Education, Reading and Asceticism in the Letters Of

The “Bookish” Jerome: Education, Reading and Asceticism in the Letters of a Fourth Century Monk Rebecca Thompson Advisor: Dr. Andrea Sterk Senior Honors Thesis Spring 2010 Acknowledgements First and foremost I would like to thank my amazing boyfriend, Damian, for putting up with me for the last year that I have spent working on this project. For all the late nights, all the days of procrastination and the breakdowns where I thought “I just can’t do this,” you were there for me and I thank you for that. Secondly, I would like to thank my parents, especially my dad who called me every day, multiple times a day during the end of the writing process to give me words of encouragement and love because he knew I could do it. I would like to thank my friend Gene, without him I would have felt so much worse about the struggles of writing a thesis and I took great comfort knowing that he was in the same position as I was. Really, I would like to thank all my friends who supported me during this process and kept calling even though I always told them, “I can’t go out tonight, I’m working on my thesis.” Finally, I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Andrea Sterk, who first approached me about the prospect of writing a thesis and guided me through the ups, downs and bouts of indifference that seem to be part of the writing process. 1 Table of Contents 1 Introduction: Jerome’s Anti-Ciceronian Dream 3 2 Early Christianity and the Book 5 3 Historiography 9 4 Christian Leaders and Pagan Literature 10 5 A Biography of Saint Jerome 14 6 Jerome’s Letters: Writing about Reading 18 -Jerome and Religious Texts -Jerome’s Defense of Secular Literature -Jerome and Rufinus: A Debate Revisited 7 Conclusion: The Anti-Ciceronian Dream Revisited 33 Bibliography 35 2 Suddenly I was caught up in the spirit and dragged before the judgment seat of the Judge; and here the light was so bright, and those who stood around were so radiant, that I cast myself upon the ground and did not dare to look up. Asked who and what I was I replied: “I am a Christian.” But He who presided said: “Thou liest, thou art a follower of Cicero and not of Christ. For ‘where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also.’”1 I. Introduction: Jerome’s Anti-Ciceronian Dream So wrote Saint Jerome in letter 22 in which he describes his famous anti-Ciceronian dream in which he is confronted by the Judge and swears to abandon those “books of men” which he had previously so cherished.2 In his writings, Jerome not only commented on much of the extant Biblical texts and authored numerous accounts of hagiography; he also revealed his own complicated feelings towards his pagan education. In letter 22, Jerome interrupts his advice to Eustochium on how to live as a proper Christian virgin in society to relate an account that happened “Many years ago, when for the kingdom of heaven’s sake I had cut myself off from home, parents, sister, relations” in which Jerome experiences his supposedly seminal anti- Ciceronian dream.3 The elder Jerome reflects on his younger self, admitting “I still could not bring myself to forego the library which I had formed for myself at Rome with great care and toil. And so, miserable man that I was, I would fast only that I might afterwards read Cicero.”4 Jerome, for all that he was a Christian still could not abandon the teachings of the pagan 1 Jerome, Letters and Select Works trans. William Henry Freemantle, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace vol. 6, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), 22.30. 2 Ibid., 22.30. 3 Ibid., 22.30. 4 Ibid., 22.30. 3 philosophers from his youth. So tormented is he by this internal division between secular and scared that he falls into a near-coma and dreams of his confession as a Ciceronian and that “He [God] had ordered me to be scourged—I was tortured more severely still by the fire of conscience, considering with myself that verse, “In the grave who shall give thee thanks?”5 Jerome’s inner conflict as a man with two masters, classical and religious, manifests itself as physical suffering and intense moral turmoil; in his dream Jerome is literally beaten until his “shoulders were black and blue” because the divine Judge is so displeased by Jerome’s love of Cicero and Plautus.6 Until punished by the Lord, Jerome could not escape the influence of Hellenism. Ultimately Jerome swears, “’Lord, if ever again I possess worldly books, or if ever again I read such, I have denied Thee.’”7 Upon awakening from his dream Jerome declares “that thenceforth I read the books of God with a zeal greater than I had previously given to the books of men.”8 This dream suggests that by the middle of the 370s, during his stay in northern Syria, Jerome had received and then rejected a classical education; however, neither Jerome’s letters from the 370s nor those written later in his life show a complete rejection of his background in the classics.9 Though Jerome is not the only example of a Christian theologian dealing with conflicted feelings about his pagan past, his account of his dream of judgment is certainly the most well-known. 5 Ibid., 22.30. 6 Ibid., 22.30. 7 Ibid., 22.30. 8 Ibid., 22.30. 9 Robert Payne, The Fathers of the Western Church, (New York: Viking Press, 1951) 91. 4 This passage illustrates the Jerome that everyone is familiar with, a man educated in classical rhetoric and philosophy but tortured by his dependence on it. Written in the 384, over a decade after the event it describes was meant to take place, Jerome’s account of his dream has been debated by historians for generations with some positing that the dream was a historical reality while others held that Jerome used it with artistic license to make a point.10 Either way, for those who do not study the early Christian book, Jerome’s anti-Ciceronian dream is a marker of the relationship between early Christians and the book: early Christians, as Jerome’s letter suggests, wished to distance themselves from the classical heritage that bequeathed to them the skills of grammar and rhetoric which they themselves used in their own works. The relationship, as historians for the last twenty years have sought to show, between early Christians and the book is a lot more complicated, less black and white, than a cursory reading of this and other letters would suggest. An examination of Saint Jerome and his complex relationship with books, both secular and religious reveals the nuanced connection between Christianity and the book as it emerged in the first to fifth centuries. Furthermore, Jerome’s letters reveal his hopes for an educated, elite Christian intellectual, the sort for which he himself is the best representation. II. Early Christianity and the Book If history is merely the study of events that “have been,” in the interest of understanding “what is” and “what will be,” where then does one place the history of ideas? How does one study the effects of thoughts and feelings? Ideas, thoughts, philosophies exist only in the 10 For a recent reading of this passage see Megan Hale Williams, The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship, 25-27. Additionally, one may turn to Neil Adkin, Jerome on Virginity: A Commentary on the Libellus de Virginitate Servanda (Letter 22) for a complete commentary on the letter. 5 thinker’s mind, with no material existence beyond words on a page. And yet, these beliefs of right and wrong, these value systems that are just words have formed the foundation for the saga of human history. Humanity’s actions do not exist in a void; every action occurs as the culmination of one’s life experiences, informed by what one has been told. The question then arises of where these experiences, the collective memory of human existence are stored. The answer, ironically enough is in books where actions are recorded and remembered through words. In books historians and laymen alike use the media of pen and paper, now keyboard and printer, to document the sum of humanity’s successes and failures. For the Western World, we children of the Greco-Roman tradition, this means our actions are the products of the spread of Christianity from East to West and back again. Christianity, despite the wars fought in its name and the holidays held in its honor—that is to say despite its material presence—first found substance as a religion of the book. The first issue then is how to address the relationship between early Christianity and the written word. Historians of the previous generation sought to show that early Christians were not only exceptionally literate, but also that Christianity functioned as an institution interested in the spread of literacy. Early Christians turned out to be no more and no less literate than their contemporaries, with the literacy rate among Christians affected by the same factors of education and social class as their pagan counterparts.11 That is to say, literacy was almost entirely restricted to the upper 10 percent—those who had the time and money for an education—with “the likely overall illiteracy level of the Roman Empire under the principate is almost certain to 11 Harry Y.

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