J. Patout Burns
NAPS 2000
In his Books and Readers in the Early Church,(1) Harry Gamble argues that Christians preferred the codex to the scroll because of the particular needs they had for mobility and especially for the efficiency of the codex in holding a larger amount of information. It regularly used both sides of the papyrus from which it was usually made in Christian books. Roberts and Skeat, on the other hand, note that the same amount of writing had to be done and none of the surviving second century papyrus codices evince any attempt to save material.(2) In the first four centuries of the Christian era, Greek and Latin literature was still predominately in the scroll form, with longer texts divided into books at about the manageable length of a scroll. The earliest Christian publications, however, were probably the collection of the letters of Paul. These would have required a roll about thirty-four meters long. If the text were done on multiple rolls, then the proper ordering of the individual letters and the integrity of the collection as a whole could not be guaranteed. As a codex, however, the letters of Paul made a fairly handy volume of 200 pages. The Chester Beatty manuscript of the letters of Paul (P 46) originally ran to 208 pages in a single quire, of which 86 leaves are preserved. Multiple quire codices could also be used. The third century manuscript (P45) contains the four Gospels and Acts in 220 leaves, gathered into quires of only two leaves each; portions of only 30 leaves are preserved.(3) Most early Christian books, however, contained only a single document, in a single quire. The great fourth and fifth parchment codices of the bible, however, contained between 1400 and 1600 pages, or 700-800 sheets.(4)
The earliest indication of books in the North African church occurs in the Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs. The proconsul Saturninus says to Speratus, "What are the things in your case?" To which Speratus answered, "Books and letters of Paul, a just man."(5) The case, a capsa, was cylendrical and intended for carrying rolls. The text of the letters was apparently in rolls rather than codices. Speratus carried them with him to trial, apparently intending to use them in prison. The text of the acta does not indicate what became of the precious volume when the witnesses to Christ were executed.
The next indication which we have of books and writing in North Africa is, of course, the very substantial literary production of Tertullian. At this point, then, we turn to the methods of production and distribution of Christian literature. Although Tertullian himself introduces Against Marcion with a sketch of the problems he experienced with the production and distribution of the book, most of our information on writing and publishing in North Africa comes, as one might expect, from Augustine. Composition seems to have proceeded in four steps. First, the author dictated the work to a scribe who took it down in a kind of shorthand, probably on individual sheets of paper.(6) Augustine uses scribere and dictare as equivalent terms.(7) He tells us as well that the individual questions and responses which became the collection On Eighty-Three Different Questions were originally taken down on individual sheets, preserved in that form, and only subsequently arranged in a single volume.(8) From the stenographer's notes, we assume that a fair copy was made. This copy might have been made on recycled papyrus sheets from which an earlier text had been washed, since it was an intermediate rather than a final text.(9) Next, this copy could be used by the author as the basis for correction and emendation. We cannot be sure whether the author himself read this text--aloud--and dictated emendations to a stenographer or whether the stenographer himself read the text, took down the emendations, and then read out the emended text. The former procedure might have involved yet another round of producing and emending a fair text. Augustine indicated that he had not been able to subject the books of On the Trinity which had been stolen from him pior to the editing and polishing which was his custom.(10) While some of Augustine's writings seem to have been dashed off, we have difficulty in conceiving the composition of such a finely crafted text as that of the Confessions by a single act of dictation. At this point, one might also suppose that scriptural citations which had been quoted from memory might have been checked. The final version of the text was then produced in at least two copies, one of which would have been retained by the author. As the Retractations make clear, Augustine maintained copies of all of his treatises, correpondence, and perhaps of his sermons as well.(11) Tertullian's practice was to supervise the preparation of multiple copies of his treatises. While the revised version of Against Marcion was awaiting correction and polishing, the text was stolen, excerpted and published by a fellow Christian who turned against its author. Tertullian then revised the text and distributed it in sufficient numbers to overwhelm the two earlier editions.(12) When one considers that this text prints out to some 335 pages in the Corpus Christianorum edition, the magnitude of the resources necessary for the project can be appreciated. We can only speculate on the process which was used to multiply copies of an established text. Did a lector read the text aloud, word by word or even letter by letter, as multiple scribes wrote it down? Or did a single scribe work from a written text, sounding it out while writing it down? If we had a significant number of manuscripts from this early period, a careful analysis of the variants might yield clues. As you know, we have few manuscripts of Tertullian, Cyprian or Augustine earlier than the ninth century.
