He, though naked, kept the garment of Christ; you, clothed in silk, have lost Christ's robe. Paul lies covered with the meanest dust, to rise in glory; you are crushed by wrought sepulchres of stone, to burn with all your works. Spare, I beseech you, yourselves; spare, at least, the riches which you love. Why do you wrap even your dead in golden vestments ? Why does not ambition stop amid grief anil tears? Cannot the corpses of the rich decay save in silk? 1 beseech thee, whosoever thou art that readest this, to remember Jerome the sinner, who, if the Lord gave him choice, would much sooner choose Paul's tunic with his merits, than the purple of kings with their punishments. [Conclusion to the Life of Paul the Hermit]What is so critical about this reference is that Jerome is not merely 'making up' the naked monastic ideal nor the association with Mark 10:17 - 31 (which we have discussed at length elsewhere). For all these elements are clearly already in place in his report on Paul the Hermit.
Indeed the important thing to see is that Jerome has deliberately taken the time to write this biography to upstage or correct the impression that readers might get from reading Athanasius's Life of Anthony as we read from Jerome's own hand:
There is a good deal of uncertainty abroad as to which monk it was who first came to live in the desert ... Yet Athanasius, who buried the body of his master, and Macerius, both of them Antony's disciples, now affirm that a certain Paul of Thebes was the first to enter on the road.
The point now is that Paul is only said to be the first hermit not because he 'invented monasticism' but because he represented a type of celibacy and communal living that was completely cut off from humanity. There are clear intimations that 'virgins' lived on the environs of the Church of St. Mark in Alexandria and in the surrounding tombs. Yet Paul is said to have fled the common intercourse of Christians and pagans to the relative safety of the Theban desert during the persecution of Decius and Valerianus around 250 CE.
Why is this dating significant? Because it is the very same period in which Origen and Ambrose were tortured - Origen living only another four years after his abuse and dying in the year 254 CE. The naked Paul represents something of a preservation of the original ascetic ideal associated with Alexandria perfectly preserved in the isolation of the desert. The stories that Jerome tells reinforce the interest in the 'perfect state' of nudity in his own writings. Paul is said to have lived in the mountains of this desert in a cave near a clear spring and a palm tree, the leaves of which provided him with raiment and the fruit of which provided him with his only source of food till he was 43 years old, when a raven started bringing him half a loaf of bread daily. He would remain in that cave for the rest of his life, almost a hundred years.
The point again is that it is impossible not to suspect now that this 'nudus nudum' in ultimately connected with the Alexandrian monastic tradition and the Alexandrian gospel of Mark referenced in the Letter to Theodore - a document developed from an original question from an unknown Theodore to Clement about a saying he has heard from the mouths of certain Alexandrian Christians 'γυμνὸς γυμνῷ' (Theod. III.13) and also known to their contemporary, the Platonic philosopher Maximus of Tyre in a speech direct presumably at similar groups of Christians (Dissertation 41).
If we go back to our previous discussions of this tradition we noted that Maximus of Tyre (c. 170 CE) preserves the full Alexandrian sorites as:
naked with naked, friend with friend, freeman with freeman
γυμνὸς γυμνῷ, φίλος φίλῳ, ἐλεύθερος ἐλευθέρῳ
It should be argued here that Paul would have been exposed to this original initiation which made men gods - or if you prefer - a ritual process by which Jesus continued to empty himself by means of a never ending succession of 'incarnations' into willing vessels. There was undoubtedly a sense at the beginning of this tradition that those who underwent this mystic baptism were not only restoring the original purity of Adam in the garden but moreover 'freeing' themselves from the enslavement to the Jewish Law. It is unknown what the exact complexion of the Alexandrian tradition looked like at the beginning of the Decian persecutions.
Nevertheless it is not impossible to see that the origins of this saying undoubtedly go back to some early Christian formula developed from Alexandrian Judaism and the true LXX known to Philo (the text which pretends to be the Septuagint is clearly different than the one known to the Alexandrian Jew). As we have noted in a previous post, 'friend with friend' (φίλον φίλῳ) appears as a formula twice in the writings of Clement of Alexandria - once as a direct citation of his LXX reading of Exodus 33:11 (where Moses is said to have been the 'friend of God) and again in a discussion of the true disciple as the 'friend' of God. The two understandings are undoubtedly related and certainly go back to the idea that LGM 1 (= the first addition to the longer gospel of Mark) was developed from notions of purification established in Judaism at the end of the Second Commonwealth period (i.e. when the temple was standing).
So it is very important to also note that when scholars attempt to uncover where Jerome got his 'naked with naked' motto, they inevitably also go back to Alexandrian Judaism and Philo in particular. Stephen R. L. Clark in his paper 'Naked in the Shrine' (in S. Hutton and D. Hedley (eds), Platonism at the Origins of Modernity (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007 pp. 45 - 61) in discussing the motto notes that:
the association of nakedness and the sacred goes back at least to Philo of Alexandria's (fl. 40) allegory whereby the high priest must strip of the soul's tunic of opinion and imagery to enter the Holy of Holies, and 'enter naked with no coloured borders or sound of bells, to pour out as a libation the blood of the soul and to offer as incense the whole mind to God our Saviour and Benefactor [p. 45]
Clark ultimately connects the tradition with Platonism, yet it is important not to lose sight of the fact that these ideas were ultimately rooted in the contemporary Jewish practices at the end of the Second Commonwealth period and preserved through Christians writers like Clement of Alexandria.
