HistoricalChristian.Faith

Did Jovinian teach that all sins are equal?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — Jovinian’s equal-recompense thesis is verified in his own quoted words, and it does flatten the consequences of sins; that he held the parity of gravity as a doctrine is Jerome’s construction upon it, repeated by everyone after · advanced by Jerome, and after him by Augustine, Bede and Aquinas

The claim

In sexual intercourse and full feeding he is an Epicurean; in the distribution of rewards and punishments he all at once becomes a Stoic, He exchanges Jerusalem for Citium, Judaea for Cyprus, Christ for Zeno. If we may not depart a hair’s breadth from virtue, and all sins are equal, and a man who in a fit of hunger steals a piece of bread is no less guilty than he who slays a man: you must, in your turn, be held guilty of the greatest crimes.

— Jerome, Against Jovinianus II.21, link (also at New Advent). The assertion is that Jovinian, an anti-ascetic ex-monk teaching at Rome and condemned there and at Milan c. 390, held the Stoic omnia peccata paria — and that his equal-reward doctrine is that Stoic thesis in Christian dress.

Who advances it

Jerome, in 393, and nobody independently. Augustine repeats it in 415 as a compliment to Jerome — “Jovinianus (a Stoic in this opinion, but an Epicurean in following after and defending pleasure)” — while writing to Jerome, and adds no evidence of his own. Bede, c. 716, writes “Jovinian the heretic followed them” and then, in the very next clause, attributes to him not the parity of sins but the equality of marriage and virginity. Aquinas, c. 1270, speaks only of “certain heretics, who not only hold all sins to be equal, but also maintain that all the pains of hell are equal.” Every link in the chain runs back to Against Jovinianus, and Jovinian’s own writings are lost apart from the fragments Jerome quotes to refute them.¹

The evidence for

Taken at its strongest, the charge is not a slur but an inference with a real basis, and the basis is Jovinian’s own words. Jerome quotes him at length before answering, and what Jovinian argues is that the insulter and the murderer land in the same place:

He who says to his brother, ‘thou fool,’ and ‘raca,’ will be in danger of Gehenna. And the murderer and the adulterer will likewise be sent into Gehenna. In times of persecution some are burnt, some strangled, some beheaded, some flee, or die within the walls of a prison: the struggle varies in kind, but the victors’ crown is one.

— Jovinian, quoted at Against Jovinianus II.20, link. Three things follow. (i) The flattening is real and it is Jovinian’s: he explicitly places the “raca”-sayer alongside the murderer and the adulterer. (ii) It is symmetrical — one grade of reward for the saved, one grade of punishment for the lost — and a scheme in which no sin earns a worse outcome than any other has, in every practical sense, denied that sins differ where the difference would matter. (iii) Jerome’s reply engages it as such: “For you admit no difference between sins” (II.31), and the retort that on Jovinian’s terms a lie would send him to hell with parricides. Whatever Jovinian would have called his own position, that is what Jerome had in front of him.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. That Jovinian taught one grade of reward and one grade of punishment is well-attested and not seriously disputable: it is the fourth of the four propositions in Jerome’s own neutral summary, and Jerome quotes Jovinian arguing it. The Stoic label is also intelligible: a thesis on which the insult and the murder yield the same sentence is functionally the parity thesis at the point where parity has consequences.

What is overstated. The distance between “one reward and one punishment” and “all sins are equal” is not nothing, and Jerome closes it by assertion.

Jerome’s own list is the strongest evidence against him. At Against Jovinianus I.3, before the polemic begins, he sets out the four propositions he is answering: that baptized virgins, widows and wives are of equal merit; that the baptized cannot be overthrown by the devil; that there is no difference between abstinence and thankful eating; and “that there is one reward in the kingdom of heaven for all who have kept their baptismal vow.” The parity of sins is not among them.² It appears only in Book II, once the argument is under way, as a characterisation of what the fourth proposition comes to.

The reasoning Jovinian is quoted using is scriptural, not Stoic. He argues from Matthew 5:22, from the labourers who all received a penny (Matthew 20:9–10), from the elder brother and the prodigal, from the one crown of the martyrs however they died. That is a soteriology of grace — salvation is not a wage scale — and it can be held, and has been held since, by people who cheerfully grant that murder is worse than rudeness. The two questions come apart: how gravely a sin offends, and whether the redeemed are differently rewarded.

Jerome had a motive to make the identification. The rhetorical structure of II.21 is the point of the passage — Epicurean at the table, Stoic in the judgment, therefore a philosopher and not a Christian, therefore refuted by the label before the arguments begin. “He exchanges Jerusalem for Citium” is a debating flourish, and Jerome’s handling of Jovinian was thought excessive by his own friends at the time; the book’s reception forced him into a defence of it in Letter 49.

The later chain adds nothing and drifts. Augustine is quoting Jerome to Jerome. Bede’s sentence attaches the label to Jovinian and then illustrates it with a different doctrine altogether — marriage and virginity — which is a sign that by the eighth century “Jovinian” had become a name for a cluster of levelling opinions rather than a set of reported propositions. Aquinas declines to name him at all.

What cannot be settled. Jovinian’s books are lost. We have him only through the man who set out to destroy him, and Jerome quotes selectively and to refute. It is possible he said in so many words that all sins are equal in a passage Jerome did not preserve; it is equally possible he never said it and would have denied it. The evidence in hand does not decide between these.

Assessment

contested — genuinely disputed, and for a reason that will not go away: the claim is strong by the lights of what Jovinian’s doctrine implies and weak by the lights of what he is recorded as holding. Trust the equal-recompense thesis: Jerome states it in his neutral summary, quotes Jovinian arguing it, and answers it at length. Treat “Jovinian held that all sins are equal” as an inference of Jerome’s, drawn from a real feature of the position but not attested as Jovinian’s own formulation, and carried forward by Augustine, Bede and Aquinas on Jerome’s authority alone. The narrower judgment — that Jovinian’s scheme leaves no room for sins to differ in outcome — is sound and is the part of Jerome’s case worth keeping. Ambrose’s parallel charge against the Novatianists is open to the same question and rests on even less: he cites no proof-text of theirs and reaches for the same handy tag.

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