Converting Verse: The Poetics of Asceticism in Late Roman Gaul

For centuries, the Roman aristocracy encoded its social and cultural superiority in classical poetry. In the late Roman world, however, Christian poets--especially those in the outlying provinces of Gaul--began to experiment with poetry as a medium for exploring and asserting ascetic identities which were based on the disciplined rejection of worldly life and set in opposition to secular nobility. Converting Verse offers a new cultural history of this ascetic transformation of Latin poetry and fortifies our understanding of the Christianization of Roman culture in Late Antiquity. It provides a fresh account of the ways Gallo-Roman Christian poets composed verse amid barbarian incursions, the rise of monasticism, and the collapse of the Western Roman Empire itself, showing how they responded to cultural instability with literary performances of spiritual discipline and religious reform. Through the fifth century, these poets--Paulinus of Nola, Paulinus of Pella, Sidonius Apollinaris, and Avitus of Vienne, among others--wrote poetry that urged and expressed the recalibration of traditional dynamics between literature and identity in the Roman world, and in the process reinvented Latin poetry's power and purpose. Drawing on critical insights from classical studies, religious studies, and literary theory, David Ungvary argues that the significance of Christian poetic experimentation was not restricted to the aesthetic domain but had profound social and cultural implications as well. In the unsettled world of late Roman Gaul, Christian verse writing produced strategies and practices of authorship, religious conversion, and Christianization that informed the emergent cultures of the post-Roman West. Cover 1 Oxford Studies In Late Antiquity 3 Converting Verse : The Poetics of Asceticism in Late Roman Gaul 6 Copyright 7 Dedication 8 Contents 10 Acknowledgments 12 Abbreviations 14 Introduction 18 1: Verse and Conversion: Augustine and His Protégés 31 Coming to Conversion 31 Asceticism in the Late Roman West : History, Theory, Practice 38 Ascetic Identity and Literary Performance 45 The Ascetic Christianization of Latin Literary Practice 50 Negotiating the Power of Poetry 58 2: Authoring Asceticism in Late Roman Gaul, ca. 400–430 67 “Ratio pro meo ac tuo facto": Explaining Ascetic Reform 67 Making Sense of Sulpicius 71 Making Sense of Martin 74 The Literary Circle as Cult of the Saint 78 The “Second Asceticism ” of Gaul 81 The Curricular Critique of John Cassian 86 The Lerinian Response: Didactic and Dialectic in Eucherius of Lyon’s De Contemptu Mundi 95 3: Verse and Incursion: The Epigramma Paulini and A Post-406 Poetics of Reform 103 Between the Waves of Gallic Asceticism 103 Barbarian Invasion and Gaul’s Political Crisis, 406–415 ce 104 A Range of Responses: Renewal and Reform 109 The Epigramma Paulini: The Moral and Metaphorical Meanings of Barbarian Invasion 115 Betwixt and Between 121 Metapoetics 123 Usurpation and its paradoxes 126 Sulpicius, Jerome, and the Search for a Gallic Literature of Reform 132 A Proliferating Poetics of Reform 140 4: A Double Life: Paulinus of Pella’s Eucharisticos 146 A Divided Self 146 The Paradoxes of the Eucharisticos 149 The Terms and Conditions of Paulinus’s Confession 152 Doctrina Duplex 157 The Ephemeris 160 Retraction, Renewal, and Reform 164 The Social Logic of an Answered Prayer 168 Paulinus of Pella vs. Salvian of Marseille 173 5: Announcing Renunciation: Sidonius Apollinaris and Poetic Disavowal 177 Sidonius the Poet 177 Surviving the Fall of the Western Roman Empire 182 Sidonius the Convert 190 The Conversion of Literature and the Renunciation of Poetry 196 Ep. 9.13: Both Horace and Not 201 A Conclusion: Ep. 9.16 206 6: The Poet and the Virgin: Avitus of Vienne’s De Consolatoria Castitatis Laude 213 In the Shadow of Sidonius 213 Avitus’s World: Bishops and Burgundians, Ascetics, and Aristocrats 215 Poetic Theory and Practice: the Prologue to the De spiritalis historiae gestis 222 The Problem of Episcopal Eloquence: A Detour to Arles 225 Framing the CCL 229 The Ascetic Poetics of the CCL 233 Epilogue: Beyond Gaul–Ennodius of Pavia’s Eucharisticon 244 Ennodius, Eucharisticon [438/op. 5] 254 Bibliography 261 Editions Of Primary Texts 261 Secondary Literature 265 Index 283