Disciplining Christians : correction and community in Augustine’s letters

267 Pages·2012·1.084 MB·English

by  Ebbeler, Jennifer

Disciplining Christians
OXFORD STUDIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY
Series Editor
Ralph Mathisen
Late Antiquity has unifi ed what in the past were disparate discipli-
nary, chronological, and geographical areas of study. Welcoming a
wide array of methodological approaches, this book series provides
a venue for the fi nest new scholarship on the period, ranging from
the later Roman empire to the Byzantine, Sasanid, early Islamic, and
early Carolingian worlds.
The Arabic Hermes: From Pagan Sage to Prophet of Science
Kevin van Bladel
Two Romes: Rome and Constantinople in Late Antiquity
Edited by Lucy Grig and Gavin Kelly
Disciplining Christians: Correction and Community in Augustine’s Letters
Jennifer V. Ebbeler
Disciplining
Christians
Correction and Community in
Augustine’s Letters
ennifer . bbeler
J V E

1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ebbeler, Jennifer.
Disciplining Christians: correction and community in Augustine’s letters /Jennifer Ebbeler.
p. cm.—(Oxford studies in late antiquity)
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 978-0-19-537256-4
1. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo—Correspondence.
2. Disciplining (Christianity)—History—To 1500. I. Title.
BR1720.A9E33 2011
270.2092—dc22 2010009149
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 3
Corrective Correspondences 7
Augustine’s Epistolary Corpus 13
Caveat Lector 18
Latin Prose Epistolography 20
Interpreting Augustine’s Correspondence 23
A Note on Terminology 25
1. Rebuke, Friendship, and Community 27
Toward a Practice of Corrective Friendship in the C onfessions 29
Scriptural and Philosophical Infl uences 42
Epistolary Correction 50
The Corrective Colloquium Litterarum 56
Epistolary Friendship Reimagined 58
2. Experiments in Epistolary Correction 63
Nebridius 64
Maximus of Madauros 66
Maximinus the Donatist 69
Jerome 75
Paulinus of Nola 81
Augustine, Paulinus, and the Pelagian Controversy 92
Conclusions 98
3. The Honeyed Sword: Rebuking Jerome 101
Paul’s Rebuke of Peter in Galatians 2:11–14 103
Jerome and Augustine on Galatians 2:11–14 104
Cultivating Friendship 106
Another Attempt at a Corrective Correspondence 109
Jerome’s Silence 113
Letter-to-Letter Combat 116
A Reliable Messenger 119
Replies 123
vi CONTENTS
Laying Down the Honeyed Sword 130
Triangulation 133
Jerome’s Apologia contra Augustinum 135
Reviving the Corrective Correspondence 139
Caritas Maior 141
Conclusions 145
Postscript: Augustine and Jerome, 415–419 147
4. The Donatists and the Limits of the Corrective Correspondence 151
Augustine the Apologist 155
Epistulae ad Inimicos 159
Salutations 163
Some Advantages of the C olloquium Litterarum 168
Silence 174
Intercepted Letters 177
Letters and the Law 181
Coercive Correction 184
The Aftermath 186
5. The Retrospective Correction of Pelagius 191
Foreshadowings 194
The Correspondence of Augustine and Pelagius 198
414–415: Augustine Reads D e Natura 202
Orosius the Heresy Hunter 204
Damage Control 211
Revisions 215
Exposing the Wound 221
Conclusions 223
Postscript 224
Conclusion: The Paper Trail 227
Bibliography 235
Index 249
Preface
Augustine’s revolutionary tactics as a letter writer have been studied
in the context of individual case studies, most especially in his
correspondence with Jerome, but not on the broader scale that this
book offers. My aim in returning to some of these well-known
correspondences is twofold. First, I hope to add to and nuance
accepted views of these individual correspondences. Second, I want to
draw attention to underlying similarities among these correspon-
dences to illuminate important features of Augustine’s epistolary
practices and to contextualize these practices in the broader tradition
of Latin letter writing. That Augustine pushed the existing boundaries
of letter writing makes his epistolary corpus particularly fruitful for
investigations of these issues. This study is oriented toward questions
of literary history, with careful attention to the ways in which Augus-
tine’s peculiar literary practices infl uenced the contents of his letters
and subsequent narratives of his life and historical context.
Augustine lived at a time when it was possible and even typical to
cultivate relationships entirely through the exchange of letters, with
no expectation that these textual relationships would lead to face-to-
face relationships. The arguments of this book are grounded in the
assump tion that Augustine’s relationships cannot be understood
separately from the literary form that facilitated them. The book
analyzes these relationships, emphasizing how the conventions of
letter writing and letter exchange shaped Augustine’s associations
with other Christians. Once the substantial infl uence of the episto-
lary form in shaping these relationships is observed, it is possible to
revisit important aspects of Augustine’s accepted biography.
viii PREFACE
Individual chapters provide fresh insights into the complicated interper-
sonal dynamics of several of Augustine’s most signifi cant relationships, in-
cluding those with Paulinus of Nola, Jerome of Stridon and Bethlehem, various
Donatist clergy, and Pelagius. Each chapter examines Augustine’s efforts to
adapt the letter exchange to the task of correcting perceived doctrinal error in
the Christian community. In classical and late antiquity, the exchange of letters
is more typically used to sustain friendly relations in absentia, but in Augus-
tine’s hands, letters become instruments of charitable correction. The propriety
of frank correction in the context of a face-to-face friendship is well documented
