Michael Donaghy's poem ‘City of God' (1993) weaves together the
poet's Catholic patrimony and the topography of the Bronx. The events of
the poem are catalysed by a collection of ‘razored passages from St
Augustine' discovered in the bedroom of a failed seminarian after his
nervous breakdown. Stalking the broken priest through the bankrupt city,
Donaghy explores the ruinous power of reading. The figure of Augustine
has long been used to investigate the cultural inheritance of
Christianity as well as to frame the Late Antique in general (Marrou;
Brown). Recent discussion has also highlighted the importance of
Augustine's contemporary, Jerome of Stridon, in this process of
reception and scholarship (e.g. Cain; Chin; Duval; Fürst; Vessey).
Building on Donaghy's poem and this scholarship on Jerome, this paper
argues that the index of Christian culture that Jerome outlines in On Famous Men (393) bears a significant debt to Origen's theology of history, not least the Homilies on Luke which Jerome translated in 392. The paper focuses on those writers or books which Jerome self-consciously excises from On Famous Men
and argues that these absences should be read alongside the discussion
of signification, dereliction and circumcision in Origen's fifth homily
on Luke. Given the recent importance attached to Jerome in shaping the
Christian culture that was to be received by medieval and modern
scholars of Patristics, this debt to Origen's supersessionist theology
needs to be unpacked. Razored passages can cut - as Donaghy tells us -
and Jerome's inheritance, like Augustine's, is double-edged.
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