ABSTRACT
Jerome’s most famous portrait of the desert was written some ten years subsequent to his two-year sojourn there. Thus theological controversy clouded Jerome’s perception of the desert as he swung in his shaping of this ambivalent landscape from its positive to its negative pole. The desert was so charged with significance that no literal description could capture it; from this perspective, Jerome’s task was to find an iconic idiom to convey the essence of the place. The desert assumed such great imaginative significance because it was there that the transformative implications of the Incarnation for the body were put into practice. Jerome was correct when he characterized the centaur as one of the desert’s monsters. Jerome’s wild man thus advertises not only the ideal nature of ascetic experience but also the savagery—the barbarism within—that was its enduring and painful companion.
