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Literate Christian Romans read Virgil and Homer. At least some literate non-Christian Romans read the Bible.1 The idea that one body of texts was the exclusive possession of one religious group, and another body of texts the possession of another, should puzzle us, in a literary and social context that did not enforce the segregation of books or readers along religious lines. Yet this idea was promoted by a number of late ancient readers: we have seen it already in the writings of Augustine and Julian the Apostate, brieXy examined in Chapter 3. I will now examine in greater detail how some grammatical practitioners who claimed a Christian identity created a division between Christian and pagan literature. The process of decontextualizing texts and homogenizing them, as in the artes, was also undertaken by these Christianizing writers, with the signiWcant difference that the maiores and antiqui of the artes are spoken of as gentes and saeculares in the overtly Christianizing texts. The grammarians’ use of apud nos, “among us,” to indicate temporal proximity became an apud nos of religious unity. Further, where the proliferation of words and quotations in the artes allowed late ancient readers to conceptualize a united past of which they were the heirs, the proliferation of language was used in a Christianizing context to instantiate a uniWed body of gentes and a uniWed body of Christiani. The same techniques were used to very diVerent ideological eVects, so that one set of texts classicized its objects of study, and another set Christianized its objects. In order to make it clear that the Christian status of various texts is not inherent, I have tried to use the term “Christianizing,” rather than “Christian,” when appropriate throughout this chapter. Many of the grammarians whose technical works have come down to us were likely to have been Christians, in the conventional sense of the term, although their works do not contain references to Christian doctrine.2 Such Christians were not 4 Displacement and Excess Christianizing Grammar necessarily actively or intentionally “Christianizing” in their discipline, in the sense that they do not overtly signal a Christian religious identity or a notion of separate Christian literature in their work. I do not take this to mean that their adherence to Christian belief or practice was any less than that of the other Wgures discussed in this chapter, who actively use grammar to construct Christian identity. For the purposes of this chapter, then, a “Christianizing” writer is one whose work overtly projects a particular delineation of “Christianity” as a real and laudable entity. Naturally it is possible for an individual writer to Christianize in one work and not in another; one clear example of an individual who did so is Ausonius, whose traditionally pious Parentalia was described in Chapter 3, and whose correspondence with his former pupil Paulinus of Nola, in which questions of Christian aYliation are prominent, will be described in Chapter 6. The texts on which I concentrate here are divided into two groups: the Wrst group consists of texts that set out the decontextualizing theory behind Christianizing reading, beginning with a brief discussion of Origen ’s principles of reading but focusing primarily on the famous debate between RuWnus and Jerome on the uses of traditional Roman literature,3 Jerome’s letters 21 and 70,4 in which Jerome elaborates his reading techniques , and Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana, book 2,5 which sets out some of Augustine’s ideas on the uses of grammar. The second group of texts consists of two of the more technical grammatical works produced by Jerome and Augustine: after a short consideration of Origen’s Hexapla ,6 I turn to Jerome’s Liber interpretationis Hebraicorum nominum7 and Augustine’s Locutiones in Heptateuchum,8 as instances of how Christianizing grammar makes use of the proliferation of language to produce the conceptual entity “Christianity.” These groups of texts have techniques in common: like the artes, all rely on the practice of reading in a fragmentary manner. This allows them to generate lists of fragments (either in the form of quotations or in the form of authors’ names), which become, in turn, signs of plenitude.9 That is, beginning with the removal of fragments from their original contexts, their subsequent listing suggests an approximation of totality, giving the appearance of unity and completeness to the objects listed.10 To the extent that these texts use literary fragments, the multiplication of those fragments is an invocation of uniWed bodies, as...

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