Nordic authors we owe to Christians, even and perhaps especially to monastic
communities of Christians.^3 To be sure, there were convoluted attempts by some
monastic librarians to justify holding on to texts which were not only pagan in
the religious sense but, as in the case of Ovid or Catullus, wondrously lewd, even
pornographic: the incongruity has led to quite a bit of learned humour. But there
is more to it. To take but one example, the thirteenth-century allegorizations of
Ovid represent a tenuous but nonetheless prodigious medieval effort to baptize
works of art which could not, in their native garb (or maybe lack of it), have been
licitly embraced.^4 None other than Jerome himself defended a notably generous
citation in his own writings of thoughtful pagan authors, but did so ingeniously
by an appeal to worthy precedent, namely the practice of biblical authors
themselves. In a kind of early Christian‘defence of poetry’he thus established
a pattern of argument and of intellectual/textual practice which tells us much
about how it will be biblical and not Roman authors who would eventually
provide the apologia for humane learning generally, as well as a platform for
method and pedagogical application.
Jerome asserts that the Jewish biblical authors themselves make learned and
thoughtful use of Middle Eastern and Hellenic pagan literature. On the author-
ity of Josephus, he ascribes particular borrowings to biblical books of the law, the
prophets, and the Wisdom books; modern scholarship has confirmed many of
his ascriptions in detail.^5 He notes further that in the New Testament, St Paul
quotes from the Greek poets, such as Epimenides (Titus 1:12), Menander
(1 Cor. 15:33), and Aratus (Acts 17:28). This, he says, so far from representing
an impurity of purpose on the part of the apostle (or syncretism either), merely
establishes a breadth of learning self-confident enough that Paul can make
skilful,fitting, often ironic use of alien instruments, much as when (he says
rather wryly) David uses Goliath’s own sword to hack off the fallen giant’shead.
Less humorously and yet tellingly for our subject, after citing the Deutero-
nomic laws permitting marriage, after purification, of a captive woman (Deut.
21:10–13), Jerome asks rhetorically:
What wonder...if I also, admiring the fairness of her from the grace of her
eloquence, desire to make that secular wisdom which is my captive and my
handmaid a rightful matron of the true Israel? (Letter70.2)(^3) Buford Scrivner,‘Carolingian Monastic Library Catalogs and Medieval Classification of Know-
ledge’,Journal of Library History15/4 (1980), 427–44; see Domenico Comparetti,Vergil in the Middle
Ages, trans. E. F. M. Benecke (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Winthrop Wetherbee,
Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972).
(^4) Robert Edwards,Augustine and Ovid to Chaucer(London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006);
Jeremy Dimmick,‘Ovid in the Middle Ages’, in Phillip Hardie (ed.),The Cambridge Companion
to Ovid(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
(^5) See, for example, F. F. Bruce,New Testament History(New York: Doubleday, 1972), 45–6;
311 – 13; also Robert M. Grant,Historical Introduction to the New Testament(New York: Harper
& Row, 1963), 211.
Scripture in theStudiumand the Rise of the Humanities 163