Jerome’s Centaur: A Hyper-Icon of the Desert Patricia Cox Miller (bio) Although Jerome was ambivalent in his view of the desert, he nonetheless fashioned his portrait of the desert as a landscape charged with religious sensibilities, particularly regarding the ideals and dangers of the ascetic life. When placed in this context, Jerome’s introduction of a centaur into the desert in his Life of Saint Paul, the First Hermit can be seen not as a mere curiosity but rather as a pictorial image of Jerome’s view of the ascetic self. A hybrid figure, the centaur carries both idyllic and barbaric connotations and functions as a marker of a “wildness” that was fundamental to ascetic identity and also to the role of the desert in the development of Christian anthropology. Introduction: From Nature to Landscape In his recent book entitled Landscape and Memory, the historian Simon Schama has observed that, “although we are accustomed to separate nature and human perception into two realms, they are, in fact, indivisible. Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind.” 1 For an example of what he means by the transformation of nature into landscape by way of human perception, he draws on a remark by the noted contemporary photographer, Ansel Adams. Adams is well known for his photographs of natural formations in Yosemite National Park in the American West, and he had this to say about a particular rock-formation named Half Dome: “In the last analysis Half Dome is just a piece of rock. . . . [But] there is some deep personal distillation of spirit and concept which moulds these earthly facts into some transcendental emotional and spiritual experience.” 2 Nature neither locates nor names [End Page 209] itself; rather, it is we, as perceivers, who change nature into landscape by infusing it with emotion, with memory and desire, and indeed, as Adams says, with religion. As Schama remarks, there is a “craving to find in nature a consolation for our mortality.” 3 Schama’s precise observation, that “it is our shaping perception that makes the difference between raw matter and landscape,” 4 has particular relevance for the function of the desert in early Christian asceticism. As Peter Brown has noted, the desert was “the outer space of the ascetic world,” a “measureless imaginative distance.” 5 The “nature” of the desert was transformed into a variety of “landscapes,” most notably the civic landscape offered by Athanasius’ exclamation that the monks had made the desert a city, 6 and the Biblical landscape offered by observers of desert ascetics, who characterized the place as Paradise and its inhabitants as angels. 7 Despite these positive perceptual transformations, however, the desert-as-landscape was not a univocal construct. Enticing and forbidding, the desert was a place both of refuge and temptation, where the howling of wild beasts was heard along with prayers of the monks. Angels might dwell there, but so also did demonic forces. 8 As a metaphor for the most basic makeup of the human, the desert exposed both angelic and demonic tendencies. The desert was thus a landscape charged with ambivalence and, unlike the Yosemite of Ansel Adams’ desire, it not only offered consolation for our mortality but also judgment: if, as Guillaumont argues, ascetics sought in the desert a therapy of the soul, it was because the soul needed healing. 9 The Desert As Landscape: Jerome’s Letters The particular landscape with which this essay is concerned is the desert as it was perceived by Jerome, both in his reported experience of it and his writing about it. With what Schama calls “the organizing move of the artist,” 10 Jerome transformed the “raw matter” of the desert—its dust, [End Page 210] heat, and caves—into a landscape charged with the sensibilities of his particular religious vision. Jerome’s most famous portrait of the desert was written some ten years subsequent to his two-year sojourn there. 11 The frame for this portrait was Jerome’s theory of the body as a boiling cauldron of libido, a theory which he included in a letter to Eustochium, a young Roman woman, in order to...