The process of dictation itself may be presumed to have been preceded
by careful preparation on the author's part, perhaps even through the development
of preliminary notes. Augustine made a clear distinction, for example,
between the works which he had dictated and sermons or debates which were
taken down as he spoke. For the one he uses dictare and for the
other dicere.(13) We know that transcription
of debates and legal proceedings was a regular part of Roman life and provided
the basis or at least the model for many of the martyr acta, such
as the
passion sanctorum Scillitanorum and the acta proconsularia
of Cyprian's trial.(14)
Publication of a written work consisted in distributing copies to friends and associates. Tertullian indicated that he had multiple copies of his treatise Against Marcion prepared, presumably for distribution.(15) Cyprian made a practice of sending copies of his eearlier correspondence in support of the points he was making in a new letter. Letter 20, addressed to the Roman clergy, for example, lists thirteen supporting letters.(16)Letter 32, addressed to his own clergy, includes two letters to him and two of his own, with instructions that they should be made available for copying by others.(17) With Letter 25, to his colleague Caldonius, he sent along five letters and a treatise, asking him to have them distributed to other bishops. Presumably, Caldonius had the means of having these copied even in the midst of persecution.(18) When he wrote to congratulate the Roman confessors for their return to the unity of the church, he sent along copies of two of his own treatises, perhaps to win a readership there.(19) A century and half later, Augustine's correspondence with Paulinus of Nola indicates that his friend and patron Romanianus was carrying not only the letter but copies of all of Augustine's writings, which he would be happy to provide for copying by Paulinus.(20) Harry Gamble suggests that Romanianus was serving as Augustine's literary agent but his role in this exchange might be explained on the basis of his travel to Italy, presumably on business, and his willingness to detour to Nola to visit Paulinus.(21) Augustine placed the final version of On the Trinity with his friend Aurelius, bishop of Carthage, for reading and copying.(22) In contrast to this work, whose premature circulation nearly caused its remaining unfinished, Augustine freely permitted some books of On the City of God to circulate before the whole was completed.(23) Once the text was completed, he sent a copy to a layman in Carthage, Firmus, with the plea that he allow it to be copied because it was the first complete copy in the city.(24) In addition, Augustine supplied advice on grouping the twenty-two books into either one, two or five codices.(25)
A particular case illustrates the vagaries of the publication process. In 418, at the critical point of his struggle against the ideas of the Pelagians, Augustine wrote a series of treatises in letter form to influential persons. One of these was directed to the Roman presbyter and future bishop, Sixtus, in which he detailed the errors of his opponents and developed his own teaching on grace.(26) A copy of the letter seems to have been sent to his associate Evodius, bishop of Uzalis, in whose library some seven or eight years later a monk from Hadrumetum, more than 325 km distant, happened upon it. He made a copy and took it back to his monastery where it caused a considerable stir among his fellow monks. The abbot appealed to Augustine for assistance and he eventually wrote two treatises to explain his teaching to these monks, On Grace and Free Choice and On Correction and Grace. In less than two years, the second of these treatises had made its way to Provence and caused such an upset that disciples of Augustine appealed for clarification. Two more treatises, On the Predestination of the Saints and On the Gift of Perseverance followed. But for the accident of Florus' poking around in Evodius' library, where he found the copy of a letter ostensibly addressed to a church official in Rome, four of Augustine's most important discussions of predestination might not have been written. One could also note that apparently only one of the treatises prepared for Hadrumetum reached Provence but that it did so within a year or two of being written.
