The Forging of Orthodoxy in Latin Christian Literature: A Case

Study
Mark Vessey

Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 4, Number 4, Winter 1996,

pp. 495-513 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/earl.1996.0077

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v004/4.4vessey.html

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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 ex-
plicit rewriting of earlier non-biblical (“patristic”) Christian texts: by mod-
ern 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 doc-
trinal 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 princi-
ples 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 Commonito-
rium, written ca. 434 under the double impact of the Council of Ephesus
and the recently “completed” works of Augustine, contained advice on de-
termining 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 Am-
496 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

The 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 par-
ticular 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.

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 Christ-
ian 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: Rout-
ledge, 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 primar-
ily 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 de-
gree of clarity which allowed one to make a distinction between believers and non-
believers on the basis of their agreement or disagreement with the formula arrived at.
This view at the same time opened the door for further dogmatical fixations” (553, em-
phasis added). To argue as I do for a recognition of the process of “dogmatical fixation”
as a “specific phenomenon of Christian literature” per se, rather than as a set of “basic
facts” belonging to a separate though simultaneous order of reality, is no doubt to risk
breaking the “framework of literary history” within which surveys such as Dihle’s have
traditionally been written. Among theologically based approaches to the forms of Chris-
tian doctrine in this period, I have learnt most from Basil Studer, La riflessione teologica
nella chiesa imperiale (sec. IV e V), Sussidi Patristici, no. 4 (Rome: Istituto Patristico Au-
gustinianum, 1989), now largely incorporated in Storia della teologia, Vol. 1: Epoca pa-
tristica, ed. A. Di Berardino and B. Studer (Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 1993), and soon
to be available in English.
 VESSEY/FORGING OF ORTHODOXY 497

A NEW ORDER OF BOOKS

“The bishops of the Eastern Church had reached a consensus about the
Christian doctrine of God. The bishops of the Western Church could find
no compelling reason to disagree.” On this resoundingly untriumphal note
the late R. P. C. Hanson ended his account of the fourth-century Trinitarian
controversy.3 His narrative draws to a close in 382, the last rumblings of
disagreement still audible in the west. At Constantinople in the summer of
381 the eastern bishops had reaffirmed the faith of Nicaea, an edict of the
emperor Theodosius issued after their council requiring “that all churches
[be] handed over to the bishops who profess Father, Son and Holy Spirit of
a single majesty, of the same glory, of one splendour.”4 At Aquileia later in
the same year Ambrose of Milan had stage-managed a defeat of the ho-
moean—as he represented them, “Arian”—bishops Palladius and Secun-
dianus.5 A new ecclesiastical and doctrinal order was emerging. We might
call it the “Theodosian” order, after the emperor whose decree signalled an
end to the business begun by Constantine at Nicaea in 325.
In 382 a council composed mainly of Italian bishops met at Rome un-
der Bishop Damasus.6 Among its acts was an anathema on the teaching
of Apollinarius, a zealous anti-Arian who in stressing the divinity of
Christ was thought by some to have neglected an essential aspect of his
humanity. Apollinarianism had been condemned before at Rome and less
emphatically at Constantinople in 381, but Damasus and his associates
were still looking for a formula to exclude it.7 If we can trust a reminis-

3. The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy 318–381
(Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988), 823.
4. CTh 16.1.3 (“Episcopis tradi”), trans. Hanson, Search, 821.
5. See now Neil B. McLynn, Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Cap-
ital (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 124–36; Daniel H. Williams, Am-
brose of Milan and the End of the Arian-Nicene Conflicts (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1995), 154–84. I regret that the second of these studies came to hand too late for me to
use it here.
6. Charles Pietri, Roma Christiana: Recherches sur l’Église de Rome, son organisa-
tion, sa politique, son idéologie, de Miltiade à Sixte III (311–440), 2 vols., BEFAR 224
(1976), 866–72. Pietri’s painstaking account of Roman dogmatic and conciliar activity
during the pontificate of Damasus provides an indispensable background to this essay.
7. Rome: Pietri, Roma Christiana, 812–18 (condemnation of Vitalis, Apollinarian
bishop of Antioch), 833–40 (Roman council of 377, with which Pietri associates the col-
lection of dogmatic texts known as the Tomus Damasi, ascribed in the past to the coun-
cil of 382); Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, Vol. 1: From the Apostolic
Age to Chalcedon, trans. J. Bowden, 2nd edn. (London & Oxford: Mowbrays, 1975),
350–51. Constantinople: Adolf Martin Ritter, Das Konzil von Konstantinopel und sein
Symbol, Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte, Bd. 15 (Göttingen: Van-
498 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

cence of a decade and a half later, this search was not without its special
hazards.
When discussions were being held on the matter of reconciling the followers of
Apollinarius [our informant writes], Bishop Damasus commissioned a certain
friend of his, a presbyter and an extremely eloquent man who regularly per-
formed such duties for him, to draw up a statement of the church’s faith (edi-
tionem ecclesiasticae fidei . . . conscribendam mandauit) which those who
wished to be reconciled would have to subscribe. In devising a form of words
for the incarnation of our Lord, this man found it necessary to use the phrase
homo dominicus. The Apollinarians took offense at the expression and began
to attack it as a novelty. The deviser set about defending himself, answering
their objections from the authority of the ancient writings of catholic men
(ex auctoritate ueterum scriptorum catholicorum uirorum). Now it happened
that to one of those who were complaining of the novelty of the expression he
showed the phrase in question occurring in a work by Bishop Athanasius (in
libello Athanasii episcopi). Seemingly persuaded, the person who received this
proof asked to be given the book (codicem), so that he might satisfy others
who were ignorantly objecting. Once in possession of the book, he contrived
an unheard-of type of fraud. He first erased the passage where the expression
appeared, then rewrote the very words he had erased. The book was returned
and accepted without inspection. Controversy about the phrase began again;
the book was brought out for the purpose of proof; the phrase in question was
found—written over an erasure. Because the erasure was taken to be a sign of
corruption and falsehood, the man who produced the manuscript in this state
was discredited (fides proferenti talem codicem derogatur).8

