For many generations, learned Christians remained steeped, as Jerome was, in a culture whose values had been shaped by the pagan classics. Platonism contributed to Christianity its model of the soul; Aristotelianism its Prime Mover; Stoicism its model of Providence. All the more reason why those Christians repeated to themselves exemplary stories of renunciation. Through the telling of these stories, they acted out, as in a dream, the abandonment of the rich cultural soil in which they, their parents, and their grandparents were nurtured, until one day they awoke to find that they actually had
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