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BOOKS RECEIVED
Antoine, Philippe. Le Manage. Droit Canonique et Coutumes Africaines. Thologie historique, 90. Paris: Beauchesne, 1992. Pp. xliv + 626. 240 FF. Augustine. Confessions: Commentary on Books 17. Vol. 2. Edited by James J. O'Donnell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. xiii + 484. $115.00. Augustine. Confessions: Commentary on Books 813. Vol. 3. Edited by James J. O'Donnell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. xiii + 481. $110.00 Augustine. The Trinity. Introduction, translation, and notes by Edmund Hill, O.P. Edited by John E. Rotelle, O.S.A. Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991. Pp. 471. $39.00 hardcover, $24.95 paper.
Augustinus. De Utilitate Credendi. ber den Nutzen des Glaubens. Fontes Christian! 9. Freiburg: Herder, 1992. Pp. 220. DM 36,00.
Basil the Great. Gateway to Paradise. The Spirituality of the Fathers, 1. Edited by
Oliver Davies. Translated by Tim Witherow. Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1991. Pp. 125. $7.95. Bradshaw, Paul F. The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xi + 217. $35.00 cloth, $13.95 paper. Brown, Virginia, editor. Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum: Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries. Volume VII.
Union Acadmique Internationale. Washington D.C: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992. Pp. xxi + 356. $59.95. Bruno, Guigo, Antelm. Epistulae Cartusiane. Frhe Kartuserbriefe. Fontes Christian! 10. Freiburg: Herder, 1992. Pp. 211. DM 36,00. Cyprian of Carthage. Born to New Life. The Spirituality of the Fathers, 2. Edited by Oliver Davies. Translated by Tim Witherow. New Rochelle, NY: New City Press, 1992. Pp. 126. $7.95. Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. 3rd edition. Oxford Paperback Reference. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. xxviii + 530.
$13.95.
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. Responses to 101 Questions on the Dead Sea Scrolls. New York/Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1992. Pp. xviii + 201. $8.95. Hahneman, Geoffrey Mark. The Muratorian Fragment and the Development of the Canon. Oxford Theological Monographs. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xi + 237. $52.00. Hallman, Joseph M. The Descent of God: Divine Suffering in History and Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991. Pp. xvi + 150. $12.95. Harbison, Peter. Pilgrims in Ireland: The Monuments and the People. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992. Pp. 256. $34.95. Harrison, Carol. Beauty and Revelation in the Thought of Saint Augustine. Oxford
Listing here neither promises nor precludes future review in the Journal of Early
Christian Studies. Prices are in U.S. dollars unless otherwise indicated.
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JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES
Theological Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. xi + 289.

$65.00.
Heim, Franois. La Thologie de la Victoire. De Constantin Thodose. Thologie
historique 89. Paris: Beauchesne, 1992. Pp. xv + 347. 270FF.

Kassia: The Legend, the Woman, and Her Work. Garland Library of Medieval Literature, vol. 84, series A. Translated and edited by Antonia Tripolitis. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992. Pp. xxviii + 153. $30.00. Lieu, Samuel N. C. Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China.
2nd edition, revised and expanded. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 63. Tbingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1992. Pp. xxii + 370. $148.00. Mohler, James. A., SJ. Late Have I Loved You. Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991.
Pp. 159. $8.95.
Mohler, James A., SJ. A Speechless Child is the Word of God: An Interpretation of Saint Augustine. New Rochelle, NY: New City Press, 1992. Pp. 174. $9.95.
Mysticism and Language. Edited by Steven T. Katz. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. vi + 262. $38.00.
Pietri, Charles. Charles Pietri: Historien et Chrtien. Edited by Philippe Levillain.

Paris: Beauchesne, 1992. Pp. viii + 220. 120FF.
Pourkier, Aline. L'hrsiologie chez Epiphane de Salamine. Christianisme Antique

4. Paris: Beauchesne, 1992. Pp. 539. 240FF. Recherches et Tradition. Mlanges patristiques offerts a Henri Crouzel, SJ. Andr Dupleix, ed. Thologie historique, 88. Paris: Beauchesne, 1992. Pp. xvi + 339.
240FF.
St. Augustine. Four Pelagian Writings: On Nature and Grace, On the Proceedings of Pelagius, On the Predestination of the Saints, On the Gift of Perseverance, translated by John A. Mourant and William J. Collinge. The Fathers of the Church, vol. 86. Washington, D.C: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992. Pp. xix + 351. $36.95. St. John Chrysostom. Homilies on Genesis 4676, translated by Robert C. Hill. The Fathers of the Church, vol. 87. Washington, D.C: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992. Pp. 228. $34.95. Turner, Paul. Sources of Confirmation: From the Fathers through the Reformation. Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1993. Pp. 94. $6.95.
Van de Paverd, Frans. Si. John Chrysostom, The Homilies on the Statues: An
Introduction. Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 239. Roma: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium, 1991. Pp. xxxi + 395. Williams, Glanmor. The Welsh Church: From Conquest to Reformation. 2nd edition. Fayetteville, Arkansas: The University of Arkansas Press, 1976. Pp. xiv +
612. $30.00.
NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS
All editorial correspondence should be sent to: Professor Elizabeth Clark, Department of Religion, Box 90964, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0964.
Books for review should be sent to Professor Michael Slusser, Department of Theology, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA 15282. Manuscripts (original and one copy) should be typewritten or printed on a letter-quality printer and doublespaced throughout (including quotations and notes). After acceptance for publication, the Journal strongly prefers to receive contributions in Word Perfect
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Greek Virginity (review)

Gail P. Corrington
Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 1, Number 2, Summer 1993, pp. 221-222 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/earl.0.0097
For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v001/1.2.corrington.html
BOOK REVIEWS
221
wish to understand the complex and challenging historical terrain of the crucial decades of the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Harry Rosenberg, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado
Giulia Sissa
Greek Virginity
Arthur Goldhammer, translator
Revealing Antiquity, 3 Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990 Pp. 240. $25.00. In this intriguing study of the connection between virginity and inspiration, illus-
trated by the figure of the Pythia, the prophetess of Apollo at Delphi, Giulia Sissa
takes on not merely one but several formidable tasks. In order to understand how the virginal body of the priestess, filled with the spirit of the deity, becomes the
deity's "voice," and how that "breath" of the deity is received, Sissa cautions that
one must understand the entire "structure of enthusiasm" in the antique world, and proceeds to delineate that structure. Interpreting metaphors, symbols, and "signs" of the virgin body throughout the text, Sissa claims that "Sexuality is . . . implicit in divinatory speech" (4). Sissa shows how the body, and especially the female body, in classical Greece was used as a metaphor for inspiration, alternating "closed" or "open" representations: either as a vessel (container) or as a "perforated jar or leaking sieve" (5). These alternations between closure and penetrability, openness and vulnerability, find their mythic and cultic expressions in the role of the Pythia, in the language of
the mysteries of Eleusis, and in the myth of the Danaides. The image of the female
body in ancient Greece as an empty vessel that can be "filled" through conception, through its analogue, inspirationin sum, as a "vehicle" for the conveyance of spiritual or physical "insemination"is not unique to Sissa (cf. Page du Bois, Sowing the Body [Chicago, 1988]). Nor is Sissa's carefully-drawn relationship between religious and philosophical views of the inspired female and the presentation of the female body in ancient medical literature unique (cf. Aline Rousselle, Porneia [Basil Blackwell, 1988]). Nevertheless, Sissa does make a unique contribution, through her analysis of the concept of virginity in classical Greece, to the study of perceptions of the female
body in its "closed" or "open" state. She continues this analysis by pointing out
significant contradictions between the Greek view and that of the early Christians, who nevertheless partially shared it, and were certainly influenced by it. For example, Christians like Origen and Chrysostom praised virginity as understood in the specifically Christian ascetic sense, while casting aspersions on the source of the "inspiration" of the virgin Pythia. In explaining the anomaly of the Christian "virginal conception," she shows how a woman might be regarded as a "virgin" in the ancient pagan Greek world, even though penetrated by a male, if the "evidence" in the form of an out-of-wedlock child (i.e., Danae and Perseus) was not a
factor.
222
But the most important contribution Sissa makes to the study of the meaning of
virginity in ancient Greece as well in that of early Christianity, a chronologically but

not conceptually distinct era, is her close reading and interpretation of the contemporary medical literature, particularly with reference to its opinion on the hymen as
"closed" or "open." By means of this analysis, she demonstrates that the "virgin
birth" is a metaphor possible in ancient Greece as well as in early Christianity because of their common visualization of the female body as a "leaking sieve." In connection with this argument, she claims that "... the Greek idea of partheneia did not require the presence of a seal over the genitals" (170). This "seal" or the "hymen," as Sissa contends, was always envisioned, like many other "guards" over
the vulnerable body of the woman in classical Greece, as many times more significant in literature and society than it actually was in the medical literature itself. One
of the chief ways in which she disagrees with writers like Rousselle is in her analysis
of the writers of the Hippocratic collection, Galen, and Soranus, which shows that
neither Greek nor Roman writers believed in the existence of a virginal, penetrable
and breakable hymen. This hypothetical organ is, in her words, "a crude and contestable sign" (172). The use of the term, "sign," brings us to the major flaw in Sissa's argument. When she portrays virginity as a metaphorical state in literature or religious language, she is on firmer ground than when she talks vaguely in semiotic jargon about the female body and virginity as "signs." She seldom explains what she means by the term or the relationship of these concepts and their portrayal to semiotics as a field. In fact, it would have been a more convincing and less meandering analysis had she left out the language of semiotic altogether. As it is, the use of the technical language of a field definitely related to her argument but loosely connected to it by Sissa only serves to detract from her important contribution to the connection of female sexuality with psychic and spiritual inspiration. Her argument would have been further supported had the publisher seen the necessity to reproduce the important representations of the Pythia at Delphi in art to which Sissa refers and which
she analyzes in meticulous detail.

Gail P. Corrington, Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee Vincent L. Wimbush, editor Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990 Pp. xvii + 514. $41.95.
This volume represents the collaborative efforts of nearly thirty members of the Society of Biblical Literature Group on Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity. The purpose of the book, according to its editor, is "to make accessible in English translation a number of interesting texts that will introduce the reader to a wide range of different types of ascetic piety as different understandings of, and responses to, the
Greco-Roman world." This the book does well and, considering the numerous scholars who have contributed to it, very competently. It relies not only upon Greek and Latin texts, but also makes ample use of Coptic and Syriac materials. As a
The Bauer Thesis Examined: The Geography of Heresy in the Early Church (review)
Thomas M. Finn

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v001/1.2.finn.html
BOOK REVIEWS
217
ever, this is primarily due to her efforts to integrate a tremendous breadth of
material to support her perception of an overarching pattern in Gregory's spirituality.
Gregory the Great is a definitive work for all students of this monk, pope and
theologian. But the book has much wider appeal. Patristic scholars and historians
of late antiquity will appreciate the nuanced treatment of Gregory in the context of
a pivotal period in religious, intellectual and cultural history. Those interested in
medieval spirituality, for which Straw demonstrates Gregory's foundational importance, will find the work a fount of information, insight and suggestive ideas for further research. This book will no doubt remain the standard work in English on Gregory's thought for years to come. Andrea Sterk, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey
Thomas A. Robinson
The Bauer Thesis Examined: The Geography of Heresy in the Early Church Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity 11 Queenstown, Ont.: Edwin Mellen, 1988 Pp. xi + 248. Np. Professor Robinson writes (on behalf of all of us?), "I could never get away from the
implications" of the Bauer thesis (ix). To get it out of his craw, he engages the Bauer
thesis head-on in this study, incorporating part of his doctoral dissertation at
McMaster and directed by Ben F. Meyer. He weighs and finds the thesis wanting: "[Bauer's] work provides an adequate basis for no conclusion other than that early Christianity was diverse and that the Eusebian scheme is defective as history" (28). After a helpful chapter (I) on the history of the debate from Eusebius to the
present about whether early Christian orthodoxy had credible apostolic roots from the beginning, R. examines the geographical underpinnings of Bauer's claim about
the primacy of heresy (Edessa, Egypt, Corinth, Rome, with reflections on Jerusalem
and AntiochII). His conclusion is that the evidence from the sub-apostolic centuries is too limited to give to Bauer's contention that heresy came first the right of truth (91). R. then (chs. Ill and IV) focuses on Western Asia Minor, so crucial to Bauer's reconstruction. He concludes that it collapses at "three structurally critical points: 1) the hypothetical alliance of 'ecclesiastically oriented' Paulinists with
Palestinian immigrants against gnosticizing Paulinists; 2) the alleged strength of heresy in the area; and 3) the proposed cause for the rise of the monarchical episcopate" (130). In the final chapter (V) he analyzes the relationship between the orthodox and the separatists as Ignatius of Antioch reports it, concluding that the
opposition Ignatius encountered came from a dissident minority and cannot, therefore, be explained by the Bauer thesis (197). Given the centrality of Asia Minor to Bauer's reconstruction of sub-apostolic
Christianity, R. proposes his own sketch in the two appendices (A and B): 1) the
catholic community, not the heretics, represented the character of the majority in Western Asia Minor; 2) there was one set of heretics in the area, Gnostics with a
218
Jewish coloring, not Gnostics and Judaizers ; and 3 ) the target of the opposition was
not the bishop but the nature of Christthe innovation in Western Asia Minor was a docetic christology and neither orthodoxy nor monepiscopacy. Sic transit thesis
Baueri.
Has R. emancipated himself (and us) from the Bauer thesis? The only way for readers to decide is to acquire a large desk, spreading out across it R., Bauer (in the
Kraft-Krodel edition), the Pauline corpus, Ignatius' letters, 1 Clement, and the Nag
Hammadi Library. Since I have neither the desk nor the space, the best I can do is
share several reactions.
First, although R. rejects the trajectory model as the "golden calf of the last few
years" for filling in the yawning gaps in the evidence (139), trajectory seems to this reviewer quite useful for emphasizing a point that R. consistently and compellingly
makes: the evidence is slender. When it comes to Christian origins, the best one can do it to plot trajectories from the few ascertainable pieces of evidence. Hazardous? Very. Perhaps, an expert software engineer could help determine the most promis-
ing candidate! Expert or no, the real hazard is to assume that you have it right. Let the tracker beware. In any case, both R. and Bauer would have been considerably
helped toward verisimilitude by a judicious use of social-science models. For instance, although R. promises a follow-up volume on the subject (29, n. 75), neither
scholar adverts to what can be known about sect development, legitimation, the
social construction of reality. Had it been available, R. would have found invaluable
H. Maier's, The Social Setting of the Ministry as Reflected in the Writings of

Hermas, Clement and Ignatius (Waterloo, Can. : Canadian Corporation for Studies in Religion, 1991), just to mention one entry. Second, both books are abrasive. Not only do their proposals rub raw some deeply held convictions about how things were in the beginning, but they are pugnacious. Neither quite succeeds in "filtering all polemical material through some more neutral screen" (144). In part, I think, both authors work from theological grounds. This stance comes clearly through in Bauer's contention that orthodoxy first surfaced in Rome, subsequently summoned to supremacy through Roman Christianity's will to power. Although R. explores the Roman evidence, he pays no detailed attention to that central part of the Bauer thesis in which he proposes that Rome's wiles and wealth solidified orthodoxy eventually even in the distant east. Perhaps, because his own roots are in the Pentecostal tradition (141, n. 31), he has other facets of the thesis on his mind.
Third, both books reinforce one important issue: theological diversity is a characteristic of early Christianity from the beginning, a characteristic underscored by
NT studies. For R., Bauer was the pioneer in establishing this fact, putting to flight
what R. calls the "Eusebian" view of church history and Bauer calls the "eccle-
siastical view." Further, R. observes that as long as "the debate about orthodoxy
and heresy defines its focus in terms of uniformity, the Bauer Thesis will appear to offer a coherent analysis of the history of the early church" (29)no emancipation. R. is convincing when he insists that orthodoxy and heresy are the wrong categories and that no theory demanding uniformity within orthodoxy offers a satisfac-
tory reconstruction of early Christianity. The primacy of heresy seems to be the new orthodoxythe Bauerian rather than the Eusebian view of church history. None-
BOOK REVIEWS
219
theless, in this study, R. does not propose anything new on how diversity achieves
unity. Perhaps, in his next book, which I await. Thomas M. Finn, Department of Religion, College of William and Mary,
Williamsburg, Virginia J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz
Barbarians and Bishops: Army, Church, and State

in the Age of Arcadius and Chrysostom
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990
Pp. xiv +312. $64.00.
The focus of this major contribution of the "transformation of society in Late Antiquity" is "Demilitarization and Christianization" (1). Professor Liebeschuetz, of the University of Nottingham, covers some well-known terrain, to be sure, but he
does so with a meticulous review of the extant sources and the very large body of
scholarship. The result is a lucid exposition of the complicated scene involving the
Eastern and Western halves of the Late Roman Empire, or better now, the world of Late Antiquity with the powerful and dynamic new elements: the Barbarians and Christianity. With careful and nearly exhaustive documentation utilizing the extant printed sources and expanding body of scholarship, Liebeschuetz describes his theme in
three parts which include twenty-three chapters, plus a particularly useful mise au pointhis "Conclusion: The Historians' Post-Mortem." There are two appendices, a 24-page Bibliography and an adequate index. Finally a collection of plates illustrating the appendix on "Arcadius' Column" concludes the volume, which
is presented according to the traditional standards of the Oxford University/ Clarendon Press. The bibliography, pp. 279-303, is devoted entirely to secondary studies, and it demonstrates Liebeschuetz' command of the complex body of scholarly studies devoted to Late Antiquity which range over Late Roman imperial government, and the increasingly defined institution of the Church in the WesternRoman Latin Catholic half of the Empire and the Eastern-Roman Greek-Orthodox half of the Empire, plus the Germanic-Barbarian factor within both the secular and religious history of this era. I have a few reservations concerning the bibliographical materials which abound
in the detailed footnotes as well as the formal list at the end of the volume. Since
assessment of the historians and chronicles for the events and personalities included in this study is a noteworthy feature of Liebescheutz' analysis, I am surprised at the omission of Glenn F. Chesnut, The First Christian Histories. Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, and Evagrius, 2nd ed. rev. and enlarged (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1986). In several instances, items listed in the bibliography are not factored into the documentation adequately in my judgment, e.g. Jay Breg-
man, Synesius ofCyrene. Philosopher-Bishop and Raymond Van Dam, Leadership

and Community in Late Antique Gaul. In "Part I: An Army of Mercenaries and Its Problems," the author concisely
reviews the military history of the fourth-century empire by describing the role of
Ignatius, Ad Polycarp. 4.3 and the Corporate Manumission of Christian Slaves

J. Albert Harrill

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v001/1.2.harrill.html
Ignatius, Ad Polycarp. 4.3 and the Corporate Manumission of Christian Slaves1

J. ALBERT HARRILL
This study exegetes the passage in the second-century letter of the bishop Ig-
natius of Antioch to his fellow bishop Polycarp in Smyrna that concerns the liberation of baptized slaves. It argues that Ignatius does not prohibit private
manumissions of Christian slaves by individual slaveowners in general, but seeks to curb abuses of common chest (or corporate) manumissions by local house churches in particular. The study, then, locates the passage within the context of Greco-Roman rhetorical and literary commonplaces alarming audiences to the dangers of slave recruitment. The thesis is that Ignatius's apprehension about the corporate manumission of Christian slaves reveals not his so-called social conservatism on slavery, but his wider apologetic stratagem for social acceptability and internal unity under his own terms as bishop.
This essay offers a new interpretation of Ignatius, Ad Polycarp. 4.3 and challenges its standard reading. The argument is that the passage addresses a clearly specific economic procedure and, therefore, cannot be used as a
proof text that the early church was generally opposed to the manumission
of Christian slaves.
An unusual feature of Roman slavery, compared with the institution in classical Athens, is that the Romans, unlike the Athenians, manumitted
1. Earlier versions of this paper were read at the annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society, Loyola University of Chicago, 30 May 1992, and at the Graduate Workshop on Ancient Societies, University of Chicago, 15 January 1991.1 wish to thank Prof. Richard P. Sailer for his invaluable criticism and suggestions, as well as Profs. Hans Dieter Betz, Adela Yarbro Collins, Arthur J. Droge, Keith R. Bradley, Dale B. Martin, and David B. Brakke, who all read previous drafts. Shortcomings that remain are of
course my own.
Journal of Early Christian Studies 1:2 107-142 1993 The Johns Hopkins University Press.
108
their urban slaves with regularity.2 Consequently, when it attempted to secure converts from the urban familiae of Roman citizens, the early Christian movement had to deal with the concrete expectations of slaves that
manumission was a realistic, albeit fragile, prospect in their daily lives.3 Likewise, when they approached non-Roman households for potential believers, Christian congregations observed local, Hellenistic manumission customs. Early Christian authors write about both situations, and
describe the specific economic practice of churches manumitting baptized slaves with funds drawn from a common chest. In his correspondence with the second-century bishop Polycarp of Smyrna, however, Ignatius of Antioch mentions this particular procedure with distaste, and warns of its
dangers to both the church as a group and the slaves themselves. Although there are excellent studies on Ignatius, this particular piece of his writing (Po/. 4.3) has not achieved the full attention it deserves.4 Ig2. I want to be clear that I do not believe that every slave, or even most slaves, in Roman urban society were manumitted. I am only saying that many urban slaves were (over time) set free, and that urban slaves probably had relatively better chances of manumission than rural slaves. Roman slaveholding ideology, unlike the ideology of ancient Athenian (or modern American) slavery, held manumission to be the appropriate reward for deserving slaves, and this ideology often translated into social practice. The evidence comes not only from the city of Rome, but also from Romanized cities
throughout its empire. The best study remains Thomas E. J. Wiedemann, "The Regu-
larity of Manumission at Rome," CQ 35 (1985): 162-75; correcting Geza Alfldy, "Die Freilassung von Sklaven und die Struktur der Sklaverei in der rmischen Kaiserzeit," RSA 2 (1972): 97-129, esp. 114-15, who presented a circular argument from
epigraphical evidence that manumission was regular not only in urban, but also rural settings; William V. Harris, "Towards a Study of the Roman Slave Trade," in J. H. D'Arms and E. C. Kopff, eds., The Seaborne Commerce of Ancient Rome: Studies in Archaeology and History, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 36 (Rome: The Academy, 1980), 118;K. R.Bradley, Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire: A Study in Social Control (1984; reprint with suppl. biblio., New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 111; pace Alan Watson, Roman Sbve Law (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1987), 23, who follows Alfldy. 3. On the problem of translating the Latin familia into English "family," see M. I. Finley, "The Silent Women of Rome," in idem, Aspects of Antiquity: Discoveries and Controversies, 2d ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 126; Richard P. Sailer, "Familia, Domus, and the Roman Conception of the Family," Phoenix 38 (1984): 336-55; Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Family, Ancient Society and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 13.1 use the term "Roman" in the technical sense of
Roman citizens, and the term "Hellenistic" in the technical sense of non-Romans influ-
enced mainly by Greek legal customs. I recognize that the two terms are not necessarily mutually exclusive. 4. Peter Meinhold, Studien zu Ignatius von Antiochien, Verffentlichungen des Instituts fr Europische Geschichte Mainz 97, Abt. fr Abendland. Religionsgeschichte (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1979); Walter Bauer, Die Briefe des Ignatius von Antiochia und der Brief des Polykarp von Smyrna, 2d ed., rev. Henning Paulsen, HNT 18
HARR1LL/AD POLYCARP 4.3 AND MANUMISSION
109
natius offers a rare glimpse into the actual lives of early Christians. My goal is to clarify the significance of this passage for early Christian social history in three ways: first, to provide a working hypothesis of what form this
manumission took, whether Roman or non-Roman;5 second, to look at the extent of this manumission practice in both ancient Judaism and early Christianity; and third, to explain why Ignatius saw it as injurious to his episcopal order. I argue that Ignatius's apprehension about the corporate manumission of slaves by churches reflects his wider concern for unity under his own terms. In short, Ignatius considered manumission pledges
by local house churches (and their wealthy patrons) a threat to his efforts to
legitimate his authority as bishop.6 The social situation I envision in Smyrna is a metropolitan center with multiple house churches, each holding not identical attitudes toward Ignatian episcopal authority and each with its own common chest.71 believe that Ignatius was advising Polycarp to unite several of these house churches together under one administrative ecclesiastical umbrella and with one common chest. Indeed, unity, with the imagery of musical harmony, resonates as a key theme throughout the Ignatian correspondence. One might, however, interpret the statements in Po/. 4.3 as an expression of personal interest in the general spiritual wellbeing of baptized slaves. I would agree that the passage is a general comment
(Tbingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1985); William R. Schoedel, Ignatius of Antioch: A Commentary on the Letters of Ignatius of Antioch, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), to list only three recent, standard studies.
5. Because Pol. 4.3 provides no detail on how the manumission ceremonial rites were observed, this determination will, of course, be to some degree conjectural. But my
endeavor is to build a more plausible context than is currently found in commentary literature for an extremely brief epistolary reference by an ancient Christian author to a
particular social practice.
6. For an excellent discussion of the terminology, see John Howard Schtz, Paul and the Anatomy of Apostolic Authority, SNTSMS 26 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975) 121. See also Hans von Campenhausen, Ecclesiastical Authority and Spiritual Power in the Church of the First Three Centuries, trans. J. A. Baker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), 97-106; Robert F. Stoops, Jr, "If I Suffer. . . Epistolary Authority in Ignatius of Antioch," HTR 80 (1987): 176 n. 69; Helmut Koester, "Writings and the Spirit: Authority and Politics in Ancient Christianity," HTR 84 (1991): 355, 360-61; Harry O. Maier, The Social Setting of the Ministry as Reflected in the Writings of Hermas, Clement and Ignatius, Dissertations SR 1 (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1991), 163-70, 182-87.
7. Floyd V. Filson, "The Significance of the Early House Churches," JBL 58 (1939): 110,112; Virginia Corwin, St. Ignatius and Christianity in Antioch, Yale Publications in Religion 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), 44-45, 65, 85; Hans-Josef Klauck, Hausgemeinde und Hauskirche im frhen Christentum, SBS 103 (Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1981), 62-63; Stoops, "If I Suffer," 163 n. 13; Maier, Social
Setting, 4-5, 147-56.
110
on how all baptized slaves should not desire to be manumitted if the phrase was not in the text. But since it stands securely in the text, we as interpreters must explain this qualification, which Ignatius placed
upon his exhortation. It is the crux of the passage. Ignatius addressed in

this letter a specific concern about a particular economic practice. Here, the bishop did not care about the general manumission of slaves, only the corporate manumission of slaves. The passage under study occurs in a list of exhortations, through which Ignatius outlines in detail how Polycarp was to carry out the task of bishop.
It reads:
Let widows not be uncared for (financially); after the Lord, you (sing.) be their trustee. Let nothing happen without your decree ( ). And, you, do not do anything without God, which indeed you do not. Stand firm. Let meetings occur more frequently; seek out all by name. Do not behave arrogantly towards slaves, either male or female. But let them not be puffed up. Rather, let them be enslaved all the more to the glory of God, so that they may happen upon a greater freedom from God. Let them not desire ( -) to be manumitted out of the money in the (church's) common
chest ( ), so that they may not be found slaves of (their) appetite/desire ( ).8
Four initial considerations come to bear upon this passage. First, the use of the phrase "without your decree" ( ) echoes state language of political authority, especially of Roman governors. This political parlance underscores the civil authority of the bishop in administrative matters, which is the overarching concern of Pol. 4.9 Second, to give wid-
ows money corporately is entirely acceptable, even encouraged, but to do the same for slaves for the purpose of manumission is considered dangerous. Third, the expression "out of the common chest" ( )
appears in pagan contexts to designate public expenditures of a city or the

disbursements of Hellenistic private associations. Both public and private
models seem to be at work here.10 To does not refer to the common
8. Ign. Pol. 4.1-3 (SAQ 2.1.1.111-12 = SC 10.148-50). There are no significant alternative readings in the MSS for this text. My translation differs markedly from that of Schoedel, Ignatius, 269. By avoiding the translation "slaves of lust" for , I hope to bring greater clarity to its meaning. 9. In Pol. 4, Ignatius addresses financial disbursements to widows, law and order in the churches, meeting schedules, and treatment of slaves. Schoedel, Ignatius, 109, 269 n. 3; cf. OGI 2.669.53-54: there is to be no transfer of title "without the permission of the prefect" ( [ ] -). 10. Schoedel, Ignatius, 14 and271;cf. the image of the ship of state in Pol. 2.3 (SAQ 2.1.1.111 = SC 10.148); the characterization of Ignatian church solidarity as a , "corporation," in Smyrn. 11.2 (SAQ 2.1.1.109 = SC 10.140-42); the
HARRILL/AD POLYCARP 4.3 AND MANUMISSION
111
chest of a single house church but to that of all the associated house churches in Smyrna that recognized Polycarp's episcopal authority. Fourth, the language "slaves of appetite/desire" ( ) has a peculiar
accent. Based upon its usage in Pol. 5.2, William Schoedel argues that the
metaphor has sexual significance. He contends that "freedmen frequently had little choice but to take up low trades and often became associated with
prostitution in particular."11 Because liberated slaves often found "them-
selves in morally questionable positions" forced upon them by poverty

(according to Schoedel), Ignatius warns Polycarp not to encourage manumission.12 Schoedel, further, connects the first sentence of the next section,
expression, "ambassadorship befitting the community" ( ) in Phil. 1.1 (SAQ 2.1.1.102 = SC 10.120). 11. Schoedel, Ignatius, 271. On the erotic vocabulary, see Edward N. O'Neil, "De cupiditate divitiarum," in Hans Dieter Betz, ed., Plutarch's Ethical Writings and Early Christian Literature, SCHNT 4 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978), 333; Hubert Martin, Jr., "Amatorius," in Betz, Plutarch's Ethical Writings, 450, 530. 12. Schoedel, Ignatius, 271 and n. 15. The evidence Schoedel adduces to "prove" that freedmen frequently fell into prostitution is the following: first, he cites two sources, Isaeus, de Philoct. hered. 19-20 and Ps-Dem. in Neaeram 18, which only mention exslaves who happened also to be prostitutes (the sources in any case reflect slavery in fourth-century B.C.E. Athens and cannot be used as evidence for the Roman period); and, second, he cites Arr. Epict. diss. 4.1.35, which is a highly rhetorical passage and cannot be taken literally. The philosophers were given to paradox by exaggeration, and this statement by Epictetus must be weighed against the mass of epigraphic evidence that freedmen were quite proud of their status as working artisans and other things and not (as if they constituted some homogeneous economic class) often forced by poverty to become associated particularly with prostitution; Bradley, Slaves and Masters, 82. Epictetus espouses ideology. To take the passage literally accepts uncritically ancient slaveholding ideology, which held that slavery was not, after all, a bad thing for slaves, and confuses that ideology for social description. I know of no recent scholar from the standard modern works, M. I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), esp. 117; A. M. Duff, Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire, 2d ed. (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1958); Susan Treggiari, Roman Freedmen during the Late Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); P. R. C. Weaver, Familia Caesaris: A Social Study of the Emperor's Freedmen and Slaves (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) ; Georges Fabre, Libertus: Recherches sur les rapports patron-affranchi la
fin de la rpublique romaine, Collection de l'cole Franaise de Rome 50 (Paris: cole
Franaise de Rome, 1981); Wolfgang Waldstein, Operae Libertorum: Untersuchungen zur Dienstpflicht freigelassener Sklaven, Forschungen zur antiken Sklaverei 19 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1986), who takes this passage as descriptive of the socio-economic condition of the entire freedman population of the Roman empire (pace Aristide CaIderini, La manomissione e la condizione dei liberti in Grecia [Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1908], 369). Furthermore, the main evidence for servile prostitution involves sources that report the sexual exploitation of slaves by their masters and their masters' family and friends, not homeless and impoverished freedmen "walking the streets"; see Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, 9596.
112
"flee the evil arts,"13 to Pol. 4.3 as continuation of the bishop's exhortation that slaves should avoid prostitution, by avoiding manumission.14 Yet
Schoedel's model of Roman freedmen frequently having little choice but to

take up prostitution (presumably, because they were homeless and thus destitute) is inaccurate, and his interpretation of as
referring exclusively to such freedmen prostitutes is implausible.15

The interpretation of "slaves of appetite/desire" as exclusively referring to destitute homeless freedmen prostitutes overlooks a fundamental ele-
ment of both Hellenistic and Roman slavery. As Keith Bradley writes, when
slaves were manumitted by Romans, "they did not find themselves absolved of all responsibilities toward their former owners, now patrons."16 Liberated slaves often owed public displays of respect, remaining with their
former masters for stipulated duties and periods of time in return for the
slaveholder's grant of manumission. For the eastern Mediterranean and
other regions influenced by Hellenistic norms, ex-slaves were regularly

bound to their former masters by paramon contracts. Paramon obligated the ex-slave to "hang around" (-) the former master for a
specified period, frequently "as a slave" before the manumission contract

became valid.17 For Roman citizens and people living in urban areas gov-
erned by Roman private law, manumission was customarily understood in

the language and ideology of patronage as the most important beneficium a master could bestow upon a slave.18 This beneficium placed the freedman
13. Pol. 5.1 (SAQ 2.1.1.122 = SC 10.150). 14. Yet as Schoedel, Ignatius, 269 n. 17, himself admits, the term has a very wide range of possible meanings. To which I would add Athenag. leg. 11.3 (Schoedel, OECT, 24), which calls the art of oratory (- ) an evil () when used to replace the display of deeds (- ). 15. I follow the standard convention in slave studies to apply the term "freedmen" without gender specificity to a broad social group, which includes both men and women. 16. Bradley, Slaves and Masters, 81. 17. William L. Westermann, "The Paramon as General Service Contract," JJP 1
(1948): 9-50. Alan E. Samuel, "The Role of Paramon Clauses in Ancient Documents,"
JJP15 (1965): 256-84, is the fullest account of paramon clauses in English, but makes legalistic claims without considering how the law operated in social practice; Keith Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves, Sociological Studies in Roman History 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 137 n. 5, 141-58. Note the critical review of Hopkins by K. R. Bradley, CP 76 (1981): 83, 86. Examples of paramon contracts are found in the useful sourcebook by Thomas Wiedemann, Greek and Roman Slavery (1981;
reprint, London: Routledge, 1988), 3, 42-44, 46-49, 105, 120.
18. For the uneven and opportunistic use of either Roman private law or local legal customs (whichever best suited a litigant's interests) in the hodgepodge that was provincial jurisprudence, see now Y. Yadin, The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters: Greek Papyri, N. Lewis, ed., Aramaic and Nabatean Signatures and Subscriptions, Y. Yadin and J. C. Greenfield, eds., JDS 11 (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration
113
under a heavy moral as well as legal obligation.19 Such obligations included the freedman's stipulation of subservience (obsequium) and specific chores [operae) in the Roman reciprocity ethic for personal patronage given by a social better.20 The traditional Roman means of support for freedmen and other social dependents would have entailed enduring the humiliating ritual of the
morning salutatio. Here, freedmen and other protgs of a patron would,

at the crack of dawn, line up (often by social rank) outside a patron's house,
hoping for handouts of money or food leftovers. Morning callers presented a daily theater of social hierarchy. The experience for those performing salutatio was thought degrading. Later European society would develop
no similar customs that articulated and reinforced status so rehearsed on a
daily basis as the Roman salutation.21 This coerced dependence upon a patron is a more likely model of the social and economic position of
freedmen than Schoedel's vision of destitute freedmen forced to prostitute
themselves.
There has been considerable debate in recent years among ancient histo-
rians over how much autonomy from their former masters Roman freedmen actually enjoyed. The issue hinges on a disputed legal rule: whether or not a manumission payment out of a slave's business funds (peculium)
absolved the ex-slave of operae.11 Many historians go so far as to claim that freedmen for the most part remained living as virtual slaves to their pa-
trons, freedman status being merely "a modified form of slavery."23 Peter
Society, 1989); and the critical review by Martin Goodman, "Babatha's Story," JRS 81
(1991): 169-75.
19. Richard P. Sailer, Personal Patronage under the Early Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 24. 20. Sailer, Personal Patronage, 24; Waldstein, Operae Libertorum; Philo, quod Deus immut. sit. 48; Tac. ann. 13.26-27; Suet. Aug. 67. See also the critical review of Waldstein by T. E. J. Wiedemann, "Duties of Freedmen," CR 38 (1988): 331-33. 21. Sailer, Personal Patronage, 11, 61-62, 128-29; Peter Garnsey and Richard Sailer, The Roman Empire: Economy, Society and Culture (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987), 122, 151, 153.
22. Even if such a freedman did not owe operae to his or her patron, he or she would still have owed obsequium, which (unlike operae) was never closely defined in law and thus was less a controlled Roman legal institution; Peter Garnsey, "Independent Freedmen and the Economy of Roman Italy under the Principate," KHo 63 (1981): 366. 23. Alfldy, "Freilassung von Sklaven," 119-22; cited in Garnsey, "Independent Freedmen," 361. Barry Nicholas, An Introduction to Roman Law, 3rd ed., Clarendon Law Series (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 75-76. Note also the servility of Sabinianus's groveling freedman in Pliny, ep. 9.21 (which is often cited, erroneously, as a parallel to PhIm; it deals with a freedman and not a slave, and Pliny's tone is entirely different from Paul's in PhIm); 9.24; A. N. Sherwin-White, The Letters of Pliny: A Historical and Social Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 505,507.
114
Garnsey, however, maintains that a significant number of freedmen worked with greater self-reliance than is generally recognized by Roman historians in the urban economy and society of Rome and other major Italian cities, such as Ostia and Pompeii.24 His argument is based on the legal rule that slaves freed following payment of their value did not owe operae, and it assumes that this rule applied to slaves who paid for their freedom out of their own peculium.15 Given this assumption, Garnsey contends that, working independently in business as agents, some urban slaves accumulated enough money in their peculium to purchase their freedom. These manumission payments involved "an aspect of 'deals' made between masters and enterprising slaves," deals that gave masters the replacement cost
of a new slave and earned ex-slaves a social and economic position of

autonomy, away from the influence of their former masters.26 Garnsey's argument is not wholly without problems. His conclusion that manumission payments out of their peculium enabled ex-slaves to claim social and economic independence from their former masters has not convinced all Roman historians. To be sure, slaves and masters may not have seen eye-to-eye on which one of them actually owned the peculium, although in law the master certainly did. Yet Garnsey's working model of, and overall approach to, the social and economic position of Roman freedmen has useful applications for studying Ignatius and the particular question of corporate manumission. If local house churches practiced charity to
redeem and support Christian slaves, then this charity would have liberated ex-slaves from dependence upon a former master for daily support, from the humiliating morning salutation, and other formalized duties of
operae. I want to be clear that my argument for independent freedmen does

not suffer from the same doubt as Garnsey's above. In Roman private law, the peculium belonged to the master, and so a purchase of freedom from the peculium was not legally comparable to the purchase of freedom by a third party, which would have entailed independence and exemption from operae. But a house church (or a synagogue) undoubtedly qualified as a third party, so its provision of the purchase price gave the freedman considerable independence in law from his or her former master.
With this model of both Hellenistic and Roman slavery in view, I propose
a new interpretation for Ignatius's use of "slaves of appetite/desire."27
24. Garnsey, "Independent Freedmen," 359-71.
25. Ibid., 364.
26. Ibid.
27. occurs only three times in Ignatius, and always in a negative sense: verbal form in Rom. 4.3 (SAQ 2.1.1.99 = SC 10.112); and 7.1 (SAQ 2.1.1.100 = SC 10.114); nominal form in Pol. 5.2 (SAQ 2.1.1.112 = SC 10.150); Robert M. Grant, ed.,
115
From the time of Plato, the phrase acquired a distinctive sense in Greek
philosophy, especially in the Stoics, as an important philosophical and ethical concept. It became a rhetorical stock term of derision for those who
lacked self-control ().28 Socrates, as the archetypal free person,
reportedly claimed to be less a slave to his bodily appetites (

