UCS8 LIBRARY
THE SAINTS
A New Series of LIVES OF THE SAINTS in separate volumes
Under the General Editorship of M. HENRI JOLY
Formerly Professor at the Sorbonne, and at the College de France,
author of numerous works upon Psychology
Small crown 8v0, Scarlet Art Vellum, Gilt lettered, gold top
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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE SAINTS
By HENRI JOLY
S. AUGUSTINE
By Prof. AD. HATZFELD. Translated by E. HOLT
S. VINCENT DE PAUL
By Prince EMMANUEL DE BROGLIE. Translated
by MILDRED PARTRIDGE
S. CLOTILDA
By Prof. G. KURTH. Translated by VIRGINIA
M. CRAWFORD. 2nd Edition
S. IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA
By HENRI JOLY. Translated by MILDRED PARTRIDGE
2nd Edition
S. LOUIS
By MARIUS SEPET
S. AMBROSE
By the Due DE BROGLIE. Translated by
MARGARET MAITLAND
S. FRANCIS OF SALES
By A. D. MARGERIE. Translated by
MARGARET MAITLAND
S. JEROME
By the Rev. Father LARGENT. Translated by
HESTER DAVENPORT. 2nd Edition
S. NICHOLAS I.
By JULES ROY. Translated by MARGARET MAITLAND
JOAN OF ARC
By L. PETIT DE JULLEVILLE. Translated by
HESTER DAVENPORT. 2nd Edition
S. DOMINIC
By JEAN GUIRAUD. Translated by
KATHERINE DE MATTOS. 2nd Edition
S. CHRYSOSTOM
By AIM PUECH. Translated by MILDRED PARTRIDGE
S. ANTONY OF PADUA
By the Abbe ALBERT LEPITRE. Translated by
EDITH GUEST
S. CAJETAN
By R. DE MAULDE LA CLAVIERE. Translated by G. H. ELY
S. TERESA
By HENRI JOLY, author of "The Psychology of the Saints"
S. PETER FOURIER
By L. PINGAUD. Translated by C. W.
THOMAS MORE
By HENRI BREMOND. Translated by HAROLD CHILD
S. MARY THE VIRGIN
By REN MARIE DE LA BROISE. Translated by
HAROLD GIDNEY
JOHN VIANNEY: Cun* d'Ars
By JOSEPH VIANNEY. 2nd Edition
THOMAS A BECKET
By Mgr. DEMIMUID
Further Volumes will be announced in due course
SAINT JEROME
Second Impression
Authorised Translation
All Rights Reserved
Saint Jerome
By Father Largent
Translated by
Hester 'Davenport
^ fcf r fPasbboitnu Ltd.
^Paternoster 1{ow London
Manchester Birmingham &* Glasgow
'Benziger 'Brothers
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1913
First Edition, 1901 Second Kef i 'ion, 1909
Ttttnsftrrtd UR& T Washbourne Ltd. June, 1913
Authorised Translation
A U rights reserved
PREFACE
CT JEROME, though one of the four "great"
^ doctors of the Church, seems never to have
been an object of any very tender personal devotion
as other saints have been, his appeal being more
directly to the head than to the heart. His sanctity
and austerity is of the kind that awes rather than
attracts, and is provocative of admiration rather
than of imitation. For this reason he has been
looked at with cool, temperate eyes; and since,
moreover, he has so fully written himself down for
us, there is little difficulty in discerning the broad
outlines of his personality.