Clearly, once he made his text available for copying, an author lost control of it. It was circulated and reproduced along lines of friendship. Tertullian lost control of the completed second edition of Against Marcion before the fair copy had even been corrected; he suppressed the excerpts from the pirated second edition by issuing an expanded third edition in multiple copies.(27) Augustine's frustration at the premature circulation of books of On the Trinity was so extreme that he threatened to abandon the entire project. He claimed that the copies in circulation limited his ability to revise and correct the text.(28) Robert J. O'Connell speculated that Augustine had changed his theory of the origin of the soul during the writing of the treatise and was not able to revise the earlier books to reflect that change.(29) In explaining to Evodius why he was reluctant to answer his questions quickly, Augustine observed that their correspondence would almost certainly be read by others; he had to write for a general audience and not presume the fuller explanations which he knew were unnecessary for Evodius himself.(30) He spoke from experience: his first letter to Jerome, in which he questioned the great man's interpretation of Galatians, had not only gone undelivered but had circulated in Rome as an apparent take-down of a man who had few enough friends anywhere, much less in Rome.(31)
Yet authors did revise their works, even after they had begun to circulate. Tertullian's double re-writing of Against Marcion has been referred to already. Cyprian produced a thorough revision of On the Unity of the Catholic Church five years after the original, in order to clarify his understanding of the relation of Peter to the college of Apostles and avoid providing amunition to his rival in Rome. That document, as we know, circulated in both its original and revised forms. The original form, which Cyprian had provided to the confessors supporting Novatian, may have been promoted with the assistance of the Roman bishops, particularly Stephen who may well have quoted it back to Cyprian and provoked the revision. After he had sent Count Marcellinus the first version of On the Merits and Remission of Sins, Augustine asked it back for revision and augmentation.(32) The final version contains not only an additional book, in the form of a letter, On the Baptism of Infants, but passages which seem to have been inserted into the first two books and which provide an interpretation of Romans 9:16 that Augustine had discovered, somewhat dramatically, only years later.(33) The third book of On Free Choice also seems to have been the subject of an interpolation, in which Augustine had to deal with the relation between the souls of Adam, Eve and their children.(34)
Efforts were made to secure not only the integrity of individual works but the completeness of collections. Although Cyprian seems to have maintained an archive of letters sent and received, the surviving collection of his correspondence does not seem to have derived from this source because of its many significant omissions. Rather the collection seems to have been assembled on the basis of incomplete sets in the hands of others.(35) Thus, Cyprian's practice of broadcasting copies of his letters and treatises may have facilitated their survival. Rufinus of Aquilea remarked that a copy of his letters was being offered for sale in Constantinople at the end of the fourth century, with the interpolation of Novatian's treatise On the Trinity. He did not indicate whether the text was in Latin or Greek.(36) Pontius, the biographer of Cyprian, provides a listing of the subjects of his treatises which roughly corresponds to the sequence and number of the surviving texts.(37) Gamble suggest that Pontius must have had access to a collection of Cyprian's treatises prepared shortly after his death.(38) The Augustine's own concern to preserve the corpus of writings is clear from the Retractations in which he lists them all in chronological order and specifies the circumstances of their composition. This, he claims, was done at the urging of the brethern. He had also begun to catalogue and date his letters and even sermons, though neither he nor any of his associates completed that mamoth task.(39) His biographer, Possidius, appended a list of writings to the Life and specified that a complete collection of authoritative texts could still be found in the church library at Hippo Regius.(40) The treatises, letters and tractates or sermons are divided into ten categories, arranged primarily by subject matter, beginning with the pagans and continuing through the Jews, Manichees, Priscilianists, Donatists, Pelagians, Arians, and Appolinarians. Categories are further divided into treatises, letters and tractates. The final, tenth category, collects materials which did not fit into the other headings, listing them by type: treatises, questions, tractates, letters (by addressee), tractates (by subject matter or scriptural text). The closing paragraph notes that the list includes some thirteen hundred items. This list is not chronological, as that of the Retractations is; it may reflect the cataloging of materials in Augustine's library at Hippo.
We may presume that Christian congregations had collections of books even in the second century. The Scillitan martyrs had a copy of the writings of Paul with them at their trial. Tertullian's references to the "ordines" of the clergy and the laity might imply the existence of lists.(41) These would have been community records, in addition to the Christian and other books which might have been his personal library. Cyprian referred on successive occasions to records kept by the church: the death days of martyrs,(42) the list of the faithful in good standing,(43) the bishops of Africa who were in the unity of the church.(44) Diocletian's order for their confiscation confirmed that the Christians owned books and relied upon them. The record of the search of the church at Cirta in Numidia reveals that the church owned some twenty-nine codices and four additional fascicules.(45) One of the codices is described as quite large.(46) Although most of these were in the possession of the readers, either so that they could prepare for the services or for safe-keeping, the community owned cabinets adequate to store them. Similarly, at Tibiuca, the bishop Felix defended the location of the books of the church with his life.(47)
As in many other aspects of church life in Roman Africa, we would like to know a good deal more about the preparation, production and distribution of books than we actually can. Even this brief survey, however, allows us to draw some conclusions about the culture of literacy in this Christian church. First, oral and literary cultures were much closer together than they are in our own day: the written text functioned more like a tape recording, a means of reproducing speech, than as a substitute for speech. Hence, people who could not themselves read might still be able to follow a fairly complex argument. Second, the enterprise of writing required skilled craftsmen who dealt in writing down dictation or live speech, and then reproducing it. They worked with speed and accuracy. Third, dictation of formal expository prose was not so far distant from extemporaneous speech as it is today. The trained rhetorician could spoke in sentences and paragraphs, just as he could dictate them. Finally, from the end of the second century, a significant portion of the resources of Christians in Africa were dedicated to the production and distribution of books.
Notes
2. Colin H. Roberts and T.C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London, 1983), pp. 45-47..
3. Bruce Metzger, The Test of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruptionand Restoration, 3 ed., (New York, 1992), pp. 36-37.