I think it might be useful to cite the whole passage in Philo which is alleged to be the source of Jerome's formulation in order for us to see that Jerome (and Paul the hermit) can't have merely been 'freely associating' Philo's writings with existing monastic ideals. The 'naked' ideal of the third, fourth and fifth centuries must itself go back to a lost gospel like 'Secret Mark' given Jerome's consistent connection of this concept with Mark 10:17 - 31. First the reference in Philo's Allegorical Interpretation:
'And the two were naked, Adam and his wife, and were not ashamed' (Gen 2:25). 'Now the serpent was the most subtle of all the beasts that were upon the earth, which the Lord God had made' (Gen 3:1). The mind that is clothed neither in vice nor in virtue, but absolutely stripped of either, is naked, just as the soul of an infant, is bared and stripped of coverings: for these are the soul's clothes, by which it is sheltered and concealed. Goodness is the garment of the worthy soul, evil that of the worthless.
Now there are three ways in which a soul is made naked. One is when it continues without change and is barren of all vices, and has divested itself of all the passions and flung them away. ... What this means is this. The soul that loves God, having disrobed itself of the body and the objects dear to the body and fled abroad far away from these, gains a fixed and assured settlement in the perfect ordinances of virtue ... This is why the high priest shall not enter the Holy of Holies in his robe (Lev 16:l ff.), but laying aside the garment of opinions and impressions of the soul, and leaving it behind for those that love outward things and value semblance above reality, shall enter naked with no colored borders or sound of bells, to pour as a libation the blood of the soul and to offer as incense the whole mind of God our Savior and Benefactor.
There can be no doubt that there are at least some points of contact between what Philo writes and Jerome preserves with regards to the role of nakedness in the mystical initiation process with God. Yet there are clear missing links which cannot be explained by assuming that Jerome simply developed his 'nudus nudum' motto on his own. The first and most obvious is that Jerome envisions a scenario where initiate and Jesus are naked together somewhere presumably undergoing some sort of ritual baptism. It is also clear that this understanding is rooted in the Question of the Rich Youth pericope (Mark 10:17 - 31) for it inevitably introduces the 'nudus nudum' formula - indeed even doing this specifically in reference to Paul the Hermit's monastic life. Further to this point is the fact that Jerome can also substitute the concept of 'Cross' for 'Jesus' which makes sense given that the Question of the Rich Youth is immediately followed by Jesus prediction of his Passion (Mark 10:32 - 34). As such there can then be no doubt that Jerome is not merely thinking of 'ritual nudity' but a ritual involving two naked men immediately following Mark 10:34.
So the question now of course is why can't Clement and Origen make reference to the ritual context of LGM 1 - i.e. a nude Jesus standing with a nude disciple - while Jerome can? This is of course a loaded question because the circumstances associated with Clement's silence might well have been different than those of Origen. I prefer to see the problem as something of a historical onion. We have to peel back the various layers of the problem, the most obvious being the fact that the writings of Clement and Origen have likely not survived 'accidentally.' There are many who argue that those who preserved Origen's writings (Pamphilus, Eusebius and Jerome) did so by 'purifying' the texts of heretical references. A similar process can be argued to have taken place with respect to Clement's writings given that the man credited with preserving the exemplar of most of the surviving manuscripts - Arethas of Commagne - did not preserve the Hypotyposeis which was deemed so heretical that his teacher Photius of Byzantium denied it was authored by Clement.
The situation on the ground in Egypt was certainly hostile to the writings of Clement and Origen. People often overlook the fact that most of the works of these early Alexandrian writers only survive because of the efforts of those outside of Alexandria. There is also the curious concentration of former 'Origenists' (= 'Alexandrianists') in Italy in the late fourth century which may have contributed to the transplantation of native Alexandrian ideas such as the celibate priesthood, the Papacy as well as various pre-Nicene written traditions from Egypt by the fifth century. All that we can really say for certain is that there were many features of the Alexandrian religion which Clement and Origen must have felt responsible to 'cover up' in an age of persecution. Origen for instance never explicitly alludes to his castrated state in his writings. One may think of the silence about the γυμνὸς γυμνῷ metaphor as somehow related to all of this.
It is worth noting that Clement is much more receptive report other parts of the Alexandrian formula preserved by Maximus - i.e. that an initiate draws close to God as a friend with friend (φίλος φίλῳ). We will ultimately argue in a subsequent study of Origen that the Alexandrian does indeed develop this notion of loving God with a ritual prohibition on seeing the 'naked Logos' until the initiate is sufficiently prepared through instruction.
