21.3.chin

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

1/23

Short Words on Earth: Theological Geography in Rufinuss Commentary

on the Apostles Creed

Catherine M. Chin

Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 21, Number 3, Fall 2013,

pp. 391-412 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/earl.2013.0036

For additional information about this article

Access provided by username 'treederwright' (2 Nov 2013 01:44 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v021/21.3.chin.html
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v021/21.3.chin.htmlhttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/earl/summary/v021/21.3.chin.html

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

2/23

Journal of Early Christian Studies 21:3, 391412 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press

1. Princ.1.1.57. Edition is that of Henri Crouzel and Manlio Simonetti, Origne:Trait des Principes, SC 252 (Paris: Cerf, 1978); translations are from G. W. But-terworth, Origen: On First Principles (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), exceptwhere otherwise noted.

2. Princ. 1.1.6 (SC 252:100; tr. Butterworth, 11).

Short Words on Earth:Theological Geography in

Rufinuss Commentary on theApostles Creed

CATHERINE M. CHIN

This article examines Rufinus of Aquileias approach to local textual varia-tions in the baptismal creed, as presented in his Commentary on the ApostlesCreed, which analyzes the creed very differently than other late-ancient Latintreatments of the creed. I argue that Rufinus sees local variations in the text

of the creed as aspects of the divine mind that manifest differently in differentplaces, following an Origenist framework in which geography is part of divinepedagogy for humans. Thus the creed, its reciters, and its local setting interactmuch like agents within a local ecosystem, which provides a specific environ-ment to which its inhabitants must adapt, but which is also changed by itsinhabitants as they live in it.

In the first book of On First Principles, arguing for the immateriality ofGod, Origen remarks that mind is not dependent on space or place forthe efficacy of its movements or thoughts.1In making this claim, Origenanticipates only one possible objection to it: motion sickness. When menare traveling by sea and tossed by the waves, their mind is somewhat lessvigorous than it is wont to be on land. . . .2Nonetheless, Origen explains,this weakness is only a characteristic of minds that are composite withbodies in the material universe, not of mind in an absolute sense. The

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

3/23

392 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

3. I use the Latin text and line numberings of Manlio Simonetti, Tyrannii RufiniScripta Varia, CSEA 5.2 (Rome: Citt Nuova, 2000), 98173; the text is the sameas that printed in CCL 20. The standard English translation remains that of J. N. D.Kelly, Rufinus: A Commentary on the Apostles Creed (New York, NY: Newman,1954), which I use here except where otherwise noted. On the date of the commen-tary, see also Caroline Hammond Bammel, The Last Ten Years of Rufinus Life andthe Date of His Move South from Aquileia, Journal of Theological Studiesn.s. 28(1977): 38889, who dates it to around 400; and Francis X. Murphy, Rufinus ofAquileia (345411): His Life and Works (Washington, DC: Catholic University ofAmerica Press, 1945), 17985, who dates it to around 402.

4. The attribution of the Explanatio to Ambrose has been much debated; for areview of the scholarship see the edition of Bernard Botte, Ambroise de Milan, DesSacrements; des Mystres, SC 25 (Paris: Cerf, 1961), 2125; but see also Klaus Gamber,Geht di Sog. Explanatio symboli ad initiandosTatschlich auf Ambrosius zurck?Byzantinische Forschungen 2 (1967): 184203, who attributes the work to Niceta ofRemesiana. I use Bottes edition, with some reference to the edition and translation

concession that terrestrial minds may well be constrained by travel andbodily location is what I would like to pursue here, in the thought of oneof Origens peripatetic followers, Rufinus of Aquileia. I find one of Rufi-

nuss texts particularly attentive to the intersections between geographyand intellectual change. Rufinuss Commentary on the Apostles Creedisnotable for its attention to minor differences between the creed of Aquileiaand other baptismal creeds.3I argue that the relationship Rufinus suggestsbetween the text of the creed and the place of its recitation presupposesa particular kind of theological geography, in which the creed is simulta-neously local and translocal, and in which the ecclesial centers in whichthe creed occurs are considered part of a living network of divine mental

activity. This geography is an extrapolation of a broadly Origenist stancein which differences between territories constitute different processes ofdivine education for souls on earth. Thus, I suggest, Rufinuss ApostlesCreed moves and adapts itself geographically as part of the overall inter-action of divine mind with its terrestrial bodies.

LOCAL, EXPERIENTIAL, AND TEXTUAL

To begin with the complex iterations of the local in Rufinuss com-mentary: the two most obvious contemporary Latin texts to which theCommentary can be compared are the Explanatio symboli ad initiandosattributed to Ambrose and the fifth book of Niceta of Remesianas Libelliinstructionis, both of uncertain date, but produced perhaps in the two orthree decades before Rufinuss work and certainly in the milieu of north-ern Italy and the Adriatic.4Rufinus may well have been aware of both

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

4/23

CHIN / THEOLOGICAL GEOGRAPHY 393

of R. H. Connolly, The Explanatio Symboli ad Initiandos, A Work of Saint Ambrose(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1952). For Nicetas Libelli instruc-tionis, see the introduction and critical edition of A. E. Burn, Niceta of Remesiana:His Life and Works(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1905), lixlxxxiiiand 654; although Niceta appears to have outlived Rufinus, Burn dates the Libelliinstructionisto relatively early in Nicetas episcopal career, and suggests (lxxiii) that

Rufinus knew the work.5. The disagreements between Rufinus and the Explanatiohave led to some spec-ulation that the Explanatiocould have been a response to Rufinus, and hence notAmbrosian, but this seems unlikely given the internal evidence for Ambrosian author-ship: see R. H. Connolly, St. Ambrose and the Explanatio Symboli, Journal ofTheological Studies47 (1946): 18596. I would suggest instead that Rufinus may beresponding to the Explanatio; I will discuss their differences in greater detail below.

6. See, e.g., Roger Grysons introduction to his edition of the Arian scholia to theActa of the Council of Aquileia, Scolies ariennes sur le Concile dAquile, SC 267(Paris: Cerf, 1980); and Neil B. McLynn, From Palladius to Maximus: Passing theArian Torch,Journal of Early Christian Studies4(1996): 47793.

7. Gennadius, De vir. ill.22; Innocent, epp.21 and 22; Paulinus, ep.29.14; carm.17 and 27; see Burn, Niceta of Remesiana, xlixlix, and 13755.

8. Kelly, Rufinus, 89, dismisses both of these possibilities; on Rufinuss social net-work more generally, see Elizabeth A. Clark, Elite Networks and Heresy Accusations:Towards a Social Description of the Origenist Controversy, Semeia56 (1992): 81107.

