Jerome having it both ways

After this week's reading, I'm even more intrigued by the use of rhetorical toys for the sake of argument. That is, one can pick up a topic, situation, or verse and spin it to make the point at hand. This is such a classical thing to do - squeamishness over internal consistency is more characteristic of our time. Perhaps some of it has to do with version control, but overall I'm accustomed to classical texts going for the "both/and" rather than the "either/or." Myths have various endings geared towards various morals, origin stories have various beginnings to emphasize various values, etc. Even in the works of one author, the "both/and" prevails. Tibullus gets his urban amor in the country, Seneca uses travel to illustrate iam the benefits of leisure reading iam the lack of leisure for reading, we could go on and on. In Jerome's letters, the very specific issue of a 7-month marriage is handled very differently at different times.

In letter 127, Jerome points out that Marcella was widowed after being married less than 7 months. She goes on to earn the highest honors of Christian widowhood, dedicating herself to chastity, hanging out with all the right kinds of virgins, even meriting an elaborate comparison with Anna. Blaesilla, on the other hand, was also widowed after being married approximately 7 months. She, however, must always play second fiddle to Eustochium, bearing cruces every day, yet reaping 60 instead of 100-fold. Jerome paints a woeful picture of Blaesilla, having missed out on virginity-for-life, and yet missing the pleasures of marriage for the rest of her dedicated virginity. These are two very different pictures of widowhood - one an example for all to follow, the other a cautionary tale for all to learn from. And they're not just any two widows - they had been widowed for the exact same amount of time, a very specific detail that Jerome needn't have included.

So, why the 7-month period? When I was reading letter 127, I thought Jerome picked out that particular detail so he could make his comparison with Anna all the more convincing. (He is careful to say less than 7 months, and then compare it to Anna's 7 years... could it have been 4 or 5 months?) But the appearance of the same 7-month marriage situation in another letter suggests something different. Could this be Jerome picking up a rhetorical toy, and bending it to his present argument? I thought in letter 127 he was doing the same thing with his quotes from Romans. Given the memorability of the strangely specific (and unusual, one would think) 7-month marriage turned widow, this seems even more like a pointed example of demonstration of rhetorical skill.

Now let me back-peddle a little bit. I'm not entirely convinced we can't chalk this up to coincidence. It is possible that Jerome didn't notice this 7-month situation appearing in such disparate contexts in his letters. Certainly he would have had a lot of time between the composition of each epistle, and I'm not sure how important consistency over such issues would have been to Jerome. Even if consistency was important to him, Miller's article, suggesting that Jerome's textualization of Eustochium's body was a failure, gives me a little bit of license to suggest that maybe this is simply an instance where all of Jerome's ideas simply aren't holding together. Ultimately I'm inclined to give Jerome the benefit of the doubt and treat this like a complex problem, rather than a lazy slip (lest I fall into that dreadful category of scholars who lament about how poor certain works are before they understand them).

But here's the kicker - the significance section to my unprecedentedly long blog post. Why is it that I'm intrigued by, amused by, impressed by, Seneca's both/and technique, but I'm disturbed by Jerome's? (Whether or not it's actually there in this case, the reaction itself still warrants discussion.) I think the issue has to do with the category of "necessary trustworthiness" Jerome falls into after translating the Vulgate. As with translating any sacred text, the transmission of "the original" becomes of utmost importance, and the role of the translator is usually minimized to the faithful conveyance of the source text. Whatever we think of Jerome's Vulgate translation (another issue entirely), I find it so interesting that I seem to have carried over my expectations for Jerome-the-Biblical-translator to Jerome-in-every-other-piece-of-writing. Jerome playing the game of rhetoric for his present agenda suggests that there were agenda that could have snuck into his translation, intentionally or not. Obviously the epistles and the Vulgate are categorically different, and we can expect Jerome to have treated them differently. But somehow I seem to have been influenced by this notion that since Jerome translated a sacred text, the stakes are higher for his general trustworthiness. Hence the squeamish feelings when Jerome misapplies a scriptural quote or turns on a dime from one argument to another about 7-month marriages. I don't think it's an appropriate reaction, but a culturally interesting one nonetheless - I think we've all seen Jerome and other church fathers idealized or censored in interesting ways. So the ultimate question for reception studies is, how can one work change the reception of and interpretation of later works? That is, how does a work allude to another work simply sharing an author?