________________ CHAPTER EIGHT ________________

Jerome and His Dreams

When I was living in the desert, in that vast solitude . . . , inflamed by the burning heat of the sun, how many times did I imagine myself amid the delights of Rome! . . . Although in my fear of hell I had condemned myself to this prison, with scorpions and wild beasts as my only companions, I was often surrounded by troops of dancing girls. My skin was pale with fasting but, though my frame was chilled, my mind was burning with desire, and the fires of lust bubbled up while my flesh was barely alive.1

AS THIS passage attests, the man who wrote it was possessed of a lively imagination, enhanced in no small part by a considerable rhetorical flair: he was Jerome, the eminent Biblical translator and commentator of the late fourth century. Jerome included this steamy memory in a letter to a young Christian woman named Eustochium, a letter whose aim was, in part, to warn her about the dangers of sexual desire. When he wrote this letter in 384 C.E., Jerome was no longer living with scorpions in the desert but rather in Rome, well-connected both to the Pope and to circles of aristocratic Christians eager to learn from this erudite teacher.² Yet, despite his change in circumstance, the memory of his unfortunate visionary experience in the desert, a memory by this time some ten years old, was still strongly charged with feeling.³ Dismissive of the passing of time, the images of Jerome’s tormenting fantasies continued to operate in the inner space of his mind.

Jerome knew that dreams were phenomena of the psyche, expressive of mental rather than literal seeing. His comment on the biblical prophet Daniel—that his visions were properly said by Scripture to be “in his head” rather than in his eyes—might well have been applied to his own inner seeing as well.⁴ This, however, was the only similarity between Jerome and Daniel for, by and large, Jerome was an unhappy dreamer. His visions—of dancing girls and other urban delights—were not prophetic but rather reflective of the struggle of the ascetic with persistent sexual desire.

Jerome did not call his desert fantasies dreams; yet, if his experience is placed in the context of the well-documented problematic of the monastic struggle with obsessive sexual imaginings, it may well have been an oneiric experience. Living chaste lives in the desert, monks who were attempting to tame their bodies saw erotic visions and dreams, often in the form of seductive women.⁵ Most were not as lucky as Abba Elias, whose dream of being castrated by angels relieved him of his desire.⁶ Rather, as Aline Rousselle has observed, “By day the conscious mind found that when it wanted to concentrate on prayer it was besieged by thoughts and visions of women. At night, dreams would wake the hermits.” As she goes on to say, distinguishing between waking dreams and dreams that occur in sleep is difficult in this context—I would say, probably impossible.⁷ Seen in this light, Jerome’s fantasies, too, can be construed as oneiric phenomena. In any case, whether their status was that of waking visions or nocturnal dreams, these imaginal experiences were important to Jerome. He did not doubt that such ephemeral images were searingly alive as accurate indicators of psychic struggle—a struggle, as we shall see, in which Jerome was reaching toward an altered sense of self-identity.

Although he did not write on dreams or oneiric theory in a sustained way as his contemporaries in the Greek East, Gregory of Nyssa and Synesius of Gyrene, were to do, Jerome was familiar with his culture’s differentiated views on oneiric phenomena. Remarks scattered throughout his works reveal his knowledge of the classification of dreams into the two broad categories of truth-telling dreams, especially of the premonitory and predictive type, and dreams that are either insignificant or false.⁸

Concerning the category of insignificant and false dreams, Jerome quotes a passage from Tertullian’s De anima in which the emotive affect of dreams is dismissed as an aspect of illusory movements of the soul during sleep. Such emotion-packed images, says Jerome, are not to be taken seriously: if one person attempts to incriminate another on the basis of a dream, he should heed prophetic teaching against belief in dreams, “for to dream of adultery does not lead me to hell, nor does dreaming of a martyr’s crown elevate me to heaven.”⁹ Using his own nocturnal adventures as proof, Jerome remarks, “How often have I seen myself dead and placed in a tomb! How often have I flown over the earth, carried over mountains and seas as if swimming in the air! One might therefore compel me not to live or to have wings on my back, because my mind has often been deluded by such vain imaginings.”¹⁰ Jerome goes on to give further stock examples of these “vain imaginings” (vanis imaginibus): the beggar who dreams of riches, the thirsty people who dream of drinking water. These non-significative dreams are what Artemidorus called enūpnia, dreams that simply reproduce the conscious preoccupations of the dreamer.¹¹

Jerome also knew the psychobiological theory of dreaming, which connected dreams with the digestive process and so dismissed them as vehicles of significant meaning.¹² In the same letter in which he recounts his visions in the desert, he refers sarcastically to the religious pretensions of some Christian widows whose chaste life-style was more apparent than real: “After a rich meal,” he remarks, “they go to sleep and dream of the apostles.”¹³ Even the dreams of these women are a sham; they are simply the psychic by-product of overeating. Finally, Jerome also knew the Christian view pertaining to the demonic inspiration of dreams. In his Life of Hilarion, he pictures the monk at night, fending off the mocking and frightening visions sent by evil spirits with the sign of the cross, and, most notably, suffering the demons’ oneiric tricks of appearing to the sleeping monk in the form of naked women.¹⁴

With regard to meaningful dreams, Jerome was familiar with theories of divine inspiration as well as theories about their predictive value, whether as moral warnings or as symbolic bridges between the present and the future.¹⁵ Like Tertullian, he read scriptural stories like those in the book of Daniel about Nebuchadnezzar’s dreams as affirmations of the view that pagans and sinners as well as morally upright people can receive true dreams, although understanding them is the province of saints.¹⁶ Further, his critique of some who think that every dream they receive is divinely inspired reveals his view that some dreams are indeed authentically revelatory and god-sent.¹⁷

This latter kind of dream is, in fact, the type for which Jerome supplies examples. In his Life of Paul the Hermit, Jerome recounts how the monk Anthony was inspired by a divine dream to seek out the eremite Paul, his venerable predecessor in the desert.¹⁸ In a letter to his good friend Marcella, one of the ascetic women in Jerome’s circle of aristocratic friends, Jerome wrote about the dream of the father of another of these women, Asella.¹⁹ Before Asella was born, Jerome writes, her father dreamed of a brilliant crystal bowl, purer than any mirror. The dream was a prefiguration of Asella’s future; she would adopt a virgin life-style and thus become an unspotted mirror of divine blessing.²⁰ Here Jerome draws on a long cultural tradition of premonitory dreams that reveal a person’s future vocation,²¹ and he also shows his knowledge of the semiotic register of dream-speech wherein oneiric signs demand interpretation, for the metaphoric resonance between a sparkling crystal bowl and the ascetic profession of an unborn baby is not immediately clear. In the case of this dream, Jerome’s method of interpretation is strikingly like that of Artemidorus; perhaps with the aid of Asella herself, he has read the sign of the dream “backward” from its known outcome and has then presented the sign as an allegory of the future.²²

It would seem that the dreams in which Jerome was most interested were those, like the dream of Asella’s father, that were connected in some way with virginity and monastic or ascetic life-styles. A striking example of Jerome’s fascination with ascetically oriented dreams, as well as his view of dreams as premonitions, is the dream he tells in yet another letter to an aristocratic woman. Laeta was the daughter-in-law of Jerome’s dear friend Paula (mother of the young woman named Eustochium to whom Jerome had written about his visions in the desert).²³ Laeta had written to Jerome for advice about how to bring up her young daughter in the properly ascetic way, and in the section of his response in which he warns Laeta not to adorn her daughter with jewels, fine clothes, and cosmetic refinements, Jerome tells Laeta the following cautionary tale about how inner purity should be mirrored in outward appearance. There was once, writes Jerome, a noblewoman named Praetextata, who was married to the uncle of Eustochium, the young virgin mentioned above. Praetextata “changed Eustochium’s dress and appearance” by having her hair waved, “desiring to conquer the virgin’s resolution and her mother’s wishes.”²⁴ In the evening of that very day, Jerome continues, an angel with a terrible face appeared to Praetextata in her dreams. Threatening her with punishment, the angel said, “‘Have you dared to touch the head of a virgin with sacrilegious hands? This very hour, those hands will wither, and, feeling tormenting pain, you will recognize what you have done, and at the end of the fifth month you will be led to hell.’” “All these things were fulfilled in turn” is Jerome’s triumphant conclusion to the story.²⁵

Unlike the enigmatic dream of Asella’s father, this dream belongs to the theorematic category of dreams in which dream-image and event correspond exactly.²⁶ Although Jerome does not call attention to the taxonomic status of this dream, he is clearly aware of the phenomenon and does not doubt the possibility of this kind of literal interchange between oneiric image and historical fact. What Jerome appears to value most about this dream is its theological affirmation of asceticism and especially female virginity. Like Tertullian before him, he drew on the witness of punitive dream-angels for moral support in his campaign to reshape the body along rigorous ascetic lines.²⁷

Adhering to a perspective similar to that of Artemidorus, Jerome emphasized the material conditions of the symbolic process of dreaming. The dreams that he chose to present have a strikingly physical quality, and they alert the dreamer to his or her condition in quite concrete ways. Even in those cases in which dreams are said to be non-significative or demonically inspired, like the widows’ dreams and the monk Hilarion’s visions, they are used by Jerome to make a point about the dreamer’s life. The point is typically conveyed by reference to the person’s body, particularly insofar as the body is related to the ascetic life-style and its attendant dangers. The “true” dream-images, like the crystalline “body” of the virgin Asella and the withered hands of Praetextata, both idealize the virginal state and warn against sullying it.

