The Origin of Sin

An English Translation of the "Hamartigenia"

Prudentius, Martha A. Malamud

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780801463068
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía antigua

Aurelius Prudentius Clemens (348–ca. 406) is one of the great Christian Latin writers of late antiquity. Born in northeastern Spain during an era of momentous change for both the Empire and the Christian religion, he was well educated, well connected, and a successful member of the late Roman elite, a man fully engaged with the politics and culture of his times. Prudentius wrote poetry that was deeply influenced by classical writers and in the process he revived the ethical, historical, and political functions of poetry. This aspect of his work was especially valued in the Middle Ages by Christian writers who found themselves similarly drawn to the Classical tradition.

Prudentius's Hamartigenia, consisting of a 63-line preface followed by 966 lines of dactylic hexameter verse, considers the origin of sin in the universe and its consequences, culminating with a vision of judgment day: the damned are condemned to torture, worms, and flames, while the saved return to a heaven filled with delights, one of which is the pleasure of watching the torments of the damned. As Martha A. Malamud shows in the interpretive essay that accompanies her lapidary translation, the first new English translation in more than forty years, Hamartigenia is critical for understanding late antique ideas about sin, justice, gender, violence, and the afterlife. Its radical exploration of and experimentation with language have inspired generations of thinkers and poets since—most notably John Milton, whose Paradise Lost owes much of its conception of language and its strikingly visual imagery to Prudentius's poem.

An Interpretive Essay

INTRODUCTION

HERE ARE TWO WAYS of looking at a poem:

A poem should be palpable and mute
Like a globed fruit
. . . . . . . . . . .
A poem should not mean
But be
(ARCHIBALD MACLEISH, “Ars Poetica”)

[T]he theory
Of poetry is the theory of life,
As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,
In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,
The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands.
(WALLACE STEVENS, “An Ordinary Eve ning in New Haven,” XXVIII)

Macleish’s claim that a poem should not “mean” but “be” is profoundly paradoxical. How can a poem, an artifact of language, exist without performing language’s primary function, signification? Of what would such a poem consist? From the point of view of an early Christian reader, Macleish’s poem would be beyond understanding—available, perhaps, to be glimpsed in the imagination like a fruit gleaming, tantalizingly, on the highest branch of a tree, but forever out of reach, like the apple that Sappho describes:

All alone a sweet apple reddens on the topmost branch,
high on the highest branch, the apple pickers did not notice it,
they did not truly forget it, but they could not reach it.
(Fr. 105)

That fruit, out of reach, not really noticed but never truly forgotten, haunts the poetry of Prudentius. He shared the early Christian view that language is fallen, and that the prelapsarian world, in which human language once reflected the unity of being and meaning that is the attribute of the divine Word, is forever lost. The “fair Fruit,” as Milton calls it, that first opened Eve’s eyes to the knowledge of good and evil, has made a poem like Macleish’s “globed fruit”—a poem that does not mean but is—an impossibility. Unlike God’s eternal “I AM,” a poem in human language cannot “be.” It is doomed instead to strive for meaning, to signify through what Stevens calls “the intricate evasions of as.”1 We might think of Prudentius’s poetry as an expression of his perception of human language as a trap in which the divine “is” is always unobtainable and the human “as” is always inadequate.

The Hamartigenia is an exploration of the problem of sin, which for Prudentius, as I argue in the pages that follow, is inseparable from the fallen state of language and the fruit of that fall. In the Hamartigenia Prudentius pursues a number of interrelated themes: orthodoxy and heresy, similitude and difference, understanding and misinterpretation, blindness and sight, fruitful creativity and sterile duplication. He ties all of these oppositions to the basic problem of the fall: man, created as the imago Dei, the likeness of God, has become, through his own will, unlike the God who is his origin. Like Milton, who retells the same tale on a heroic scale in Paradise Lost, Prudentius wrestles with the enigmatic pattern of likeness and unlikeness that is man.