9. Sym. apos.3.

these works.5The production of these three works in close temporal andgeographic proximity suggests a general interest in creedal interpreta-tion and the public explication of baptismal instruction in late fourth-

and early fifth-century North Italy and the Adriatic, where indeed thepolitical implications of neo-Nicene and homoian theologies continuedto play out well into the sixth century.6This proximity also places Rufi-nuss work within a well-established Italian and Adriatic intellectual andecclesiastical network: the influence of Ambrose and Milan on northernItalian ecclesiastical politics is well known, and Niceta seems likewiseto have been well-connected, from his friendship with Paulinus of Nola,appearance in the letters of Innocent, and notice in Gennadiuss con-

tinuation of the De viris illustribusof Jerome.7As part of this network,Rufinuss Commentarymay be understood as itself local in its produc-tion and imagined audience: nothing is known of the Bishop Lawrencefor whom Rufinus wrote the work, but it has been suggested that he waseither bishop of Rufinuss native Concordia, or that Laurenti is a cor-ruption of Gaudenti, and that the work was written for Gaudentiusof Brescia; in either case the work would be equally part of this NorthItalian network.8Rufinuss indication that he is writing a commentary

specifically on the creed of Aquileia indicates the locality of the com-mentary very clearly.9

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

5/23


10. Kelly, Rufinus, 11.11. Burn, Niceta of Remesiana, lxxlxxiii.12. Dayna Kalleres, Cultivating True Sight at the Center of the World: Cyril of

Jerusalem and the Lenten Catechumenate, Church History74:3 (2005): 43159; onthe relationship between visible and invisible experience in Cyril, see Georgia Frank,Taste and See: The Eucharist and the Eyes of Faith in the Fourth Century, ChurchHistory70:4 (2001): 62330. On Cyril and liturgy more generally, see Jan WillemDrijvers, Cyril of Jerusalem: Bishop and City(Leiden: Brill, 2004), 7295, and A. J.Doval, Cyril of Jerusalem, Mystagogue: The Authorship of the Mystagogic Catecheses(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001).

13. On Rufinuss relationship with Cyrils successor, John of Jerusalem, see Murphy,Rufinus of Aquileia, 55, 7881 and Clark, Elite Networks, 112 n.58.

The commentary also draws attention to the local through a set of strik-ing omissions. As is well known, Rufinus draws heavily on the Catecheti-cal Lecturesof Cyril of Jerusalem. Rufinuss use of these lectures in sec-

tions 2030 of his Commentaryis extensive enough that, as J. N. D. Kellyremarks, it would not be unfair to describe his treatise . . . as a rather free,drastically abbreviated presentation in Latin of St. Cyrils teaching. . . .10Niceta of Remesiana also draws extensively on Cyril, which suggests thatCyrils work had spread into Italian and Adriatic Greek-speaking circles,and might indeed have been familiar to at least some of Rufinuss audi-ence.11For some time, however, scholarship on Cyril has pointed to Cyrilsemphatic connection between the words of the baptismal creed of Jeru-

salem and the experience of catechumens physically located in Jerusalem.Cyrils Lecturesthus transform the creed into an intensely local experi-ence. His repeated verbal gestures such as Golgotha, here, or You seebefore you . . . have led scholars to posit a strongly sensory argumentfor the centrality of Jerusalem itself in Cyrils Jerusalem liturgy.12By con-trast, Rufinuss commentary focuses almost exclusively on the words ofthe creed itself; his interest is not liturgical, although Rufinus refers to therecitation of the creed, nor is his argument sensory, despite the fact that

Rufinuss lengthy earlier monastic career at the Mount of Olives in Jeru-salem could easily have supplemented Cyrils descriptions of Jerusalemsites.13Instead, Rufinus insists on the fundamentally verbal nature of thecreed that is his subject. Rufinus disembodies the creed in the sense thathe treats its words as separable, if not separate, from their non-textualphysical surroundings, whether these surroundings are liturgical or geo-graphical. For Rufinus, although the creeds words may be provisionallylocated in specific places and events, they are, as repeated and transmitted

words, fundamentally removable from these contexts.The Italian and Adriatic texts of Ambrose and Niceta likewise demon-strate this contrast between Rufinuss treatment of the creed as separable

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

6/23


14. Lib. ins.1.frag.6 (Burn, Niceta of Remesiana,7).15. Lib. ins. 2.frag.4 (Burn, Niceta of Remesiana, 8).16. Lib. ins. 5.114 (Burn, Niceta of Remesiana, 3852).17. Exp. sym. 1 (SC 25:46).18. Exp. sym. 3, 8 (SC 25:48, 56).19. For a useful brisk overview of baptismal practices in Milan and north Italy, see

Everett Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology and Liturgy in theFirst Five Centuries(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 63462.

20. Sym. apos.3.21. See Bammel, Last Ten Years, 38690; Kelly, Rufinus, 59.22. Allan Doig, Liturgy and Architecture from the Early Church to the Middle

Ages (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008), 4648.

from its physical surroundings and their own treatments of the creed asfully enmeshed in its human performance. While they do not use locallandmarks in the way that Cyril does, they both focus extensively on the

immediate, experiential aspects of baptism and its attendant rituals, as theoccasion on which their audiences learn the creed. Niceta sets his writingon the creed in the context of an entire baptismal instruction: the fragmentsof the first book, for example, address the segregation of catechumens fromthe rest of the congregation, and the exorcism of candidates for baptism;14the second book explains that memorizing the creed is similar to memo-rizing the Lords prayer or making the sign of the cross;15the fifth book,on the creed, addresses catechumens consistently in the second person,

explaining what exactly their recitation of the creedal clauses will mean.16The Explanatio symboli, similarly, opens with reference to the exorcismprior to baptism, and then indicates its immediate context, and its statusas a transcription, with the words: It is now the time and the day for usto hand on [tradamus] the creed.17Interspersed through the interpreta-tion of the creed are imperatives for the listeners to make the sign of thecross as they learn each clause.18Thus these texts, like Cyril, insist on avivid sensory and physical environment for the learning of the creed; the

creed itself is merely the most verbal part of a richly orchestrated physi-cal process.19While they do not summon the same kind of local geogra-phy as Cyril does, they nonetheless create a setting of immediate physicalspecificity for the baptismal candidate. Rufinus, however, excludes eventhis kind of local and temporal specificity. Although Rufinus clearly statesat the outset of his commentary that he has chosen to comment on thecreed as taught at Aquileia,20and was very likely in Aquileia at the timeof writing,21he makes no mention of the physical environment or experi-

ence of baptism in the city. If, as has been suggested,22

the Jonah mosaiccycle at Aquileia should be taken as a type of baptism, we might expect areference to Jonah in Rufinuss commentary to take up this type, but there

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

7/23


23. Y.-M. Duval, Jonas Aquile: de la mosaque Theodoriana sud aux textes deJrme, Rufin, et Chromace? Antichit Altoadriatiche47 (2000): 27396. For anoverview of the relationship between the mosaics at Aquileia and the Christian com-munity there, see Claire Sotinel, Identit Civique et Christianisme: Aquile du IIIeau VIe Sicle(Rome: cole franaise de Rome: 2005), 7689.