Unlike Artemidorus, however, Jerome did not draw on a large vocabulary of oneiric images. Instead, it was the body that provided the central signifying ground in the dreams that interested him. Especially intriguing is Jerome’s tendency to use images of the body that he thought were negative—the withered hands, the naked women and dancing girls—to argue positively for a remaking of the body in ascetic terms. Jerome used this method of interpreting such “negative” images of the body positively on his own dreams as well as on those of others. Indeed, Jerome’s use of such oneiric images was part of his program of revisioning the body ascetically. This may explain why he did not present his own visions in the desert as demonic dramas, as he did in the case of Hilarion. Those visions, as oneirically constructed signs of the body’s treachery, were for Jerome too important to dismiss because they functioned for him as vehicles for self-reflection. They allowed him to berate himself, thus negatively reinforcing the positive ascetic ideal of release from physical desire.

Jerome recorded what is now his most famous dream in the same letter to the virgin Eustochium in which he had narrated his tormenting visions in the desert. Jerome recounts his dream to Eustochium in the course of advising her not to be overly stylish either in her pronunciation of words or in her choice of reading material. Such affectations, whether of speech or literature, are not becoming to an ascetic; indeed, Jerome calls them an “adultery of the tongue,” using a sexual metaphor that extends the arena of sexuality considerably beyond the body.²⁸ Like the body, language too can be an instrument of desire. Jerome follows this statement linking language to desire with a paraphrase of Tertullian: “What has Horace to do with the psalter, Virgil with the gospels, Cicero with the Apostle?”²⁹

As though in direct answer to those questions, Jerome then narrates his dream. He prefaces the narrative of the dream with a brief account of the beginning of his ascetic practice: unable to give up his beloved library, he would fast—only to be able afterward to read Cicero as a reward for his labors. So too with Plautus and, by implication, the rest of the secular corpus that he so admired. Sadly, he remembers, the style of the Scriptures seemed rude and repellent by comparison.³⁰ It was while Jerome was in this vacillating state of mind that he fell ill, and in the midst of this illness he dreamed the following dream:

Suddenly I was caught up in the spirit and dragged up to the tribunal of a judge. . . . Asked about my identity, I replied, “I am a Christian.” And he who sat [behind the tribunal] said, “You are lying; you are a Ciceronian, not a Christian; for where your treasure is, there is where your heart is also.” Immediately I became mute, and, amid the floggings—for he had ordered that I be beaten—I was tortured more strongly by the fire of conscience, pondering within myself that verse, “In hell who shall acknowledge you?” Nevertheless I began to cry out and woefully to say: “Have mercy on me, Lord, have mercy on me.” Amid the lashings this sound rang out. Finally those who were standing around, falling down on their knees before the one who was presiding, begged that he have mercy on my youth and give me the opportunity for penitence. There would be more torture at a later point if I were ever again to read pagan literary books. . . . I began to make an oath and, calling on his name as witness, I said “Lord, if at any time [in the future] I possess pagan writings or read them, I will have denied you.” Dismissed after this oath, I returned to the upper world. . . . This was not an idle dream. . . . My shoulders were black and blue, and I felt the bruises after I awoke from sleeping. Thenceforth I read the divine books with much more eagerness than I had read the books of human beings.³¹

It is likely that Jerome was presented with this dream during the Lenten season of 374 C.E., about a year before he retreated to the Syrian desert near Chalcis.³² Some interpreters have seen the dream as a second conversion that settled Jerome’s crisis of conscience concerning what being an ascetic Christian entailed.³³ From this perspective, the dream both reflected and resolved the conflict between what Kelly has described as Jerome’s “enthusiastic world-renouncing aspirations on the one hand, and his wholehearted delight in the classical, humanist culture, to which everything he wrote at the time bears witness, on the other.”³⁴ Other interpreters, however, have downplayed the significance of the dream, either by dismissing it as a product of the delirium that accompanies illness or by doubting its authenticity, seeing it merely as a rhetorical contrivance for proselytizing on behalf of ascetic practice.³⁵

It is true that Jerome did not keep the promise he made in his dream regarding the reading of secular literature, because later in his life he devised a theory for the judicious use of such literature by Christians.³⁶ It is also true that the letter in which the dream is narrated, indeed even the account of the dream itself, is studded with allusions to the very classical texts that he had supposedly foresworn.³⁷ Nonetheless, I agree with Kelly that the dream was an authentic and moving experience for Jerome.³⁸ In the first place, in the letter to Eustochium the dream is formally parallel to his account of his visionary experience in the desert. Jerome remembers himself as caught between two irreconcilable attachments in both cases. Just prior to his retreat to the desert, the dream presented Jerome to himself as the locus of a clash between two cultures, one secular and one religious; once he was in the desert, his visions of women’s bodies showed Jerome that he was caught between an ascetic view of the body and an obsessive eroticism. The structural similarity between these two oneiric sequences suggests that both are authentic reflections of Jerome’s divided state of mind at that time in his life. He was suffering the return of what he was trying to repress: Cicero and the dancing girls would not give way to Scripture and chastity.

In the second place, there is the important fact that Jerome never denied the authenticity of the dream. In the letter to Eustochium, he insists that his experience was not a vana somnia, an “idle dream.”³⁹ It is true that, some sixteen years later, Jerome appears to have reversed himself, using his own dreams of flying, dying, and so on as proof that dreams are vanae imagines, “vain imaginings.”⁴⁰ However, Jerome wrote this remark in an apologetic treatise in which he was defending himself against an attack by his old friend, now turned enemy, Rufinus. Rufinus knew how Jerome had used his dream in the letter to Eustochium and had accused him of subsequently breaking his oneiric oath never to read secular literature again.⁴¹ In response, Jerome objects to being taunted with a “mere dream”; but he also says that the promise made in the dream pertained to the future and that, if he still quotes secular literature, it is from memory, which he can’t erase, and not from his post-oneiric reading practices.⁴² Thus, in this defensive context, Jerome tried to occupy both sides of the issue and ended in the curious position of slighting dreams as airy fantasies while at the same time affirming, even heightening, the importance of the impact of one particular dream on his life.

Jerome viewed his dream as divinely inspired, like the dream of Praetextata. Also like hers, Jerome’s dream was premonitory, and frighteningly so, because the avenging figure in his dream is not simply an angel but a figure of the Christ as judge.⁴³ Further, both of these dreams are good examples of the way in which dreams were viewed in Graeco-Roman culture as semiotic constructs that functioned as a means for articulating inchoate thoughts and emotions. Dreams provided a language for interpreting life’s experiences while one was in the midst of living them; it was a language that allowed for reflection on the meaning of one’s actions.⁴⁴ Thus Praetextata was, by Jerome’s account, shocked into a recognition of the error of her actions, while Jerome himself was presented with a forcefully articulate picture of his own situation of vacillation, a situation that the dream both reflects and reformulates. As a “detective of his heart’s secret,” the dream made Jerome fully conscious, at last, of his schizoid swing between denial and gratification.⁴⁵

By his own testimony in his apologetic treatise against Rufinus, Jerome was a prolific dreamer. However, he chose to emphasize only two of his oneiric experiences, those that he recorded in his letter to Eustochium, and both are used as a vehicle for warning Eustochium about the difficulties of the ascetic life. In the form of his oneiric memories, Jerome presents himself as a counter-example of the image to which he hopes Eustochium will conform. Furthermore, from his repertory of dream-images he chose those that focused on the body, on his body, which he offers as a negative sign of his attempt to reimagine the body along the lines of an ascetic ideal that he viewed as a positive one. Particularly telling in this regard is Jerome’s account of the movement of his flagellated body from oneiric into conscious reality. Bruised and battered, his body functions as a sign of a dramatic change of consciousness. In this oneiric image, which Jerome sets forth for Eustochium to “view” in the text of his letter, the negative and positive values of the body-as-sign coalesce. For Jerome, the physical body is also a psychic “body,” and both can carry positive and negative charges in the ascetic context in which they have meaning for him. Thus his black-and-blue body points to his abject condition, felt both literally and spiritually, as well as to his change in perspective, which again is not only spiritual but literal, involving a different practice of reading.

