ON THE ORNAMENTS AND FIGURES of the Hamartigenia rested the burden of generating meaning in the mind of the active Roman reader. We will explore those ornaments and figures in what follows, in the hope that through the process of figuring out the figures in the text, the contemporary reader will be better equipped both to follow the logic and to enjoy the linguistic virtuosity of the poem. As the Hamartigenia is neither a well-known nor a transparent text, a brief summary of its narrative scheme may be helpful to readers unfamiliar with the poem.
Like Prudentius’s other hexameter poems, the Hamartigenia appears in the manuscripts under a Greek title and features a preface written in a different meter from that of the poem itself (iambic preface followed by hexameter poem).1 The main topic of the poem is the origin of sin in the universe and its consequences; it is framed as a refutation of the heresy of Marcion, a second-century-CE thinker who preached a dualistic theology.2 The preface describes Cain’s murder of Abel and associates that crime with heresy in the church and the fallen state of humanity, in which flesh is pitted against spirit. The poem proper begins with an apostrophe to Cain, who is castigated as a “divider of God” (this is, on the face of it, a surprising charge against Cain, who shows no dualist tendencies in Genesis, but Prudentius has already identified Cain with Marcion, the dualist heretic, in the preface) and accused of having double vision.3 Prudentius next asserts the unity of God and rejects any division of the Godhead (1–173; Lat. 1–123). He describes the apostasy of the devil, with a vivid description that identifies him as the biblical hunter Nimrod (Nebroth), and names him the fountainhead of sin (173–280; Lat. 124–205). From there, Prudentius addresses the effects of sin on the universe; human transgressions and the corruption of the five senses; and, in a miniature Psychomachia, the attack of Satan and the vices against humanity. The souls under attack by the vices are compared to the Jews who, led by Moses out of Egypt and by Joshua across the Jordan into the Promised Land, nevertheless keep backsliding into sin (280–657; Lat. 206–505). Arguing that God cannot be the originator of evil and that man cannot blame his nature for sin, Prudentius provides two exempla of the origin of sin: a graphic description of the breeding habits of vipers, and the biblical tale of David and Absalom. He then describes Adam’s original sin, for which, he argues, man’s free will, not God, is responsible (658–957; Lat. 506–722). To illustrate the central concept of free will, he sets out a series of vivid exempla: the biblical stories of Lot and his wife fleeing the cities of the plain; Ruth’s loyalty to her mother-in-law Naomi (957–1051; Lat. 722–88); a parable of two brothers at a crossroads (1051–70; Lat. 788–803); and a simile describing the fates of a flock of doves, a few of whom fly to heaven, but most of whom fall victim to a snare with poisoned food and are unable to take flight (1071–95; Lat. 804–23). The poem culminates with a vision of the fates of souls after judgment: the damned are condemned to worms, torture, and flames, while the saved return to a heaven filled with delights, one of which is the pleasure of watching the torments of the damned (1096–1244; Lat. 824–931). It ends with a prayer for clemency for the poet’s own soul (1245–90; Lat. 931–66).
