Chapter 1
Fancying Hermits:
Sublimation and the Arts of Romance
Sublimation is coextensive with (rather than âbeyondâ) sexuality.
âLeo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art
âHow often, when I was living in the desert, in the vast solitude which gives to hermits a savage dwelling-place, parched by the flames of the sun, how often did I fancy myself among the pleasures of Rome (putavi me Romanis interesse deliciis)!â (Ep. 22.7). Thus begins Jeromeâs account of his own brief career as a hermit, intruded into a letter written to the Roman virgin Eustochium circa 384, some eight years after he had decisively fled the Syrian desert. In this passage, ascetic fantasy quickly overwhelms historical description. Still inventing himself in the present, Jeromeâs interest in his own past lies largely with the power of the imagination to shapeâand reshapeâa human life.1 His autobiographical confession unfolds in a series of dreamily shifting scenes, as vibrant in emotional tone as they are rich in sensory detail. The remembered landscape conveys the tenor of the former life, even as the terrain of memory itself buckles and folds: in the desert he once fancied Roman allurements; in Rome he now fancies desert delights. Mobile displacements of pleasures thus make space for desire while transforming both topography and chronology.2 Defined by mutual lack, desert and Rome, past and present, become (by mutual attraction) almost one topos, a savage habitation that is also the no-place where a sublime eros burns bright.3
As Jerome rewrites his past, he reinscribes the desert on his body, roughly effacing the soft pallor of Rome: âmy skin from long neglect had become like Ethiopian flesh (squalida cutis situm Aethiopicae carnis adduxerat).â The scene bends back on itself, as his savagely âburning mindââitself a desert productâin turn converts the almost intolerably bleak solitude of sandy wastes into a stage crowded with foregone delights: âI often found myself amidst bevies of girls (choris . . . puellarum),â he reminisces boldly (Ep. 22.7). In this fantastic desert that is also the site of Roman pleasures, Jerome appears virtually indistinguishable from the voluptuous bands of chorus girls, a confusion not repressed but intensified by the text. His skin weathered in the sun-scorched desert, the hermit has become as darkâand perhaps thereby as beautifulâas the sun-scorched bride of the Song of Songs (cf. Song 1.6),4 whose naked desire he will, later in this same letter, commend to the girl Eustochium in terms exceeding even the Songâs abundant eroticism (Ep. 22.25).5 First, however, he abandons himself fleetingly to a still more exuberant identification with another sensuously, indeed sinfully, female biblical figure: âHelpless, I cast myself at the feet of Jesus, I watered them with my tears, I wiped them with my hair, and then I subdued my rebellious body with weeks of abstinenceâ (cf. Luke 7.38). Beating his breast and weeping copiously in the queerly feminized and darkly exoticized literary persona of his own construction,6 Jerome quickly returns to the opening verses of the Song of Songs, now with an explicit citation, as he sings joyously to his Lord: âbecause of the scent of thy ointments we will run after theeâ (Ep. 22.7; cf. Song 1.3). The words of the Songâs lover and her maidens, directly voiced by Jerome, thus supplement the account of foot washing. The fragrant oils initially elided in his abstinent citation of the Lukan text mingle again with the foot washerâs tears, and the mutely weeping woman is fractured, pluralized, and dispersed in dancing choruses of maidenly celebrationââbevies of girlsâ fit to accompany the Saviorâs bride, none other than Jerome himself, now more than ever one of the girls.7 Authorial âfancyâ is no longer worldly but rather densely biblical, as Jerome refashions his desire ascetically by rewriting the desert as a voluptuous scriptural text, thereby also reinscribing Scripture as a teeming desert of delights. Fact or fantasy? History or romance? Sexuality or sublimation? In the text of his own recollected life, Jerome dissolves such distinctions.