24. Exp. sym.2 (SC 25:46).25. Exp. sym.8 (SC 25:56).26. Sym. apos. 2.27. Sym. apos. 1.2223 (CSEA 5.2:98). Rufinus does use reddereonce in the fol-

lowing section, 3.82, when describing this point in the liturgy. Overall, trad- wordsoccur about twice as often in the work as redd-words, 33 times as opposed to 13.Ambrose, Exp. sym.1, also uses tradamusfor the instruction of catechumens in thecreed; we can legitimately infer a similar invocation of a historical past here, althoughit is not emphasized to the same degree. It is also likely true that the Latin baptismalcreeds of the fourth century bear some genealogical relationship to each other, and

is no such tie to the physical experience of Aquileia in the text. 23Thus,although Rufinus is careful to locate his commentary with reference to theparticular creed at Aquileia, the physical markers of baptism are absent.

Instead of embedding it within these localized sensory markers, we findRufinus presenting the creed as a text subject to typical late-ancient com-mentarial practice. His focus is on authorial intentionality as well as onthe state and meanings of the text. The idea that the text of the baptismalcreed is part of a verbal apostolic tradition is emphatically established inthe first two sections of Rufinuss Commentary, in a detailed origin storyon the creation and purpose of the creed. The literal apostolic authorshipof the baptismal creed is not commented on in sources earlier than the

Explanatio, which simply says, So, when the holy apostles had cometogether, they created a summary of the faith, so that we could graspthe content of the faith completely and in brief.24Later in the text, theExplanatiodivides the creed into three groups of four sententiae, and says,Look: just as there are twelve apostles, so there are twelve sententiae.25Rufinuss version elaborates such minimal statements of fact to more thanfifty lines of exposition on the apostolic authorship, setting, and purpose ofthe creed, and adds the detail that each of the twelve clauses of the creed

was composed by an individual apostle.26

That the clauses authored bythe apostles are the same words that these fourth- and fifth-century writ-ers had is stressed by Rufinus in his repeated use of tradereand traditiointhis passage, six times in the first sixty lines of the commentary, as opposedto reddere or redditio, the liturgical term for the catechumens recitationof the creed, which is only used once in the first two sections of the com-mentary, and then as Rufinuss claim that he is returning simplicity tothe apostolic words.27It is clear that Rufinus intends to retroject a histori-

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

8/23


this may be partly behind the idea of apostolic origins: J. N. D. Kelly, Early Chris-tian Creeds(3rd ed.; London: Longman, 1972), chapters 4 and 6 on the Old RomanCreed and its reception.

28. At this point in his career, Rufinus had not yet translated any of Origens formalcommentaries, but had translated Origens homilies on Joshua, Judges, and Psalms3638: Bammel, Last Ten Years, 39194.

29. Sym. apos. 3536 (CSEA 5:2:15456; tr. Kelly, Rufinus, 7172).30. On Serviuss techniques, see Robert Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Gram-

marian and Society in Late Antiquity(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,1988), ch. 5; on Rufinuss exegetical technique here, see also Calogero Riggi, RufinoCatecheta, Antichit Altoadriatiche31:1 (1986): 18087.

31. Sym. apos.2.5660 (CSEA 5.2:100; tr. Kelly, Rufinus, 30). The corruption ofwritten texts by heretics was of course a major preoccupation for Rufinus, and formsthe backbone of his defense of Origen in On the Adulteration of the Works of Origen.

cal setting and verbal tradition from the baptismal creed of Aquileia thatrelies on apostolic authorship.

Rufinus also emphasizes the particulars of this verbal tradition in a way

that fits more comfortably within the setting of late-ancient commentarialwork, both biblical commentary and commentary more broadly, than itdoes within the context of liturgical performance.28For example, in sec-tions 3536 of the commentary, on belief in the Holy Spirit, the HolyChurch, the remission of sins, and the resurrection of the flesh, Rufinusexplains at great length why the creed has the word in before theHoly Spirit but not before the Holy Church, the remission of sins, andthe resurrection of the flesh.29The prepositional distinction is precisely

the sort of thing that could be found in biblical commentary, but also in,for example, Serviuss Aeneid commentary, in which Virgils particularuses of prepositions and declensions are taken to give information aboutboth the author and the meaning of the text.30Whereas other writers onthe creed treat the learning of the creed as part of an overall process ofcatechesis and baptism, Rufinus frames it primarily as a document of thewords that are authoritative for fifth-century Christians, not unlike theway the words of Virgil carried cultural and religious authority for fifth-

century Latin readers in general.Rufinuss treatment of the creed as a text upon which commentary canbe written is all the more striking given the insistence, which Rufinus him-self emphasizes, that the creed is not to be written down: . . . the reasonwhy the creed is not written down on paper or parchment, but is retainedin the believers hearts, is to ensure that it has been learned from the tra-dition handed down from the apostles, and not from written texts, whichoccasionally fall into the hands of unbelievers.31The same prohibition

is found in Cyril, Niceta, and the Explanatio, which even warns against

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

9/23


32. Exp. sym.9.33. See especially Eric Hobsbawms seminal Introduction: Inventing Traditions,

in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge,UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 114. On the idea of apostolicity in Eusebiusand some pseudo-Clementine literature, see Annette Yoshiko Reeds excellent Jew-ish Christianity as Counter-history? The Apostolic Past in Eusebius EcclesiasticalHistoryand the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies, in Antiquity in Antiquity: Jewish andChristian Pasts in the Greco-Roman World, ed. Gregg Gardner and Kevin Osterloh(Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 173216.

reciting the creed aloud as part of memorizing it, since this might causethe newly baptized to recite the creed accidentally in the hearing of cat-echumens or heretics.32Given this tradition, it is perhaps not surprising

that most of these earlier texts on the creed are found in written recordsof oral performance. Rufinus, however, is writing against the grain ofthis tradition, by treating the creed as ifit were a written text, even as heinsists that it is not. This treatment of the creed as written fits in, instead,with Rufinuss other preoccupations with earlier Christian words: his Onthe Adulteration of the Works of Origen, from 397, traces the textualcorruption of works from the post-apostolic period to his own time. Afew years after writing his commentary on the creed, in 407, Rufinus will

translate the pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, attempting to establish theconnection between Peters missionary sermons and the episcopal traditionof Rome. In Rufinuss account, the baptismal creed becomes another tex-tual connection between apostolic preaching and the authority of specificrepeatable words in the fifth century.33

Placing the creed in this textual genealogy appears to move the creedfrom the sphere of local liturgy to the less immediately physical, and lessimmediately local, sphere of commentarial object. It may be tempting to see

this absence of physical markers of locality as a typically Origenist claim,extrapolated from the passage in On First Principleswith which I began,on the fact that the divine mind is independent of place. Yet Rufinus is notin fact removing the creed from a local context by treating it as a writtentext. Instead, he is outlining a relationship between texts and places thataligns locality with textual practice, rather than separating the two. It isto this alignment that I now turn.

CREED AS TRAVELLING MIND

Rufinus does distinguish local creeds from one another, and he occasionallygoes into some detail about their variations. For example, in his exami-nation of the beginning of the Aquileian creed, he sets out the opening as

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

10/23


34. Sym. apos.4.11315 (CSEA 5.2:104; tr. Kelly, Rufinus, 33).35. Sym. apos.5.2047 (CSEA 5.2:10810; tr. Kelly, Rufinus, 37).36. Exp. sym.4; see also Bottes introduction, 23.37. Here I have found Tim Whitmarshs discussion, Thinking Local, in his Local

Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World(Cambridge, UK: Cam-bridge University Press, 2010), 116, particularly helpful; Whitmarsh refers (6 n.20)to M. Kearney, The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization andTransnationalism, Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 54765, which Ihave also found useful.