-) than anyone else because he refused finan-
cial gifts, including those offered to ransom his way out of prison.29 Classical authors from Isocrates to Plutarch employ the "slave of appe-
tite/desire" metaphor as a common topos of derision against the utterly

unfree person, who was anxiously self-seeking.30 Early Christian writers from Paul and the author of Titus to composers of the apocryphal acts
appropriated this philosophical concept.31 These examples illustrate how Ignatius's rhetoric was shaped as much by Greco-Roman commonplaces
and models as by early Christian tradition.32 Because in Pol. 4.3 Ignatius speaks of slaves "attaining a better freedom from God," we may assume
that slaves were seeking manumission in association with baptism. Baptisms based upon self-seeking , baptisms only for the manumisThe Apostolic Fathers: A New Translation and Commentary, vol, 4, idem, Ignatius of
Antioch (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1966), 133. 28. Friedrich Bchsel, " , .," TDNT 3 (1965): 168. 29. Xen. . 16.
30. The following citations are not to be thought of as parallels to Pol. 4.3, but as illustrations to prove that the expression occurs in literature as a generic rhetorical commonplace and need not refer exclusively or even remotely to destitute freedmen forced by poverty into prostitution: Isoc. ad Nie. 29.5; ad Dem
21.11; Xen. mem. 4.4.24-5.12; Pl. Phdr. 238e.3; resp. 8 (554a.7); leg. 838d.4; Arist
rhet. 2.13.13-14 (1390a.l5); Polyb. 18.15.16.2; Dion. Hal. 2.3.5.9; Plut. mor. con praecepta 142e.9; vit. Agis 1.3.6; Diog. Laert. 6.66.11; Arr. Epict. diss. 4.1.35-37 Philo, quod omn. prob. lib. sit. 156-57; 159-160; de cherub. 71.6; spec. leg. 4.113.9 de proem, et poen. 124.3; Josephus, a-. 4.18.23 244.1; 15.4.1 91.2; 15.7.4 219.3
Luc-an, Hermot. 8.10; Galen, de plaais Hippocratis et Platonis 3.7.12.4 (De Lacy,
CMG 5.4.1.2.1.214); Ps.-Hippoc. ep. 12.20 (Wesley D. Smith, ed., Hippocrates: Pseudepigraphic Writings, Studies in Ancient Medicine 2 [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990], 62) Achilles Tatius, Leucippe et Clitophon 6.19.4.4; Aristid. or. 2.44-46 (Charles A. Behr,
ed., P. Aelius Aristides, vol. 1 [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986], 105-6 191, 195, 197); or 3.119 (Behr, 153 17); 123 (Behr, 155 28); 281 (Behr, 256 556); or. 4.387 (Behr, 309 42).
31. Rom7;Titus3.3;Eph2.3; 1 Pet4.3;2Pet3.3-,Herrn.man.8.5.2(GCS48.1.35); Just. 2 apol. 5.4.5 (Goodspeed, 82); dial. 134.1 (Goodspeed, 256); Athenag. leg. 21.4.9 (Schoedel, OECT, 46); 31.4.3 (Schoedel, OECT, 76); Clem. Alex. paed. 2.2.34.2.1 (SC
108.72); 3.1-2 (SC 158.12-16); Str. 3.12.90.3.1 (GCS 52[15].2.237); 6.16.136.2.2
(GCS 52[15].2.500) quoting LXX Exod 20.17 (= Deut 5.21), n.b. connection with slaves (cf. Sirach 5.2); AJo. 35.11 (LB 2.1.169); Burton S. Easton, The Pastoral Epistles (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1947), 186-88. 32. A point made in several contexts in Schoedel, Ignatius.
116
sion money, brought (to Ignatius's mind) undesirable converts to Christianity. In this manner, Pol. 4.3 reflects concerns comparable to those of other Roman and Hellenistic religions, such as the Isis cult, which preached against hollow conversions of believers who had impure thoughts about,
and selfish motivations for, joining the cult.33 In addition, the literary/moral topos of the slave attempting to break out of bondage by ques-
tionable means, the of (liberated) slaves, is present. In Luc-an of

Samosata, for example, there are passages ridiculing the rich because they
tolerated former slaves getting hold of their wealth and squandering it.34
Yet it must be admitted that desire for freedom does not always connote negative images in ancient authors. Literary sources sometimes ring quite the opposite tone, and call desire () for liberty (, particularly in the political sense) an instinctive passion of human nature.35 In this context, servile desires for personal freedom comprised quite natural emotions, intelligible to both Hellenistic and Roman slaveholders. Ignatius
responded to these emotions. In Pol. 4.3, the expression refers not to an enslaving desire for liberty, but an enslaving desire for gold and, specifically, for the church's gold. Despite attempts to link it with
prostitution, is a rhetorical commonplace found in various literary contexts to characterize a person enslaved to his or her material wants generally and ought not be read as social description. Unlike
33. H. S. Versnel, Inconsistencies in Greek and Roman Religion, vol. 1, Ter Onus: Isis, Dionysos, Hermes. Three Studies in Henotheism, Studies in Greek and Roman Religion 6 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), 91; although Versnel, 91 n. 180, overstates that Ignatius "firmly opposed" the concept of corporate manumission. Ignatius only wanted to curb its abuse. His exhortation is that slaves should not join the church in order to gain access to the church's money, since the Christian ideal (like the Stoic) was to desire nothing of the material world, see Rom. 4.3 (SAQ 2.1.1.99 = SC 10.112); 7.1 (SAQ
2.1.1.103 = SC 10.114). 34. Hans Dieter Betz, Lukian von Samosata und das Neue Testament: Reli-
gionsgeschichtliche und parnetische Parallelen, TU 76 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1961), 191 n. 1. On the topos of of (liberated) slaves, see Betz, Lukian, 194-99, esp. 196 with the material in notes; Ernst Meyer, Der Emporkmmling: Ein Beitrag zur antiken Ethologie (Giessen: Otto Kindt, 1913), 14, 43, 47-62, 73, 78-82, 85, who provides examples of individual slaves and freedmen as social types for the character of the upstart "social climber." Ethically, the phenomenon falls under "hypocrisy," see
Ulrich Wilckens, Alois Kehl, and Karl Hoheisel, "Heuchelei," RAC 14 (1988): 120531.
35. Josephus, BJ4.3.10.175; Diod. Sic. 11.36.5; Caes. BGaIl. 3.10; Ch. Wirszubski, Libertas as a Political Idea at Rome during the Late Republic and Early Principate (1950; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960); see also the critical review of Wirszubski by Arnaldo Momigliano in JRS 41 (1951): 146-53; Keith R. Bradley, "Servus Onerosus: Roman Law and the Troublesome Slave," Slavery & Abolition 11 (1990): 135.
117
, the phrase can be read as social description,

referring to a specific manumission procedure, and so must be the crux of
the passage. The bishop was concerned not with manumission of Christian slaves in general, but abuse of corporate manumission paid out of the church's common chest in particular. Understanding how common chest
manumission operated in the ancient world, not some so-called social
practice behind the metaphor "slaves of desire," is the key to the puzzle.
1. CORPORATE MANUMISSION
The economic practice of group-sponsored manumission supplies a promising model against which to read Ignatius. Known from Athens and many other parts of the Greek-speaking world, this procedure enabled a slave to purchase his or her freedom through sums borrowed from an ad hoc group in a loan called an ranos.36 In Athenian sources, eranos-loans are regularly distinguished from other kinds of lending. Typically, the loan operation involved a temporary meeting of individual lenders, who together gave large or small sums, depending on the group's means and the borrower's requirements. rawos-loans were by their very nature non interest-bearing. They served a variety of purposes, though personal emergency was the underlying need in most cases, including ransom, tax or liturgy payments, and manumission of a slave.37 The particular financial arrangement stressed reciprocity and or "giving back in return."38
We learn about eranos-loans for Athenian manumissions from a set of
inscriptions, commonly called the "Attic manumission lists," which date
to the reign of Alexander the Great.39 The inscriptions served as public notices in a bulletin board fashion and registered payments, in the form of one-hundred-drachma silver bowls, which freed slaves remitted to the city of Athens upon acquittal in a special legal procedure called a fictitious "trial of abandonment." The precise legal details of this procedure are
36. M. I. Finley, Studies in Land and Credit in Ancient Athens, 500200 B.C.: The Horos Inscriptions, Social Science Classics Series (1951 ; corr. reprint with introductory essay by Paul Milien, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985), 105. 37. Ibid., 100. 38. Paul Millett, Lending and Borrowing in Ancient Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), 153-55.
39. G 22.1.1553-1578. Dale B. Martin, Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 186 n. 52, doubts whether these lists are in fact manumission records, and posits an alternative hypothesis that these describe metics acquitted of some legal responsibility to Athenian citizens. I, however, agree with Finley, Studies, 100106, that these inscriptions certainly reflect manumission activity (the word 1 does occur).
118
difficult to reconstruct given the abbreviated and fragmentary nature of the inscriptions.40 Yet these documents occasionally cite a provisional group () of creditors (-), who together put up the cost of the manumission.41 These texts provide significant evidence that group or
"corporate" manumission paid from a common fund developed at Athens at the beginning of the Hellenistic period.421 say common "fund" and not "chest" to stress that I understand these groups not as permanent charity associations but as ad hoc groups. This custom of corporate manumission paid from a common fund con-
tinued to be practiced throughout Attica and the Hellenistic East. Another

group of Hellenistic texts, the so-called "Delphic manumissions," provides additional evidence for this practice.43 These documents date from 200 B. CE. to CE. 70 and record manumissions transacted in the Apollonian
sacred precinct. Some of the sales indicate that legally the slave was freed
through an eranos-\oan, but nevertheless still owed paramon obligations to the individual responsible for the loan, usually the former master.44 As in the Attic manumission documents, a few Delphic inscriptions registered
a sum of money, a friendly, interest-free eranos-type loan, given by a group

to liberate a slave.45 For this study of early Christian manumission, it is
40. Marcus N. Tod, "Some Unpublished 'Catalogi Paterarum Argentearum,' " ABSA
8 (1901/2): 197-202; William L. Westermann, "Two Studies in Athenian Manumis-
sions," JNES 5 (1946): 94-99; David M. Lewis, "Attic Manumissions," Hesperia 28 (1959): 237-38; idem., "Dedications of Phialai at Athens," Hesperia 37 (1968): 36880; Arnold Krnzlein, "Die attischen Aufzeichnungen ber die Einlieferung von -," in Hans Julius Wolff, ed., Symposion 1971: Vortrge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte, AGR 1 (Cologne: Bhlau, 1975), 255-64. 41. J. Vondeling, ranos, Historische Studies 17 (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1961), 11750, 25961, contends (contra Finley) that the inscriptions emanate not from ad hoc groups, but permanent Hellenistic charity associations. See, however, recent criticism of Vondeling in Millett, Lending and Borrowing, 1415, 15556. 42. Finley, Studies, 291 n. 71, notes that because all the evidence is crowded around a short time span of a few years before and after the death of Alexander the Great, the whole procedure may not have been a normal one in Athens, and may have been created to meet the peculiar needs of the moment. If this is true, then one cannot say that corporate manumission was routine at Athens, but exceptional. As to the specific circumstances around the time of Alexander the Great that gave rise to this procedure, one can only speculate. Macedonian conquest and occupation did change Athenian society and economy in many and significant ways.
43. GDI 2.1772, 1791, 1804, 1878, 1909, 2317.
44. Herbert Rdle, "Selbsthilfeorganisationen der Sklaven und Freigelassenen in Delphi," Gymnasium 77 (1970): 1-5; Westermann, "Two Studies," 94; Franz Bmer, Untersuchungen ber die Religion der Sklaven in Griechenland und Rom, pt. 2, Die sogenannte sakrale Freilassung in Griechenland und die () , AAWM (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1960), 35.
45. S. Scott Bartchy, 1: First-Century Slavery and the Interpreta-
119
significant that pagan temples provided the settings for the manumission ceremonies. Indeed, temple altars often served as religious sanctuaries for
slaves.46 This evidence shows that the economic practice of corporate manumission paid from a common fund was accepted in the Hellenistic East, in both civic and cultic contexts. Such practice provided a model for early
Christian congregations to follow, such as the ones in Asia Minor that so concerned Ignatius.47 Unlike the Greek ad hoc groups, however, Christian
house churches were permanent associations. This model raises a further question of motivation. Why would groups of creditors have wanted to fund a slave's manumission? I propose a partial answer in the Greek institution of paramon, which was an integral part of
slavery in the East. As we saw above, paramon contracts were widespread

in Hellenistic areas of the Mediterranean and were a more demanding agreement than the stipulation of operae from liberti to a patron under
Roman private law. These paramon obligations would have supplied an

incentive to fund a slave's manumission. Because the institution of ranos
constituted friendly, non-interest bearing loans, an enticement other than
money must have been at issue. The very act of giving itself established all kinds of obligations of receiver to giver. Especially when gifts were exchanged between persons of unequal rank, status, or class, the act of giving
was done for the sake of a return.48 Athenian and Hellenistic ad hoc
partnerships, which lent eranos-\oans for manumission purposes, would

have been well aware of the heavy moral and legal obligations placed upon freedmen. I argue that these eranos-loans were paid out in order to obtain paramon services.
tion of First Corinthians 7:21, SBLDS 11 (1973; reprint, Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985), 103; who follows Rdle, "Selbsthilfeorganisationen," 2-4; who follows Erich Ziebarth, Das griechische Vereinswesen (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1896). Yet these works must be read cautiously in the light of Finley, Studies, 101-2, who correctly argues that the word ranos here almost invariably refers to the loan (or the ad hoc lending-group) and not to a permanent club. Finley, esp. 275 n. 5 and 289 n. 59, is sharply critical of Ziebarth and those who follow his anachronistic assumptions about ancient Athenian law recognizing juridical personalities. 46. William L. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society 40 (Philadelphia: The Society, 1955),
17-18,40-41,108.
47. Schoedel, Ignatius, 270; Bartchy, , 103. 48. A. R. Hands, Charities and Social Aid in Greece and Rome, Aspects of Greek and Roman Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 26-48 ; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 211-14, applying the anthropological theories of Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Formsand Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cullison (London: Cohen &
West, 1954), 3-5.
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It is difficult to enumerate what specific tasks and services ranos groups

expected the slaves they freed to perform for them. By their very nature, Hellenistic paramon contracts were drafted in rather general and unde-
fined terms; indeed, such contracts were intentionally vague. William Westermann characterizes the position of someone bound under paramon as a kind of "handyman."49 The indeterminate nature of a freed-
man's duties and obligations makes paramon wholly unlike other Hellenistic labor contracts, which often spelled out concrete job descriptions. In
the Delphic manumissions that contain paramon clauses, this unspecified character of the services is evident. The ex-slave agreed to "do what is necessary," or in another formulation, to "do what is ordered," or in longer statements to "do whatever" or "everything he (or she) is ordered to do as far as possible."50 To the group making an ranos loan, obtaining a paramon contract might prove more valuable than either hiring a leased
slave or a freeborn laborer, since avoidance of precise statements placed these freedmen in particularly vulnerable legal positions.51 But if the group wanted to secure someone in a vulnerable legal position,
why did it not simply buy a slave of its own outright? An initial answer
includes avoiding the added cost of clothing, feeding, and maintaining a slave. This explanation, however, goes only so far. A variety of reasons existed for manumission in both the Hellenistic and Roman ideologies of
slavery. Oftentimes, slaves were practically more useful after manumission. One must keep in mind that these lending groups were temporary, ad hoc partnerships. The outright purchasing of a slave, which groups certainly did in the Hellenistic period, might have proved less desirable to the erattos-lenders attested in these particular inscriptions because these
groups lacked permanence, less desirable since this lack of permanence

could have led to complications over who would keep the slave once the group was dissolved. During the Roman period, from which many of these
documents date, other factors come into play. Besides the hope of gaining better loyalty, a group of lenders might have wanted a manumitted slave
because of the freedman's usefulness as a Roman citizen. Formal manumis-
sion by a Roman citizen master normally gave citizenship to the ex-slave.52

49. Westermann, "Paramon," 24.
50. E.g., GDI 2060.7-10 (183-182 B.C.E.): - , - -.

51. Westermann, "Paramon," 25-26.
52. W. W. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery: The Condition of the Slave in Private Law from Augustus to Justinian (1908; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1969),
439.
121
Citizenship carried the three legal rights of ius commercii (the right to be a party to mancipatio, in form a conveyance on sale, and other specifically Roman methods of acquiring property and making contracts), ius conubii
(the right to contract with a Roman citizen a marriage recognized by civil
law), and testamenti factio (the right to make, and to take under, a Roman
will), and increased one status generally.53 Not infrequently slaves were freed to serve their patrons as citizened freedmen procuratores, personal business managers who could legally make contracts.54 These domestic
officials were charged with supervising the household slave staff and representing their patrons in commercial affairs. In addition, lenders might have wanted freedmen dependents in order to swell their train of clients and protgs. In the Roman understanding of aristocratic virtue, greater dignitas came to the householder surrounded by many protgs and clients, since there was no special honor in having a large train of slaves who were forced by violence to be there. A Roman master might free her or his slaves, as Susan Treggiari writes, so she or "he might enjoy the prospect of a fine funeral, his corpse attended by grateful freedmen with caps of liberty on their heads, witness to their patrons munificence."55 Manumission brought the slaveholder dignitas. Manumission was a regular feature of Roman slavery because it suited the master's interests. Another reason for why lenders might have wanted a freedman instead of a slave might be that they had hoped to avoid examination by torture of their dependents, which was required (not just permitted) in the court testimony of slaves.56 All
these motivations provide a partial explanation for why Romans viewed manumission as a regular, even desirable, feature of slavery, and why purchasing a slave's freedom was sometimes more attractive to investors than the acquisition of a slave.57 In early Christianity, motivations for manumission similar to those described above must have been at work. In addition, some congregations might have interpreted the early baptismal formula of Gal 3.28, "neither free nor slave," literally. To these house churches, baptism created a new person, spiritually free and legally manumitted. But before engaging the question of corporate manumission in early Christian congregations, the situation among Jewish synagogues deserves attention.
53. Nicholas, Roman Law, 64-65.
54. Digest 40.2.13; Gaius, Institutes 1.19; Duff, Freedmen, 20. 55. Treggiari, Roman Freedmen, 14; Dion. Hal. 4.24; Petron. cena 71. 56. P. A. Brunt, "Evidence Given under Torture in the Principate," ZRG 97 (1980):
256-65.
57. Duff, Freedmen, 18-19; Treggiari, Roman Freedmen, 11-20.
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2. SIMILAR MANUMISSION FORMS
IN JEWISH SYNAGOGUES Jews practiced corporate manumission in forms similar to the eraos-loans reflected in the Attic and Delphic documents. Evidence of this economic activity is found among Jewish communities all over the ancient world, from Egypt to the north shores of the Black Sea. Jewish synagogues had common chests.58 These chests functioned institutionally in ways similar to those in a Roman collegium (area collegii, area communis, arca publica,
ratio publica, respublica collegii), which one or more elected officers of the
association managed.59 Hellenistic private associations also operated a common fund (, ).60 Several pieces of evidence suggest that synagogues used their common chests to redeem their enslaved coreligionists. One source is a vellum fragment from the Egyptian nome of Oxyrhynchos, which contains a legal instrument of manumission of a Jewish maid and her two (or three) children.61 The ransom was paid collectively by the Jewish community of Oxyrhynchos. It is unclear whether the common chest referred to belonged to a single synagogue or to an association of synagogues in the nome. The deed reads:
Translation of manumission. We, Aurelius [ . . . ] of the illustrious and most illustrious city of Oxyrhynchos, and his sister by the same mother Aurelia [ . . . ] daughter of [ . . . ] the former exegetes and senator of the same city, 58. David Seccombe, "Was there Organized Charity in Jerusalem before the Christians," JTS 29 (1978): 140-41; Emil Schrer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.A.D. 135), rev. and ed. Geza Vermes, Fergus Millar, and Matthew Black, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1979), 437; Gildas Hamel, Poverty and Charity in Roman Palestine, First Three Centuries CE., Near Eastern Studies 23 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 218; m. Pe'a8.7; b. B. Bat. 8a-9a; b. B. Mes. 38a; t. B. Mes. 3.9 (Zuck. 376); b. Sanh. 17b; Samuel Krauss, Griechische und lateinische Lehnwrter in Talmud, Midrasch und Targum, pt. 2 (1899; reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964), 516. 59. J.-P. Waltzing, Etude historique sur les corporations professionnelles chez les romains depuis origines jusqu' la chute de l'empire d'occident, (1895-1900; reprint, Bologna: Forni, 1968), vol. 1, 449 and vol. 4, 624-25; P. Habel, "Area," PW 3 (1895): 426; Ettore De Ruggiero, "Arca," in Dizionario epigrfico di antichit romane, vol. 1 (1895; reprint, 1961): 629-31; E. Kornemann, "Collegium," PW 7 (1900): 429-31. 60. E. Kornemann, "," PWSup4 (1924): 938-40; Franz Poland, Geschichte des griechischen Vereinswesens (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1909), 380-83, although Poland confuses the eranosAoan with eranos-c\ub, as Finley points out. 61. P. Oxy. 1205 (ed. A. S. Hunt) = CPJ 3.473, dating to CE. 291; the late date is admittedly problematic for comparison with earlier periods, but the Bosporus inscriptions (discussed below), dating to the first century CE., provide a control. I thank Dale B. Martin for initially introducing me to this important document.
123
with her guardian [ . . . ] the admirable [...], have manumitted and discharged inter amicos our house-born slave Paramon, aged forty years, and
her children [ . . . ] with a scar on the neck, aged ten years, and Jakob, aged
four years, [ . . . ] from all the rights and powers of the owner: fourteen talents of silver having been paid to us for manumission and discharge by the community of the Jews ( ) through Aurelius Dioskoros [ . . . ] and Aurelius Justus, senator of Ono in Syrian Palestine, father of the community [ . . . ]. And, the question being put, we have
acknowledged that we have manumitted and discharged them, and that for
the said manumission and discharge of them we have been paid the abovementioned sum, and that we have no rights at all and no powers over them
from the present day, because we have been paid and have received for them
the above-mentioned money, once and for all, through Aurelius Dioskoros and Aurelius Justus. Transacted in the illustrious and most illustrious city of
Oxyrhynchos [...], in the second consulship of Tiberianus and the first of

Dion, year seven of Imperator Caesar Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus
and year six of Imperator Caesar Marcus Aurelius Valerius Maximianus, Germania, Maximi, Pii, Felices, Augusti: Pharmouthi [ . . . ] nineteenth day, [second hand] [ . . . ] Paramon and her children [ . . . ] and Jakob [ . . . ]
[I witness] the agreement as stated above. I, Aurelius [ . . . ] [wrote for him]

as he is illiterate.
[third hand] Aurelius Theon also called [ . . . ] of the money [ . . . ] piety
[Eusebia?] [ . . . ] rights [ . . . ] of Dioskoros [ . . . ] Justus [ . . . ] the [talents] of silver [ . . . ] manumit [ . . . ] illiterate.62
As the first line indicated, the Greek was a translation of the original Latin document, conforming to the requirement that all Roman legal contracts must be in Latin, even in the Greek-speaking East. The maid had no name; she was called Paramon, a nickname resembling the English pet-name "Fido," indicating her fidelity to her masters, or simply mocking her. This use of the nickname (or the refusal to give a real name to chattel) as a tool for humiliation, dishonor, and (to use the term Orlando Patterson has coined) "social death" of a slave is found in nearly all slave societies, both
ancient and modern.63
Two siblings, Aurelius and his sister Aurelia, have manumitted the fortyyear-old maid Paramon, along with her two children (there may have been a third child mentioned but lost because of lacunae in the vellum fragment). The manumission was inter amicos, a formless procedure by the declara62. P. Oxy. 1205 (text, trans, and commentary in CPJ 3.473); Ross Kraemer, ed., Maenads, Martyrs, Matrons, Monastics: A Sourcebook on Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman World (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 93. 63. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 54-58. The name Paramon itself is an interesting example of the intermingling of Hellenistic manumission terminology in what is clearly a Roman legal document.
124
tion of the master "before friends" who served as witnesses.64 A third party
was involved, namely Aurelius Dioskoros and Aurelius Justus, both of
whom would have been prominent and powerful patrons (Justus was the
son of a decurin from the Syrian-Palestinian town of Ono). These patrons
acted as middlemen who handled the financial transaction of fourteen
silver talents. That the two sibling owners spelled out explicitly in the deed that they will have had no claim to any of the normal rights and powers over the maid Paramon is significant not only from a legal but also a
sociological perspective. Aurelius and Aurelia forfeited their normal rights
to the freedwoman's body and labor. The synagogue gained the maid
Paramon without any strings attached to her former masters.
In this way, the common chest enabled the synagogue to ransom an enslaved Jewish maid and to integrate her and her family into the synagogue community. Whether she was originally Jewish or was converted as
a result of the manumission is unclear. This event might have been a case of
religious recruitment, although this hypothesis is difficult to substantiate with precision. Whether or not there was recruitment, the function of the common chest remains socially significant. This function is unitive, joining
the maid Paramon and her family to the synagogue at Oxyrhynchos. The
release from duties of operae enabled the maid Paramon to have formal,
legal independence from her former (pagan) master. She became legally an
independent freedwoman. A related situation is reflected in the so-called Bosporus inscriptions, which record Hellenistic manumission activities of organized Jewish communities in the Cimmerian Bosporus on the north shore of the Black Sea, and date to the first century CE.65 One fragment concerning the synagogue in Panticapaeum (Kertch) is illustrative of the formulae in the texts. It contains the final clause of a paramon contract. In this deed, a (perhaps)
64. Adolf Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law, TAPhS 43.2 (Philadelphia: The Society, 1953), 576; W. W. Buckland, A Text-Book of Roman Law from Augustus to Justinian, 3rd ed., rev. Peter Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 77, 82; Wiedemann, "Regularity of Manumission," 174. 65. The texts are from several cities in the Bosporus Kingdom: Panticapaeum (Kertch), CII683 (CE. 80), 683a (s. II p.), 683b (s. II p.); Gorgippia, CII690 (CE. 41), 690a (CE. 67/68), 690b (CE. 59); Phanagoria, CII 691 (CE. ?16); in most cases, the inscriptions record a calendric date in Bosporanic eras; Laurence H. Kant, "Jewish Inscriptions in Greek and Latin," ANRW 2.20.2 (1987). 675-76; and they reflect patterns of paramon obligations similar to the Delphic manumission inscriptions; Westermann, Slave Systems, 125. The stones themselves are housed in museums in Russia and were published there under the title Corpus Inscriptionum Regni Bosporani (= CIRB), ed. V. V. Struve, et al. (Moscow-Leningrad: Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1965).
125
Jewish widow named Chreste declared the manumission of her foster slave
Heracles under the co-guardianship of the Jewish community:

In the rein of King Tiberius Julius Rhescuporis, the Pious, friend of the Emperor and the Romans, in the year 377,66 on the twelfth day of the month of
Peritios, I, Chreste, formerly the wife of Drusus, declare in the prayer-house ([]) that my foster slave () Heracles is free once (for all), in accordance with my vow, so that he may not be captured or annoyed by my heirs, and may move about wherever he chooses, without let or hindrance, except for (the obligations toward) the prayer-house regarding subservience [; literally "flattery," perhaps in the sense of obsequium] and remaining in attendance [-; literally "perseverance, patience," referring to paramon service, as in CII 683a below]. (Done) with the approval of
my heirs Heracleides and Heliconias, and with the participation of the community of the Jews in guardianship ([] [] [] ).67
The paramon clause obligated the freedman Heracles to remain at the
prayer-house for [][], perhaps a reference to work as a "handyman."68 The synagogue obtained the privilege of
Heracles's services apparently in return either for a financial gift, in the
form of an eranos-type loan from the synagogal common chest to pay the
manumission price, or for providing a public forum and witnessing confirmation to the transaction, or for both. If Heracles was Jewish, the ceremo-
ny might reflect the synagogue's role in aiding Chreste (who may have
bought this slave in order to manumit him) to fulfill the biblical injunction that mandated Jewish masters to liberate their Jewish slaves in the seventh year of servitude (Exod 21.2-6; Deut 15.12-18).69 If Heracles was not
Jewish, then related biblical commandments may have been at issue, ones
that enjoined Jewish masters to circumcise their male, and otherwise con66. Ca. CE. 80/81; Emil Schrer, "Die Juden im bosporanischen Reiche und die
Gnossenschaften der ," SPAW 12/13 (1897): 201. 67. CII 683 (= CIRB 70). Baruch Lifshitz, "Prolegomenon," Corpus of Jewish Inscriptions: Jewish Inscriptions from the Third Century B.C. to the Seventh Century A.D., vol. 1, Europe, P. Jean-Baptiste Frey, ed., Library of Biblical Studies (New York: Ktav, 1975), 64, corrects the misprinted "" for "" in line 14 of Frey's first edition. 68. See commentary in Lifshitz, "Prolegomenon," 64-65. Benjamin Nadel, "Slavery and Related Forms of Labor on the North Shore of the Euxine in Antiquity," in Actes du colloque 1973 sur l'esclavage, Annales littraires de l'Universit de Besanon 182, Centre de recherches d'histoire ancienne 18 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1976), 214-15, translates [][] of lines 14-15 as "worship and constant attendance," which apparently is a misreading, based upon the erratum in line 14 of Frey's first edition. 69. Julia Ustinovo, "The ThiasoioiTheosHypsistosinTanais," HR 31 (1991): 163.
126
vert their female, non-Jewish slaves (e.g. Gen 17.12,23-27; Exod 12.44).70 That Heracles is called a "foster slave" (; equivalent of Latin alumnus) implies some privileged status within Chreste's household. In Roman private law, alumnus is a conveniently ambiguous term, often referring to either an enslaved foundling infant or a domestic slave subsequently
adopted as a "foster child" by his or her owner. In either case, the legal
sources clearly reveal that close bonds of affections could be assumed between "foster-parent" and alumnus, and that such attachments resulted in preferential status from the householder.71 In this document, Heracles receives from Chreste special treatment similar to a Roman alumnus.72 In his discussion of this text, Benjamin Nadel suggests that the synagogue paid for Heracles's manumission.73 William Westermann concludes from this paramon clause that the slave must have been a Gentile who was
converted to Judaism as part of the manumission procedure, although

Franz Bmer expresses doubts whether we can know this for sure.74 If Westermann is correct, then here is an example of religious recruitment, manumission paid from a common chest operating as a conscious tool of mission. I, however, agree, with Bmer that the evidence is too meager to prove this hypothesis. In any event, the paramon obligations do seem to be in return for some sort of financial and/or legal arrangement of Jews
70. Bernard J. Bamberger, Proselytism in the Talmudic Period (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1939), 124-32; Paula Fredriksen, "Judaism, the Circumcision of Gentiles, and Apocalyptic Hope: Another Look at Galatians 1 and 2," JTS 42 (1991):
560 n. 72.
71. Beryl Rawson, "Children in the Roman Familia," in idem, ed., The Family in Ancient Rome: New Perspectives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 173-86; Hanne S. Nielsen, "Alumnus: a Term of Relation Denoting Quasi-Adoption," C & M 38 (1987): 141-88; John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1988), 116-21.
72. The text does not state that the ceremony itself made Heracles Chreste's "foster child," but that he was her before the manumission act ( [] [] ). Therefore, the Hellenistic use of meaning a "fictive adoption" in Attic (and Delphic) manumission texts (C. Bradford Welles, "Manumission and Adoption," RlDA 2d ser. 3 [1949]: 507-20) does not seem to be at
issue here.
73. Benjamin Nadel, "Actes d'affranchissement des esclaves du royaume de bosphore et les origines de la manumissio in ecclesia,'" in Wolff, Symposion 1971, 284-85. 74. Westermann, Slave Systems, 126 n. 100; see also Schrer, "Juden im bosporanischen Reiche," 201-3; Erwin R. Goodenough, "The Bosporus Inscriptions to the Most High God," JQR 47 (1957): 221; Adolf Deissmann, Light from the Ancient Near East: The New Testament Illustrated by Recently Discovered Texts of the GraecoRoman World, 2d ed., trans. R. M. Strachan (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1927), 32122. Bmer, Untersuchungen, 104-5.
127
to redeem fellow Jews.75 For these services, the Jewish synagogue in Pan-
ticapaeum obtained a share of the paramon rights (the freedman would

"remain in attendance"), thus granting Heracles an alternative source of patronage. Group patronage from the Synagogal common chest freed Heracles from formal, legal dependence upon his former master Chreste and protected him from any paramon claims by her heirs, Heracleides and
Heliconias.
Another Jewish inscription discovered in the Euxine city of Pan-
ticapaeum provides additional evidence. It records the liberation of a certain slave named Elpia and was drafted with the same paramon formula
that occurs in other Bosporan manumission deeds. The document reads: "I release in the synagogue Elpia the son(?) of my slave, bred in my house (); he shall remain undisturbed and unassailable by any of my heirs, except for (his duty) to visit regularly the synagogue ( ); the community of the Jews and the Godfearers(?) will be (together with me) guardian (of the enfranchised) (- ' -)."76 This deed is similar to the other Panticapaeum deed (concerning Chreste and
her slave Heracles). Elpia, a (Greek equivalent of Latin alumnus),

is manumitted without paramon obligations to either his former master
or any of his former master's heirs. The freedman Elpia, however, must
remain with the synagogue, observing the requirement "to visit (it) regu-
larly" (; as we saw above, the nominal form of the same

word appears in manumission deed of Heracles). This "visitation" is a
reference to unspecified work duties, perhaps those of a "handyman."77

These paramon services were given in return for the synagogue's active involvement in the manumission ceremony and its corporate patronage of
the freedman.78
75. Nadel, "Slavery on the North Shore," 217; idem, "Actes d'affranchissement," 270-76; cf. Shim'on Applebaum, Jews and Greeks in Ancient Cyrene, SJLA 28 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979), 158, for suggestions of similar practices in North Africa. 76. CII 683a (= CIRB 71); trans, and commentary in Lifshitz, "Prolegomenon," 65-67. The editors of CIRB date the inscription to the second century CE. 77. Pace Lifshitz, "Prolegomenon," 65, who interprets too exclusively in the religious sense of prayer duties. 78. One might argue that the inscription seems rather to suggest a benefaction to the synagogue and that paramon services were given in return for nothing. Yet one must remember that a heavy moral and legal obligation towards the one responsible for manumission was routinely placed upon a freedman in the ancient world. It is, therefore, more plausible to suppose that the stipulated obligation of paramon services to the synagogue implies that the synagogue had some important role in effecting Elpia's
manumission.
128
Redemption of captured, enslaved Jews by synagogues continued into

Rabbinic times. The Talmud calls it a mitzvah.79 The Jewish evidence of the
vellum fragment from Oxyrhynchos and the Bosporan inscriptions, together with the Hellenistic evidence of the Attic and Delphic manumission documents, support the argument that corporate manumission was practiced throughout the East. This material provides background and a social
context against which to read Ignatius.80
3. CORPORATE MANUMISSION OF SLAVES IN ANCIENT CHRISTIANITY
Pol. 4.3 is not an isolated example of corporate manumission being practiced by early Christian congregations. Many other Christian sources discuss such public displays of generosity from ecclesiastical common chests.
In these sources, the three categories of slave, captive, and prisoner become blurred, with all sharing the imagery of chains, shackles, bondage, and need for redemption.81 This early Christian paraenesis includes calls to
both individual and corporate acts of charity.
One example, found in the Shepherd of Hermas, presents the "proper

way" for individual Christians to spend their personal funds.82 In the third
part of the Shepherd of Hermas, the Similitudes, the author advises personally affluent Christians: "Therefore instead of lands, purchase afflicted
79. B. Git.46b; also, m. Git. 4.9; m. Seqal. 2.5; t. Git. 3.4 (Lieberman, 255); t. Seqal. 1.12 (Lieberman, 204); cf. Josephus, Vit. 75 $419; Boaz Cohen, "Civil Bondage in Jewish and Roman Law," in Louis Ginzberg Jubilee Volume, Engl. ed. (New York: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1945), 127; Solomon Zeitlin, "Slavery during
the Second Commonwealth and the Tannaitic Period," in Solomon Zeitlin's Studies in
the Early History of Judaism, vol. 4, History of Early Talmudic Law (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1978), 209 (originally published in JQR 53 [1962-63]: 209); G. Fuks, "Where have all the Freedmen Gone? On an Anomaly in the Jewish GraveInscriptions from Rome," JJS 36 (1985): 30. 80. Nadel, "Actes d'affranchissement," 284-85. 81. Adolf von Harnack, Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten, 4th ed., vol. 1 (Leipzig: J. C Hinrichs, 1924), 190. 82. The Shepherd of Hermas is generally considered to be an apocalyptic text written in the early second century at Rome; David Hellholm, Das Visionenbuch des Hermas als Apokalypse: Formgeschichtliche und texttheoretische Studien zu einer literarischen Gattung, ConBNT 13.1 (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1980); Carolyn Osiek, "The Genre and Function of the Shepherd of Hermas," in Adela Yarbro Collins, ed., Early Christian Apocalypticism: Genre and Social Setting, Semeia 36 (Decatur, GA: Scholars Press, 1986), 113-21; Peter Lampe, Die stadtrmischen Christen in den ersten beiden Jahrhunderten, WUNT 18,2d ser. (Tbingen: J. C B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1989), 187-88.
129
souls as each one is able, and look after widows and orphans."83 The
passage is paraenetic, and connects this purchasing of souls with other duties of Christian charity. The Shepherd additionally encourages corporate charity by the church as a whole: "to minister to widows, to look after orphans and the destitute, to redeem from distress the slaves of God ( ). . . ."84 As Carolyn Osiek argues, the most acceptable interpretation of this sentence is that "it refers to the moral tradition and pious praxis of ransoming prisoners."85 The precise nature of the imprisonment is unclear, partially because the social patterns of
slavery, captivity, and detention after arrest were not unambiguously differentiated in early Christian paraenesis.86 The Apostolic Constitutions provides additional evidence.87 Using the authority of Solomon, its author exhorts Christian congregations to offer corporate aid to the needy. The passage reads: "Therefore, maintain and clothe those who are in want from the righteous labor of the faithful. And such sums of money as are collected from them in the manner aforesaid, appoint to be laid out in the redemption of the saints, the deliverance of slaves ( ), and of captives, and of prisoners, and of those that have been condemned by tyrants to single combat and death in the name of Christ."88 The Constitutions continues, exhorting believers to perform individual acts of personal charity. They are "not to go to any of those public meetings, unless to purchase a slave, and save a soul (or life; ), and at the same time to buy such other things as
suit their necessities."89 Here is a clear case of individual Christians being

advised to visit the urban chattel markets, to approach slave dealers, and to buy slaves, perhaps for conversion.90 The clause "save a life/soul" is admit83. Herrn, sim. 1.8 (GCS 48.1.47). 84. Herrn, mand. 8.10 (GCS 48.1.35).
(1981): 372; arguing correctly against Bartchy, , 101, who places exclusive emphasis on slavery at the expense of the greater metaphor of imprisonment
generally. 86. Osiek, "Ransom," 373.
85. Carolyn Osiek, "The Ransom of Captives: Evolution of a Tradition," HTR 74
87. The const, app. is a composite work dated to around 380; Marcel Metzger, Les 88. Const, app. 4.9.2 (SC 329.186); cf. 5.1-2 (SC 329.202-4). The author(s) of the Didascalia Apostolorum, which was compiled in the third century and served as a source for the const, app., retains the meaning "to redeem," translating Greek into Syriac prq; didasc. ap. 19 (CSCO 407.184). I thank David B. Brakke for translating
the Syriac for me. 89. Const, app. 2.62.4 (SC 320.336).
90. Harnack, Mission und Ausbreitung, vol. 1,189-90.
Constitutions Apostoliques, vol. 1, SC 320 (Paris: Cerf, 1985), 54-62.
130
tedly ambiguous. It may simply have the ordinary sense of bodily safety
and survivalthe slave would be spared death.91 Yet the clause may also reflect traditions similar to those behind Jas 5.20, which interpret "saving a life" ( ) in the technical theological, Christian sense of rescu-
ing (and converting) a sinner's inner soulthe slave would become a Christian. I find the latter interpretation more plausible, and argue for the
translation "save a soul" in the technical sense of conversion.92
In his Social Structure of the Early Christian Communities, the Marxist scholar Dimitris Kyrtatas denies that the "purchasing" in this passage
implies manumission, or that it has anything to do with slavery. He argues,
instead, that the author of the Constitutions refers to "illegally captured

