The Ascetic Apostle

Abstract

Jerome viewed his commentaries as a formal scholarly enterprise, a teaching tool for their ostensible addressees (and other readers down the line), and also a vehicle for propagating his idiosyncratic ascetic ideals. This chapter begins by situating the commentaries as a textualized extension of his face-to-face instruction of his circle of spiritual advisees, which included Paula and Eustochium as well as Marcella (an honorary dedicatee of the commentaries) and other discipulae he had left behind in Rome. From there we look closely at the often subtle ways in which he interprets Paul through an asceticizing lens to center his own ideological priorities, from his emphasis on sexual purity to his notion of a monastic clergy.