True or not—and we shall have to consider its veracity in due course—the

anecdote points to two salient features of “Theodosian” theological cul-
ture. In the first place, after more than fifty years of wrangling over a form
of words for the relations between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, it was now
widely accepted that the essence of the Christian faith could be captured in

denhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965), 120–3. McLynn, Ambrose, 143–4, argues attractively
that Ambrose seized upon the issue of Apollinarianism in order to promote the idea of
a general council at Rome. On this account, as on Pietri’s, the dogmatic pretensions of
the Roman council derive in part from the resistance of the western bishops to the fi-
nality claimed by Theodosius for the eastern settlement of 381–2. In the event, the Ro-
man church’s anti-Apollinarian formula of 382 was drafted by an individual whose in-
terests were aligned with a party adversely affected by the decrees of Theodosius’
“coalition of [eastern] bishops” (McLynn, Ambrose, 141), namely the Paulinians of An-
tioch—see below.
8. Full Latin text and reference below, n. 45. The Latin continues: “Sed quoniam—
ut iterum eadem dicam—uiuenti haec facta sunt ac uigenti, continuo egit omnia ut fraus
commissi sceleris nudaretur, et nequitiae macula non innocenti uiro, qui nihil tale
gesserat, adhaereret, sed in auctorem facti atque in uberiorem eius infamiam redun-
daret.”
 VESSEY/FORGING OF ORTHODOXY 499

a short declaratory statement or creed, supplemented where necessary with

exclusionary clauses or anathemas.9 As a western contemporary of Athana-
sius had remarked, “Necessity introduced the custom of expounding the
faith and of subscribing that which was expounded.”10 In the words of the
writer quoted above, the faith of the church (fides ecclesiastica) could be
written out (conscripta) and published (edita). Secondly, the process of re-
fining a Christian doctrine of God having precipitated an extensive body
of writing by men retrospectively acclaimed as “catholic” writers, their
texts—with others falsely attributed to them—now offered themselves as
a basis for further elaborations de fide. Seeking to discountenance a doc-
trine from beyond the mental horizon of the Fathers of Nicaea, a dogma-
tist of 382 such as Bishop Damasus’ secretary would turn to the works of
writers like Athanasius of Alexandria whose impeccably Nicene creden-
tials served as a guarantee of their orthodoxy on supra-Nicene topics.
The practice of explicit argument ex auctoritate ueterum scriptorum
catholicorum uirorum, “from the ancient [or indeed not so ancient] writ-
ings of [supposedly] catholic men,” seems not to have become widespread
until after the fourth-century search for the Christian doctrine of God had
been brought to a conclusion, although many of the bibliographic re-
sources on which it drew had accumulated before that time. Throughout
the trinitarian controversy, as Hanson observes, “all sides, Arians as well
as pro-Nicenes, appealed to the tradition of the Fathers, and recognised
that they must as far as possible teach doctrine . . . in consistency with
what had been taught in the past.”11 Such appeals to tradition, however,
rarely if ever took the form of textually verifiable references to individual
teachers. When theologians of Athanasius’ or Hilary’s time clashed over
the textual warrant for a disputed doctrine, their arguments were usually
about Holy Scripture, not the works of earlier Christian teachers outside
the biblical canon. Only with the “Theodosian” imposition of a supposed
“Nicene” orthodoxy which the creed and anathemas of 325 were by then
inadequate to represent, did a new generation of theologians—not all
strictly orthodox by later standards—begin to make a habit of arguing for-
mally from what we should now call “patristic” texts. This turn of events,
which historians of dogma tend to treat as inevitable and historians of lit-
erature to ignore, amounted to little less than a revolution in Christian lit-

9. Cf. R. P. C. Hanson, “Dogma and Formula in the Fathers,” SP 13.2 (1975),

169–84; repr. in his Studies in Christian Antiquity (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1985),
298–318.
10. Hilary of Poitiers, syn. 63 (PL 10.523C): “[N]ecessitas consuetudinem intulit, ex-
poni fides, et expositis subscribi.”
11. Search, 872.
500 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

erary practice. If the conciliar and imperial enactments of 380–82 ushered

in a new ecclesiastico-doctrinal order, they also heralded a new order of
books.12

FIDES PROFERENTIS CODICEM

Damasus’ secretary presumably did not expect to argue a case. Let us grant
that his initial wielding of the phrase homo dominicus was founded on
knowledge of one or more prior texts including (?) the one he would later
adduce.13 We are given no reason to think that he would have identified an
“authority” for it, had he not been challenged on the point. If we define pa-
tristic citation as the insertion into a new discursive context of text explic-
itly attributed to one of the Fathers (a procedure which is commonplace in
Greek and Latin dogmatic writing after 430 but exceedingly rare, or at least
poorly attested in the extant literature, before 400), then his intended use
of the libellus Athanasii episcopi—if that was indeed among his “sources”—
would not count as citation in this sense.14 The document he was drafting

12. I derive the concept of an “order of books” from Roger Chartier, The Order of
Books, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), who
alludes in turn to Michel Foucault’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, published
as L’ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). Chartier aims to complicate the con-
temporary synthesis of post-structuralist hermeneutics and Foucauldian discourse-
theory by insisting, after bibliographers like D. F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann, on
the importance of social and material factors in literary production and reception. His
ordre du livre comprehends the social arrangements that control the production of tex-
tual meaning in a given literate milieu and “the effects of meaning that material forms
produce” (ix). Although he seems to me to exaggerate the distinctiveness of the early
modern phase in the western “relationship with texts” and neglects classical and pa-
tristic literary technologies altogether, Chartier’s emphasis on the materiality of reading
and writing practices should serve as a corrective to the unhistorical and anti-biblio-
logical bias of some recent post-structuralist work on late antique and early medieval
Latin “textuality.”
13. Otherwise we might suppose that he coined the term suo Marte and only later set
about “authenticating” it. The currency of homo dominicus and its Greek equivalent in
the dogmatic literature of the later fourth century (n. 22 below) make this, on balance,
a less probable alternative.
14. “Les docteurs du IVe siècle, en dotant l’Eglise d’une riche bibliothèque théo-
logique ont rendu possible l’emploi intensif de l’argument patristique et la composition
d’amples florilèges dogmatiques,” writes Marcel Richard of the Cyrillian reaction to
Nestorius, observing, however, that “[j]usqu’à la fin du IVe siècle ce procédé d’argu-
mentation était resté chose tout à fait exceptionelle” (emphasis added). See his article,
“Les florilèges diphysites du Ve et du VIe siècle,” in Das Konzil von Chalkedon:
Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. A. Grillmeier and H. Bacht, 3 vols. (Würzburg: Echter-
Verlag, 1951–54), 1:721–48 (here 721–2), repr. in Opera minora, 3 vols. (Turnhout:
Brepols, 1976–77), vol. 1, no. 3; Martin Tetz, “Zum Streit zwischen Orthodoxie und
 VESSEY/FORGING OF ORTHODOXY 501