What of Jeromeâs other Livesâthe holy biographies of Paul, Malchus, and Hilarion? âAre the Lives romances?â queried E. Coleiro in 1957, wondering aloud âwhether Jerome meant the Lives to be considered as history or fiction.â Skittishly, Coleiro concludes that, although Jerome certainly cannot have intended that his saintly biographies be read as novels, they do make for rather bad history while exuding considerable âromantic charm.â8 Coleiro stands in a tradition of scholarship that has attempted to discipline Jeromeâs disturbingly labile hagiographic compositions by giving them a respectable place within literary history, identifying them as variations on conventional genres of history, biography, or aretalogy and keeping the romanceâs troubling fictionality (not to mention its seemingly unmentionable eroticism) at armâs length wherever possible.9 His sensitive reading of the Hieronymian Lives, however, partly subverts his own conclusion. In order to classify Jeromeâs Lives as âhistoryââor, more specifically, âbiographyââhe must demonstrate the (lamentable?) compatibility of âthe more fanciful methods of Jeromeâ with contemporaneous historiography, which seemingly admitted âthe possibility of non-historical additions,â blurring the âline between reality and legend,â introducing details that served a prurient curiosity more than a desire for accuracy, and frequently sacrificing narrative coherence for the vividness of swiftly shifting scenes that remain loosely linked, at best, not only with one another but also with the broader trajectory of âcontemporary history.â10 âIt is like the disconnected glimpses of a hidden sky that one would get if a cloud covering the whole length and breadth of it were to break up in parts and let one see a few patches of what is beyond,â muses Coleiro.11 Idealized âheroesâ are dramatically depicted and âoverstress is conspicuous,â he continues.12 Indeed, Jeromeâs Lives, with âtheir appeal to the imagination and their romantic associations,â are (he admits) âdelightful works of art.â If not quite granting them the status of âromances,â Coleiro is willing to catalogue their distinctly âromanticâ aspects: âthe use of the weird,â the delight in presenting âthe reader continually with unexpected situations,â âthe spirit of adventure,â and above all the âtaste for description.â13 Jerome is especially adept, as Coleiro reads him (reading him well), at using description to convey a particular feeling: âthe reader sees the scene under the influence of that sentiment.â14 Nonetheless, âthere is no doubt that [Jerome] intended the Lives to be considered as history.â âSuch considerations lead us to reject the opinion that the Lives are romances,â intones Coleiro; âfundamentally, they represent historical truth.â15
As a hagiographer, Jerome is, then, a master of romance but a lousy historian. All the same, we must read him for his history and resist the lure of his romance, eschewing âentertainmentâ in favor of âinformation,â insists Coleiro. A dauntingly ascetic interpretive practice is here recommended. And perhaps we would do well to take the advice, even to take it to excess. Reading âromanceâ as âhistoryâ and writing âhistoryâ as âromanceâ may indeed be the genre-bending technique by which Jerome not merely blurs but effectively dissolves the distinction between âreality and legendâ (or fantasy)âthereby rendering the concept of an extratextual âhistorical truthâ virtually irrelevant. Ascetic â(in)formation,â grounded in refusing the tempting reduction of âimagination and feelingâ to a merely âentertainingâ superficiality, may be exactly what Jerome intends for his readers.16
But what clues does Jerome himself offer us concerning his hagiographic intentions? As it happens, the three canonical Hieronymian Lives are all mentioned in the self-entry with which Jerome immodestly concludes his catalogue of Christian writers, entitled On Famous Men. Why not, then, begin there in re-posing the question of the hagiographerâs generic purposes? Jeromeâs interest in this innovative literary-historical composition does not lie in correlating Christian writings with âGentileâ genres but rather in delineating the emerging corpus of distinctly Christian literature (On Famous Men, preface) and the rise of a new class of Christian men of lettersâbest represented by Jerome himself.17 This overt authorial agenda, however, is not necessarily a problem. It may even offer valuable clues for students of Jeromeâs hagiography, inciting fresh interpretations of what is perhaps after all best read as a ânewâ kind of writingâcreated not ex nihilo but through inventive recyclings of materials borrowed from already overlapped traditions of historical, biographical, aretalogical, martyrological, and novelistic literature. Jeromeâs list of his own written worksâpresumably chronologicalâbegins with the Life of Paul the Hermit and concludes (apart from a final, looser reference to his Bible translations, countless unpublished letters to Paula and Eustochium, and work-in-progress) with the works On the Captive Monk and The Life of the Blessed Hilarion (On Famous Men 135). Two of his conventionally identified hagiographies are, then, also designated by their author as Lives. Taking the form of a rhetorical inclusio, they neatly bracket the list of Jeromeâs polemical treatises, published letters, and historical, exegetical, and homiletic writings. If the Lives seem thus to claim a certain prominence in his own oeuvre, it is striking that Jerome credits only one among his Christian literary predecessors, namely, Athanasius of Alexandria, with authorship of a Lifeâthe Life of Antony the Hermit (On Famous Men 87).18 Does Jerome understand the ascetic Life as a distinctive Christian literary âgenre,â and, if so, where does this âgenreâ originate, what does it include, and how does he intend it to be read?