free[-born] Christians."93 Yet Kyrtatas's overarching agenda aims to deny an old thesis, chiefly expressed and made popular within and outside academic circles by the French ecclesiastical historian Paul Allard, that ancient Christianity advocated all-out emancipation (n.b. not manumission) of every slave and abolition of the entire institution of slavery.94 This thesis has largely been abandoned by scholars of ancient slavery, in part because Westermann so successfully refuted it in his Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity.95 Ancient Christians did not hold abolitionist tendencies, but considered slavery a natural, integral part of human civilization; they used slavery as a fundamental metaphor for the believer's proper relation to God. By "abolition" I refer exclusively to the moral and political conviction (originating out of the Enlightenment) that slavery, both as an institution and an ideology, is repugnant to the aims of all civilized and
91. Cf. Luke 17.33. The Evangelist, however, plays upon the ambiguity between the ordinary, everyday meaning and the technical, Christian interpretation of . 92. This interpretation is also advanced in a footnote in ANF 7(1886; reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1982), 424 n. 9; Metzger, Constitutions Apostoliques, 337, translates Greek into French "vie," not "me." 93. Dimitris J. Kyrtatas, The Social Structure of the Early Christian Communities
(New York: Verso Press, 1987), 68.
94. Paul Allard, Les esclaves chrtiens, depuis les premiers temps de l'glise jusqu' la
fin de la domination romaine en occident, 6th d. (Paris: Victor Lecoffre, 1914), xiii et
passim; who, in turn, was influenced by Henri Wallon, Histoire de l'esclavage dans l'antiquit, 2d ed., 3 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1879), whose monograph and personal legislative efforts pressed the abolition of slavery in the French colonies during the period that led up to the 1848 revolution. By "emancipation" I mean the liberation of slaves done without observance of any manumission procedures and regardless of the slaveholders' interests. The terms "emancipation" and "manumission" ought to be used with control. (Technically, a Roman householder "emancipated" [emancipo] a son or daughter from his patria potestas, but "manumitted" [manumiti] a slave.) 95. Westermann, Slave Systems, 152-53; Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideolgy-> 14-15. See also Ramsay MacMullen, "What Difference Did Christianity Make?"
Historia 35 (1986): esp. 322-25.
131
just societies of human beings.96 Rather than serving as an example of early Christian abolitionist activity (Allard's thesis) or having nothing at all to
do with manumission (Kyrtatas's position), the situation in the Constitu-
tions appears more analogous to what happened to the Jewish maid at Oxyrhynchos and what Ignatius found threatening in Asia Minor churches. Thus, it provides further testimony that Christians ransomed
slaves as a conscious tool of mission.
Justin Martyr provides a third illustration. In his first Apology, a petition (libellus) addressed to the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius and his sons Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, Justin sketches the institution of a common chest and use of its funds for corporate charity. He writes, "And
they who are wealthy, and willing, give what each thinks fit; and the collection is deposited with the president, who supports the orphans and
widows, and those who are in want, through sickness or any other cause, and those who are in chains ( - ), and the stranger sojourning
among us, and, in a word, takes care of all who are in need."97 Justin describes churches performing corporate acts of charity, using their common chests to ransom "those in chains." Whether "those in chains" refers
to prisoners or captives or slaves is unclear. Most likely Justin follows

common early Christian paraenesis by blending together all three catego-
ries of shackled persons in his description of church redemption of the

imprisoned.98 These examples show that exhortations to, and descriptions of, both
corporate and individual public displays of generosity to the imprisoned

are common in early Christian literature. These particular calls to, and acts of, public charity are different from that displayed by Athenian, Hellenistic, or Roman private associations, which seem more to give mutual aid to their own than to offer unsolicited help to recruit into their group outside widows, orphans, slaves, and other kinless people.99 The manumission of
96. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 422-45; idem, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 107-16.
97. Just. 1 apol. 67.6 (Goodspeed, 75-6). 98. Cf. Osiek, "Ransom," 374-75.
99. G. Uhlhorn, Christian Charity in the Ancient Church, trans. Sophia Taylor (Edinburgh: T.& T. Clark, 1883), 8 et passim, argues for a fundamental distinction between Greco-Roman liberalitas and Christian caritas; Harnack, Mission und Ausbreitung, vol. 1, 170-220, calls Uhlhorn "unfair to paganism" (p. 170-71 n. 3). Harnack, nonetheless, still agrees with the pagan/Christian distinction; as does Hamel, Poverty, 21920; who follows Hands, Charities, 3561. See also the earlier work by Hendrick Bolkestein, Wohlttigkeit und Armenpflege im vorchristlichen Altertum: Ein Beitrag
zum Problem "Moral und Gesellschaft" (Utrecht: A. Oosthoek, 1939).
132
slaves operated for these Christians as a conscious tool of mission to gain

converts. It was still practiced in the time of Augustine.100 Further exam-
ples of Christians ransoming "those imprisoned" include the martyr-acts of Pionius (ca. CE. 300), which describes Christians in Smyrna sneaking
supplies to the runaway (or banished) slave Sabina, and offering funds to
buy her freedom from her pagan mistress.101 Even critics of Christianity
noticed its ransoming of the imprisoned. Luc-an of Samosata satirizes such
Christian charitable contributions to redeem a prisoner and depicts how a

charlatan like Peregrinus could easily bamboozle these stupid Christians out of their money.102 Ignatius stands alone among Christian authors (and ironically, sides with Luc-an) in his criticism of ransoming taken too far.
4. IGNATIUS'S PROBLEM
Why was Ignatius against this practice? Perhaps he was concerned that
congregations might offer ransom money for himself, releasing him from his chains and thereby denying his opportunity to "attain God" through the mouths of the beasts in the Roman arena.103 Yet, given that Ignatius in Smyrn. 6.2 attacks his opponents on the grounds that they show no concern for the widowed, orphaned, distressed, or imprisoned, the issue de-
mands further consideration.104 When compared to similar Christian

charity lists, this type of exhortation would normally include, not exclude, financial help to ransom those enslaved, especially given the common association between prisoners and slaves in early Christian paraenesis. Ignatius's restriction of the corporate manumission of slaves differs signifi100. Henry Chadwick, "New Letters of St. Augustine," JTS 34 (1983): 432-33. On Augustine and slavery, see now Richard Klein, Die Sklaverei in der Sicht der Bischfe Ambrosius und Augustinus, Forschungen zur antiken Sklaverei 20 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1988), and the recent critical review by Andrew Lenox-Conyingham, JTS 43 (1992):
255-58.
101. Mart. Pion. 9.3-4 (Musurillo, 138); Robert M. Grant, Early Christianity and Society: Seven Studies (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977), 93; Kyrtatas, Social Structure, 67. The passage suggests that Sabina was already a Christian when she was cast out on the mountains and when other Christians offered her help. Thus the eventual manumission was not for the purpose of mission in this case, but to save a fellow
Christian.
102. Lucian, Peregr. 1213; Osiek, "Ransom," 37576. For Lucian's knowledge of Ignatius's letter to Polycarp, and his possible parody of the letter in Peregrinus, see Schoedel, Ignatius, 279. On the verbal parallels between Lucian and Ignatius, see Betz, Lukian, 109 n. 9; C. P. Jones, Culture and Society in Lucian (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1986), 122.
103. I owe this observation to Prof. Robert M. Grant during the discussion that followed this paper's oral presentation at the NAPS conference.
104. Maier, Social Setting, 154-55.
133
cantly from other Christian authors, and seems odd in the light of what he
writes about the importance of charity to "those imprisoned" in his correspondence with Polycarp's Smyrnaean congregations.1051 want to be clear that Ignatius does not condemn corporate manumission by churches outright, but instead aims to control (what he perceives as) its abuse. Why were slaves a special case for Ignatius ? One might surmise that the issue was
simply that common chest manumission should be at the initiative of the

bishop or those with wealth as a freely chosen benefaction rather than at the initiative of the slave, which was considered improper and selfcentered. I, however, propose a further explanation in the Greco-Roman commonplace of slave recruitment. Classical authors often warned that groups recruiting slaves presented dangers to unity, especially in times of political upheaval. In the Roman late republic, Cicero had warned of slaves being recruited into the violent gangs (or collegia) under the leadership of the populist tribune Clodius. Cicero's
language uses the commonplace in Greco-Roman rhetoric of the polarities

of the faithful slave and the unfaithful slave.106 Clodius, Cicero writes, enlists (conscribo) slaves as a military commander recruits soldiers.107 He
claims that Clodius "would have made our slaves his own freedmen."108
These charges against Clodius echo similar charges brought against another threat to order in RomeCatiline and his conspiracy. Plutarch reports that many had "urged Catiline to set the slaves free and to march them on
Rome." The Greek biographer further writes that the evening of the attack
was fixed to coincide with "one of the nights of the Saturnalia," when slaves typically enjoyed an extraordinary degree of license.109 Roman historians differ on the historical accuracy of this passage.110 Whatever its historicity, the rhetoric of the passage nevertheless worked because it
105. Pace Martin, Slavery as Salvation, 8 ; Kyrtatas, Social Structure, 66; Lawrence P. Jones, "A Case Study in 'Gnosticism': Religious Responses to Slavery in the Second Century CE." (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1988), 132; and Davis, Problem of Slavery, 87, who all view Ign. Pol. 4.3 incorrectly as an example of some "normative" early Christian attitude against the manumission of slaves. 106. On the faithful slave ropos, see VaL Max. 6.8; Veil. Pat. 2.67.2; Joseph Vogt, Ancient Slavery and the Ideal of Man, trans. Thomas Wiedemann (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1975), 129-45. 107. Cic. dorn. 54; red. in sen. 33.
108. Cic. Mil. 89: "servos nostros libertos suos fecisset." 109. Plut. vit. Cic. 18.3; Zvi Yavetz, "The Failure of Catiline's Conspiracy," Historia
12 (1963): 494.
110. J. Annequin, "Esclaves et affranchis dans la conjuration de Catilina," in Actes du colloque 1971 sur l'esclavage, Annales littraires de l'Universit de Besanon 40,
Centre de recherches d'histoire ancienne 6 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1972), 206; K. R.
Bradley, "Slaves and the Conspiracy of Catiline," CP 73 (1978): 329 . 5.
134
played upon very real fears of slave recruitment in the minds of Roman
slaveholders.
Other ancient authors exploited this rhetorical topos to point to the dangers, especially during violent times of political upheaval, of slaves being lured away from their masters by manumission offers from opposing factions. Plutarch reports that after Sulla's capture of Rome, many urged
Cinna "to call the slaves to arms under the promise of manumission."111 Strabo says that Aristonicus "assembled a large number of resourceless people, and also of slaves, invited with the promise of manumission" in his revolt to seize the throne of Pergamum.112 Appian narrates how aristocratic Romans from the senatorial and equestrian orders recruited slaves, especially slaves of their political enemies, to take their respective sides in
factional violence of the Roman republican civil wars. Some slaves, however, did not accept such manumission offers.113 These few remained loyal
and received praise in the narrative for being moral exempta of "faithful
slaves."114
From these examples, a rhetorical pattern emerges. Resorting to recruit-
ment of followers by promising to manumit slaves, who owed then operae

to someone other than their master, revealed a city and state turned upside down and in great danger of collapse. In his slandering of Clodius and the Clodian collegia, Cicero skillfully crafted his language to exploit the fear of slave recruitment by manumission offers. This language would have had a stunning effect, especially to senators who had fresh memories of Spartacus, who only thirteen years previously had ravaged Italy in a war that took three years and ten consular legions to suppress.115 Understanding this rhetorical commonplace in the aftermath of Spartacus makes the negative tone of Ignatius against the abuse of corporate manumission in house churches more intelligible. I argue that Ignatius wanted the Christian slave to imitate the model of
the "faithful slave" in both the Christian and pagan sense. Such calls to
loyalty may also reflect Ignatius's own interpretation of 1 Cor 7.21, the
111. Plut. vit. Mar. 42.2; cf. 35.5; 41.2; 43.3; Kathleen O'Brien Wicker, "Mulierum
virtutes," in Betz, Plutarch's Ethical Writings, 125.
112. Strabo 14.1.38; for further examples, see F. W. Walbank, The Hellenistic World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 167-68, 170, 173. 113. PaceBartchy,, 110-ll;idem, "Slavery (Greco-Roman)," in David Noel Freedman, ed., The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 6 (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 71 (stated less strongly), who argues incorrectly that it was impossible for a
slave to refuse manumission.
114. App. be 1.26; 1.54; 1.58; 1.65; Bradley, Slaves and Masters, 85. 115. On Spartacus, see now Keith R. Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World, 140 B.C.-70 B.C. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 83-101.
135
final clause of which is both a brachylogy and ambiguous in Greek (
)316 The Antiochene bishop possibly understood Paul as exhorting

Christian slaves to refuse tempting liberation offers and to remain in their
servile positions for the duration of the present eschatological turmoil.117

Ignatius was a Paulinist, who had clear knowledge of 1 Corinthians; Rom.
4.3 has direct verbal parallels to 1 Cor 7.22. In Pol. 4.3, the bishop sought to clarify and interpret 1 Cor 7.21 for Polycarp and his Smyrnaean congregations.118 In Rom. 4.3, Ignatius sought to clarify and interpret the Pauline passage for himself and the Roman congregations. The bishop writes, "I
am a convict; those ones (i.e. the apostles Peter and Paul) were free, but I am a slave even up to now. But if I suffer, I will become the freedman of
Jesus Christ, and will arise free in him. Now as one bound I am learning to desire nothing (- -)."119 Ignatius calls himself an enslaved "convict" (), with legal imagery of a servus poenae (penal slave), a free person who became a slave (and lost any citizenship) through condemnation with capital punishment, typically sentenced to labor in the public works, the mines, or gladiatorial troops.120 But by exhibiting loyalty to his true, divine master, the bishop hoped to gain "spiritual" manumission as a reward. Ignatius aspired not to break out of his imprisonment by questionable means and faced his capital punishment as a "faithful
slave." He learned "as one bound (by chains, being a penal slave) to desire
116. Bartchy, . The ambiguity of has been recognized by biblical interpreters at least since John Chrysostom, horn. 19 in I Cor. 5 (PG 61.164); horn, in Philm. argumentum (PG 62.773); serm. 5 in Gen. 1 (PG 54.666), who felt the need to clarify Paul's Greek as meaning "slaves must remain slaves." On brachylogy, see Herbert Weir Smyth, Greek Grammar, 2d ed., rev. Gordon M. Messing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 674-77 3017-3018; F. Blass and A. Debrunner, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, trans, and rev. from the 9th10th German ed. by Robert W. Funk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 255-56 483; Norbert Baumert, Ehelosigkeit und
Ehe im Herrn: Eine Neuinterpretation von 1 Kor 7, 2d ed., FB 47 (Wrzburg: Echter, 1986), 451-52.
117. PaceBaumert, Ehelosigkeit, 134; Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1987), 317; Stanley E. Porter, Verbal Aspect in the Greek of the New Testament with Reference to Tense and Mood, Studies in Biblical Greek 1 (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 357-58; and Gregory W. Dawes, "'But if you can gain your freedom' (1 Corinthians 7:17-24)," CBQ54(1990): 693-94, who all follow Bartchy's inaccurate assumption that slaves in antiquity could
never turn down a manumission offer.
118. Meinhold, "Die Ethik des Ignatius von Antiochien," in idem, Studien zu Ignatius, 75-77. 119. Rom. 4.3 (SAQ 2.1.1.99 = SC 10.112).
120. Buckland, Law of Slavery, 277-78; Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary, 705-6; J. A. Crook, Law and Life of Rome, 90 B.C.-A.D. 212, Aspects of Greek and Roman Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 57, 272-73.
136
(-) nothing" worldly, even potential ransom money that might set him free (similar to how Socrates refused to let his associates ransom him out of prison). Rom. 4.3 uses metaphorical language based upon a social actuality and makes apparent what the bishop's concerns in Pol. 4.3 were.
He did not want Christian slaves to desire to be freed out of the common
chest, a policy that he extended even to his own situation as a servus

poenae.
Although the corporate manumission of slaves was a common practice in early Christianity, Ignatius saw it as posing three dangers to his episcopal authority. The first danger was the intrusion of self-seeking initiates into congregations. Freeborn Christians could have rejected baptized freedmen, who sought conversion only for the money, as unwelcomed "slaves of appetite/desire." The resultant internal strife would have threatened unity, which Ignatius so passionately strove for in his letters. The second danger was pagan slander against Christianity and its gospel.121 Even the rumor that churches corporately sponsored the manumissions of slaves for recruitment purposes could have been seen as subversive by society. Ignatius
exploited the topos of slave recruitment as an apologetic stratagem to

deflect potential criticism by non-Christians that churches as a group regularly lured slaves away from pagan masters. Pagan slaves may have been attracted to wealthy congregations in the hope that they would (later) be manumitted.122 The third danger was competition for members among house churches. Without unity and episcopal control over the common chest, only rich (or worse, "heretical") house churches could have afforded to buy members through corporate manumission.123 Ignatius writes of the dangers caused by desertion in times of crises with another, related image. This other image concerns army loyalty. He exhorts, "Listen to the bishop, so that God may also listen to you. I am the expiation of those subordinate to the bishop, presbyters, and deacons; and may I obtain my lot with them
121. Cf. Trail. 8.2 (SAQ 2.1.1.95 = SC 10.100): "Do not give a pretext to the Gentiles, so that the congregation in God may not be slandered because of a few fools. For woe be it to the one through whom my name is slandered among some by foolishness."
122. There is some evidence that the churches to which Ignatius wrote were relatively wealthy. They had common chests large enough to make charity to widows, the distressed and imprisoned (and slaves) a key issue. A further indication of comparative wealth is that the Philadelphian congregations even had archives ( ); Phil 8.2 (SAQ 2.1.1.104 = SC 10.126). On the relative affluence of Polycarp and his Smyrnaean association of house churches, see Maier, Social Setting, 156. 123. I use the admittedly anachronistic term " heretical" only as a heuristic marker to point out second-century Christian believers considered errant by Ignatius, without making a theological value judgment over whether Ignatius or his opponents expressed a more genuine expression of Christian piety.
137
in God. Toil together with one another. Compete together. Race together. Suffer together. Bunk together. Rise together as God's managerial slaves, attendants, and servants. Be pleasing to whom you are enlisted as a soldier,
from whom you also receive your wages; let none of you be found a
deserter."124 The military metaphors reinforce Ignatius's wider theme of unity. Soldiers must remain loyal to their army commander from whom they receive their military pay. Slaves, likewise, must display fidelity to the
bishop's house church and not be lured away by cash offers of liberation by
other unauthorized (and to Ignatius's mind, "heretical") house
churches.125
According to Ignatius, the ultimate authority over the metropolitan

common chest was the bishop, together with the colleges of both presbyters
and deacons. I envisage the actual social setting as involving many individual house churches, each with their own particular common chests, liturgical assemblies, and ecclesiastical leaders.126 Ignatius's goal was to consolidate control over these various house churches and to create one common
chest. The Antiochene bishop assumed an adversarial relationship between himself and errant congregations (and their leaders), whom he de-
clined to mention even by name.127 This rhetorical tactic of no-naming plays an important role also in Cicero to indicate his hostility and distance from opponents.128 No-naming of enemies denies them legitimacy. The bishop's concern was to increase control and solidarity among house
churches that constituted the Christian metropolitan community.129 By controlling the purse-strings, and by denying his opponents' legitimacy to authority, Ignatius attempted to pull individual house church operations in the city of Antioch under his own administrative umbrella. He instructs Polycarp to do likewise in Smyrna. There are other examples of Ignatius trying to consolidate financial and other matters under his own authority as bishop, and away from local house churches. Ignatius demands control over liturgical rituals and views only those sacraments (such as the Eucharist, baptism, and agap) valid that are administered by the bishop or by someone he appoints. 13 He also
124. Pol. 6.1-2 (SAQ 2.1.1.112 = SC 10.150-52). 125. Also, there may have been wealthy "heretical" Christians vying for power within house churches loyal to the bishop.
126. See note 7 above.
127. Smyrn. 5.3 (SAQ 2.1.1.107 = SC 10.136). 128. J. N. Adams, "Conventions of Naming in Cicero," CQ 28 (1978): 163-64. 129. Maier, Social Setting, 154. 130. Eph. 20.2 (SAQ 2.1.1.88 = SC 10.76); PhId. 4 (SAQ 2.1.1.103 = SC 10.122); Smyrn. 7 and 8 (SAQ 2.1.1.108 = SC 10.138-40); and probably Eph. 13.1 (SAQ 2.1.1.86 = SC 10.68); cited in Cyril C. Richardson, "The Church in Ignatius of Anti-
138
asserts that the license to marry belongs only to the bishop, perhaps with a stern eye cast toward ascetics.131 Ignatius exclaims that vows of celibacy
must be revealed only to the bishop, and must not become a source of boasting.132 He dictates that corporate generosity in the name of the church, such as common chest payments to widows and orphans (and slaves, I argue), must go exclusively through the bishop. Financial matters must be administered out of the episcopal, city-wide common fund, which
presumably was collected into a strongbox and locked safely in a room of
the bishop's own house church. Corporate payments should absolutely not come out of other, local house church treasuries without episcopal authorization.133 Ignatius commands that only the bishop can summon official church councils, employ ecclesiastical letter couriers, sign letters of commendation, and elect authorized ambassadors to visit other churches.134 He denies anyone liturgical, business, or any other ecclesiastical power without episcopal consent.135 Ignatius even denies that recalcitrant house churches can claim the holy moniker "church."136 He curses such un-
authorized congregations as "serving the devil."137 From these examples,

one can see that Ignatius attempts to consolidate and legitimate his author-
ity over all areas of Christian life, including prayer, fellowship, creed, organization, correspondence, and titular nomenclature.
But what exactly was going on in the churches where slaves were being
freed "out of the common chest"? In answering this question, I am trying
och," JR 17 (1937): 434-35. Eric G. Jay, "From Presbyter-Bishops to Bishops and Presbyters: Christian Ministry in the Second Century," SecCent 1 (1981): 13738; Maier, Social Setting, 148, 154. 131. Pol. 5.2 (SAQ 2.1.1.112 = SC 10.150); Hermann J. Vogt, "Ignatius von Antiochien ber den Bischof und seine Gemeinde," TQ 158 (1978): 24-25. 132. Pol. 5.2 (SAQ 2.1.1.112 = SC 10.150); Christine Trevett, "Prophecy and AntiEpiscopal Activity: A Third Error Combated by Ignatius?" JEH 34 (1983): 7-9, 11. 133. Pol. 4.1 (SAQ2.1.1.111 = SC 10.148); Richardson, "Church in Ignatius," 439. 134. Pol. 7.2 (SAQ 2.1.1.112-13 = SC 10.152); Smyrn. 11.2-3 (SAQ 2.1.1.109 = SC 10.140-42); Richardson, "Church in Ignatius," 439. On the letter as a political instrument in ancient Christianity, see the recent discussion in Koester, "Writings and the Spirit," 356-64. 135. Smyrn. 8.1 (SAQ 2.1.1.108 = SC 10.138); Patrick Burke, "The Monarchical Episcopate at the End of the First Century," JES 7 (1970): 507-8. 136. Trail. 3.1 (SAQ 2.1.1.93 = SC 10.96); cf. Magn. 4 (SAQ 2.1.1.89 = SC 10.82); Maier, Social Setting, 165-66. The term "catholic church" ( ) appears for the first time in early Christian literature in Smyrn. 8.2 (SAQ 2.1.1.108 = SC 10.138), yet it cannot be understood as meaning "orthodox." Rather, Ignatius coins the term to contrast his episcopal churches from other, unauthorized assemblies; Schoedel, Ignatius, 243-44; Koester, "Writings and the Spirit," 360 n. 29. 137. Smyrn. 9.1 (SAQ 2.1.1.108 = SC 10.140); Richardson, "Church in Ignatius," 436; Maier, Social Setting, 174-75.
139
to construct a more plausible context than what previous commentators have thus far provided. Pol. 4.3 could reflect at least four distinct phenomena, each with differing legal consequences and social implications. In one
scenario, churches were buying slaves outright and subsequently manumit-
ting them; church ownership of slaves is attested well into the late antique and Byzantine periods.138 In this case, freedmen obligations would have
been owed to the church. In the second scenario, churches were offering payment to individual, private owners as an incentive to manumit particu-
lar slaves recently baptized by the congregation. The freedmen, in this case,
would still have been held to obligations to their former masters. In the
third scenario, churches were ransoming slaves with the guarantee that the
former master, as a result, would have forfeited any future claims upon the freedman's body and labor in legal language similar to the Oxyrhynchos vellum fragment concerning the maid Paramone's manumission. These freedmen would have become legally independent of their former masters
and would have been indebted to the house church that ransomed them. In
the fourth scenario, churches were providing a public assembly with witnessed recognition of some Hellenistic or Roman manumission ceremony,
in situations comparable to the Jewish Bosporus inscriptions. The social implications of this fourth hypothetical case are difficult to judge. Although slaves of non-Romans were manumitted with local customs, the administrative complications for formal manumission by a Roman citizen (that is, manumissio vindicta before a magistrate) were great.139 The for-
mal Roman ceremony was always at the pleasure of the magistrate, normally the provincial governor touring local assize centers in the region. As
a consequence, a slave might have had to wait several months after a

manumission promise had been given until the governor would have been available to officiate, assuming the magistrate even expressed a willingness to perform the ceremony at all. In addition, Roman slaveowners might not have been inclined to take the added time, effort, and expense of travel to a provincial assize center.140 Given these difficulties, it is quite understandable why, in the Roman imperial period, informal manumission forms,
such as ceremonies "before friends" as witnesses (manumissio inter amiUS. Greg.-M. ep. 6.12 (PL 77.804); Gervase Corcoran, "The Christian Attitude to Slavery in the Early Church," Milltown Studies 13 (1984): 9; Raphael Taubenschlag, The Law of Greco-Roman Egypt in the Light of the Papyri: 332 B.C-640 A.D., 2d ed. (Warsaw: Panstowowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1955), 69 n. 14; cf. P. Oxy. 2.673 ( = Naphtali Lewis and Meyer Reinhold, Roman Civilization: Selected Readings, vol. 2, The Empire, 3rd ed. [New York: Columbia University Press, 1990], 569-70). 139. Buckland, Text-Book of Roman Law, 73-74; Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary,
577.
140. Bradley, Slaves and Masters, 101-2.
140
cos), became more common than those involving formal, magisterial procedures. After Constantine, the church developed its own version of infor-
mal Roman manumission, called manumissio in ecclesia.141 Perhaps Pol.

4.3 reflects an earlier version of this or some related Hellenistic ceremo-
ny.142 It is difficult to state with precision which one of these four distinct
phenomena is reflected in Pol. 4.3. More likely, the passage covers a broad
range of activities, including combinations of some or all of the above.
What one can say for sure is that whatever the particulars, corporate
manumission became a burning issue for Ignatius. Private, individual
forms of manumission do not appear to have concerned him, however, at

least not in his extant letters.
This urgent call to restrict corporate manumission belongs to Ignatius's
wider concern for unity. Local neighborhood house churches were providing funds out of their common chests to manumit slaves after some Hellenistic or Roman fashion. They did so perhaps with recruitment of addition-
al baptized Christians in mind, but also in the interest of gaining some other tangible return. I suggest that this return possibly included the paramon obligations, which slaves would have owed to the respective house
churches. In this hypothesis, I assume that local slave liberation ceremonies were local and under Hellenistic customs rather than involving Roman
manumission procedures, either formal or informal. I make this assumption based upon the knowledge that Ignatius's exhortation about slaves to Polycarp was also directed to Christian congregations in Smyrna, a city whose population remained largely non-Roman under the reign of Trajan.143 Yet even if some Romans were involved, my thesis still holds. In these special cases, the local house church providing for the ceremony would have been after the concrete operae work stipulations. What specific operae obligations would have been involved? Perhaps the congregation
simply wanted a Roman freedman client to increase its public image and respectability (in the technical Roman aristocratic virtue of dignitas) before the eyes of either other house churches, its non-Christian neighbors, or
a combination of both. Another reason for such recruitment of citizened
clients could be that the house church planned to make the Roman freed-
man its financial procurator, an economic officer, legally empowered to be

141. Buckland, Text-Book of Roman Law, 81-82; Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary,
576 ; Watson, Roman Slave Law, 31 ; F. Fabbrini, La manumissio in ecclesia, Instituto di
diritto romano e dei diritti dell'oriente mediterrneo 40 (Milan: A. Giuffr, 1965).

142. Nadel, "Actes d'affranchissement," 284.
143. Fergus Millar, The Roman Empire and Its Neighbours, 2d ed. (London: Duckworth, 1981), 85-89, 196-97; idem, The Emperor in the Roman World (London:
Duckworth, 1977), 483-86.
141
a party to mancipatio, that later congregations are known to have employed.144 But what did a house church hope to gain by claiming Hellenistic para-
mon rights? Given the unspecific nature of paramon obligations generally, answering this question is difficult. Perhaps the house church wanted a general "handyman" to hang around the home and serve, in some capacity, the liturgical or social needs of the congregation. Or, possibly, the congregation actively recruited slaves by giving them manumission promises in an
effort to swell the train of legally free dependents tied to the particular house church. Such a "crowded house" of protgs would have brought
fame, respect, and prominence to the congregation. Additionally, facing Roman or provincial persecution, the patron(s) of a house church might have adopted manumission as a legal maneuver to avoid examination by
torture of its vulnerable servile members. In any case, the giving for the sake of a return is analogous to the concerns reflected in the Attic, Delphic,
and Bosporus inscriptions, as well as in the vellum fragment from Oxyrhynchos. Paramon obligations directly to house congregations would
have established a hierarchy of patronage independent of any "monarchical" bishop who claimed authority over the whole metropolitan area.145
This independence would have fueled the potential for a power struggle between Ignatian clergy and wealthy house church patrons over which group controlled congregational church funds. Indeed, the clergy and the
rich were two distinct and sometimes rival sources of authority in early Christianity.146 Yet with this said, one might still simply interpret this advice as yet
another proof text that Ignatius was a so-called "social conservative," like
the author of the Pastoral Epistles and other bishops in the second century generally. I contend, however, that such a general reference to "social
conservatism" only confuses the issue and ignores the specifics of Ignatius's
situation. Personal manumission of individual slaves constituted an ordi-
nary part of Roman life and in itself was not considered a revolutionary act. It had nothing at all to do with conservative social, political, or economic
144. Cypr. ep. 50 (CSEL 3.3.613-14); for commentary, see G. W. Clarke, The Letters of St. Cyprian of Carthage, vol. 2, ACW 44 (New York: Newman Press, 1984),
280.
145. On the thorny issue of Ignatius as a monarchical bishop, see Allen Brent, "The Relations between Ignatius and the Didascalia," SecCent 8 (1991): 130-34, who argues that this term better applies to the didasc. than to the Ignatian letters. Maier, Social
Setting, 177-78.
146. L. Wm. Countryman, "Patrons and Officers in Club and Church," in Paul J. Achtemeier, ed., SBLSP (Missoula, MT: The Society, 1977), 139; cf. Maier, Social
Setting, 147-48.
142
attitudes, as defined by either Greek, Hellenistic, or Roman standards.147

Even social conservatives like Cicero freed their slaves and considered the
regularity of the act desirable. Ignatius's rhetoric points not to his "social
conservatism" on slavery (since to oppose manumission on principle was
never a defining quality of a Greek, Hellenistic, or Roman conservative), but rather directs attention to his specific concern about unity and episcopal control over the church funds used for corporate manumission.
5. CONCLUSION
It is notoriously difficult to reconstruct what the actual lives of early Christians were like since very little evidence survives. Yet the second-century Antiochene bishop Ignatius does provide one important piece of evidence to reconstruct social history. In his letter to Polycarp, he mentions the
practice of churches manumitting slaves with funds drawn from congregational common chests. This statement becomes quite significant when one considers the serious social meanings and functions that the common chest
had in the development of the early church. Like Cicero as a Senator of consular rank trying to keep order and unity in the city of Rome under the threat of political upheaval, or a Roman governor trying to maintain control in a province, Ignatius as a second-century Christian leader struggled
to maintain church order (under his own terms) in a turbulent period of upheaval and persecution. Trying to wield the authority of a "monarchical" bishop, he battled to place individual house churches (and their liturgical and financial operations) under his own control. By attacking what he
considered abuses of corporate manumission, Ignatius saw one way to do

just that.
/. Albert Harrill teaches in the Division of the Humanities, University of

Chicago.
147. As the prime agent of proper Roman social values, the Emperor Augustus certainly allowed for, and approved of, manumission. He directed his manumission legislation (lex Fulfia Caninia, lex Aelia Sentia, and lex Junta) not against manumission per se, but against its indiscriminate use by Romans. In this way, Augustus hoped to bar slaves of questionable moral character access to the Roman citizenship. Bradley, Slaves
and Masters, 88.
John Chrysostom on the Gaze

Blake Leyerle

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v001/1.2.leyerle.html
John Chrysostom on the Gaze*

BLAKE LEYERLE
The work of feminist film criticism on "the gaze," a term denoting the subordi-
nated position of woman as spectacle, provides a new perspective on the writings of John Chrysostom against those couples living in spiritual marriage. We
discover that his program of reform is carried out through a sustained manipulation of the gaze. This exposing gaze which "feminizes" both the men and the women implicitly lays claim to truthfulness, but when subjected to scrutiny, is
revealed to be a construct and, as such, chiefly revelatory of Chrysostom himself
as the authoritative "bearer of the look."
Feminist film criticism has charted with increasing precision the mechanics
and pleasures of "the gaze," a term denoting the socially ascribed and iconographically confirmed position of woman as spectacle"body to be looked at, place of sexuality, and object of desire"1and man as "bearer of the look." This gendered gaze ensures a hierarchical positioning of male
and female encoded in terms such as active/passive and subjective/objective.2
But if the feminist analysis of the gaze is relatively recent, the conviction that women connote "to-be-looked-at-ness"3 is not. For by the late fourth century of our era, the writings of John Chrysostom, priest of Antioch and then bishop of Constantinople, brilliantly illustrate this same "taking of the female body as the quintessential and deeply problematic object of Academy of Religion, Anaheim, California, 1989. I am grateful for the helpful comments of Susan Calef, John Cavadini, Elizabeth Clark, Patricia Cox Miller, Georgia
Frank and Eric Plumer.
*An earlier version of this paper was given at the annual meeting of the American
1. Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 4. See the now classic study by Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16 (1975): 6-18. See also E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the
Camera (New York: Methuen, 1983).
2. Beth Newman, "'The Situation of the Looker-On': Gender, Narration, and Gaze in Wuthering Heights," PMLA 105 (1990): 1037-38. 3. Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure," 11.
160
sight."4 Nor is this concern new with the Christian era; Chrysostom's
arguments themselves rest upon an impressive poetic and philosophical

concord on the dangers faced by men viewing women. In a spectacular instance of the shifting of blame, this concern centered not on the roving
eyes of men, but on the transgressive female gaze. Chrysostom's deft manipulation of this language and its attendant fears
in order to influence and control his congregation will be our concern here. Within this broad field, of particular interest will be his means of disciplin-
ing those men and women whose ascetic practices struck him as distinctly dangerous. But because his prose tells us, finally, far less how these couples actually appeared than how he made them visible to his listening and imagining audience, it is chiefly revelatory of Chrysostom himself. Implicit in his construction is the fostering of a desire to see, a complicitous voyeurism. And like all voyeurism, its pleasure depends upon the voyeur occupy-
ing a place of secure and privileged vantage. The ancient Greeks had understood eros to be a pathology of the eyes.
Plato's easy assumption that the source of erotic attachment lies in the visual aspect of the beloved rested upon a tradition as old as Sappho.5 Indeed, so strongly was appearance alone known to stir the passions that
bizarre stories of lovers gripped by passion for lifeless images hover around the fringes of classical erotic lore. Pliny tells us one such story, a tale of a
man so smitten by Praxiteles' statue of Aphrodite that he embraced it one
night, surreptitiously he thought, but left behind a tattling stain.6 It was in the eyes of the beloved, however, that desire's disturbing power
concentrated. For if we can name a sight "striking" or "stunning," or even
profess ourselves to be "smitten or "astonished," these metaphors are

dead to us. But this was not so in classical antiquity where poets cele-
brated in outrageous oxymoron the blows inflicted by the eyes of a lovely

woman, from which might stream "melting shafts," "arrows of pity" or
even "gentle daggers of sight."7 Relying upon such tropes, the historian
4. Naomi Scheman, "Missing Mothers/Desiring Daughters: Framing the Sight of
Women," Critical Inquiry 15 (1988): 63.
5. Sappho 31,16. See also Gorgias' theory of perception in the Helen (Hermann Diels
and Walther Kranz, eds., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker [Berlin: Weidmannsche
Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1960], 2:82, B. frag. 11.15-16; cf. Plato, Phaedrus 251b2,

