and for the arrogance and luxury of its elites. But the move had another, perhaps even more important, dimension. At Aquileia, Christian asceticism was in its earliest stages. Antioch was at the center of a region in which the most stringent forms of Christian renunciation had been pioneered and had reached a high level of development. The city itself lay on the banks of the Orontes river, in the center of a fertile plain. Its wealthiest suburb, Daphne, was famous as a resort where cooling springs provided refreshment even in the hottest months of the Syrian summer. Beyond the city, the terrain rises rapidly into rugged mountains and highlands-rich agricultural land and miles of olive groves, dramatically interspersed with harsh, stony desert.
In the caves and on the summits of the rocky hills of north Syria, hermits had long pursued forms of renunciation as extreme as any practiced in the Egyptian desert. As in Egypt, where the sharp demarcation between desert and farmland created by the unique ecology of the Nile valley meant that monastic anachoresis might not in fact remove an aspiring hermit very far from his native village, so in the region around Antioch the hermits often remained close either to the city itself or to its numerous nearby settlements, some of them major cities themselves. But in Syria the mixture of stony mountainsides with rich farmland was far less orderly than in the valley of the Nile. Relations between hermit and village or town, too, seem to have been more varied. Such is the picture, for example, that we glean from Theodoret of Cyrrhus's History of the Monks of Syria, which chronicles the careers of heroic hermits stationed in the hinterlands of Theodoret's hometown, a city not far from Antioch.
This picture of Antioch and its region may help to make sense of the pattern of Jerome's life in the 370s after his move to Syria. His relocation was clearly motivated by a desire to be closer to the Eastern roots of the ascetic movement that had become the focus of his life. But it was only after several years, and then rather briefly, that he experimented with a life of extreme ascetic renunciation as a desert hermit. His attraction seems to have been more to the ascetic idea than to the ascetic life, if indeed he had any clear sense of what he was seeking in moving to the East. The years Jerome spent in and near Antioch in the 370s were a period of experimentation, even confusion. The poignant terms in which he wrote home, begging for letters from the friends he had left behind, suggest that he was a bit lost-a Latin at sea in a far more sophisticated and more treacherous Greek world. Perhaps only the connection to Evagrius, and through him to the controversies that divided Christian Antioch throughout the fourth century, gave Jerome any sense of purpose at all. By moving to the East, he had undertaken a quest for a life of Christian purpose, guided by the most stringent ideals. For a variety of reasons he was repeatedly diverted from his course.
Yet the years in Antioch were of great importance for Jerome's later career. By placing himself under Evagrius's protection, Jerome enmeshed himself in the complex politics of the Antiochene see. Evagrius had translated Athanasius's Life of Anthony, the pioneering work of ascetic propaganda, into Latin with great success. He was also an adherent (and the eventual successor) of the ultra-Nicene Paulinus, one of three contenders for the episcopacy of Antioch in the 370s. The association with Evagrius, therefore, embroiled Jerome in one of the nastiest squabbles of a century of Christian controversy, and linked him to some of its less appealing players, notably the intransigent Epiphanius of Salamis.
It is difficult to give a straightforward narrative of Jerome's years in Syria. Many of the letters he wrote during the period are impossible to date within it; it is equally clear that most of his contemporary correspondence is lost. But the surviving letters from the 370s do support a general picture of Jerome's activities and his social contacts. His circle of correspondence was exclusively Latin: the only Greek to whom his letters refer is the bilingual Evagrius. We have one letter-a rather contentious one-that Jerome wrote to a family member at this time. His other surviving letters reveal the many ties that still connected him to friends in Aquileia and its hinterland, some of them known from boyhood, others acquaintances gained during his years there in the early 370s. Jerome also wrote to other Westerners who had traveled to the East: not only his old friend Rufinus, but a new acquaintance, Florentinus, a wealthy Latin established at Jerusalem, whom Jerome knew exclusively by letter. Already Jerome's world was one of elective affinities, held together by common ascetic ideals that linked men and women of varying social statuses across a broad swath of the Mediterranean world. In such a milieu, letters took on an intense symbolic significance. They were tokens of affiliation, not merely vehicles for information. Hence the passion with which Jerome beseeched his friends in Italy to write to him, and the care that he put into crafting his letters to them-even those whose content consists of little more than a request for a letter in return.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1 The Making of A Christian Writer
2. Experiments of Exigesis
3. Interpretation and Construction of Jerome's Authority
4. Jerome's Library
5. Toward the Monastic Order of Books
6. The Book and the Voice
7. Readers and Patrons
Epilogue
Appendix: Chronology of Jerome's Career
Bibliography
Index