The hints supplied by On Famous Men draw us into the hagiographic texts themselves. In introducing the earliest of his Lives, the Life of Paul (written circa 374), Jerome acknowledges that it is âpartly trueâ that Antony was the âoriginatorâ or âheadâ (caput) of eremitic asceticism. âPartly I say,â he clarifies, âfor the fact is not so much that Antony preceded the rest as that they all derived from him the necessary stimulus (ab eo omnium incitata sunt studia).â Jerome goes on to make it abundantly clear that Paul of Thebes, the hero of his own Life, did, in his view, precede Antony as the âleaderâ or âfirstâ (princeps) in the eremitic venture (Life of Paul 1). In what sense, then, can Antony be understood as the âoriginatorâ or the âstimulusâ for the ascetic endeavors of âallâ? Jerome, I would suggest, has here deliberately confused the âLifeâ with the âlifeâ: his subtly displaced, but easily recognizable, claim is that it is the textual Life of Antony (transmitted by âboth Greek and Roman writers,â as he goes on to note),19 rather than the hermit Antonyâs living example, that provides the âstimulusâ or âincitementâ not to asceticism per se but, more importantly, to hagiography. We should not miss the payoff of this rhetorical sleight of hand. In the Life of Paul, Jerome implicitly inscribes the Life of Antony as a âsourceâ (a reading that will prove extraordinarily influential)20 only so that heâthus incitedâmay make himself the âfirstâ author of holy Lives.21 His seeming compliment to Athanasius, who remains unnamed here and elsewhere in Jeromeâs Lives (if not in his catalogue of Christian writers), is thus written with the left hand. If hagiography is a genre, from Jeromeâs perspective it is a genre of his own imaginative invention. Athanasiusâs work is merely the provocationâthe pretext, one might say.22
Indeed, if Hieronymian hagiography is a genre, it is a genre always being invented. The Lives of Paul and Hilarion are intertextually linked through their common (if also strategically differentiated) construal of the Life of Antony as their literary point of departureâa linkage further strengthened by the explicit reference to the Life of Paul in the Life of Hilarion. The same is not true of On the Captive Monk. Yet this not-quite-Life of Malchus sidles up cozily enough to the Life of Hilarion in Jeromeâs On Famous Men, and indeed the oriental setting and overt historicism of On the Captive Monk (described by Jerome as a warm-up exercise for a future church-historical narrative) may be seen to anticipate the Life of Hilarionâs ambition to convey a broad history of eastern monasticism in which Syria-Palestine takes its rightful place. At the same time, On the Captive Monk is arguably the least metahistorical and most explicitly romantic of Jeromeâs three saintly biographies, reproducing the plot line and rhetorical style of the ancient novel with parodic near-exactitude. In these respects, it draws closer to the Life of Paul, while also sharply distancing itself from the latterâs mythical flights of fancy, as well as from the focus on the miraculous characteristic of the Life of Hilarion. The point is that Jeromeâs hagiographic writings exceed and contradict even his own lightly insinuated generic definitions and refuse, collectively, to stabilize into a single literary form. Previous scholarly studies strongly suggest (not least where failing to achieve consensus) that the Lives are each generic hybrids, emerging in the interplay of already distinctly hybridized literary genres. Beyond that, I am suggesting, these ambiguously overlapped texts are also remarkably dissimilar to one another, to put it simply. Nor can their differences be easily smoothed away by plotting a linear development toward a single, culminating âend.â23 The reader of Jeromeâs three hagiographic compositions is, rather, left with the impression of an ongoing, even restless experimentation at work in these texts.
Hieronymian hagiography is, thus, a remarkably plastic genre. Possibly it is even a genre defined by its irreducible plasticity, which (by effectively refusing the contrast with âreal lifeâ) exposes and exploits the promising fictiveness and malleability of any âlife,â remaining stubbornly resistant even to literary devices of normalization. Fact or fantasy? History or romance? What is a true story, who is a holy man? These are questions that Jeromeâs saintly Lives continue to incite, while successfully deferring conclusive answers. At this point, a âdeferentialâ (which is also to say, a âdifferentialâ) reading of Hieronymian hagiography may be just what is required, for would-be saints and other shifty subjects of phantasmatic desire. There is, there can be, no end to the incitement to write and read holiness, to discover new âqueeringsâ of romance,24 further intensifications of erotic longing within the operations of sublimation. From Jeromeâs perspective (as I here imagine it), there are always more Lives to be found and lostâmultiplied, fractured, and destroyedâin the savage (dis)habitation, the prolific specula(riza)tions, of hagiographyâs fluid literary imaginary.
The Queer Life of Paul the Hermit
Both art and criticism compensate for the surrender of physical sexuality by providing imaginative gratifications that have their own attractiveness. Freud argued that beauty . . . represented a sublimation of sexuality, a rerouting of transgressive energies along socially acceptable lines; and while this seems a decidedly modern view of the matter, I would argue that we can in fact locate the germ of sublimation, the beginnings of a modern understanding, in ascetic art and its cultural interpretation. As one among countless examples, I want to focus on a picture by Sasetta (c.1400â1450) . . . depicting . . . the meeting between Antony and Paul the Hermit. . . . The compensation I am hunting for does not withhold itself, for the meeting between the two saints represents a momentary relief from the intense solitude suffered by each; their holy embrace provides, in fact, not only an affirmation of the worthiness of the ascetic life, but an astonishing interval of sensation, an unrepeatable break amid the unrelieved decades of self, or rather t...