Abstract
One of the most encouraging developments in literary criticism over the last half century has been the resurgence of interest in early Christian poetry. Early Christian poetry, also sometimes called Patristic poetry, is a term covering a broad range of poetic endeavors by Christians: from the earliest Latin, Greek, and Syriac hymns from the second and third centuries to the Byzantine and Carolingian verse of the seventh century. The Christian poetry of the fourth and fifth centuries has gained the most attention in the last few decades, especially the Syriac poems of Ephrem the Syrian (∼306–373), the Greek poems of Gregory Nazianzus (∼330–390), and the Latin poems of Prudentius (∼348–413). There are several stand-out volumes in which these poets’ work has been selected, translated, and appraised: Ephrem enjoys a volume of poetry in both the Popular Patristics (1997) and the Classics of Western Spirituality series (1989), Gregory Nazianzus enjoys two volumes in the Popular Patristic series (2001, 2013), as well as two translations of his autobiographical poems from Cambridge (2005) and from The Fathers of the Church series (2001). Easily the most formally accomplished of modern translations of early Christian poetry is Sister M. Clement Eagan’s translation of the complete works of Prudentius in the Fathers of the Church series (1962). For those wishing to read more broadly, there is Caroline White’s anthology Early Christian Latin Poets (2000). Those wishing to encounter early Christian poetry in English translation should start with such volumes.
Sadly, English-language critical engagements with early Christian poetry have lagged behind translation efforts. This is, perhaps, not a bad thing: it can be infuriating to read critical examinations of poems one cannot read for oneself. Further, it has been exciting to witness the increasing artistry with which translators have rendered Gregory Nazianzus’s verse over the past decades from the accessible but formally imprecise renderings of McGuckin (1986) and Gilbert (2001) to the polished pentameter of Daley (2006). But now, especially to poets like Prudentius, whose works have been well translated and widely accessible for decades, it is time that the full force of contemporary critical investigation and insight be brought.
Karla Pollman proposes to do just this in The Baptized Muse. The volume collects nine essays on early Christian poetry from Pollman’s career. Her focus is Latin Christian verse—especially the under-explored poetry of Venantius Fortunatus—though she makes time for some remarks on Greek poetry, especially in her chapter on Christus Patiens, arguably the first Greek tragedy on a Christian subject. Sadly, Pollman does not interact with Syriac Christian verse, a rich and sometimes dominant strain in early Christian poetry, especially in the second-century Odes of Solomon and hymns of Ephrem the Syrian. (Indeed, in claiming that the first extant Christian poetry dates from Commodian’s verse in the third century, Pollman does not at all acknowledge second-century Christian poems like the Odes of Solomon and the wild, important On Pascha by Melito of Sardis.) Those wishing to read more about Syriac verse should look to James Charlesworth’s Odes of Solomon (1978), the volumes of Ephrem mentioned above, as well as Sebastian Brock’s monographs The Luminous Eye (1992) and From Ephrem to Romanos (1999).
I do not wish to be too harsh on Pollman for her ignoring much of Greek and all of Syriac Christian poetry. Latin poetry is enough to focus on in one monograph, and Pollman’s treatment of it provides two crucial elements to the ongoing critical conversation: an argument that Christian poets were interested in cultural authority in their inheritance and adaptation of the classical pagan literary tradition, and a thorough knowledge of the German critical conversation about early Christian poetry.
Central to Pollman’s overall argument is a desire to move away from the common dismissal of early Christian poetry “as derivate and ‘decadent,’ depending on a glorious past because of the lack of talent and ingenuity on the part of the early Christian poets” (3). Instead, Pollman would have us read early Christian poetry as “a highly original strategy establishing itself as a new dominating cultural force in a changing environment, thereby both preserving the cultural past it usurps and contributing to the success and endurance of Christian thought in a time of radical historical transition” (3). Simply put, Pollman wants us to see early Christian poetry as a means by which Christian writers established the cultural authority of their faith. Too often Christian poetry—and not just early Christian poetry—is treated as mere entertainment for the unthinking faithful. Pollman sees it, rather, as contributing to “Christian thought” and “making genuine, intellectually challenging contribution[s] to scriptural exegesis” even as it delights and consoles the faithful reader (3). This promotes early Christian poetry to the rank of early Christian prose—homiletic, theological, and philosophical—that has traditionally been taken much more seriously by modern scholars.