was a credal formula of some kind, formally if not substantively an ances-

tor of the one that would later go by the title of Fides sancti Athanasii, but
as yet without any attribution of its own. In normal circumstances, its claim
to express “the faith of the church” would not have depended upon any
explicit, legible appeal to individual named authorities. Unsignalled bor-
rowing or textual dependence of this kind is characteristic of Christian dog-
matic writing of the later fourth century, both in the abbreviated genre of
the conciliar or personal creed and in more extended literary forms. (An-
other pertinent example ca. 382 would be the treatise De incarnatione of
Ambrose of Milan, bedecked with Athanasian and Basilian plumage but
devoid of citations.15) The dogmatic professions and dissertations surviv-
ing from the final stages of the Arian controversy are saturated with other
men’s texts, but it is typically the job of the modern Quellenforscher to sup-
ply notes of provenance.
What principles could underlie the textual regime of late fourth-century
Christian writers in such cases? Considered as a device of style or rhetori-
cal elocutio, the practice of silent assimilation accords with classical pre-
cepts encouraging the orator to turn inherited texts to his own use without
advertising his assiduity as a reader.16 Contrariwise, as a mode of argument
in (quasi-)judicial discourse it could be said to squander the persuasive

Häresie an der Wende des 4. zum 5. Jahrhundert: Anfänge des expliziten Väterbe-
weises,” Evangelische Theologie 21 (1961): 354–68; Henry Chadwick, art. “Flori-
legium,” RAC 7 (1966), 1156f.; Studer, Riflessione (n. 2. above), 187–90. Some of our
earliest evidence for the use of “patristic” testimonia in Latin dogmatic writing comes
from the “Arian” Fragmenta theologica preserved in a Bobbio palimpsest, edited most
recently by R. Gryson who dates them “after 380” (CCL 87:229–31 [citations of Hi-
lary, Phoebadius, Ambrose, all controverted], 235 [positive citations of Athanasius of
Anazarbus and Theognis of Nicaea]). See also the essay by Neil B. McLynn in the pre-
sent collection.
15. See the remarks of O. Faller in CSEL 79 (1964), 48*–49*; McLynn, Ambrose,
148–9.
16. E.g., Quintilian, inst. orat. 10.1.19 (reading and imitation): “Lectio libera est . . .
repetere saepius licet, siue dubites, siue memoriae penitus adfigere uelis. Repetamus
autem et tractemus, et ut cibos mansos ac prope liquefactos demittimus, quo facilius di-
gerantur, ita lectio non cruda sed multa iteratione mollita et uelut confecta memoriae
imitationique tradatur.” Cf. Seneca, ep. ad Lucil. 84.3f. (The reader-writer as a bee mak-
ing honey with nectar from more than one flower, and other similes of multiple assimi-
lation), esp. 5–8: “nos quoque apes debemus imitari et quaecumque ex diuersa lectione
congessimus separare (melius enim distincta seruantur), deinde adhibita ingenii nostri
cura et facultate in unum saporem uaria illa libamenta confundere, ut etiam si apparuerit
unde sumptum sit, aliud tamen esse quam unde sumptum est appareat. . . . Hoc faciat
animus noster: omnia quibus est adiutus abscondat, ipsum tantum ostendat quod ef-
fecit.” The Senecan passage is taken over entire, without acknowledgment, by Macro-
bius, sat. 1, praef. 5–8.
502 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

force of a clear and circumstantial presentation of prior judgments in com-

parable cases, or of a careful evaluation of relevant testimony, both of
which were traditionally considered under the heading of “inartificial
proofs” among the resources of oratorical inuentio.17 In due course, we
must assume, the demands of inuentio in Christian forensic oratory of the
conciliar-controversial type began to preponderate over the scruples of a
classicizing elocutio. From then on, ecclesiastical orator-writers sum-
moned their predecessors by name and quoted them verbatim. Exactly how
and why this change occurred are important and difficult questions of
Christian literary history. One reason for lingering over the story of Dama-
sus’ assistant and the Apollinarians at Rome is that it (re)creates a scene in
which implicit reliance on prior patristic texts in dogmatic drafting is made
to disclose itself in the form of explicit citation in a forensic setting. By ac-
cident perhaps, instructively in any case, the secretary’s “bringing out” a
codex with a work attributed to Athanasius provides us with a dramatic
image of an otherwise virtually invisible transition from one textual regime
to another.
Patristic retractation in its more explicit modes reconfigures the orator’s
traditional duty of invention (inuentio) as a procedure for discovering ear-
lier statements of the faith in written texts. Simultaneously, it shifts one of
the burdens of memory (memoria) from the mind of the individual reader
to the manuscript repository. We may imagine that Damasus’ secretary, on
being asked to compose a formula that would exclude the “errors” of Apol-
linarius, first surveyed whatever potentially useful documents were to hand
in the Roman episcopal archive (chartarium) or his personal collections.
Later, when called upon to justify his own use of the term homo domini-
cus, he had only to reenact publicly the process by which he himself had
come upon it: codex profertur, inuenitur sermo (“the book was brought

17. On the handling of prior judgments (iudicata, praeiudicia) in judicial discourse,

see, e.g., rhet. ad Her. 2.13.20: “Ergo, quia possunt res simili de causa dissimiliter iudi-
catae proferri, cum id usu uenerit, iudicem cum iudice, tempus cum tempore, numerum
cum numero iudiciorum conferemus”; ibid. 2.29.46; Quintilian, inst. orat. 5.2. The ex-
amination of witnesses (testes, testimonia) is discussed at length by Quintilian, inst. orat.
5.7; note also ibid. 5.5 (exposing forged documents). The author of the Ad Herennium
gives a checklist of topics for and against the character of witnesses which is clearly rel-
evant to later habits of patristic argumentation: “A testibus dicemus secundum auc-
toritatem et vitam testium et constantiam testimoniorum. Contra testes: secundum vi-
tae turpitudinem, testimoniorum inconstantiam,” etc. (2.6.9). Full reference to the
ancient literature on these methods of proof is provided by Josef Martin, Antik Rhetorik:
Technik und Methode, Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft, Bd. II.3 (Munich: C. H.
Beck, 1974), 97–100.
 VESSEY/FORGING OF ORTHODOXY 503