As Catherine Conybeare (2007) has pointed out, the Hamartigenia, though a written text, assumes the rhetorical markers of an oral text, using apostrophe (direct address to the reader or to a character in the poem), prosopopoeia (having imaginary characters speak or act), and first-person interventions by the narrator. This “feigned orality” reflects the pervasive influence of rhetorical performance for Christians and non-Christians alike in late antiquity.4 Throughout most of the poem, the poet/narrator is ostensibly addressing an interlocutor, who occasionally is presented as responding in direct dialogue. The dialogue is heavily one-sided, however; the brief interventions of Marcion are answered with a torrent of verbiage from the narrator asserting orthodoxy.5 The addressee is a heretical thinker from the second century CE: Marcion, the son of the bishop of Sinope in Pontus, who expounded one of the forms of dualism so popular in late antiquity.6 Marcion believed that there were two gods: the god of the Hebrew scriptures, who was a creator god associated with matter, which is imperfect; and the god of the New Testament, a good god, entirely immaterial, who sent his son to redeem mankind from the creator. Believing that the material world is at best imperfect, he rejected both the notion of the resurrection of the body, which, he argued, had no place in the kingdom of heaven, and the institution of marriage, which produces more creatures subject to the inferior creator god.7
It is highly unlikely that Prudentius thought that Marcionism per se presented a clear and present danger to orthodox Christianity. The controversy over Marcion’s teachings had largely disappeared by the late fourth century. Manichaeism was a much greater contemporary threat, and the poem seems to address dualist heresies in general as much as Marcionism in particular. Indeed, Catherine Conybeare has persuasively argued that Prudentius’s use of biblical quotation in the Hamartigenia is directly related to contemporary debates about Manichaeism. The central problem of the poem is as much an issue for Manichaeans as it was for followers of Marcion: What is the origin of sin and evil? How can they exist if God is indeed omnipotent and benevolent? The logical response of the dualists is that, in fact, a good God could not and would not have created evil, so we must assume the existence of two gods, one good, one evil. The Hamartigenia struggles to refute this notion.
Prudentius’s response to these arguments is as much exegetical and figural as it is philosophical or doctrinal. In other words, while both Marcion and Prudentius rely on the authority of scripture, Prudentius’s refutation of dualism depends on his way of reading that scripture. Marcion is central to the overall design of the poem because he could represent the dangers of dualist theologies and because of his interpretative methodology, which was literal and reductionist. With his refusal to reconcile the apparent conflicts embedded in the Bible and his wholesale rejection of most of the canonical books of both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures, Marcion initiated the process of canon formation: the identification of a restricted list of books thought to have a privileged relation to divine authority and truth.8 “Sacred story had become sacred book,” Patricia Cox Miller observes. “Marcion’s sense of authority, rooted as it was in theological content and a conception of ‘original’ or pristine meaning, was adopted some forty years later by Irenaeus of Lyons, who, although he did not accept Marcion’s version of the New Testament canon, nevertheless accepted the idea of canon that Marcion initiated.”9 It is important that Prudentius’s rejection of Marcion appears to be focused at least in part on his literal and restrictive approach to reading and interpretation. This is of key importance, for reading and interpretation are crucially linked to the ability to distinguish right from wrong, and thus to appropriately exercise free will. In her study of reading in the Hamartigenia, Catherine Conybeare points to the importance of reading as an interpretative and ethical act in the poem:
Prudentius engages explicitly with no books other than holy scripture. And he brings into play no clear metaphors of the book: for example, Christ is never represented simply as the gospel incarnate. Yet the Hamartigenia is profoundly and constantly concerned, not with doctrine as something rightly spelled out . . . but with reading: with reading as an interpretative act, and hence as an ethical one; with the right and wrong motivations for reading; and with the results of right reading. Prudentius counters Marcion and related heresies not with direct refutation, but with illustrative subterfuge: the poem enacts in its construction the sort of figural reading which by its very nature renders the two testaments of the Bible indispensable to each other. (emphasis added)10
Conybeare’s point, that the Hamartigenia’s concern throughout is with reading as an interpretative act, and with the results of right and wrong reading, is key to interpreting the poem. Correct interpretation leads the soul to discern right from wrong, and thereby to choose proper over improper action.
Marcion follows in the tradition of addressees of didactic verse, from Perses, castigated by his brother Hesiod, to Memmius, whom Lucretius tried so strenuously to educate. In the Hamartigenia, Marcion is cast in a particular role, the role of a bad reader whose interpretation needs the constant correction supplied by the poet. One of the ironies of this poem is that by adopting this adversarial structure—the opposed pair of Prudentius and Marcion is only one of a series of polar opposites—Prudentius creates a polarized text that reflects the dualist view of the world that he strives so hard to refute.