As his narrative construction of both of his oneiric experiences makes clear, Jerome directed his program of ascetic reimagining not only at the body but also at the psychic makeup of the self. In his dream of flagellation, for example, it is clear that he conceived of the oneiric body as the signifying ground upon which a new, ascetic version of the whole person could be explored and constructed. Similarly, the visions in the desert point as much toward psychic desire as they do toward bodily needs. Despite all of his talk about the taming of the physical body in order to harness it to the ascetic cause, however, that body remained a problem to Jerome, as his presentation of his own body to Eustochium makes clear. This may be due to one of the central problematics of the role of the body in asceticism, in which the body is both an object of disgust as well as a potential instrument of personal transformation. As Geoffrey Harpham has observed, the ascetic’s attempt to escape the desirable world and to deny gratification to the body’s senses actually “pitched the ascetic into the world of desire,” in which the ascetic was flooded with images that held forth the very pleasures that he was trying to renounce.⁴⁶ Materiality was hard to banish. As Harpham goes on to say, “The desert does not even provide a true refuge from the material world. Sartre speaks of the ‘enchanted’ world of desire as ‘a destructured world in which things have lost their meaning and jut out like fragments of pure matter.’ Objects emerging under the ‘enchantment’ of desire acquire not an ideality but a refined materiality."⁴⁷

As I will argue, the theory of sexuality that Jerome sets forth in his letter to Eustochium can be conceptualized as a theory that attempts to transform the body precisely into “refined matter." Gross physicality is rejected as contaminating, but this rejection makes the body available for use at the level of figuration. It is in this context that Jerome’s use of dreams in the letter is significant. He had ready-to-hand a transformative figurative language in which his theory of ascetic sexuality was both represented and formulated. As Jerome’s understanding of the bodies in his dreams as “negatively positive” signs has already shown, Jerome accomplished the body’s transformation by constructing it in such a way as to distance himself from it; yet the body is retained in the form of bodily metaphors that signify the condition of the inner self. For the ascetic Jerome, the body is useful mainly as a sign of psychic terrain. Again, as Harpham has argued, the ascetic “manages” the material world, which includes especially the human body, by using a discourse composed of “rhetorical and figural substitute[s] for the gratifications of the senses that the ascetic denies himself.” Further, “in such rhetoric, the excluded world makes a triumphantly innocent appearance through a figurality that condemns it only to recover it, essentialize it, and wash it clean of its worldliness. . . . In figurality ascetic writers discovered an element in language that enabled them to recover and, in a sense, control the world they had renounced.”⁴⁸

In the letter to Eustochium, which will be the focus of the rest of this discussion, Jerome used two linguistic forms that function as complementary strategies for washing the body clean of its worldliness, a dynamic in which the negated physical body is more present than ever by means of its figural substitutes. Those two forms—the oneiric writing of his own body and the metaphorizing of Eustochium’s body by means of scriptural images—all serve Jerome’s ascetic program by providing mediating discourses in which the self can be transformed and its “matter” refined. Although the letter is addressed to Eustochium, I suggest that it can also be read as a form of self-address in which Jerome, attempting to surmount his own, very problematic, physicality, shifts the apprehension of meaning from the physical to the rhetorical, from the literal to the imaginal, from the profane to the scriptural. Through all of these shifts, the ascetic paradox of the absent-present body structures Jerome’s writing and infuses the letter with that sense of unfulfilled—indeed, unfulfillable—desire that Harpham argues is at the heart of asceticism.⁴⁹

By his own admission, Jerome was a lover of words. Late in his life, he reports that he still dreamed of himself as a youth, “curly-headed, dressed in my toga, declaiming a controversial thesis in front of the rhetorician.”⁵⁰ It is thus not surprising that he turned to language as the medium for exploring the conundrums of the ascetic life and particularly for transferring passion from the physical to a spiritual register. In his letter, there is a net of relationships in which the body, desire, and language are intertwined; the forms in which this intertwining occurs will be the focus of what follows. I am going to explore each of these mediating discourses in turn, with a view toward demonstrating how Jerome’s use of narrative accounts of his own dreams in this letter was crucial to his strategy of reimagining the self in ascetic terms. I will begin with Jerome’s remaking of the body of Eustochium by translating it from the physical to a spiritual register by means of scriptural images.

Jerome wrote his letter to Eustochium in 384 C.E. during his second sojourn in Rome.⁵¹ These were heady days: consultant to Pope Damasus, spiritual advisor to a circle of talented and wealthy Christian women, Jerome was riding high on the crest of rigorous ascetic doctrine that he was urging on the Roman church.⁵² This letter is generally considered to be the finest expression of his ascetic doctrine, a “systematic theory of sexuality.”⁵³ Eustochium was an adolescent girl who had already dedicated her life to ascetic practice, and to perpetual virginity in particular.⁵⁴ To her Jerome wrote a very long letter characterized by one interpreter as “the greatest slander of women since Juvenal’s sixth satire.”⁵⁵ Eustochium, it should be noted, was not the one so slandered in the letter; on the contrary, she is highly praised, and Jerome’s estimation of her worth is focused on her status as a virgin. Jerome describes Eustochium almost entirely in terms of her body and her sexuality, which are repeatedly pictured by images drawn from the bridal imagery in the biblical Song of Songs.⁵⁶ Jerome is especially interested in her closed virginal body as a signifier of a soul already “laden with gold,” yet he insists that the object of his letter is not praise of virginity. Rather, his goal is that Eustochium should understand that she is “fleeing from Sodom and should be fearful of the example of Lot’s wife.”⁵⁷

Commentators have noted the oddity of Jerome’s warm friendships with women in the face of his advice to other men to avoid women’s lascivious, contaminating company.⁵⁸ In the case of this letter, there is the further incongruity of sending to a woman a portrait of women that is filled with biting ridicule. There is, however, no doubt that Jerome intended his critique to be religiously instructive. As Elizabeth Clark has pointed out, “[Jerome’s] letters to women are in fact educational devices for Scriptural instruction,” and the letter to Eustochium is no exception with its hundreds of references to biblical texts.⁵⁹

Jerome’s stated intention as author was to warn Eustochium about the dangers to spirituality that were posed by the body, and, on its surface, the letter presents itself as an expression of pastoral care for the moral well-being of its recipient. The explicit intentions of an author, however, cannot always control or limit the meanings that arise from associative movements and configurations of his or her text’s tropes and metaphors. Texts can articulate perspectives and bear significations that are quite different from the announced goals of the author.⁶⁰ Thus in exploring the relationships among body, language, and desire in Jerome’s letter, I am going to follow the metaphorical figurations of the text rather than Jerome’s explicit intention of offering avuncular advice to the daughter of his friend. When the letter is read by attending to the figural languages—oneiric and scriptural—that are used to (re)construct the body, such metaphors as the “flight from Sodom” take on a life of their own apart from Jerome’s vitriolic cautionary tale.

The first mediating form I will consider, across which Jerome transforms the body, pertains to Eustochium. Here the metaphor of the flight from Sodom assumes its full significance. There is a double movement in Jerome’s letter which can be described as a “flight” from the literal female body as well as a “flight” toward a metaphorical female body that is a creation of language, a textual body that is the object of Jerome’s desire.

In the letter to Eustochium, Jerome describes the body in general as “fragile”; it is bestial, it is voracious, but most of all it is sexual.⁶¹ The “Sodom” of the body is its libido, its desire, which “titillates the senses”; even more, “the seductive fire of sensual pleasure floods us with its sweet heat.”⁶² According to Jerome, the body’s major tendency is to be on fire. Speaking against the drinking of wine, he asks, “Why do we throw oil on the flame? Why do we supply kindling-wood to a little body that is already burning with fire?”⁶³

This blazing body is burning with the signifiers of desire. For Jerome, the fiery flesh is not only a physical fact; it is also a psychic landscape or, perhaps better, it is a physical alphabet of the inner person’s most basic drives.⁶⁴ Already it is clear that, in the very act of talking about the body, Jerome is transforming it into a signifier of something else—in this case, the psyche’s erotic impulses. In the letter to Eustochium, it is the physical bodies of women with which Jerome is seemingly most concerned. The sensuality and lewdness of women is described in terms of their bodies: what they wear, what they eat and drink, the color of their skin, their gestures, their pronunciation of words are all paraded before the reader’s eyes.⁶⁵ From the pompous display of a rich widow distributing alms, to the women who disfigure their faces and lower their voices to a whisper to simulate fasting, women’s physicality is presented as both disturbing and disgusting.⁶⁶

Dismayed by the pornographic bodies of women, which he interprets as though they were texts to be inspected for clues to psychic flaws, Jerome proceeds to transform those bodies by reimagining them linguistically, using Eustochium as his model for what Harpham called “refined materiality.” The female body, fearful for “its power to articulate itself,”⁶⁷ is rearticulated by Jerome. This re-articulation is based on what Jerome presents in his letter as criticism of the public behavior of Roman Christian women, whom he had observed firsthand. However, it has been shown convincingly that Jerome’s “observations” are not straightforward descriptions but caricatures. He based his portraits on the rhetorical conventions of Roman satire and mimicry.⁶⁸ The conceit of this aspect of the letter is a critique of religious pretension, which disguises the rhetorical indebtedness of the text to a literary technique. But the satirical rhetoric of the text disguises another of the text’s figurations, which is Jerome’s re-articulation of the too-open body of woman as the closed body of the virgin.