A strange, strong man, strenuous and intense
even to the verge of ferocity, as was the fashion of
his day with the champions of orthodoxy ; nor is
the fashion yet wholly obsolete, for all our longer
study of the meekness of Christ. In him is ex-
emplified the sort of antagonism that exists between
delicacy of perception and strength of execution,
and renders their equal development so rare in one
and the same character. With great capacity in both
directions, St Jerome seems alternately to sacrifice
one of these interests to the other. In his zealous
self-hatred it never occurred to him apparently that
the difficulties he was contending with were more
vi PREFACE
probably the effect of mental strain and nervous
exhaustion than of an overplus of animal energy,
and therefore were rather augmented than allevi-
ated by his violent methods. In the feverish vision
of his judgment before Christ's tribunal embodying
no doubt the state of his conscience at the time
the whole apparatus of secular learning by which
he himself was subsequently enabled to become so
acute an exponent and defender of the faith, and
which the later Church blessed, sanctified, and con-
secrated to the service of religion, was condemned
without qualification as repugnant to Christianity;
even as the body and all natural affections were
indiscriminately condemned as inimical to virtue and
sanctity.
It is mainly to the gigantic force of his intellect,
to his stupendous power of work, to his prodigious
scholarship as scholarship went in those days
that he owes his prominence in the history of
Christianity. When we think of what he did,
and did single-handed, for scriptural criticism and
exegesis : how he created order and coherence where
previously there had been wild chaos and confusion ;
how he expanded and applied the critical principles
then in vogue as far as the material to hand would
permit ; we cannot help wondering what he would
do, what he would be allowed to do, were he among
us now, and were he master as doubtless he would
be of the rich harvest of learning and information
that has been accumulating during the intervening
centuries. Would he regard his past work as final
and irreformable, and view subsequent discoveries
PREFACE vii
with peevish suspicion ; or would he welcome truth
fearlessly from whatsoever quarter deriving ? And
the like doubt arises in regard to another eminent
doctor one who embraced and reconciled to the
faith that same philosophy which the sub-apostolic
Fathers had anathematised, and this, at a time when
Peripateticism was in as little favour with Catholics
as perhaps Hegelianism is now. What would he
think now, what would he say, what would he do ?
Doubtless a twentieth century Jerome or Aquinas
would be to our day what he was to his own : he
would take and give ; he would see much good as
well as some evil ; much light as well as some
darkness ; he would delight as much in building up
and uniting as rigid formalism does in sundering
and destroying.
G. TYRRELL.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY ..... I
CHAPTER I
YOUTH ...... 10
CHAPTER II
THE DESERT OF CHALCIS .... 19
CHAPTER III
ROME ....... 3 2
CHAPTER IV
BETHLEHEM YEARS OF PEACE . . . 45
CHAPTER V
CONTENTIONS RUFINUS AND ORIGENISM . . 56
CHAPTER VI
JOYS AND SORROWS JEROME AS MENTOR . 85
ix
x CONTENTS
CHAPTER VII
PAGE
CONTROVERSY WITH SAINT AUGUSTINE . . 96
CHAPTER VIII
THE LAST YEARS OF SAINT JEROME'S LIFE HIS
LAST ORDEALS . . . . .11
THE WORKS AND THE TEACHINGS
OF SAINT JEROME
CHAPTER I
THE WORKS OF SAINT JEROME . . .143
CHAPTER II
THE DOCTRINE OF SAINT JEROME . . .163
SAINT JEROME
INTRODUCTORY
AINT JEROME, a contemporary of St Ambrose
and of St Augustine, who was his junior and
survived him, forms with those two great men the
incomparable triumvirate of the Latin Church in
the fourth and fifth centuries. The Bishop of
Milan, the Counsellor of Valentinian II., the friend
of Theodosius St Ambrose, whose eloquence be-
came at times pathetic and soared to the sublime,
and who possessed a rare aptitude for government,
was the pioneer of Christian statesmen, while St
Augustine is pre-eminently the metaphysician of
Christianity ; none of his predecessors had made a
more searching and comprehensive survey of the
synthesis of the dogmas, and no one has bequeathed
more ideas to posterity. St Jerome, however, did
not resemble either St Ambrose or St Augustine in
any of the gifts which distinguished them. If he
directed the elect few who intrusted their souls to
his care, he never dreamed of extending his authority
beyond this limited field. The fierce adversary of
Helvidius, Jovinian, Vigilantius, Pelagius, and even
of Origen, whom at first he had so much admired,
A9
THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
was of course a theologian, but not after the manner
of an Augustine, an Anselm, or a Thomas Aquinas.