Concern with right reading manifests itself immediately in the Hamartigenia; it is the subject of the poem’s preface. Prefaces were evidently an important tool for Prudentius: as we have noted, he introduces each of his hexameter poems with one. As is the case for the Psychomachia,11 the preface of the Hamartigenia sets forth an epitome (which, as Carruthers points out, is “an ornament of contraction”) of a biblical story, and follows it with an exegesis that ostensibly serves as an interpretive model to assist the reader in interpreting not just the opening figure but the Hamartigenia as a whole.12 The story begins in medias res with two brothers performing a sacrifice:
Fratres ephebi fossor et pastor duo,
quos feminarum prima primos procreat,
sistunt ad aram de laborum fructibus
Deo sacranda munerum primordia.
hic terrulentis, ille vivis fungitur;
certante voto discrepantes inmolant,
fetum bidentis alter, ast alter scrobis.
Deus minoris conprobavit hostiam,
reiecit illam quam paravit grandior.
(H. praef. 1–9)
Adolescent brothers, a digger and a shepherd—the two
born first to the first of women—
set on the altar firstfruits of their labor,
offered up as holy gifts to God.
One offers earth’s crops, the other living things.
In conflict, they make rival pledges:
one the young of a sheep, the other the yield of his trench.
God approved the victim of the younger brother
and rejected what the older had acquired.
The brothers, at first unidentified, are described as youths (ephebi), one a farmer (fossor), the other a shepherd (pastor). They are the first sons (primos) of the first of women (feminarum prima). They offer a sacrifice to God, the fruits of their labor (laborum fructibus), a sacrifice that reflects the nature of their professions: the farmer gives the fruits of the earth, the shepherd offers up a living sacrifice. The sacrificial moment brings with it fatal rivalry: the offerings are contentious as the brothers try to distinguish themselves through the act of sacrifice. The younger offers a lamb, the elder the produce of the earth (marked as inferior by Prudentius’s use of the word scrobis, literally “ditch,” a word that carries the negative connotations of one of its common meanings, “grave”). God approves the sacrifice of the younger, but rejects that of the elder brother. This tale of two brothers is, of course, the story of Cain and Abel, as we learn when the voice of God identifies Cain by suddenly shouting a rebuke: “Cain, quiesce!” (H. praef. 11). Cain sacrifices improperly to God, and in his rage and jealousy at God’s acceptance of Abel’s sacrifice, he kills his brother. Prudentius, in an ostentatious act of exegesis (agnosco nempe quem figura haec denotet) that links heresy to this paradigmatic crime, compares Marcion’s improper division of the Godhead into two with Cain’s improper sacrifice, and interprets the murder of Abel as symbolic of Marcion’s destruction of the soul. The preface ends with Cain celebrating a triumph over the death of his brother’s soul (Cain triumphat morte fratris halitus, H. praef. 63).
Certain thematic ideas that originate in the preface recur throughout the poem, most notably division, imitation, reproduction and its consequences, deception, and the notion of being lost or astray. As Rosemarie Taddei has suggested, one of Prudentius’s main reasons for opening with the sin of Cain is his desire “to emphasise the idea of division . . . which he finds in the Septuagint version of the story.”13 In the Septuagint, as in the Vetus Latina, the reason Cain’s sacrifice is rejected is that he divided it improperly.14 In Prudentius’s account, the voice of God warns Cain that properly offering without dividing the sacrifice according to divine law would lead to sin:
vox ecce summo missa persultat throno:
“Cain, quiesce! namque si recto offeras,
oblata nec tu lege recta dividas,
perversa nigram vota culpam traxerint.”
(H. praef. 10–13)
Look! A voice resounds from the throne on high:
“Cain, be still! If you rightly make your offering
and yet do not divide it up correctly,
your perverted gifts will bring black guilt.”