Women’s bodies were disturbingly open for Jerome not only because they were obviously open to sexual penetration. Rather, encoded in that openness was the dangerous strength and persistence of that fiery desire that Jerome came to identify with the flesh, where “flesh,” as a signifier of one aspect of the body, is already a metaphorical substitute for the body as a whole, although it can also signify the sexual condition of the literal body.⁶⁹ Writing, for example, about good and bad virgins, Jerome argues that virginity is not only a condition of the body, but also of the inner self. Virginity may be lost even by a libidinous thought: such are “evil virgins, virgins in the flesh, not in the spirit.”⁷⁰ Jerome goes on to argue in this passage that physical virginity in itself is not salvific; indeed, the nonvirginal mind shows that the literal body’s virginity is a sham. Jerome appears to be caught in an interpretive dilemma: on the one hand, the literal bodies of women are blatant signifiers of psychic libido and other moral flaws; but on the other hand, as in the case of the evil virgin, the literal body can lie, presenting a false mirror of the soul.

Because of the semiotic problems presented by the female body, I suggest, Jerome moved away from the literal physicality of women altogether, and he did so by shifting to a figurative mode of interpretation in which the psyche is described with bodily metaphors. To return to the evil virgins: following his statement that their virginal flesh does not reflect a virginal spirit, Jerome then characterizes loss of virginity in the inner self with bodily metaphors drawn from Scripture. Such women will be found with their skirts over their faces, opening their legs to all who pass by.⁷¹ Using images of prostitution from the biblical prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel, who had themselves appropriated the female body metaphorically as a sign of spiritual debasement, Jerome moves from the semiotically unstable physical body to a textual body that does not lie.⁷²

In his discussion, Jerome has shifted his focus from the actual physicality of women (whose grossness is apparent even, or especially, in his caricatures) to bodily metaphors used to describe psychic states. It is at the level of physical metaphor that Jerome’s rewriting of the female body takes place, and it is there that he will construct an erotics of asceticism. As Jerome distances himself from the libidinal contagion of literal female bodies, the “blaze” of the body burns more brightly in the metaphorical constructions of his text. With regard to Eustochium, whose body will be a sign of Jerome’s own desire, it is the transmutation of the physical body into a textual—specifically, a scriptural—body that is most striking, and that engages Jerome’s interpretive energy.

Jerome begins by giving Eustochium the usual ascetic advice, encouraging her in the course of action that she had already undertaken. Counseling avoidance of wine and delicate food, he pictures Eustochium’s body reductively as “a rumbling stomach and fevered lungs,” both of which are images that he has drawn rather arbitrarily from scriptural passages.⁷³ Eustochium’s body is not only reduced to three of its organs, it cannot even be understood apart from textual references. The body’s physical needs, like eating and drinking, can corrupt the soul; in order for a soul to flee from its own Sodom, it must have a newly inscribed body, rewritten in scriptural metaphors. Much of Jerome’s practical advice to Eustochium repeats this movement from the physical to the metaphorical. Paradoxically, the virginal body is achieved at the expense of the actual physical body; biological femaleness is not overcome or erased but transformed by being absorbed into scriptural texts.⁷⁴ Once safely textualized, its materiality refined by a figural whitewashing, that body was ready for use as a signifier of theological desire.

It is when Jerome writes Eustochium’s virginity as such, as differentiated from advice on how to avoid losing it, that the displacement of the physical by the metaphorical is most stark and also most voluptuous. The virginal body breaks the biblical curse: “Death came through Eve, but life through Mary. For that reason, the gift of virginity comes forth more richly in women because it began from a woman.”⁷⁵ The virginal body is most essentially a female body, yet it becomes the site for Jerome’s drive toward signifying his ascetic ideal, applicable to men as well as to women. Although physical woman, as Jerome so satirically shows, is “nothing,” her textual body is really “something,” and it provides the space for a stunning theological articulation of desire.⁷⁶

Jerome accomplishes the transformation of Eustochium’s physical body into a metaphorical body by way of tropes from the Song of Songs. From the many images offered by this biblical poem, Jerome draws almost exclusively on two kinds: images of closure and images of seductive sexual foreplay. Eustochium is, as Jerome often says, God’s bride, and as such she lives in a “paradise of virginity.” Textually speaking, paradise is found in a scriptural love poem, where Eustochium is the Shulamite, the bride, the black but comely one who, in Jerome’s words, has been “washed white” (dealbata).⁷⁷ The coarse and disturbing physicality of her body, characteristic of all women’s bodies, has been whitewashed in the course of its transformation into a poetic body of Jerome’s construction. It is an imaginal body that becomes a signifier of desire precisely because of its closure.

Again practically speaking, Jerome advises Eustochium to stay inside her house.⁷⁸ Thus domestically sequestered, she is doubly enclosed, and the physical space of her enclosure underscores the psychic significance of her virginity. Jerome’s imaginal articulation of her enclosed body places her, however, in the king’s chamber of the Song of Songs.⁷⁹ This is no ordinary room, but a bridal chamber, a space of sexual love. Eustochium’s refined body is for Jerome “a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed,”⁸⁰ but this closing of the body does not end erotic desire. It intensifies it.

Jerome’s choice of the king’s bridal chamber and the enclosed garden as images that articulate Eustochium’s body leads directly to the other set of images from the Song of Songs to which he appeals. The king desires his bride and will lead her into his chamber with his own hand; he will kiss her, and she will seek him by night; he will put his hand through the opening and her inner body will be moved for him.⁸¹ As Jerome remarks, “Desire is quenched by desire”: the imaginal body is an erotic body of the highest degree; it is the text of inner desire.⁸² Thus, across the mediating discourse of scriptural images, Jerome can “safely” contemplate the female body as he could not do in the desert; as a metaphor of spiritual desire, that body has been distanced from its own physical reality and appropriated for the ascetic cause.

Interpreters have noted how peculiar it is to find such sensuous language in a text that argues for rigorous asceticism. In his biography of Jerome, J.N.D. Kelly, for example, observes that “it is ironical to reflect that, in urging a young girl like Eustochium to crush the physical yearnings of her nature in the effort to surrender herself the more completely to Christ, he should feed her fantasy with such exciting images.”⁸³ Similarly, Geoffrey Harpham makes the following comment on Jerome’s use of the scriptural scene of sexual foreplay: “The difference between the pleasures of the figural bridegroom and those of any literal one is not altogether clear; one cannot say with complete confidence that ascetic Sport’ is altogether non-erotic.”⁸⁴ To Kelly’s sense of the irony of Jerome’s use of the Song of Songs in an ascetic context and Harpham’s sense of the blurring of boundaries between the literal and the figural, I would add Julia Kristeva’s understanding of the Song of Songs, which will help to show the appropriateness of Jerome’s use of this love poem in his rewriting of the female body.

Kristeva notices that union is not achieved in the Song of Songs. There is no sexual intercourse. “Conjugal, exclusive, sensuous, jealous—love in the Song of Songs is indeed all of that at the same time, with in addition the unnameable of carnal union.”⁸⁵ Love in the Song of Songs is “sensuous and deferred”; never fulfilled, the erotic sensibility in this poem is “indissolubly linked with the dominant theme of absence, yearning to merge,” such that the poem is “a legitimation of the impossible, an impossibility set up as amatory law.”⁸⁶ The Song of Songs constructs erotic love in such a way that its climax is always deferred, never quite reached, yet it holds out union as the end toward which the lovers strive. Desire is continuously kindled but never satisfied.

For Jerome, too, union was the ideal. It was his “amatory law.” As he says in the letter to Eustochium, “Flesh desires to be what God is” (cum caro cupit esse, quod deus est).⁸⁷ Like the “unnameable” of the carnal union of the bride and the bridegroom in the Song of Songs, however, the union of flesh with God is perpetually deferred but also tantalizingly seductive in its ongoing appeal. As Harpham has suggested, “Asceticism is essentially a meditation on, even an enactment of, desire. . . . While asceticism recognizes that desire stands between human life and perfection, it also understands that desire is the only means of achieving perfection, and that the movement towards ideality is necessarily a movement of desire.”⁸⁸

Jerome chose to move toward ideality by reconfiguring the female body as a text that could mediate between the flesh and God. Eustochium’s virginal body, which closes the fearful articulation of women’s physical bodies, becomes a poetic text, but the paradox is that her imaginal body is still articulate, but now its message is one of theological desire. Interestingly, the overtly erotic body with which Jerome endows the ascetic Eustochium carries a strong positive charge, while the erotic dancing girls of his dreams in the desert were negative signifiers. It is as though Jerome’s dreams showed him the need to re-evaluate the eroticism that his culture associated with women. From this perspective, his dreams formed the foundation upon which his imaginal version of Eustochium’s body was constructed.

