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  • The Letters of Jerome: Asceticism, Biblical Exegesis, and the Construction of Christian Authority in Late Antiquity
  • Robert Hayward
The Letters of Jerome: Asceticism, Biblical Exegesis, and the Construction of Christian Authority in Late Antiquity. By Andrew Cain. [Oxford Early Christian Studies.] (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009. Pp. xiv, 286. $99.00. ISBN 978-0-199-56355-5.)

This fine study of Jerome's letters represents a quite new direction in the study of a significant number of the saint's epistles. Previously well researched as sources of information about Jerome's life, theological stance, and exegetical activities and techniques, the letters are here investigated to "examine Jerome's sophisticated use of literary artistry to construct spiritual and intellectual authority for himself" (p. 6). In this, the author is brilliantly successful and contrives at the same time not to neglect those traditional concerns of former students of the letters. Omitting from sustained discussion Jerome's letters to St. Augustine and Paulinus of Nola, Epistles 117 and 108, and documents treating of the Origenist controversy, Cain first sets his sights on the Epistularum ad diversos Liber. He plausibly reconstructs the contents of this collection, arguing that Jerome intended it for use on his visit to Rome (382) to promote his reputation as a holy ascetic in the Eastern mold. As a novus homo (Cain refers to him as a "provincial upstart," p. 8) of modest social standing and limited financial means, Jerome stood in need of support and patronage, which this collection of letters was designed to elicit. Jerome's qualities as a master of Latin prose are here on full display; his command of the language and his outstanding abilities as a stylist were to serve him well, Cain argues, when enemies and opponents were never reluctant to attack this "avant-garde" scholar with his newfangled Hebraica veritas. Indeed, Cain argues that the publication of his collected letters to Pope Damasus, examined in chapter 2, was designed by Jerome to reassure a multitude of doubters that his forays into Hebrew scholarship and the Jewish world were undertaken with the pope's blessing and authority.

Cain views the collection of letters titled Ad Marcellam Epistularum Liber, discussed in chapter 3, as a skillful exercise in damage limitation to Jerome's reputation following the events of summer and autumn 385, as a result of which he had been compelled to leave Rome. The events themselves are carefully investigated in chapter 4; here Cain maintains that Paula's relations were principally responsible for the charges of clerical misconduct laid against Jerome, charges that his enemies were content to support from "offstage," as it were. After leaving Rome and settling in the Holy Land, however, Jerome was able to write from that sacred place to his spiritual children in the West, once again preserving these letters as evidence of the constant demands for advice in matters moral and ascetic continually laid upon him by persons far away. The final chapter treats of the exegetical letters designed, Cain argues, to cultivate the image of Jerome as an unrivaled master of biblical exegesis: "he was uneasily aware . . . that he was but one voice among many vying for personal influence and a sympathetic audience. . . . The [End Page 762] burden, then, was on Jerome to convince prospective supporters why the spiritual and Scriptural mentoring he offered was sound" (p. 199).

Jerome's renown from late antiquity onward as a remarkable scholar and ascetic, Cain thus suggests, owes a great deal to his letters, many of which functioned effectively as forms of self-promotion. Although Cain presents it as a first appendix to his book, the new taxonomy of Jerome's letters set out on pages 207-19 (a significant contribution in its own right to our understanding of ancient literary genres) strongly supports this central thesis. There is hardly an epistolary type known from antiquity that Jerome does not use and in some manner adapt to his own needs; and it is in the development of these epistolary types that Jerome's motives often stand revealed. A second appendix discusses lost letters of Jerome, a third gives a lucid account of the manuscript tradition of the letters...

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