He faithfully and jealously upheld and defended the
Catholic dogma, but he did not try to penetrate into
it or to throw any light, of necessity essentially im-
perfect, upon the mysteries of Christianity. Jerome's
immense erudition, his critical and exegetical talents,
which he devoted to an indefatigable study of the
Scriptures, on which point the most contrary opinions
have agreed in praising his pre-eminence, are what
distinguished him from amongst all the Latin Fathers.
"Although," said Richard Simon, "he borrowed many
things from Origen, he was, nevertheless, more
learned than he in his knowledge of languages. . . .
The Greek Fathers had this advantage over the
Latins, that the books of the New Testament were
written in their own tongue ; but in this particular
Jerome yielded nothing to them, and his knowledge
of Hebrew, his mastery of the art of criticism, gave
him an advantage which they did not possess." 1
Before the days of Richard Simon, the protestant,
Joseph Scaliger, Sixtus of Sienna, that pious and
learned Dominican, and still further back the ecclesi-
astical writers and Fathers had signalised these
glorious characteristics of Jerome, and the Church,
with an authority which has no precedent, thanks
God in the prayers on St Jerome's day for having
bestowed upon it in this Saint the most dependable
interpreter of the Scriptures : " Deus qui Ecclesiae
tuae in exponendis sacris Scripturis beatum Hiero-
1 Critical History of the Leading Commentators of the New
Testament. Chapter xv.
INTRODUCTORY 3
nymum Doctorem maximum providere dignatus
es. . . ."
Other traits further reveal the originality of this
historical figure, who was the most learned of the
Latins in his knowledge of classic antiquity as well
as in the study of the early history of Christianity
and the Bible.
Jerome, the "Ancestor of our great humanists,"
as M. Henri Goelzer called him, was a writer who
throughout his career recalled, and reminded others
of the masterpieces he had absorbed in his youth.
" Transplanted into Oriental soil," wrote Villemain,
"amongst Syrians and Hebrews, the idioms of whose
languages he frequently employed when translating
the Holy Books, he retained in his own writings the
purity of the Latin tongue he had spoken in his
youth at Rome." l His style not only preserved an
elegance forgotten by many of his illustrious con-
temporaries, but it was also eloquent. St Jerome
derived his eloquence from his own soul, in which
exalted virtues mingled so strangely with undeniable
defects. We must not expect to find in him the
serene meekness of Ambrose. Like Augustine, he
was capable of the most ardent affection, but he
also gave way to passionate anger and resentment,
neither of which ever troubled the gentle soul of the
son of Monica. Violent invectives, hard and un-
justifiable accusations seemed to come naturally to
him, and as Lenain de Tillemont (whose unpolished
language was sometimes most expressive) wrote:
" Whoever had Jerome for an adversary was almost
1 Picture of Christian eloquence in the fourth century. St Jerome.
4 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
always the very last of men." 1 Notwithstanding
these defects of character, notwithstanding the
mistakes which they occasioned, in spite of the error
in judgment which led Jerome to join Theophilus of
Alexandria in a deplorable campaign against St John
Chrysostom, the hermit of Bethlehem left in the
Church a saintly fame which has descended through
fourteen centuries. The memory of his priceless
works inspired by his passion for truth, and of the
penances with which he reduced his flesh, by ridding
his soul of importunate recollections of the past
and freeing it from dangerous temptations, explain
and justify the cult. " Jerome's preference for a life
of solitude and poverty when he might have claimed
the support of Damasus and disposed of the wealth
of St Marcella and St Paula, and his habit of fleeing
from those who would pay him homage, were," says
Tillemont, an historian not always to be trusted but
with whom we can in this instance thoroughly agree,
" acts characteristic of a saint alone." An ignorant
and narrow conception might wrongfully confound
saintliness with impeccability and incapability of
erring. No doubt the Saints (I speak of those whom
the Church has declared or recognised to be such)