255c6).
6. Natural History 36.20; cf. Luc-an, imagines 4, and amores 15-16; Cicero, de inventione 2.1. Tales of necrophilia attest to a fascination with the body in its most passive state (Libanius, progymnasmata 11.27; Philostratos, vitasoph. 261; "Drusiana and Callimachus" in The Acts of John 63-70, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, E. Hennecke and W. Schneemelcher, eds. [London: Lutterworth Press, 1965], 245). 7. Agamemnon 241, 741-42; cf. Sophocles, Antigone 781-800; Longinus, On the
LEYERLE/CHRYSOSTOM ON THE GAZE
161
Herodotus could both register and dismiss beautiful women as just so much "eye torture."8
In this combination of the seductive and the deadly, philosophy supported poetry. Socrates warned that a pretty face was "more dangerous than a scorpion" because it could "inject its poison into anyone who looked at it" and, like an archer, "wound even at a distance."9 When Plato
posited an intimate relation between sight and knowledge,10 he privileged

the eye among the senses,11 and in so doing, escalated the stakes. For the
subtle fire that joined object and beholding eye created a pathway of influence that led directly to the soul.12 The vulnerability of the eye to attack or subversion was therefore serious and troubling.13 In the late fourth centu-
ry, this linkage of eye and soul carried all the weight of the obvious. So John
Chrysostom remarks that,
The soul may be compared to the eye, which when it is clear and radiant, is Sublime 4.4-7. Roland Barthes terms this power to seize and take an image the "haptic" function of the gaze (The Responsibility of Forms, [trans. Richard Howard; New York: Hill and Wang, 1985], 238). 8. Algedonas ophthalmon from Longinus' summary in On the Sublime 4.7, quoting Herodotus, 5.18.1 am indebted to Susan Calef for bringing this reference to my attention.
sight is found to be a kind of extended touch or contact at a distance; cf. Timaeus 45b-d.
9. Xenophon,-memorabilia 1.3.13. 10. The classic discussion of this may be found in the Theaetetus 184b-193d where
Here he follows Empedocles who noted that "wisdom is of like by like . . . wisdom being either identical with or closely akin to perception" (Theophrastus, de sensu 10, in Diels and Kranz, Fragmente, 1:31 A. 86). Chrysostom also notes this connection, observing that, "If we wish to convince someone we say, 1We have seen with our own eyes,' not, 'We know by hearsay" (horn. 26.3 in Jo. [M 59.156]). He further insists that "what for us is sight, is for [the powers above] knowledge, ... to look fixedly is to know"
(incomp. 4.731b-c [SC 28.226]).
11. Republic 6.507c. Chrysostom avers that "the eyes are the most beautiful and necessary of all our limbs" (anom. 10.4 [M 48.790]). For his fullest praise of the eye's excellence, see horn. 56.2 in Jo. (M5930S); stat. 1.3 (M 49.21); ibid., 11.3 (M 49.12223); horn. 5.5 in 2 Thess. (M 62.500).
are continually giving off effluences, and when these effluences are of the right size to fit
into the pores of the sense organ, then the required meeting takes place and perception arises" (fr. 89, Plutarch, quaest. nat. 19.916d; cf. Heraclitus, fr. 26, Clem. str. 4.141.2. The Stoics considered that the "percipient was acted upon by external objects, but then
12. The presocratics first articulated this theory. Empedocles states that "all things
had to give a mental act of assent" (Chrysippus, de fato 42-43). This combination
of impression and internal sense was in concord with Aristotle's theory of de anima
3.10-11.
13. John says that sight may be damaged through bad habits (horn. 17.4 in Heb. [M 63.132]). With the pollution of one's eyesight, one pollutes also one's soul (horn. 7.7
in Mt. (M 57.81]).
162
sharp-sighted ... in observing even the smallest objects, but when . . . some
foul liquid . . . some dark smoke ... a dense cloud forms before the pupil,
... it sees nothing plainly. . . .In the same way it happens to the soul . . . when it becomes turbid with many passions, (horn. 2.4 in Jo. [M 59.35])14
But if every ensouled creature had reason to fear the undisciplined gaze, ancient medical treatises dwelt with particular sharpness upon the vul-
nerability of males. For it was the phantasias seen at night that caused
nocturnal emissions, that squandering of seed which diminished the essential self.15 And in that curious document of the Peripatetic school, the Problems attributed to Aristotle, the eye is decisively implicated in all
sexual performance and desire. "Why," it ponders, "do both the eyes and
loins sink so noticeably in those who overindulge in sexual inter-
course? . . . Is it because both of these parts obviously work together in the act of intercourse by contracting at the time of emission of semen?" "Why
is it that those who indulge in sexual intercourse . . . suffer a deterioration in vision?" It even musingly enquires, "Why are those men lustful, whose eyelashes fall out?"16
Thus while envy and covetousness,17 drunkenness,18 wrath19 and hatred,20 could all, in the thought of John Chrysostom, pervert the eye and
of evil desires, in the darkness of passions and of worldly matters, we can scarcely look up . . . hardly raise our heads, with difficulty see clearly" (horn. 22.3 in Heb.
[M 63.158]). "[God] made your eye; make it useful to him, not to the devil. How useful gazing at women" (horn. 10.5 in Phil. [M 62.261]). 15. Caelius Aurelianus, Chronic Diseases 5.7. Aline Rouselle notes that medical
14. In his commentary on Hebrews, he notes that "if we bury ourselves in the depths
to him? By contemplating his creatures and praising him, and by withdrawing it from treatises assumed that the sight of women and young boys generally aroused male desire and that erotic pictures or stories aroused desire in most women (Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity [trans. Felicia Pheasant; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988], 65). See also Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure (The History of Sexuality 2, trans. Robert Hurley; New York: Vintage Books, 1985), 130-36. 16. Problems 4.876a.37-876bl, 876b.24-26, 878b.22. This collection is particularly useful for understanding Chrysostom's assumptions as it was compiled in the fifth
century of our era.
17. "The eye of the envious man sees nothing whole and entire" (horn. 55.3 in Jo. [M 59.305]; ibid., 64.4 [M 59.359]; laed. 10 [M 52.471]; stat. 2.5 [M 49.41]). Avarice entered the world when men first saw "opulent homes, extensive fields, herds of slaves, silver vessels, and a great accumulation of garments ..." (ibid., 65.3 [M 59.363-64]). Gold "ensnares" (horn. 3.6 in 1 Thess. [M 62.416]; horn. 37.3 in Jo. [M 59.210]). 18. Drunkenness can be used as a metaphor for involvement in any passion which causes the "eyes [to] see things other than they really are" (Jud. 8.1 [M 48.927]).
19. Sac. 3.14 (SC 272.220); stat. 15.2 (M 49.156).
20. Encountering an opponent, "we are as though blinded by enmity" (anom. 10.7
[M 49.793]).
163
take the soul captive, nowhere did the perils of sight impress themselves on
him more forcefully than in his consideration of the viewing of women. A true child of his culture, he cautions his congregation that "the eye not only
of the wanton but even of the modest woman pierces and disturbs the
soul. "21 He too has heard tell of stories in which men became "emotionally affected by statues and stones."22 But he knows that flesh is more exciting:
"Do you not see in the case of radiant bodies, and the lovers of them, how as long as they are in their sight the fire is kindled, the flame rises radiant; but
when anyone removes them far off, all is extinguished, all is quenched?"23
Behind this apprehension, however, it is not hard to detect an element of
voyeurism which was fostered by late antiquity's careful segregation of the sexes.24 That well-to-do women continued to be enclosed in Chrysostom's time, his own approving remarks testify. The well-raised girl, he notes, "is
relieved of every reason which might compel her to come into the gaze of men . . . the virgin must be walled-in on all sides, in the course of the
whole year leaving the house only rarelyonly when urgent and pressing
reasons compel her."25 On those few occasions when she did walk outside,
21. Sac. 6.8 (SC 272.332); cf. Laz. 3.1 (M 48.993). Of the woman who would adorn
herself, he says, "She shot the dart . . . she mixed the poison, she prepared the hemlock . . . and gave it to the wretched soul" (horn. 17.2 in Mt. [M 57.257]; cf. ibid., 68.4). Occasionally, he assigned blame more accurately, noting in this same homily that "Rather it is not she who shot the arrow but you yourself inflicted the critical wound by your wanton looking" (ibid., 17.2 [M 57.257]; cf. stat. 15.3 [M 49.158]).
22. Subintr. 5.45-46, section and line references follow the critical edition estab-
lished by Jean Dumortier, Saint Jean Chrysostome: les cohabitations suspectes; comment observer la virginit (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1955), trans. Elizabeth A. Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom and Friends (New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1979),
178. Hereafter abbreviated as Clark.
23. Hom.3.6inl Thess. (M 62.416). He advises that the eyes fast: "for looking is the food of the eyes. . . . You do not eat flesh, do you? Then do not feed on wantonness by means of your eyes" (stat. 3.4 [M 49.33]). 24. For the classical period see Aristotle, Politics 4.12.19 and 6.5.13; Xenophon, oeconomicus 7.35-36. This issue has received much scholarly attention; for a review of some of this work, see Sarah B. Pomeroy, "The Study of Women in Antiquity: Past, Present, and Future," American Journal ofPhilology 112 (1991): 263-68. In the second century of our era, Artemidorus can still understand dreams of household doors as symbolizing wives or concubines: "burning doors portend the death of a wife. ... of these, the door with the bolt-pin signifies a free-born wife, whereas the door that is held signifies a slave" (oneirocriticon 2.10, trans. Robert J. White, The Interpretation of Dreams [Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes Press, 1975], 97. Hereafter abbreviated as White).
25. Sac.3.17 (SC 272.214-16). For other remarks testifying to the enclosure of wom-
en from society's upper strata, see horn. 61.3 in Jo. (M 59.340); virg. 44.1.11-18 (SC 125.252); ibid.,52.6.100-101 (SC 125.296);esp. ibid.,57.2.32-35 (SC 125.308-10); horn. 12.5 in 1 Cor. (M 61.103); horn. 7.7 in Mt. (M 57.81); stat. 13.2 (M 49.138); propter forn. 2 (M 51.211); quales ducendae 3 (M 51.230).
164
the chaste woman was to wrap her seclusion around herself; she was to be
discreetly veiled, sequestering not only her body, but most especially, her
eyes.26 The result of such enclosure was, predictably, to eroticize the female body. Chrysostom can take as a given that "even if we encounter a woman in the agora, we are perturbed."27 The secure investiture of sexuality within women's bodies allowed John to linger upon the threat posed to male chastity by the unexpected sight of merely a woman's bare arms; whereas a virgin imagined as coming suddenly upon a wholly naked man occasions only ridicule at his expense.28 As the locus of desire,29 women's bodies demanded and justified a policy of social containment. To Chrysostom's eye, this divinely intended repression was mapped within the individual body by the contained heart. He thus notes approvingly how
God constructed [the breast] with bones as though with a kind of stone ... so that [desire] might never burst or break through and instantly destroy the whole living creature. . . . Physicians agree that this is the reason that the lungs have been spread under the heart: that the heart being [enclosed] in something softbeating as it were into a sort of spongemight not suffer injury from its violent beating against the hard and resisting sternum, (horn. 5.8
in Heb. [M 63.53-54])
Like the barricaded heart, the enclosure of women protected both themselves and others from a damage their passionate "nature" decreed inevitable.
Given this seclusion of women, it was only in the context of the likely sighting of women that Chrysostom could dwell on the perils of the licentious gaze. In late antiquity, one such prospect was the theater, where actresses flaunted themselves in the public eye.30 But in John's own commu26. "[AJppearing in public or retiring from it does not cause shame. . . . Therefore many women who have been liberated from their apartments walk through the crowded market and are not censured. In fact, they are much admired for their modesty. ... In contrast, not a few of those sequestered have surrounded themselves with an evil reputation" (virg. 66.2.31-42 [SC 125.334-46], trans. Sally Rieger Shore, John Chrysostom: On Virginity; Against Remarriage [New York and Toronto: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983],
103. Hereafter abbreviated as Shore). 27. Thoruboumetha (theatr. 2 [M 56.266]).
28. Fem. reg. 10.74-76, Clark, 241; ibid., 11.2-7, Clark, 242. In his complaints about Plato's republic, John singles out the legislation concerning women. Tellingly, what disturbs him most is that Plato "having stripped virgins naked, brings them into the palaestra and into the gaze of men" (horn. 1.4 in Mt. [M 57.19]). 29. Although the locus of sexual desire for men, women themselves find that "the
tyranny of desire is [not] so predominant" (virg. 52.7.121-23 [SC 125.296-98], Shore, 87; cf. ibid., 34.4.46-49 [SC 125.202]).
30. In his advice on raising children, John insists that it is necessary to have especially
165
nity, the Christian practice of spiritual marriagea domestic arrangement in which a professed virgin shared a house with a monk in, they claimed, ascetic chastityoffered another fruitful venue. To these contexts let us
now turn.
Much of Chrysostom's extensive tirade against the theater is informed
by his appreciation for the lethal capacity of the eye. Male spectators, he
insists, "receive ten thousand mortal injuries from the sight" of "those
lavishly decked out women on stage," whose faces, clothing, words, and gait all "rise up before their eyes, and lay siege to their souls."31 Returning
from the theater, he sees the male soul "tied," "bound," "fettered," made "ten-thousand times a captive"32 by the sight of women there. The strength of these chains, "harder than any iron,"33 was attributable in part to the mind's marvelous ability to recreate in its interior spaces spectacles once seen. Nor is John himself above exploiting this imaginative capacity to provoke an instructive discomfort in his congregation. Sternly he enquires, At the same time as the tongue breathes the name of the dancer, does not the soul immediately conjure up the image of ... a harlot: her words, her appearance, her face, her roving eyes, her languid gaze, her curly hair, her smooth cheeks and kohl-rimmed eyes? And did you not feel any emotion as I
was enumerating these details? Consider then how they are affected who are
seated in the theater itself, (hom. 18.4 in Jo. [M 59.120])
Indeed so palpably could desire be evoked that Chrysostom can elsewhere respond to their wan protest, "What adulterer, you ask, has been made by these spectacles?" by relying on the hard saying of the gospels, "Who
indeed has not been made an adulterer?"34
It is, however, in his consideration of the monks who live with virgin housemates that Chrysostom charts most clearly the power and the genstrict laws about "the gate of the eyes." The first of these is: "never send your son to the theater so that he may not be utterly corrupted through his eyes and ears" (de inani gloria 56.732-34 [SC 188.154]).
31. Hom. 60.5 in Jo. (M 59.333). "Nothing," says John, "is more full of harlotry and
impetuosity than an eye that endures to look at [scenes of adultery on stage]" (hom. 6.8
in Mt. [M 57.72]). 32. Hom. 7.7 in Mt. (M 57.81); cf. ibid., 6.10 (M 57.72); 68.4 (M 58.645); hom. 42.4 in Ac. (M 60.301). 33. Hom. 42.4 in Ac. (M 60.301); cf. theatr. 2 (M 56.266).
34. Hom. 37.6 in Mt. (M 57.427). "Don't think," says John, "that because you haven't had intercourse with the harlot that you are clean from the sin" (hom. 7.6 in Mt. [M 57.80]; cf. hom. 12.6-7 in 1 Cor. [M 61.105]). For "in the theater, there is . . . planning for unnatural lust, the study of adultery, practical training for fornication, schooling for wantonness, fostering of filthiness, ... [in short] paradigms for indecency"
(hom. 42.4 in Ac. [M 60.301]; cf. theatr. 2 [M 56.267]).
166
dered nature of the gaze. Indeed, his focus on the visual aspect of eroticism
is apparent in the scriptural verse that spurs him, in the course of his gospel homilies, to inveigh against spiritual marriage: "if your right eye offends
you, pluck it out, and cast it from you."35 It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that in his treatise devoted exclusively to correcting these men, he locates the attraction of spiritual marriage precisely in the titillation of voyeurism.36 With disingenuous care, he begins, "Perhaps the notion that this pleasure and love can be greater than that afforded by living together in a legal marriage astounds you."37 But as
he dwells on the blooming appearance of the virgins who, having been spared the rigors of child-bearing, can rival, even at forty years old, girls being led to the nuptial chamber,38 he comes at last to his triumphant conclusion: "These men are stirred by a double desire: they are not permitted to satisfy their passion through sexual intercourse, yet the basis for their desire remains intensely potent for a long time."39 With unerring precision, John has mapped the dynamic of a voyeur's pleasurea pleasure
which can unroll only where a gap separates desire from its object. This gap constructs the gaze, its limit, and its pleasurable transgression.40 Against this avidity of the eyes, Chrysostom sets first the fortitude of Job, who "made a covenant with his eyes not to look into a virgin's face, since he knew that it is perhaps impossible to escape injury from doing so." He then recites the words of Jesus, whom he credits with understanding "the mag35. "You know that the saying is not about limbs, but about those who are close to us" (hom. 17.3 in Mt. [M 57.258]; cf. hom. 57.2-3 in Jo. [M 59.314]). These men "must be guilty," he claims, "of ten thousand adulteries, daily beholding them with desire . . . although you have not touched her with your hand, yet you have caressed her with your eyes" (hom. 17.2 in Mt. [M 57.257]). 36. He characterizes the attraction of this arrangement as a "petty lust of the eyes" (subintr. 2.75-76, Clark, 170) and imagines that the monks' pleasure consists in being able "to feast his eyes on the sight of the virgins" (ibid., 12.1-2, Clark, 199). 37. Subintr. 1.42-44, Clark, 165.
38. Subintr. 1.52-60, Clark, 166.
39. Subintr. 1.60-63, Clark, 166. John puts his case as follows. "Even in the act of intercourse there seems to be no pleasure, since the one who has consummated the union also has extinguished the pleasure; on the other hand, the one still in coitus does not experience pleasure, but rather tumult, confusion, frenzy, madness, great turmoil and violent shaking" (oppugn. 2.10 [M 49.346-47], trans. David G. Hunter, A Comparison Between a King and a Monk/Against the Opponents of the Monastic Life: Two Treatises by John Chrysostom [Lewiston and Queenston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988], 118. Hereafter abbreviated as Hunter).
40. For the analysis of this technique in film criticism, see Christian Metz, "The Imaginary Signifier," Screen 16:2 (1975): 60; Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator," Screen 23 (1982): 76.
167
nitude of the problem."41 But in his hands, the gospel injunction has
undergone a telling alteration. For he insists that "Jesus did not permit a
man even to look into the eyes of a woman, but threatened those who did so with the penalty laid on adulterers."42
But if this verse suggests that adultery could be carried out through look
alone, the real force of his argument to the men centers in upon the gap between desire and its object: the painfulness of looking with longing upon what one cannot have. For although the philosophical tradition continued to teach that only the ache of privation could give pleasure its sharpest savor,43 the very ease by which pleasure might shift to pain spoke to John of the unseemly mixtures of the devil.44 Obsessional and incapable of being fully satisfied, such pleasures just out of reach remind him initially of Tantalus' hellish punishment.45 Subsequently, they recall even more forcibly Adam's predicament, when God placed him just next to the paradise from which he was debarred, in order, notes Chrysostom calmly, that he might have "a more constant punishment."46 But if, in his treatise to the men, Chrysostom has highlighted privation, when he turns to the women, it is the completeness of union that he labors. Explicitly he levels his accusation, "You carry out the sinful deed, if not by intercourse then by the eyes."47 In part, this charge of "making adulterers
41. Subintr. 4.72-77, Clark, 176, referring to Job 31.1. 42. Mt. 5:28; subintr. 5.21-22, Clark, 177, emphasis added. Elsewhere, Chrysostom comments on this locus of desire: "The eye of the virgin is so beautiful and comely that it has as a lover not men but the incorporeal powers and their master" (virg.
63.2.13-15 [SC 125.326-28], Shore, 99).
43. Foucault, Use of Pleasure, 43. "The struggle is greater on seeing but not possessing the object of desire . . . the pain of captives and prisoners is not greater" (hom. 17.2 in Mt. [M 57.257]). "The terrible feature of this very bitter slavery is that it even persuades them to feel grateful for it; the more they become enslaved to it, the more the pleasure they take in it will be increased" (hom. 65.3 in Jo. [M 59.363]). "Where there is satiety, it is not possible for desire to exist, and if there is no desire, how could there ever be pleasure?" (hom. 22.3 in Jo. [M 59.138]). 44. It is "an unnatural combination of elements" (atopon tina krasin) (subintr. 2.7882, Clark, 170), "an unnatural pleasure" (hedonen atopon) (fem. reg. 4.62, Clark, 220). 45. Subintr. 2 A25, Clark, 167. John concentrates on the inappropriateness of vision: such pleasure cannot be savored "through the eyes" (subintr. 2.8-9, Clark, 167); "he is disturbed not so much by looking as he is when he stretches out his hand to touch what is before him, but is forbidden to take it" (subintr. 2.40-42, Clark, 169). John therefore concludes, "this sort of activity is not pleasant but its opposite and we derive no pleasure from this sight" (subintr. 12.4-6, Clark, 199). 46. Subintr. 2.48-52, Clark, 169; cf. hom. 18.3 in Gen. (M 53.152); Laz. 2.4 (M
48.897).
47. Fem. reg. 1.67-69, Clark, 211. This image could also be used positively. Chrys-
168
of all who look at you "48 simply mirrors his condemnation of actresses that we have already noted. But more strangely to our ears, he continues, "I am not [accusing you of] sexual intercourse, for what would be its advantage,
when even the communion of the eyes accomplishes the same thing?"49
What, we might well ask, is this "same thing"? Does he, in fact, believe that virginity could be lost by gaze alone, that sight itself could defile? Remembering his own ready concession, however, that of virginity, "the physical aspect is the least part,"50 we must be prepared to move into metaphor. Behind this charge of physical defilement stand two related social issues. We glimpse the first in his contention that even if the virgin's body remains undamaged, the intactness of her seclusion, which her closed body replicated, has been irrevocably torn. He finds his proof in the openness of her visage: "When a virgin learns to discuss
things frankly with a man, to sit by him, look straight in his face, laugh in
his presence, and to disgrace herself in many other ways, and does not think this is dreadful, then the veil of virginity is destroyed and the flower trampled under foot."51 To appreciate the second issue, we must recall the language in which
antiquity cloaked its understanding of the eroticized female gaze: snares, nets, chains, fetters. The unchaste woman held men in bondage. John
Chrysostom accuses these women of exercising a bruising and imperious dominion over men, through their eyes.52
ostom says that in the eucharist, Jesus "gives himself to those who wish to enfold and embrace him, which they do, all of them, with their eyes" (sac. 3.4.25-29 [SC 272.144]). 48. Fem. reg. 10.26-27, Clark, 239. 49. Fem. reg. 4.63-65, Clark, 221. 50. Fem. reg. 1.36-37, Clark, 210; cf. virg. 5.2.14-24 (SC 125.106-08); ibid., 6.1.3-21 (SC 125.108-10); ibid., 7.1.3-4 (SC 125.112); ibid., 77.1.4-6 (SC 125.366); de non it. conj. 3.204-06 (SC 138.178), Shore, 136; hom. 28.7 in Heb. (M 63.202). With the same reasoning, Chrysostom can insist that "marriage is not called marriage because of coitus . . . but because the married woman is content with one
man" (de non it. conj. 2.96-108 [SC 138.168], Shore, 132).
51. Fem. reg. 11.27-31, Clark, 242. Chrysostom tells us elsewhere of the constraint felt by women in the presence of their husbands; they rarely laugh, and if they do, it is "only during a time of relaxation" (hom. 15.4 in Heb. [M 63.122]). 52. Marriage to rich wives also reversed "natural" roles by "enslaving" men (virg. 53.1.6-21 [SC 125.298-90]; Thdr. 2.5.7-9 [SC 117.70]); see Elizabeth A. Clark, "The Virginal Politeia and Plato's Republic: John Chrysostom on Women and the Sexual Relation," in her Jerome, Chrysostom and Friends, 1-34, esp. 10-11. Feminist film criticism has made the point that a woman's direct gaze threatens to immobilize men (Linda Williams, "When the Woman Looks," in Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams, eds., Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism [Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1983], 86; cf. Beth Newman, " 'The Situation of the Looker-On,'" 1030; Doane, "Film and Masquerade," 83).
169
In the Fall he finds a paradigm to link this female domination of men with the work of the devil. In his version, Eve's temptation was orches-
trated through the organ of sight. Dangling before her eyes the globe of
fruit, the serpent put it to her: Why did God deprive you of such enjoyment? Why does he not allow you to share in the good things of the garden? Instead, he grants you the pleasure of looking at them, but does not permit you to possess them and enjoy greater pleasure. . . .[Are you not, therefore, worse off in the garden,] since you experience the more intense pain of having the sight of these things but not the enjoyment that comes from possession? (hom. 16.2 in Gen. [M 53.126-27])
Genesis tells us that she took the fruit and ate it, but John supplies a revealing motivation. He insists that she acted thus because she had "set her heart on the very pinnacle of power."53 Like Eve and like the devil,
the virgins living in spiritual marriage are driven by a desire for selfaggrandizement whose vehicle is the enslavement of men through desire. The burden of guilt thus belongs to the women:54
You have not pronounced [the words] with your tongue, . . . you have not uttered them with your lips, . . . you have not called with your voice, but you
have spoken them more clearly with your eyes. . . .you have wrought indeed, the perfect adultery for the man conquered by your scheme. His madness is
your work. (fem. reg. 1.59-75, Clark, 211)
In the monks' subordination to the virgins, Chrysostom sees the mark of
passion consummated.
This analysis of the contours of the problem simultaneously offers Chrysostom a mode of correction. Skillfully he holds up the prospect of male submission to dominant women to pillory and ridicule. Scenarios follow, each detailing their womanish ways: the monk is found sequestered inside, even holding the distaff for the spinning virgin.55 He is likened to a
53. Horn. 16.4 in Gen. (M 53.130). "Do you see," asks John, "how the devil led her captive, handicapped her reasoning, and caused her to think more highly of herself than her proper worth, in order that she might be puffed up by empty hopes and lose what good she already had?" (hom. 16.4 in Gen. [M 53.129-30]). 54. This accords with Chrysostom's general denigration of the passions as instruments of bondage. He speaks here of "violent and tyrannical pleasure" (subintr. 1.3335, Clark, 165) and of "a slavery crueler than any darkness" (subintr. 12.60-61, Clark, 201). See also his description of the married couple as two fugitive slaves, each individually shackled as well as bound together (virg. 41.2.18-28 [SC 125.236-38]; cf. ibid., 28.1.12-16 [SC 125.182]; ibid., 28.3.25-36 [SC 125.184]; ibid., 47.5.90-100 [SC 125.270]). Chrysostom derives this equation of sexual love with tyranny from Plato, who compared the actions of a tyrant to those of one prompted by eros (Republic
9.573c; cf. Phaedrus 265a). 55. Subintr. 10.72-79, Clark, 195.
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cowardly soldier who, having cast away his weapons, hides among the women.56 The final mark of gender slippage lies in his speech which has itself become stamped with female traits.57
But even while mocking this kind of feminization, Chrysostom is nevertheless intent upon inculcating another sort. When he turns to the task of impressing upon his male congregation58 the perils of viewing women, he
knows that his counsel of flight from temptation will raise the exasperated
cry, "What are you ordering us to do? Retreat to the mountains and be-
come monks?"59 And indeed he sighs over his unreconstructed congregation which continued to find in the chance sight of a prostitute an augury
for good business.60 To dislodge them from their complacent posture as
spectators, Chrysostom calls to mind another vision. Repeatedly describing in bruising detail the scene of the last judgment, he would have the men
remember that there they will be spectacle rather than spectator.61 In that
place there will be no need of accusers or witnesses, for all of one's life will simply unscroll before a mighty audience.62 Then a wrong glance, a bark of
laughter, or even the simple words, "you fool," of which everyone stands
culpable, will be cause enough to precipitate the soul into endless tor56. Subintr. 11.1-11, Clark, 196; cf. subintr. 11.23-30, Clark 197, for the simile of
the denatured lion made into a woman's pet.

57. Subintr. 11.37-40, Clark, 197. 58. Ramsay MacMullen, "The Preacher's Audience (AD 350-400)," JTS n.s. 40 (1989): 504-7.
59. Hom. 7.7 in Mt. (M 57.81). There was reason for this cry, since in recommending the solitary life, he notes that "if a strange thought creates a representation . . . the image is weak and capable of being speedily subdued, because there is no fuel added to the flame from without, arising from actual sight" (sac. 6.3.38-42 [SC 272.312]; cf.
ibid., 6.12.10-13 [SC 272.342]). But inconsistently, he also says that "carnal desire
affects the monks more violently since they do not have intercourse with women"
(oppugn. 3.15 [M 49.375], Hunter, 160).
60. Catech. 2.5 (M 49.240). Artemidorus explains the underlying rationale in his analysis of dream imagery: "prostitutes . . . are auspicious for every undertaking. For they are also called 'hustlers' (ergasimoi) by some people" (1.78, White, 59; cf. 4.9,
White, 191).
61. The prison is thus a better sight than the theater, because it calls to mind the judgment to come (hom. 42.4 in Ac. [M 60.301-02]). Returning from prison, he says, a man encountering a prostitute "won't be caught in the snare of that sight . . . since the fear of judgment rather than that wanton face is before his eyes" (hom. 60.5 in Jo. [M
59.333]).
62. Then "the living word of God, who is aware of what happens in secret, will set their lives naked and exposed before the eyes of all people, and bring the hidden thoughts of human hearts into the open (fem. reg. 3.8791, Clark, 218; cf. hom. 34.3 in Jo. [M 59.196-97]; stat. 6.7 [M 49.92]; ibid., 20.2 [M 49.200]; Thdr. 1.13.1-8 [SC 177.152]; ibid., 2.2.39-44 [SC 177.56]; Laz. 2.2 [M 48.984-85]; ibid., 2.4 [M 48.987]). See his remarks about publicity evoking shame (hom. 39.3 in Ac. [M 60.279]).
171
ment.63 Over this scene sits God, the great "Unsleeping Eye."64 This penetrating eye has, moreover, a personal corollary: the eye of conscience, which was "implanted in us from the beginning as a ceaseless accuser."65 By a scrupulous recollection of this ever-vigilant gaze, Chrysostom aims to
bring the erotic eye under the control of shame. His reasoning here merely extends the obvious, noting that, "if anyone were watching, no one would
choose to commit fornication, but even though ten thousand times aflame with that evil, the tyranny of passion is conquered by a sense of shame
[aidous] before other people."66

Against the roving and autonomous male eye, hoarding up spectacles to
savor in the license of imagination's privacy, John sets the stark publicity of
the last judgment. As society constrained women physically, he would constrain men psychically, by reminding them of their ultimate subordination to another's gaze. The reward Chrysostom promises the monks for
renouncing their unorthodox living arrangements is wholly consonant with his analysis of the problem: they will find release from the alluring
eyes of women. "What could be," he asks, "more pleasant than to . . . end
the constant war with desire . . . and to look toward heaven with free
eyes}"67 Chrysostom's corrective advice to the virgins reveals a similar redirec-
tion of the attentive gaze. He begins, unremarkably, by insisting that the true virgin will be known not only by flight from the sight of men, but also
by her veiled eye.
63. "Tell me," John asks, "who does not call his brother a fool? But this renders a
person liable to the fire of Gehenna" (oppugn. 1.8 [M 49.330], Hunter, 92; cf. diab. 7 [M 49.256]), John comments that "with the most violent and bitter punishment [God the judge] afflicts one simply for gazing with wanton eyes" (oppugn. 3.1 [M 49.350], Hunter, 124; cf. hom. 1.8 in Mt. [M 57.23-24]; hom. 60.5 in Jo. [M 59.333-34]). For the importance of the last judgment in John's thought see Francis Leduc, "L'Eschatologie: une proccupation centrale de S. Jean Chrysostome," Proche-Orient Chrtien 19 (1969): 109-134.
64. For examples of God as the Unsleeping Eye, see oppugn. 3.21 (M 49.386); Jud. 8.8 (M 48.941); hom. 7.3 in Gen. (M 53.64); ibid., 8.6 (M 53.75); hom. 3.6 in Jo. (M 59.46); ibid., 4.4 (M 59.52); hom. 12.4 in 1 Cor. (M 61.101); stat. 20.4 (M 49.203);
Laz. 1.8 (M 48.973).
65. Hom. 17.1 in Gen. (M 53.135). Here John speaks of the conscience as "the incorruptible judge which takes its stand against the accused, crying out clearly, as though bringing before their eyes the indictment of the magnitude of their sins" ; cf. hom.
34.3 in Jo. (M 59.196-97); laed. 9 (M 52.470); Laz. 1.11 (M 48.979); ibid., 4.4 (M 48.1011); ibid., 6.1 (M 48.1028). 66. Hom. 12.3 in 1 Cor. (M 61.100).
67. Subintr. 12.51-52, Clark, 201; emphasis added. John comments that, "the beginning of chastity is to abstain from the sight of an improper object" (hom. 1.2 in 2
Thess. [M 62.470]).
172
When she makes her regal entrance into the marketplace . . . she walks
... as though through a desert, and when she sits in church she sits in deepest silence, her eyes see none of those in attendance, neither men nor women, but only [her heavenly] bridegroom. . . .she flees not only the looks of the
male sex but also from association with worldly women, (fem. reg. 9.6480,
Clark, 237)
But as his argument develops, it relies increasingly upon the social construction of women as spectacle, with its accompanying assumption that prestige may be indexed from the number and status of the viewers. He insists that a chastely veiled eye itself exercises an irresistible attraction.68 She will become, he promises, a "spectacle, longed for not only by humans,
but by the angels themselves,"69 oreven betterby Christ the bridegroom, "a lover," he claims, "more ardent than any man."70 But Chrysostom is not content to rely solely upon enticement when a stick lies ready to hand. Smoothly he calls up the judgment of the contemporary world which meted out shame and honor with a stringently assessing eye.
Let us not just talk about cohabitation, let us also unfold the subject. . . . Since it is not the Unsleeping Eye they fear, but rather it is the eyes of people
that are alarming to them, let us rob them of this consolation by bringing
these matters which the walls had kept hidden and in shadows into public view, and open the doors to those eager to see. (fem. reg. 10.4349, Clark,
240)71
Although delivered in tones of outrage, Chrysostom is nevertheless offering his congregation, and us, the pleasure of voyeurism, the pleasure of a Peeping Tom that thrives precisely on the possibility of looking without being seen, of indulging a libidinous gaze from a place of privileged vantage.72 This promise of pleasure, however, should not distract us from the
68. Anom. 10.4 (M 48.790); virg. 68.1.5-8 (SC 125.338). "All women will come running to love you" (fem. reg. 11.66-68, Clark, 244; vid. 6.404-08 [SC 138.14850]).
69. Fem. reg. 9.67-70, Clark, 237. "Beautify your face therefore with modesty, holiness, almsgiving, philanthropy . . . these are the colors of virtue, by which you will attract not human beings but angels to you as your lovers; by which you will have God himself to praise you" (catech. 2 [M 49.238]; cf. hom. 28.7 in Heb. [M 63.201]). 70. Sphodroteron (fem. reg. 12.27-28, Clark, 238). 71. This threat of exposure has already been raised by John's terrible prediction that it will be the virgin's companions, who have been privy to her private affairs, who will "broadcast all her secrets" (fem. reg. 8.71-72, Clark, 234). 72. Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure," 9,14; Annette Kuhn, The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 28, 41;
Doane, "Film and the Masquerade," 76.
173
violence implicit in the threat of public stripping.73 For the violence and salacious revelation which mark John's vision of the final judgment were a familiar combination to the theater-going public of late antiquity, who could hope to enjoy, among other things, the sight of a goose pecking seeds from between the naked thighs of a low-born girl.74
If Chrysostom's teasing promise to lay bare before our eyes the scandalous and licentious activities of these couples has itself incited a measure of voyeurism, the vignettes he proceeds to detail turn out to be disappointingly banal. Their banality, however, underscores the far more interesting issue of our complicity. Our desire to see, in turn, discloses the mechanics of how Chrysostom has made these couples visible to us : his reforming zeal has been carried out by a prolonged and fascinated gaze.75 As a master rhetorician, he has drawn his audience to his own position and made them sharers in his gaze. Chrysostom's correction of these ascetic couples has, therefore, been carried out through a sustained manipulation of the gaze. We realize that not only has he "feminized" the men by presenting them as passive objects of the gaze, but also, to our discomfort, that he has posed the figure of the
virgin as an erotic object on two levels. Certainly, he has argued that she
functions thus for the monks involved in spiritual marriage, but he has also presented her in this light to his listening and imagining congregation.76 In the body of the virgin we see not only how deeply the boundaries between gaze and touch, desire and contamination have become blurred in the course of these treatises, but also an intensification of the position of woman as "body to be looked at, place of sexuality and object of desire." But perhaps such intensification is inevitable. For consecrated virginity was
73. Chrysostom realizes the violence of this language. He commends the retired life of the monk precisely because they "have a veil for their private faults in their solitude. But when they are brought into public life, they are compelled to strip off their retirement like a cloak and to show everyone their naked souls by their external movements" (sac. 3.10.195-200 [SC 272.180]). He also uses such language in his treatise on virginity, "We do not strip [the virgin's] soul bare and scrutinize its inner state (virg. 7.1.13-14
[SC 125.112], Shore, 9). Elsewhere he wishes that he could undress the souls of those
who swear frequently so that he could expose the ravages of sin (stat. 14.6 [M 49.152]). 74. A scene from the early life of the Empress Theodora (Procopius, Secret History
9.20, quoted and analyzed by Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and
Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity [New York: Columbia University Press,
1988], 320).
75. A point expertly made for the Victorians by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 12548 esp. 139.
76. Laura Mulvey uses these same levels to describe the presentation of women in film
("Visual Pleasure," 11).
174
never simply a state antecedent to honorable marriage, but rather a claim
to perduring statusa status built up precisely through the public recognition of deeply private acts inscribed upon the body; holiness itself might be
said "to petition the gaze."77 But what of Chrysostom himself? If he has presented all women, but especially ascetic ones, as connoting "to-be-looked-at-ness," he is himself
the prime "bearer of the look." His claim to truthfulness rests ultimately
upon the sheer artfulness of his manipulation of the gaze: what we "see" is just what he would have us see, and as such it is revelatory of no one more than Chrysostom himself. If we then drag our reluctant eyes away from the offered spectacle and focus them instead upon the spectator, our vision
doubles. We see how John's tones of outraged morality as well as his thinly
veiled offers of voyeuristic pleasureboth of which would conscript our
eyescannot be dissociated from the exercise of power. The alignment of

his own sight with that of the privileged eye of God neatly underscores his
authoritative claim. If feminist film criticism has shown us how "the gaze" works to ensure the hierarchical positioning of male and female by feminizing its object, John Chrysostom's own vision, feminizing those who live in spiritual marriage, marks the assertion of clerical superordination over
ascetic lives.
Blake Leyerle is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame
77. With thanks to Patricia Cox Miller for bringing this possibility to my attention.
Why Tatian Never "Apologized" To The Greeks

Michael McGehee

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v001/1.2.mcgehee.html
Why Tatian Never "Apologized

To The Greeks
MICHAEL MCGEHEE
33
Tatian's "To the Greeks" (Pros Hellenas) has usually been classified as either an apology or a harangue. Yet neither of these genres can explain the work's vituperative style, denigration of Tatian's rivals, frequent digressions, and intent. If we classify the work as a protrepticus, however, we can see it as an integrated whole which was given with the intent of attracting people to study the "barbarian philosophy" with Tatian. The use of this genre implies that Tatian understood Christianity to be a philosophy and himself to be an independent teacher who could work without ecclesiastical oversight.
Although Tatian's work "To the Greeks" {Pros Hellenas) is usually entitled an "oration,"1 this essay will argue that Pros Hellenas is better understood as a protrepticus. It will then demonstrate how this literary classification
allows us to reconcile what have often been considered self-contradictions
within the work. The essay will conclude by presenting several implications about early Christian teachers, their authority, and their teaching which are suggested by this literary category.
Discovering the proper genre of an ancient text is of far more than

taxonomic value. If research into ancient literature degenerates into mere labeling, scholarly effort in the field is of little consequence. But if research
into literary classification goes beyond label-making into illuminating the

thought of ancient authors, we will be better able to understand both texts
and social movements.
1. A modern edition is Tatian, Oratio ad Graecos and Fragments, edited and translated by Molly Whittaker (Oxford Early Christian Texts; Oxford: Clarendon, 1982). All Greek and English quotations of Pros Hellenas are from Whittaker.
144
INTRODUCTION
Although the genre of protrepticus has not been ignored, it has not been fully appreciated in the study of early Christianity.2 Protreptic speeches
appear to have developed in the fifth century B.C.E. by Sophists who used them as recruiting speeches to interest potential students in instruction. In this early period the speaker pointed out to his potential students the
deficiencies of their current way of life, the superiority of his pedagogy

compared to other teachers, and then explained how his teaching would benefit the prospective students. By the late fourth century B.CE., however, protreptic compositions (which usually appear as either speeches intended for public declamation or letters of private correspondence) were no longer limited to the individu-
alistic Sophists. Philosophers of the major traditions were also producing

protreptic works. Although the literary form could vary, the function of a protrepticus remained the same. The protrepticus was intended to attract students to philosophical instruction. Still further changes had occurred by the time of the Empire: the term
had taken on the more general meaning of an exhortation to almost any

particular behavior, whether philosophical or not. Yet even into the first Christian centuries, the term continued to be used with the earlier, more specific meaning related to philosophical instruction, as well as in the more general sense.
To be sure, any discussion of the protreptic genre is hampered by the

limited number of protreptic pieces which have survived. Complete works, however, do exist from Epicurus {To Menoeceus), Isocrates (To Nicocles), Pseudo-Isocrates {To Demonicus), Pseudo-Justin {To the Greeks), and
Clement of Alexandria {Protrepticus). Works from which only fragments

survive include Aristotle's Protrepticus and Cicero's Hortensius.
A brief discussion of protreptic discourse can be found in Epictetus

3.23.3338. Epictetus sees the protrepticus as a type of speech parallel to
display {epideiktikos), teaching {didaskalikos) and refutation (elegktikos)

speeches, whose function is to demonstrate "to the individual, as well as to
the crowd, the warring inconsistency in which they are floundering about,
2. The following comments are meant only as a very general summary. For a more detailed introduction to this body of literature, cf. K. Gaiser, Protreptik und Paraenese bei Platon (Tubingen Beitr. 40; Stuttgart: Kolhammer, 1959); H. I. Marrou, Histoire de l'ducation d'antiquit (Paris: Seuil, 1956); Werner Jaeger, Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948); P. Hartlich, Deexhortationem a Graecis Romanisque scriptarum historia etindole, Leipziger Studien zu Classischen Philologie 11 (1889). Also relevant is the section on protreptic letters in Stanley K. Stowers, Letter Writing in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986), 112-125.
MCGEHEE/WHY TATIAN NEVER "APOLOGIZED"
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and how they are paying attention to anything rather than what they truly want. For they want the things that lead to happiness, but they are looking
for them in the wrong place."3
TATIAN'S PROS HELLENAS
Modern scholars have applied a variety of literary classifications to Pros Hellenas but have seldom made productive use of such classifications in their analyses of the text, probably because understanding the work as either an "apology" or a "harangue" (the most common classifications) leads into several interpretive problems with portions of the text. By classifying Pros Hellenas as a protrepticus, however, one is able to resolve these
difficulties.
There are several reasons why the category of "apology" is inadequate.