38. This is particularly clear in Origenist-inflected ascetic practice; for a goodoverview, see Blossom Stefaniw, Mind, Text, and Commentary: Noetic Exegesis inOrigen of Alexandria, Didymus the Blind, and Evagrius Ponticus (Frankfurt: PeterLang, 2010), chapter 4.

I believe in God the Father Almighty, but then immediately explains,Almost without exception the Eastern Churches give this in the form,I believe in one God the Father Almighty.34Rufinus suggests that the

insertion of one is in deference to the Apostle Paul, a verbal remi-niscence of 1 Cor 8.6. In the next section of the commentary, he explainsthat after God the Father Almighty, the Aquileian creed inserts thephrase invisible and impassible, but that these two predicates . . . areabsent from the creed of the Roman church. They were interpolated . . .to meet the heresy of Sabellius. . . .35This degree of specificity suggeststhat Rufinus is not in fact arguing that the creed is free from constraintsof place. The local points of interest, however, are not themselves visible

physical sites, but localized verbal events, occurring either under the influ-ence of scriptural precedent or to counter the influence of local heresy. Itshould be noted, moreover, that this interpolation is explicitly criticizedin the Explanatio symbolias a local deviation from the creed in Rome;36Rufinus, by contrast, suggests that the adaptation of local creeds to localsituations is thoroughly appropriate. Thus the local in Rufinuss com-mentary is particularly the local of specific verbal events engaged withparticular intellectual tasks.37

In this sense, Rufinuss commentary is a peculiarly textual understandingof place: the difference between Rome and Jerusalem, or Alexandria andAquileia, is not a matter of what sites are to be found there, but of whatwords can legitimately be said there. This setting of the conditions underwhich certain intellectual acts can occur is Origenist in the fuller senseof understanding terrestrial intellection as tied to specific environmentalconditions.38Nowhere does Rufinus suggest that the creeds of what hecalls the Eastern Churches, the creed of Rome, or the creed of Aquileia

are wrong in having local variation: the state of affairs is not pristine, butneither is it corrupt. Rather, despite their locality, Rufinus is at pains to

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

11/23


39. Sym. apos.43 (CSEA 5:2:168). Cf. Apol. c. Hier.1.46. For the importanceof this clause in Rufinuss defense of himself and of Origen, see Clark, The OrigenistControversy: The Social Construction of an Early Christian Debate(Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1992), 175, 18587; Murphy, Rufinus of Aquileia, 18385;Kelly, Rufinus, 150 n.268.

40. For some time, much of the scholarship on Rufinuss translations focused onhis infidelity to his original texts; for the shift in scholarly opinion about the reli-ability of Rufinuss translations, see the classic study of M. Monica Wagner, Rufinus,the Translator(Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1945), especially chapters1 and 6. On the problematic notion of fidelity in translation in general, see DouglasRobinson, Who Translates? Translator Subjectivities Beyond Reason (Albany, NY:SUNY Press, 2001), especially chapters 1 and 2.

41. Rec.preface; Hom. Greg. preface. For an overview of the way Rufinuss trans-lation career overall does participate in the tropes of East-to-West trade, see TomsSpidlck, Rufino e lOriente, Antichit Altoadriatiche31 (1987): 11524.

42. Sym. apos.2.

explain how the various creeds are correct to insert the words that theyinsert. The most famous example is of course his discussion of the clausethe resurrection of the flesh, which in its Aquileian version is the res-

urrection of thisflesh.39This local safeguard, Rufinus argues, serves agood purpose; it is not a corruption of doctrine in any way, and in factclarifies the doctrinal correctness of the Aquileian church and its members.Thus the local here cannot be assumed to be a departure from right doc-trine, even if it is clearly a departure from other local verbal practices. Bydefending local verbal interpolations in this way, Rufinus is fundamentallyarguing that the creed is a set of truth-bearing verbal traditions that adaptthemselves to different environments, while retaining the same truth-value.

That such a view can be found in the work of a longtime translator andtheorist of translation should not be surprising.40Instead, we can see inthe Commentary on the Apostles Creedthe same kind of principles ofverbal locality and adaptation that underlie Rufinuss translations overall.

As Rufinus presents the particular case of the creed, moreover, I wouldsuggest that the adaptation of text to place is one of the defining condi-tions of creedal statements. Unlike his translations of other texts, such asthe Recognitionsof Clement or the homilies of the Cappadocians, Rufinus

does not present the creed as particularly Eastern wisdom brought to theWest or more broadly as thought that diffuses the value of one place acrossdifferent places.41Instead, the creed is presented as originally intended,and indeed composed, for a variety of places and in a variety of languages.Probably the most famous element of Rufinuss commentary is his accountof the joint composition of the creed, clause by clause, by the apostles.42The fact that this account is manifestly a fiction has led to some neglect

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

12/23


43. Sym. apos.2.3134 (CSEA 5.2:100; tr. Kelly, 29).44. Sym. apos.12 (CSEA 5.2:98; tr. Kelly, 29).45. Sym. apos.2.6772 (CSEA 5.2:102; tr. Kelly, 31).46. Compare Whitmarshs discussion of the translocal Res Gestae in Thinking

Local, 48. On the relationship between place and travel, and the way in which travelcan create place, see Marc Aug, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology ofSupermodernity, tr. John Howe (London: Verso, 1995), chapter 3, which relies heav-ily on Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. 1, tr. Stephen Rendell(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), part 3.

47. Sym. apos. 2.

of the context in which Rufinus places it. The creed, Rufinus argues, wasspecifically designed for travel. In his account, after the apostles weregranted facility in different languages at Pentecost, the Lord then com-

manded them to journey separately to different countries to preach theword of God. When they were on the point of taking leave of each other,they first settled on a common form for their future preaching. . . .43Thisis the specific context in which Rufinus claims that the apostles draftedthis short summary in fulfillment of Isaiah 10.22, a short word will theLord make upon the earth.44The mobile and terrestrial nature of thecreed is clear in this introductory section. In fact, Rufinus reiterates thepoint at the end of the introduction, and elaborates on it, arguing that the

descent of languages upon the apostles at Pentecost is the mirror imageof the story of the Tower of Babel. One group, on the eve of their sepa-ration . . . built a tower of pride, while the apostles, erecting a towerof faith, were rewarded with the knowledge of . . . all languages.45Thiscomplex introduction to the creed emphasizes its overriding unity, butinsists that this unity has as its originary point a multiplicity of languagesand authors, who are divinely tied to movement across different territo-ries. Thus the proof of the apostolic nature of the creed lies in its move-

ment and adaptation to a series of places that require linguistic change.The purpose and origin of the creed is its own dispersion.46