Jerome accomplished his movement from the bodies of the dancing girls to Eustochium’s body without relinquishing sexual metaphors. His persistence is using such language is understandable when placed in the context of a series of remarks by the Italian novelist Italo Calvino. In one of his literary-critical essays, Calvino wrote that “the language of sexuality makes sense only if it is placed at the top of a scale of semantic values. When the musical score needs the highest and lowest notes, when the canvas requires the most vivid colors: this is when the sign of sex comes into operation. . . . The positive or negative connotation that accompanies the signs of sex in every single literary production determines how values are assigned within the text.”⁸⁹ Asceticism was Jerome’s musical score, and he used the language of sexuality to hit the highest and lowest notes—Eustochium and the dancing girls respectively. This helps to explain how the figuration of women’s bodies in Jerome’s letters signifies more than social critique or satiric exercise in misogyny. Their bodies were important as figurations, both negative and positive, of life lived ascetically. While the dancing girls hit the low note of the temptations that asceticism fosters, the paradisal body of Eustochium hits the high note by providing a space for an expression of the erotic desire that asceticism only seemingly denies.⁹⁰

Why did Jerome choose the female body for the articulation of his erotics of asceticism? It has already been noted that Jerome wrote to Eustochium that virginity, as the gift of Mary, was in a sense engendered as female. Thus the female body is the more appropriate one for ascetic signification. Accordingly, in the letter Jerome develops a theory of ascetic sexuality whose positive metaphors are female, but the theory applies to men as well as to women—and, given the letter’s self-referentiality, it applies particularly to himself. Woman’s erotic body has become a text to be read by women and men. The erotic ideal of a theological union that is never consummated— that is to say, the constant desire for God, for what is other-than-oneself— has been encoded as female.⁹¹ What is other to the self, which constitutes the goal of the self’s desirous yearning, is figured as woman, for whom Eustochium stands as a sign.

Just as his dreams provided Jerome with a set of images that he used to engage reflectively with the emotional difficulties of ascetic practice, so his discourse about Eustochium provided the opportunity to articulate a theory of sexuality that redirected those very emotions, harnessing them for rather than against the ascetic vision of reality. Jerome’s statement that “desire is quenched by desire” needs to be taken seriously as an indication of his awareness that the remedy for eros is not denial but displacement.⁹² In the context of the letter, Eustochium functions as a figural substitute that defuses the unbridled eroticism of Jerome’s visions in the desert while at the same time allowing eros a role to play in asceticism. In a sense, the metaphorizing discourse about Eustochium’s body worked for Jerome as the magical spells of attraction worked for those who sent them: both strategies provided therapeutic means for dealing with strong erotic impulses by projecting them on a visual screen of an “other” who is a mirror of the self and its desires.⁹³

It should be noted that eroticism is here understood, as it was in the case of the oneiric love spells of magic, as a desire for what is other to the self. As Anne Carson has explained, “eros denotes ‘want,’ ‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing.’ The lover wants what he does not have.”⁹⁴ Construing desire as “want” catches nicely the ambiguity inherent in the concept, a simultaneous feeling of yearning and recognition of absence. Desire fulfilled would no longer be desire. This is as true of theological as it is of carnal desire, a fact that makes Jerome’s use of the Song of Song’s dynamic of unfulfilled and so continuously present desire so fitting as a trope of ascetic desire.

It should also be remembered, however, that in Graeco-Roman antiquity intense desire was thought to be a “diseased state affecting the soul and the body” in which eros was “described in a pathology of physical and mental disturbance.”⁹⁵ While Jerome presented the imaginal body of Eustochium as a sign of the cure of erotic disease, his presentation of his own body remained pathological rather than curative. He did try to shift the grounds for determining his own ascetic identity from the physical to the imaginal plane, and he did so by narrating his dreams, thus making his oneiric body into a written text, useful for reflection. However, the visual representations of his body in the text of the dreams show that body to be a battleground and not a serenely closed vehicle for theological desire like Eustochium’s body. Perhaps Jerome found that it was easier to shift the sexuality of another person from the literal body to the medium of language than it was to shift his own.

Jerome’s ascetic project of providing figural substitutes for the body in order to find a safe space for the expression of eros was problematic when that body was his own because of the type of figuration that he had found to be most appropriate for achieving real distance from physicality and its untamed eroticism. As we have seen, Jerome does accomplish the transformation of Eustochium’s body into language, the true medium of ascetic sexuality, as Harpham has argued.⁹⁶ However, she does not assume the character of language in general, but of a specific language, the language of Scripture as found in the Song of Songs. This was not a language that was available to Jerome for the erotic textualization of his own body because, as Peter Brown has observed, “the language of the Song of Songs . . . came, in the course of the fourth century, to settle heavily, almost exclusively, on the body of the virgin woman.”⁹⁷ Jerome did not have access to the kind of scriptural metaphor of desire that he used to construct Eustochium’s body as an ascetic text.

Interestingly, Jerome made one attempt in the letter to textualize his own body by using a female metaphor drawn from Scripture. Describing to Eustochium his struggles with the “bubbling fires of lust” in the desert, Jerome casts himself in the role of the sinful woman of Luke 7.37-50, who had washed the feet of Jesus with her tears and dried them with her hair. “Helpless,” Jerome wrote, “I threw myself at the feet of Jesus, watered them with tears, dried them with my hair, and I subdued my resistant body with weeks of fasting.”⁹⁸ Sadly, this attempt at encoding his body with a scriptural metaphor was not theologically satisfying for Jerome. Unlike his troping of Eustochium’s body with an erotic metaphor of virginity, Jerome troped his own body with an image of prostitution, and it served only to remind him of his own lost virginity: “I do not blush with shame [in the face of] my wretchedness, rather I lament aloud that I am not now what I used to be.”⁹⁹ This failed attempt at textualizing his body with a scriptural metaphor suggests the difficulty that the encoding of virginity as female presented for Jerome, because the literal male body is not easily metaphorized with images of closure and intactness. This may explain Jerome’s fascination with Eustochium’s body as the most appropriate field for the cultivation of ascetic virtue: as a paradigm, her body functioned as an erotic allure that fired his ascetic longings as well as his attempts to conceive his own body in an imaginal way.

It appears that Jerome was doubly bound by his physical maleness and loss of virginity and by his inability to find a scriptural metaphor that would, by textualizing his body, safely remove him from the fiery libido of the flesh. Nonetheless, he experimented with a language to use for articulating his desire, and that language was one of oneiric memory. This experiment, I suggest, can be seen as a step in Jerome’s journey toward the paradigmatic goal that he so forcefully expressed under the sign of “Eustochium.”

The space of Jerome’s letter to Eustochium consists of oddly juxtaposed passages in which the presentation of Eustochium’s idealized body gives way to Jerome’s presentation of his own body. These shifts of focus are accompanied by shifts in language, for while the language of Scripture applies most successfully to Eustochium, the language of remembered dreams applies to Jerome. There is a passage in Aristotle’s Rhetoric that can provide a helpful interpretive framework for understanding Jerome’s presentation of his body in this way. Aristotle defined desire as “a reaching out for the sweet”; in her discussion of this passage, Carson explains that he goes on to say that “the man who is reaching for some delight, whether in the future as hope or in the past as memory, does so by means of an act of imagination (phantasia).’’¹⁰⁰ Desire is encoded imaginally, that is, in languages of figural perception. While Jerome did not have the imaginative code of the Song of Songs to use in constructing his erotic body, he did have the language of dream-memories, a language that deals, in Aristotle’s terms, with both the past and the future. It was this language that Jerome used to “reach for delight” as he investigated the possibilities for articulating an imaginal body for himself.

There are two places in the letter to Eustochium where Jerome’s body is figurally present. The first is his memory of his visionary experiences in the desert, in which he composes an image of his remembered body with metaphors of libido. In this written version of his memory, Jerome presents himself as a lustful bag of bones, tormented body and soul by physical and psychic heat.¹⁰¹ The second is his nightmare, a brutal projection of his future should he continue in his Ciceronian reading habits and, implicitly, a hopeful forecast of a literary life wholly devoted to Scripture.¹⁰² These two references to his person accord well with Aristotle’s sense that desire, the reaching out for delight, is configured imaginatively either in terms of the future or the past. However much a nightmare experience of the future and a memory of tormenting visions may not seem to partake of delight, both oneiric memories are exercises of phantasia and both are grounded in eros.¹⁰³

The language of oneiric memory is erotic because it participates in lack— and here I petition the “wanting” and “lacking”dimensions of eros, discussed above, that give the term erotic a meaning that is more encompassing than “mere” delight. In oneiric memory, the imagination constructs as present objects that are literally absent. “Eros is lack,” and, as Freud and many others both ancient and modern have shown, “that which is known, attained, possessed, cannot be an object of desire.”¹⁰⁴ What Jerome did not possess was his body, that is, the metaphoric body that would make union with God, the goal of his desire, possible. In written memories of dreams, then, Jerome constructed an imaginal body, a move that paradoxically both displaced his literal body and underscored its problems all the more forcefully.

