The last two decades have seen several monographs and collected volumes dedicated to the question of how Latin poetry became Christian.[1] Some have focused on Christian poets’ reception of their Classical antecedents. Others have asked how contemporary linguistic theory and aesthetics shaped change. David Ungvary’s book takes a fresh approach, reading the poetry of fifth-century Gaul against contemporary ascetic discourse to show how the Christianization content of these works mirrored the poet’s own conversion experiences. The result is a book that is as much about conversion as it is about verse. For this reason, it offers much to students and scholars of late antique Christianity and of late antique poetics. Moreover, Ungvary’s focus on Gaul allows for the exciting opportunity to read well-studied works alongside more obscure texts.
An introductory chapter establishes the goals of the book. Much of the poetry on which Ungvary focuses contends with a question that was important in the fifth century: whether poetry was merely frivolous or if it could be useful for Christians. Ungvary claims that this tension drove some poets to transform their art into a genuine ascetic practice, and this transformation took on characteristics of conversion. This argument situates literature within its social context, which Ungvary sketches with the help of contemporary writings on politics, ritual, and prayer.
Ungvary begins with an example of a poetic conversion. In 386, Augustine encouraged a young poet named Licentius to reorient his inner life without abandoning the poetry that he loved. Rather, Licentius was to continue writing verses about erotic love, only with a focus on the danger it can bring. Ungvary argues that this kind of converted literary practice exemplifies an “integrative asceticism” (28) that accommodated elements of secular culture for ascetic purposes. When Augustine later sent Licentius to Paulinus of Nola for further instruction, Paulinus responded with a letter in verse that both justified ascetic verse and imitated Augustine’s method of argument. Ungvary shows how this letter was a lesson in imitation, which taught Licinius how to emulate a teacher. The notion that asceticism was a “science of imitation” (37) informs Ungvary’s view of the phenomenon throughout the rest of the book.
In his second chapter, Ungvary turns to prose works to delineate competing views of ascetic practice in early fifth-century Gaul. The first form of ascetism considered by the author is associated with Sulpicius Severus, who established a new form of Latin hagiography and founded an integrative ascetic community. His asceticism converted aristocratic otium and spiritualized the Classical, Sallustian form of biography. A second form of asceticism, associated with John Cassian, also adapted Roman otium and rhetoric, but held different views on literature. Cassian’s educational program challenged rhetoric on the grounds that it obscured the truth, even as it adopted the vocabulary and pedagogical techniques of a traditional, rhetorical education. Cassian’s goal was to build an alternative canon composed of Biblical texts and his own writings, which sought to explain without frills how people could orient themselves toward purity of heart. Eucherius of Lyon offered a third path, an asceticism that incorporated aristocratic literariness. This detour away from verse helps the reader situate the poetry of the following chapters within contemporary debates on traditional intellectual frameworks.
Ungvary’s third chapter is his most ambitious, arguing for a unified poetics among certain works written after the various barbarian incursions over the Rhine in the early fifth century. He does this by setting the anonymous (or pseudonymous) Ad coniugem, Epigramma Paulini, and Carmen de providentia Dei against the De reditu suo of Rutilius Namatianus and the prose dialogs of Sulpicius Severus. Ungvary shows how the Epigramma Paulini inverted its Virgilian hypotext to direct the reader’s focus from physical to spiritual reconstruction. Generic mixing and a gradual revelation of the poem’s artificiality presented poetry itself as a poison while offering a paradoxically poetic antidote. The Carmen de providentia Dei and Ad coniugem also called for conversion through formal features. The former underwent a metrical conversion from an elegiac lament on the deficiencies of the age to a proposal in hexameters of solutions. Likewise, the Ad coniugem deployed the anacreontics of light verse and wedding poetry to call for a turn to chastity within marriage. Much of this chapter deals in the close reading of poems and adds considerably to our appreciation of them. The chance to consider these poems together is exciting, and the argument that their formal features undergo conversion so as to convince their readers to do the same is compelling.