Yet despite Rufinuss emphasis on the physical movement of the creedfrom place to place, he clearly does not consider that what is being trans-mitted is primarily material or terrestrial. The composite nature of Rufi-nuss creed is usually considered to be the contribution of one clause byeach apostle; but of course the more vital component for Rufinus is theinspiration of the Holy Spirit, which oversees the content of the creed

along with its attendant travel and translation needs.47

The role of theHoly Spirit in the commentary aligns closely with the description of theHoly Spirit in Rufinuss translation of On First Principles, possibly oneof the more heavily revised sections of the text, in which Rufinus erases

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

13/23


48. This at least is Jeromes claim in ep.124.2; see discussion in Crouzel and Sim-onetti, Origne: Trait des Principes, vol. 2, SC 253 (Paris: Cerf, 1978), 14 n.21, 60n.20, 62 n.23. For a fuller discussion of Origens pneumatology, see Maureen BeyerMoser, Teacher of Holiness: The Holy Spirit in Origens Commentary on the Epistleto the Romans(Piscatawy, NJ: Gorgias, 2005), who takes the Romans commentaryas representative of Origens pneumatology as a whole; see chapter 4 especially for theinteraction between the Holy Spirit and human beings. On the reception of Origenspneumatology in the fourth century, see also Andrew Radde-Gallwitz, Holy Spiritas Agent, not Activity: Origens Argument with Modalism and its Afterlife in Didy-mus, Eunomius, and Gregory of Nazianzus, Vigiliae Christianae65 (2011): 22748.

49. Princ.1.3.4 (SC 252:150; tr. Butterworth, 32).50. Princ. 1.3.8 (SC 252; tr. Butterworth, 38).51. On the substantiality of the Spirit as a necessary condition for its activity in

the world, see Radde-Gallwitz, Holy Spirit as Agent, 22735.

Origens subordinationism.48In Rufinuss Latin version, the Holy Spirit,while not divine rationality itself, is the mediator of correct divine thoughtto humans: For all knowledge of the Father, when the Son reveals him,

is made known to us through the Holy Spirit.49The Holy Spirit acts asthe gatekeeper to different kinds of divine gifts, including access to divinethought: such as have been deemed worthy of advancing to this degreethrough the sanctification of the Holy Spirit obtain in addition the giftof wisdom by the power of the working of Gods Spirit.50This notionof the Holy Spirit as the mediator of divine wisdom and various formsof spiritual gifts gives a particular significance to the idea of the creed asadaptable local knowledge. In this system, a local creed is a geographical

adaptation of the divine mind writ large. The adaptation and the localspecificity of creedal variations are thus physical manifestations of divinemental activity; that is, textual variants represent physically situated instan-tiations of divine movement, as the Holy Spirit reveals the divine mind indifferent places and persons. Thus, what is moving in the transmission ofthe creed is not simply the verbal tradition, but the revelation of divinewisdom, and what is plotted in that movement are the terrestrial contoursof the divine mind itself.51The creed situates divinity in the human and

in the terrestrial. In other words, the verbal differences in the text of thecreedsometimes slight, sometimes less soare on this view the neces-sarily different physical manifestations of the activity of the divine mind,as far as it is bound to physical instantiation.

THE NOETIC NETWORK

Thus Rufinuss interest in textual variation is undergirded in part by a physi-

cal system of geographical variation in the visible presences of the divine. Itis useful to place this imagined geographical system into the context of the

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

14/23


52. At Sym. apos. 3, 5, 16.53. Sym. apos.20.

54. Given the references to Eastern Churches in the commentary (4, 5) we canalso assume that Jerusalem is included in these, perhaps privileged; see Y.-M. Duval,Aquile et la Palestine entre 370 et 420, Antichit Altoadriatiche12 (1977): 299.

55. See esp. Sotinel, Identit Civique, chapters 1 and 4; Drijvers, Cyril of Jerusa-lem, chapter 1; the bibliography on the city of Rome in late antiquity is of coursevast, but for a useful guide to the interactions between religious and civic acitivty,see John R. Curran, Pagan City and Christian Capital: Rome in the Fourth Century(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chapter 4.

56. Duval, Aquile et Palestine, 26789; Sotinel, Identit Civique, 1628; cf.also Sotinel, How were Bishops Informed? Information Transmission Across theAdriatic Sea in Late Antiquity, in Travel, Communication and Geography in LateAntiquity: Sacred and Profane, ed. Linda Ellis and Frank L. Kidner (Aldershot, UK:Ashgate, 2004), 6371.

57. Murphy, Rufinus of Aquileia, 8283, 111; Bammel, Last Ten Years, 38486.58. This idea would also fit neatly into the rise of the figure of the bishop as civic

and urban leader: Claudia Rapp, Holy Bishops in Late Antiquity: The Nature ofChristian Leadership in an Age of Transition(Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress, 2005), chapters 7 and 9.

three most prominent environments for Rufinuss commentary: Aquileia,Rome, and Jerusalem. The first two are the only creedal locations men-tioned by name in the text,52and although Jerusalem is only mentioned as

part of the crucifixion narrative,53it is clearly the source location for muchof Rufinuss material.54These three urban centers appear to have been thriv-ing hubs in the late fourth century, even if Aquileia and Rome would beunder military threat soon after the commentary was written, in the earlyfifth.55Travel and commercial routes between Jerusalem and North Italywere well established, as were routes between Jerusalem and Rome, andbetween Rome, eastern ports, and Aquileia.56Rufinus, of course, wouldhave traveled these routes himself in 397 and 399, making his way from

Jerusalem to Rome, and then to Aquileia.57The cities were, in additionto being commercial centers, episcopal centers as well, and the mappingof textual variants of the creed along these ecclesial routes suggests thatthe terrestrial network of divine mental activity overlaps predictably withecclesiastical movement. In this case, the material presence of divine intel-lection is manifested according to the constraints imposed by the presenceof ecclesial urban centers; the divine mind is visible in the particulars ofthe city. In such a system, the varieties of the text of the creed indicate

not only regional distinctions in the material manifestations of the divine,but suggest that episcopal centers play a privileged role in the terrestrialmovement of divine manifestations.58

The relationship between intellection and location is, moreover, recipro-cal. The location of creeds in cities reflects an obvious geographic reality,

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

15/23


59. See Gisella Cantino Wataghin, Christianisation et Organisation Ecclsiastiquedes Campagnes: LItalie du Nord aux IVe-VIIIe Sicles, in Towns and Their Ter-ritories between Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. G. P. Broglio et al.(Leiden: Brill, 2002), 20934.

60. This notion of mental activity as distributed across multiple agents and in spaceis much more fully explored in Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild(Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1995); for the idea of the city as a set of repeated actions (in thiscase physical movements), see Bill Hillier, Space is the Machine(London: Space Syn-tax, 2004), chapter 4, Cities as movement economies, but also de Certeau, Practiceof Everyday Life, chapter 7.