The other of the self that Jerome desired was the ideal face of his soul’s divinity, the union of his flesh with God.¹⁰⁵ Such unachievable perfection was tauntingly seductive, and I suggest that it was with a sense of the impossibility of what was nonetheless an “amatory law” that Jerome dreamed and remembered his body. What he found there, however, was lack and an uncomfortable feeling that something was missing, that his body was too “open” and not yet virginally “closed.” Carson has written in this regard that, “reaching for an object that proves to be outside and beyond himself, the lover is provoked to notice that self and its limits. From a new vantage point, which we might call self-consciousness, he looks back and sees a hole. . . . Desire for an object that he never knew he lacked is defined, by a shift of distance, as desire for a necessary part of himself.”¹⁰⁶ Having constructed his paradigm in his figural translation of Eustochium’s body, Jerome then used dreams to explore his own body as part of his journey to a closed “female” body of his own.

Just prior to the account of his visions in the desert with which this chapter opened, Jerome had been telling Eustochium about the inner heat that attacks the senses: “lust [libido] titillates the senses” and “the seductive fire of sensual pleasure floods us with its sweet heat.”¹⁰⁷ Such inner heat, for Jerome a phenomenon both physical and psychological, apparently reminded Jerome of the literal heat of the desert sun; it was a libidinal theory of the body that triggered his memory. He closes the narrative about the visions of dancing girls by saying, “I feared my cell as though it knew my thoughts.”¹⁰⁸ As with Eustochium, Jerome pictures himself as enclosed, he in a cell, she in a garden. Her garden, however, is sealed, while his cell opens on a torrid landscape of psychic fever.

Peter Brown has described this narrative as an “artistically brilliant contraposto of the sweltering body of the monk and the untamed sexual drives of his mind.”¹⁰⁹ However, apart from the opening reference to the burning desert sun, Jerome describes his body as literally icy cold, his flesh as good as dead. The literal pallor and chill of a body ravaged by ascetic fasting was not matched by a cooling of desire; indeed, Jerome’s libidinal imagination was producing very erotic visions. As with the evil virgin described earlier, Jerome’s literal body was not a trustworthy mirror of the condition of his psyche. I suggest that Jerome’s picture of himself as exusta solis ardoribus, “inflamed by the burning heat of the sun,” is a portrayal of his imaginal, not his literal, body. Exusta, from exuro, can carry the metaphorical sense of “inflamed” as well as the literal sense of “burned” or “dried up.”¹¹⁰ Whatever one might say about his actual body, it was the “body” of his imagination that was on fire.

It was this kind of passage that led an older generation of scholars to view the basis of asceticism as a dualistic split between body and soul; hatred and therefore punishment of the body were the complement of spiritual devotion.¹¹¹ A newer generation of scholars has almost completely reversed this view. In the words of Brown, “Seldom, in ancient thought, had the body been seen as more deeply implicated in the transformation of the soul; and never was it made to bear so heavy a burden. . . . In the desert tradition, the body was allowed to become the discreet mentor of the proud soul.”¹¹² I agree with this perspective as an overview, but in Jerome’s case I think it needs to be qualified. Given his flight from the actual body and his attempts to construct a paradigm of an ideal body whose “matter” is refined, the question that presents itself is, Which body served as mentor to the soul? It would appear that only the oneiric body, the body-as-metaphor, could serve Jerome as psychic tutor.

In his narrative presentation of himself in this memory-space of desire, Jerome has taken the steps he took when writing about women’s bodies: he has noted his own gross physicality, and he has then shifted his vision to a bodily metaphor—the chorus of girls—to signal his psychic condition. What he has not yet attained, however, is a safe figural substitute that would allow him to express his erotic drives in a register other than the carnal. The one scriptural image that he does find and that he quotes just after his narrative of his visions, the Lukan image of the penitent prostitute, only underscores his dilemma. Lacking, then, a transformative scriptural body, Jerome remained too open to the fearful articulations of his libido. Only by assuming the character of language in the mode of the chaste eroticism of the Eustochium-paradigm could Jerome unite his physical and psychic bodies in that “third” body where erotic expression could be given free rein.

Harpham has written that the man who went to the desert had placed himself “under a virtual obligation to reinvent himself.”¹¹³ The self of the ascetic in the desert was an unfinished work of art for whom “the personal is the trivial; it is that which must be sacrificed in the interests of form. ”¹¹⁴ This was exactly Jerome’s situation in the desert—at least, this was Jerome’s situation in his written account of his experience in the desert. In this textualization of his memory, he was struggling to banish the personal and, like his view of Eustochium, to become the form of his own imaginal body. That he took a step toward the final chiseling of himself in the desert is not part of his narrative to Eustochium, but we know from elsewhere that he did take that step, and he did it in and by language.

Given the specific scriptural images that Jerome used to rearticulate Eustochium’s body, it is interesting that, while he was in the desert, he asked Rufinus to send him a copy of a then-popular commentary on the Song of Songs.¹¹⁵ It would seem that, burning with oneiric “heat” as he was at that time, he needed textual images of eroticism to gratify his desire. The language of the Song of Songs was not, however, the language that provoked a turn in Jerome’s relation with carnality; rather, that language was Hebrew.

In a letter written some thirty years after his stay in the desert, Jerome wrote:

When I was a young man walled in by the solitude of the desert, I was unable to resist the allurements of vice and the hot passions of my nature. Although I tried to crush them with repeated fastings, my mind was in a turmoil with sinful thoughts. To bring it under control, I made myself the pupil of a Christian convert from Judaism. After the subtlety of Quintillian, the flowing eloquence of Cicero, the dignified prose of Fronto, the smooth grace of Pliny, I set myself to learn an alphabet and strove to pronounce the hissing, breath-demanding words.¹¹⁶

Language—in this case, the scriptural language of Hebrew—provided Jerome with a refuge from his body. But it also proved itself to be an erotic outlet, with its “hissing words” that made him literally “pant” for breath.¹¹⁷ Only by submerging his desire in a language that took his breath away could he begin to experience the closure for which he longed. Jerome had discovered that his fasting could not satisfy the voracious hunger of his inner self. Contrary to his ascetic expectations, a hungry body did not make for a chaste psyche.¹¹⁸ Like the haiku poet who said,

I can’t eat all this

lust

Jerome found another way in which to engage his desires.¹¹⁹

Jerome’s goal was to cure his body through language. The idea that language might be a therapy of the body is not unique, it would appear, to contemporary psychoanalysis; it was already at work in Jerome’s quest for healing.¹²⁰ In the account of his famous dream of flagellation induced by secular literary tastes, there is explicit evidence of a conviction that a new language, the language of Scripture, could bring Jerome closer to the refined self of his desire. This dream presented to Jerome the “other” of his Ciceronian self, which was a healed self no longer torn between competing languages. Yet, given the Graeco-Roman convention, and Jerome’s own recognition, regarding the future-oriented nature of dreams, this dream presented to Jerome a picture of a self that did not yet exist. The dream was a text of desire, founded on lack. Further, because the source of dreams was located in otherness—in God—the dream presents the dreamer to himself as “written” by what is other to himself. The “I” of the dreamer is estranged from its conventionally constituted self, decentered, and reformulated.

Harpham notes that St. Anthony urged his followers to write down their dreams, thus “moving textuality into the undisclosed regions of the self.”¹²¹ From this perspective, Jerome’s dream is doubly textual and also doubly disclosive. Written in the letter to Eustochium, the dream is a text that is about text, and it reveals not only an undisclosed region of Jerome’s self but also an unknown aspect of his body. For Jerome, writing down his dream issued in a textualization of the unknown self that he desired, that is, the self that could express desire theologically rather than carnally. This was so because language, as Jerome knew, was itself a medium of sexuality that could be either adulterous, as he remarked to Eustochium, or chastely erotic, as in the virginal images of the Song of Songs. Thus the dream’s demand that Jerome move from Cicero to Scripture was a demand that redirected Jerome’s desire as well as his reading material. As I remarked earlier, in the oneiric experiences that Jerome reports in the letter, Cicero and the dancing girls are structurally parallel; they belong together as images that mirror both each other as well as that untamed libido from which the ascetic needs to escape.

