Jerome’s Epitaph on Paula: A Commentary on the Epitaphium Sanctae Paulae by Andrew Cain

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jerome’s Epitaph on Paula: A Commentary on the Epitaphium Sanctae Paulae by Andrew Cain Philip Rousseau Andrew Cain Jerome’s Epitaph on Paula: A Commentary on the Epitaphium Sanctae Paulae Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013 Pp. xx + 569. $275.00. This may seem at first sight an unusual book, devoted wholly to a single letter of Jerome (108). But of course the Epitaphium is much more than a letter, albeit in part a consolatio addressed to Paula’s daughter, Eustochium. As the editor reminds us, this was “one of Jerome’s finest and most ambitious compositions” [End Page 448] (33), and (on the evidence of the surviving manuscripts) “one of the most popular of Jerome’s writings during the Middle Ages” (37). Since the editor is Andrew Cain, the work is marked by breadth, learning, and exhaustive detail. Cain has already laid out for himself a significant path among Hieronymian scholars, and this volume can only enhance further his own reputation and reinforce our gratitude for his labors to date. The work includes just over fifty pages of a much-improved text and the first competent English translation in more than a century. This is preceded by a judicious introduction that alerts the reader to the main categories of inquiry—biography, literary genre, ascetic theory and practice, the Bethlehem scene, and Paula’s enduring reputation. But the central value of the work resides in the nearly 400 pages of original commentary. Our dependence on Cavallera, Rebenich, Nautin, and Duval will not be superseded; but there is thoughtfulness here and lateral allusion that makes a great deal more ready to hand and focused on core concerns. Paula’s death marked a tipping point in Jerome’s life, an important caesura between his final years and his heady days of status and influence in the Rome of Damasus in the 380s. He was subsequently less successful in his role as a looming exile, still to be reckoned with among his Latin-speaking acquaintances. His former friend Rufinus, returned to and active in the West from 397, was already a harbinger of his waning significance in Italy. He had been forced to concentrate on local battles in Palestine, especially in relation to the reputation of Origen (little referred to in the Epitaphium), and he began to cultivate new allies, especially in Gaul. In spite of the enduring presence and fidelity of Eustochium, the connection with Rome in particular was severed definitively by the death of Pammachius in 410. Cain begins his study, therefore, with an account of Jerome’s relations with Paula, beginning in those early days in Rome. One is struck most, perhaps, by his opportunism in seeking the patronage of a wealthy widow; and one is led immediately to see how this consolatory memoir, penned nearly twenty years later, brings its author—characteristically, some would probably say—close to the heart of the endeavor. The ascetic experiment and the scholarly vocation needed the material support of highly-placed lay patrons. Jerome’s particular temperament demanded in addition—not least of Eustochium—the recognition of both his emotional dependence and his sense of proprietary magisterium. But Cain is more intent on the literary qualities and antecedents of the text, and he is right in adopting that approach—less evident, as he convincingly argues, in other analyses to date. A traditional characteristic of the encomium was a search for causality, for appropriate connections between ancestry and upbringing on the one hand and accomplishment on the other. Jerome, according to Cain, was anxious to reverse the traditional sequence and attribute Paula’s exegetical astuteness, her spiritual insight, to her later ascetic devotion, so that a shift in practice (the very renunciation of inherited privilege) underpinned the qualities of mind to be most admired. As Cain puts it himself, “her lineage contributed absolutely nothing to her moral fabric. Her spiritual nobility was conferred through faith, not inherited by blood” (137). This is perhaps the chief example of Jerome’s skill in adapting classical forms [End Page 449] to a new Christian agenda. Cain is exhaustive, however, in picking out many other sleights of hand, which make the piece, in his view, “arguably...