61. Sym. apos.3.8687 (CSEA 5.2:102; my translation).62. I rely to some extent here on the model of social reproduction through verbal

reproduction as outlined most famously in Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron,Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, 2nd ed., tr. Richard Nice (London:Sage, 1990), but would like to add to it, first, the problem of the material situated-ness of that reproduction, which necessarily varies over time and place, and, second,the problem of the invisible divine as co-agent in the activity of reproduction.

in that such cities clearly served as physical network hubs for travel andexchange, and were the location of episcopal baptismal oversight.59Tothe extent that Rufinus sees the creed as physically based in travel, then,

the conflation of creed and city is predictable. At the same time, this con-flation also creates a kind of noetic privileging of cities as moments inwhich divine activity becomes visible and reproducible. In this sense, thecity should not be understood exclusively as a place, but also as a series ofrepeated actions, or repeated moments of collective intellectual reproduc-tion, governed by a combination of divine mind, human baptism, and ter-restrial motion between places.60The idea of the city as a repetitive set ofsituated intellectual reproductions is in fact clear in Rufinuss commentary,

in which the distinguishing characteristic of the cities that are its founda-tion is precisely the liturgical repetition of the local creed. For example, innoting his own use of the creed of Aquileia, Rufinus simply states that hewill follow the sequence of the creed which I accepted through the graceof baptism.61The tie between acceptance of the creed and acceptanceof baptism in a particular urban center means, on the one hand, that thecreed is reproduced in the situated community, but also that this particu-lar community, on the other hand, is reproduced through the mechanism

of the situated creed. The creedal urban center, then, is fundamentally acenter of reproduction, but reproduction of a combined verbal, divine,human, and terrestrial kind.62

The privileging of the reproductive activity of episcopal urban centers,and particularly those tied to major travel and commercial routes, offersan alternative to the dominant narrative of the creation of Christian sacred

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

16/23


63. See especially Robert A. Markus, How on Earth Could Places Become Holy?Origins of the Christian Idea of Holy Places, Journal of Early Christian Studies 2(1994): 25771; P. W. L. Walker, Holy City, Holy Places? Christian Attitudes to Jeru-salem and the Holy Land in the Fourth Century(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990);and Brouria Britton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on ChristianPilgrimage in Late Antiquity(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005).

64. See especially Andrew Jacobs, Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land andChristian Empire in Late Antiquity(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004),chapters 2 and 3.

65. Sym. apos.3.8486 (CSEA 5.2:102; tr. Kelly, 32, with my modification). Notethe emphatic initial In ceteris autem locis.

66. Exp. sym. 4 (SC 25:50).67. Sym. apos.3.7880 (CSEA 5.2:102; tr. Kelly, 31). The sentence balances that

at 3.84 by opening, In ecclesia tamen urbis Romae.

geography.63Rather than focusing on sites in Palestine, sanctified in a vari-ety of ways through the use of biblical texts,64or on the creation of memo-rials to martyrdom, we see the creation of matrices of divine intellectual

activity that manifest their unity and difference through the variations inthe text of the creed. The relationship between text and place here is com-plex: as texts are understood to reproduce and change from place to place,materially, through repetition, interpolation, excision, or translation, soplaces have their invisible theological characteristics mapped through suchreproductive changes. This guiding principle becomes clear in Rufinussexplanation of the main reason for variations between regional creeds: Inother places, to the best of my knowledge, the presence of heretics seems

to have occasioned the insertion of clauses, the idea being that they wouldhelp to exclude novelties of doctrine.65Here heretics, like manuscripts,provide regional theological variants, and, as it were, constitute the land-scape to which divine activity must adapt. Again we see Rufinus taking astance opposed to that of the Explanatio symboli, which argues that thepresence of heretics is not sufficient cause to alter the words of the creed:Where the faith is kept whole, the teachings of the apostles are enough:safeguards, even those of bishops, are not needed.66In contrast to this

concern about local variations in the creed, Rufinuss alternative stanceframes textual variation not as textual corruption, but as appropriateadaptation to local conditions.

Rufinus makes one notable exception to this principle of heretically-informed local variation: No such development . . . can be detected in thecase of the church of the city of Rome. The reason, I suppose, is that no her-esy has ever originated there.67The Explanatio symboli, although it holdsthe creed of Rome as its standard for creedal consistency, nowhere offers

an explanation for Romes primacy. Rufinuss commentary supports the

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

17/23


68. Murphy, Rufinus of Aquileia, 9599 and 10510; Bammel, Last Ten Years,385.

69. Sym. apos.2.70. Sym. apos.3.8083 (CSEA 5.2:102; tr. Kelly, 3132).71. On Plinys rather mild attempt to relate location and person in book 7 of the

Natural History, see Trevor Morgan Murphy, Pliny the Elders Natural History: TheEmpire in the Encyclopedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), chapter 3.On Ptolemys Tetrabiblos, see Tamsyn S. Barton, Power and Knowledge: Astrology,Physiognomics, and Medicine under the Roman Empire (Ann Arbor, MI: Universityof Michigan Press, 1994), especially chapter 2. For an example of the close connec-tion between geography and astrology in late antiquity, see Evelyn Edson and EmilieSavage-Smith, An Astrologers Map: A Relic of Late Antiquity, Imago Mundi52(2000): 729.

72. Princ.2.9.58.

notion that the creed of Rome is pristinely apostolic, but explains Romesconsistency as yet another instance of local variation, or in this case, localinvariance. The idea that Rome has never been the birthplace of heresy is

a fascinating claim for Rufinus to make, particularly since he had at thetime of writing recently left a Rome hotly divided over Origenism; he wascertainly aware of the effects of disputes over doctrine in Rome, even if heconsidered these disputes imported, rather than domestic.68Yet his claimreveals the imagined relationship between textual change, divine mentalactivity, and terrestrial geography: Rufinus does not claim that Rome is theoriginary point for the creed; to the extent that the originally multilingualcreed can be said to have an originary point, it is clearly Jerusalem.69Yet

Rome is equally clearly imagined as a highly favorable physical environ-ment for the reproduction of the creed. This is supported in part throughphysical events specific to that location: the ancient custom is maintainedthere whereby candidates who are on the point of receiving the grace ofbaptism deliver the creed publicly, in the hearing of the congregation ofthe faithful. As a result . . . the interpolation of even a single article is nottolerated.70Thus location sets the conditions in a variety of ways for theterrestrial manifestation of divine thought in verbal practice.

The idea that geography constrains mental activity is not new; PlinysNatural Historyand Ptolemys Tetrabiblos, among others, famously cor-relate regional variation in both bodies and temperaments with geographiclocation relative to the sun, moon, or other planets.71More importantlyfor Rufinus, Origen himself subscribes to a version of this theory of geo-graphical variation. In the second book of On First Principles, Origen sug-gests that souls are incarnated in different geographical regions to undergoappropriate corrective training.72He elaborates on this argument in Against

Celsusas part of an explanation of the Tower of Babel narrative: And each

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

18/23


73. C. Cels.5.30 (SC 147:90). Translation is that of Chadwick, Origen: ContraCelsum(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 287.

74. C. Cels.5.31 (SC 147:92; tr. Chadwick, 288).75. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 18289.76. Comm. Rom. 5.2.78 (SC 539:414). Translation is that of Thomas P. Scheck,

with my modification: Origen: Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Books15, tr. Thomas P. Scheck, FC 103 (Washington, D.C. Catholic University of AmericaPress, 2001), 33233; n.b.the paragraph numbering of SC 539 (Paris: Cerf, 2010)differs slightly from the paragraph numbering used by Scheck.