The fourth chapter, which focuses on the Eucharisticos of Paulinus of Pella, is perhaps the most successful. This challenging poem appears to be a prayer of thanksgiving to God. Its author was an aristocratic Gallo-Roman who lost his wealth and home and underwent a conversion, while still remaining ambivalent about his faith. Ungvary offers a solution to the open question of whether this poem was a private and sincere prayer or a public attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of the author. In a preface to the poem, Paulinus claimed that he was adapting his earlier ephemeris, though it is uncertain what he meant by this. The standard interpretation is that he was working from a prose diary, but Ungvary argues that the statement also affiliated Paulinus’s poem with Ausonius’s earlier Ephemeris, which contained for the first time a personal prayer in verse. The chapter argues convincingly that the Eucharisticos refuted a contemporary view on the efficacy of prayer, which held that only the prayers of people removed entirely from the world were heard. The poem, instead, offered proof that one can turn to asceticism and offer efficacious prayer while remaining in society. This chapter adds a helpful interpretation of one of the more challenging works of fifth-century Latin verse. At the same time, it shows what can be gained by reading this literature against contemporary ascetic discourse.
The fifth chapter also offers insightful close readings, here of works by Sidonius Apollinaris. Sidonius won literary prestige through secular poetry early in his career, but he later underwent an ascetic conversion and renounced poetry. Paradoxically, in this notional retirement, he continued to read and write, though in a more anti-literary way. Ungvary shows how we can understand Sidonius’s unconventional literary career to be part of two larger stories. The first is that of the centrality of literary Latin to Roman identity in the second half of the fifth century. The second is that of an “otherworldly” (175) turn in the ascetic discourse, which succeeded in encouraging Gallo-Roman nobles to give up their wealth and to take ecclesiastical roles. Rather than merely abandoning his pledge, Sidonius used his anti-literary reading and writing to challenge the culture from which he had turned. In perhaps the best reading of the book, Ungvary shows how Sidonius’s Ep. 9.13 accepted an invitation to write Horatian asclepiads, but then refused to give the audience what it wanted from them. A similar invocation and clever rejection of Horace’s model appear in Ep. 9.16, where Sidonius acknowledged his own everlasting monument, but portrays his poetic career as something worthy of shame.
In his sixth chapter, Ungvary turns to the nephew and devotee of Sidonius, Alcimus Ecdicius Avitus. More specifically, he focuses on the De consolatoria castitatis laude, which Avitus wrote to encourage his sister in her asceticism. Avitus’s rules for the content and style of poetry mirrored the caution that her religious life demanded. Ungvary contrasts Avitus’s poetics with the sermo humilis of his contemporary, Caesarius of Arles, while stressing that both presented a theory of Christian speech that fit ascetic practice. Avitus represents a later stage in a process by which poets became less interested in Roman identity and more concerned both with the accurate communication of true belief and with proper behavior in religious life.
In an epilogue on Ennodius of Pavia’s Eucharisticon, Ungvary gestures toward the larger stakes of his project. Ennodius wrote his Eucharisticon after the fifth century and outside of Gaul, yet Paulinus of Nola and Sidonius were important models for him. By the sixth century, the poetics of asceticism that developed in Gaul in the fifth was available for reuse, and it would be taken up again by later authors including Boethius and Venantius Fortunatus. This epilogue includes a translation of the Eucharisticon that Ungvary prepared with his student, Rachel Hodes, a gesture toward the appeal that this book will have for students and professional scholars, alike. The strongest sections of it offer close readings of individual poems and add to our appreciation of them. While more analysis of Latin poems would have been welcome, Ungvary’s synthetic approach to the poetry of fifth-century Gaul allows us to see how better and less well-studied poems fit together in contemporary debates about verse and conversion. It emerges that poetry and conversion were both complex undertakings, and different people approached them in different ways. Converting Verse makes a helpful and honest contribution by showing how much each can teach us about the other without losing sight of that complexity.
Notes
[1] For a brief overview of recent scholarship on Latin poetics in Late Antiquity, see C. O’Hogan, “Thirty Years of the ‘Jeweled Style’,” in The Journal of Roman Studies 109 (2019), 305–314.