The Roman Self in Late Antiquity: Prudentius and the Poetics of the Soul (review)

This book persuasively re-evaluates Prudentius as a poet who effectively reshaped the reader’s awareness of Christian self in relation to the wider Christian community, doing in poetry much the same thing that Augustine sought to do in his Confessions. Beginning with a confrontation between the Psychomachia and Aeneid VI, Mastrangelo assesses Prudentius’ epic ambition in terms of Aeneas’ descent to the underworld in search of understanding and the Christian’s spiritual wandering ended by Christ speaking through Prudentius’ poetry. Roman national identity gives way to Christianitas on both the moral and political planes.

As the Roman epic tradition engaged the narrative of Rome, so Prudentius seeks, in the Psychomachia, Peristephanon, and to some extent in the Hamartigenia and Contra Symmachum, to present salvation history through a synthesis of Roman pagan history in tension with the biblical narration of God’s works, both Jewish and Christian, and the stories of martyrs. Emphasis here and elsewhere is placed on the poet’s drive to link the soul of the reader who engages the text, especially the Psychomachia, with the moral and spiritual battles set forth in that work. This kind of exegetical strategy for strengthening the reader’s personal journey toward salvation results also in the strengthening of the Christian community as a whole, as well as in re-invigorating Latin epic and lyric. Narrative as both historia and fabula is revealed as human stories connected typologically to the Roman past. Doctrine likewise plays a formative and controlling role in such historical narrative, as a new kind of historical memory is precipitated in readers reading works such as those of Prudentius that draw together profane and sacred history.

The thorny topic of allegory is addressed as well. Mastrangelo presents Biblical exegesis as driving the signifiers of the allegorical universe of the Psychomachia by giving us a wealth of examples introduced by a careful analysis of the praefatio of that work. Text, reader, and author go hand in hand with God, Christ, and the human soul as typologies unfold for the faithful reader growing in that faith. The reader negotiating the connections between biblical characters, abstract qualities, and a sense of his own spiritual identity, is enabled to choose between virtue and vice. Shadow and type, Old and New Testament texts, and other typological pairs reveal a new epoch in human history as well as a new direction for Latin poetry.

Pagan philosophy is not neglected, but is shown to color the vices rampant in the Psychomachia, where the allegory of the soul also is informed by pagan philosophical traditions such as the Platonist metaphysical and political analogy of city and soul, the Platonist doctrine of the ascent and descent of the soul, the mortality of the soul according to the Epicureans, and the later idea of the soul as a Christian Neo-Platonist reflection of the Trinity.

Throughout, the methodology embodies a careful study of poetic allusion, intertextuality, typology, and figurative reading; and specific passages are exhaustively examined from these points of view. Mastrangelo gives us a Prudentius who was deeply concerned with effects of his poetry that take place outside of the poem, the “political purpose of creating one Christian Roman at a time” (161). Thus, the poetic self, it would seem, of both poet and audience is conceived of in relational terms. But a typological self also is postulated as mediating through Prudentius’ texts, which likewise is an “inner space” inside the reader where moral conflicts and decisions are resolved by freedom of choice. Crucial events and characters in the allegorical framework stand for moral dilemmas. The Pyschomachia stimulates spiritual improvement and the strengthening of moral choice by mediating an internal typological landscape where abstract moral personifications and the major players in salvation history stage battles. The book claims that the Roman Christian reader can be alerted, changed, and shaped toward the good by this right kind...