First is Tatian's vituperative style, a puzzle to many who have seen the work as an apology.4 Tatian, like Justin, identifies the Greco-Roman gods as demons who have misled people into worshipping them (8-10, 19, etc.). He ridicules pagan prophecy, with Apollo's oracle singled out for particular attention, because of its pretensions to know the future (19). But he breaks ranks with Justin by condemning the whole of Greek philosophical thought and its founders (23, 2527). The vituperative tone of Pros Hellenas is not at all what one would
expect in an apology whose function was to rebut false charges made

against the Christians.5 Instead, Tatian seems to go out of his way to insult the religions, philosophies, and morality of the Greco-Roman world. His condemnations and ridicule are not qualified by the polite (or valid) stipu3. Text and translation of Epictetus are from W A. Oldfather's translation in the LCL. For analysis of this passage, cf. E. G. Schmidt, "Die drei Arten des Philosophierens," Pbilologus 106 (1962): 14-28. 4. References to the text being an "apology" may be found throughout the literature. For illustrative examples among those scholars who have studied Tatian in detail, cf. L. W. Barnard, "The Heresy of Tatian- Once Again," )EH 19 (1968): 10; G.F. Hawthorne, "Tatian and His Discourse to the Greeks," HTR 57 (April 1964): 161; Robert M. Grant, "The Date of Tatian's Oration," HTR 46 (1953): 100; Aim Puech, Les Apologistes grecs du IIe sicle de notre re (Paris: Hachette, 1912), 167 et passimand Recherches sur le Discours aux Grecs de Tatien (Paris: Hachette, 1903), 4 et passim. Nevertheless, although the term "apology" is used by many different authors, there is a wide difference of opinion as to what an "apology" is. 5. Tatian does not explicitly identify those who follow "the barbarian philosophy" as Christians, but his listeners would have understood that to be his position. In order to avoid the cumbersome circumlocutions which would be required for absolute accuracy, I shall refer without further comment to those who accept "the barbarian philosophy" as
"Christians."
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lations one would expect in a plea for Christians to receive legal toleration.
For example, he puts forward a blanket denunciation of "the Romans" for their pederasty in which "they try to gather together herds of boys like
herds of grazing horses" (28). Such language in a defense speech, especially in one meant for Roman officials, would seldom have led to an acquittal. Yet despite the two passages (4.1 and 25.3) where Tatian does defend
Christians against popular accusations (as we might expect in an apology),

he does not argue in any systematic way against them. He simply affirms Christian obedience to the laws or declares that the charges are false. Neither section is central to the argument of Pros Hellenas. In 4.1 (a reference to Christians not participating in pagan rituals), Tatian first af-
firms that Christians are good citizens and then discusses at length the
transcendence of God and the necessity of human obedience. In 25.3 he denies the charge of cannibalism and immediately follows up with a counter-charge of cannibalism against the pagan deities, most especially
Zeus.
Tatian's digressive denigration of philosophical rivals (23, 19) is also out of place in an apology. Although such a negative interpretation of his
rivals probably reflects Tatian's mindset, the denigration of these rivals is

beside the point in an apology and might have alienated the audience he
was attempting to persuade. If Tatian is presenting a protrepticus, however,

his audience would have seen his sarcasm and abuse as following the standard technique of highlighting the various weaknesses of one's opponents while presenting one's own superior case. (Clement of Alexandria in Protrepticus 56 provides an example of this almost rambling denigration of rivals.) Most significantly Pros Hellenas does not function as an apology in that
it does not defend the Christians, or any particular Christian, against legal
complaints or charges. If we consider that an apology, at the very least, is a
defense 1.) of somebody (or some group), 2.) in relation to a specific

charge, and 3.) addressed to a particular recipient, we may wonder whom this "apology" defended, what charges were refuted, and who was supposed to be persuaded. Only by redefining the term "apology" can the
work be understood as one.
Nevertheless many commentators have classified Pros Hellenas as an apology. G. F. Hawthorne, for example, concedes that the tone of the work
is "violently hostile; harshly dogmatic."6 Yet he ends his analysis by comparing Tatian's work with Pseudo-Justin's To the Greeks.
6. Hawthorne, "Tatian," 162.
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Neither "Discourse" is an apology in the strict sense of the word. Rather, both could be classed as harangues against the Greeks. Pseudo-Justin at the end, however, makes a warm and sincere appeal to the pagan to become a Christian. Tatian makes no such appeal, but simply presents himself prepared for examination. The style of both is rhetorical.7
Hawthorne's comments on the literary nature of the work provide almost
no help in interpretation. What does he mean by "apology in the strict

sense of the word," "harangue," or the style of both discourses as "rhetorical"? And more importantly, how can a "harangue" in any sense of the word be an "apology"?
Yet, to go to the opposite extreme, classifying it as a "harangue" does not adequately explain Pros Hellenas either. Although differing in their terminology, many scholars have seen the work as an "attack."8 Typical of this approach is Edgar J. Goodspeed's comment on the work: "It is usually
classed as an apology, but it is just as much a bitter attack upon Greek pretensions in arts and letters."9 Understanding Pros Hellenas as a harangue allows us to make sense of
the vituperative style and the abuse of philosophical rivals, but this only
raises questions about the Sitz im Leben of the work. For example, why does Tatian offer to answer questions (42)? Why would his Greek audience (1, 4, 12, 13, etc.) pay any attention to Tatian's abuse? What would
he hope to accomplish by an attack on the Greeks? Must we assume that, in spite of what he repeatedly says, Tatian really intended Pros Hellenas
for a Christian audience? Or was he merely "getting something off his
chest"? io
Johannes Quasten, although aware of the various classifications which have been applied to the work, appears to follow the line of interpretation
which sees it as an attack: 7. Ibid., 188.
8. References to the text being some kind of polemic may be found throughout the literature. For illustrative examples, and keeping in mind that many of the same authors have also described the work as an apology, cf. Barnard, "Heresy," 1; Hawthorne, "Tatian," 188; Robert M. Grant, "The Heresy of Tatian,"/TS New Series 5 (1954): 63; Puech, Les Apologistes grecs 151. 9. Edgar J. Goodspeed, A History of Early ChristianLiterature, revised and enlarged by Robert M. Grant (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1966), 106. 10. An effort to explain Tatian's vehemence by his personal history or emotional makeup may be found in Whittaker, Tatian, xii-xv; Grant, "The Date," 100; Goodspeed, 106; and Johannes Quasten, Patrology Vol. 1 (Westminster, Maryland: Newman, 1951), 220-221. Such interpretations may be correct, but it is not clear to me how these hypotheses could ever be falsified by research or data.
148
Some scholars think that the Oration is not an apology intended to defend Christianity or to justify the conversion of the author, but a dedicatory speech, containing an invitation to attend the school of the author. But even if it was delivered as an oration at the opening of a school there is no doubt that
from the beginning it was thought to be an address to the public. It remains

true, however, that the speech is not so much an apology for Christianity as it is a vehement, immoderate, polemic treatise which rejects and belittles the
whole culture of the Greeks.11
Quasten's comment on the work as a "polemic treatise" is most interesting. What does he mean by the term and how may it be contrasted with an apologetic treatise? I suspect he means to contrast not only a polemic with an apology but also a "treatise" with a "speech."12
We can find another specific identification of the work as a polemic

"treatise" but one which also has some discussion of the classification.
Notwithstanding his earlier indentification of the work as a harangue, Hawthorne, in contrasting Pros Hellenas with other pieces, concedes that: "Perhaps the title is also a bit misleading, if one interprets 'Discourse' in the strict sense of Logos, or a public lecture delivered to various audiences encountered on a preaching tour similar to those carried on by the sophists." Hawthorne then suggests that Pros Hellenas is better understood
as a treatise rather than a speech, and specifically as "a syntagma rather

than a logos."13 Even though few have been willing to call Pros Hellenas a treatise, the text is almost always interpreted as if it were an exposition of systematic theology. Part of this interpretive tendency surely results from scholars' traditional interest in theological issues. But Pros Hellenas (like Paul's letters) was never meant as theological exposition. A "theology," no doubt, underlies the work. But, unless we choose to classify the work as a theological treatise, we should not assume that what Tatian presents here was ever
meant to be a systematic presentation of his thought on the Being of God, the nature of Christ, the internal dynamics of the Trinity, and so on.14 In fact, additional evidence such as Origen's Against Celsus 3.50-53, suggests that theological education occurred in private and implies that protreptic discourses would not become too specific about the finer points of Christian thought.
11. Quasten, Patrology, 221.
12. Since it is not clear what difference it makes whether Pros Hellenas was written
for oral delivery or written later after an oral delivery, I will not explore the question of whether the work was originally spoken or written.
13. Hawthorne, "Tatian," 161-162. 14. This is the fundamental flaw of works such as Martin Elze, Tatian und seine
Theologie (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960).
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Several commentators have approached Pros Hellenas as if it were a
theological treatise. For example, although Molly Whittaker is right to stress the hortatory nature of the work, she seems to interpret the text as if
Tatian had intended to write a systematic treatise. Tatian's apology is essentially hortatory rather than didactic. His main concern is to urge pagan readers to leave the error of their ways in order that they
may turn to the truth. ... He calls himself "herald of the truth" ... for him
Christianity (a term he never uses) is in itself an educational discipline (paideia), a philosophy superior to anything the Greeks can offer. . . . Tatian's theology is harder to follow because what sets out to be a systematic exposition is continually interrupted by outbursts of polemic. However the following points emerge. [She then gives an outline of his theology.]15
Whittaker's analysis fails in that Tatian does not attempt to give a "sys-
tematic exposition" anymore than he delivered an apology or a harangue.

If that were his purpose, Pros Hellenas is certainly a failure: the many digressions, unexplored ideas, and abusive sections are inappropriate in a
systematic exposition. However, if the speech is understood as a protrepticus, Tatian need not be faulted for digressions since a protrepticus did not have to be systematic. Further, unexplored ideas were common within a
protrepticus since it was expected that a teacher would elaborate on them

once students began studying. And, finally, abuse was a standard technique in protreptic discourse. Tatian's comments in chapter 30 might seem to indicate that he intends
to spell out the details of his philosophy: "... if you want to examine our
tenets I will give you an easily understood and full account." But, after we consider the context of this offer, we can see that the "full account" is on a
specific topic. In this passage Tatian is discussing why there are so many languages in the world: he refers to the tower of Babel and not the literary agenda of Pros Hellenas. Furthermore, since Tatian does not follow up with an explanation for the confusion of tongues, we may infer that he would be
available later for dialogue on that topic (cf. also 42). Some of the scholarly discussion about the literary character of Tatian's work suffers from a lack of clarity and even, at times, self-contradiction.
For example, Barnard's otherwise valuable analysis of Tatian's "heresy" is

not consistent in its description of the literary character of Pros Hellenas. Two different, and seemly contradictory, classifications appear to be com-
bined. Although Barnard labels the speech an "apologetic work" and

regularly refers to Tatian as an apologist,16 he also labels it "a violent
15. Whittaker, Tatian, xv. 16. Barnard, "Heresy," 1 et passim.
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diatribe" and "a violent polemic against Greco-Roman culture."17 He
gives a fuller description when he explains the function of the work:

[Tatian's] work was directed at non-Christians and was not so much a defence of Christian doctrine as an answer to laughers and scoffers who sneered at them. Tatian's weapon is not sweet reason, as with Justin and Athenagoras, but the wielding of a sword. Christian philosophy is carried into the enemy's camp with banners flying.18
In analyzing Barnard's remarks, it is important to understand that an
apology and a polemic are different kinds of literature. The Sitzen im Leben
and purposes are different. (Further, neither is a protrepticus.) Since the purposes of the two types of literature are so different, it is doubtful that anyone would attempt to present an apology while he was in fact delivering a polemic. The genres do not readily admit interchange.19 Aim Peuch, likewise, suffers from the same self-contradiction. He describes Pros Hellenas as an apology, a harangue, "une conference," an apology but "n'est pas une Apologie au sens strict," and even specifically as a protrepticus.20 Given all these classifications, Peuch is able to interpret any passage in the text in terms of one of these types of literature. Of course, he is right to speak of the text as a protrepticus. But because he has neither consistently applied that category nor made use of it in his interpretation of the material, Peuch's analysis did not go as far as it might have. Furthermore, in his construction of Tatian's theology, it is clear that Peuch reads
17. Ibid., 9 and 1. 18. Ibid., 10.
19. An ingenious attempt to deal with this problem is A. E. Osborne, Tatian: A Literary Analysis and Essay in Interpretation (Dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 1969). Osborne considers Pros Hellenas to be two different works which have been
joined together. Chapters 1-30 and 42 are one unit, a diatribe, "that is, a discourse
delivered for the edification of its hearers" (28), and chapters 31-41 are the other unit.
In addition to the lack of any textual evidence, Osborne's case for the insertion of 31-41 is weakened by several other factors: 1.) Since 42 does not follow smoothly from 30, it appears that we must assume that a section from Part 1 was dropped out when Part 2 was
inserted. 2.) What explains why Part 2 was inserted into Part 1 instead of being added on
at the end? 3.) Although 31 does not follow smoothly from 30, and 42 from 41,
prove textual hanky-panky.) Whittaker's synopsis (Tatian, xviii-xx) clearly illustrates Tatian's disjointed style. It seems extreme to focus on two abrupt transitions while ignoring others. Osborne, however, makes a good point in reference to the work having
similarities with the diatribe. But his comments on the character of the diatribe should be
nevertheless Tatian often digresses and returns to earlier themes. (Digressions do not
considered in light of Stanley K. Stowers, The Diatribe and Paul's Letter to the Romans, SBL Dissertation Series 57 (Ann Arbor: Scholars, 1981). 20. Puech, Les Apologistes grecs, 148-171 passim.
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Pros Hellenas as a straightforward statement of theology, i.e. a systematic

treatise.
Peuch, R. C. Kukula and others have noticed the many indications of
protrepticus within the speech, yet they did not follow up on the implications of such a classification.21 Kukula, in fact, specifically rejects the idea
that the speech is a protrepticus by contending that it is a convocation

lecture (logos eisiterios). "Unsere oratio . . . eine Inaugurationsrede ist,
die wirklich einmal zur Erffnung einer Schule von Tatian gesprochen
worden ist."22
Kukula's hypothesis, however, does not adequately explain Tatian's intention for Pros Hellenas. If he is speaking to his students at the opening of
his school, why does he address "the Greeks" ? Why does he not provide a more systematic introduction to what the students will be learning? Why
bother abusing his audience with such comments as 26.3? ("Because you do not know God you make war among yourselves and kill one another. For this reason you are all nothing; you appropriate words but your conversation is like a blind man with a deaf.") Kukula's hypothesis is simply less convincing than the thesis that the piece is a protrepticus. What internal indications can we see, then, of Tatian's intention for Pros Hellenas} He is not, I contend, presenting philosophical theories or sys-
tematic theology. Rather he asks his listeners to do something. He urges

them to receive instruction in the "barbarian philosophy" of Christianity. His summons in chapter 11 certainly is an invitation: "'Die to the world'
by rejecting its madness; 'live to God' by comprehending him and rejecting

the old birth. We were not born to die, but die through our own fault." And
again, in chapter 18, when arguing that the demons have no power to cure,
21. Richard Cornelius Kukula, Tatian's Sogenannte Apologie (Leipzig: Teubner, 1900), passim; B. Ponschab, "Tatians Rede an die Griechen," Programm (Metten,
1895), 8, 22, et passim; Elze, Tatian, 43 et passim.
22. Kukula, Tatian's, 51. In rejecting Kukula, Puech (Recherches, 2-3 et passim) has argued that a public lecture of the sort proposed by Kukula is socially inconceivable in the middle of the second century. Although Kukula's hypothesis may be wrong, Peuch's argument against it has two fundamental flaws. First, Peuch is affirming the consequent. Because he assumes such speeches were inconceivable, he necessarily will deny that any occurred. Further, Peuch does not appreciate the significance of Tatian refering to "the barbarian philosophy" and not Christianity. Roman officials would have seen Tatian as a teacher of philosophy. Finally, Puech's argument is a two-edged sword. If Kukula's "Inaugurationsrede" were impossible, how could a protrepticusa term Puech uses to refer to Pros Hellenashave been delivered either? Puech applies so many different labels to the work and refutes so many of them that it simply is not clear what his
position is.
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Tatian urges his listeners to accept a more powerful Lord. "Follow the power of the Word [logou dynamei katakoloutheson]."
Another specific invitation to his audience is found in chapter 19, which

begins with sarcasm but ends with an appeal. Tatian exhorts, "You who have no comprehension of these things should learn from us who have, when you say that you despise death and practise self-sufficiency. ... I can demonstrate how these things are organized [echo deiknuein ten touton oikonomian]; listen, and he who believes will come to know." Furthermore in chapter 32, another section which clearly suggests a protrepticus, Tatian affirms that instruction is not predicated on wealth. " [N]ot only the rich philosophize, but the poor also enjoy teaching without charge, for there is no comparison in exchange value between the truth of God and this world's recompense. Thus we admit all who wish to hear, even if they are old women or youngsters . . . ." Thus Tatian has made it explicit that accepting the "barbarian philosophy" involves a period of instruction.23 Moreover, since he is presenting this protrepticus, he is advertising the fact, both by the form of Pros Hellenas and by its content, that he is available as a teacher of the Christian faith. Finally, the examination (anakrisis) to which Tatian declares himself ready to undergo in chapter 42 supports the contention that the speech was
meant as a protrepticus. Tatian's offer is similar to the tests of wit and logic
in which philosophers so often engaged to prove their intellectual powers. Taken together, these sections fit poorly with understanding the text as an apology, a harangue, or a treatise. The purpose of the speech appears to be an encouragement to accept the barbarian philosophy and to learn of it through the instruction of Tatian. Adopting the classification protrepticus allows for several seemingly problematic elements of the speech to make sense: the vituperative style, the ridicule of other philosophies, the apparently random references to unexplored ideas, and the offer to answer questions. No other classification allows for these four elements to be taken together and then connected
with a definite intention for the work.
Recently Robert M. Grant has proposed a radically new understanding of Pros Hellenas based upon a study of the handbook Menander Rhetor.24 This rhetorical handbook probably dates from the late third or fourth
23. Cf. Justin, Apology and Origen, Against Celsus. 24. Delivered as a lecture at the University of Rome, Grant's "Forms and Occasions of the Greek Apologists" is forthcoming in Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni. I thank Prof. Grant for an advance copy of his manuscript.
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century CE.25 Although affirming that Pros Hellenas contains protreptic elements, Grant suggests "that the Oratio is essentially a logos syntaktikos
or 'farewell discourse' to the culture of Greece and Rome." He argues that sections 1.3, 22-23, 29,35, and 42 indicate that Tatian is saying goodbye to the culture which he has rejected. Even though Grant correctly attempts to classify early Christian literature on the basis of ancient genres, I contend that he has misunderstood both Menander and Tatian in his proposal to treat Pros Hellenas as a logos
syntaktikos. In terms of the types of speeches which Menander does discuss, Pros Hellenas probably comes closest to being a "farewell address." Menander Rhetor, however, is not a complete analysis of the various cate-
gories of speech in the early Christian period, as is made clear in the first paragraph of Book 1 (331.11): "Do not therefore expect to hear about
rhetoric as a whole from the beginning . . . ."The focus of the text is rather
on epideictic rhetoric.26 The protrepticus as a type of speech is not discussed at all, an omission that is understandable in light of Epictetus
3.23.3338 where the protrepticus is considered distinct from epideiktikos. By using the rhetorical categories of Menander Rhetor, Grant limits
the range of possible classifications prematurely.

Further, the citations from Tatian which Grant uses to construct his case for a "farewell address" simply do not support his argument. Sections 1.3, 2223,29, and 35 indeed make mention of leaving or rejecting things, but
the objects to be rejected are schools of wisdom, practices, or ideas. They do not appear to conform to Menander's concept of a "farewell address,"
which says goodbye to a place or a group of people. More importantly, these passages relate to Tatian's past activities, not to his present situation: they provide biographical detail, and not the Sitz im Leben of Pros Hellenas. Grant's implication that chapter 42 indicates Tatian's forthcoming return to his homeland is not supported by the text. For these reasons Grant's proposal that the work is a "farewell address" is not compelling. But in addition, understanding Pros Hellenas as a "farewell address" does not do justice to the work as a whole: Grant himself concedes that the work has sections of "a positive, 'Christian' content" as well as protreptic elements. How these themes belong in a farewell address
are not explained. Taking the work as a protrepticus, however, explains the
25. Menander Rhetor, edited with translation and commentary by Donald Andrew Russell and Nigel Guy Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981) xi. 26. Menander Rhetor 3, cf. also xi-xxiv and 226228 for commentary and explanation.
154
positive, the negative, and the protreptic elements. It provides the most complete explanation for the parts, as well as the whole, of Pros Hellenas.
The overall effect of the speech conforms to Epictetus' description of the

sort of speech which a philosopher must give in order to attract students
(3.23.28): "I invite you to come and hear that you are in a bad way, and that you are concerned with anything rather than what you should be concerned with, and that you are ignorant of the good and the evil, and are wretched and miser-
able." That's a fine invitation! And yet if the philospher's discourse [logos]
does not produce this effect, it is lifeless and so is the speaker himself.
TATIAN AS TEACHER
What can we infer from Tatian presenting a protrepticus} Although we do not have clear evidence of protreptic speeches being used to proselytize for the traditional Greco-Roman religions, we do find a relative abundance of them associated with philosophies of the period. It seems likely, therefore, that Tatian also understood (or, at the very least, presented) Christianity as a philosophy to which he wished to attract his audience. Whatever Christianity wasbefore the New Testament was collected, before the creeds were formulated, and before the Fathers wrotewould have appeared as a "philosophy" to Tatian's listeners. Further, Tatian himself would have been seen as a philosopher. The title of his lost work On Animals (15) suggests that his interests included the wider world which other philosophers also studied. Tatian's use of the phrase "barbarian philosophy" would have been understood as a reference to his own position. Whether or not other Christians of the second century would have agreed, Tatian's listeners would have understood Christianity, therefore, to be a rival to other Greco-Roman philosophies and not merely as an alternative to the traditional cults.
Even by those who condemned him, Tatian was seen as a teacher.27 Apparently he did not set himself up as a rival bishop or attempt to start a
church. The fact that he is described as a teacher obviously implies that he

had both a "school" and pupils. And, since teachers had to attract students, Tatian either had to rely on others to publicize for him or else follow the common practice of recruiting by his own protreptic speeches. The latter practice is implied by Hippolytus's occasionally misunderstood comment in Heresies 10.14. "And [Tatian] habituates himself to a very cynical mode of life, and almost in nothing differs from Marcion, as
27. Irenaeus, haer. 1.28 and Eusebius, h.e. 4.29.
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appertaining both to his slanders, and the regulations enacted concerning

marriage."28 The editor of the Ante-Nicene Fathers series explains in a footnote that
the phrase "a very cynical mode of life" refers "to the shamelessness of the Cynics in regard to sexual intercourse." This explanation is totally mistaken.29 While it is true that some of the earliest Cynics favored promis-
cuity in regard to both women and boys, by the Empire this was no longer
true.30 Furthermore, Encratism (the heresy most often associated with
Tatian) and Marcionism were systems which recommended abstinence from sexual relationships, even within marriage. Tatian is explicit in his denunciation of immorality (11): "I hate fornication [porneian]." Since Hippolytus' remark about Tatian's similarity to the Cynics cannot
refer to sexual licentiousness, his comment must be construed differently.
The Cynics during the period from Tatian to Hippolytus were a diverse group. They ranged from the uneducated boors, whom Luc-an had ridiculed, to the most refined "cultured despisers" of pagan life. Most often they were ascetic and were almost always opposed to the excesses of materialism and vanity in their societies.
Is Hippolytus' comment, therefore, meant descriptively or normatively ?

If the comment was meant to be descriptive, Hippolytus may only acknowledge that Tatian was an ascetic who openly condemned society.31 The reference might also include a implication about the similarity be-
tween Encratism and the Cynic virtue of autarkeia. On the other hand, if the comparison is meant as a normative judgment on both Tatian and the Cynics, Hippolytus may have in mind the many rude loafers who wore the Cynic cloak because it furnished an easy way of life. If this is the case,
however, Hippolytus was basing his condemnation on a false stereotype of the Cynics. If Tatian followed the normal procedure in managing his "school," his students would have been expected to pay for their course of study. His statement in chapter 32 that "not only the rich philosophize, but the poor also enjoy teaching without charge" implies that payment for education was the norm, even if something similar to a fee structure based on a sliding-scale allowed the indigent to receive instruction. Tatian almost
28. English translation from ANF 5:146. 29. It is unfortunate that this very accessible set of early Christian literature has such
misleading footnotes that students must be warned not to read them.

30. Donald Dudley, A History of Cynicism (London: Methuen, 1937). For additional discussion and a more recent bibliography, cf. also Abrahman J. Malherbe, The Cynic Epistles (SBLSBS 12, Missoula, Montana: Scholars, 1977).
31. Cf. Hawthorne, "Tatian," 162.
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certainly would have earned his living from the fees his students paid. His
means of support, therefore, would have allowed bishops and others within
a developing hierarchy little leverage over his instruction. In fact, there is no definite implication of outside influence being exerted on Tatian's activities as a teacher. Teachers like Tatian could have been very independent and may, at times, have been difficult for other authorities to work with. In addition, Tatian's speech implies that becoming a Christian involved a process of education. But what sort of education would "the barbarian
philosophy" provide? Tatian is not clear about this point in Pros Hellenas. However, a protreptic speech did not necessarily outline the course of study
which one would be undertaking with a particular teacher, and we should
not expect to find such an exposition within the work; instead the protrepticus concentrated on the negative aspects of the other alternatives. Neither
the method nor the content of Tatian's instruction can be inferred from Pros Hellenas.
Interesting also is Tatian's failure to comment on the Scriptures or on cultic activities among the Christians. He quotes from or alludes to the
Scriptures but seems to make little of their authority.32 Yet certainly they
did matter to him. Tatian, after all, compiled the Diatessaron. Perhaps he did not believe that they would help in his persuasion. Since a pagan audience would have been unfamiliar (and probably unimpressed) with Christian texts, he might have considered that there was no advantage in quoting from them. The situation is more problematic, however, concerning his relative ne-
glect of reference to Christian rituals. It is possible that Tatian deliberately

chose not to mention Christian cultic activities in order not to turn away any potential students, but it is also conceivable that these cultic activities were not important to him. If Tatian understood Christianity primarily as a philosophy and not as a cult, his failure to refer to worship practices is explainable.
This lack of reference to Christian rituals and to the developing hierachy

may account for why Tatian is sometimes understood as a Gnostic. Irenaeus refers to the Valentinian position on the existence of the aeons when he speaks against Tatian (haer. 1.28), and Grant follows Irenaeus when he concludes, "Tatian wrote not in the name of Christianity but as an
individual Gnostic teacher."33
There are two major suppositions implied in Grant's claim which under32. Whittaker, Tatian, xvii and Robert M. Grant, "Tatian and the Bible," SP 1
(1957): 297-306.
33. Robert M. Grant, "The Chronology of the Greek Apologists," VC 9 (1955): 28.
157
mine its force. First, unless Grant is willing to define what he means by
"Gnostic," he has gone beyond what Tatian says. For Tatian appears to affirm the Incarnation in chapter 21 and even the suffering of Christ (15).
He also argues for the resurrection of the body (6) and seems to contrast
that with the immortality of the soul (13). Finally, Tatian always speaks
highly of Moses and his writings. Given Tatian's references to the works of
Moses and his view of the Logos (5 and 7), Greeks would have certainly
assumed that the "barbarian philosophy" of which Tatian spoke was Christianity. Second, Grant seems to make a distinction between an "individual
Gnostic teacher" and one writing in the name of Christianity. Whether or not such a distinction can now be upheld in the religious climate of the
second century, pagans would surely not have been sensitive to the later
(and assumed!) differences between an orthodox Christianity and a gnostic

Christianity of that time. The Greeks surely would have understood Tatian to be a Christian philosopher.34
How, we might ponder, would Tatian's approach to Christianity have been evaluated by the developing hierarchy? Marcel Simon and Stanley K.
Stowers correctly see that the educational policies which had been customary for teachers in the Hellenistic age implied a challenge to the Christian bishops if the independent Christian teachers followed the example of their
pagan counterparts.35 Local elders and bishops would have had little opportunity to exercise control over the work of teachers such as Tatian who depended upon their students for support.
Since some church leaders were already beginning to claim that apostolic authority guaranteed uniform doctrine, it is possible that the freedom
Christian teachers enjoyed in their own schools caused problems in the churches because the teachers were free to develop new ideas and disagree
among themselves, unhampered by ecclesiastical oversight. The sheer vari-
ety of haireseis common among the philosophers was the very thing that
Irenaeus and so many others saw as a threat to the apostolic tradition.
Likewise absent from Pros Hellenas is a discussion of miracles which we
might expect had the work been either a theological treatise or an apology. This absence seems somewhat unusual since miracles were commonly (and
most effectively) used as a means to convince non-believers of the truth of
34. Cf. Hawthorne, "Tatian," 162-175 and Barnard, "Heresy," passim. 35. Stanley K. Stowers, "Social Status, Public Speaking and Private Teaching: The Circumstances of Paul's Preaching Activity," 26 NovT (1984): 59-82 and Marcel Simon, "From Greek Hairesis to Christian Heresy," Early Christian Literature and the Classical Intellectual Tradition: In Honor of Robert M. Grant, edited by W. Schoedel
and R. L. Wilken (Paris: Editions Beauchesne, 1979), 101-134.
158
the Gospel.36 Tatian's argument for Christianity seems here to be made on
rational rather than supernatural grounds. Although Tatian might have refused to buttress his argument with miracles because he anticipated a skeptical audience, it is possible that he considered "proof through miracles" as no proof at all. A final implication from understanding Pros Hellenas as a protrepticus serves as a warning about attempting to reconstruct Tatian's theology. If
the work is a protrepticus, the details of Tatian's thought would have been
spelled out to his students during his later teaching on the "barbarian philosophy." It is illegitimate (or, at the very least, rash) to explore the intricacies of Tatian's view on the logos endiathetos and logos prophorikos if the work is a protrepticus. Even if Tatian was as fully aware of the myriad
implications of those terms as modern patristic scholars are, there is no
reason to assume that he intended the terms in a protrepticus to carry all

the freight with which modern researchers have loaded them.
If Pros Hellenas is a protrepticus, we probably know less about Tatian's

theology than we once thought we knew. Nevertheless, from a better starting point, we can now begin to study Tatian and his work on their own terms. It may turn out that his heresy and the heresies of other second century teachers were more related to the profession of teaching than to anything which was taught.
Michael McGehee is an Adjunct Professor at Howard Payne University,

El Paso, Texas
36. Cf. Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100-400) (New Haven: Yale, 1984) and Howard Clark Kee, Miracle in the Early Christian World
(New Haven: Yale, 1983).
Barbarians and Bishops: Army, Church, and State in the Age of Arcadius and Chrysostom (review)
Harry Rosenberg

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v001/1.2.rosenberg.html
BOOK REVIEWS
219
theless, in this study, R. does not propose anything new on how diversity achieves
unity. Perhaps, in his next book, which I await. Thomas M. Finn, Department of Religion, College of William and Mary,
Williamsburg, Virginia J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz
Barbarians and Bishops: Army, Church, and State

in the Age of Arcadius and Chrysostom
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990
Pp. xiv +312. $64.00.
The focus of this major contribution of the "transformation of society in Late Antiquity" is "Demilitarization and Christianization" (1). Professor Liebeschuetz, of the University of Nottingham, covers some well-known terrain, to be sure, but he
does so with a meticulous review of the extant sources and the very large body of
scholarship. The result is a lucid exposition of the complicated scene involving the
Eastern and Western halves of the Late Roman Empire, or better now, the world of Late Antiquity with the powerful and dynamic new elements: the Barbarians and Christianity. With careful and nearly exhaustive documentation utilizing the extant printed sources and expanding body of scholarship, Liebeschuetz describes his theme in
three parts which include twenty-three chapters, plus a particularly useful mise au pointhis "Conclusion: The Historians' Post-Mortem." There are two appendices, a 24-page Bibliography and an adequate index. Finally a collection of plates illustrating the appendix on "Arcadius' Column" concludes the volume, which
is presented according to the traditional standards of the Oxford University/ Clarendon Press. The bibliography, pp. 279-303, is devoted entirely to secondary studies, and it demonstrates Liebeschuetz' command of the complex body of scholarly studies devoted to Late Antiquity which range over Late Roman imperial government, and the increasingly defined institution of the Church in the WesternRoman Latin Catholic half of the Empire and the Eastern-Roman Greek-Orthodox half of the Empire, plus the Germanic-Barbarian factor within both the secular and religious history of this era. I have a few reservations concerning the bibliographical materials which abound
in the detailed footnotes as well as the formal list at the end of the volume. Since
assessment of the historians and chronicles for the events and personalities included in this study is a noteworthy feature of Liebescheutz' analysis, I am surprised at the omission of Glenn F. Chesnut, The First Christian Histories. Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, and Evagrius, 2nd ed. rev. and enlarged (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1986). In several instances, items listed in the bibliography are not factored into the documentation adequately in my judgment, e.g. Jay Breg-
man, Synesius ofCyrene. Philosopher-Bishop and Raymond Van Dam, Leadership

and Community in Late Antique Gaul. In "Part I: An Army of Mercenaries and Its Problems," the author concisely
reviews the military history of the fourth-century empire by describing the role of
220
the "Barbarian Officers and Generals" and then the military and demographic realities which necessitated the expanded effort at recruiting the Barbarians. The status of the Barbarians in the Roman military establishment, especially after the disaster at Adrianople, is then evaluated both from the Imperial and the Barbarian points of view; this brings Alaric and the Goths into clear view. Liebeschuetz provides a most informative description and explanation of the role of Alaric and
the "Visigoths" in the historical development of both halves of the empire.

With "Part II: The Eastern Government and Its Army," Liebeschuetz addresses
one of his major themes, the "Demilitarization" of the eastern half of the Empire. The conclusion he reaches is the triumph of the civilian over the military element at
Constantinople, climaxing with what he describes as the "Arcadian Establishment, AD 392-412." There are many keen insights in these several chapters. Here and
elsewhere, this study is enriched by the author's skillful use of prosopography and
by his equally skillful and nuanced handling of secular and religious history. The intertwining of profane and sacred developments has been a concern of historians at least since Gibbon, of course, a topic I shall return to below when considering Liebeschuetz' "Conclusion," but here I must underscore his masterful elucidation of the complexities of his subject. In the concluding section, "Chrysostom and the Politicians," Liebeschuetz continues his superb exposition: complicated religious issues and theological disputes
as well as secular and personality factors are discussed with sensitivity and a sense
of cool detachment. Revealing insights into the nature of Orthodoxy, the Eastern
Church and its impact on the social milieu, including the role of women in imperial
ecclesiastical developments abound in Part III. Professor Liebeschuetz' "Conclusion: The Historians' Post-Mortem," is an especially rewarding bonus, so to speak. It is an enormously valuable discussion of the historiography on Late Antiquity from Montesquieu to Liebeschuetz with particular attention to Gibbon, A. H. M. Jones' magnum opus, The Later Roman Empire 284-602: an economic survey (1964), and G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, who dealt with the issue of Christianity in the concluding portion of his massive The Chss Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981). As Liebeschuetz notes, he, like de Ste. Croix, "starts from Jones' analysis of the Later Empire. But instead of focusing on the slave
system of production, or indeed production at all. [sic] I have gone back to Montesquieu and concentrated on the military system" (245). The analysis of militarism and of the role of Christianity in the Later Empire includes emphasis on the complexity of the Churches' impact on society, particularly the "ideal of charity," and
asceticism with its emphasis on chastity. Indeed as Liebeschuetz observes in his understated yet compelling manner, "The impact of Christianity on Late Roman society . . . calls for comprehensive analysis and mapping. But for this one has to
go to historians of another school." And footnote 69 here (250) refers the reader to n. 58 in this same summary chapter (249) where one finds among others N. H. Baynes, Peter Brown, Averil Cameron, and E. Patlagean. To this roster I would add
Professor Robert Markus, Liebeschuetz' esteemed emeritus colleague at Nottingham, whose most recent contribution The End of Ancient Christianity (1990) is germane to the task of "analysis and mapping," and most assuredly I would add Professor Liebeschuetz himself whose splendid monograph must be read by all who
BOOK REVIEWS
221
wish to understand the complex and challenging historical terrain of the crucial decades of the late fourth and early fifth centuries. Harry Rosenberg, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado
Giulia Sissa
Greek Virginity
Arthur Goldhammer, translator
Revealing Antiquity, 3 Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990 Pp. 240. $25.00. In this intriguing study of the connection between virginity and inspiration, illus-
trated by the figure of the Pythia, the prophetess of Apollo at Delphi, Giulia Sissa
takes on not merely one but several formidable tasks. In order to understand how the virginal body of the priestess, filled with the spirit of the deity, becomes the
deity's "voice," and how that "breath" of the deity is received, Sissa cautions that
one must understand the entire "structure of enthusiasm" in the antique world, and proceeds to delineate that structure. Interpreting metaphors, symbols, and "signs" of the virgin body throughout the text, Sissa claims that "Sexuality is . . . implicit in divinatory speech" (4). Sissa shows how the body, and especially the female body, in classical Greece was used as a metaphor for inspiration, alternating "closed" or "open" representations: either as a vessel (container) or as a "perforated jar or leaking sieve" (5). These alternations between closure and penetrability, openness and vulnerability, find their mythic and cultic expressions in the role of the Pythia, in the language of
the mysteries of Eleusis, and in the myth of the Danaides. The image of the female
body in ancient Greece as an empty vessel that can be "filled" through conception, through its analogue, inspirationin sum, as a "vehicle" for the conveyance of spiritual or physical "insemination"is not unique to Sissa (cf. Page du Bois, Sowing the Body [Chicago, 1988]). Nor is Sissa's carefully-drawn relationship between religious and philosophical views of the inspired female and the presentation of the female body in ancient medical literature unique (cf. Aline Rousselle, Porneia [Basil Blackwell, 1988]). Nevertheless, Sissa does make a unique contribution, through her analysis of the concept of virginity in classical Greece, to the study of perceptions of the female
body in its "closed" or "open" state. She continues this analysis by pointing out
significant contradictions between the Greek view and that of the early Christians, who nevertheless partially shared it, and were certainly influenced by it. For example, Christians like Origen and Chrysostom praised virginity as understood in the specifically Christian ascetic sense, while casting aspersions on the source of the "inspiration" of the virgin Pythia. In explaining the anomaly of the Christian "virginal conception," she shows how a woman might be regarded as a "virgin" in the ancient pagan Greek world, even though penetrated by a male, if the "evidence" in the form of an out-of-wedlock child (i.e., Danae and Perseus) was not a
factor.
Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook (review)

Edward Sellner

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v001/1.2.sellner.html
222
But the most important contribution Sissa makes to the study of the meaning of
virginity in ancient Greece as well in that of early Christianity, a chronologically but

not conceptually distinct era, is her close reading and interpretation of the contemporary medical literature, particularly with reference to its opinion on the hymen as
"closed" or "open." By means of this analysis, she demonstrates that the "virgin
birth" is a metaphor possible in ancient Greece as well as in early Christianity because of their common visualization of the female body as a "leaking sieve." In connection with this argument, she claims that "... the Greek idea of partheneia did not require the presence of a seal over the genitals" (170). This "seal" or the "hymen," as Sissa contends, was always envisioned, like many other "guards" over
the vulnerable body of the woman in classical Greece, as many times more significant in literature and society than it actually was in the medical literature itself. One
of the chief ways in which she disagrees with writers like Rousselle is in her analysis
of the writers of the Hippocratic collection, Galen, and Soranus, which shows that
neither Greek nor Roman writers believed in the existence of a virginal, penetrable
and breakable hymen. This hypothetical organ is, in her words, "a crude and contestable sign" (172). The use of the term, "sign," brings us to the major flaw in Sissa's argument. When she portrays virginity as a metaphorical state in literature or religious language, she is on firmer ground than when she talks vaguely in semiotic jargon about the female body and virginity as "signs." She seldom explains what she means by the term or the relationship of these concepts and their portrayal to semiotics as a field. In fact, it would have been a more convincing and less meandering analysis had she left out the language of semiotic altogether. As it is, the use of the technical language of a field definitely related to her argument but loosely connected to it by Sissa only serves to detract from her important contribution to the connection of female sexuality with psychic and spiritual inspiration. Her argument would have been further supported had the publisher seen the necessity to reproduce the important representations of the Pythia at Delphi in art to which Sissa refers and which
she analyzes in meticulous detail.

