Since the landmark studies of Peter Brown in the 1970s, Anglo-American scholarship has cast late antiquity as a time of cultural transformation exemplified by the writings of a canon of compelling, if at times, “tortured intellectuals,” the likes of Augustine, Athanasius, or the Cappadocian fathers. Epiphanius (367–403 c.e.), conversely, has earned a rather disparaging reputation as an intolerant, simple-minded, and reactionary heresy-hunter, whose writings indicate a lack of originality and an attachment to literal, uninspired exegesis. As the study proceeds, it seems that Epiphanius's distain for the theological and exegetical interests of Origen of Alexandria—who loomed large for fourth century intellectuals—is partly to credit for his unwelcome reception amongst scholars. In Epiphanius of Cyprus, Jacobs offers a theoretically sophisticated cultural biography that places this maligned figure at the center of late antiquity rather than (comfortably) at its margins. Jacobs's rationale, often unacknowledged amongst Anglophone scholars, is that in his own day Epiphanius was powerful and even popular. In Jacobs's study, Epiphanius stands as a window into fourth century culture, namely “the multifarious ways Christians came to understand their material and intellectual particularity in their world” (5). As such, Jacobs rethinks the place of Epiphanius in late antique history, but also how prevailing historical narratives about this period reinforce contemporary values of multi-culturalism and diversity (29).
The introduction addresses Epiphanius's literary record and the complicated textual transmission associated with a number of his writings, namely the few surviving letters (including two sent to Jerome), treatises like Ancoratus and the massive heresy catalogue (for which he is best known) Panarion, and two biblical commentaries. Each of the six chapters are structured around themes and concepts derived from cultural studies. In the first, “Celebrity,” Jacobs shifts focus from the why of Epiphanius's fame to how his fame functioned—what were its “effects” (33)? Stories of Epiphanius's celebrity do not yield a consistent image, but rather alternative reports that play out cultural tensions over imperial authority, education, and asceticism. Chapter 2 opens to “conversion,” where Jacobs mines insights from post-colonial theory and frames conversion not in terms of interiority or an event, but rather “as the exteriorized management of status and difference” (73). We see how imperial politics, the policing of boundaries and frontiers, coincides with the interests of Christian clerics, like Epiphanius, over precisely how people move across various social categories, in this case lay person and cleric, Jew and Christian, or orthodox and heretic. Epiphanius's imperializing approach to difference, which names and magnifies rather than resolves it, operates as a strategy of control (95). Epiphanius's totalizing approach to difference surfaces as a theme across the rest of Jacobs's study. A third chapter, entitled “Discipline,” uses performative theories of improvisation to consider how Epiphanius claims an ascetic sensibility that is flexible and fluid in contrast to the rigors of heretical ascetics. Jacobs attends to the rhetorical form of Panarion, a scattered, ad hoc catalogue, dictated rather than clearly structured, lacking in editing—a form that contributes to a play between spontaneity and mastery of difference (130).
Chapters 4 and 5 helpfully locate Epiphanius's literary productions in proximity to those of better known (or esteemed) Christian intellectuals. In “Scripture,” Jacobs shows how the biblical aesthetic of Origen's allegorical exegesis stands in contrast to Epiphanius's decidedly antiquarian preferences for scattered curios and assemblages of knowledge. Distinguished from the systematic impulses of Platonizing hermeneutics, antiquarianism provided an alternative mode of reading—one at which Epiphanius was adept. Collating and collecting scattered fragments of information, the bishop again does not elide difference, but claims the exegetical insight to gather the bits together in a unitary whole (169). Chapter 5, “Salvation,” turns to Epiphanius's theological program. Epiphanius's theological concerns were “grounded in the body,” and ultimately, oriented around the moral integrity of the person. Jacobs notes that Epiphanius's fixation on the unity of the human person and the material continuity of the body in the resurrection asserted itself as the dominant theological paradigm in this period (220).
The final chapter, “Afterlives,” returns to themes from the opening one, “Celebrity.” He traces two hagiographies of the saint, one from the late fifth century, and the other, surprisingly, a nineteenth-century English novella. Epiphanius can be read as a “cultural signifier,” a saint—a figure that by definition operates through “transgressions” (223). These stories share common themes: in them Epiphanius has been stripped of much of his historical content, his imperial designs unsuited to the interests of his hagiographers. Yet these narratives retain some memory of the dogged heresy-hunter so concerned to manage difference and border crossing, suggested by the fact that Epiphanius emerges as a cipher for cultural tensions around religious and ethnic difference as well as the politics of church and empire.
Placing Epiphanius at the center of a cultural history of late antiquity, ultimately, Jacobs pushes back against decades of Anglo-American scholarship that treats this age as one of cultural transformation and reflexivity (268). This historical narrative emerged to challenge earlier disparagements of the age as one of “decadence” and “decline.” While Jacobs remains sympathetic to the cultural turn in late antiquity (his training and previous work are certainly a product of it), he nonetheless questions something of a refusal to write other narratives of this period. Is this trend representative of a desire, however unwitting, to see western values of multiculturalism reflected back to us from across time (277)? Jacobs ends with a probing question that commands attention (and sympathy from a scholar who writes on another, oft-maligned early late antique figure, Tertullian of Carthage): If history is a reflective and ethical exercise, what is it that we, as Anglophone scholars, refuse to see about how “difference” is mobilized as an exercise of “power and control” in our own day (277)? In the wake of what have been startling election cycles, and swells of populist, nationalistic sentiment in both the United Kingdom and United States, Jacobs's conclusion reads as prescient.