out, the phrase found”). What had formerly been an archival discovery
should then have been repeated as a forensic one (ad probationem).
Athanasius, who as a young deacon had attended the Council of Nicaea,
who as bishop had more than once risked martyrdom to uphold its teach-
ing, and who had been dead for a decade, would bear witness through his
writings to the reality of the Word made flesh.18
The point of the story as told is evidently to illustrate the fraud commit-
ted by a cunning Apollinarian heretic, the effect of which was to undermine
the credit of the pope’s secretary as conveyor of a suspect document (fides
proferenti talem codicem derogatur) and so to cast doubt on his probity as
draftsman of “the faith of the church.”19 The moral is easily drawn. In the
unwritten handbook of Theodosian patristic retractation, the part dealing
with the writer’s duty of discovery should have contained a section devoted
to archival security, beginning with an instruction never to lend theologi-
cal books. Yet in a society in which the usual way of adding to one’s library
was by borrowing an exemplar and having it copied, and where favors in
this kind were frequently exchanged, such a rule would be almost impos-
sible to keep.20 We might wonder how secure the Roman doctrinal archive
had been before the Apollinarian pseudo-fraudster went to work. What
was that libellus Athanasii? Was it really by Athanasius?21 Where had it

18. The rise of the textualized “Athanasius” as figure and guarantor of Nicene or-
thodoxy is the subject of a new study of Patrick T. R. Gray (in preparation). See already
his “‘The Select Fathers’: Canonizing the Patristic Past,” SP 23 (1989): 21-36.
19. For fides in the regular classical sense of credit imputed either to the pleader in a
legal case or to a witness or piece of evidence, see TLL 6, 679, ll. 50–70; 684, ll. 50–72.
The expression derogare (or abrogare) fidem alicui (alicui rei), i.e., to “take away credit
from a person or thing,” is common from Cicero onwards. Fides and auctoritas are fre-
quently associated in this context.
20. Bibliological research in the field of late antiquity has largely failed to take ac-
count of the processes of dogmatic drafting and debate after Nicaea. On the traffic in
books in general, see Guglielmo Cavallo, “Libro e pubblico alla fine del mondo antico,”
in Libri, editori e pubblico nel mondo antico, ed. G. Cavallo (Rome: Laterza, 1977),
83–132, and, in the Latin sphere, the more specialized studies of Evaristo Arns, La
technique du livre d’après saint Jérôme (Paris: De Boccard, 1953) and Jürgen Scheele,
“Buch und Bibliothek bei Augustinus,” Bibliothek und Wissenschaft 12 (1978):
14–114. Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early
Christian Texts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), usefully consolidates our
knowledge for this period, without addressing the issues with which I am here
concerned.
21. Almost certainly not, according to A. Grillmeier, “ÔOkuriako;~ a[nqrwpo~: Eine
Studie zu einer christologischen Bezeichnung der Väterzeit,” Traditio 33 (1977): 1–63
at 33–8. (An abbreviated version of this article was published as “Jesus Christ, the Kyr-
iakos Anthropos,” ThS 38 [1977]: 275–93).
504 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

come from?22 Did it contain a single complete work, several complete

works, or excerpts from one or more separate works?23 Was it in Greek,
as any work by the Alexandrian confessor must once have been, or, as our
source would lead us to think, in Latin?24
Up to this point we have taken our informant’s account of proceedings
in 382 at face value. If we call its veracity into question, allowing that as
orthodox history it may put an anti-heretical spin on events open to more
than one interpretation, the uncertainties are multiplied. Another well in-
formed if scarcely impartial contemporary writer affirms that the Greek
equivalent of homo dominicus was customarily used by Apollinarians.25
Why then should they have contested the phrase in 382? If in fact they did

22. The Greek equivalent of homo dominicus appears in several Athanasian pseud-
epigrapha, including the Sermo maior de fide or Epistula ad Antiochenos (CPG 2803,
following Martin Tetz’s attribution to Marcellus of Ancyra). This work may have been
part of a store of Athanasian and pseudo-Athanasian material exploited in the late 370s
by an anti-Apollinarian faction at Antioch under Bishop Paulinus. For evidence of an
“Eustathian library”: of Nicene texts at Antioch in this period, first postulated by Mar-
cel Richard, see Martin Tetz, “Zur Theologie des Markell von Ankyra I,” ZKG 75
(1964): 231–43, and Charles Kannengiesser, Athanase d’Alexandrie: Sur l’Incarnation
du Verbe, SC 199 (Paris: Cerf, 1973), 43–8 (repeating the substance of a paper given in
1963). Such a provenance for the document in our story would conveniently fit the ca-
reer of Damasus’ assistant (see below). Given the regular contact between Rome and the
Paulinian church at Antioch since the mid-370s, however, the libellus may already have
been in the papal collection at the time of his arrival.
23. There is nothing in our source to indicate that the text of the libellus Athanasii
was coextensive with the book in which it appeared. If the diminutive has any force, it
is more likely that the document cited was part of a compilation of the kind facilitated
by the “new” technology of the codex. Cf. Tetz, “Zur Theologie,” 239: “Freilich muß
man noch offenlassen, ob die einzelnen schon früh bezeugten [sc. athanasianischen]
Schriften nur erst in einer Bibliothek gesammelt oder bereits als Sammlung in einem
Codex erfaßt waren” (emphasis added).
24. Tetz, “Zur Theologie,” 241 n. 120, suggests that the text in question may have
been the pseudo-Athanasian Professio arriana et confessio catholica (ed. M. Simonetti,
Pseudo-athanasii De Trinitate libri X–XII [Bononiae: Capelli, 1956]), which answers
the description of a libellus. Here we find (61.12–18): “Tenendum itaque et confiten-
dum est hoc ueraciter, quod homo creuerit ac profecerit in Deum, hoc est in Dei filium.
Euangelista ait quia qui receperunt eum, dedit eis potestatem filios Dei fieri [John 1:12].
Et quomodo dominicus homo et seruilis forma in Deum proficit? Deus autem uerbum,
uirtus et sapientia Patris semper fuit perfectus et aequalis genitori in substantia diuini-
tatis. . . .” Cf. Grillmeier, “oJ kuriako;~ a[nqrwpo~,” 34. It is not my purpose in this paper
either to deal with this problem of provenance or to enter on the theological issues raised
by the former kyriakos anthropos/homo dominicus.
25. Greg. Naz., ep. 101 (To the presbyter Cledonius against Apollinarius): “mh; ajpatav-
tfsan oiJ a[nqrwpoi, mhde; ajpatavsqwsan, a[nqrwpon a[noun decovmenai to;n kuriako;n, wJ~ auj-
toi; levgousi . . .” (PG 37.117B). In Grillmeier’s opinion, however, “[f]ür die Apollinar-
isten ist [kyriakòs ánthropos] eine contradictio in adiecto, ein Widerspruch in sich”(“ Ôo
kuriako;~ a[nqrwpo~,” 60).
 VESSEY/FORGING OF ORTHODOXY 505