all strove after perfection, and all attained to a
certain degree of it, but this does not mean that
their first effort was crowned with success. They
did not all escape the errors of judgment and conduct
which reveal the presence of original sin even in the
most righteous and enlightened souls; and in the
mysterious workshop where they tried to reproduce
111 Memoirs" The Ecclesiastical History of the first Six Centuries.
INTRODUCTORY 5
in themselves the likeness of the Divine Image, more
than one clumsy effort was abandoned, more than
one rough sketch preluded the accomplishment of
a final and lasting work.
Another characteristic distinguished Jerome from
the Fathers with whom we have compared him.
Ambrose confined himself to the journeys which the
discharge of his duties, first as prefect and later as
bishop, made imperative ; neither did Augustine ever
betray any tendency for travel. It is true that we
can trace him from Tagastus to Madaura, from
Madaura to Carthage, and from thence follow him
to Rome, Milan, Cassiciacum and Ostia, to those
shores which beheld the ecstasy of both mother and
son, and which preserved the precious relics of the
former until the fifteenth century. But these journeys
were imposed upon him by necessity or by the re-
sponsibilities of his position ; once returned to Africa,
once installed in his episcopal town of Hippo, he
never left it except when summoned to Carthage by
the duties of his office, and he allowed his letters and
works to be disseminated through the Roman Empire
without him. He was completely indifferent to the
spectacle of the outside world, and without neglect-
ing either the modest flock to whom he brake the
bread of the Word of God, or the countless souls
who eagerly sought his teachings, he lived in the
presence of the eternal truths ; their horizon sufficed
him and he desired no other ! Jerome, on the other
hand, unlike these two great men, was a born traveller.
His eager and restless imagination, his adventurous
temperament, led him from the borders of Dalmatia
6 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
and Pannonia where he was born, and from Rome
where he received his literary education, to Gaul,
Asia and Egypt. The desire to learn rather than the
desire to see, made an incessant pilgrimage of one
portion of his life. We are told that he " undertook
long and toilsome journeys throughout the Roman
Empire, seeking to acquire in the society of men an
experience which cannot be found in books, and
halting at all the towns where there was anything
to learn. We see him now at Treves, which possessed
one of the most flourishing schools in the West, now
at Antioch or Constantinople. ... He knew the
three languages, Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and if his
Greek was not as thorough as his Latin, at least he
knew it as well as any other Roman of his period." l
Jerome seems to have wished to justify his love of
travel by citing the example of illustrious predecessors.
" We read," he wrote Paulinus, " that people have
been known to traverse provinces, cross seas, land
among strange peoples, for the sake of seeing face to
face those whom they knew only through their works.
Thus did Pythagoras visit the wise men of Memphis,
thus did Plato visit Egypt and Archytas of Tarentum,
and at the cost of the rudest hardships travelled
along the shores of that portion of the Italian coast
which was then called Magna Gracia. He who in
Athens was a powerful master became voluntarily a
stranger and a disciple, preferring humbly to learn
the thoughts of others, rather than rashly and im-
prudently impart his own."
1 Henri Goelzer, " Lexicographical and Grammatical Study of
the Latinity of St Jerome." Introduction, I.
INTRODUCTORY 7
We must not forget that the knowledge which
Jerome sought before all others was that of the Holy
Writ and of tradition. To quote from Villemain :
" This eager soul yearned to see at close range the
birthplaces of religion and the summits on which its
dawn first broke, and to question the teachers and
anchorites of the Eastern Churches." l Jerome was
the forerunner of all the pilgrims who have wished
to begin or finish their studies of the Scriptures by
a visit to the Holy Land. " One understands the
Greek historians better after having seen Athens,
and the third book of Virgil when one travels from
Troas to Sicily, by Leucadia and the Acroceraunian
mountains, and arrives at the mouth of the Tiber,"
wrote Jerome, " and in the same way one acquires
a clearer insight into the Scriptures when one has
seen Judaea with one's own eyes, evoked the memory
of its decaying cities and learned the ancient and
modern names which those famous places bear."
