A Call to Holiness: Baptism, the Church, and Asceticism in Jerome’s <b> <i>Adversus Jovinianum</i> </b>

Abstract Scholarship on the Jovinianist controversy has shown that the idea of baptism as deeply transformative lay at the heart of Jovinian’s thinking. Scholars have likewise held that Jerome, who through his Adversus Jovinianum is our main source to the ideas of Jovinian, did not acknowledge the ecclesiological concerns on which his opponent’s argument was based. This article argues, to the contrary, that Jerome was well aware of the challenge that Jovinian’s ecclesiology implied for ascetic superiority. I show that in his polemics against Jovinian, Jerome did not disregard the importance of baptism, but rather reinterpreted it. The transformation ascribed by Jovinian to the baptismal rite was transferred by Jerome to the postbaptismal life, and more precisely, to the ascetic life. I examine three themes: Baptism as a new birth, baptism as a resurrection to a spiritual life, and the baptized person as a bride of Christ, showing how these were ascetically interpreted by Jerome. I argue that Against Jovinian is a work deeply engaged with the precisely the questions which Jovinian raised, namely about the essence of the church and the relationship between its members.