not, what gave rise to the story of mysterious erasure and reinscription?
The one irreducible datum in our narrative is the exhibition of a document,
ascribed to Athanasius, in which the phrase homo dominicus or its Greek
equivalent was written over an erasure. The narrator would have us believe
that the reading under erasure was identical to the one over it, but he could
not have known that by autopsy. He tells us that the codex was first in the
possession of the orthodox party, that it changed hands twice, and that it
was finally produced in open court where it became the subject of contro-
versy. Since, however, his version of the events leading up to the moment
of forensic probatio is patently designed to vindicate the fides of the pope’s
secretary, we are entitled to consider what other versions could have been
offered at the time. We might also ask—with better hope of satisfying our
curiosity—what made the story in this form worth telling a decade and a
half later. What was the point of commemorating a fraud which had failed
and which, had it succeeded, would have left the textual record of Christ-
ian teaching “literally” unaltered? It is time to take a broader view of the
processes of Christian doctrinal transmission.

HERESY AND CHRISTIAN AUTHORSHIP

“Orthodox” anxiety about various kinds of “heretical” tampering with

texts (corruption, interpolation, misattribution, etc.) is attested long before
the Theodosian Age, and has been well documented in modern scholar-
ship.26 The author of the Apocalypse pronounces the first and greatest
anathema (Rev 22.18–19). Even before the unity that would later be called
the canon of scripture had been definitively established, a similar concern
for textual purity and integrity was manifesting itself in writings with no
pretensions to biblical status. In the late second century, Irenaeus exhorts
the reader of his work on The Ogdoad, “If you should transcribe this little

26. Wolfgang Speyer, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Al-
tertum: Ein Versuch ihrer Deutung, Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft, Bd. I.2 (Mu-
nich: C. H. Beck, 1971), 171–303; Norbert Brox, Falsche Verfasserangaben: Zur Erk-
lärung der früchristlichen Pseudepigraphie, Stuttgarter Bibelstudien, Bd. 79 (Stuttgart:
KBW, 1975). See now also Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), impressively reasserting the interrelated-
ness of issues of interpretation and textual transmission. Ehrman would apply the term
“corruption” in an ironic sense wherever texts have been altered “to make them ‘say’
what they were already known to ‘mean’” (276, cf. 29–31). My own use of the term
“forging” (after Robert M. Grant, cited below n. 29) is similarly ironic, but provisional.
In order to give due weight to the “scribal” processes at work in early Christian litera-
ture, we should perhaps change these implicitly pejorative terms for a more positive vo-
cabulary of “scriptural” poetics.
506 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

book, I adjure you by the Lord Jesus Christ and by His glorious advent,
when He comes to judge the living and the dead, to compare your tran-
script and correct it carefully by this copy, from which you have made your
transcript. This adjuration likewise you must transcribe and include in
your copy.” By a nice irony, these are the only words of that work to
survive, transcribed out of context by Eusebius of Caesarea as “a splendid
example of meticulous accuracy.”27 Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History is
among other things an historical essay in the definition of the biblical canon
and of the corpus of works left by others who (as the preface announces)
“in each generation [were] ambassadors in writing of the divine word.”28
Robert M. Grant has recently offered a revised account of the efforts of
early Christian readers to ensure that the literary works on which they re-
lied for their understanding of the faith were properly attributed and tex-
tually correct. Like other scholars before him, Grant connects many of
these Christian initiatives with the methods of secular literary criticism,
particularly those associated with the Alexandrian Museum. The main
novelty of his study is its emphasis on the pioneering work done in that
kind of criticism by men condemned as heretics by the early church,
notably the Gnostics Marcion, Ptolemaus and Apelles. His final chapter,
“The Orthodox Counter-Attack,” follows the course of Catholic criticism,
mainly as it was applied to the biblical text, through the writings of Tatian,
Theophilus of Antioch, Irenaeus, Clement, Origen, Julius Africanus and
Dionysius of Alexandria, to Eusebius of Caesarea. The last few pages con-
tain a section on “Jerome and Authorship.” Grant concludes: “We have
seen that heretics were the first to raise critical questions, but the orthodox
rapidly forged ahead (so to speak) into the Greco-Roman world of lower
and higher criticism. Above all others Origen was responsible for this
move, but later giants included such antagonists as Eusebius, Rufinus, and
Jerome.”29
For Grant, a classicist and historian of early Christianity, Jerome the
critic is a skillful continuer of the work of Origen and Eusebius. Writing
from another perspective, a contemporary philosopher and occasional lit-
erary theorist has raised the stakes. “In literary criticism,” declared Michel
Foucault in an essay published in English in the late 1970s, “the traditional
methods for defining an author—or, rather, for determining the configura-

27. Ecclesiastical History, 5.20, trans. G. A. Williamson, 2nd. edn. revised by An-
drew Louth (London: Penguin, 1989).
28. Ecclesistical History 1.1; Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament:
Its Origin, Development, and Significance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 201–7.
29. Robert M. Grant, Heresy and Criticism: The Search for Authenticity in Early
Christian Literature (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993), 112.
 VESSEY/FORGING OF ORTHODOXY 507

tion of the author from existing texts—derive in large part from those used
in Christian tradition to authenticate (or to reject) the particular texts in its
possession. Modern criticism, in its desire to ‘recover’ the author from a
work, employs devices strongly reminiscent of Christian exegesis when it
wished to prove the value of a text by ascertaining the holiness of its au-
thor.”30 Foucault says no more about the correlation of sanctity and au-
thenticity in early Christian literary criticism, perhaps because it was fa-
miliar enough to him and others brought up in Roman Catholicism to be
taken for granted. Instead, he launches into a discussion of the “Principles
of Textual Criticism Known to Saint Jerome.”31
In De Viris Illustribus, Saint Jerome maintains that homonymy is not proof of
the common authorship of several works, since many individuals could have