(Ad Domnionem et Rogatianum in librum Paralipo-
menon Praefat.)
Such long and laborious researches were not fruit-
less. Returned for the last time to the desert and
permanently established at Bethlehem close to the
holy cave with which his memory was henceforth in-
separably connected, he continued his work, which
was occasionally interrupted by public and private
calamity. He writes : " I was suddenly informed of
the death of Pammachius and Marcella, of the siege
of Rome and of the falling asleep in Jesus of so many
Description of Christian eloquence in the fourth century. St
Jerome.
8 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
of my brothers and sisters in the faith. Appalled, I
remained motionless, and for days and nights could
think of nought but the deliverance of those dear to
me. I shared, in imagination, the captivity of the
Saints. I waited before opening my lips, to have
more certain tidings of them. . . . And after the
light of the entire earth had been extinguished, after
the power of the Roman Empire had been overthrown,
or, to express it better, when in the fall of a single
city the whole world had perished, I kept silence in
my humiliation, I left unspoken what words of
comfort I might have said, and my grief burst forth
afresh. My heart kindled and burned within me
whilst I meditated upon these things. I thought
that I ought not to forget this sentence, 'An un-
seasonable discourse is like music during lamenta-
tion.' " l
The aged lion, however, rose again in his might ;
amongst the ruins which the invasion was heaping
one upon another amid the tombs into which Nepotian,
Fabiola, Pammachius, Marcella and Eustochium
were lowered one by one, in spite of his grief at sur-
viving these dear ones Jerome did not cease to write
or dictate, and seemed to repeat, giving it a Christian
interpretation, the motto of the Emperor Severus
" Laboremus." Death alone, to which he succumbed
when over eighty years of age, relieved the intrepid
veteran from the post of toil and battle which he had
so long occupied. May those who wonder at, and
are perhaps scandalised by the harshness of his
language and the violence of his polemics, recall
1 Commentary on Ezekiel. Lib. prim., I, 2.
INTRODUCTORY 9
to their minds this lifetime entirely consecrated to
study and to the defence of truth, which he loved
with undivided devotion ; then will astonishment
tinged with distaste give way to a feeling of tender
and grateful admiration.
THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
CHAPTER I
YOUTH
JEROME was born about the year 342 at Stridon,
J on the borders of Dalmatia and Pannonia, in the
midst of a semi-barbaric population. 1 His parents,
however, were wealthy Christians, and in a letter to
Theophilus, the Patriarch of Alexandria, he testified
to the pious care which from his earliest childhood
had nourished him with the milk of the Catholic doc-
trine. 2 He was called Eusebius after his father, for
Hieronymus or Heirome was merely a surname, or
what in Latin is termed cognomen. His mother's
name we do not know. Besides an aunt, Castorina,
who seems to have shown him small affection, 3
Jerome had a sister, a cause of many anxieties, and
one brother, Paulinian, whom he later took with him
to Palestine from Rome.
The young Dalmatian began his studies at Stridon,
and at the age of eighteen he went with Bonosus,
a friend of his childhood, to continue them at Rome,
where he attended the lessons of Donatus, the gram-
marian, and possibly those of Victorinus, whose
1 De viris illustribus, cap. cxxxv.
8 Epist. Ixxii. ad Theophilum, 2.
* Epist. xiii. ad Castorinam Materteram
12 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
humble and courageous conversion has been im-
mortalised in the Confessions of St Augustine. 1
Reading, in which his eager soul found its outlet
(he tells us himself that he studied Porphyry's Intro-
duction, Alexander of Aphrodisias' Commentaries
upon Aristotle, and Plato's Dialogues), completed
his masters' teaching ; and his passion for books,
which he confesses were indispensable to him, en-
abled him to acquire, at the cost of the most arduous
labour, that is by copying them with his own hand,
an extensive library. 2 Thus was Jerome uncon-
sciously preparing himself for the great works which
were to fill his life.