What would constitute proper division is not stated, nor is there any explanation of what is improper about Cain’s division.15 By identifying Marcion with Cain, he implies that Cain’s improper division of the sacrifice foreshadowed Marcion’s division of God into two deities, making him a precursor of heretics who espouse a dualist interpretation of the Old and New Testaments. Improper division of the sacrifice leads to jealousy that culminates in fratricide, the most radical form of division within human society. There is a long-standing exegetical tradition associating Cain with walling cities, dividing land, and developing weights and measures. Josephus says that Cain “changed, by his invention of weights and measures, the simplicity with which men previously lived, their life innocent because of their ignorance of such things; and he turned magnanimity into cunning artifice and corruption.”16 Augustine (De civ. 15.5 and 15.8) identifies Cain as the first city builder. Boundaries, cities, weights and measures all exemplify division, and the distance of fallen humanity from the perfect prelapsarian unity of Eden.17
Prudentius’s interpretation of the Cain and Abel story is unusual and sets him apart from the mainstream of exegesis.18 In contrast to the arbitrariness of God’s rejection in the Hamartigenia, Milton makes it very clear why Cain’s sacrifice was not accepted by contrasting Cain’s “unculled” offering of what was to hand with Abel’s careful selection of the best of his flock:
A sweatie Reaper from his Tillage brought
First Fruits, the green Eare, and the yellow Sheaf,
Uncull’d, as came to hand; a Shepherd next
More meek came with the Firstlings of his Flock
Choicest and best.
(PL 11.434–38)
Milton’s account of the story of Cain comes close to the end of the poem, when the angel Michael removes from Adam’s eyes the film “which that false fruit that promised clearer sight/Had bred,” and shows him visions of man’s future. Prudentius, on the other hand, deliberately places Cain’s sin at the beginning of the Hamartigenia so that it stands as the exemplary original sin within the narrative framework of the poem. This is out of line with the narrative chronology of Genesis, in which the sin of Eve and Adam precedes the account of the sin of Cain, and the chronological peculiarity underscores the importance of the story. Immediately after recounting Abel’s murder, Prudentius draws attention to the process of reading and interpreting it, in a passage that seems to go out of its way to ensure that the reader arrives at a proper interpretation:
ergo ex futuris prisca coepit fabula
factoque primo res notata est ultima,
ut ille mortis inchoator rusticus
insulsa terrae deferens libamina
Deumque rerum mortuarum deputans
rastris redacta digna sacris crederet,
viventis atrox aemulator hostiae.
agnosco nempe quem figura haec denotet,
quis fratricida, quis peremptor invidus
prave sacrorum disciplinam dividat,
mactare dum se vota censet rectius.
(H. praef. 25–35)
So the ancient story began with things yet to be,
and the last things were marked out by that first deed,
when the crude farmer who invented death
brought his bungled, unsalted offerings of earth,
and thinking God a god of lifeless things,
believed the yield of his hoe worth offering
in his dark envy of the living victim.
I recognize, of course, whom this figure implies,
the killer of his brother, the jealous slayer,
who perversely divides holy doctrine
and reckons his own offerings more just . . .
This story sets up a template for reading the Hamartigenia, but it is a complicated template. As Mastrangelo (2008, 48) notes, this passage reverses the typological relationship, so that stories of the past originate in the events of the future: “The future, constructed as a set of ideologically fixed points in time (e.g., the Incarnation and Last Judgment), causes the stories of the past to exist as history.”
Mastrangelo suggests that part of this passage, lines 25–26, should be read in dialogue with two other passages in which Prudentius uses the word fabula. The first is from the Apotheosis, in which Prudentius accuses a Manichaean interlocutor of imagining that all of human history, right up to the present day, is nebulous and illusory: Omne quod est gestum notus auferat inritus, aurae/Dispergant tenues. Sit fabula quod sumus omnes! (Apoth. 1017–18). [“Everything that has been done the South wind carries off in vain,/the light breezes disperse. All we are is a story!”] The second is from Pe. 9, in which a church attendant asserts the veracity of the events depicted in a painting of the martyrdom of Saint Cassian—a schoolmaster stabbed to death by the pens of his own pupils:
aedituus consultus ait: “quod prospicis, hospes,
non est inanis aut anilis fabula.
historiam pictura refert, quae tradita libris
veram vetusti temporis monstrat fidem.”
