INTRODUCTION Jerome's Saints' in This Book, I Look at Jerome's Saints

INTRODUCTION

Jerome’s Saints’ LIVES

In this book, I look at Jerome’s saints’ Lives as evidence of his world. The Lives are independent literary compositions—they are not depen- dent on books of the Bible, like his Commentaries, or on a particular recipient, like his Letters, or on an issue, like his polemic. In the Lives Jerome was free to present his world as he saw it, and as he would like it to be seen: they combine rhetoric with realia. I shall attempt to analyse his methods of writing in order to see how this is done and whether it is possible to disentangle the two. Jerome’s saints’ Lives comprise his Lives of Paul the hermit, of Hilarion, and of Malchus the captive monk. I shall also be looking at his letter to Eustochium, ep. 108, which was written as a life of his friend Paula, and has also been published as a saint’s Life.1 The Life of Paul heads Jerome’s list of his own works in his de viris illustribus, and was written no later than 380 CE; the Lives of Hilarion and Malchus were written around 390–1, while the Life of Paula contained in ep. 108 was written after Paula’s death in 404.2 I shall analyse the texts of each of these works separately, to distinguish between the diﬀerent levels of reality in Jerome’s Lives. Jerome’s ﬁrst hero, Paul the hermit, appears to be the least real. Jerome himself writes that many people doubted whether Paul ever existed. Such doubts persist to the present day. In considering the vita Pauli, I shall be looking at historical parallels to some of the details of the Life, as well as Jerome’s use of his own experience, both actual and literary, to build layers of meaning and metaphor.

1 See under Texts in Bibliography for details of the editions used here. 2 Dates: Kelly pp. 60f. (vita Pauli); 170f. (vita Malchi and vita Hilarionis); 277f. (ep. 108). Kelly thinks both the vita Malchi and the vita Hilarionis were written in Bethlehem at about the same time, together with de viris illustribus, although he thinks the vita Malchi pre-dates the vita Hilarionis. However, his arguments against Cavallera’s earlier dating mean that there is no longer any need to give precedence to the vita Malchi. Although Jerome places the vita Hilarionis after the vita Malchi in de viris cxxxv, he refers to the reception of the vita Pauli only in his preface to the vita Hilarionis, which would seem to indicate that the vita Malchi had not been written yet. 2 introduction

Here I shall be concerned with analysing the autobiographical ele- ments in this Life, which deals with withdrawal from the world. The hero, Paul, asks three questions about the state of the world he has left behind him: what new roofs rise in the ancient cities, what power now rules the world, and who remains in the power of the demons? The answers to these questions are central to Jerome’s agenda, as in all his saints’ Lives, which deal with the acting out of the process of Christianisation. I shall also be considering here the question of whether Jerome used and Christianised Jewish aggadic sources about Rabbi Shim'on bar Yohai to build his own picture of the ascetic saint. The longest of Jerome’s saints’ Lives is his vita Hilarionis. Jerome says he got all his information about this hero from his friend Epiphanius bishop of Salamis, who had known Hilarion and written a brief letter about him.3 There are independent details of Hilarion’s life and activities in Palestine from Sozomenus, who wrote around the middle of the ﬁfth century.4 Jerome’s Life is about the saint and his relationship with society, and the process of Christian- isation of the Roman empire. Thus it encompasses both Palestine, the Christian Holy Land where Christianity is beginning to win signiﬁcant victories but where the process is far from complete, as well as the whole of the rest of the empire. Jerome is concerned both with the physical world and with the world of literature: I shall look here in some detail at his appropriation of the ancient novel and its conversion to Jerome’s ascetic Christianity. I shall also look at the confrontation of the holy man with popular culture and pagan cults. This Life can be seen as a microcosm of the whole of the Roman world—both in terms of space and in terms of the social structure, the whole epitomised in a chariot race at the centre of the work. Jerome tells us that he actually met the monk Malchus, the hero of the vita Malchi, in person, and heard his story from his own mouth.

3 vita Hilarionis 1: Epiphanius ...qui cum Hilarione plurimum versatus est, laudem ejus brevi epistula scripserit. 4 Sozomenus: H.E. 3, 14, 21 (PG 67, 1076). Date: Sozomène: Histoire Ecclésiastique I–II (SC 306, ed. G. Sabbah, Paris, 1983) 25–31. See on this B. Bitton-Ashkelony & A. Kofsky ‘The monasticism of Gaza in the Byzantine period Cathedra 96 (2000, in Hebrew with English summary) 69f.