He was as yet only a catechumen, for in those early
centuries they frequently waited until the perilous
ways of youth had been safely traversed before con-
ferring baptism, and the Christian initiation was some-
times deferred from reasons of prudence. To know,
however, that this prudence was liable to terrible
mistakes one has only to recall the anguish of Gregory
Nazianzen and of Satirus, St Ambrose's brother,
who both, when overtaken by a tempest at sea, were
terrified at the thought of dying unbaptised. It was
especially the fear of the restraints imposed by the
Christian life which deferred for years the baptism
of many, and we are told by St Augustine that the
deviations of the unbaptised were freely excused by
a spirit of general tolerance. 8
More fortunate in this respect than the son of
1 Confession, lib. viii,, cap. II.
2 Epist. xxii. ad Eustochium, 30.
'Confession, lib. i., c. xi.
YOUTH 13
Monica, Jerome, as he wrote to Theophilus of
Alexandria, never fell into error. He used often to
interrupt his studies in order to visit the basilicas of
the Saints or to descend into the catacombs, and
when an old man he thus described these pilgrimages
in his " Commentaries upon Ezekiel." " In my
youth, when I was studying literature in Rome, it
was my custom to visit on Sundays, with some com-
panions of my own age and tastes, the tombs of the
martyrs and apostles. I often wandered into those
subterranean galleries whose walls on either side
preserve the relics of the dead, and where the dark-
ness is so intense that one might almost believe that
the words of the prophet had been fulfilled : ' Let
them go down alive into hell.' A gleam of light
shining through a narrow aperture, rather than a
window, scarcely affected the awful obscurity, and
the little band, shrouded in darkness and able only
to proceed one step at a time, would recall this
verse of Virgil's ' Everywhere horror and even the
very silence appal me.' " l
In his youth Jerome witnessed the attempts made
by Julian to restore paganism, and he saw also the
utter failure in which they resulted. " While I was
attending the schools of the grammarians," he wrote,
" when every town was stained with the blood of
idolatrous sacrifices, suddenly at the very height of
the persecution Julian's death was announced to us.
' How,' exclaimed a pagan, and not unreasonably,
1 do the Christians say that theirs is a patient and
a merciful God? There is nothing more terrible,
1 Comment, in Ezech., lib. xii., cxl.
14 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
nothing more swift than His wrath. He could not
even for an instant defer His vengeance.' " l
The faith which had so early been instilled into
Jerome and which was so precious to him, did not,
however, shield him from the seductions of Rome,
but unlike Augustine, who wrote the humble confes-
sion of his protracted sins, he only alludes to his
in passing. "You know," he wrote Chromatius,
" how slippery are those pathways of youth where I
succumbed." In a letter to Heliodorus, whom he
wished to take with him into the desert and whom
he rebuked for his delay, he was more explicit:
'Why linger in the world, thou who hast already
chosen solitude ? If I give thee this advice it is
not as if my ship and my cargo were undamaged,
not as if I were ignorant of the deep, but rather as
one shipwrecked and just cast up upon the shore, in
feeble tones I warn the navigators of their peril." 2
There is another difference between Augustine
and Jerome worthy of notice. It is evident that
after the supreme struggles of which Augustine
has given us a dramatic account, he experienced
no further aggression of the vanquished foe. The
luring voices which made one final effort to woo him
to excess were silenced, and no doubt remained so
for ever, for after his conversion Augustine seems to
have inhabited serene heights inaccessible to any
disturbing memories of the past; but Jerome, who
was by nature more ardent and perhaps less gentle
than the son of Monica, could not forget so quickly.