(Pe. 9.17–20)
When asked, the doorman said, “What you look at, guest,
is no old woman’s empty story. The picture relates
the history which, handed down in books,
shows the true faith of old times.”
Mastrangelo argues that Prudentius, in these passages, expands the typical fourth-century meaning of fabula (a tale that is false or untrue) and uses it to mean “literary storytelling,” which he constructs as the proper vehicle for salvation history. “Taken together, these three texts suggest that the true stories of individual human beings are typological in nature. This constitutes the core of Prudentian history. A human life is a story that is typologically connected to the past. . . . The concept of typology is at the core of Prudentius’ thinking” (Mastrangelo 2008, 48). Such a Christian typological view of sacred scripture and scriptural history is fundamentally positive, one that sees the new law brought into being by Christ as both superseding and completing the law of the Old Testament.
Complicating this typological schema, which is fundamental to Prudentius’s view of Roman and Christian history, is his view of language, a view succinctly summarized in a review of Fyler’s 2007 study of post-Augustinian theories of veiled language in the works of Dante, Chaucer, and Jean de Meun:19
Telling the same story [i.e., the story of Christian universal history] in terms of the fate of language . . . offers a very different and much more somber perspective. Without renouncing the dialectic between the old law and the new, the linguistic perspective roots itself firmly in the material world of biblical—and contemporary—history. For this reason, it does not stress the positive figures of the Fall and its aftermath but invokes rather the negative dynamic of the old law. This antifigural movement effectively models itself on the duplicitous language introduced by Satan in his seduction of Eve: diabolical eloquence previews the ambiguous, veiled language of the fallen world.
Similarly, throughout the Hamartigenia an optimistic typological scheme stands in uneasy tension with a fundamentally apophatic view of language and interpretation.20 This is evident even in the preface, which confidently asserts a clear reading of the story of Cain and Abel. “I recognize, of course, whom this figure implies,” says the narrator, agnosco nempe quem figura haec denotet. But the very intrusion of the narrator is evidence of the need to guide the reader to a proper interpretation of the text—it points, that is, to the possibility of misinterpretation.
At this point, the text identifies Marcion as Cain, and then goes on to present an allegorical reading of the story of Cain in which Cain represents Flesh, who attacks Spirit (Abel) in a passage that introduces several images that permeate the Hamartigenia:21
natura cuius fraude floret fertili
fecunda fundens noxiorum crimina,
animaeque vitam labe carnis enecat.
caro in sororem tela mentem dirigit,
mens in cerebro ventilatur ebrio,
ex quo furores suculentos conligit
madens veneno corporis lymphatico.
Deum perennem findit in duos Deos,
audet secare numen insecabile.
cadit perempta denegans unum Deum,
Cain triumphat morte fratris halitus.
(H. praef. 53–63)
Its nature flourishes with fertile fraud,
pouring from her womb the teeming sins of guilty men,
and kills the life of the soul through the fall of flesh.
Flesh turns her shafts against her sister, Mind;
Mind fans the flames within the drunken brain,
where she gathers potent passions,
drunk with Flesh’s maddening poisons.
Eternal God she splits into two; she dares
divide the Godhead indivisible.
Murdered, she falls, denying God is one.
Cain triumphs in his brother Spirit’s death.
The warring brothers Cain and Abel are figures for Flesh (Caro) and Spirit (Mens), here personified as warring sisters. Failure to comprehend divine unity results in divisiveness on many levels: the separation of spirit from flesh within the individual; societal strife, as represented by Cain’s murder of Abel; heresy within the church. This closing figure creates a matrix of ideas (deception, madness, reproduction, division, and death) that will be further explored in the poem itself.