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The Virgin, the Bride, and the Church: Reading Psalm 45 in Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine

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The Virgin, the Bride, and the Church: Reading Psalm 45 in Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine The Virgin, the Bride, and the Church: Reading Psalm 45 in Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine DAVID G. HUNTER Within the past decade or so, historical studies of early Christianity have been affected by what has been called the "linguistic turn."1 This development has entailed a new appreciation of the varied forms of Christian "discourse" and their importance in shaping the cultural, political, and social worlds of late antiquity.2 For example, historians of religion and culture, such as Judith Perkins and Kate Cooper, have drawn attention to the way in which narrative representation in early Christian literature functioned to construct Christian identities and to negotiate power relations both within the church and in society at large.3 It has become increasingly difficult for historians to ignore the An earlier version of this paper was delivered at the University of Notre Dame as part of the symposium "The Harp of Prophecy: The Psalms in Early Christian Exegesis/' October 16-18, 1998. I am grateful to Brian E. Daley, S.J. for his kind invitation to the symposium and his generous support of it. A somewhat different version was delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society of Church History, January 7-10,1999, as part of the session, "The Bible in North Africa and Maureen Tilley's The Bible in North Africa." I have also benefited very much from the comments of the anonymous reviewers for Church History. 1. For an explication of the theoretical influences on this development and a helpful exploration of its practical implications for church historians, see Elizabeth A. Clark, "The Lady Vanishes: Dilemmas of a Feminist Historian after the 'Linguistic Turn,' " Church History 67 (1998): 1-31. 2. Averil Cameron has been a notable proponent of this perspective. See Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse, Sather Classical Lectures 55 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); and her essay, "Virginity as Metaphor: Women and the Rhetoric of Early Christianity," in eadem, ed., History as Text: The Writing of Ancient History (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 181-205. Behind many of the current developments stands the work of Michel Foucault. See Cameron, "Redrawing the Map: Early Christian Territory after Foucault," Journal of Roman Studies 76 (1986): 266-71. 3. Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era (London: Routledge, 1995); Kate Cooper, The Virgin and the Bride: Idealized Womanhood in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). For a somewhat different application of the same approach, see Virginia Burrus, "Reading Agnes: The Rhetoric of Gender in Ambrose and Prudentius," Journal of Early Christian Studies 3 David G. Hunter holds the Monsignor James Supple Chair of Catholic Studies in the religious studies department at Iowa State University. © 2000, The American Society of Church History Church History 69:2 (June 2000) 281 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.19, on 26 Sep 2021 at 16:11:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.2307/3169581 282 CHURCH HISTORY power of rhetoric in shaping the imaginative (and, therefore, real) worlds of late ancient Christians. These new perspectives have created some dilemmas for church historians. For example, feminist scholars have become sensitized to the way in which male writers used women to "think with."4 Literary representations of women by men are increasingly recognized as problematic, and feminist historians are less optimistic than they once were about the possibility of recovering the histories of "real women" from the stories about them in early Christian literature.5 Although it has created these difficulties for historians, attention to the figural character of Christian discourse has also opened up new avenues of historical investigation and rendered a greater variety of "texts" more susceptible to historical inquiry. As Judith Perkins has noted: "The recognition that literary, religious, and technical dis- courses all contribute to generating a cultural world has revealed that the traditional distinctions made between historical documents and other texts was [sic] essentially arbitrary. If historians wish to approach an understanding of the dynamics of a past period, they must incorpo- rate the testimony of many different kinds of discourses."6 Christian biblical interpretation, for example, is now mined for evidence of the way in which texts were deployed as rhetorical strategies for creating and maintaining symbolic worlds, which in turn sustained actual social and religious communities.7 Sensitivity to the rhetorical character of male representations of women may contribute similarly to the study of Christian history. If male descriptions of women can no longer be taken at face value as reflecting the actual experience of "real" women, it has become plau- sible to read such stories for evidence of how the rhetoric of female virtue could serve in an economy of power relations among men. As Kate Cooper recently has argued regarding the representation of women in the early Christian apocryphal acts: "The challenge by the apostle to the householder is the urgent message of these narratives, (1995): 25-^16; and " 'Equipped for Victory': Ambrose and the Gendering of Orthodoxy," Journal of Early Christian Studies 4 (1996): 461-75. 4. Clark, "The Lady Vanishes," 27, with reference to Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 153. 5. See, for example, the important cautions expressed by Clark, "The Lady Vanishes," 24-30. 6. Perkins, The Suffering Self, 5. 7. A notable example in early Christian studies is Maureen Tilley, The Bible in Christian North Africa: The Donatist World (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997). Adopting insights from the sociology of religion, Tilley charts changes in the Donatist use of the Bible over several generations and correlates these changes with alterations in the social and political environment of the Donatist community. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.19, on 26 Sep 2021 at 16:11:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.2307/3169581 THE VIRGIN, THE BRIDE, AND THE CHURCH 283 and it is essentially a conflict between men [her emphasis]. The chal- lenge posed here by Christianity is not really about women, or even about sexual continence, but about authority and the social order."8 In other words, Christian discourse about the virtue and purity of women may tell us more about the thinking of the men who wrote the texts (and about their own struggles for status and authority) than about the women who are represented therein. The aim of this essay is to suggest that these new historical perspec- tives are useful in reading certain aspects of Christian biblical exegesis. The biblical image of the virgin bride of Christ is a literary trope that especially lends itself to analysis in terms of its social and political function, and not merely as an episode in the history of biblical interpretation. In the later years of the fourth century the ascetic and monastic movements led male Christian writers to devote an extraor- dinary degree of attention to the bodies of women, especially celibate women. In the hands of ascetic authors the traditional biblical image of the virgin bride acquired new life. The "bride of Christ" became the celibate Christian woman. The most notable example of this development can be found in interpretations of the Song of Songs. As Elizabeth Clark has demon- strated, Western writers, such as Ambrose and Jerome, taking their cue from aspects of Origen's spiritual exegesis, applied the bridal imagery of the Song to the life of the ascetic Christian. The "virgin bride," traditionally used as a figure of the church, became the celibate Christian, particularly the female virgin, and ultimately the preemi- nent virgin, Mary.9 By contrast, Augustine of Hippo stood aloof from the ascetic interpretations of his contemporaries. As Clark has noted, Augustine discussed the Song only to counter the attempts of the Donatists to enlist the text on behalf of their own elitist ecclesiology.10 The contrast between Augustine and the more ascetic interpreters suggests that readings of the virgin bride were by no means univocal in the late fourth century, even among authors with ascetic interests. Moreover, if we include the opponents of asceticism, we find even greater diversity. For example, Jovinian, one of the central figures in the Western resistance to the ascetic ideal, cited both 2 Corinthans 11:2 and the Song of Songs to argue that virginity is a distinguishing mark 8. The Virgin and the Bride, 55. Cf. Cooper, "Insinuations of Womanly Influence: An Aspect of the Christianization of the Roman Aristocracy," Journal of Roman Studies 82 (1992): 150-64. 9. Elizabeth A. Clark, "The Uses of the Song of Songs: Origen and the Later Latin Fathers," in eadem, Ascetic Piety and Women's Faith: Essays on Late Ancient Christianity (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1986), 386-427, esp. 401-6. 10. "The Uses of the Song of Songs," 407-10. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.33.19, on 26 Sep 2021 at 16:11:48, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.2307/3169581 284 CHURCH HISTORY of the church as a whole. All baptized Christians, Jovinian reasoned, share equally in the holiness of the church. Therefore, distinctions based on the ascetic merit of individuals can have no ultimate rel- evance in the kingdom of God.
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