77. Princ. 2.11.6 (SC 252:408; tr. Butterworth, 152).

one is led by angels, who put in them their native language, to the partsof the earth which they deserve.73Even the movements of the Israelitesin and out of captivity, Origen says, were part of this geographical system

of correction: in proportion to their sins they were abandoned to thosebeings who had obtained other countries.74Thus ones place on earthis, on a large scale, part of the divine pedagogical plan for the training ofthought. In his commentary, Rufinus has taken this general principle andapplied it to the smaller scale of ecclesial urban centers, and indeed to hisown history of travel. The variety of nations become cities, and the localeducational differences Origen suggests become variations in the text ofthe creed, necessary to deal with regional intellectual problems.

This geographical pedagogy should likewise be applied to the physi-cal context of the liturgy as a whole. Rather than devaluing the liturgicalstatus of the creed, Rufinus is instead attempting to expand the liturgicalprocess in a particularly Origenist fashion. It is unclear what sort of bap-tismal creedal statements Origen himself would have been familiar within third-century Alexandria or Caesarea,75but from one of the works thatRufinus would later translate, the Commentary on Romans, we know thatOrigens primary understanding of baptism was as part of a lifelong peda-

gogical process: . . . Parents not only produce sons but they also educatethem. . . . And just as [Christ] substituted birth with rebirth, so also hereplaced one [instruction] with another. For when he sent his own dis-ciples to do this task, he did not merely say, Go, baptize all nations, butGo, teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and theSon and the Holy Spirit.76It is of course a similar moment of apostolicdispersal and teaching with which Rufinus begins his own commentaryon the creed. In other words, for Origen and in the tradition of his teach-

ing, baptism is located within an ongoing process of divine instruction.This is more than appropriate for a thinker whose idea of paradise in theafterlife is, famously, a place of instruction and, so to speak, a lectureroom or school for souls.77Baptism is at best merely the beginning of

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

19/23


78. For a useful and thorough narrative, see Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church,part five, The Fourth Century; and more specifically on ritual aspects, Victor Saxer,Les rites dinitiation chrtienne du IIe au VIe sicle: Esquisse historique et signifi-cation daprs leur principaux tmoines(Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull altomedioevo, 1988).

79. Sym apos. 3.7883.

this eschatological process of schooling, a process that is located for eachindividual in a specific location.

This eschatological view, however, requires some elaboration to trans-

plant into the context of fourth- and fifth-century catechesis. As is wellknown, in the wake of Constantines conversion, fourth-century catechistsbegan to emphasize a much more formalized, and much shorter, process ofcatechesis as part of the Lenten period of preparation for baptism.78Thuscatechesis over the course of the fourth century became known primar-ily as part of the Lenten baptismal process. This is the context in whichinstruction in the creed is located in Ambrose, Niceta, and Cyril: all arebishops serving as catechists during the Lenten preparation for baptism.

Their explanations of the creed are embedded within the overall liturgicalevent. By contrast, Rufinus is writing a stereotypical textual commentary.The change shifts the location of creedal knowledge away from the lit-urgy and places liturgy itself into Origens cosmological lecture room.Rather than instruction occurring within liturgy, liturgy itself becomes partof instruction, turning the work of earlier creedal writers inside out. Thisdoes not devalue liturgy; indeed liturgy and instruction work together forthe overarching pedagogical aim. It is, as already noted, the recitation of

the creed in the liturgy in Rome that Rufinus claims is responsible for thepreservation of the apostolic text.79Likewise the interpolations in the creedthat Rufinus mentions are intended to clarify and protect the apostolictradition. This returns the creed to an Origenist pedagogical framework,but it does so while working with the realities of fifth-century liturgy andscholarship.

The manifestations of divine mental activity in different urban hubs arethus connected into an entire adaptive system of intellection that is simul-

taneously human, verbal, geographical, and divine. In the same way thatOrigens Israelites are sent where they are for the education of their souls,the catechumens in Rome, Aquileia, and Jerusalem learn the creeds thatthey do, and perform the liturgy that they do, in order to facilitate theirown appropriate noetic activity. Thus the creed is certainly local but itis so in the service of a much larger mobile and changeable system of intel-lection. Urban centers and local bishops participate in a dynamic materialenvironment of mind, manifested in the creed, providing focal points for

the multifaceted reproduction of divine thought on earth.

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

20/23


80. Jane Bennett observes the ways in which the ostensibly inanimate becomesanimate and active in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things(Durham, NC:Duke University Press, 2010), chapters 1 and 4; I would like to tie this to the ideaof distributed cognition in Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, as a way of thinkingthrough the intellectual agency of entire systems. These systems also include invisibleforces or what we might now deem the supernatural; for an attempt to re-integratesuch invisible forces into the writing of religious history, see Robert Orsi, Abun-dant History: Marian Apparitions as Alternative Modernity, Historically Speaking9 (2008): 1216; and Orsi, 2 + 2 = Five: The Quest for an Abundant Empiricism,Spiritus6 (2006): 11321.

81. The use of ecological metaphors is not new to discourse or textual analysis;see Einar Haugen, The Ecology of Language, in Haugen, The Ecology of Lan-guage(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972), 32539, who points out theuse of biological metaphors in nineteenth-century linguistics (326); see also BernardCerquiglini, In Praise of the Variant: A Critical History of Philology, tr. Betsy Wing(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 6670, on the alignment of

CONCLUSION: TEXTUAL ECOSYSTEMSAND TEXTUAL FUTURES

Taking this Origenist view of creedal variation from place to place as themapping of combined terrestrial and, as it were, extraterrestrial mentalactivity into earthly environments leads us quite obviously out of therealm of normal histories of text transmission, liturgy, or late-ancienttravel. In concluding, I would like to suggest that this departure into theextra-human history of the creed allows for a way of understanding thecomplex experience, and perhaps the complex expectation, embedded inearly Christian textuality more broadly. The links between geography,movement, verbal reproduction, and the physical constraints of divineand human thought that Rufinuss work reveals suggest a widely distrib-uted, and richly populated, system of intellectual agency.80This systemaccounts for the complex production of past texts, but also entails anequally complex production of future texts. In Rufinuss account, the creedis the product of ongoing divine and human interaction, but is also actedupon by its physical location, which determines the constraints of thoseinteractions. The creed is thus a document of past interactivity, but it isalso expected to become both an agent and a document of interactivity yetto come. Having been acted upon, the creed is expected to act in its turnupon its human agents, in and after the process of baptism; in this way itboth reveals particular characteristics of the divine, and adapts itself to avariety of local environments over time, from past to future. To borrow amodel from the biological sciences, this is essentially an ecosystemic viewof the creed, in which multiple agents interact, adapt, and reproduce inongoing and developing ways that are constrained or facilitated by eachother and by their surroundings.81

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

21/23


text criticism and biological thought in the early twentieth century. Note more recentlythe adaptation of ecosystems to discourse systems in Jay L. Lemke, Textual Politics:Discourse and Social Dynamics(London: Taylor and Francis, 1995), 10629. I havefound the ecological model of mutualism, in which different species interact in a vari-ety of ways, both cooperatively and competitively, to facilitate individual biologicalevents, to be extremely helpful in its insistence on the multiple agents involved inthis textual system: for a short introduction, see Judith L. Bronstein, Our Current

Understanding of Mutualism, The Quarterly Review of Biology69 (1994): 3151;Bronstein, The Costs of Mutualism, American Zoologist41 (2001): 82539; andJohn J. Stachowicz, Mutualism, Facilitation, and The Structure of Ecological Com-munities, BioScience51 (2001): 23546.