Gail P. Corrington, Rhodes College, Memphis, Tennessee Vincent L. Wimbush, editor Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity: A Sourcebook Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990 Pp. xvii + 514. $41.95.
This volume represents the collaborative efforts of nearly thirty members of the Society of Biblical Literature Group on Ascetic Behavior in Greco-Roman Antiquity. The purpose of the book, according to its editor, is "to make accessible in English translation a number of interesting texts that will introduce the reader to a wide range of different types of ascetic piety as different understandings of, and responses to, the
Greco-Roman world." This the book does well and, considering the numerous scholars who have contributed to it, very competently. It relies not only upon Greek and Latin texts, but also makes ample use of Coptic and Syriac materials. As a
BOOK REVIEWS
223
sourcebook, it sets out to broaden the context in which asceticism has traditionally
been understood; that is, primarily equated with various forms of ascetic behavior of early Christian monasticism and desert Christian spirituality. Ascetic practices, as the selections show, were a much wider phenomenon. Although in Christianity they can be traced back to John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul, they existed in Judaism as well as in Hellenistic-Roman religions and philosophical schools. Aware of this great diversity, those who planned the volume, the editor says, took
a "minimalist approach" to the subject of asceticism. They sought to include "representative" texts of a number of types of ascetic piety in Greco-Roman antiquity while avoiding the impression that any one text or group of texts was adequate in fully defining or typifying asceticism. The argument or thesis they propose is that "ascetic behavior represents a range of responses to social, political, and physical
worlds often perceived as oppressive or unfriendly, or as stumbling blocks to the

pursuit of heroic personal or communal goals, life styles, and commitments." Selections in the book consist of more than abstract theological treatises. They include sermons that were preached to the Christian laity, stories and sayings from
the hagiographies of both female and male wisdom figures, ritual texts, and documents that detail archaeological and papyrological discoveries. Thus, the materials bring the reader much closer to the social life, religious views, and spirituality of ordinary people in late antiquity. That is one of its major contributions. As such, the content of the book is divided into five categories based upon literary genres. Under "Homily" are included texts of exhortation toward different kinds of ascetic re-
sponses to the world. The section, "Philosophical and Theological Exhortation," contains the visions and moral challenges of philosophers and theologians. "Ritual
and Revelation" pertains to various texts on rituals, magical rites, and mysticism which reflect the structure of particular types of ascetic spirituality. "Life and Teachings" refers to the hagiographical texts which tell the stories of saintly heroes and their ascetic disciplines. Finally, the section, "Documentary Evidence," includes a group of texts that draw upon archaeological research that documents the practices of specific communities. Chronological tables and a select bibliography follow. Each text in the volume has a brief introduction which explores the historical context of the translation and pertinent scholarship. Short bibliographies after each selection also provide helpful resources for anyone who wishes to pursue further research. Readers, of course, will naturally have their own preferences regarding the wide variety of texts presented in this volume. As a pastoral theologian and historian of early Christian spirituality, I found some particularly interesting and informative. The text, "On Hermits and Desert Dwellers", translated by Joseph Amar, tells how in Syria, before the Egyptian model of asceticism became dominant, the ascetic ideal was lived within society and did not require escape from "the world." David Hunter's translation, "Ambrosiaster: On the Sin of Adam and Eve," reveals that there were critics of the asceticism developing in early Christianity who spoke
against those who would condemn marriage and sexual union. "Peter had a wife
and children," Ambrosiaster argues, "and producing children did not prevent him from receiving primacy among the apostles. How, then, can one condemn that which does not restrict merits?" In another text translated by Gail Paterson Corri-
ngton entitled "Philo: On the Contemplative Life," we find reference to pagan
224
philosophers acting as "therapeutai"surely the first therapists in Western civilization, since, Philo says, they "profess a healing art" and "care for the Real."
Elizabeth Castelli's translation of Pseudo-Athanasius's "The Life and Activity of the
Holy and Blessed Teacher Syncletica" is a fascinating account of one of the early
desert mothers of whom we have so little written information. Although this hagio-
graphy does not offer very much in the way of biographical information, it does show us a vivid picture of a charismatic woman who attracted eager female disciples. One of the most interesting aspects of it, perhaps, is how early Desert Christians believed that asceticism not only pertained to strict practices and abstinent living, but to the patient endurance of disease and illness.
I agree with the editor's assertion that this volume "should help to changing the thinking of those who were convinced that asceticism can or must mean one thing."
Anyone who begins to read it will necessarily come to an appreciation of the rich
diversity of ascetic behaviors and traditions in and outside of Christianity. Ascetic Behavior In Greco-Roman Antiquity is, as its title implies, an excellent "sourcebook." It makes accessible to a wide audience many primary resources that have previously been unavailable. It would be a worthy addition to the library of any college, seminary, or university. Graduate students, theologians, and patristic scholars especially would benefit from it. As James Robinson, Director of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, says in the foreword: it is important for all of us to listen to these ascetic texts to the extent that "they address us today," questioningand perhaps clarifyingour own approach to askesis in the modern world. Edward Sellner, College of St. Catherine, St. Paul, Minnesota
Alan Scott
Origen and the Life of the Stars: A History of an Idea

Oxford University Press, 1991 xvi + 189 pp. $49.95.
Beginning with the Pythagoreans, who upheld it, and the Ionians, who denied it,
Scott traces to Origen the idea that the stars are rational beings. On the way he deals with the classical philosophical schools, with Philo, with Hellenistic natural sci-
ence, with gnosticism, and with Clement of Alexandria. As in Jean Pepin's Theologie cosmique et thologie chrtienne, Aristotle turns out to have a bigger role in the story than does Plato. In the process, Scott provides us a distinctive perspective
on Christian attitudes to the natural world and awareness of the natural sciences.
He also helps us better understand the world-view ultimately apotheosized in
Dante's Paradiso. Interestingly, this strand of Origen's thought had a fuller career in
the West, where Ambrose and, at least to some extent, Aquinas accepted it, than in the East, where Basil and John Philoponus rejected it.
Origen refers to the rational nature of the stars in several works and devotes to them a chapter (1.7) in On First Principles. There he provides scriptural and philosophical arguments that the stars are rational beings. Scripturally, Origen appeals to passages in the LXX like Isaiah 45.12, "I have given precepts to all the stars" and
Psalm 148.3 "Praise him, sun and moon, Praise him all stars and light." Most
Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection (review)

Andrea Sterk

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v001/1.2.sterk.html
Book Reviews
Carole Straw
Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection

Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 14 Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988 Pp. xiv + 295. $42.50.
Rarely does a work combine the virtues of theological insight, historical sensitivity
and careful literary criticism as masterfully as Carole Straw's Gregory the Great. The book examines the paradoxical relation between "oppositional contrasts" in
Gregory's moral theology. His underlying vision of complementarity, Straw argues, enabled Gregory to reconcile such opposites as sin and virtue, adversity and prosperity, active and contemplative life. The result is a theology of equilibrium embracing the totality of human experience.
The fundamental distinction in Gregory's theology, Straw suggests, is between carnal and spiritual. She explores this contrast in the first two chapters, which treat
Gregory's understanding of the human being and the world. In his sacramental vision of the cosmos, carnal signs mediate between the world of flesh and blood and the transcendent world of the spirit. Despite antitheses, there is a continuity between this world and the next. Gregory's Christianity neither renounces nor ignores the world. Straw describes his universe as "an organic whole," comprising a mixture of carnal and spiritual elements.
Chapters five and six examine the Christian beset by the curse of mutability.
Physical needs and desires, particularly the appetite for pleasure, draw men and women away from God. Yet the body becomes a focal point of Gregory's spirituality. In her discussion of his asceticism, Straw shows how human mutability functions for Gregory as both a curse and a blessing. The body is both the cause of sin and the vehicle of discipline and purgation that leads to the health of the soul.
Through such a "logic of antithesis," God uses evils to teach good by contrast. For example, vengeance on the reprobate teaches the elect to live uprightly; experience of pain increases enjoyment of pleasure; and judgment of sin leads to the mercy of
redemption. In the center of all antitheses is Christ, who reverses the effects of the Fall and reconciles such opposites as spirit and flesh, heaven and earth, God and humankind. In an insightful treatment of Gregory's Christology, Straw discerns his varia-
tion on the traditional communicatio idiomatum. Gregory speaks of Christ's mediation effecting a transfer of power between divinity and humanity by which
spiritual becomes carnal, making carnal spiritual. This transfer of qualities restores
216
humanity's spiritual health. Yet redemption must also be "activated" by the Chris-
tian's willing assumption of the sufferings of Christ through the sacrifice of the mass
and a corresponding self-offering in penitence and obedience.
The theme of sacrifice, analyzed in chapter nine, is central to Gregory's spirituality, especially to his ideal of "perfection in imperfection" (the subtitle of the
book). He considers as sacrifice both renunciation of carnality and return to the
carnal life one has renounced in obedience to God's command of charity. Departing
slightly from earlier tradition which tended to posit the antagonism of flesh and spirit, Gregory describes a cyclical return to the carnal element. In this connection
Straw elucidates the relation of contemplative and active life in Gregory's spiritual
system. He views the return to active life as a type of sacrifice. Gregory emphasizes
complementarity between active and contemplative life, Straw suggests, in order to

justify his own involvement in worldly affairs.
The final chapter focuses on the need for proper balance or stability amidst both the trials and blessings of life. It is precisely such polarities as adversity and prosperity, vice and virtue, carnal and spiritual, which, when rightly used, help the Christian maintain constantia mentis. Gregory perceives the Christian's equilibrium "as a mean between extremes, a point of balance between the spirit and flesh of which
man is a composite" (244). Straw demonstrates a parallel system of complementarity in Gregory's view of relationships within the Church and between the Church and the secular powers. She argues that this elaborate pattern of complementarity
arises from the fundamental paradoxes of Christ's Incarnation, particularly the

exchange of spiritual and carnal that Christ enacts. The conclusion includes a helpful diagram of complementarity in Gregory's thought (258). It underscores the centrality of Christ in uniting spiritual and carnal realms and in restoring God with humanity through sacrifice. The book ends with a selective bibliographical essay. Throughout this work Carole Straw demonstrates both depth and breadth in her understanding of Gregory the Great. Alongside her skillful analysis of his writings,
she shows insight into personal and psychological factors that motivated Gregory
and influenced his theological system. His relation to philosophical ideals and the Christian tradition are always taken into account. Straw is careful to note Gregory's indebtedness to the church fathers, both eastern and western, as well as his divergence from or modifications of earlier doctrinal formulations. She also highlights aspects of his thought which have particular significance for later medieval theology. Finally, the reader will appreciate her perspicacity and patience in weaving the many diverse strands of Gregory's thought into a comprehensive system of complementary opposites. She succeeds in sustaining her thesis throughout her intricate
treatment of this complex figure.

Any weaknesses in the book are only relative to Straw's outstanding scholarly achievement. While the introduction provides a sensitive historical overture to Gregory's life, one might have hoped for a clearer outline of the direction of the work as a whole and the rationale behind her selection of themes and the particular order in which they are treated. Chapters three and four, on the saint and the holy man in Gregory's thought, are less clearly connected with the overall thesis. Occasionally Straw's arguments seem repetitive and the reading slightly tedious. How-
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217
ever, this is primarily due to her efforts to integrate a tremendous breadth of
material to support her perception of an overarching pattern in Gregory's spirituality.
Gregory the Great is a definitive work for all students of this monk, pope and
theologian. But the book has much wider appeal. Patristic scholars and historians
of late antiquity will appreciate the nuanced treatment of Gregory in the context of
a pivotal period in religious, intellectual and cultural history. Those interested in
medieval spirituality, for which Straw demonstrates Gregory's foundational importance, will find the work a fount of information, insight and suggestive ideas for further research. This book will no doubt remain the standard work in English on Gregory's thought for years to come. Andrea Sterk, Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey
Thomas A. Robinson
The Bauer Thesis Examined: The Geography of Heresy in the Early Church Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity 11 Queenstown, Ont.: Edwin Mellen, 1988 Pp. xi + 248. Np. Professor Robinson writes (on behalf of all of us?), "I could never get away from the
implications" of the Bauer thesis (ix). To get it out of his craw, he engages the Bauer
thesis head-on in this study, incorporating part of his doctoral dissertation at
McMaster and directed by Ben F. Meyer. He weighs and finds the thesis wanting: "[Bauer's] work provides an adequate basis for no conclusion other than that early Christianity was diverse and that the Eusebian scheme is defective as history" (28). After a helpful chapter (I) on the history of the debate from Eusebius to the
present about whether early Christian orthodoxy had credible apostolic roots from the beginning, R. examines the geographical underpinnings of Bauer's claim about
the primacy of heresy (Edessa, Egypt, Corinth, Rome, with reflections on Jerusalem
and AntiochII). His conclusion is that the evidence from the sub-apostolic centuries is too limited to give to Bauer's contention that heresy came first the right of truth (91). R. then (chs. Ill and IV) focuses on Western Asia Minor, so crucial to Bauer's reconstruction. He concludes that it collapses at "three structurally critical points: 1) the hypothetical alliance of 'ecclesiastically oriented' Paulinists with
Palestinian immigrants against gnosticizing Paulinists; 2) the alleged strength of heresy in the area; and 3) the proposed cause for the rise of the monarchical episcopate" (130). In the final chapter (V) he analyzes the relationship between the orthodox and the separatists as Ignatius of Antioch reports it, concluding that the
opposition Ignatius encountered came from a dissident minority and cannot, therefore, be explained by the Bauer thesis (197). Given the centrality of Asia Minor to Bauer's reconstruction of sub-apostolic
Christianity, R. proposes his own sketch in the two appendices (A and B): 1) the
catholic community, not the heretics, represented the character of the majority in Western Asia Minor; 2) there was one set of heretics in the area, Gnostics with a
Origen and the Life of the Stars: A History of an Idea (review)

Joseph W. Trigg

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v001/1.2.trigg.html
224
philosophers acting as "therapeutai"surely the first therapists in Western civilization, since, Philo says, they "profess a healing art" and "care for the Real."
Elizabeth Castelli's translation of Pseudo-Athanasius's "The Life and Activity of the
Holy and Blessed Teacher Syncletica" is a fascinating account of one of the early
desert mothers of whom we have so little written information. Although this hagio-
graphy does not offer very much in the way of biographical information, it does show us a vivid picture of a charismatic woman who attracted eager female disciples. One of the most interesting aspects of it, perhaps, is how early Desert Christians believed that asceticism not only pertained to strict practices and abstinent living, but to the patient endurance of disease and illness.
I agree with the editor's assertion that this volume "should help to changing the thinking of those who were convinced that asceticism can or must mean one thing."
Anyone who begins to read it will necessarily come to an appreciation of the rich
diversity of ascetic behaviors and traditions in and outside of Christianity. Ascetic Behavior In Greco-Roman Antiquity is, as its title implies, an excellent "sourcebook." It makes accessible to a wide audience many primary resources that have previously been unavailable. It would be a worthy addition to the library of any college, seminary, or university. Graduate students, theologians, and patristic scholars especially would benefit from it. As James Robinson, Director of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, says in the foreword: it is important for all of us to listen to these ascetic texts to the extent that "they address us today," questioningand perhaps clarifyingour own approach to askesis in the modern world. Edward Sellner, College of St. Catherine, St. Paul, Minnesota
Alan Scott
Origen and the Life of the Stars: A History of an Idea

Oxford University Press, 1991 xvi + 189 pp. $49.95.
Beginning with the Pythagoreans, who upheld it, and the Ionians, who denied it,
Scott traces to Origen the idea that the stars are rational beings. On the way he deals with the classical philosophical schools, with Philo, with Hellenistic natural sci-
ence, with gnosticism, and with Clement of Alexandria. As in Jean Pepin's Theologie cosmique et thologie chrtienne, Aristotle turns out to have a bigger role in the story than does Plato. In the process, Scott provides us a distinctive perspective
on Christian attitudes to the natural world and awareness of the natural sciences.
He also helps us better understand the world-view ultimately apotheosized in
Dante's Paradiso. Interestingly, this strand of Origen's thought had a fuller career in
the West, where Ambrose and, at least to some extent, Aquinas accepted it, than in the East, where Basil and John Philoponus rejected it.
Origen refers to the rational nature of the stars in several works and devotes to them a chapter (1.7) in On First Principles. There he provides scriptural and philosophical arguments that the stars are rational beings. Scripturally, Origen appeals to passages in the LXX like Isaiah 45.12, "I have given precepts to all the stars" and
Psalm 148.3 "Praise him, sun and moon, Praise him all stars and light." Most
BOOK REVIEWS
225
importantly, he appeals to Job 25.5, "the stars are not clean in his sight." The uncleanness of the stars could not have been their original state, since that would imply imperfection on God's part. If the stars are not clean, therefore, there must have been a moral failure on their part. Origen further argues that the stars have been, in the words of Romans 8.21, "subjected to futility," their present embodiment, on account of their fault. Like the angels, though, they also serve humanity as they await their deliverance. Philosophically, Origen argues that the stars' motion implies animation and that their exact observance of rule and plan further implies rationality. Scott makes no attempt to distinguish between the Christian and the philosophical elements in Origen's thought on the stars. His work thus witnesses to a consensus among students of Early Christianity that Harnack's hypothesis about the Hellenization of Christianity, with its implicit assumption that we can distinguish the biblical tradition from its Greco-Roman cultural context, does not point us to useful questions. In the case of Origen this led to a false dichotomy between a committed Christian theologian and a Middle Platonist. Scott's extensive discussion of the relation between the corporeal vehicle (okhma) Origen envisaged for the stars and the resurrection body also witnesses to a consensus on Origen's eschatology. Scholars can now agree that Origen's understanding of the Christian hope did not entail the loss of some sort of embodiment that would remain as an essential distinction between the creature and the creator. Whether understanding this doctrine would have mollified Origen's ancient detractors is another question. They clearly preferred to understand resurrection as the resuscitation of the corpse, as in the story of Lazarus so prominent in early Christian iconography. Scott shows a solid grasp of classical and Patristic sources and secondary literature. His work testifies to Origen's great interest in and knowledge of the natural sciences. Without a trace of Augustine's suspicion of curiositas, Origen regarded the natural world as, like Holy Scripture, an avenue toward the knowledge of God. The book's main limitations are that it does not put Origen's understanding of the stars within a broader theological context than his eschatology and that, by and large, it does not deal with exegetical issues. Scott does little to relate Origen's understanding of the stars to his theological system as a whole, of which it is an integral part. As a result, he perhaps underestimates the importance of gnosticism
in moving Origen toward Greek philosophical understandings of the stars. The

view that the stars are rational beings serving humanity provided an alternative to the gnostic view that they are malevolent powers seeking to keep the divine-human spirit from escaping the cosmos. It would also have been intriguing if Scott had dealt with the scriptural side of Origen's argument. Why should we take seriously Origen's philosophical arguments while dismissing the arguments from scripture that he himself gave priority? It may seem arbitrary to us when Origen takes the personifications of the stars in the Bible literally, deliberately rejecting their interpretation as figures of speech. Nonetheless, Isaiah Berlin reminds us, in an essay on Vico, that metaphor and simile "are natural ways of expressing a vision of life different from ours". We should entertain the possibility that, as an interpreter, Origin was right. Joseph W. Trigg, St. Patrick's Episcopal Church, Falls Church, Virginia
Conference and Confession: Literary Pragmatics in Augustine's "Apologia contra Hieronymum"

Mark Vessey

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v001/1.2.vessey.html
Conference and Confession: Literary Pragmatics in Augustine's "Apologia contra Hieronymum"

MARK VESSEY
In the decade or so between his ordination to the priesthood and the completion of the Confessions Augustine can be seen working towards a "literary pragmat-
ics" that would provide an integrated vision of the relations between (1) the
Christian writer, (2) texts of his own composition, (3) the biblical text, and (4) his fellow Christian readers-and-writers. As expounded and enacted in the De doctrina Christiana and Confessions this Augustinian literary pragmatics de-
pends on the ideal of the biblical "conference": a text act performed jointly by
two or more human beings in the presence of God and in a spirit of charity. Au-
gustine formulates the conference paradigm in reaction to Jerome's advocacy of an ascetic and professional practice of scriptural interpretation, using hints supplied by his epistolary conversation with Paulinus of NoIa. The ensemble of the
De doctrina Christiana and Confessions may thus be construed as an apologia contra Hieronymum silently dedicated to Paulinus.
According to his first biographer, when Augustine returned from Italy to

his native North Africa in 388, he and his friends gave themselves up to a
life of fasting, prayer, good works, and Bible study. Like the blessed man in the Psalms, the former public orator of Milan now delighted in "meditating day and night in the law of the Lord." The fruits of this meditation, too, were made public: Et de his quae sibi deus cogitanti atque oranti intellecta revelabat, et praesentes et absentes sermonibus ac libris docebat ("And
what God revealed to his understanding as he thought and prayed, he would teach in conversation to those who were present and in books to those who were not").1 Possidius did not join Augustine's circle until a few
1. Vita S. Augustini 3.2. Quotations follow the edition of A. A. R. Bastiaensen in Vite dei Santi, ed. Christine Mohrmann, Vol. 3: Vita di Cipriano, Vita di Ambrogio, Vita di Agostino (s.l.: Mondadori, 1975). Journal of Early Christian Studies 1:2 175-213 1993 The Johns Hopkins University Press.
176
years later, so it is possible that he allowed subsequent developments to
influence his description of the primitive community at Thagaste.2 Be that as it may, the account given in the Vita Augustini of the saint's activity in teaching and writing is fully consistent for all phases of his post-conversion career. As pious layman, priest, and then bishop, Augustine continually
meditated on "the things of God", imparted what he discovered (that is, what God revealed to him) by word of mouth to those he could reach in this way, and committed the same to writing for the benefit of readers in other places and times. Possidius' attention to the processes of doctrinal transmission is aston-
ishingly scrupulous; his narrative is punctuated throughout with references to Augustine's habits of Bible study, preaching, writing, and publication, and to the experiences of his listeners and readers. No other saint's life from late Latin antiquity stands comparison with the Vita Augustini in
respect of such information.3 How are we to account for this peculiarity? If

the choice is between regarding it as a hagiographer's quirk and as the reflection of Augustine's personal preoccupation with the modalities of
Christian doctrina, we shall have no difficulty preferring the latter alternative. Possidius' presentation of Augustine's life and literary works (listed in
an appendix to the Vita) reposes on a set of reasoned assumptions, worked

out or approved by Augustine himself, about the cooperation of literate and articulate Christians in the intellection and promulgation of revealed Truth. Those assumptions relate to the nature of divine revelation (includ-
ing the function of Scripture); the personal qualities, lifestyle, and public
comportment of the religious teacher; the social and institutional contexts of Christian instruction; and the needs and abilities of a late antique Christian readership. More concisely, they specify the conditions of a doctrinal
and literary practice dedicated to bringing human beings to a knowledge and love of God; or, in terms of a distinction proposed by Augustine himself, a policy of charitable use in the service of everlasting enjoyment. Although modern humanistic discourse has no ready way of naming this
ensemble of concerns, many of them can be shown to fall within the province of "literary pragmatics,"4 defined as a science of the relations
2. But see now George P. Lawless, Augustine of Hippo and His Monastic Rule (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 45-62, and William J. Collinge, "Developments in Augustine's Theology of Community Life After A.C. 395," AugStud 16 (1984): 60. 3. Cf. Christine Mohrmann's introduction to Vita di Cipriano, etc., xliii; Philip Rousseau, "The Spiritual Authority of the Monk-Bishop: Eastern Elements in Some Western Hagiography ofthe Fourth and Fifth Centuries," JThSn.s. 22 (1971): 380-419
at406n.l.
4. The essays in Literary Pragmatics, ed. Roger D. Sell (London: Routledge Sc Kegan Paul, 1991) offer a variety of definitions of this concept. My own use of the term is
VESSEY/CONFERENCE AND CONFESSION
177
between texts, the users of those texts, and the conditions (material and ideological) of such use. In another article, conceived in conjunction with
this one, I hope to show that Possidius' simplified and systematized account of the principles of Augustinian doctrina can serve as a basis for theorizing Christian literary activity in late antiquity. Here I want to take a closer look at some of those principles as they emerge from Augustine's writings of the 390s, and to begin to distinguish the stages by which Augustine himself
arrived at a settled and ultimately normative vision of the relations between the Christian writer, his own texts, the text of the Bible, and other Christian
men and women.
Whatever Possidius may have known about his subject's life at Thagaste in the period ca.5 89-3 91, the description he gives of it is merely schematic. Apart from the monastic colour provided by a standardized list of activities (ieiuniis, orationibus, bonis operibus) and a biblical commonplace (in lege
domini meditans die ac nocte), all he offers is a cluster of binaries intended to evoke certain routine procedures (cogitanti atque oranti; revelabat. . . docebat; praesentes et absentes; sermonibusac libris). To the mod-
ern reader, following Augustine through works as strenuous and inchoate

as the De Genesi adversus Manicheos, De magistro and De vera religione, such formulas are bound to seem somewhat glib and deceptive. The chro-
nological sequence of the Retractationes enables us to retrace the author's own steps, even where they faltered; what mattered to Possidius after 430
were the established norms of Augustinian pastoral practice, not the pro-
cess by which they had been reached. The difference in perspectives between the Retractationes and the Vita is particularly marked for the period
in question. Augustine's writings from the years immediately following his

influenced by recent work in and between the fields of literary theory and textual bibliography, tending to emphasize the instability and historicity of the notion of (a) text. See, for example, D. C. Greetham, "Textual and Literary Theory: Redrawing the Matrix," Studies in Bibliography 42 (1989): 1-24; Philip Cohen, ed., Devils and Angels: Textual Editing and Literary Theory (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991). Granting, with Greetham and most contemporary theorists, that "there is no 'natural' or 'self-evident' ontology of the text" (3), we have to allow for a potential indeterminacy in the object(s) of a literary pragmatics as defined above. The specification of a meaning for "text" appropriate to the Christian discourses of late antiquity is one of the major challenges facing (literary) historians of this period. I share the methodological assumptions of Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 16: "What is textually possible cannot be theoretically established. What can be done is to sketch, through close and highly particular case studies, the general framework within which textuality is constrained to exhibit its
transformations." To which I would add that the "framework" thus sketched defines
what we mean by text/textuality when referring to the phenomena considered to fall

within it.
178
return to Africa reveal an urgent, sometimes frantic desire to ascertain the
conditions for successful Christian learning and communication. These

are the very conditions that Possidius takes for granted. By 390 Augustine knew that literate, eloquent converts like himself had
an important role to play as teachers in the Catholic Church; the Confessions contains a record of his acquaintance with several men who had filled
such a role, either as laypersons or as members of the clergy. He was also persuaded of the value of a sound biblical knowledge for anyone called or aspiring to a public office of instruction. Beyond these basic convictions,
however, almost everything to do with the theory and practice of Christian teaching, in the literary medium or viva voce, had still to be worked out. He was, it is true, unusually well equipped for the task. A trained orator,
widely read in classical literature, practised both in writing philosophical dialogues and in debating problems of biblical interpretation with the
Manichees, he was likely if put on to prove most magisterial. And in 391 he
was "put on", elevated to the public stage of the African church by a Greekspeaking bishop who had long prayed for one like him to edify the church
of Hippo "with the word of God and saving doctrine".5 How did he then
proceed? How, as a matter of fact, did Augustine assume the figure of the
biblical teacher-and-writer that Possidius ascribes to him?
To start more modestly, and confine ourselves to the sphere of literary

pragmatics: how did Augustine address the requirements implicit in the
Possidian scheme of Christian mediation, intellecta . . . et praesentes et absentes sermonibus ac libris docere? Even this question opens up a vast
field of inquiry, but if we neglect for the moment the evidence of his " local " performance in the diocese of Hippo (praesentes sermonibus . . .) and focus on his contacts with persons physically separated from him (absentes libris . ), part of the answer seems to be that in the course of the 390s Augustine's understanding of the relations between his own (written) words, the word of God in Scripture, and the situation of other literate
Christian men and women in the world came to centre on the act of biblical
interpretation conceived as conference or conlatio.
The development of that idea in Augustine's works of the decade, especially the De doctrina Christiana and Confessions, is the subject of the following pages. By concentrating on certain recurring features of his approach to the biblical text in their occasional variations, I shall try to provide a view of the processes of Augustinian doctrina that makes fuller allowance for circumstance and historical contingency than Possidius was inclined to. To that end, unlike the author of the Vita Augustini, I shall not
5. Possidius, Vita S. Augustini 5.2: "verbo dei et doctrina salubri."
179
consider the hero alone. As presented here, Augustine's pragmatics of the literary conference is to be seen not just as the resolution of certain long-
standing concerns of his own, but also as a creative (if at times polemical)
response to the attitudes and opinions of his contemporaries, notably those of two individuals whom he frequently encountered in writing but never
met: Jerome of Bethlehem and Paulinus of NoIa.6

SCIENTIA SCRIPTURARUM: JEROME
We may begin by recalling some of the issues raised by Augustine in the first work he wrote as a priest, the De utilitate credendi. Addressed to a friend and alter ego named Honoratus who was still affected by the Manichaean charge that Christian recourse to authority was an abdication of reason,
the treatise conflates an essay in hermeneutics with a sustained defence of the auctoritas of the Catholic Church as interpreter of the Bible.7 Au-
gustine sets himself a limited goal, and makes a show of saying more than
would be needed to achieve it. Yet for all his bluster it is evident that he is
grappling with problems more intractable than any ascribed to his correspondent. Granting the essential unity of the Old and New Testaments and trusting the Catholic Church to interpret them could be represented as the
first step for Honoratus, but for Augustine, who had taken this step and been ordained a teacher in that Church (vtil. cred. 2.4), other matters were
already pressing. Predictably, many of them concerned the Bible. What

kind of book was this that he now had to expound? How was it related to other books he knew? Why and how had it been promulgated? How did it fit into the (Christian Platonic) scheme of God's mediation of wisdom
through Christ? Why was it often so difficult to understand? What were the
constraints on its interpretation? How were reluctant readers to be reconciled to it? Some of these questions are raised formally in the De utilitate credendi, then deferred. Others merely suggest themselves. Few are con6. An earlier version of this article was given as a paper at the annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society in Chicago in May 1992, as part of a panel on "Interpretation in Theory and Practice" organized by Elizabeth A. Clark. In revising it for publication I have been helped by the comments and advice of Professors Clark, Patricia Cox Miller, and Robert Markus, and by Karla Pollmann, Stefan Rebenich, and Dennis Trout. To all my thanks. 7. Text ed. J. Zycha in CSEL 25.1 (1891), 3-48. See now 01ofGigon,"Augustins'De utilitate credendi'," in Catalepton: Festschrift fr Bernhard Wyss, ed. C. Schublin (Basel: Seminar fr Klassische Philologie der Universitt Basel, 1985), 138-57; Christoph Schublin, "Augustin, 'De utilitate credendi', ber das Verhltnis des Interpreten zumText," VC 43 (1989): 53-68. Both writers emphasize the tensions within the
work and its final incoherence.
180
vincingly answered. Behind them all, we sense, lies a single great unspoken question: who were these ideal teachers, the magistri, praeceptores or
doctores who embodied the authority of the Catholic Church? More precisely: what kind of men were they, and how did they discharge their teaching functions ? A sign of Augustine's concerns is the almost exclusively generic and anonymous style of his frequent references to expert Christian interpreters. In the recent past he had met, observed and heard about a number of distinguished Christian teachers (e.g. Ambrose, Simplicianus,
Marius Victorinus). Now he was being forced to generalize and draw

lessons from their individual performances. In only one place is the anonymity of the ideal Christian teacher seriously compromised.8 Although no human master steps forward to lay claim to the title in the De utilitate, a shadowy figure beckons from between its lines. In order to read the Bible with understanding, Augustine tells Honoratus, you must find a qualified interpreter: "Is he difficult to find? Then search harder. Not to be found in your own country? Then travel. Not on the same continent? Take a boat. Not just across the water?
Then go further, if necessary to the very land in which the events recorded
in those books are said to have taken place" (usque ad illas terras, in quibus ea, quae HHs libris continentur, gesta esse dicuntur)? At this point, Augustine's rhetoric takes another turn. Nowhere else in the work does he suggest that in order to understand the Bible one must visit the holy places;
such a radically historicist thesis would in fact be quite foreign to his

thought. Unless the passage quoted is simply a flourish, we should suspect another reason for its eastward trajectory. If the Holy Land recommends itself as a place to study Scripture, is it not because Jerome was there? He, surely, is the genius behind Augustine's latest thinking de magistro. Augustine had missed meeting Jerome in Rome in the early 380s,10 but
8. The teaching of Ambrose is briefly evoked at vtil. cred. 8.20: "et iam fere me commoverant nonnullae disputationes Mediolanensis episcopi, ut non sine spe aliqua de ipso vetere testamento multa quaerere cuperem." However, Ambrose's role is restricted to that of one who helped Augustine to reach a conviction of the value o- auctoritas in the Christian religion; he is not yet cited as an exemplary teacher, as he was to be in the Confessions (though even there Augustine makes only limited claims for him). This autobiographical passage in til. cred. begins with a reminiscence of Faustus the Manichee, the master from whom Augustine had vainly expected so much ("cuius nobis adventus, ut nosti, ad explicanda omnia, quae nos movebant, quasi de celo promittebatur").
9. Vtil. cred. 7.17. Translations my own unless otherwise noted. 10. Cf. John Matthews, Western Aristocracies and Imperial Court, A.D. 364-425
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975),212: "It was of course the merest coincidence that the
visit to Rome of Augustine was contemporaneous with the second stay there of Jerome. The two men never met, nor had occasion to: Jerome's present preoccupations . . . were
181
would have had many opportunities since then to hear about him and his work. The internal evidence of his earliest reading of Jerome has yet to be collected. We know, however, that as early as 392 bishop Aurelius of Carthage took steps to secure copies of Jerome's biblical writings for the African church. A recently discovered letter of Jerome to Aurelius enables us to suppose that the author of the De utilitate credendi already had access at least to some of the translations of Origen's homilies.11 When Alypius returned from a visit to the Bethlehem monastery shortly afterwards, he
probably brought more manuscripts with him. By then, too, the Africans
were in contact with one of Jerome's literary agents in Rome, from whom copies of his future works could be obtained.12 Thus although it would be a few years before Augustine could claim close acquaintance with Jerome
through the medium of his writings,13 already in the early 390s he would
have had a strong impression of his literary personality.
worlds away from those of Augustine. Yet a point of similarity is worth noting. Jerome was a court official turned ecclesiastical politician [and writer, we might add], Augustine a professor of rhetoric who became bishop of an African town: both of them, as a result of conversions experienced in court circles, were lost to the service of the imperial government." For further remarks on the "coincidence" of Jerome's and Augustine's
activities in the early 380s, see below.
11. Letter 27* in SanctiAureli Augustini. . . Epistolaeex duobus codicibus nuper in lucem prolatae, ed. Johannes Divjak, CSEL 88 (1981), from Jerome to Aurelius, 2: "Scribis te quaedam nostrae parvitatis habere opuscula, id est paucas in Ieremiam homelias et duas cantici canticorum. ..." The writer invites Aurelius to send a copyist to Bethlehem to procure texts of all his more recent works "de scripturis Sanctis". There is an excellent commentary on this letter by Yves-Marie Duval in Bibliothque Augustinienne 46B (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987), 560-68, who judiciously concludes: "Il ne me semble pas invraisemblable que cette Ep. 27s ait contribu a nouer des liens entre Carthage-Hippone et Bethlem et favoriser la diffusion des oeuvres de Jrme en
Afrique."
12. For Alypius' travels, see the Prosopographie de l'Afrique chrtienne, ed. Andr Mandouze (Paris: CNRS, 1982), 55-56, and for the role of Domnio, to whom Alypius refers Paulinus in 395 (Paulinus, ep. 3.3 = Augustine, ep. 24.3), as Roman distributor of Jerome's works, E. Arns, La technique du livre d'aprs saint Jrme (Paris: De Boccard, 1953), 147-48. Augustine's aristocratic patron Romanianus appears to have played a similar role in diffusing his writings in Italy (see below, n.27). 13. Ep. 40.1 : "Quattadgredere, quaeso, istam nobiscum litterariam conlocutionem, ne multum ad nos disiungendos liceat absentiae corporali, quamquam simus in domino spiritus unitate coniuncti, etiam si ab stilo quiescamus et taceamus. Et libri quidem, quos de hrreo dominico elaborasti, paene te totum nobis exhibent. ..." The terms of
this summons seem to reflect the influence of Paulinus' ideal of the conloquium Utterarum (see below). The letter is traditionally dated to 397; it miscarried and was a
cause of much resentment on Jerome's part: D. de Bruyne, "La correspondance change entre Augustin et Jrme," ZNTW 31 (1932): 233-48, modifying H. Lietzmann, "Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Briefsammlung Augustins," Sitzungsberichte der Preuischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Klasse, (1930): 374-82, repr. in his
182
That literary personality or persona was founded on emulation of Origen.14 "It is in your power," Augustine would write to Jerome in 394/5,
"to let us have that man whom you so delight in celebrating in your
writings" (quem tu libentius in tuis litteris sonas).15 Jerome would not
oblige Augustine and the rest of the "studious society of the African churches" by delivering a complete Latin translation of Origen's works, but he did aspire to the reputation for biblical scholarship that Origen had
acquired among the Greeks. The ideal of scientia scripturarum that the
Alexandrian represented for him is proclaimed repeatedly in the letters,

prefaces and other promotional pieces that he published or republished in
the late 380s and 390s after his removal from Rome to the East. Mean-
while, he sought to realize that ideal in his own major works, the biblical
translations and commentaries. No other Latin Christian writer had ever
made so determined or exclusive a claim for interpretative expertise, or supported it with such overwhelming evidence. From all round the Mediterranean, Christian studiosi were now sending messengers, or going themselves to sit at the feet of the scholar of Bethlehem.16 The newly
ordained priest of Hippo, who had lately begged his bishop for a little
leisure for Bible study,17 was bound to reckon with his example.
Jerome was not a particularly original theorist of biblical interpretation, or of the relations between Christian readers, writers, and texts. His own literary pragmatics are pragmatic in a vulgar sense, the reflexes of one who
Kleine Schriften, Vol. 1, TU 67 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1958), 286-96. Augustine's letters of the period ca. 391-401 are quoted in the edition of A. Goldbacher, CSEL
34.1-2 (1895-98).
14. See my "Jerome's Origen: The Making of a Christian Literary Persona," in Studia Patr-stica: Papers Presented to the Eleventh International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford, 19-24 August 1991, ed. Elizabeth A. Livingstone (Leuven: Peeters Press, forthcoming). 15. Ep. 28, 2. One group of manuscripts offers the synonymous variant "personas": as Boethius would say, "persona a personando" (duab. nat. 3; PL 64.1343). On Augustine's acquaintance with Origen see B. Altaner, "Augustinus und Or-genes," HJ 70 (1951): 15-41, repr. in his Kleine Schriften, TU 83 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1967), 224-52; A.-M. La Bonnardire, "Jrme, 'informateur' d'Augustin au sujet d'Origne," REAug 20 (1974): 42-54.
16. See now Stefan Rebenich, Hieronymus und sein Kreis: Prosopographische und sozial-geschichtliche Untersuchungen, Historia Einzelschriften 72 (Stuttgart: Steiner,
1992).
17. Ep. 21.3: " . . . debeo scripturarum eius [sc. dei] medicamenta omnia perscrutari et orando ac legendo agere . . . Quod ante non feci, quia et tempus non habui; tunc enim ordinatus sum, cum de ipso vacationis tempore ad cognoscendas divinas scripturas cogitaremus et sic nos disponere vellemus, ut nobis otium ad hoc negotium
posset esse."
183
by birth and education conformed closely (more closely than Augustine) to
the type of the late Roman litteratus so memorably evoked by H.-I. Marrou,18 and who set out to make a profession of Christian writing. His
unprecedented success in this venture can be put down to the combination of a gift for languages (real, however exaggerated) and the inspired decision to capitalize on Origen's biblical philology at a time when large numbers of
educated Christians in the West were looking for intellectually respectable
ways of expressing their piety.19 Add to these assets a remarkable flair for self-promotion, and we have the figure of Jerome that a well informed
African reader could have discerned ca.39\.
Augustine may soon have concluded, if he did not already know, that this man could not answer all the questions posed in the De utilitate credendi. However, Jerome's practice of the sacred text, and the assumptions on
which it was based, were current and widely respected before Augustine's
reputation as a Christian teacher had spread beyond the circle of his friends. Whether he liked it or not, Augustine was engaged in a dialogue with Jerome from the moment he began to write on Scripture. The history of their personal communications in the 3 90s is for the most part a depressing tale of mistrust, miscarriage and malentendu.20 Few attempts at opening a long-distance literary conversation have been as unsuccessful as this
one of Augustine's.21 Nevertheless, by reading Jerome's works down to
and including the De viris illustribus of 392/3 against the De utilitate, we may be able recover some of the heads of a discussion that never took
place.22
1.
Augustine asks after the magistri, doctores or (as he calls them once)
professores of the Christian religion. Jerome for his part offers the
18. Henri-Irne Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (Paris: De
Boccard, 1938; reissued with a Retractatio, 1949).
19. For a thorough reassessment of Jerome's work as a biblical philologist, emphasizing his strengths as both a Hellenist and a Hebraist, see Adam Kamesar, Jerome, the Hebrew Bible, and Greek Scholarship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
20. See the articles cited above, n. 13, and J. de Vathaire, "Les relations de saint
Augustin et de saint Jrme," in Miscellanea Augustiniana (Rotterdam: Brusse, 1930), 484-99. A new study by R. Hennings is announced. 21. Note especially ep. 28.6: "Multa alia cum sincerissimo corde tuo loqui cuperem et de studio christiano con ferre ..." 22. The references given below are necessarily very selective. For the positions ascribed to Augustine, see vtil. cred. passim. Jerome's side of the conversation can be derived from his letters, prefaces to this biblical translations and commentaries, and the De viris illustribus. Quotations from the letters follow the edition of I. Hilberg, CSEL
54-56(1910-18).
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living example of a Christian magisterium that is also a professio, in
the sense of a specialized occupation for which training is required.23
2.
Augustine endeavours to classify the different kinds of error that are

possible when we try to understand a text (vtil. cred. 4.10). Jerome
introduces a wholly new consideration: the text is a faulty translation from another language, which the interpreter probably cannot read. We may not need to travel to Jerusalem, but we ought to learn
Greek and Hebrew.24
3.
While ready to place the Bible in a special category of books, Augustine assumes a basic analogy between the study of secular literary or philosophical texts and the study of Scripture (vtil. cred. 4.10, 6.13, 7.17). Jerome makes a similar assumption, but takes every opportunity in his earlier writings to mark the distance between
the two realms of discourse.25
4.
Augustine represents Bible study as hard work (cf. ep. 21). Jerome goes much further. In his eyes, the Studium scripturarum is an allconsuming askesis, a mortification of the body and a rejection of
the world. Naturally the province of monks, it can be prosecuted by

5. clergy or laypeople only if they are prepared to follow a monastic way of life.26 The De utilitate credendi presents itself as a preliminary to the Catholic exposition of Scripture; it implies nothing about the literary forms such exposition might take, or about other possible uses of writing in the service of the Christian religion. For Jerome, Chris-
23. E.g., ep. 37.3: "Est sermo [sc. Reticii] quidem conpositus et Gallicano coturno fluens: sed quid ad Interpretern, cuius professio est, non, quomodo ipse disertus appareat, sed quomodo eum, qui lecturus est, sie faciat intellegere, quomodo intellexit ille, qui scripsit" (cf. Augustine, vtil. cred. 4.10-5.11). On this sense of "profession" and its application in a late antique context, see Robert A. Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988), 33-35.
24. Kamesar (cited n. 19 above); Stefan Rebenich, "Jerome: The 'Vir Trilinguis' and the 'Hebraica Veritas'," forthcoming in VC; Vessey, "Jerome's Origen." 25. The locus classicus is of course ep. 22.30 ("'Ciceronianuses, non Christianus'"). For evidence suggesting that Augustine may have read this letter as early as 387/8, see John Kevin Coyle, Augustine's "De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae": A Study of the Work, Its Composition and Its Sources, Paradosis25 (Fribourg: University Press, 1978),
214f.
26. Denys Gorce, La "Lectio divina " des origines du cnobitisme saint Benot et Cassiodore, 1: Saint Jrme et la lecture sacre dans le milieu asctique romain (Wpion-sur-Meuse: Monastre du Mont-Vierge, 1925), esp. 165ff; Rebenich, Hieronymus und sein Kreis, 154-70.
185
tian writing is essentially writing de scripturis,17 and the Christian
literary form par excellence is the biblical commentary as practised by Origen. Those principles notwithstanding, he himself had essayed or improvised several other genres, including the biblical quaestio and (closely associated with it in his use) a kind of epistolary causerie on exegetical topics.28 These are just a few of the matters that Augustine might have wanted to take up with his fellow priest in the early 390s. In his first extant letter to
Jerome of 394/5 (Letter 28), he defends the principle (already stated in the
De utilitate) of the absolute veracity of the biblical text, against Jerome's
recent exegesis of an awkward passage in Galatians. Other topics of that letter and its sequels likewise bear on questions of biblical pragmatics. But I
do not wish to review Augustine's correspondence with Jerome, important though it is for the history of Christian literary pragmatics. Instead I want to suggest that many of the most significant elements of his theoretical response to Jerome are to be found outside the letters he wrote to him: to propose, in fact, that we read two of his major works of the 390s as
constituting a kind of apologia contra Hieronymum de scripturis.

