Virgil is a poet famously interested in fathers and sons. But does his poetry also have things to say about the Father and the Son? As Thomas W. Dilbeck demonstrates, Latin Christian authors in late antiquity believed that it did, while also turning to Virgil when examining the role of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity. Dilbeck’s slim monograph succeeds in showing how Virgil shaped particular areas of late-antique Christian trinitarian thinking. In the process, he adds to the now developed picture of late antiquity as a borderland period, when language and ideas flowed between the classical and the Christian to produce a richly hybrid textual and religious landscape. Yet counterbalancing the strengths of the book are some significant problems that limit its value as a contribution to the study of both early Christianity and Virgil’s reception.
Dilbeck’s monograph consists of an introduction, five chapters, a conclusion, and an appendix. This is a lot to squeeze into the 150 pages of the book, and each section is necessarily short; the brevity is most extreme in the second chapter, which comes flickering in at all of six pages, including bibliography. Within those tight confines, Dilbeck covers sharply bounded terrain: focusing on “a very small sampling of the enormous number of quotations and allusions [to Virgil] found in the Latin Fathers,” he examines “those [found] in discussions concerning the Trinity,” (p. 29), and then only those that respond to Eclogues 4, the “messianic eclogue,” and Aen. 6.724–27, the beginning of Anchises’ great cosmological speech in the underworld. The aim is to uncover how certain Christian authors understood, and at times tendentiously forced, the Virgilian material to anticipate, confirm, or harmonize with aspects of Christian thought and doctrine. Dilbeck centers his study on the fourth Eclogue and Aen. 6.724–27 “because [they] seemed to be important to the Christian writers in question, and also because Christian authors quoted from them in a unique way” (p. 29). While the first part of this certainly seems true, Dilbeck does not make a convincing case for the second—indeed, he cannot do so without a comprehensive study of Virgilian quotations/allusions among Christian authors. One might also suspect, perhaps ungenerously, that Dilbeck’s explanation for why he restricts himself to the two texts is a mask for the practical necessity of making his labor manageable, rather than losing himself in the vast forest of Virgilian echoes in early Christianity.
Dilbeck’s work is at its best in his fifth chapter, when he explores how Christian authors quoted or alluded to Aen. 6.724–27 in passages on the Holy Spirit. He begins the chapter with Ambrose, examining how he refers to the spiritus described in the Virgilian lines that pervades and nourishes the world to explain the role the Holy Spirit played in creation (pp. 72–79). Dilbeck shows a strong command of pneumatological controversies in the fourth century, while also interpreting Ambrose’s thinking with real theological and historical insight. After brief discussions of the poets Proba and Paulinus of Nola, Dilbeck then concludes the chapter with a lengthy examination of Jerome (p. 82–93). Once more, the level of erudition and analysis impresses: Dilbeck moves comfortably between Hebrew and Latin, and between poetry, philosophy, and religion, to illuminate Jerome’s approach to the Holy Spirit across several passages.
Other chapters in the book all have their moments of strength; particularly compelling is Dilbeck’s discussion in Chapter Three of how Minucius Felix and Lactantius incorporate Aen. 6.724–27 to help explain God’s simultaneous immanence and transcendence (pp. 36–44). But that discussion also embodies a larger problem in the book: it raises questions about what Dilbeck’s subject really is and therefore about the clarity and coherence of his approach. In laying out his topic, Dilbeck relates that he will focus on the Trinity not only on p. 29, cited earlier, but also when introducing the book on p. 1 (“especially as they [the quotations of/allusions to Virgil] expound upon notions related to the Christian concept of the trinity”). This strongly suggests that Dilbeck will focus on the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, i.e., on how the three persons coexist and relate to one another as a unity, as he does in parts of his fifth chapter.[1] Instead, Dilbeck mainly examines how Latin Christian authors use Virgil to discuss the three persons of the Trinity individually: thus Chapter Three deals with ways of thinking about God alone, and Chapter Four with the fourth Eclogue and Christ alone ,which creates confusion over what Dilbeck actually means by the Trinity.
It is only in the second chapter that he provides a short overview of his methodology (p. 29). Yet Dilbeck does not in fact explain his interpretive method; instead, he gives a few examples of Christian references to Virgil from Ambrose and Jerome to illustrate their citation techniques. He argues that these figures “are generally representative of how Christian writing in Latin quoted the works of Rome’s most celebrated poet” (p. 32). This is far too sweeping a point to make from the limited material that Dilbeck presents. What, for instance, of Augustine (mentioned just in passing on p. 33)? And how about Christian poetry, given that Christian poets so pervasively imitate and allude to him?
A handful of other shortcomings further compromise Dilbeck’s effort. The s In the potted literary history of Virgil’s influence in antiquity in Chapter One, Ovid, Lucan/Seneca, and the Flavians each get a paragraph, (p. 6), and even in the longer overview of late antiquity, there is little on Augustine (p. 10), and nothing on, e.g., Ausonius, Claudian, biblical epic, or Prudentius (but strangely quite a bit, relatively speaking, on Endelechius and the Epigramma Paulini [p. 12-14]).
Even with its flaws, Dilbeck’s book warrants attention as a serious and often stimulating study of how Christians read and reused Virgil. In a small and imperfect way, it will help to move readers toward seeing late antiquity as the binary-busting period it was, when Christianity stood both outside and inside classical culture, and when the poetry of Virgil was often a meeting point between the pagan and the Christian.
Notes
[1] One might also expect Dilbeck to treat Trinitarian disputes in late antiquity; yet while there are occasional references to Arianism (p. 57-58, 85-86), Dilbeck largely–and explicitly (p. 2)–bypasses them.