Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity: The Jovinianist Controversy (review)

We have here a first-rate instance of the classical tradition of objective scholarship: Everything on the topic has been read, mastered, and put in its place; the bibliography is exhaustive, the index helpful, and the final product, inevitably, dull. The book might interest those, if any such still exist, who know nothing of fourth-century Catholicism—specifically, of Pope Siricius's overriding concern for clerical status, Ambrose's Mariological excesses, and St. Jerome's typically obnoxious—and derivative—defense of consecrated virginity. The point at issue was the superiority of consecrated virginity to marriage, which the Church continues to maintain, but Hunter in his academic straitjacket is unable to address this crucial question. He merely provides a scholarly consensus about the various positions assumed in "ancient Christianity," although, as befits a contemporary thinker, his sympathy is clearly on the side of Jovinian. As Peter Brown—whose name is never mentioned without Hunter's performing a mental genuflection—says, "Paul left a fatal legacy to future ages" (p. 89).

The opening chapter includes a description of the impressive ritual of baptism in the fourth-century Church, which Hunter convincingly presents as the origin of Jovinian's conviction that all forms of Christian life are equivalent. He also taught that, as baptized, Christians are secure from the devil's attacks, not obliged to fast, and assured of "one reward in the kingdom of heaven for those who have preserved their baptism" (p. 41). None of Jovinian's works is extant, of course, but references to them in Siricius, Ambrose, and especially Jerome render it relatively easy to reconstruct his argument. Hunter's scope, however, is too narrow. He could have made something of the Christian tradition, dating back to apostolic times, of the sinless ideal for all baptized, as is indicated, for example, by the history of penance.

Rejecting the attempts of Christian Cochini and Stefan Heid to trace obligatory clerical continence/celibacy to apostolic times, Hunter falls back on ritual purity to account for the "novelty" of legislated clerical continence at the end of the fourth century, but without examining in any significant way what ritual purity was—and is in Judaism and the Orthodox Church. (It also continued in full vigor in Catholicism until the pontificate of John XXIII, when it unaccountably disappeared.) Instead, he simplistically links it to the encratite suspicion of sexual activity as morally tainted. The essential point is bypassed, viz., that Christianity, like every other religion, is based on the conviction that the transcendent realm is real and, further, because of Jesus Christ can be anticipated even here on Earth by the spiritually adept, the "angelic life" of Matthew 22:30. The result in Catholicism has been a more-or-less moderate dualism, which has veered between an overemphasis on the transcendent at the expense of the here and now (the anti-Jovinians of the fourth century, et alii) and vice versa (Jovinian—and Hunter).