Before turning to those works we must take account of the vital role played by a third party. CONLOQUIUM LITTERARUM: PAULINUS
At the same time as they worked to establish links with Jerome, the new
men in the African church were opening channels of communication to the Christian elite of Italy. In the summer of 395, Aurelius' special envoy to Bethlehem, Alypius, took the initiative in writing to Meropius Pontius
27. Jerome's literary biblicism awaits its proper exposition. Meanwhile, see the valuable remarks of Reinhart Herzog, Die Bibelepik der lateinischen Sptantike: Formgeschichte einer erbaulichen Gattung, Vol. 1 (Munich: Fink, 1975), 173-75, and Jacques Fontaine, "L'esthtique littraire de la prose de Jrme jusqu' son second dpart en Orient," in Jrme entre l'Occident et l'Orient: Actes du Colloque de Chantilly (septembre 1986), d. Yves-Marie Duval (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1988), 32342.
28. G. Bardy, "La littrature des 'quaestiones et responsiones' sur l'Ecriture Sainte," RB 41 (1932) : 357-69. In his letters of the 38Os to Marcella and other Roman ladies, Jerome maintains the illusion of a daily interchange of biblical problems and solutions within his group, carried on both in face-to-face meetings and in writing. While the remains of Origen's correspondence may have provided hints for this scenario, its full development must be attributed to Jerome's genius for creating the conditions for his
own literary art.
186
Paulinus, a Gallo-Roman aristocrat with poetic ambitions whose ascetic conversion had caused a great stir a few years earlier, and who had now moved to NoIa in Campania.29 In return for a service he asked of Paulinus,
Alypius sent him a collection of Augustine's anti-Manichaean writings. The result, no doubt intended, was the beginning of a correspondence between Augustine and Paulinus that would continue with only brief interruptions for the next thirty years. The sequence and much of the literary
and historical interest of these exchanges have been painstakingly expounded by Pierre Courcelle.30 The latter's suggestion that Augustine's new correspondent could have been partly responsible for the genesis of the
Confessions, though not universally accepted, has helped undermine the once common view of Paulinus as a passive partner in the two men's
epistolary conversation. Even so, modern Augustinians may still be guilty

of underestimating the impact that the "discovery" of Paulinus had on
Augustine's sense of Christian vocation, and in particular on his literary

pragmatics. The African party evidently hoped that Paulinus would assist in winning
a wider audience for Augustine's writings. To that end, he was not only sent copies of the latest productions but also referred to Romanianus for any
others he might want.31 If Paulinus' actions matched the enthusiasm of his first letters to Augustine, he may indeed have done much for the promotion of his work in Italy. Equally if not more important to Augustine, however, were the terms in which that initial enthusiasm was expressed. As Pierre Fabre has shown in his classic study, Paulinus was the apostle of epistolary
29. Janine Desmulliez, "Paulin de NoIe: Etudes chronologiques (393-397)," Rech Aug 20 (1985): 35-64; Dennis E. Trout, "The Dates of the Ordination of Paulinus of
Bordeaux and of His Departure for NoIa," REAug 37 (1991): 237-60. Trout convinc-
ingly reasserts the traditional date of Christmas Day 394, o- 395, for Paulinus' presbyteral ordination in Barcelona; he would have come to NoIa in the spring/summer of 395, a year before Augustine's episcopal ordination in 396, o- 395 as recorded by Prosper of Aquitaine (see Trout, "The Years 394 and 395 in the Epitoma chronicon: Prosper, Augustine, and Claudian," CPh 86 [1991]: 43-47). 30. "Les lacunes de la correspondance entre saint Augustin et Paulin de Noie," REA 53 (1951): 253300, revised and expanded in his Les 'Confessions' de saint Augustin dans la tradition littraire: antcdents et postrit (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1963), 559607: "La correspondance avec Paulin de Noie et la gense des 'Confessions'".
31. Augustine, ep. 27A: "Librorum autem nostrorum copiam faciet [Romanianus] venerabili studio suo; nam nescio me aliquid sive ad eorum, qui extra ecclesiam dei sunt, sive ad aures fratrum scripsisse, quod ipse non habeat." The passage that follows this statement is quoted below. Romanianus' bibliographical services are described by Jrgen Scheele, "Buch und Bibliothek bei Augustinus," Bibliothek und Wissenschaft 12
(1978): 14-114 at 33-5.
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caritas.32 Believing more passionately than most other men that letters were the portraits of their writers' souls, that letter-writing was true conver-
sation, and that educated Christians had a duty to build up each other's spiritual strength by correspondence, this converted disciple of Ausonius
(another zealot for epistolary reciprocity) had turned the hackneyed topics of amicitia into a sacrament of communion. Augustine positively reels under the shock of his first letter, but he also recognizes at once the potential value of the Paulinian literary conversation or conloquium litterarum as a medium for religious instruction of the kind that he was now called upon to dispense. In his first letter Paulinus dilates upon his joy at receiving Augustine's
writings, "not just for our own instruction, but for the use of the church in
many of our cities" (25.1: non pro nostra instructione tantum, sed etiam pro ecclesiae multarum urbium utilitate)?1 After acclaiming the author's services to Catholicism in the most extravagant terms, he continues with a characteristic figure of literary and spiritual refreshment:
25.2: Vides . . . quam familiariter te agnoverim, quanto admirer stupore, quam magno amore complectar, qui cotidie conloquio litterarum tuarum fruor et oris tui spiritu vescor. Os enim tuum fistulam aquae vivae et venam fontis aeterni mrito dixerim, quia fons in te aquae salientis in vitam aeternam Christus effectus est, cuius desiderio sitivit in te anima mea et ubertate
tui fluminis inebriari terra mea concupivit. [You see how intimately I have come to know you, how fondly I admire you,
with how great a love I embrace you, who daily enjoy the converse of your writings and feed upon the spirit of your words! For I may justly say that your
mouth is a conduit of living water and a course of the eternal well-spring, because Christ has become in you "a well of water springing up into everlasting life" (John 4.14), in desire of which my soul's ground has thirsted for you and craved inebriation with the fullness of your flood.]
On the basis of the relationship thus proleptically established, Paulinus

32. Saint Paulin de Noie et l'amiti chrtienne, Bibl. des Ecoles franc. d'Athnes et de Rome 167 (Paris: De Boccard, 1949). For closer analysis of epistolary topics in Paulinus and other late antique writers, see Klaus Thraede, Grundzge griechisch-rmischer Brieftopik, Zetemata48 (Munich: Beck, 1970). The letters of the pagan senator Quintus Aurelius Symmachus and his circle provide rich matter for comparison: J. F. Matthews, "The Letters of Symmachus", in Latin Literature of the Fourth Century, ed. J. W. Binns (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 58-99; Philippe Bruggisser, Symmaqueou Ie rituel pistolaire de l'amiti littraire: Recherches sur le premier livre de la correspondance, Paradosis 35 (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires, 1993). 33. References are to letters in the order in which they appear in Augustine's correspondence. Letter 25 = Paulinus, ep. 4 (ed. G. Hartel in CSEL 30 [1894]), 30 = 6.
188
asks to receive more of Augustine's works and to be fostered and strengthened by him in his literary and spiritual endeavours: fove igitur et corrobora me in sacris litteris et spiritalibus studiis (25.3).
Though more restrained in its use of biblical language and imagery,

Augustine's reply is scarcely less ecstatic. O bone vir et bone frater, latebas
animam meam (27.1: "O goodly man and goodly brother, you were hidden until now from my soul"), it begins. Here indeed was a man he might have met sooner, one fit to have been an interlocutor in the dialogues of
Cassiciacum, fitter perhaps than some who had been. A priest in a minor North African town could not expect to receive many such overtures, and Augustine makes the most of this chance to adapt the amities and aspirations of his Italian past to the realities of the present. Paulinus is enlisted to help with the difficult case of Licentius, the son of Augustine's patron Romanianus, who was excessively attached to secular learning. He is also
fashioned into the ideal Christian reader. His own vision of himself as an
ardent consumer of Augustine's works was dangerously enthusiastic, but it could be modified. Reverting to the neo-Platonic pedagogy outlined in the
De magistro and combining it with a traditional model of literary emendatio or friendly copy-editing, Augustine now represents Paulinus as the
reader who will discriminate critically but charitably between the words
spoken by the divine Truth through Augustine's books and the words written in error by Augustine:
27.4: Sed tu cum legis, mi snete Pauline, non te ita rapiant quae per nostram
infirmitatem Veritas loquitur, ut ea quae ipse loquor minus diligenter advertas,

ne dum avidus hauris bona et recta quae data ministro non ores pro peccatis et erratis quae ipse committo. In his enim quae tibi recte si adverteris displicebunt ego ipse conspicior, in his autem quae per donum spiritus quod aeeepisti recte tibi placent in libris meis ille amandus, ille praedicandus est apud queni
est fons vitae. . . . Quid enim habemus, quod non aeeepimus?

[When you read ... I would not have you so transported by what the Truth speaks through our infirmity as to observe less carefully what I speak in my
own right, lest in avidly drinking in the good and right things that I administer, having myself first received them, you neglect to pray for the sins and errors that I myself commit. For in those things which will rightly displease you if you take good notice, I am myself revealed; but in those which (through the
gift of the spirit you have received) rightly please you in my books, He is to be
loved and proclaimed, in whom is the well-spring of life. . . . For what have
we that we have not received?]
In another context, such remarks could be dismissed as conventional modesty.34 Occurring in this case as the response to an impassioned appeal
34. For the topics of emendatio, see Tore Janson, Latin Prose Prefaces: Studies in
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from an exceptionally qualified Christian reader, immediately after directions for obtaining copies of Augustine's works,35 immediately before the announcement of a project destined to form part of the Confessions,36 and in the context of an exchange saturated on both sides with expressions of confidence in the virtue of letters (in two senses) as vehicles of Christian charity and instruction,37 they carry considerable weight. Here in nuce was a literary pragmatics befitting both the Christian writer and the Christian
reader, already consistent with the most rigorous theology of grace (note the echo of 1 Cor 4.7). All that was lacking was a clearly defined place for
the biblical text.
In the event, Augustine's conversation with Paulinus had barely begun when Jerome broke in on it with an imperious reminder of the demands of the Studium scripturarum as he conceived them.38 His Letter 53 to PauLiterary Conventions (Stockholm: Almqvist-Wiksell, 1964), 141-3. The works of Ausonius afford many good examples. 35. See the passage quoted above, n. 31. 36. Ep. 27.5 concerning the project of a "life" of Alypius; interpreted in this sense by Courcelle, Les Confessions, 57Of. 37. In addition to the passages already signalled, note ep. 24.1-2 (Paulinus to Alypius) : "Haec est vera caritas, haec perfecta dilectio, quam tibi circa humilitatem nostram inesse docuisti. . . . Accepimus enim per hominem nostrum Iulianum de Carthagine
revertentem litteras tantam nobis sanctitatis tuae lucem adferentes, ut nobis caritatem
tuam non agnoscere sed recognoscere videremur. . . . Accepimus . . . insigne praecipuum dilectionis et sollicitudinis tuae opus sancti et perfecti in domino Christo viri, fratris nostri Augustini. . . . Itaque fiducia suspiciendae nobis unanimitatis tuae et ad ipsum scribere ausi sumus, dum nos Uli per te et de inperitia excusandos et ad caritatem commendandos praesumimus . . ." (cf. 25.5 and 30 to Augustine); 27.23 (Augustine to Paulinus): "Legi enim litteras tuas fluentes lac et mel, praeferentes simplicitatem cordis tui. . . . Legerunt fratres et gaudent infatigabiliter et ineffabiliter tarn excellentibus donis dei, bonis tuis. Quotquot eas legerunt, rapiunt, quia rapiuntur, cum Iegunt. . . . Haec atque huius modi suavissima et sacratissima spectacula litterae tuae praebent legentibus, litterae illae, litterae fidei non fictae, litterae spei bonae, litterae purae caritatis." There is an interesting variation on the theme of the conloquium per litteras in Augustine's ep. 31 to Paulinus (written in response to ep. 30, which had
crossed with his earlier answer), in which Paulinus' letter-carriers Romanus and Agilis
are represented as a human page inscribed with the character of their sender: "Sanctos fratres Romanum et Agilem, aliam epistulam vestram audientem voces atque reddentem et suavissimam partem vestrae prasentiae . . . suscepimus. . . . Aderat etiam, quod nulli chartae adesse potest, tantum in narrantibus gaudium, ut per ipsum etiam vultum oculosque loquentium vos in cordibus eorum scriptos cum ineffabili laetitia legeremus. Hoc quoque amplius erat, quod pagina quaelibet, quantacumque bona scripta contineat, nihil ipsa proficit, quam vis ad profectum explicetur aliorum; hanc autem epistulam vestram, fraternam scilicet animam, sic in eorum conloquio legebamus, ut tanto beatior appareret nobis, quanto uberius conscripta esset ex vobis. Itaque illam ad
eiusdem beatitatis imitationem studiosissime de vobis omnia percontando in nostra corda transcripsimus."
38. On Jerome's correspondence with Paulinus, see Pierre Nautin, "Etudes de chro-
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linus, also written in 395, is a programmatic statement of his view of
biblical science as a distinct discipline, one not to be attempted by any mere

literary amateur. Also containing a summary of the biblical canon, the
letter was later prefixed to the Vulgate. In a long and rhetorically elaborate exordium Jerome piles up classical and biblical exempla designed to convince Paulinus and all other readers that they could never hope to enter the maze of Scripture without the help of a trained guide. The message is broadly that of the De utilitate credendi stripped of Augustine's ecclesiology and metaphysics, only this time it is delivered by a self-professed and practising magister scripturarum.39 In his Letter 58 to Paulinus, despatched in the following year, Jerome completes the picture of the perfect biblical reader-and-writer, both positively by associating his activity with a
specifically monastic propositum, and negatively by pointing out the defects of earlier Latin commentators on the Bible.
Some scholars have detected a likeness of Augustine in the rogues' gallery of unqualified biblicists pilloried by Jerome in Letter 53.40 If we assume that Alypius had taken copies of some of his friend's works to Bethlehem in 392, this may even have been part of the author's intention.41
Jerome's self-serving polemic certainly ran too close to the documented

nologie hironymienne (393-397)," RE Aug 19 (1973): 213-39, and Yves-Marie Duval, "Les premiers rapports de Paulin de Noie avec Jrme: moine et philosophe? pote ou exgte?" Studi Tardoantichi 7 (1989): 177-216, both now to be revised in the light
of Trout, "Date" (cited n. 29 above).
39. The opening sentences of Jerome's ep. 53 carry an echo of the topics of caritas which may be presumed to have formed part of Paulinus' initial letter (no longer extant) :
"Frater Ambrosius . . . detulit . . . suavissimas litteras, quae in principio amicitiarurn
probatae iam et veteris amicitiae praeferebant. Vera enim ilia necessitudo est, Christi glutino copulata, quam non utilitas rei familiaris, non praesentia corporum tan tum, non subdola et palpans adulatio, sed timor domini et divinarum scripturarum studia conciliant." In general Jerome shows little interest in the theory of epistolary amicitia, or that of the conloquium litterarum: in this case he simply adapts the Paulinian ideology of communion to suit his own purpose, emphasizing the studia divinarum scripturarum as one of the bases of true fellowship. 40. E.g., A. Kurfess, "Vergils vierte Ekloge bei Hieronymus und Augustinus: 'lam nova progenies celo demittitur alto' in christlicher Deutung," SEJG 6 (1954): 5-13, who argues that Jerome's criticism of the Christian exegesis of Vergil was inspired by a passage in Augustine's unfinished commentary on Romans of ca. 394. 41. Though cf. Jerome, ep. 105.5 (to Augustine in 403/4): "Hoc dico, non quod in operibus tuis quaedam reprehendenda iam censeam. Neque enim lectioni eorum umquam operam dedi nee horum exemplariorum apud nos copia est praeter Soliloquiorum tuorum libros et quosdam commentariolos in Psalmos." Of course this may be disingenuous, and even if Alypius did not take copies of Augustine's works to Bethlehem he may have said enough about him (and his relations with Ambrose?) to excite Jerome's suspicion of a possible competitor.
191
anxieties of the priest, soon to be bishop, of Hippo for the latter not to have felt himself implicated, had it come to his attention at this time. And it is very likely that it did come to his attention, for as Jean Doignon observed thirty years ago, there are several traces of Jerome's Letter 58 in the De
doctrina Christiana.42 Acting on this and other hints, Doignon imagines a contest between Augustine and Jerome over the literary vocation of Pau-
linus, an aspect of the relations between the two great doctores which had gone unnoticed by commentators concerned primarily with their differences over biblical exegesis. I now wish to argue that the components of
this triangular relationship are more closely connected than even Doignon would seem to allow, that Augustine has in effect left us an apologia contra Hieronymum tacitly dedicated to Paulinus, in which the Paulinian conloquium litterarum is made to serve as the theoretical matrix for a distinctively Augustinian biblical pedagogy, incorporating as much of the
Hieronymian scientia scripturarum as Augustine was able to use. The "apology" as it has reached us is in two parts, the second of which significantly modifies or "retracts" the first: it begins with the De doctrina Christiana of 396/7 and continues in the Confessions.
FIRST PART OF THE "APOLOGY": DE DOCTRINA CHRISTIANA
By 396 Augustine was ready to offer solutions to many of the problems

raised five years earlier in the De utilitate credendi. Then he could only evoke the ideal of a Christian teacher, now he would lay down guidelines for his activity: Sunt praecepta quaedam . . . (Prol. 1: "There are certain precepts, etc.").43 The new treatise would have to have a name. He had already written De magistro: to use that title again, or a variant of it, would be to invite confusion between the ultimate and proximate sources of knowledge, an error that he was as keen to discourage now as ever. What was needed was a phrase that would encompass the whole economy of
saving instruction, without prejudging relations between the divine and

human agencies involved. Augustine's phrase is doctrina Christiana, a char-
acteristically qualified form of the only Latin substantive whose meaning was both broad enough for his purpose and so far uncompromised by
42. Jean Doignon "'Nos bons hommes de foi': Cyprien, Lactance, Victorin, Optt, Hilaire (Augustin, De doctrina christiana, IV, 40, 61)," Latomus 22 (1963) : 795-805.
For traces of Letter 53 in the same work, see below.
43. Citations of the De doctrina christiana follow the edition of J. Martin, CCSL 32
(1962).
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others' use.44 The latter consideration was not trivial. Already in his choice of title Augustine was staking a claim in an area which, if not yet heavily built up, had lately seen a lot of speculative development. Though we are apt to forget it, the De doctrina Christiana was only one of several attempts to establish norms for Christian instruction in late Latin antiquity.45 From
the outset, Augustine was defining his position with reference to, and partly against, those adopted by others.
The oppositional quality of the De doctrina appears most clearly in the

prologue in which the author defends his project against three sorts of objection, the third of which he takes seriously.46 To those who rejoice in a God-given ability to interpret Scripture without the use of such precepts as
he is about to impart, Augustine opposes a carefully balanced theory of the

instrumentality of human beings in the ministration of God's Word (Prol.
49). The argument is built up of a number of elements: a characteristically

Augustinian view of the mediation of transcendent truth, a demonstration
of the social basis of language acquisition that anticipates the sign theory of Book 2, a series of biblical exempla showing men of faith deferring to other
men, and two a priori assertionsthat the human condition would be
debased, and charity defeated of its aim, si homines per homines nihil
discerent (Prol. 6: "if men learnt nothing through their fellow men").
To whom is the argument addressed? Since none of the proposed identifications of a hostile charismatic party commands general assent, we are
free to entertain Rudolf Lorenz's suggestion that Augustine is rejecting an

extreme version of his own illuminism, and that the main purpose of the prologue is therefore apologetic.47 We should then suppose that the author
44. For possible alternatives see Marrou, Saint Augustin, 549-60. Lactantius had used Institutiones, Hilary and others made play with eruditio, Jerome was investing heavily in scientia and Studium. Augustine himself tends to associate litterae closely with texts and employs litteratura as a synonym for grammatica; disciplina he reserves for another application. Much of the modern debate (since Marrou) over the sense(s) of doctrina in Augustine's treatise is vitiated by a lack of sensitivity to the creative, appropriative, and potentially exclusive quality of Christian vocabulary-building in late antiquity. See now Gerald A. Press, "'Doctrina' in Augustine's 'De doctrina Christiana'," Philosophy and Rhetoric 17 (1984): 98-120. 45. Alongside the names mentioned in the preceding note, we should allow for the efforts of Roman pontiffs from Damasus onwards to fix the standards and conditions of clerical education (partly coinciding with the aims of Ambrose's De officiis ministrorum), and the later initiatives of monastic educators like John Cassian. "Christian education", variously named and conceived, was a highly contentious issue in the "Age
of Theodosius".
46. Peter Brunner, "Charismatische und methodische Schriftauslegung nach Augustins Prolog zu 'De doctrina Christiana'," Kerygma und Dogma 1 (1955): 59-69,85103.
47. R. Lorenz, "Die Wissenschaftslehre Augustins," ZKG 67 (1955-56), 29-60,
193
of the De doctrina christiana chose deliberately to stress the outward or
social aspect of Christian instruction in order to correct what might otherwise be perceived by readers of his works as a pastorally and ecclesially
disastrous emphasis on its inward or psychological aspects. Plausible as
this argument is, it requires us to consider why Augustine should particularly fear such an objection in 396. While it is easy to see how a text like the De magistro could be construed as hostile to the claims of professed (a
fortiori ordained) teachers of the gospel, those claims had been amply
endorsed in the De utilitate credendi and other more recent works. More-
over, there is no reason to believe that Augustine's epistemology had itself
changed significantly since the time of the De magistro.4* Thus when he goes out of his way to assert the validity of a human science of Scripture at
the outset of the De doctrina, he cannot be doing so merely for the purpose of a retractatio or internal revision of his published opinions. Rather, he
appears to be measuring his own approach to the biblical text against one
that set more store than he ever would by the competence of the human
interpreter. As we have seen, his properly cautious attempt to establish his authority as a Christian teacher (writer and now bishop) had recently been crossed by Jerome's propaganda for a "professional" discipline of biblical interpretation. It cannot be coincidental that two of Augustine's four biblical examples of human instruction in the prologue to the De doctrina (Paul
213-51 at 237. Lorenz's insight is confirmed by C. P. Mayer, "'Res per signa.' Der Grundgedanke des Prologs in Augustins Schrift 'De doctrina christiana' und das Problem seiner Datierung, " REAug 20(1974) : 100-12. For attempts to identify Augustine's opponents, see G. Folliet, "Des moines euchites Carthage en 400401," Studia Patr-stica!, TU 64 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1957) 386-99; Ulrich Duchrow, "Zum Prolog von Augustins 'De doctrina christiana'," VC 17 (1963): 165-72; and, most recently, Charles Kannengiesser, "Local Setting and Motivation of 'De doctrina christiana," in Collectanea Augustiniana 2, forthcoming. 48. Contra U. Duchrow, Sprachverstndnis und biblisches Hren bei Augustin (Tubingen: Mohr, 1965), 206-13 who interprets what he takes to be a radical discrepancy between the theory of language and learning expressed in De magistro and that of the prologue to the De doctrina christiana as a sign that the latter text was composed as an afterthought in 426/7. In a similar vein: Graziano Ripanti, "Il problema della comprensione nelPermeneutica agostiniana," REAug 20 (1974): 88-99. For a more nuanced view of the development of Augustine's thought, which nevertheless stresses the formative importance of the years 391-397, see A. D. R. Polman, The Word of God according to St. Augustine (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1961), 13-38. Polman observes that "The . . . interpretation of the Logos as the inner teacher who shows us how to contemplate truth was never rejected by St. Augustine, and made its influence felt throughout his writings on the Word of God as Holy Writ and as proclamation" (30). Likewise Mayer, "'Res per signa,'": "Nirgends jedoch ist im Prolog ein ernsthaftes Rtteln an den in De magistro niedergelegten Fundamenten seiner Zeichenlehre und der damit engstens verknpften Sprach thorie festzustellen" (109).
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and the Ethiopian eunuch) had appeared in exactly the same cause in Jerome's first letter to Paulinus.49 Like so much of Augustine's writing, the treatise De doctrina christiana is visibly over-determined. As correction, the prologue and all that follows in 396/7 is ostensibly directed at wouldbe charismatic or inspired interpreters of the Bible, perhaps even Augustine himself at an earlier stage of his theological development. As defence, it
must contend with their arch-opponent: the magister scripturarum Jerome.
Augustine's response to the Hieronymian theory of biblical scientia is
not only defensive, however. Even as he domesticates Jerome's polemic pro magistro, he undercuts the social ambitions of the expert interpreter by
assimilating his function to that of the humblest of the literary "professionals", the primary school teacher or magister litterarum (Prol. 9). The same
process of reaction, adaptation, and critique can be observed throughout the length of the two and a half books of the De doctrina completed in the
390s. Most of the issues of literary pragmatics raised by a confrontation of the De utilitate credendi with Jerome's early programme as a biblical
writer are there specifically addressed, and dealt with in ways that would
be hugely influential.50 Augustine theorizes the scientia scripturarum more comprehensively than Jerome does, but is careful to place it no higher than
the third step on a seven-rung ladder to sapientia (2.7.911). He accepts

the importance of an acquaintance with Greek and Hebrew for the correct understanding of the Latin Bible, but applies to it to a general restraint on all knowledge of human conventions: quantum satis est, "as much as is necessary" (2.26.40; cf. 2.11.16-14.21). Perhaps most striking of all, at least to modern readers, is his subjection of secular literary and philosophical culture to the principle of usus iustus, "right use" (2.40.60), a criterion at once more generous and more rigorous than any hitherto proposed by Jerome. All these initiatives, it is worth noting, are fitted within the framework of a theory of the biblical text as consisting of signa divinitus data [sed] per homines nobis indicata, "signs given by God but pointed out to us by men" (2.2.3). From first to last, Augustine's is a Christian doctrina simultaneously human and divine, historical and transcendent.51 There are two further respects in which the De doctrina christiana of 3967 promises to correct or enlarge the biblical pragmatics that a Latin
49. Prol. 6-7; Jerome, ep. 53.2, 5. 50. My awareness of "Hieronymian" elements in the De doctrina christiana owes much to a fine paper by Christoph Schublin which inaugurated the conference on "Augustine's 'De doctrina christiana': A Classic of Western Culture" held at the University of Notre Dame in April 1991.
51. Cf. Meyer, " 'Res per signa,' " 111.
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reader like Paulinus could have learnt from Jerome. First, it offers to shift the ethical conditions of acceptable or "successful" exegesis from the realm of askesis to that of caritas. Secondly, it announces precepts for the trac-
tatio scripturarum that would govern the enunciation of biblical meanings by human interpreters (modus proferendi) as well as their discovery
(modus inveniendi). Neither of these promises is kept. Although Book 1
contains prolonged and often difficult discussion of the rule (or rules) of charity, it does not make good the providential connection between caritas
and doctrina asserted in the prologue. And the first draft of the treatise breaks off before the author reaches the part devoted explicitly to the
modus proferendi. Some time in 397, it seems, Augustine turned aside from
the De doctrina christiana to concentrate on other compositions.52 The work we know under that name would only be completed thirty years later,
as part of the tidying-up operation represented by his Retractationes. This

does not mean, however, that his contemporaries were obliged to wait three decades for the remainder of his apologia contra Hieronymum de
scripturis. For within a short space they had this (and much else besides) in
the form of the next extant work listed in the Retractationes: the so-called
Libri confessionum.
SECOND PART OF THE "APOLOGY": CONFESSIONES
Much of the controversy surrounding the De doctrina christiana has been created by scholars who treat the work as an organic whole, even though
they know perfectly well that its two parts were composed respectively near
the beginning and at the very end of the ecclesiastical career of a man who never stopped thinking about what he was doing, or seeking words in
which to explain himself to others. Not content to wonder at the persistence of a writer who went back to finish a manuscript half a lifetime after putting it away, they want to believe that he completed it just as he would have done had he not been "interrupted". The inconsequence is
particularly grave with regard to Book 4, since there are no grounds for
52. See Josef Martin's introduction to his edition in CCSL 32, vii-xix, and his "Ab-
fassung, Verffentlichung und berlieferung von Augustins Schrift 'De doctrina chrisstoria: Studi in onore di E.D. Theseider (Rome: Bulzoni, 1974), 2, 541-59. The break
between the unfinished treatise of 396/7 and its later continuation occurs at 3.25.35/36.
tiana," Traditio 18 (1962): 69-87, with Augustine, retr. 2.4 and Alberto Pincherle, "Sulla composizione del 'De doctrina christiana' di S. Agostino," in Storiografia e
The evidence of the early fifth-century Codex Petersburg Q. v. 1.3, containing doctr. chr.
Prol.3.25.35 and other early works of Augustine, is reassessed in a paper by Kenneth Steinhauser in the proceedings of the Notre Dame De doctrina christiama conference (University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming).
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assuming that Augustine's statements on Christian rhetoric ca.427 bear any close relation to the ideas he had when he began the treatise in 396. In fact, as even Marrou has to admit, the last book of the De doctrina is manifestly more "ecclesiastical" than the others, in the sense that it is directed to the teaching (especially preaching) needs of the clergy.53 By contrast, Books 12 avoid any reference to the institutional conditions of Christian teaching, and never once evoke the situation of the priest or bishop preaching ad populum. Augustine's imagined reader of ca.396 is
simply that: a Christian reader confronting the biblical text. This reader,
after learning certain rules, is supposed capable of instructing others in
turn; whether by writing or speaking is not specified. Interestingly enough,

although Augustine begins the prologue with a plurality of studiosi scripturarum in view, by the end of it he has narrowed his attention to a single
lector. Thus in the taxonomy of Christian utterance subsequently provided in Book 4, the De doctrina itself approaches most nearly the form of a
collocutio cum aliquo uno sive cum pluribus, a conversation with some
one or a few.54
And yet in 397 this unfinished treatise would have counted as one of the least conversational of all Augustine's works, a heroic but failed attempt by a master of dialogue to commit himself to a monologic mode of instruction: Sunt praecepta quaedam. . .. For the first time ever Augustine seems to have begun a major work without an interlocutor, without a dedicatee, without even so much as an alter ego. In the continuing absence of Jerome,
the man who (in Peter Brown's words) "would never be alone" suddenly
found he had no-one to talk to. The strain on him is apparent from the start. Having announced the two parts of his subject at the beginning of
53. Saint Augustin, 507 and 638 n.l. Similarly Mark D. Jordan, "Words and Word: Incarnation and Signification in Augustine's 'De doctrina christiana'," AugStud 11 (1980): 177-196, notes that "even without the historical evidence, one would notice a
shift of stance near the end of Book III which makes the close of the work more
insistently pastoral and anti-speculative," yet still holds that "it is appropriate ... to take from the early and late parts of the work equally" (180). While I agree that any general study of Augustine's thought should take equal account of both parts of this work, it seems to me important not to attribute to Augustine in 397 ideas that he cannot
be shown to have entertained until later.
54. 4.10.25: "Et hoc quidem non solum in conlocutionibus, sive fiant cum aliquo uno, sive cum pluribus, verum etiam et multo magis in populis, quando sermo promitur, ut intellegamur instandum est, quia in conlocutionibus est cuique interrogandi potestas; ubi autem omnes tacent, ut audiatur unus, et in eum intenta ora convertunt, ibi ut
requirat quisque, quod non intellexerit, nec mor-s est nee decoris." Cf. 4.9.23,18.37;
serm. 23.8.8 (PL 38.158): "Iam multos vestrum intellexisse non dubito. Non video, sed ex collocutione, quia loquimini ad alterutrum, sentio eos qui intellexerunt, velle exponere iis qui nondum intellexerunt" (cited by Marrou, Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 506 n.5).
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Book 1, he proceeds to a division: De inveniendo prius, de proferendo
postea disseremus. Magnum opus et arduum . . . ("We shall first discuss

the discovery [of scriptural meanings], then the manner of their enunciation. A great and difficult task . . ."). The reminiscence of the Orator underlines the difference between the leisurely Ciceronian dialogues of Cassiciacum and the heavy business of the present monologue. Magnum
opus omnino et arduum, Brute, conamur, Cicero had written, sed nihil
difficile amanti ... ("A great and difficult task it is that we attempt, Brutus, but nothing is difficult for one who loves his friend as I do
you . . ."). Ostensibly the expression of a friendship, the Orator is presented as a natural continuation of private conversations between Cicero and Brutus, conversations duly commemorated in the next sentence of the treatise.55 This fiction was one that Augustine had earlier used to great
advantage, but was now trying to do without. Not surprisingly, when the task of laying down precepts for the interpretation of Scripture finally proved too much for him, he transferred the matter in hand to a literary
conversation already in progress between himself, his God, and his spiritual friends in Christ. In this respect as in others, the Confessions is the first
and aptest sequel to the unfinished De doctrina christiana of 397.56