Just as Jerome shifted the apprehension of meaning from Eustochium’s literal body to a figural, scriptural one, so his dream shifted the grounds of his own self-awareness. Like a specter, his black-and-blue body floated before his eyes as a signifier of his ascetic desire. Encoded in those oneiric bruises was Jerome’s longing to reinvent himself in terms of scriptural images. More so than his memory of the visions in the desert, this dream encapsulates and brings to expression the intricate relationships among body, desire, and language that fuel the letter’s exploration of ascetic desire. Furthermore, the dream—an imaginal form of apprehension, as Jerome knew—was a fitting vehicle for his ascetic drive to shift the grounds of selfidentity from the physical to the spiritual arena.¹²²

In fact, Jerome used the discourse of dreams in his revisioning of Eustochium’s identity as well. The most heavily eroticized passage in Jerome’s letter to Eustochium, in which her body is aroused by the sexual foreplay of the bridegroom, is presented by Jerome as a dream! Here are his words: “The secrets of your bedchamber always guard you; your bridegroom always sports with you on the inside. Do you pray?: you speak to the bridegroom. Do you read?: he speaks to you. And, when sleep comes upon you, he will come behind the wall and put his hand through the opening and touch your inner body, and trembling you will rise up and say, ‘I am wounded by love.’”¹²³ In this passage, the two discourses that mediate Jerome’s theory of ascetic sexuality come together: at its most erotic pitch, Eustochium’s metaphorized body is oneiric. As imaginal forms capable of representing the self’s desire for what it is not, dreams served Jerome well as vehicles for the ideal ascetic self, wholly external to its own carnality but voluptuous nonetheless, ephemeral in its figural composition yet tangible as a textual “magnet for erotic interest.”¹²⁴

A written dream is a curious combination of the ephemeral (the dream) and the permanent (the text). Thus the dream-as-text is a paradoxical construction that matches perfectly the paradox of chaste eroticism that formed the basis of Jerome’s ascetic theory. Jerome could not, finally, do without his dreams, for they reflected both the substance and the form of his revisioning of the identity of the self.

¹ Jerome, Ep. 22.7.1-3 (CSEL 54.152-53).

² See J.N.D. Kelly, Jerome, pp. 80–103.

³ For the date of Jerome’s retreat to the desert, see Kelly, Jerome, p. 46.

⁴ In Dan. 1.28 (CCL 75A.791); see also Dulaey, Le Rêve, p. 62.

⁵ Rousselle, Porneia, pp. 150–51; Brown, The Body and Society, pp. 230–34.

⁶ See p. 108–9 above.

⁷ Rouselie, Porneia, p. 151. On the difficulty of distinguishing between dream and vision, see also John Hanson, “Dreams and Visions in the Graeco-Roman World and Early Christianity,” pp. 1407–8.

⁸ See Dulaey, Le Rêve, pp. 61–63, and Amat, Songes et Visions, pp. 217–19.

⁹ Tertullian, De an. 45.4 (ed. Waszink, p. 62); Jerome, C. Ruf. 1.31 (PL 23.423C).

¹⁰ C. Ruf. 1.31 (PL 23.423C).

¹¹ See pp. 80–81 above.

¹² See pp. 42–51 above.

¹³ Ep. 22.16.3 (CSEL 54.164). See also In Hierem. 23.25 (CCL 74.225), where Jerome criticizes those who think that all dreams are spiritually revelatory.

¹⁴ Vita Hilarionis 6–7 (PL 23.38); on the relation between dreams and demons, see pp. 63–65 above.

¹⁵ For theories pertaining to meaningful dreams, see pp. 81–83 above.

¹⁶ In Dan. 1.29 (CCL 75A.792); see Tertullian, De an. 47.2 (ed. Waszink, p. 65).

¹⁷ In Hierem. 23.25 (CCL 74.225).

¹⁸ Vita Pauli 7 (PL 23.22B).

¹⁹ For discussions of Jerome’s friendships with Marcella and Asella, see Kelly, Jerome, pp. 92–96, and Elizabeth A. Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends, pp. 44–45, 76–77.

²⁰ Ep. 24.2 (CSEL 54.215).

²¹ Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 218.

²² See pp. 83–91 above for Artemidorus’ interpretive techniques.

²³ Kelly, Jerome, pp. 273–75.

²⁴ Ep. 107.5.2 (CSEL 55.296).

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ See p. 82 above on theorematic dreams.

²⁷ See pp. 66–70 above for Tertullian’s use of dreams.

²⁸ Ep. 22.29.6 (CSEL 54.188).

²⁹ Ibid. 22.29.7 (CSEL 54.189); for Tertullian’s famous exclamation, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem, or what has the Academy in common with the church?,” see his Praescr. haer. 7 (CSEL 70.10).

³⁰ Ep. 22.30.2 (CSEL 54.189).

³¹ Ibid. 22.30.3-5 (CSEL 54.190-91).

³² Kelly, Jerome, p. 41; for the date of the dream, see J. J. Thierry, ‘The Date of the Dream of Jerome,” 28–40.

³³ Kelly, Jerome, p. 41; Amat, Songes et Visions, p. 222.

³⁴ Kelly, Jerome, p. 43.

³⁵ For the view that Jerome’s dream was due to delirium induced by illness, see Paul Antin, “Autour du songe de Saint Jerome,” pp. 354, 364–65; on the dream as a rhetorical device, see Dulaey, Le Rêve, p. 62, and Pierre de Labriolle, “Le Songe de St Jérome,” pp. 227–35.

³⁶ Ep. 70 (CSEL 54.700-708); see Kelly, Jerome, pp. 43–44.

³⁷ David S. Wiesen, St. Jerome as a Satirist, pp. 119–27; see also Kelly, Jerome, p. 43.

³⁸ Kelly, Jerome, p. 43.

³⁹ Ep. 22.30.6 (CSEL 54.191).

⁴⁰ C. Ruf. 1.31 (PL 23.423C); see above, pp. 206–7.

⁴¹ Rufinus, Apol. 2.6-8 (CCL 20.87-90).

⁴² C. Ruf. 1.30-31 (PL 23.421B-424A).

⁴³ Antin, “Autour du songe de Saint Jérome,” p. 352, points out that the picture of Christ as judge stems from Rom. 14.10 and 2 Cor. 5.10.

⁴⁴ See pp. 54–63 above for a discussion of the reflective qualities of oneiric language.

⁴⁵ For the view of dreams as detectives of the heart’s secrets, see p. 59 above.

⁴⁶ Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism p. 55.

⁴⁷ Ibid.

⁴⁸ Ibid., pp. 70–71.

⁴⁹ Ibid., pp. 45–66.

⁵⁰ C. Ruf. 1.30 (PL 23.422B).

⁵¹ For the dating of Jerome’s letters, I have followed the chronology of Kelly, Jerome, passim (for the date of the letter to Eustochium [Ep. 22], see ibid., p. 100).

⁵² Ibid., pp. 100–101; see also F. Cavallera, Saint Jerome, 1:104-13; Wiesen, St. Jerome, pp. 68–74.

⁵³ Kelly,p. 102.

⁵⁴ For detailed discussions of Jerome’s circle of women friends in Rome, see Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends, pp. 44–79; Kelly, Jerome, pp. 91–103; Philip Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority, and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian, pp. 108–13.

⁵⁵ Wiesen, St. Jerome, p. 164.

⁵⁶ Ep. 22.1.2-5, 2.1, 6.2, 17.4, 24.1-25.1, 26.2, 35.3 (CSEL 54.144-46, 150–52, 166, 176–79, 181, 198).

⁵⁷ Ibid. 22.2.1, 3.1 (CSEL 54.146).

⁵⁸ Wiesen, St. Jerome, p. 164; Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends, p. 45.

⁵⁹ Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends, pp. 47, 75–76.

⁶⁰ For discussions of the issues of authorial and textual intentionality, see Foucault, “What is an Author?” pp. 141–60; Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” pp. 142–48.

⁶¹ Ep. 22.4.1 (CSEL 54.148) and throughout the letter. See the discussion by Brown, The Body and Society pp. 376–77, who remarks that, for Jerome, “the human body remained a darkened forest, filled with the roaring of wild beasts, that could be controlled only by rigid codes of diet and by the strict avoidance of occasions for sexual attraction. . . . Men and women were irreducibly sexual beings” (376).

⁶² Ep. 22.6.4 (CSEL 54.151).

⁶³ Ibid. 22.8.2-3 (CSEL 54.154-55). On the medical view of the body as a “little fiery universe,” see Brown, The Body and Society, pp. 17–20; on Jerome’s reliance on medical advice concerning avoidance of foods, including wine, that might increase the body’s heat, see Rousselle, Porneia, p. 174. Doctors recommended a dietary regimen of cool and dry food for reducing sexual desire (Rousselle, Porneia, p. 19).

⁶⁴ Brown, The Body and Society, pp. 223–37, and Rouselle, Porneia, pp. 141–59, for ascetics’ use of the body to articulate the desires of the soul.

⁶⁵ Ep. 22.8 (CSEL 54.154-56), wine and food; Ep. 22.10-11 (CSEL 54.157-59), gluttony, luxury, dainty food; Ep. 22.13-14 (CSEL 54.160-62), false virgins with swelling wombs, clothing; Ep. 22.16 (CSEL 54.163-64), clothes as signifiers of inner dispositions; Ep. 22.17 (CSEL 54.164-66), skin color; Ep.22.27 (CSEL 54.182-84), physical gestures of false humility; Ep. 22.29 (CSEL 54.186-89), affectations of speech. See Wiesen, St. Jerome, pp. 119–65.

⁶⁶ Ep. 22.32 (CSEL 54.193-95), the rich widow; Ep. 22.27 (CSEL 54.184), simulation of fasting.