82. See especially Alan Scott, Origen and the Life of the Stars(Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1994).

83. See Lambros Malafouris and Colin Renfrew, The Cognitive Life of Things:Archaeology, Material Engagement and the Extended Mind, in The Cognitive Lifeof Things: Recasting the Boundaries of the Mind, ed. Malafouris and Renfrew(Cam-bridge, UK: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2010), 112; a moreliteral account of how religious objects allow the supernatural to be thought is foundin the same volume: Andy Clark, Material Surrogacy and the Supernatural: Reflec-tions on the Role of Artefacts in Off-line Cognition, 2328, but Clark begins fromthe premise that the supernatural is only thought, not thinking, which obviously can-not account for the presence of divine agency in Rufinuss model.

84. Cf. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 100104, who expands John Deweys notion ofconjoint action to non-human agencies.

This ecological or ecosystemic view is a product of the much larger scalecosmological systemic thinking that we find in the theology of Origen, inwhich both terrestrial and non-terrestrial beings, human and non-human,

play a variety of competitive or adaptive roles within a system that stretchesbeyond earth, through the planetary spheres or heavens, and ultimatelyinto the divine.82The lives and trajectories of these multiple agents intersectin a variety of ways, and depending on which agents are chosen as focalpoints, the narratives that can be produced around particular events orprocesses will inevitably change. The process that is the performance of thecreed in a specific place may be understood variously as the performanceof divinely-sanctioned thought by humans, the performance of situated

humanness by the divine mind, or the performance of divine and humanintellection by terrestrial territory.83It is of course all of these things. Inthis system, the event that is the creed is performed by multiple humanand non-human actors at once, all of whom are acting upon and mani-festing themselves through the others.84Thus the city of Rome thinks thecreed in a particular way, untroubled by heresies, while Aquileia thinksthe creed in a way that properly adapts the doctrine of the resurrection toother countervailing thoughts within its territory. The movement of the

creed to other cities may generate other adaptations. Origen believed in

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

22/23


85. Scott, Origen and the Life of the Stars, 12649.86. See, for example, J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, The Decline and Fall of the Roman

City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); the essays collected in Luke Lavan,Recent Research in Late-Antique Urbanism(Portsmouth: Journal of Roman Archae-ology Supplementary Series, 2000); or in Jens-Uwe Krause and Christian Witschel,Die Stadt in der Sptantike: Niedergang oder Wandel? (Stuttgart: Fritz Steiner, 2006).

87. Hillier, Space is the Machine, chapter 9, The fundamental city; cf. DoloresHayden, Urban Landscape History, in Understanding Ordinary Landscapes, ed. PaulGroth and Todd W. Bressi (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 11133.

88. Cf. Catherine M. Chin, Through the Looking Glass Darkly: Jerome Insidethe Book, in The Early Christian Book, ed. William E. Klingshirn and Linda Safran(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 10115.

both the angels of specific places and the intellectual capacity of planetaryspheres;85what we see here is the somewhat literalist working out of suchprinciples in the apparently small-scale problem of the movement of words

from one place to another. These divinely-directed verbal migrations allowfor active engagement and adaptation between words and their physicalenvironments, both human and otherwise.

It will be useful here to return to the relationship between Rufinussphysical travels around Jerusalem, Rome, and Aquileia and his empha-sis on these cities as hubs of creedal reproduction. Recent work on late-ancient cities has focused on the physical and governmental structure ofthose cities, their building projects, populations, and economic activity.86

An ecosystemic view of the city that incorporates texts, thoughts, andinvisible as well as human forces, into these physical and political struc-tures can reframe the visible and physical features of the city as a variable,moving nexus of additional agents, all of which act upon their human andnon-human inhabitants and travellers, ultimately encouraging or constrain-ing certain kinds of repetitive movements.87Thus the city can be under-stood as a variable, combined intellectual and physical system, localizedin a specific setting, for the regulation and ongoing reproduction of both

human and non-human rational agents. On the level of noetic activity,this is in fact the view of the city that we see implied in Rufinuss com-mentary. The text of the creed is one of the actors that engages with thecity in their overlapping fields of movement, both being manipulated bythe city and manipulating the city in its turn. Cities produce and reproducetexts, humans and thoughts, but they are also reproduced in those texts,humans, and thoughts. Thus, physically, we see Rufinuss own movementsmapped in the text of his commentary, so that the inhabitation of cities

by texts is reciprocated in the inhabitation of texts by cities. Rufinus him-self moves through these places both with and within his commentary.88

8/13/2019 21.3.chin

23/23


89. Cf. John Dagenais, The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture: Glossingthe Libro de buen amor(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), chapter 1;Andrew Taylor, Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), chapters 1 and 5.

Thinking of textuality as a set of densely-populated local systems, inwhich textual events are distributed across a variety of human and non-human agents in specific places, acting in both competitive and adaptive

ways, allows us to account in a more complex and textured way for thetension between variation and sameness as the creed seems to move fromcity to city. For the inhabitants of this intellectual system, like Rufinus,what we might consider the text-critical, historical, or theological prob-lem of textual variation is not a problem at all: it is simply and directly ageography of this world in relation to the next. It is not a sacred geographyof the kind we might expect from contemporary pilgrimage accounts, butis instead the geography of a complex intellectual ecosystem in which an

abundance of human and non-human actors meet, use, and inhabit oneanother. Thinking of late-ancient textuality in such systemic terms allowsus to account for the influences, beyond the simply human, that late-ancientpeople experienced when encountering, or being encountered by, a text.The vitality of this kind of textual culture, and its relation to place, pointsto a sometimes-overlooked quality of pre-modern textualities, which issimply that texts are produced and experienced uniquely in places, andverbal traditions are local.89We should, moreover, acknowledge the likeli-

hood that textual practitioners in late antiquity thought in complex waysabout texts both as reflections of past changes and as agents susceptibleto future change. Rufinus, as a theorist of textual change, accounts notonly for the change of texts over time, but for the change of texts fromplace to place as well.

Rufinuss Commentary on the Apostles Creed thus opens an analyticavenue into the intersections between the words, earths, and human andnon-human intelligences that inhabited the late-ancient world. The varia-

tions of the creed from place to place are not a simple matter of histori-cal reconstruction or textual genealogy; they are instead a manifestationof a complex invisible world within the limited visible bounds of humanexperience.

Catherine M. Chin is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at theUniversity of California, Davis

Date post:	04-Jun-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	timobota
View:	230 times
Download:	0 times

21.3.chin

Documents