Paradise Lost, indeed, has proved to be a useful text against which to read the Hamartigenia, despite the vast differences in scope, scale, narrative, and tone of the two poems, and I will occasionally be turning to it to illuminate the Hamartigenia (and sometimes vice versa). The parallels between the two poems are extensive and enlightening, and have not, to my knowledge, been explored in any depth. Milton had certainly read Prudentius, and drew on the Hamartigenia’s vivid and original portrayal of the devil in his portrait of Satan.2 My focus in this book is on the Hamartigenia, not on Milton, but it is striking and intriguing to see how much Prudentius’s systematic, thematic employment of visual language and imagery foreshadows Milton’s, and how both writers engage in elaborate, often enigmatic forms of wordplay at significant thematic moments in their poems.

Of course, as is often the case with similes and comparisons, the differences between the two poems are as revealing as their similarities. Any reader of Milton will come away from Prudentius’s text astonished by the near absence of Eve from the poem, and by the Hamartigenia’s fierce misogyny. Absent too is the radiant beauty of so much of Milton’s poem, the sensuous joy in creation that comes across so strongly in his account of Paradise. Like Milton, Prudentius is a brilliant poet with a strikingly vivid command of language, but the world of the Hamartigenia is not that of Milton’s lost Paradise: rather, it is the world of Milton’s Hell, dark and treacherous. In it the beauties of nature feature only as traps for our perverted senses.

Paradise Lost has an irresistible teleological narrative trajectory that propels us onward. It ends not with an ending, but with the beginning of a new journey, fraught with difficulty but overseen by Providence:

The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand, with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitary way.
(PL 12.646–49)

The Hamartigenia, on the other hand, is curiously and, for the twenty-first-century reader, frustratingly static. Its narrative structure is based on tableaux rather than plot, and its many oppositions are never finally resolved. It ends not with the hopeful assertion that Providence will be our guide, but with a prayer that the poet’s guilty soul might suffer only mild torments in hell.

Finally, although Milton sometimes struggles with the nature of his creativity, even verbally associating himself with Satan and with Sin at one point, he ultimately does not doubt his own role as a creator. Prudentius’s view of his own poetry is much more ambivalent in the Hamartigenia. Especially in this poem, he takes the fallen nature of language seriously. Although he embraces and asserts a typological view of Christian history that looks forward to the redemption of Adam’s sin, and although, as I have argued previously, he undoubtedly takes enormous pride in his own poetic mastery, in this poem about sin and its consequences, he presents himself as less than confident that he has escaped the traps and snares of language in the creation of his own text.

My interpretation begins with a discussion of ways of reading late antique literature, and then moves to an overview of Prudentius’s poetics before turning to the particular text of the Hamartigenia. My purpose in both the translation and the reading of the Hamartigenia that follows is to equip the reader to engage imaginatively with Prudentius’s unfamiliar but fascinating poetics. His language is both figural, in that it assumes a typological view of Christian history (that is, the belief that the events of the Old Testament “shadow forth” the events revealed by the New Testament and that history itself will culminate in the unveiling [apocalypse] of truth), and figurative, in that it very self-consciously makes its meaning through figurae verborum, through tropes and textual figures. Far from being mere verbal ornament, these rhetorical figures are fundamental to Prudentius’s poetic project. As I hope to demonstrate, the best way to understand this difficult but rewarding text is to figure out and figure forth the figures that constitute it.3 The Hamartigenia offers insights into late antique ideas about sin, justice, gender, violence, the afterlife, and language. It is also a complex and sophisticated poem by a writer whose poetic innovations had an enormous impact on the development of the Europe an literary tradition.4 This study, then, is a reading and contextualization of the Hamartigenia, beginning with the preface and proceeding through the poem to its conclusion.

