Ascetics, Authority, and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian: Second Edition

I. A BISHOP AND HIS BIOGRAPHER

I A BISHOP AND HIS BIOGRAPHER 1. SULPICIUS THE DISCIPLE The narrative of Jerome's life (or rather of some, at least, of his successive hopes and convictions) links the asceticism of Egypt with the monasticism of Gaul. Jerome himself may not have been the chief mediator of ideas and practices between the two, nor even a major influence on western monks of the fifth century j but his career was like the first curling of a wave, carried forward by deeper and more varied currents; and its spectacular release on the shores of early western monasticism echoed chiefly in the writings of Sulpicius and Cassian. Jerome provided exemplary proof that many of the changes taking place among Egyptian ascetics could be re­ flected, and even carried further, in a different setting. His own ascetic life in Palestine was at once more coenobitic and less remote than that of Egypt.1 In Antioch, Constanti­ nople, and Rome, he encountered and encouraged a style of religious life more urban, more closely linked with secular society. As an ascetic priest, he faced the problem (both for himself and for others) of how to combine personal dedica­ tion to an ascetic life with a sense of pastoral responsibility. Above all he showed, in his letters and Lives, how the written word could encourage, and even regulate, the practice of the ascetic life, and how many kinds of treatise could acquire a lasting influence and authority in distant and diverse parts of the empire. Jerome's biography can also be used to provide a more specific bridgehead between Egypt and Gaul. His own conver­ sion took place at Trier, where memories of Athanasius may well have lingered (to influence Sulpicius, not less than I For a treatment of Palestinian monasticism during the early fifth century, see Chitty, Desert, 82-9 7 . 144 MARTIN OF TOURS himself);2 he must surely have known the biography of Antony; and he tasted the life of the desert. At the same time, he admired the works of Hilary, and praised the later exegetes of Gaul; he set himself to direct the religious life in wealthy households and estates (not unlike that which Sul­ picius had tried to form at Primuliacum); and he acknow­ ledged without regret (in Provence, as well as Aquileia) the increasing links between ascetic discipline and preparation for the priesthood and episcopate. But it was as a hagiographer, as 'the first Christian writer in Latin to show a taste for stories about miracles',3 that Jerome represented a tradition passing from Athanasius to Sulpicius. Paulinus of Milan, the biographer of Ambrose, certainly read his Life of Paul;4 and, although Sulpicius made no direct reference to his biographies, it is equally likely that he knew of them.s Where Sulpicius followed Jerome most was in reacting against the Life of Antony: against the notion that Antony was the sole exemplar or pioneer of the ascetic life.6 This wish to rival Athanasius was probably more impor­ tant than the inevitable dependence of subsequent biography on the patriarch's account of Antony.7 Sulpicius seems to have felt, not only that in Martin he possessed an acceptable alternative hero, but also that he and his fellow admirers had access to a truly alternative tradition. Not only were they no longer dependent on Antony as a model;8 they were no longer totally dependent on the appeal to the imagination inherent in a literary account.9 2 J. Fontaine, Vie de saint Martin, i (Paris 1967),150; ii (Paris, 1968), 593 f. 3 An unusual, but nevertheless accurate, description of Jerome: H. Delehaye, 'Saint Martin et Sulpice Severe', AB xxxviii (1920), 79. 4 Paulinus, V. Amb. 1. 5 Fontaine, Vie, i. 119. 6 Ibid. 79. 7 On the relation between the two Vitae, the scepticism of Delehaye is still the most convincing reaction: 'Everyone who has read them agrees that there is a marked distinction between the personalities concerned-the way they are de­ scribed, the way they behave, the impression one gains from the work as a whole', 'Saint Martin et Sulpice Severe', 47; see also, for detailed comparisons, 40 ff. In this, Delehaye is followed by Fontaine, Vie, i. 60,n. 2; 71,131. But it is just to remember that E.-Ch_ Babut also admitted that particular parallels were not always easy to substantiate: Saint Martin de Tours (Paris, n.d.), 73-83. 8 Fontaine, Vie, ii. 416. • In this sense the circle that...