5. Passio Sanctorum Scillitanorum, 12; Musurillo, Acts of the Christian Martyrs ((London, 1972), 88.
6. Augustine distinguished the signs used by notarii from those that were used in writing the fair version of the text in On Christian Doctrine 2.26.
7. Retract. prol. 2, CCSL 57:5.16-17, ep. 82.17, CSEL 34:368.12-18; ep. 173A, CSEL 44:650.6-10. Other instances of the term "dictare" are to be found in Retract. 1.18, 2.67.
8. Retract. 1.26; CCSL 57:74.5-11.
9. Roberts and Skeat, Birth of the Codex, pp. 16-18, indicate that the palimpsest process would have been done by washing and applied to papyrus even before parchment.
10. Ep. 174, CSEL 44:650.15-21. In a very different vein, Jerome complained to Augustine that the impatience of the letter carrier was forcing him to dictate in haste answers to the questions which had been sent to him; he would have preferred more time to reconsider and polish his answers. ep. 75.1.1, CSEL 34:280.4-281.8.
11. Retract. epilogus, CCSL 57:142.1-143.6.
12. Adv. Marc., 1.1, CCSL 1:441.5-14.
13. Thus at Retract. epilogus, CCSL 57:142.1-143.6, he implies that letters were dictated and corrected while sermons were only spoken. Ep. 238.1.1, CSEL 57:533.1-12, speaks of the debate with an Arian Count which was transcribed.
14. Musurillo, pp. 86-89; CSEL 3.3:cx-cxiv.
15. Adv. Marc., 1.1, CCSL 1:441.5-14.
16. Ep. 20.2.1, CCSL 3B:107.16-17.
17. Ep. 32.1, CCSL 3B:162.4-8.
18. Ep. 25.2, CCSL 3B:124.16-21.
19. Ep. 54.4, CCSL 3B:255.57-65.
20. Ep. 27.4, CSEL ; with his next letter, ep. 31.7 CSEL 34:7.2-11, Augustine sent copies of de libero arbitrio which he says Romanianus did not have. It is unclear whether Romanianus did not have the treatise in its complete form or did not take it with him to Nola.
22. Ep. 174, CSEL 44.651.10-13.
23. Ep. 184A 3.5-7, CSEL 44.734.27-736.19, tells Peter and Abraham to obtain the thirteen books already completed and the following ones when they are done from the priest Firmus.
24. Ep. 1*.2, CSEL 88:8.13-23.
25. Ep. 1*.1, CSEL 88:7.7-8.12.
27. Adv. Marc., 1.1, CCSL 1:441.5-14.
28. Ep. 174, CSEL 44:650.19-651.10.
29. The Origin of the soul in St. Augustine's Later Works (New York: 1987), pp. 246-281.
30. Ep. 162.1, CSEL 44:511.13-512.3.
31. Ep. 67.2.2, CSEL 34:238:1-239.2 and ep. 68.1, CSEL 34:240.4-241.12.
32. For the request to Marcellinus, see ep. 139.3 CSEL 44:152.5-9. In the Retractations, he did indicate that the third book is actually a letter but he did not explain why he used the different formats; Retract 2.33, CCSL 57:117.16-17.
33. Robert J. O'Connell, Origin of the Soul, pp. 98-111, 179-200.
34. De lib. arb., 3.19.53-22.63. O'Connell makes the argument in On the Origin of the Soul, pp. 17-72.
35. Harry Gamble, Books and Readers, pp. 128-129.
36. De adult lib. Origenis 41-42; PG 17, 628C, 692A.
37. Vita Cypriani, 7, CSEL 3.3:xcvii.
38. Harry Gamble, Books and Readers, p. 128.
39. Retract. epilogus, CCSL 57:142.4-143.6.
40. Vita Augustini 18, ed. H.T. Weiskotten (Princeton, 1919) and AAR Bastiaensen, in Vite dei santi, v. 3, ed. C. Mohrmann (Milan, 1975). The Induculus was published by A. Wilmart in Miscellanea Agostiniana (Rome, 1930-31), 2:149-233.
41. Exhort. cast. 7.2,3, 13.4 CCSL 2:1024.9-12, 1024.16-1025.22, 1035.35-36; monog. 11.4,12.2, CCSL 2:1244.28-31, 1247.15-16.
42. ep. 12.2.1, CCSL 3B:69.31-33; 39.3.1, 3B:189.44-51.
43. The bishops and presbyters who acted for Cyprian toward the end of his exile seem to have been commissioned to do a census of the church, ep. 41.1.2, CCSL 3B:196.16-197.21.
44. Ep. 59.9.3, CCSL 3C:351.239-352.245.