Prudentius

Reconstructing the biographies of ancient writers is necessarily an uncertain enterprise because of the lack of reliable evidence. Prudentius provides us with just enough information to sketch out a rough picture of his life.5 We know his name: he refers to himself by name (Prudentium) at Peristephanon 2.582, and the manuscripts indicate that his full name was Aurelius Prudentius Clemens.6 He came from northeastern Spain, the Roman province of Hispania Tarraconensis, probably from the city of Calagurris on the Ebro River. What little we know of his chronology comes from the only two poems of his that can be firmly dated: the preface to his collected works (405 CE) and the Contra Symmachum (402–3 CE). From these we know that Prudentius was born in 348, and died sometime after 405, the year he wrote his preface. Prudentius is not mentioned in Jerome’s De viris illustribus, which suggests (though it does not prove) that he had not yet written, or not circulated, his poems at the time Jerome was writing (392–93). It is probable, then, that most of Prudentius’s poems were written over the period of roughly a decade before 405, during the reigns of his contemporary, the Spanish emperor Theodosius I, and Theodosius’s son, Honorius.

What Prudentius tells us about his life is highly schematic, almost generic: he was educated in grammar, rhetoric, and law; he had a successful career in public ser vice and received two appointments as provincial governor (he does not name the provinces, nor specify his rank), followed by some sort of position in the imperial court (probably under Theodosius; see Palmer 1989, 25n1). We know from his other poems that he had spent time in Rome and probably traveled a good deal. We know nothing about his family, whether he was married, or whether he had children. Literary analysis of his work demonstrates that, in addition to his formidable knowledge of his classical poetic predecessors, he was well aware of the work of other poets of his day, including Ausonius and Claudian, two poets with connections to the imperial court, and perhaps Paulinus of Nola as well.7

From the preface to his works, it seems that Prudentius had a conversion experience some time in middle age. It is reasonable to conjecture (though it is only conjecture) that he retired from his administrative career and devoted the rest of his life to forging a new identity as a Christian (perhaps a Christian contemplative) and a poet. Such a move—a turn away from secular life toward a life of religious devotion—was certainly not uncommon in the fourth and fifth centuries. In addition to the most famous convert of them all, Augustine of Hippo, Paulinus is another example of an aristocrat who withdrew from secular affairs to take up a Christian life. After spending some time in retreat at his own estates, he became a Christian ascetic and was particularly devoted to Saint Felix of Nola.8 It is not clear from the preface whether all of Prudentius’s poetry dates from the period subsequent to his withdrawal from public life, nor is there any evidence of where Prudentius settled down after his retirement, though Roberts, following Fontaine, plausibly suggests that he withdrew to his own estate in Spain and composed most of his surviving poetry there.9 His poetic project was ambitious: “Nothing less than to give expression in his poetry to the mental, spiritual, and material world of the late fourth-century Roman Christian” (Roberts 1993, 3). Prudentius, then, was a well-educated, well-connected, successful member of the late Roman elite, a man fully engaged with the politics and culture of his times, and with his faith.

The Roman world experienced enormous cultural change in the course of the fourth century. After the grim economic collapse and political instability of the third century, the reforms instituted by Diocletian and the consolidation of power and military success of Constantine and his heirs resulted in economic recovery and a concomitant cultural revival. But even as state revenues stabilized and the central bureaucracy reorganized, the gap between rich and poor increased dramatically, and the basis for the feudal economy was laid, as wealthy estate owners acquired more and more wealth, cities declined in population, and formerly in de pen dent peasants were forced to become virtual slaves of the estate owners. The senatorial class, which had lost much of its institutional power by this time, now grew in wealth and regained its political clout. In this period Christianity moved from being recognized as a religion by Constantine to becoming the only state religion under Theodosius, a development that changed the nature of Christianity as much as it changed the nature of the empire. “In such times history itself is up for grabs, available to be claimed by what ever side wins the political, religious, and intellectual battles. In the fourth century, Christians were winning those battles and thus staking their claim to a particular view of history.”10

1. WRITING IN CHAINS

THE LITERATURE of the fourth century reflects the dynamism and upheaval of the time. The third century appears to have been a cultural wasteland for Latin literature, remarkable for the paucity of literature, especially poetry, that has survived. In the fourth and fifth centuries, the floodgates opened: old genres were revived and new ones created. After the silence of the third cent...