in lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The Forging of Orthodoxy in Latin Christian Literature: A Case Study MARK VESSEY Christian literary production of the post-Theodosian era is predominantly in two modes. The first is a creative and explicit rewriting of the Bible: in Latin of the period, tractatio scripturarum. The second is a creative and explicit rewriting of earlier non-biblical (“patristic”) Christian texts: by modern analogy, retractatio patrum. Each of these procedures was governed by a set of more or less agreed-upon rules, in effect a rhetoric or poetics of doctrinal composition. Tractatio scripturarum, though not comprehensively theorized in the West until Augustine took up the matter in his treatise De doctrina christiana, has a history continuous with that of the biblical canon. By contrast, the main work of dogmatic retractatio patrum may be said to begin at the Theodosian moment itself, even if some of its principles do not emerge clearly until the Pelagian and Nestorian controversies of the earlier fifth century. Its first western theorist, as controversialists of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were quick to recognize, was the Gallo-Roman writer Vincent of Lérins, whose so-called Commonitorium, written ca. 434 under the double impact of the Council of Ephesus and the recently “completed” works of Augustine, contained advice on determining from non-biblical—that is, conciliar and patristic—texts what had been believed “everywhere, at all times, by all Christians” (ubique, semper, ab omnibus).1 1. The epochal significance of this treatise has been well brought out by H. J. Sieben, Die Konzilsidee der Alten Kirche (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1979), 149–70. Vincent’s argument is grounded on the textual factum of the Nicene Creed as promulgated by AmThe tracing of these developments in their detail will be the task of some future literary history of Christian doctrine.2 The aim of the present essay is to convey a sense of what was at stake in the earliest phase of dogmatic retractatio patrum, and to hint at the complexity of material, technical, and ideological factors involved. I shall evoke the circumstances of one highly marked instance of patristic rewriting de fide, glance at the theoretical and practical contexts within which such events acquire their meaning for later readers (including ourselves), and attempt a provisional placing of this particular event in a longer, hypothetical narrative of Christian literary history. What is offered, then, is a “case study” in the forging of orthodoxy in and as Latin Christian literature. 496 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES brose of Milan (comm. 5.1). Elsewhere I have tried to locate the Commonitorium in the “Theodosian” order of Christian books: “Peregrinus Against the Heretics: Classicism, Provinciality, and the Place of the Alien Writer in Late Roman Gaul,” in Cristianesimo e specificità regionali nel Mediterraneo latino (sec. IV–VI), XXII Incontro di studiosi dell’antichità cristiana, Roma, 6–8 maggio 1993, Studia Ephemeridis Augustinianum 46 (1994), 529–65. 2. Cf. Journal of Literature and Theology 5 (1991): 352–3. The chapters on Christian writing in Albrecht Dihle’s recent survey, Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire: From Augustus to Justinian, trans. M. Malzahn (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), advance cautiously beyond previous attempts to combine the histories of literature and Christian doctrine. The following remarks, which introduce a section on fourth- and fifth-century “Christian-theological literature,” are characteristic: “The epoch quoted here as the one in which the dogma was ultimately fixed was at the same time the Classic period in early Christian literature. Within the framework of a literary history, I cannot attempt to describe the development of Christian dogma in detail. . . . [On the other hand,] the specific phenomena in Christian literature cannot be explained without mention of basic facts concerning dogmatical and ecclesiastical history” (503, emphasis added). Dihle presents the dogmatic-ecclesiastical settlement of 381 primarily as a philosophical achievement: “In the controversies leading to the decision of 381 ad philosophical thought had once again taken hold of the content of the faith. . . . [T]he contention was that the inexplicable could be described in ontological terms, with a degree of clarity which allowed one to make a distinction between believers and nonbelievers on the basis of their agreement.
Posted on: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 01:14:31 +0000
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