The Christian Cento and the Evangelization of Christian Culture

Introduction

Andre Kadel's Matrology chronicles the writings of Christian women from the beginning of the Church until the end of the fifteenth century. He includes approximately 250 names. Apart from the spurious authorship attributed to some women who may have composed apocryphal or Gnostic texts, there is the reported speech of St. Perpetua as well as various sayings of the Desert Mothers, such as Syncletica and Theodora. The first Christian woman whose work we can actually verify and whose writing we still possess in full, however, is a fourth-century Roman matron named Faltonia Betitia Proba. Kadel reports, "Proba wrote a substantial cento, which used the lines from Virgil to tell the Christian story of salvation. This text was relatively popular for study in the Middle Ages, and there are printed versions from as early as the fifteenth century."¹ What Kadel is referring to here is an obscure literary form known as a cento, coming from the Greek word denoting a goad or a stitching needle. Applied to literary activity, then, we can understand how Faltonia's achievement was a patchwork poem stitched together from borrowed lines of Virgil.²

The cento is a curious construction of the canonical and the contemporary. It carefully gathers lines out of a community's normative texts so as to form them into a daringly new story with a meaning never intended by the original author. By selecting and stitching various verses and half-lines together, the great poets' words became attached to a new historical situation. In this way, the cento is not a poetic genre per se but a technique or method of imitation and resemblance. By definition, the centoist has at his or her hands a ready-made system of easily recognizable and appreciated words, enjoying the luxury of centuries of well-spun phrases and expressions from which to choose. Able to draw on the reputation and authority of the past, the centoist's only quandary was "not 'whether,' but 'which' line" to use.³ Such removal and transference of particular lines out of established authors into newly composed texts was used most often in pre- and non-Christian theater either to effect a serious message or to achieve a playful, satirical tone.⁴

After the beginnings of the Christian aristocracy in the fourth century, however, learned Christians picked up on the centonic method and began to remove lines from the past's literary and rhetorical masters. The first of these new Christian poets, Faltonia Proba, removed enough verses and half-verses from Virgil in order to compose a 694-line cento. In so doing, she simultaneously pays tribute to the great bard of Rome but in such wise that this voice of the empire's glorious past now proclaims something, Someone, completely novel. In claiming Virgil for Christ, Faltonia's patchwork poem gives us a glimpse into how the early Church understood and employed non-Christian literature. This essay examines the nature and dynamic of the Christian cento. It is the perfect symbol for what was transpiring in the early Church: utilizing the best of non-Christian culture to argue that all that was good and true and beautiful in the ancient world spoke of Christ when understood correctly. Divided into three main sections, this study begins with a biographical sketch of Faltonia Proba along with some examples of her work; section two goes on to examine exactly what constitutes a cento; the third and final section argues that the cento represents a form of apologetic literature hitherto unrecognized.

Faltonia Betitia Proba (c. 320 -. 370)

The only woman included in Isidore of Seville's seventh-century ecclesial "Who's Who?" is Faltonia Proba, "wife of the proconsul Adelphius . . . who formed a cento about Christ out of verses wrestled out of Virgil. We marvel not so much at her eagerness...