in ancient philosophical writings, but it is not a typical feature of epistolary
relationships. Indeed, Augustine’s practice of epistolary correction—that is, his
textualization of friendly (as he saw it) correction—appears to be an inspired
innovation relative to conventional late-antique epistolary practice.
The extant evidence suggests that Augustine’s correspondents did not
share his revolutionary epistolary mores. This study analyzes the tactics of
resistance that they employed in their correspondences with Augustine. It
also discusses how that resistance infl uenced individual relationships, most
notably in Augustine’s fraught correspondence with Jerome. Similarly,
Augustine’s eventual decision to turn to the Roman legal system to correct
Donatist error is all the more poignant when viewed in the context of his re-
peated efforts to establish corrective correspondences with various Donatist
clergy and even laymen. Given Augustine’s clear preference for correcting
error via letter exchange, the absence of a corrective correspondence in the
case of Pelagius is notable. The book’s fi nal chapter investigates possible ex-
planations for this apparent change in tactics. After a careful reexamination
of the evidence for Augustine’s relationship with Pelagius, now augmented
by the relatively recent (re)discovery of new letters and a new sermon, the
book proposes that until the summer of 416, Augustine was unaware of Pela-
gius’s connection to the heretical teachings that came to bear his name. Be-
ginning in mid-416, Augustine scrambled to recast his correspondence with
Pelagius as corrective. No independent external evidence verifi es Augustine’s
version of events. Indeed, Augustine’s narrative of the relationship is best
understood as a retrospective revision similar to his version of his own life
story in the Confessions .
I began to think seriously about ancient letters in the summer of 1998. I
was weighing potential dissertation topics when one of my graduate profes-
sors, Jacqui Sadashige, suggested that Latin letters were a potentially rich
and underexplored body of texts. The genre of letters is now attracting sub-
stantial scholarly interest and is even considered a topic worthy of sustained
study in graduate seminars. This was not the case as recently as a decade ago.
At that time, the study of ancient letters was very much a new frontier in
Latin studies, full of exciting landscapes to explore but also daunting to a
young graduate student trying to decide what questions to ask. In the summer
PREFACE ix
of 1999, I began work full-time on a dissertation on Latin letters under the
patient direction of Jim O’Donnell.
Refl ecting the state of scholarship on ancient letters at the time, the disser-
tation was formulated around a specifi c set of questions intended to demon-
strate the utility and even necessity of treating prose letters as literary texts. It
also argued for the benefi ts of reading classical and late-antique Latin letters as
part of the same literary tradition. Most important, and thanks largely to Jim’s
encouragement, the dissertation work gave me the opportunity to acquaint
myself with a range of classical and late-antique Latin letter collections while
orienting myself in the existing scholarship and thinking hard about how I
might contribute to this complicated but fascinating genre. As I worked through
some of these diffi cult issues, I benefi ted tremendously from the sound schol-
arly and professional advice of Joe Farrell, Bridget Murnaghan, and Peter
Struck.
I spent the year of 2001–02 in Munich as a fellow at the Thesaurus Lin-
guae Latinae, where I composed lexicographical articles on a range of words
beginning with the letter p . A highlight of the year in Munich was a chance
meeting with Bianca Schröder, a former fellow who was at that time working at
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität as an assistant professor and fi nishing a
monograph on the letters of Ennodius (Schröder 2007). We enjoyed conversa-
tions about all things epistolary, often accompanied by strong coffee and sweet
pastries. It was a pleasure to renew this bond in the spring of 2007, when
Bianca spent three weeks in Austin as a visiting professor in my Latin Letters
graduate seminar. I remain deeply grateful for our personal and intellectual
vinculum amicitiae , sustained over the years by many letters in an electronic
medium that Augustine could not have imagined.
I continued to explore my interests in Latin letters after my arrival at the
University of Texas, Austin, in the fall of 2002. My attention became increas-
ingly focused on the dialogic aspect of the letter exchange. I had fi rst investi-
gated this topic in the fi nal chapter of my dissertation, a study of the
Augustine-Jerome correspondence in the context of the Origenist heresy. Spe-
cifi cally, I began to refl ect on the ways in which all interpersonal interactions,
whether oral or written, are governed by (often implicit) conventions. Indeed, a
signifi cant element of socialization is learning these rules and how to apply
them to real-life situations. As long as everyone in a community understands
and agrees to play by the same set of rules, interpersonal interactions tend to
proceed smoothly. If an individual deliberately refuses to play by the rules,
however, interactions are severely disrupted. As I began to think more con-
cretely about letter exchanges as textualized social interactions, I become more
interested in analyzing the tactics that correspondents used to negotiate the
epistolary relationship.
Such a study requires that we have both sides of the correspondence, at least
in fragmentary form. Because most ancient letter collections preserve only the