30. “What Is an Author?” in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Prac-

tice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. with an intro. by Donald F. Bouchard, trans.
Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977),
113–38 at 127 (emphasis added). For a concise statement of the relations between this
essay (which had been published in French in 1969) and Foucault’s other projects of the
time, see Simon During, Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing (Lon-
don and New York: Routledge, 1992), 120–25. Foucault subsequently revised the arti-
cle for a translation published in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist
Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 141–60. In
a chapter entitled “Figures of the Author” in The Order of Books (n. 12 above), Roger
Chartier makes several corrections to Foucault’s schematic history of the “author-
function” but misses the significance of the early Christian contribution. A similar mod-
ernocentrism pervades the essays in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appro-
priation in Law and Literature, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1994). I have tried to take a longer view in “Erasmus’ Jerome:
The Publishing of a Christian Author,” Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 14
(1994): 62–99. The interest of Foucault’s remarks on the “author-function” for mod-
ern patristic scholarship has already been noted by Frederick W. Norris, “Black Marks
on the Communities’ Manuscripts,” 1994 NAPS Presidential Address, JECS 2 (1994):
443–66 at 459–61.
31. Although a footnote in the 1977 version of the essay refers to Arns, Technique
(n. 20 above), Foucault’s source is in fact an article with this title by K. K. Hulley in Har-
vard Studies in Classical Philology 55 (1944): 87–109 at 105–109 (“Various Points Per-
tinent to Questions of Authorship”). His remarks on the problem of homonymy are a
scrambled version of Hulley’s paragraph on uir. 9; 18 (John the Evangelist and John the
Presbyter). His four principles of author-construction inaccurately summarize the next
four paragraphs in the order 1, 3, 4, 2. Contrary to the impression given by his single
reference to the De uiris illustribus, the evidence for those principles is drawn from a
range of works, notably the preface to Jerome’s Commentary on Philemon. In fact, the
only principle of authenticity used with any regularity in Jerome’s catalogue of Christ-
ian writers is that of consistency of style (e.g., uir. 1, 5, 15, 25, 58, the first three appli-
cations deriving directly from Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History). Jerome’s practice in
these matters is anything but systematic. See also Arns, Technique, 173–9; Speyer, Lit-
erarische Fälschung, 181–6; Grant, Heresy and Criticism, 108–9.
508 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

the same name or someone could have perversely appropriated another’s

name. The name, as an individual mark, is not sufficient as it relates to a tex-
tual tradition. How, then, can several texts be attributed to an individual au-
thor? What norms, related to the function of the author, will disclose the in-
volvement of several authors? According to Saint Jerome, there are four
criteria: the texts that must be eliminated from the list of works attributed to a
single author are those inferior to others (thus, the author is defined as a stan-
dard level of quality); those whose ideas conflict with the doctrine expressed in
the others (here the author is defined as a certain field of conceptual or theoret-
ical coherence); those written in a different style and containing words and
phrases not ordinarily found in the other works (the author is seen as a stylistic
uniformity); and those referring to events or historical figures subsequent to
the death of the author (the author is thus a definite historical figure in which a
series of events converge). Although modern criticism does not appear to have
these same suspicions concerning authentication, its strategies for defining the
author present striking similarities.32 . . . Thus, even while Saint Jerome’s four
principles of authenticity might seem largely inadequate to modern critics,
they, nevertheless, define the critical modalities now used to display the func-
tion of the author.
(127–9)

Foucault almost certainly overestimates the singularity, in this respect,

of Jerome’s catalogue of “Famous Men.” The scattered remarks in that
work on problems of attribution contain little if anything that would have
struck an Alexandrian critic of an earlier age as methodologically new and
nothing for which precedent cannot be found in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical
History. The De uiris illustribus is not a particularly rigorous instance of
the efforts of Christians “to authenticate the . . . texts in [their] posses-
sion.” Indeed, Jerome seems more intent on possessing than authenticat-
ing. His criteria for inclusion are elastic. Josephus finds a place among the
ecclesiastici scriptores, as does the philosopher Seneca (saepe noster) on the
strength of a spurious correspondence with Saint Paul. So too do a con-
siderable number of Christian writers whose theological opinions could no
longer pass for catholic or orthodox in the “fourteenth year of the Emperor
Theodosius” (uir. 135). A few years later Augustine would complain of this
inconvenience and ask Jerome to add an heresiological appendix or
gloss.33 (By then, as we shall see, the scholar of Bethlehem had been forced

32. In the revised (1979) version Foucault is less reserved: “Modern literary criticism,
even when—as is now customary—it is not concerned with questions of authentica-
tion—still defines the author the same way . . .” (151).
33. Ep. 40.6.9, written ca. 397–399. The letter miscarried and circulated at Rome.
In his ep. 102 (402), Jerome relates that a copy of a letter purportedly by Augustine and
written in his style had reached him in Bethlehem, and asks “si tua est epistula, aperte
scribe uel mitte exemplaria ueriora.” After receiving an authenticated copy, he replied
 VESSEY/FORGING OF ORTHODOXY 509

to take a more circumspect view of the criteria for determining Christian

authorship.)
The Hieronymian De uiris illustribus is neither the acme of early Chris-
tian literary-critical method nor the reflection of any foundational consen-
sus. To concede this, however, is not automatically to dispense with Fou-
cault’s inspired misreading of his (secondary) sources. On the contrary, as
we replace the textual imbroglio of 382 in the context of its literary narra-
tion, we may begin to see how Foucault’s guesswork and Grant’s scholar-
ship both contribute to a delineation of the “Theodosian” order of Chris-
tian books.

