Narrating the ascetic model, its context and its hero(in)es: A new proposal for Jerome’s Letters and Lives

Abstract

ferent from one another in length, addressee, and content, can be considered narrative letters show specific narrative techniques and strategies. What makes them ,narrative' is the author's behaviour: he is pleased to narrate episodes, places, memoirs, novels, or exempla to his friends, trying to persuade them to embrace (or persist in following) his monastic way of life. We can talk about ,weak narrativity' because they incorporate a proliferation of ,minor' narrative genres to be compared to the Lives and divided into three main periods. The inner and extratextual functions of these epistles change throughout these periods, especially since letter-writing is: »a form not only of representing but of constituting reality«, of constituting, in the case of Jerome, his reliability and the monastic movement itself, its history, its heroes and heroines.

Inspired by Cicero: Ambrosian Contribution to the Formation of a Clerical Ethos in the De officiis

“…12 But on the other hand, Christianity also brings a newness which primarily means a deepening, a religious grounding and a radicalisation of doctrine, especially in terms of celibacy. Certainly, the greater emphasis on celibacy and virginity as a way of religious life is more pronounced in the later and greater ascetic writers (Grandi 2021), so Ambrose seems somewhat halfway between the old pagan and the new Christian morality. He requires his clerics to strive for chaste and shameless behaviour towards women.…”