How to Persuade a Saint: Supplication in Jerome’s Lives of Holy Men

Abstract

Among the arguments emerging from this volume is the cardinal position of Jerome in the development of hagiography in general and for ascetic biography in particular.His imaginative responses to the Life of Antony set the tone for later adaptations, and their popularity is attested in the vast number of surviving manuscripts. 1 Varied as his three Lives of Holy Men are in structure and content, close reading reveals some shared patterns of composition.This chapter identifies one such pattern and discusses its implications for the literary shaping of these hagiographical narratives.It focuses on the scenes of supplication which are found at pivotal points in all of the Lives: that is to say, on an intense request at a moment of crisis, articulated in a sequence of actions which combine movement and speech.My discussion has three aims: firstly, to bring out the intertextual relations between the three works; second, to investigate the links of this pattern with earlier texts; and, thirdly (and most importantly), to consider the motivation for using supplication as a literary structure, and to explore what it can tell us about Jerome's construction of sainthood.Supplication: What Is It?In this chapter I treat supplication as a particularly emphatic, ritualised method of asking someone for something.The classic object of such a plea is the life of the suppliant (for example Lykaon in Iliad 21.34-135), but it is also suitable for something valued more or less than one's own life (for example, Priam supplicating Achilles for the return of his son Hector's body in Iliad 24).Even immortal deities can be portrayed as employing supplication (for example Thetis in Iliad 1.495-513).What distinguishes supplication from a mere request is its elaborate form, which Fred Naiden has analysed as consisting of four steps: 1. 'an approach to an individual or a place'; 2. 'a distinctive gesture', usually a physical lowering of the suppliant and often involves touching or clasping a part of the body of the person supplicated; 3. 'the request for a boon', which 'is wholly verbal'; and 4. 'the response of the supplicandus' (the 1 See Bernard Lambert, Bibliotheca Hieronymiana Manuscripta: la tradition manuscrite des œuvres de saint Jérôme, vol. 2 (Stenbrugis: Martinus

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