OBELOS AND ANATHEMA

As some of you have known all along, the hapless victim of the Apollinar-
ian fraud in our story was none other than Jerome. In one of his letters he
speaks of a time past when he “assisted Damasus, bishop of Rome, with
ecclesiastical documents and drafted replies to the inquiries of eastern and
western synods.”34 In 382 Jerome was newly returned to Rome after
spending nearly a decade in the east, mainly at Antioch and Constantino-
ple. In the aftermath of the previous year’s synod he had journeyed from
the eastern capital in the company of Paulinus, would-be Nicene bishop of
Antioch, and Epiphanius of Salamis, the heaviest hammer of heretics of the
Theodosian Age. The two bishops had been invited to a council in Rome.35
Jerome’s exact purposes are obscure. Almost all our evidence for his activ-
ity in that city between 382 and 385 comes from his own writings and is
therefore subject to caution.36 As one well acquainted with the theological

to most of the other points raised in it but passed over Augustine’s request for guidance
on the heretical errors of certain of the uiri illustres. For the context, see Ralph Hen-
nings, Der Briefwechsel zwischen Augustinus und Hieronymus und ihr Streit um den
Kanon des Alten Testaments und die Auslegung von Gal. 2.11–14, Supplements to Vig-
iliae Christianae, vol. 21 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), 34ff.
34. Ep. 123.9.1 (CSEL 56.82): “Ante annos plurimos, cum in chartis ecclesiasticis
iuuarem Damasum, Romanae urbis episcopum, et orientis atque occidentis synodicis
consultationibus responderem. . . .” The letter was written ca. 409.
35. Above, nn. 6–7. The Roman council duly excommunicated Paulinus’ rival in An-
tioch, Bishop Flavianus.
36. Stefan Rebenich, Hieronymus und sein Kreis: Prosopographische und
sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchungen, Historia Einzelschriften, Bd. 72 (Stuttgart: Franz
Steiner, 1992), 141–53, offers a fresh assessment. The involvement of Jerome’s friend
and patron Evagrius of Antioch in the proceedings at Aquileia in 381 and their sequel
provides an important personal link: Rebenich, Hieronymus, 73f., 142, now supple-
mented by his article “Hieronymus und Evagrius von Antiochia,” SP 28 (1993): 75–80;
McLynn, Ambrose, 140–1.
510 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

literature emanating from such important centers as Antioch and Alexan-

dria, he was certainly fit for employment in the papal chancellery. But this
was not to be his only theater. Within a short time he was making a name
for himself as a writer on the bible. In the East he had come upon some of
the works of Origen; at Rome he presented himself to western readers as a
Latin Origen who would deliver biblical commentary such as they had
never had. It was a masterly piece of freelancing.37 Even after he was com-
pelled to quit the Eternal City in 385, Jerome’s Origenian literary persona
kept its hold over a Latin-reading Christian public that would henceforth
obtain his works through intermediaries at Rome or else send for them to
Bethlehem.
Rounding off his catalogue of “Famous Men” in 392/3 with a generous
notice on himself, Jerome must have felt (not without reason) that his niche
in the pantheon of Christian letters was secure. And so it should have been,
without further exertion on his part, but for the anti-heretical charisma of
his former fellow-traveler, Bishop Epiphanius. The wearisome details of
Epiphanius’ campaign against the alleged theological errors of Origen,
launched at this very moment (393), will not detain us here. All we need
recall is that Jerome adopted the bishop’s view of the matter, violently con-
demning the faults in doctrine of his master in scriptural exegesis and
pursuing anyone less outspokenly anti-Origenist than himself with a vitu-
perativeness remarkable even by his own high standards.38 He did not,
however, abandon Origen entirely, protesting that the scholar and spiritual
guide could be saved even if the speculative theologian were damned. Nor
did he discard his own Origenian persona as a Christian author.
Jerome demanded the right to continue reading Origen, critically and se-
lectively, as (he claimed) he had always read him in the past. Was not he of
all people the one best equipped for such a task of literary discernment,
who had followed—nay, surpassed—Origen in critical scrutiny of the
received text of Scripture? One of his letters written at Rome in the
380s echoes Tertullian’s famous question, “What has Athens to do with
Jerusalem?”39 Jerome had blazed a trail from one place to the other, via
Alexandria. In the best tradition of the Alexandrian Museum, he had com-

37. “Jerome’s Origen: The Making of a Christian Literary Persona,” SP 28 (1993):

135–45.
38. The shifts in Jerome’s stance on Origen during the 390s and afterwards are ex-
pertly plotted by Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Con-
struction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992),
121–51.
39. Ep. 22.29.7, recalling praescr. 7.9.
 VESSEY/FORGING OF ORTHODOXY 511

bined textual criticism with the practice of poetry,40 in his case a new kind
of Christian poetry-as-art-of-scripture, an ars tractandarum scripturarum
carefully constructed on the model of the Horatian ars poetica, indeed with
phrases borrowed from Horace and other Latin poets.41 With a scorn like
Horace’s for Augustan poetasters he had driven most other would-be Latin
biblicists of his day from the field. And was he, the Christian poet-critic par
excellence of the Theodosian Age, to be denied the liberty of bracketing
certain passages of Origen that were inconsistent with the orthodox faith?
“Bracketing” is a modern expression. What Jerome would do was “dag-
ger” or obelize, that is—following the practice of Hellenistic critics of
Homer—place an obelos or short horizontal stroke in the margin to the left
of the spurious verse or passage.42 Only now the passage would be judged
spurious with respect to an imagined textual corpus of orthodoxy, rather
than (as in Homeric criticism) with respect to the corpus of an individual
author’s work. Censoria virgula, the critic’s wand, is the Latin phrase trans-
lating the Greek obelos that Jerome uses most often in connection with the
theological “editing” of Origen.43
The impact on Christian literature of this reconceptualization of the
obelos-function was potentially very great. Applied to a corpus of texts
such as that theoretically constituted by the catalogue of “Famous Men”
it could have yielded an orthodox textual organon of impressive dimen-
sions. (Perhaps that was what Augustine had in mind when he asked
Jerome to add an heresiological apparatus to his work.) Of course there is
no reason to think that Jerome ever meant to undertake an “edition” of
Origen’s writings in accordance with Epiphanius’ anathemas. He proba-
bly hoped that rhetorical dagger-rattling would be enough to dispel any lin-
gering doubts about his probity as a reader of suspected texts. He reckoned,
however, without the venturesomeness of his erstwhile friend Rufinus of
Aquileia, who in 397 issued an alternative statement of the critic’s role with
regard to texts of Origen. Enlarging on hints provided by the early fourth-
century Apology for Origen by Pamphilus and Eusebius, part of which he