In Pollman’s opening chapters, she surveys the different approaches early Christian poets took in conceptualizing their relationship with both the pagan poetic tradition and the biblical textual tradition. She acknowledges that rather than a monolithic dismissal of the classical tradition and embrace of the Bible, many methods and attitudes were attempted by the major early Christian poets: the Latin poet Commondian is “anti-classical and anti-pagan” (29), while Lactantius’s poem on the Phoenix is “a seamless continuation” of classical tradition with a Christian “twist” (32). One of Pollman’s most exciting treatments in her early chapters is of Prudentius’s allegorical epic Psychomachia, one of the most written-about early Christian poems. The poem, she argues “can be read on several levels: as an allegorical and metaphorical representation of the inner battles of the individual, as a contrafacture to epic pagan models, and finally also as a typological description of the path of the Christian Church to salvation” (61). This makes the poem “an example of pure allegorical epic poetry whose rigorous form was rarely matched to this degree by later authors” (61). The uniqueness, then, of Prudentius’s epic, both in comparison to previous pagan and later Christian epic, reveals it to be a prime example of the innovation that took place in early Christian poetry at its best.
Another early Christian epic that has received significant attention of late is Proba’s fourth-century Virgilian Cento. Pollman contrasts this cento, which uses fragments of Virgil’s verse to retell of the creation and gospel stories from scripture, with a cento by Proba’s contemporary Ausonias, who uses virgilian fragments to write a ribald epithalamion. Pollman finds Proba’s cento “truly innovative” in that “Proba (in contrast to many Christian authors) accepted that Vergil in all his works proclaims Christian truth and that she therefore understands her cento as a kind of Vergilian exegesis … This leads to the self-confident position that Proba on the one hand refuted pagan poetry … and on the other felt able to use Vergil to convey the Christian message of truth” (113). For Pollman Proba successfully shows the complex cultural and intellectual situation of the early Christian: in awe of and indebted to the pagan past, while also confident that the pagan account of the cosmos was wrong and the Bible’s account right. Proba’s achievement (not unlike Prudentius’s) was to harmonize the honor due to pagan genius with the allegiance due to Christian truth in feat of classical-Christian literary mastery. Further, the fact that both Christian and pagan reader alike acknowledged this mastery suggests that these early Christian poets achieved the cultural authority they arguably sought.
One of the recurring heroes, as it were, of Pollman’s book is the sixth-century Latin poet Venantius Fortunatus. Pollman champions him as a prime example of “hagiographical epic,” a subgenre of epic in contrast to biblical epic. She dedicates a whole chapter, plus portions of several other chapters, to Fortunatus’s Vita Martini, a retelling of Paulinus of Perigrueux’s poem on St. Martin which is itself a versification of the prose hagiography of St. Martin by Sulpicius Severus. The poem “represents an extreme case in terms of layered reception” of classical epic, biblical narrative, prose hagiography, and verse hagiography. Pollman also sees in Fortunatus an indication that by the sixth century “Christian poetry has got its own traditional authority” (232). For Fortunatus is the first Latin Christian poet who contextualizes himself within “an already long-established Christian poetic tradition. In Vita Martini … he names as his predecessors Juvencus, Sedulius, Orientius, Prudentius, Paulinus of Perigueux, Arator, and Alcimus Avitus. Furthermore, at the end of his epic, he expressly call his sodales (‘comrades’) to imitate him” (70). Fortunatus, then, confirms that Christian poetry did mature to a point that he could “develop an exclusively Christian canon of poets … Christianity is not given any pagan foundation, but is seen as a tradition in its own right and with a self-sufficient past” (232). Pollman’s book as a whole invites us to take Fortunatus seriously here. Early Christian poetry, in Pollman’s idiosyncratic survey of it, succeeds in establishing itself as an authoritative tradition, providing the great link between the classical and medieval literary traditions, a link that should be apparent but is often overlooked.