55. Orator 9.33-34: "Magnum opus omnino et arduum, Brute, conamur; sed nihil difficile amanti puto. Amo autem et semper amavi ingenium, studia, mores tuos. Incendor porro cotidie magis non desiderio solum quo quidem conficior, congressus nostras, consuetudinem victus, doctissimos sermones requirens tuos, sed etiam admirabili fama virtutum incredibilium. . . . Iam quantum illud est quod in maximis occupationibus nunquam intermittis studia doctrinae, semper aut ipse scribis aliquid aut me vocas ad
scribendum."
56. See Alberto Pincherle, "S. Agostino: tra il 'De doctrina christiana' et le 'Confessioni',", Archeologia classica 16-17 (1973-74): 555-74. The author concludes that the Confessions "si rivela come il proseguimento, o meglio l'attuazione del programma, di quello rimasto interrotto [i.e. in doctr. chr.]" (574). In a related article, "Intorno alia genesi delle 'Confessioni'," AugStud 5 (1974): 167-176, Pincherle implicates Paulinus of NoIa in the commissioning of the De diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum and sketches an Italian background for the composition of the Confessions. Note especially his description of Augustine's position in 397 as men like Paulinus and Simplicianus, alarmed by the direction of his new thinking on grace and free will, broke off their correspondence with him: "Agostino dovette sentir si abbandanato, se non proprio tradito, da coloro sulla cui amicizia o benevolenza contava. E, per di pi, senza spiegazioni, senza avviare quella franca discussione che, tra amicie sopratutta nell'amicizia cristianapermette di esprimersi con chiarezza, e magari durezza, senza che la diversit dei pareri rompa il vincolo di affetto e fiducia, o, tanto meno, violi la carita." This theory of the charitable conference, though clearly Augustinian, anticipates the Confessions itself. Courcelle, Les 'Confessions', 56568, ascribes Paulinus' silence towards Augustine at this time to doubts about the validity of his episcopal ordination. Whatever its cause or causes, the temporary rupture of relations between the two men coincides closely with Augustine special initiative in literary conversation.
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Already in the De utilitate credendi Augustine had experimented with autobiographical narration as a means of "opening the way" to a study of Scripture within the Catholic communion.57 Now, perhaps encouraged by Paulinus' request for a Life of Alypius, certainly eager to exploit the new opportunities for charitable converse that his correspondence had indi-
cated, he recast his scriptural propaedeutic in the form of a narrative of

praise delivered in the presence of God and his fellow Christians, with a particular eye to those whom he calls the "spiritual ones" (spiritales). The Confessions dramatizes the substance of the first or unfinished De doctrina christiana, recuperates elements of the author's epistemology that had
there been deliberately suppressed, and supplies a temporary but enduring

substitute for the missing chapters on the modus proferendi. Since a full comparison of the two works is beyond the scope of this article, I shall concentrate on the last point, which happens to be the most significant from the point of view of literary pragmatics.
CONFERENCE AND CONFESSION
Paulinus' correspondence had reminded Augustine of the delights of epistolary conversation and suggested to him a way of turning them to religious account. It had also, as a result of Jerome's interference, made him acutely aware of the awkwardness of maintaining simultaneously a belief in the dependence of human insight on divine illumination and a public practice of scriptural exegesis. This difficulty, which his developing notions of divine grace could only exacerbate, was to exercise Augustine for the rest of his life. The immediate challenge, deferred at some cost in the De doctrina christiana, was to locate the activity of biblical interpretation within the literary-colloquial mode. Biblical theology, in the strict sense of "talking about God on the basis of his word in Scripture", had to be made part of a human dialogue conducted in writing. Thus formulated, the task confronting Augustine posed both a danger and a problem. The danger was that the dialogue would become merely human, mere chatter among men; this hazard he averts in the Confessions by the bold expedient of bringing God himself into the conversation.58 The problem was that the message of a
57. Vtil. cred. 8.20: "His igitur constitutis . . . edam tibi, ut possum, cuiusmodi
viam usus fuerim, cum eo animo quaererem veram religionem, quo nunc exposui esse
quaerendum." The narrative begins with Augustine's departure for Italy. 58. The dynamics of this conversation has been expounded with admirable subtlety by Reinhart Herzog, "'Non in sua voce': Augustins Gesprch mit Gott in den 'Confessiones'Voraussetzungen und Folgen," in Das Gesprch, ed. Karlheinz Stierle and Rainer Warning, Poetik und Hermeneutik 11 (Munich: Fink, 1984), 213-250. On his analysis, Books 1-8 of the Confessions enact the gradual fulfilment of the conditions
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voiceless and at times barely intelligible text, the Bible in a Latin codex, had somehow to be inserted into the current discourse of late antique men and women: it is the problem of the modus inveniendi et proferendi, in reality a single complex procedure rather than two separate (or separable) ones.
The standard forms of biblical commentary, as Augustine who had lately

begun to practise them knew only too well, represented at best a partial solution. A new literary pragmatics was required, for which recent experiments in Latin biblical poetry ( Juvencus, Proba, Paulinus) and epistolography (Jerome, Paulinus) offered precedents but no clear directions.59 The Confessions shows what this new Christian literary pragmatics might be
like.
For the first seven of the ten books which he wrote about himself, Augustine represents reading and conversation either as distinct and potentially opposed activities, or as related forms of time-wasting. Learning to
read and write might be useful; reading and reciting pagan poetry was
dangerous self-indulgence (1.12.19ff ) . When Monica asks the local bishop to speak with her son (3.12.21: ut dignaretur mecum conloqui), he assures her that he will find his own way by reading (ipse legendo reperiet). The society of the friends with whom Augustine is wont to talk, laugh and read (4.8.13: conloqui et conridere, simul legere libros) is a snare. He reads Cicero, Aristotle and other difficult pagan texts on his own (4.16.2831:
solus, per me ipsum, nullo hominum tradenti, nullo adminiculo humani

magisterii) and has no trouble undertanding them, but does less well with the Bible. The long awaited conversation with Faustus the Manichee is a disappointment: the two men end up studying classical authors together
for a dialogue between Augustine and God (one of which is the exclusion of other, human partners-in-conversation), a dialogue which properly begins in the garden in Milan: "Die Szene im Garten von Mailand wird in der Tat bis zum Schlu der Confessiones arretiert: Augustin vor der Schrift spricht mit Gott" (233). No sooner has the dialogue begun, than it expands to include other human interlocutors: "Das Gesprch mit Gott . . . erweitert sich in den Confessiones bereits bei seiner ersten Realisierung zum zwischenmenschlichen Gesprch" (236, italics in the original); see also the diagram, 240. Herzog notes the relevance of the De doctrina christiana for the developments he outlines, especially with regard to Augustine's " 'caritas'-Asthetik' ",but leaves the tracing of connections for later study. In its use of a terminology of "speech acts" partly suggested, in this case, by Eugene Vance's work on the ConfessionsHerzog's article is an impressive demonstration of what I would call a literary-pragmatic approach to early Christian texts. See now Eugene Vance, Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 1-50, esp. 28f. on the Confessions "as a sequence not only of events, but of discursive acts which carry us beyond the narrative to the philosophical, and beyond the philosophical to the exegetical. " 59. Cf. Herzog, "'Non in sua voce'," 241.
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(5.6.1013). Even Ambrose, reading silently apart, is unavailable for the talk that Augustine now so urgently desires to have (6.3.3). By this stage of the narrative, the reader of the Confessions already has a strong sense of the kind of talk that would be. It is represented in Au-
gustine's text by a word that appears with remarkable frequency in Books

47, the verb conferre. In his use of it, which largely exploits the range of meanings in the classical lexicon, this compound typically signifies one or
more of the following: (1) to converse or confer, (2) to share or place

something in common, (3) to compare ideas, opinions or impressions. In most instances in the Confessions it is applied in such a way as to emphasize the social and communicative implications of the con-prefix. Augustine was too good a grammarian to play idly with morphemes; as Kenneth Burke has shown, prefixes and their corresponding prepositions often mass with coercive force in the Confessions.60 In this case the reiterated conferre inclines the reader surely if insensibly to accommodate the
activity of conloqui ("to converse"), for which it is a common synonym, to

that of legere ("to read"), with which it is regularly associated in the text. Three examples will serve to illustrate this process:61 1. As a student in Carthage, Augustine had read Aristotle's Categories. Here are his reflections on the experience:
4.16.28: Et quid mihi proderat, quod annos natus ferme viginti, cum in manus meas venissent Aristotlica quadam, quas appellant decern categor-as . . . legi eas solus et intellexi} Quas cum contulissem cum eis, qui se dicebant vix eas magistris eruditissimis non loquentibus tantum, sed multa in pulvere depinguentibus intellexisse, nihil inde aliud mihi dicere potuerunt, quam ego solus apud me ipsum legens cognoveram. [And what did it profit me that, being scarce twenty years old, the book of Aristotle, called the Ten Categories, fell into my hands, and 1 read and understood it without a teacher? For when afterwards I conferred about them with
others they professed that they had much to do to understand them, though
they had been instructed therein by most learned masters, and that not by lectures only but by means of many delineations drawn in the sand; yet could they not, for all that, tell me anything about the matter, which I myself had not learned, by reading them alone.] 60. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 43-171. 61. Translations are from the version by Sir Tobie Mathew (London, 1620), adapted
as necessary. Where comparison with a more modern English translation can help
illustrate a feature of the Latin original, I refer to the rendering by R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).
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Two solitudes are depicted. The first is that of the lone reader of Aristotle, contrasted with the company of master and disciple(s) in a teaching scene of "classical" type. The second is that of the would-be participant in a
dialogue, exposed by the inability of his interlocutors to bring anything to

the interpretation of a text that he has not already discovered for himself. The two solitudes are generalized in Augustine's subsequent assertion that he had likewise read and understood by himself the whole cycle of liberal
arts texts (4.16.30: omnes libros artium, quas liberales vocant. . . per me ipsum legi et intellexi, sine magna dificltate nullo hominum tradente
intellexi) and found few men able to follow him when he expounded them (cum eis [sc. studiosis et ingeniosis] eadem conabar exponere . . . erat ille excellentissimus in eis, qui me exponentem non tardius sequeretur). These statements acquire their full significance in conjunction with his remarks on education in the prologue to the De doctrina christiana. There Augustine had presented human intercourse as the normal prerequisite for
any science, specifying the relation between teacher and pupil, and had
argued for the role of the human teacher in Christian instruction.62 Here he presents himself as a brilliant autodidact, unable to engage in any productive discussion with his fellow men, in order to argue for a Christian "conversion" of secular science according to the principle of usus tusts outlined in De doctrina 2.40.60. The object of his scorn in this chapter of
the Confessions is neither Aristotle nor students less talented than himself,
but his own motives as a reader and interpreter (discussant and/or expositor). His former attempts at communication concerning secular literary and philosophical texts had failed because he was not aiming at their right use (non ad usum sed ad perniciem, mihi bona res non utenti bene). Whereas Book 2 of the De doctrina christiana concentrates on the theory of the Christian use of pagan texts in relation to their contents, the Confessions strives for a vision of its practice in relation to the human parties involved (eas conferre cum eis, eadem exponere eis ).
2. For nine long years Augustine had looked forward to meeting Faustus
the Manichee, in conversation with whom (5.6.10: conlatoque conloquio)
62. The argument is already well developed in the vtil. cred., e.g. at 7.17: "Cum legerem, per me ipse cognovi, itane est? Nulla inbutus potica disciplina Terentianum Maurum sine magistro adtingere non auderes,Asper, Cornutus, Donatus et alii innumerabiles requiruntur, ut quilibet poeta possit intellegi, cuius carmina et theatri plausus videntur captaretue in eos libros, qui quoqo modo se habeant, sancti tamen divinarumque rerum pleni prope totius generis humani confessione diffamantur, sine duce inruis et de his sine praeceptore audes ferre sententiam. . . ." The passage evoking the ideal teacher of Scripture, quoted n. 9 above, follows.
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he hoped to find solutions to the difficulties he was experiencing with the sect's doctrines. On finally hearing him speak, he was charmed by his
eloquence. As described in the Confessions, Faustus' performance is comparable to that of the show-orators of the Second Sophistic, men like his
countryman Apuleius who had held earlier audiences of educated Africans

spellbound with their verbal artifice. The mature Augustine takes him as a pretext for separating the claims of truth from those of eloquence, verbal form from doctrinal content, the human minister from the divine source. He also uses him to dramatize the problem of the "conference" evoked in connection with his earlier readings of the poets and philosophers. The
young Augustine, we are told, was not prepared just to listen to Faustus and applaud him with the rest:
5.6.11: [M]oleste habebam, quod in coetu audientium non sinerer ingerere illi et partiri cum eo curas quaestionum mearum conferendo familiariter et accipiendo ac reddendo sermonem.
[I was nothing well content that, in the throng of them that listened to him, I might not be suffered to urge him and to impart to him the burden of some questions that I had a mind to ask, by familar converse and the giving and
taking of discussion.]
These quaestiones related to things he had read. There were certain Manichaean texts he wished to discuss, passages he had marked as conflicting
with other authorities:
5.7.12: Libri quippe eorum pleni sunt longissimis fabulis de celo et sideribus et sole et luna: quae mihi eum, quod utique cupiebam, conlatis numerorum
rationibus, quas alibi ego legeram, utrum potius ita essent, ut Manichaei libris continebantur, an certe vel par etiam inde ratio redderetur, subtiliter ex-
plicare posse iam non arbitraban [For their books are full of lengthy fables, of the heaven, of the stars, of the sun and moon; and while I greatly desired to discuss with him the reasons of these things, which I had read elsewhere (Pine-Coffin: I badly wanted Faustus to compare these with the mathematical calculations which I had studied in
other books), and to find out if the things delivered about them in the Manichaean books were true or at least possible, I did not now think that he would
be able to explain them with any true knowledge.]
Although the modern translation of conlatis . . . rationibus is strictly preferable to Mathew's, the context allows room for both, and more besides. Augustine's desired conversation or conference (conlatio, sense 1) would include a comparison of ideas (conlatio, sense 3) based on a sharing or mise-en-commun (conlatio, sense 2) of relevant texts, extracted or summa-
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rized. Unfortunately, Faustus turns out not to be the conference-partner he

is looking for, and he is once again confined to an unequal dialogue con-
cerning texts he has already mastered:

5.7.13: Refracto itaque studio, quod intenderam in Manichaei litteras
. . . coepi cum eo pro studio eius agere vitam, quo ipse flagrabat in eas litteras, quas tunc iam rhetor Carthaginis adulescentes docebam, et legere cum eo sive quae ille audita desideraret sive quae ipse tali ingenio apta existimaren!.
[And so, the pursuit whereby I was bent towards that learning of the Manichees being checked, I began at his request to pass some time with him in that
study after which he thirsted. This was the study of letters, which I, being
then Master of Rhetoric at Carthage, did teach my scholars; and I read with him either those books which he himself desired to hear, or those which 1
thought most fit for such a kind of wit as his.] 3. Incompetence or unwillingness to ventilate their own texts is not the
only failing for which Manichaean teachers are castigated in the Confessions. Their pragmatics of the biblical text is also sharply criticized. Com-
pelled by their philosophy to discount large portions of the scriptures held canonical by the Catholic Church, they justified themselves by claiming
that the excluded matter had been interpolated by judaizing heretics. In contending with this view, and finally rejecting it as untenable, Augustine was led into considerations of biblical philology:
5.11.21: Deinde quae illi in scripturis tuis reprehenderant defend- posse non existimabam, sed aliquando sane cupiebam cum aliquo illorum librorum doctissimo conferre singula et experiri, quid inde sentiret. ... Et inbecilla mihi responsio videbatur istorum . . . cum dicerent scripturas novi testamenti falsatas fuisse a nescio quibus . . . atque ipsi incorrupta exemplaria nulla proferrent.
[Besides 1 thought that those things which the Manichees reprehended in the Scriptures could not be defended; but yet I sometimes desired to examine
them one by one with some man most learned in those books, and thereupon to see what he held. And I thought the answer of the Manichees was weak, for they would say that the Scriptures of the New Testament were falsified by 1 know not whom, but themselves did yet produce no copies thereof which were uncorrupted.]
This is as close as Augustine comes in the Confessions to using the verb conferre in the technical sense (4) of "collating" manuscripts.63 Even without such codicological precision, the passage is important testimony to the
63. TLL, s.v. "confra", I. B. b (citing, inter alia, Jerome, and Augustine, cresc.
1.34.40); cf. "collatio", I. B. 1. a.
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role played by the Manichees in shaping his view of the biblical text qua text, that is, as a set of verbal signs transmitted by writing, subject to the usual hazards of literary tradition in a manuscript culture. Interestingly
enough, Augustine's dissatisfaction with the Manichaean view of the text
and desire to confer with "some man most learned in those books" (aliquo illorum librorum doctissimo) are recorded in the Confessions at a point
just before the announcement of his departure from Rome in 384. Their
dramatic date thus coincides exactly with the launching in the same city of Jerome's career as a biblical philologist, an event closely associated with his collation (in the technical sense) of Greek and Latin manuscripts of the
New Testament. Augustine's experience as a Manichee undoubtedly
helped make him receptive to Jerome's insistence on the philological aspect

of the Studium scripturarum, at the same time ensuring that he would not follow him all the way in his editorial revisionism.64 In 397, as in 391, Jerome would have been a natural choice as "man most learned in those
books". But in 3 84 Augustine was bound for Milan, where (always according to his own account) he was destined to profit from the preaching of
another contender for that title, though without ever obtaining the private
conference he craved: "and so I came to Milan, to bishop Ambrose"

(5.13.23: et veni Mediolanium ad Ambrosium episcopum).
These examples from Books 45 by no means exhaust the implications

of the verb conferre as used in the Confessions.65 They may suffice, however, to establish the importance of conlatio as a multivalent literarypragmatic concept and to justify our considering other scenes and episodesincluding some that are described without recourse to the verb conferre itselfin the light of the "conference" paradigm. They may even warrant our taking a general, albeit partial, view of the Confessions as the record of a series of conlationes conducing to a literary-interpretative transaction, or "text act", of potentially definitive type. As we should
64. For a clear statement of Augustine's position, see Gerhard Strauss, Schriftgebrauch, Schriftauslegung und Schriftbeweis bei Augustin (Tbingen: Mohr, 1959),
esp. 44-73.
65. Note also 6.11.19: "Pereant omnia et dimittamus haec vana et inania: conferamus nos ad solam inquisitionem veritatis. . . . Quid cunctamur igitur relicta spe saeculi conferre nos totos ad quaerendum deum et vitam beatam?"; 6.14.24: "Et multi amici agitaveramus animo et conloquentes ac detestantes turbulentas humanae vitae molestias paene iam firmaveramus remoti a turbis otiose vivere, id otium sic moliti, ut, si quid habere possemus, conferremus in medium unamque rem familirem conflaremus ex omnibus . . ."; 6.16.26: "Nee considerabam miser, ex qua vena mihi manaret, quod ista ipsa foeda tarnen cum amicis dulciter conferebam nee esse sine amicis poteram beatus etiam secundum sensu, quem tunc habebam quantalibet afluentia carnalium
voluptatum."
205
expect in a work that resumes so much of the programme of the abandoned De doctrina christiana, the culminating conference of the Confessions has
the Bible as its focus. Herein lies the main achievement of the work as the
second instalment of a hypothetical apologia contra Hieronymum de scripturis ad Paulinum. By persistently associating human conversation with various kinds of comparison or collation involving texts, and gradu-
ally narrowing the range of texts considered to the Bible, Augustine contrives, first, to identify Christian discourse with attention to the biblical text and, secondly, to present the literary-colloquial mode as an appropriate vehicle of biblical exegesis.
The autobiographical climax of Augustine's Collations is reached in the

threefold conversion-narrative of Book 8. Reading and conversation play decisive roles in the stories of Marius Victorinus and of the two imperial officials at Trier, but the privilege of conversion by biblical "conference" is reserved for Augustine and his life-long partner in God-talk, Alypius. The
word conferre does not appear in the surface text of the famous garden
scene. Instead, as in the preceding description of Ponticianus's visit, the narrator uses the verb sedere ("to sit") in the first person plural to create the context for a shared activity of reading. In his distress, we are told, Au-
gustine laid down the copy of Paul's Epistles that was to have been their
study that day, got up from the place where he and Alypius were sitting
together (ubi sedebamus), and prostrated himself under a fig tree some
distance away (8.12.28). It is while he is lying there crying that he hears the childlike voice summoning him back to his reading: tolle lege, tolle lege ("take it up and read, take it up and read"). The singular imperative (lege not legite) can only apply to one reader, but since it is delivered more than once (crebro) by an invisible speaker, it could in principle be addressed to more than one person. We are not told whether Alypius heard the voice; the sequel suggests that he did, but was less quick than Augustine to interpret it, otherwise he would have been the first to pick up the book.
Augustine, returning to stand or sit again beside his friend, opens the codex
at random and reads in silence from Romans (legi in silentio). This is not a conversation, at least not between men, nor yet a conference.66 Even now, in the close company of Alypius his fellow reader, Augustine (like Ambrose in the earlier scene) reads alone. The silence continues after he has finished reading and as Alypius reads in turn. The two men communicate over the text by facial expression and gesture:
66. Cf. Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, "St. Augustine's Rhetoric of Silence," Journal of the History of Ideas 23 (1962): 175-97, esp. 189-92.
206
8.12.30: Tum interiecto aut d-gito aut nescio quo alio signo codicem clausi et
tranquillo iam vultu indicavi Alypio. At ille quid in se agereturquod ego

nesciebamsic indicavit. Petit videre quid legissem: ostendi, et adtendit etiam
ultra quam ego legeram. Et ignorabam quid sequeretur. Sequebatur vero: infirmum autem in fide recipite. Quod ille ad se rettulit mihique aperuit. [Then shutting the book, and putting my finger or some other mark between the leaves, I showed it to Alypius, my countenance now calm. And he also, in like manner, showed me what was in his heart, of which I knew nothing. He desired to see what I had read: I showed him, and he read on further than I had done. For I was ignorant of what followed, which was this: "Him that is weak in the faith receive ye" (Rom. 14:1). And this he applied to himself, as
he then revealed to me.]
Of course if one translates the verbs indicare, petere, ostendere and aperire
as "to declare", "to ask", "to tell" and "to explain", as many good translators have, the silence is immediately broken. Augustine, however, seems to
have gone out of his way to use deictic terms which do not require any speech to take place. The scene is certainly more dramatically powerful, as well as more theologically significant, if no articulate sound is heard in the garden after the (divine) utterance from the neighbouring house.67 The
subsequent "conversation" with Monica can also be seen as occurring in
conditions of wordless rapture: Inde ad matrem ingredimur. Indicamus, gaudet ("Thence we went in to my mother. We indicated to her [what had happened], she rejoiced."). Only then, and with heavy emphasis, does Augustine introduce a verb that necessarily implies speech: Narramus, quemadmodum gestum sit ("We related how it had happened"). If this interpretation is accepted, the conversion of Augustine and Alypius appears as an example of what could be called the literary conference degr
zro, a text act involving two people who confer without speaking. Para-
doxically but predictably, this minimal form of the literary conference is for Augustine also its highest form, unattainable without supernatural help.
As shared human experience it is surpassed, in this life, only by such
moments of textless communion as the vision of Ostia described in
Book 9.
The deixis of the conversion-scene may be regarded as an epitome of the
autobiographical part of the Confessions, Books 110 on the author's

67. Cf. Pierre Courcelle, Recherches sur les 'Confessions' de saint Augustin, 2nd ed. (Paris: De Boccard, 1968), 306-10, for whom the voice saying "fo//e, lege" is an internal voice heard only by Augustine. Whether this point is granted or not, Courcelle is surely right that "Il s'agit matriellement d'une scene muette, d'une histoire sans paroles
[humaines]" (307).
207
reckoning.68 Augustine's narration is self-indication, lndicabo me ("I will show myself ", lit. "I will point myself out", with the possible further sense
of "I will accuse myself"), he says repeatedly at the beginning of Book 10,
in a passage which is of the utmost importance for an understanding of his purpose in the work as a whole (10.1.1-4.6). We recall that in the De doctrina christiana Augustine had defined the contents of the Bible as "signs given by God but pointed out to us by men" (signa divinitus data [sed] per homines nobis indicata). Now he is intent on reading his own life as a divinely inspired narrative.69 By revealing himself, not merely as he once was but also as he now is, he hopes to induce in his readers a response comparable to Monica's at the end of Book 8: joy and praise of God, mingled with holy terror. As in the garden, so in the Confessions as a literary work, the act of self-indication is achieved through the medium of the Bible. The "character" Augustine reveals himself to Alypius and Monica by reading himself into (and out of) a passage in Romans in a manner suggested to him by the Vita Antonii; the "author" Augustine reveals himself to his fellow human beings by writing himself into (and out of) a biblical narrative of loss and redemption artfully reconstituted from the Gospels and the Psalms. In neither case are the moment and means of discovering-himself easily distinguishable from the moment and means of discovering-himself-to-others, or from the moment and means of discovering-God-for-himself-and-so-to-others. The complex dynamics of this multiple process of discovery and indication is the main subject of Book 10, in which Augustine considers his own memory as the ground of his knowledge both of himself and (in an infinitely mysterious way) of his
God, and as the source of all his utterances. Although the biblical text itself
is conspicuously absent from the discussion, the return of two key terms
from the De doctrina christiana, namely invenire ("to find, discover") and
proferre ("to utter"),70 reminds us that these reflections on discovery and

68. Retr. 2.6.1 (ed. A. Mutzenbecher, CCSL 57 [1984]): "... A primo usque ad decimum de me scripti sunt, in tribus ceteris de scripturis Sanctis, ab eo quod scriptum est; In principio fecit deus caelum et terram. ..." 69. The same point is made somewhat differently by Ralph Flores, "Reading and Speech in St. Augustine's 'Confessions,' " AugStud 6 (1975): 1-13.1 agree with Flores that Books 1-9 provide "a frame within which the events of the narrative itself can be viewed as a discovery of a kind of textuality or reading," but am at a loss to understand what he considers that textuality to be. 70. 10.14.22: "Sed ecce de memoria profero, cum dico quattuor esse perturbationes animi ... et quidquid de his disputare potuero . . . , ibi invento quid dicam atque inde profero, nee tarnen ulla earum perturbatione perturbor, cum eas reminiscendo conmemoro; et antequam recolerentur a meet retraetarentur, ibi erant. . . . Forte ergo sicut de ventre eibus ruminando, sie ista de memoria recordando proferuntur. . . . Quis enim
208
declaration are the sequel to conferences textual (Book 8) as well as non-
textual (Book 9), and prepares us for the transition from the ten books Augustine wrote about himself to the three he wrote about the Bible. Any dating of individual books of the Confessions is necessarily speculative, but it is tempting to postulate a link between the abandonment of the De
doctrina christiana, with its anxious affirmation of the role of the human teacher, and the extraordinarily arduous Book 10 de memoria, with its
unqualified reassertion of the rights of the Veritas docens, the divine truth
that alone truly teaches.71 Book 11 of the Confessions resumes the unfinished business of the
"apologia contra Hieronymum de scripturis'", inserting the act of biblical interpretation into the conference paradigm established in Books 19 (10). The narrative of Augustine's life, we are now given to believe, has delayed a
more important enterprise:
11.2.2: Quando autem sufficio lingua calami enuntiare omnia hortamenta tua et omnes terrores tuos et consolationes et gubernationes, quibus me perduxisti praedicare verbum et sacramentum tuum dispensare populo tuo? Et si sufficio haec enuntiare ex ordine, caro mihi valent stillae temporum. Et olim inardesco meditari in lege tua et in ea tibi confiten scientiam et inperitiam
meam. . . .
[But when shall I be able with this tongue of my pen to declare all thine exhortations and comforts and particular providences, whereby thou hast drawn me to preach thy word and to dispense thy sacrament to thy people? And although I should be able to declare these things in order, yet the very
moments or drops of time are precious unto me; and for a long time have I
been fired with a desire to "meditate in thy law", and therein to confess to thee both my knowledge and my ignorance. . . .]
Whatever sense we attach to "confessing" in Augustine's previous use of
the verb, there is no denying the novelty of his idea of a confessio scientiae [sc. scripturarum], of a voluntary exposure of his limited expertise as an interpreter of the Bible. If explanation be needed for the plural confessiones
talia volens loqueretur, si quotiens tristitiam metumve nominamus, totiens maerere vel timere cogeremur? Et tamen non ea loqueremur, nisi in memoria nostra non tantum sonos . . . sed etiam rerum ipsarum notiones inveniremus. ..." These reflections lead
naturally to others concerning the problems of finding (invenire) and uttering (confiten,
praedicare) God/the Truth. 71. Conf. 10.65.40. Note also 10. 6.10, on man's "conversation" with the natural world and the internal "conference" on which its sense depends: "Nonne omnibus,
quibus integer sensus est, apparet haec species? Cur non omnibus eadem loquitur? . . . immo vero omnibus loquitur, sed Uli intelligunt, qui eius vocem acceptam
foris intus cum veritate conferunt."
209
of the title, the simplest may be that this "professional" confessionwhich

is not a confession at all in any sense current at the timewas grafted on to a work originally planned without it. To say this is not to call in question the much-debated "unity" of the Confessions, merely to remark another
instance of Augustine's habit of allowing his various, often simultaneous literary projects to cross and combine with one another. It is easy enough
to find warrants for the developments of Books 1113 earlier in the Con-
fessions. As the author turns from the narrative of himself to the mysteries of Scripture, his references to God's people and to the preaching of God's word recall the theme of praedicatio announced in the opening sentences of the work, and can be taken as a sign that the confessional mode is now finally expanding to encompass the professional functions of the priestly interpreter.72 This is a legitimate inference, provided we respect the relations between confessio and professio implied in the work as a whole, and do not try to read Augustine's exegesis of the Creation story in Books 11 13 as a specimen sermo ad populum of the kind he might have preached to his congregation in Hippo. We do indeed see the professional biblicist at
work in these books, but in a context dictated by the preceding parts of the Confessions rather than by the as-yet-unwritten fourth book of the De
doctrina christiana.
When Augustine says he will "confess" before God whatever he "discovers" in the sacred text (11.2.3: confitear tibi quidquid invenero in libris
tuis), he invites us to consider confession as a possible modus proferendi for

the biblical interpreter. At the same time, he makes that possibility contingent on our own activity as readers. As a statement at the beginning of Book 11 reminds us once again, the aim of his personal narrative in the earlier books has been to turn each and every reader into a fraternal accomplice in the act of confession: "to stir up the affections both of myself and of others who shall read these things; that so together we may say: 'The Lord is great and greatly to be praised'" (11.1.1: ut . . . affectum meum excito in te et eorum, qui haec legunt, ut dicamus omnes: magnus dominus et
laudabilis valde).73 That affective design does not lapse as confession turns to, or more fully becomes, biblical interpretation. When, a few lines later,
72. Thus Pincherle, "S. Agostino," 556; Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion, 123,135.1 have used this argument myself in discussing the later reception of the De doctrina christiana and Confessions: "John Donne (1572-1631) in the Company of Augustine: Patristic Culture and Literary Profession in the English Renaissance," forthcoming in
REAg39(1993). 73. Cf. refr. 2.6.1 : "Confessionum mearum libri tredecim et de maus et de bonis meis
deum laudant iustum et bonum, atque in eum excitant humanum intellectum et affectum. Interim quod ad me attinet, hoc in me egerunt cum scriberentur et agunt cum leguntur."
210
the intending exegete proclaims his desire not only to benefit himself but also tobe "of use to fraternal charity" (11.2.3: desiderium meum . . . non mihi soli aestuat, sed usui vult esse fraternae caritati), we are meant to recognize the same perfect symmetry between the self-interested and the
altruistic, feel the accumulated weight of innumerable con-prefixes, and understand that we (the fraternal reader) are to carry on participating in a speech act that is now manifestly a text act of the type prefigured in earlier
books.
The last three books of the Confessions, Augustine's invitation to a charitable conference de scripturis Sanctis, rank among the hardest in
Latin literature. "Anfractuous" one scholar has rightly called them. They
embrace, inter alia, an exegesis of the biblical Creation story, a demonstration of the multiplicity of possible exegeses of the same, and a discussion of the principles on which different exegeses (of this or any biblical text)
should be rejected or accepted. Reduced to a set of precepts, a large part of

what is said repeats statements already made in the unfinished De doctrina christiana.74 But Augustine is no longer giving precepts; he is working through examples with his imaginary partners in conference, including some who he knows will want to contradict him. Problems of interpretation and adjudication that had been raised theoretically in works such as
the De utilitate credendi and practically by his earlier attempts to expound

Genesis, problems that had become embarrassingly personal in the triangular correspondence with Paulinus and Jerome, and with which he had wrestled at length in the De doctrina christiana, are now the subject of a
debate that relentlessly solicits the reader's involvement. Though few late
antique readers can have felt themselves wholly adequate to the task, none could mistake what was being required of them: to "seek, ask, knock" in company with Augustine, in the faithful and charitable hope of "receiving, finding, and entering" with him.75 At the risk of over-simplification, we
74. While some of what is said anticipates the still-to-be-written second part of Book 3: Pincherle, "S. Agostino," 565f. 75. Conf. 13.38.53 (the closing sentences of the work): "Et hoc intellegere quis hominum dabit homini? Quis ngelus angelo? Quis ngelus homini? A te petatur, in te quaeratur, ad te pulsetur: sic, sic accipietur, sic invenietur, sic aperietur." The final phrase is potentially ambiguous: though the biblical subtext suggests that the "opening" will be made to the human postulant (i.e. by God), the passive form allows the additional possibility that one human recipient ("sic accipietur") will "open" what is found ("sic invenietur") to another. For the implied equivalence "aperire" = "proferre" cf. the opening sentences of doctr. chr. prol. 1: "Sunt praecepta quaedam tractandarum scripturarum, quae studiosis earum video non incommode posse tradi, ut non solum legendo alios, qui divinarum litterarum operta aperuerunt, sed etiam ipsi aperiendo proficiant."
211
could say that the author of the Confessions had reverted to the manner of his earlier "literary debates with those present and with himself alone in
the presence of God" (9.4.7: libri disputait cum praesentibus et cum ipso
me solo coram te), the dialogues of Cassiciacum or the De magistro,76 only this time with the biblical text as the centre of conference and the City of God as its declared goal.
CONCLUSION: CHRISTIAN LITERATURE AS BIBLICAL CONFERENCE
The confessio scientiae of Confessions 1113 registers an important
literary-pragmatic advance on the De doctrina christiana of 396/7, and marks a turning-point in Augustine's relations with the Latin reading public.77 While the earlier treatise had laid an initial emphasis on the social
aspect of biblical interpretation, only to lose itself in semantics, the Confessions finally envisages the actus inveniendi et proferendi as the combined
work of two or more human beings in the presence of God, as an actus conferendi or "conference" performed in the spirit of charity. It thereby deflects possible criticism of the author as one who would undervalue human instruction in the science of Scripture, yet without committing him to a fully "professional" (or for that matter markedly ascetic) conception of the interpreter's task and social function. It defines an ideal context in which a recently elevated bishop could communicate on biblical topics with men like Paulinus, and not fall victim to the philological rigour of a
At its close the Confessions comes back to the point-of-departure of the De doctrina christiana, in order to "retract" (but not withdraw!) the statements made there about
the role of the human teacher.
76. Thus Pincherle, "Quelques remarques sur les 'Confessions' de saint Augustin,"
La Nouvelle CIb 7-9 (1955-57): 189-206, 206 and "S. Agostino," 574 n. 73, with
reference to the Confessions as a whole. But cf. Herzog, " 'Non in sua voce,' " passim,
and Franca EIa Consolino, "Interlocutore divino e lettori terreni: la
funzione-destinatario nelle 'Confessioni' di Agostino," Materiali e discussioniper I'analisi dei testi classici 6 ( 1981 ) : 119-46, who both stress the generic innovativeness of the
later work.
77. It is impossible to enter here on the Wirkungsgeschichte of the Confessions, or on the rich and varied history of the conlatio in Latin Christian literature after Augustine. For evidence of contemporary reaction to the worklittle of it directly relevant to the aspects considered heresee Courcelle, Recherches, 235-47; Les 'Confessions', 2016. While it is unlikely that Augustine's contemporaries "totally ignored" the last three books (as suggested by Consolino, "Interlocutore divino," 135), their engagement with this part of the Confessions has left fewer traces than one might have hoped for.
212
Jerome. And it does all this without compromising Augustine's view of

God as the only source of knowledge, the inner teacher in conference with
whom we discover what is true and what is false. The delicate balance
between the respective claims of the external divine text and the internal divine voice is struck at the moment of approach to Genesis 1.1 in Book 11 : 11.3.5: Audiam et intellegam, quomodo in principio fecisti caelum et terrani.
Scripsit hoc Moyses et abiit, transiit hinc a te ad te eque nunc ante me est. Nam si esset, tenerem eum et rogarem eum et per te obsecrarem, ut mihi ista panderet, et praeberem aures corporis mei sonis erumpentibus ex ore eius, et si hebraea voce loqueretur, frustra pulsaret sensum meum nee inde mentem meam quiequam tangeret; si autem latine, scirem quid diceret. Sed unde sci-
rem, an verum diceret? Quod si et hoc scirem, num ab illo scirem? Intus utique mihi, intus in domicilio cogitationis nee hebraea nee graeca nee latina nee barbara veritas sine oris et linguae organis, sine strepitu syllabarum diceret: "verum dicit" et ego statim certus confidenter illi homini tuo dicerem: "verum dicis."
[Let me hear and understand how thou, "in the beginning created the heaven and the earth." Of this Moses wrote and passed away, he went hence from thee, to thee, and he is not now before me. For if he were, then would I hold him fast and beg of him for thy sake that he would discover these things to me; and I would lay these ears of mine to the sound that should break out of his mouth. Yet if he should speak Hebrew, in vain would it fall upon my ears, nor would aught of it reach unto my mind; but if he spake Latin, I should know what he said. Yet how should I know, whether he said true or no? And if I knew this also, should I know it of him? Indeed I should not. For within me, in that very house of my thought, neither Hebrew, nor Greek, nor Latin, nor any barbarous tongue, but Truth itself, without instrument of mouth or tongue, and without the noise of any syllables, would say unto me, "It is the truth"; and I, being assured thereof, would confidently avow to that man of thine, "Thou speakest truly."]
The ground on which Augustine rejects an imaginary conversation with

Moses is the ground on which he joins in an imaginary conference with his
readers. Responding to Jerome in the De doctrina christiana, he had stipulated a limited knowledge of the original biblical languages, quantum satis est. Now even that requirement is tacitly lifted. Jerome, who in his recourse
to the Hebraica Veritas (as he called it) had seemed to identify biblical "truth" with the language of its first expression, might converse with Moses in Hebrew if he wished. The author of the Confessions is not interested in that kind of conversation.78 Less than a decade earlier, in the De
78. The relevance of conf. 11.3.5 to Jerome's theories is remarked by Pincherle, "Quelques remarques", 205. Cf. Gennaro Luongo, "Autobiograf-a ed esegesi b-blica nelle 'Confessioni' di Agostino," Parola del Passato 31 (1976): 286-306 at 304-5.
213
utilitate credendi, he had briefly hinted that the aspiring Christian biblicist should seek a master in the Holy Land, by implication someone like Je-
rome. However, the experience of the intervening years, in particular his epistolary converse with Paulinus, had convinced him of the pointlessness of such expedients. Augustine was in Hippo, and there would remain, the
animator of a biblical "conference" of ever-growing dimensions that would
go on for centuries after his death. His biographer's attempt to formulate the nature of this activity (absentes libris docere) may miss something of the complexity of the process of Augustinian doctrina, but his services as literary executor were carried out in precisely the right spirit. In taking leave of Moses, Augustine also takes his distance, charitably but deliberately, from his chief rival and partner in the exacting new enterprise of writing de scripturis for a Latin readership. Jerome had pioneered that art, but in a way that was forbidding to all but the most intrepid fellowtravellers. With a little help from his friends (less perhaps than he had once
hoped for), Augustine was now able to open a broader, more companionable road. The third chapter of Book 11 of the Confessions is the end of the apologia contra Hieronymum and the beginning of one of the greatest
conversations in western literature.79
Mark Vessey is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of

British Columbia
interpretationis consistent with his reinterpretation of the monastic life as described

by Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 63-83. For a divergent reading of the final books of the Confessions, which I nevertheless find very persuasive, see Geoffrey Gait Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 119-34. For
79. The main tendency that I have discerned in Augustine's literary pragmatics namely his desire to establish caritas rather than askesis as the ethical basis for biblical
Harpham, the Confessions demonstrates an "ascetic practice of reading" that is "at

once, and profoundly, personal, transcendent, and social" (134).

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Theological Monographs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Pp. xi + 289.

Heim, Franois. La Thologie de la Victoire. De Constantin Thodose. Thologie

historique 89. Paris: Beauchesne, 1992. Pp. xv + 347. 270FF.

Pietri, Charles. Charles Pietri: Historien et Chrtien. Edited by Philippe Levillain.

Pourkier, Aline. L'hrsiologie chez Epiphane de Salamine. Christianisme Antique

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NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS

Greek Virginity (review)

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virginity in ancient Greece as well in that of early Christianity, a chronologically but

she analyzes in meticulous detail.

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ever, this is primarily due to her efforts to integrate a tremendous breadth of

material to support her perception of an overarching pattern in Gregory's spirituality.

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H. Maier's, The Social Setting of the Ministry as Reflected in the Writings of

Barbarians and Bishops: Army, Church, and State

Pp. xiv +312. $64.00.

man, Synesius ofCyrene. Philosopher-Bishop and Raymond Van Dam, Leadership

Ignatius, Ad Polycarp. 4.3 and the Corporate Manumission of Christian Slaves

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Ignatius, Ad Polycarp. 4.3 and the Corporate Manumission of Christian Slaves1

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HARR1LL/AD POLYCARP 4.3 AND MANUMISSION

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

upon his exhortation. It is the crux of the passage. Ignatius addressed in

appears in pagan contexts to designate public expenditures of a city or the

HARRILL/AD POLYCARP 4.3 AND MANUMISSION

selves in morally questionable positions" forced upon them by poverty

fin de la rpublique romaine, Collection de l'cole Franaise de Rome 50 (Paris: cole

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

Schoedel's model of Roman freedmen frequently having little choice but to

referring exclusively to such freedmen prostitutes is implausible.15

other regions influenced by Hellenistic norms, ex-slaves were regularly

specified period, frequently "as a slave" before the manumission contract

erned by Roman private law, manumission was customarily understood in

HARRILL/AD POLYCARP 4.3 AND MANUMISSION

morning salutatio. Here, freedmen and other protgs of a patron would,

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

of a new slave and earned ex-slaves a social and economic position of

operae. I want to be clear that my argument for independent freedmen does

HARRILL/AD POLYCARP 4.3 AND MANUMISSION

reportedly claimed to be less a slave to his bodily appetites (

tite/desire" metaphor as a common topos of derision against the utterly

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

tionable means, the of (liberated) slaves, is present. In Luc-an of

HARRILL/AD POLYCARP 4.3 AND MANUMISSION

, the phrase can be read as social description,

inscriptions, commonly called the "Attic manumission lists," which date

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

tinued to be practiced throughout Attica and the Hellenistic East. Another

a sum of money, a friendly, interest-free eranos-type loan, given by a group

45. S. Scott Bartchy, 1: First-Century Slavery and the Interpreta-

HARRILL/AD POLYCARP 4.3 AND MANUMISSION

slavery in the East. As we saw above, paramon contracts were widespread

Roman private law. These paramon obligations would have supplied an

constituted friendly, non-interest bearing loans, an enticement other than