40. On this tradition at Alexandria, see Rudolf Pfeiffer, History of Classical Schol-
arship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1968), esp. 87–104.
41. This is the argument of a study I have in hand on “Jerome’s Art of Scripture” (read
as a paper at the Twelfth International Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford,
August 1995), modifying and expanding suggestions made in JECS 1 (1993): 175–213
at 179–85.
42. L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Trans-
mission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 10.
43. E.g., epp. 61.2.5, 84.7.3; Ruf. 1.11, 2.27.
512 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

translated, Rufinus argued that Origen’s works had been interpolated by

heretics. Origen had said as much himself during his lifetime. And there
were other instances of the same problem: in the works of Cyprian, for
example, and of Hilary.44 There had even been a fairly recent case in the
entourage of Bishop Damasus, involving certain Apollinarians and a codex
containing a work by Athanasius.45
Rufinus knew better than to mention Jerome by name. When the latter
got hold of a copy of his monograph “On the Adulteration of the Books of
Origen,” he identified himself to all future readers. He also heaped scorn
on the theory of widespread heretical interpolation. Some of his counter-
arguments are well made. Others compound the problems raised by Rufi-
nus’ approach. Concerning the alleged Apollinarian fraud of ca. 382,
Jerome writes in the second book of his Apology against Rufinius: “My
dear friend, in ecclesiastical writings when the issue is the truth of certain
dogmas and the authority of the elders is invoked concerning the salvation
of our souls, I beg you to desist from this kind of foolishness and not to mis-
take after-dinner tales for warrants of the truth. After all, it is possible that

44. The case is set out in Rufinus’ Liber de adulteratione librorum Origenis, ap-
pended to his translation of parts of the Apology. There is a modern edition by M. Si-
monetti in CCL 13.
45. Adult. 13 (CCL 20.15–16): “Adiciam adhuc unius facti talis exemplum, quod
memoriae quidem recentioris est (commissae autem nequitiae antiquum satis) et quod
omnes ueterum fabulas uincat. Damasus episcopus, cum de recipiendis Apollinarianis
deliberatio haberetur, editionem ecclesiasticae fidei, cui iidem editioni, si ecclesiae iungi
uelint, subscribere deberent, conscribendam mandauit amico suo cuidem presbytero,
uiro disertissimo, qui hoc illi ex more negotium procurabat. Necessarium uisum est dic-
tanti in ipsa editione de incarnatione Domini hominem dominicum dici. Offensi sunt in
hoc sermone Apollinaristae: nouitatem sermonis incusare coeperunt. Adesse sibi coepit
qui dictauerat et ex auctoritate ueterum scriptorum catholicorum uirorum confutare eos
qui inpugnabant. Decidit ut uni ex ipsis qui nouitatem sermonis causabantur, ostenderet
in libello Athanasii episcopi scriptum esse sermonem de quo questio habebatur. Quasi
suasus iam ille cui hoc probatum fuerat, rogauit dari sibi codicem, quo et aliis ignoran-
tibus et contradicentibus satisfaceret. Accepto codice, inauditum excogitauit adultera-
tionis genus. Locum ipsum, in quo sermo iste erat scriptus, rasit et ipsum sermonem rur-
sum rescripsit quem raserat. Codex redditus simpliciter receptus est. Mouetur iterum
pro eodem sermone quaestio; ad probationem codex profertur; inuenitur sermo, de quo
erat quaestio, ex litura in codice positus; fides proferenti talem codicem derogatur, eo
quod litura illa corruptionis ac falsitatis uideretur indicium.” Rufinus then concludes:
“However, because—as I’ve said already in other connections—these tricks were played
on a person who was still living and able to fend for himself, he (i.e., the “victim”) im-
mediately did what was necessary to expose this criminal fraud. And so it came about
in this case that the stain of ill-doing adhered, not to an innocent man who had done
none of the things imputed to him, but to the author (sic!) of the deed itself, and re-
dounded to his greater discredit” (Latin text given above, n. 8).
 VESSEY/FORGING OF ORTHODOXY 513

even if you heard a true account from me, someone else who knew noth-
ing of the matter would claim that you had made the story up.”46 Is this
confirmation or denial? We might note that the logic of Jerome’s evasion
at this moment exactly mirrors that of the alleged Apollinarian fraud in the
original story: even if he (Jerome) had produced an authentic, uncorrupted
text, it would have been easy for others to claim—or make it appear—that
he had forged it for his own purposes.
Had Jerome really been embarrassed at Rome in 382, more so than Rufi-
nus’ account of the fraud and its speedy detection would lead us to believe?
Had he experienced some difficulty shaking the charge of forging orthodox
doctrine? Had he (heu nefas!) perpetrated a forgery? These questions are in
their nature unanswerable. Rufinus’ reference to a presbyter disertissimus
in the circle of Bishop Damasus is our only evidence outside Jerome’s own
writings for his activity at the time, and even its evidentiary status is uncer-
tain. Sooner or later we must recognize that the text on which we have re-
lied for intelligence of events of the early 380s is more likely to be reliable
as a record of those of the 390s. Rather than lessening the value of Rufinus’
narrative for a modern history of the earliest phase of retractatio patrum in
Latin Christian literature, this post-dating may in fact enhance it. For what-
ever else they demonstrate, the De adulteratione and related documents of
fraternal rivalry between Jerome and Rufinus leave us in no doubt that the
challenge of reading Origen in the Theodosian Age had given rise to a new
anxiety about the integrity of the Christian doctrinal oeuvre as collabora-
tive work of art. Conflating the sub-titles of the recent books by Hanson
and Grant and giving Foucault his due, we may provisionally conclude that
the end of the search for the Christian doctrine of God was the beginning
of a new search for authenticity in Christian literature.

Mark Vessey is Associate Professor, Department of English, University of

British Columbia, Vancouver.

46. Ruf. 2.20 (CCL 79.56–57): “Et superfluum puto apertas ineptias confutare, cum
mihi mea ingeratur fabella—asino uidelicet lyra!—et sub nomine cuiusdam amici
Damasi, romanae urbis episcopi, ego petar, cui ille ecclesiasticas epistulas dictandas cre-
didit, et apollinarianorum uersutiae describantur, quod Athanasii librum, ubi ‘domini-
cus homo’ scriptus est, acceptum ad legendum, ita corruperint ut in litura id quod
raserint rursus inscriberent, ut scilicet non ab illis falsatum, sed a me additum putare-
tur. Quaeso te, amice carissime, ut in ecclesiasticis tractatibus, ubi de ueritate dogma-
tum quaeritur et de salute animarum nostrorum maiorum flagitatur auctoritas, huiusce-
modi deliramenta dimittas et prandiorum cenarumque fabulas pro argumento non
teneas ueritatis. Fieri enim potest ut, etiam si a me uerum audisti, alius qui huius rei ig-
narus est dicat a te esse conpositum et, quasi mimum Philistionis uel Lentuli ac Marulli,
stropham eleganti sermone confictam.”