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.

His theses, as his opponents reported them, were four. A virgin, a widow, and a married woman, once baptized and equal in their other works, stand equal in merit. Those reborn in baptism with full faith cannot be overthrown by the devil. There is no difference in reward between abstaining from food and receiving it with gratitude. And all who keep their baptism receive one and the same reward in the kingdom of heaven. Behind the four lay a single instinct: a suspicion that the new monastic enthusiasm was smuggling a hierarchy of holiness into a faith that had promised one grace to all.

The reaction was swift. A synod at Rome under Pope Siricius condemned him around 393, and a council at Milan under Ambrose confirmed the sentence. The more lasting blow came from Jerome, whose Adversus Jovinianum — written the same year — answered the case for marriage with a torrent of praise for virginity so extreme that Jerome’s own friends in Rome were embarrassed by it, and he had to write afterward in his own defence. Augustine, troubled by the opposite danger, later wrote on the good of marriage partly to keep the rejection of Jovinian from tipping into contempt for marriage itself. The controversy thus helped fix, by reaction, the shape that the Western doctrine of marriage and celibacy would hold for centuries.

Modern scholarship has worked to recover Jovinian from the caricature his enemies left. Read against the grain, the surviving fragments suggest not a libertine but a serious if combative theologian, drawing on Paul and on a baptismal theology of equality, resisting what he saw as a two-tier Church. The recovery is necessarily partial; the sources are his accusers, and a man remembered only in refutations is hard to hear clearly. Later movements that challenged the spiritual privilege of monks and clergy have sometimes been read as distant echoes of the same complaint, though the connection is one of resemblance rather than descent. The argument he raised — whether one Christian life can be holier than another, or whether grace levels them — did not end with his condemnation.

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