Jovinian

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Jovinian (Jovinianus, died around 405) was a Christian monk active in Rome in the late fourth century who argued that the baptized who keep their baptism are all equally rewarded in heaven, regardless of whether they marry or stay virgin, fast or eat with thanksgiving. The claim cut against the rising prestige of the ascetic life, and it got him condemned as a heretic. Almost nothing of what he wrote survives in his own words. What is known of his teaching comes mostly from the men who set out to demolish it.

Domenico Ghirlandaio’s fresco of Saint Jerome in his study (1480, Ognissanti, Florence); Jerome’s lost work against Jovinian preserves nearly all that is known of him — Domenico Ghirlandaio, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

He himself had once lived the harder discipline. The reports agree that Jovinian was an ascetic before he turned against asceticism’s claims — a monk who had fasted, gone barefoot, and worn the coarse tunic, and who then put off the austerities not out of weakness but on principle, having concluded that they purchased no extra share of God. He never married, never abandoned his celibacy; he simply denied that it raised him above the married. That is the sharpest form the argument can take, and it is the form his accusers could least afford to ignore: not a layman defending his comforts but a renunciant denying that renunciation earned anything heaven would not also give a faithful husband.

The four theses

His teaching reached his opponents — and through them, posterity — as a short written work, a set of commentarioli, brief notes marshalling Scripture for his case. The book is lost; it survives only in the sentences his enemies quoted in order to refute them. Jerome, answering in 393, set the propositions out as four, and it is in his hostile transcription that they are still read.

The first: virgins, widows, and married women, once they have passed through the laver of Christ, are of equal merit if they are on a par in their other works. The second: those who with full assurance of faith have been born again in baptism cannot be overthrown by the devil. The third: there is no difference between abstinence from food and its reception with thanksgiving. The fourth and last: there is one reward in the kingdom of heaven for all who have kept their baptismal vow.

The four are facets of one stone. Beneath them lay a single conviction, and it was a baptismal one. The decisive act in a Christian life, for Jovinian, was the washing that joined a person to Christ; everything after it was the working-out of a grace already wholly given, not a ladder by which some climbed nearer than others. The married woman and the consecrated virgin had stepped through the same water into the same body. To grade them afterward by continence or fasting was, on his reading, to undo what baptism had done — to smuggle a hierarchy of holiness back into a church that had been promised one grace for all. He was not denigrating virginity. He was denying that it bought a better seat.

The argument was conducted on Scripture, which is why the answer to it had to be. Jovinian read Paul closely, and read him against the ascetic enthusiasts: where they took 1 Corinthians 7 to enthrone the unmarried, he took the same chapter to relativize the difference, the apostle allowing marriage without subordinating it, granting that each had a gift. The parable of the sower’s thirtyfold, sixtyfold, and hundredfold harvest — the favorite proof-text for grades of reward — he read otherwise, and the marriage feast and the wedding garment served his case for a single table. His doctrine of the unassailable baptized, too, came out of Paul and the promises: the reborn, held in full faith, are not at the devil’s mercy.

The condemnation

The reaction was swift and institutional. Around 393 a synod at Rome under Pope Siricius examined the teaching and condemned it; Jovinian and eight named associates — Auxentius, Genialis, Felix, and the rest — were judged promoters of a new blasphemy and shut out of the church in perpetuity. Siricius sent the sentence north, and a council at Milan under Ambrose confirmed it, Ambrose taking up in particular the point on which Jovinian had pressed hardest after the four: the perpetual virginity of Mary, which Jovinian denied as to the birth itself, holding that in bearing her son she ceased to be in the bodily sense a virgin. Ambrose answered that to deny the manner of the birth was to imperil the reality of the incarnation, and pinned the charge of Manichaean error on a man whose whole program had been an argument against the suspicion that the body and its ordinary goods were less than holy. The irony is exact and was not lost on later readers: the anti-ascetic was condemned in the vocabulary reserved for those who despised the flesh.

Fifth-century mosaic portrait of Ambrose of Milan in the chapel of San Vittore in Ciel d’Oro, thought to be the earliest likeness of the bishop who confirmed Jovinian’s condemnation — photograph by Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

An imperial rescript followed the ecclesiastical one. Jovinian and his circle were sentenced to flogging and exile; he was banished, by report, to a small Adriatic island, and there or thereabouts he died, the date a guess somewhere around 405. The state had lent its arm to a verdict the church had reached on its own.

Jerome, and the embarrassment of the defense

The lasting damage, and the lasting record, came from Jerome. His Adversus Jovinianum, written in 393, answered the case for the equal dignity of marriage with two books whose praise of virginity ran so far, and whose disparagement of the married state ran so low, that Jerome’s own admirers in Rome were appalled. Pammachius — a senator, a friend, a man Jerome could not afford to lose — judged the books an embarrassment and tried to withdraw the copies from circulation before they did more harm. They had already gone too far to recall. The Roman priest Domnio sent Jerome a list of the passages that gave offense and asked him to explain or retract. Jerome’s reply, his Letter 48 to Pammachius, is one of the more revealing documents of the affair: a defense not of his doctrine, which he would not soften, but of his method, the polemicist’s plea that in a disputation one argues as hard as the opposing position requires and is not to be read as if every sentence were a creed. A further letter pressed the point and urged Pammachius to give up the futile effort at suppression. The treatise that was meant to bury Jovinian had nearly buried its author’s standing in the city whose esteem he prized.

The episode marks something durable about how the controversy was won. Jovinian forced his opponents to say, in full, what they had previously left as atmosphere — that the celibate stood higher than the married. Jerome said it with such violence that the saying recoiled. The exaltation of virginity needed a more careful advocate, and found one.

