Abstract
Even if early Christian poetry does not always satisfy the aesthetic demands of a modern audience (at least, that is the feeling of the reviewer, and there are noteworthy exceptions), other reasons remain why it is a fascinating corpus of texts. One of them is the fact that we can more or less follow a new kind of literature emerging in close interaction with sociopolitical circumstances and existing literary traditions. It is to these literary traditions, and the justification for writing poetry from a Christian perspective, that Karla Pollmann has devoted many insightful investigations.
In the book under review, ten such investigations are collected, which were originally published in the period 1997–2013; the Introduction is the only new piece. Pollmann discusses texts that are not read frequently, not even by expert readers. The strong point of the volume, however, is that these rather unknown texts are put in a broader perspective and analysed in their literary environment. Pollmann shows how early Christian poets engaged with the Bible (their main source of inspiration for the contents of their work), the pagan literary tradition (the inevitable source of all culture in late antiquity) and their own emerging literary tradition. The latter is definitively established with Venantius Fortunatus in the sixth century, who was the first author to only list Christian poets as his predecessors, thus creating a canon of Christian authors (Chapters Three and Ten). The notion of cultural authority mentioned in the title duly returns in many contributions: Pollmann studies the role of early Christian poetry as an authoritative source of early Christian culture, a way of legitimising the emerging Christian way of life. At the same time, she analyses how this poetry itself is used as a legitimatisation of Christian ideas.
In most of the cases, analyses of passages remain restricted to a few pages only, and often an entire work is treated by discussing one significant passage. This aspect can make the book a tough read for someone less familiar with the field, because Pollmann rather quickly moves from one text to another, even if she always introduces new authors and works. She explicitly reaches out to humanities scholars at large in her Introduction (p. 2), but it seems that for them the Introduction and Conclusion of the book – both very well written and of great interest – are most accessible. As a gesture towards the reader, non-English quotations in the main text are always translated. Concluding remarks at the end of each chapter also facilitate reading. Pollmann’s book, which includes six contributions translated into English, clearly shows what is lost if scholars only read English and ignore literature in the other main modern languages of scholarship (in this case especially the German tradition, to which Pollmann refers extensively).
In the first chapter, Pollmann discusses literary genres and the reasons that Christian poets give for writing poetry. Although she does go a bit deeper into the enigmatic (and very first) Christian poet Commodianus (third century), the chapter remains rather introductory. The second chapter is devoted to mythical, panegyrical, allegorical, biblical and hagiographical epic in late antiquity, and the connections to epics from the classical period. Cassiodorus and Venantius Fortunatus, both from the sixth century, are central to the next chapter, in which Pollmann explains how Christian authors justified the use of pagan knowledge and combined it with insights from the Bible and the Church fathers. Her succinct analysis leaves the reader wanting more. When Fortunatus explicitly refuses pagan knowledge, for example, he refers to it anyway: is that indeed the ‘radical and sweeping abolition of the pagan past’ (p. 91) that Pollmann reads into it?
The fourth chapter on the poetess Proba, the writer of a cento, is illuminating. This contribution has indeed become a classic (p. v), if only for its title starting off with the eye-catching phrase Sex and Salvation; it cannot be a coincidence that it is the only original title that is retained. Here, however, it becomes clear that the contributions have been updated to a limited extent only (p. v). Indeed, Pollmann refers to literature published after the original date of publication, but mainly in the footnotes where some literature, such as a monograph by Schottenius Cullhed, seems to deserve more direct engagement.
Chapter Five discusses the story of the Theban legion in three different sources (from the sixth, ninth and eleventh centuries). Again, the discussion is insightful but rather succinct. What follows is the only chapter on a Greek poem. ‘Jesus Christ and Dionysus: Rewriting Euripides in the Byzantine Cento Christus Patiens’ is very good, but remains the odd one out; not only because it is about a Greek work, but especially since the work is now generally dated (also by Pollmann) to the twelfth century, and as such falls entirely outside the scope of the book. There is also some overlap with the fourth chapter on Latin centones. Chapter Seven is about Prudentius’s and Avitus’s different viewpoints on the origins of culture and the influence of pagan thinking and theology, respectively. More attention to the difference in genre could have given the analysis even more depth. In the dense and challenging piece that follows, Pollmann discusses the tension between the Christian ideas of progress within God’s plan of salvation and decay in human behaviour by looking at the obscure Metrum in Genesin – Carmen de Evangelio from the fifth century. Chapter Nine again compares one theme (three miracles from the life of Saint Martin) in three versions, focusing on the topic of holiness. It is a pity that Pollmann did not include a fuller response to Meinolf Vielberg, who criticised her article (p. 210n63), but whose book she was unable to read (p. 209n58). The last chapter, although equally published separately in an earlier stage, functions as a conclusion, and is a wide survey of the different responses of early Christian poets to the notion of authority in their work.
The contributions come together very well. Still, given Pollmann’s rich and intriguing thoughts on early Christian poetry in general, this reader was left with a feeling of slight disappointment that she did not decide to write an entirely new monograph; clearly, that would be a different project. Therefore, this remark is meant as a compliment to Pollmann’s inspiring work rather than as criticism. The volume as it is now sometimes distracts from the main argument by the (occasionally repetitive) introductions of rather obscure authors. At the same time, some other authors are missing who cannot really be absent from a book on early Christian poetry, such as Paulinus of Nola. Equally, a fuller treatment of Christian poets who did not write poetry with Christian contents, and the responses towards early Christian poetry by pagan and Christian contemporaries, could have strengthened the book. Despite these minor criticisms, Pollmann’s scholarship shows itself to be outstanding. The book, which is produced with care, is a praiseworthy example of its sort.