⁶⁷ This phrase is from Susan Gubar, “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity,” p. 76. Gubar traces the history, in Western culture, of woman’s body as a “blank page” written on by men, with an emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

⁶⁸ See Wiesen, St. Jerome, pp. 7–15, 119–28 on the satirical elements in Ep. 22.

⁶⁹ Brown, The Body and Society, pp. 376–77, discussed Jerome’s “definitive sexualization of Paul’s notion of the flesh" (emphasis in original).

⁷⁰ Ep. 22.5.3 (CSEL 54.150).

⁷¹ Ibid. 22.6.2-3 (CSEL 54.150-51).

⁷² Ibid. (CSEL 54.151). The biblical quotations are from Jer. 13.26 (“I myself will lift up your skirts over your face, and your shame will be seen.”) and Ezek. 16.25 (“At the head of every street you built your lofty place and prostituted your beauty, offering yourself to any passerby, and multiplying your harlotry.”) (RSV).

⁷³ Ep. 22.11.1 (CSEL 54.158). Jerome supports this image with a concatenation of verses from Job, Ps., Gen., Ex., Matt., Lk., and Ezek.

⁷⁴ For a discussion of other ways in which Jerome attempted to transform the femaleness of his friends, see Clark, Jerome, Chrysostom, and Friends, pp. 48–59.

⁷⁵ Ep. 22.21.7 (CSEL 54.173).

⁷⁶ I owe this play on the words something and nothing to David L. Miller, “Why Men Are Mad! Nothing-Envy and the Fascration Complex,” pp. 71–79.

⁷⁷ Ep. 22.2.1, 6.2, 8.1, 16.1, 20.2, 25.1-26.4 (CSEL 54.145, 151, 154, 163, 170–71, 178–82), “God’s bride”; Ep. 22.18.2 (CSEL 54.167), “paradise of virginity”; Ep. 22.1.5 (CSEL 54.145), “washed white.”

⁷⁸ Ibid. 22.17.1, 25.2 (CSEL 54.164-65, 179).

⁷⁹ Ibid. 22.1.5, 6.2, 25.1 (CSEL 54.145, 151, 178–79).

⁸⁰ Ibid. 22.25.1-5 (CSEL 54.178-80); this is the most extended passage in the letter in which Jerome eroticizes Eustochium’s body with imagery from the Song of Songs.

⁸¹ Ibid. 22.25.1 (CSEL 54.179). Song of Songs 5.4 is translated by the RSV as “My beloved put his hand to the latch, and my heart was thrilled within me” (emphasis added). Translations of Jerome’s Ep. 22.25.1 render Jerome’s quotations of this verse as follows: “He will come and put his hand through the hole of the door, and your heart shall be moved for him” (NPNF 6:32, emphasis added); “He ‘will put his hand through the opening and will touch your body’” (ACW 33,1:152, emphasis added). My own translation (“He will put his hand through the opening and your inner body will be moved for him”) attempts to be more faithful to Jerome’s use of the Latin venter to translate the word koilia in Greek and ma’im in Hebrew. The Hebrew ma’im does not mean either “heart” or “body,” as the translations above would have it. Rather, it means “internal organs,” “inward parts,” “belly,” “womb” (see Brown, Driver, and Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. mah). Similarly, the Greek koilia, used by the Septuagint to translate the Hebrew ma’im, means “cavity of the body,” especially the intestines, bowels, and womb (Liddell, Scott, Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. koilia). The word venter carries the same meanings (Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. venter). My translation of this term as “inner body” attempts to be more faithful both to etymology and to the erotic suggestiveness of the verse.

⁸² Ep. 22.17.4 (CSEL 54.166).

⁸³ Kelly, Jerome, p. 103.

⁸⁴ Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, p. 46.

⁸⁵ Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 97.

⁸⁶ Ibid., pp. 96, 94, 97.

⁸⁷ Ep. 22.40.5 (CSEL 54.209).

⁸⁸ Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, p. 45.

⁸⁹ Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature, pp. 67–68.

⁹⁰ See the remarks of Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, pp. 70–71:

We may recall how Jerome’s formula, “Desire is quenched by desire,” offers a rhetorical and figural substitute for the gratifications of the senses that the ascetic denies himself. Such a strategy permits the entry of desire, even of lust and wantonness, into the arena of denial that constitutes the official program of asceticism. . . . In figurality ascetic writers discovered an element in language that enabled them to recover and, in a sense, control the world they had renounced.

⁹¹ See Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis, p. 25 and passim, for a statement in terms of modern literature of a phenomenon that also occurred in antiquity, namely, that what is other to the self is “coded as feminine, as woman” (italics in original).

⁹² Ep. 22.17.4 (CSEL 54.166).

⁹³ See the discussion on pp. 121–23 above.

⁹⁴ Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 10.

⁹⁵ Winkler, The Constraints of Desire, pp. 82, 84.

⁹⁶ Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, p. 132; Harpham further describes asceticism as “an attempt by human beings to stand ‘outside the world’ by assuming the character of language.” Also, “asceticism is an application to the self of certain insights into language: to be ascetic is to make oneself representable” (27).

⁹⁷ Brown, The Body and Society, p. 274; see also Elizabeth A. Clark, “The Uses of the Song of Songs: Origen and the later Latin Fathers,” pp. 386–427, an essay that shows in detail how Latin authors, especially Jerome, appropriated the Song of Songs for ascetic purposes.

⁹⁸ Ep. 22.7.3 (CSEL 54.153); my thanks are due to Elizabeth A. Clark for calling this passage to my attention.

⁹⁹ Ibid. 22.7.3 (CSEL 54.153); for discussion of the identity of the Lukan woman as a prostitute, see Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, pp. 127–29; on Jerome’s reference to his loss of virginity in Ep. 49.20.2 (CSEL 54.385), see Kelly, Jerome, p. 21.

¹⁰⁰ Aristotle, Rhet. 1.1370a6, quoted and translated by Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 63.

¹⁰¹ Ep. 22.7.1-4 (CSEL 54.152-54).

¹⁰² Ibid 22.30.3-6 (CSEL 54.190-91).

¹⁰³ For discussions by Jerome’s contemporaries on these issues, see Augustine, Conf. 10, where memory is discussed as a storehouse of images, and Synesius of Cyrene, De ins. 3–5, on the connection between dreams and imagination.

¹⁰⁴ Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, p. 65.

¹⁰⁵ Ep. 22.40.5 (CSEL 54.209).

¹⁰⁶ Carson, Eros the Bittersweet, pp. 32–33 (italics in original).

¹⁰⁷ Ep. 22.6.4 (CSEL 54.151); Jerome again discusses the topic of “innate heat” in Ep. 54.9 (CSEL 54.475), appealing for authority to the Greek physician Galen. For the evidence from ancient medical writings on this and related topics, see Rouselie, Porneia, pp. 5–23.

¹⁰⁸ Ep. 22.7.1-4 (CSEL 54.152-54).

¹⁰⁹ Brown, The Body and Society, p. 376.

¹¹⁰ Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. exuro.

¹¹¹ Emblematic of this generation is Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety, pp. 29–36, who wrote that “contempt for the human condition and hatred of the body was a disease endemic in the entire culture of the period” (35). See Brown, The Body and Society, p. 235nn. 103–4, for further examples.

¹¹² Brown, The Body and Society, pp. 235, 237.

¹¹³ Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, p. 24.

¹¹⁴ Ibid, p. 25.

¹¹⁵ Ep. 5.2.2 (CSEL 54.22); see Kelly, Jerome, p. 48.

¹¹⁶ Ep125.12 (CSEL 56.131), trans. by Kelly, Jerome, p. 50.

¹¹⁷ See Kelly, Jerome, p. 50n17: “The participle ‘anhelantia’ (lit. ‘panting’) refers to the drawing of breath required for pronouncing certain aspirate or guttural sounds in Hebrew.” Such forceful drawing-in of the breath would require a correlatively forceful exhalation.”

¹¹⁸ On the relation between food and sexuality in ascetic thinking, see Rousselle, Porneia,, pp. 160–78. Both doctors and ascetics subscribed to the idea that a severely restricted diet would reduce sexual urges, and Jerome was no exception (see n. 63 above); in his case, however, the diet didn’t work.

¹¹⁹ This haiku is by Morimoto Norio and is quoted in Hiroaki Sato, One Hundred Frogs, p. 143.

¹²⁰ For a good contemporary discussion of Freud’s “talking cure” and its therapeutic effects on the body, especially on the bodies of hysterics, see Dianne Hunter, “Hysteria, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism: The Case of Anna O.,” pp. 89–115.

¹²¹ Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, p. 14.

¹²² See p. 205 above. Jerome’s use of the term imago, even when valenced negatively, shows that he placed the phenomenon of dreams in the province of imagination, much as did his contemporary Synesius of Cyrene, whose theory of oneiric imagination is discussed on pp. 70-73 above.

¹²³ Ep. 22.25.1 (CSEL 54.178-79).

¹²⁴ This phrase is taken from Harpham, The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, p. 51.