Augustine, and the rescue of marriage

That advocate was Augustine, who came to the question from the other side of the danger.

Sandro Botticelli’s fresco of Saint Augustine in his study (1480, Ognissanti, Florence); Augustine’s De bono coniugali rejected Jovinian’s leveling while defending marriage as a genuine good — Sandro Botticelli, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Writing De bono coniugali, On the Good of Marriage, around 401, Augustine set out to repair the damage the Jovinian affair had done in both directions: to refute Jovinian’s leveling of the two states while refusing Jerome’s contempt for the lower one. Marriage, he argued, is genuinely a good — not a concession to weakness merely, but a good in its own three goods of offspring, fidelity, and the sacramental bond — even as consecrated virginity is the higher good. The achievement was to hold both claims at once: to keep the church’s rejection of Jovinian from hardening into the very disdain for the body that Jovinian had feared and that Jerome had nearly licensed. Augustine’s careful settlement, not Jerome’s torrent, became the Western mind on the matter, and it carried Jovinian’s defeat embedded in it, the equality denied and the marriage saved in the same stroke. The shape that Latin Christianity would give to marriage and celibacy for a thousand years was fixed, in large part, by reaction against a man whose own book no longer existed.

A merit controversy before its name

The argument Jovinian raised was not, in its own moment, a quarrel about sexual abstinence so much as a quarrel about the economy of salvation — about whether grace, once given, admits of more and less. His opponents understood it that way. The four theses move from the particular (the equal merit of the virgin and the wife) through the second and third (the security of the baptized, the indifference of fast and feast) to the general principle that gathers them: one reward for all who keep their baptism. That is a thesis about merit, and it anticipated, by a generation, the deeper Western argument over grace and human desert that would occupy Augustine and his adversaries to the end of his life. The controversy that began over the married woman’s crown ended by drawing in the whole question of what a Christian can earn — which is one reason Jovinian’s case kept being reopened long after the synods supposed they had closed it.

His instinct, set against the institutional grain of his age, was leveling. The fourth century was the century in which the desert filled with monks, in which consecrated virginity became a public order with a public prestige, in which the ascetic acquired a standing the ordinary believer could not match. Jovinian’s protest was that the gospel had promised the ordinary believer everything the ascetic was now claiming as a surplus. He was, in that narrow sense, a conservative — appealing past the new monastic enthusiasm to an older equality he located in baptism and in Paul. That the conservative was the one condemned, and the innovation that won, is the shape of the affair.

Reading him through his accusers

Modern scholarship has worked to recover Jovinian from the caricature his enemies left, and the labor is delicate, because the only witnesses are the prosecution. Read against the grain, the fragments suggest not the libertine of the heresy-catalogs but a serious if combative theologian: an exegete of Paul, a reader of the baptismal promises, an opponent of what he took to be a two-tier church creeping in under the banner of monasticism and the new prestige of asceticism. David Hunter’s Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity (2007), the first book in English given wholly to the controversy, argues that Jovinian’s challenge was theological before it was moral — that baptism and the consequent equality of all the baptized was the governing category of his thought, not a slackened standard but a different and defensible reading of grace. Hunter’s study also unpicks the long afterlife of the man’s reputation, alternately conscripted by Protestant historians as a proto-Reformer against monkish merit and condemned by Catholic ones as the anti-ascetic heretic the synods had named — two receptions that say more about their authors than about the priest of the commentarioli, of whom not one continuous paragraph survives. Distant later movements that attacked the spiritual privilege of monks and clergy — Michael Servetus among the radical Reformation’s lone dissenters, the English lollards with their suspicion of a clerical caste — have sometimes been read as echoes of the same complaint, though the kinship is one of instinct rather than any traceable descent from a book nobody after the fifth century could read.

The text and the scholarship

Everything in this story turns on a problem of sources, and the scholarship is in the first place an exercise in reading a man out of his enemies’ citations. The primary witness is Jerome’s two-book Adversus Jovinianum of 393, where the four theses are quoted to be demolished; it is read today in the nineteenth-century translation of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, whose Book I — wholly devoted to the first proposition, on marriage and virginity — is available in full. Jerome’s own retreat under fire survives alongside it in his Letter 48 to Pammachius and the letters around it, the polemicist defending his method when his Roman friends recoiled from his doctrine. Augustine’s De bono coniugali of around 401 is the constructive counterweight, the work that kept the church’s rejection of Jovinian from collapsing into contempt for marriage; Ambrose’s letters and synodal acts and Pope Siricius’s rescript fill out the institutional record of the condemnation.

The modern reassessment rests above all on David Hunter’s Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity: The Jovinianist Controversy (Oxford University Press, 2007), the first full-length study in English, which treats Jovinian as a theologian in his own right and traces the controversy through the whole field of his opponents — Siricius, Ambrose, Jerome, the later Pelagian writers, and Augustine — to argue that the formation of Western teaching on marriage, clerical celibacy, and Marian doctrine ran in significant part through the work of refuting him. The reception of that book, and the state of the question, can be followed in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review’s notice of it. The pattern across all of it is constant: there is no Jovinian apart from the hostile transcription, and the historian’s task is to hear, under the prosecution’s summary, the defendant’s actual case.

There the matter rests on a sharp point. Jovinian taught that no Christian stands higher in heaven than another who has kept the same baptism — that rank among the saved is an illusion the church should refuse. The teaching cost him the church, the empire, and his own words; what he left behind is preserved entirely in the prose of men who outranked him, refuted him, and meant the quotation as a sentence of condemnation. The leveler reaches us only on the authority of those he tried to level — quoted to be answered, and surviving in the answer.

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