Whatever we now may think of Jerome’s archaic nuptial analogy, it is clear
enough that the wall of partition between pagan and biblical culture has
proven much more permeable by the fourth century than might have seemed
possible on the basis of the famous quotation from Tertullian. Marriage is
decidedly acontrary to Montanism, even metaphorically speaking. Indeed,
when Jerome goes on to cite a large bibliography of Jewish and Christian
writers (including fathers of the church), bishops, and apologists, all of whom,
he notes, have made deft use of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, and Quintilian
to extend the reach and defend the claims of the gospel, he has already begun
to indicate the superior explanatory power of his narrative for our under-
standing of the growth of Christian philosophy and humane learning in the
West. As Henri de Lubac has shown,^6 Jerome’s argument becomes a medieval
commonplace, by means of which allegorical practices in textual interpret-
ation are enabled to draw on both biblical and classical precedent simultan-
eously, and through which Roman poets such as Virgil and Ovid and not only
biblical authors are found by their Christian readers to have written real
‘truth’. This in turn allows the pagan authors to become credible authorities,
even in Christian theological discourse.
In this regard Jerome’s argument is an echo of Origen and Clement
of Alexandria from the mid-second century.^7 But it is evident that pagan
writers have not set the Christian agenda. Clement was a master of Greek
literature, yet he celebrated the Hebrew Scriptures as ‘wisdom in all its
splendour’, distinctive and superior to the Hellenic foundation (Exhortation
1.2.2–3;Stromateis6.11.95–6). In Clement’s writings, as Wilken notes,‘the
Bible emerges for thefirst time as the foundation of a Christian culture’(56).
Actually, then, Jerome can build confidently upon an already established
classical culture for which the Scriptures have become, implicitly (when not
explicitly) the new primary foundation. Intellectually, as time goes on, mar-
riage proves unsurprisingly more fruitful than abstaining from embrace;
progeny abound, and in their turn become fruitful. To continue with Jerome’s
metaphor, however, the language this progeny speaks is no longer Greek, but a
vernacular version of what the reader’s preface to the 1611 King James Bible
calls‘the language of Canaan’and southerners in the United Sates call‘the
language of Zion’. Even as metaphor, this indicates a cultural fact of decisive
importance: Scripture has become formative for vernacular idiom.
Genetically speaking, the subsequent development of the humanities
disciplines in Western culture cannot be fully understood apart from an
appreciation of scriptural husbandry and, if I may use the term somewhat
(^6) Henri de Lubac,Exégèse médiévale: les quatre sense de l’écriture, 4 vols (Paris: Aubier, 1964);
vols 1 and 2passim.
(^7) Robert Louis Wilken,The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God(New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003) offers the best recent account.
164 David Lyle Jeffrey