1 Comment in Habacuc. Lib. ii. c. iii.
2 Epist. xiv. ad Heliodorum, 6.
YOUTH 15
Beguiling visions followed him to the desert of
Chalcis, and he succeeded in exorcising them only
through ceaseless work and penances.
From Rome the young Dalmatian, with Bonosus,
passed into Gaul and repaired to Treves, where
Valentinian I. then resided, and it was in Gaul that
Jerome determined to renounce the world which
had so wounded him, and devote himself to the
service of Jesus Christ. He accordingly returned to
Rome and was baptised there by Liberius. This Pope
having died on the 24th of September 366, Jerome's
baptism could not have taken place at a later date.
Leaving Rome he started for Aquileia, where religious
studies and monastic discipline flourished, and which
was at that time an important town and the capital
of its native province. Here he met many friends.
These friends monopolise a great part of Jerome's
correspondence, but the place they held in his affec-
tions they did not all, alas! retain until the end.
We will mention a few among them : Valerian,
Bishop of Aquileia; Chromatius, Nicias, Jovinianus
or Jovianus, who also became bishops ; Chrysostom
and Innocentius, called by Jerome the half of his
soul, and Hylas, who, from being a freedman of the
noble widow Melania, rose through the fellowship of
a common vocation to the intimacy of men whose
birth, learning, or fortune, had placed so far above
him. Besides Bonosus, of whom we have already
heard, there were two men at that time especially
dear to Jerome Heliodorus and Rufinus; the former
famous through the earnest letter which Jerome
wrote him trying to entice him into the desert, and
16 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
because of the Episcopal virtues which he displayed,
and the latter like Jerome himself, in turn a devoted
friend and a bitter enemy, through quarrels, of
which an account will be given.
Near Aquileia, at Concordia, a town now in ruins,
the future translator and chronicler of Eusebius of
Caesarea met an aged man called Paul, who in his
youth had known a secretary of St Cyprian's at
Rome. 1 We quote here the charming letter in
which Jerome, when sending him one of his works
upon the holy writers, seems to have delighted in
describing and praising the robust old age of this
dweller in the remote past. " Behold, your hundredth
year is passing, and ever faithful to the Saviour's
precepts you find in present blessings a foretaste of
the bliss to come. Your sight is clear, your steps
firm, your hearing quick, your voice sonorous, and
your body full of sap. Your rosy complexion con-
trasts with the whiteness of your hair, and your
strength contradicts your years. Old age has not
destroyed your memory, as with so many, nor a
cooling blood blunted the keenness of your mind
or extinguished its fire. No wrinkles furrow your
brow or line your face. Your hand does not
tremble: upon the waxen tablets it guides an un-
swerving stylus. God, who in your person illustrates
the vigour and verdure of the future resurrection,
has given us a lesson. If sin is the cause of others
being already dead in the flesh although still alive,
then your virtue has won you the privilege of still
seeming young when of an age which is young no
1 De viris illustribus. Cap. liii.
YOUTH 17
longer." l Jerome gathered much precious knowledge
from Paul, whose wonderful and rare old age he so
much admired. From him he learned that St Cyprian
professed a keen admiration for Tertullian, whose
works he daily read and whom he called his master.
Thus through oral tradition Jerome began that study
of church history to which he was later to contribute
so largely.
His stay at Aquileia was only the first halt in a
life of travel. From that time forth trials beset him.
"He was already beginning," says Tillemont, "to
make enemies whose persecutions were sufficiently
violent to oblige him to move from place to place,
and serious enough to reach the ears of the Pope
Damasus." 2 One of his adversaries was the
Bishop Lupicinus. Finally he determined to go
to the East and, according to Baronius, before
leaving the Western Hemisphere he paid a visit
to his native town and there bade farewell to
his own people for ever. He did not attempt
to conceal the painful effort the breaking of these
family ties cost him. "Whenever the impress of
your familiar hands recalls your dear faces to me,
then am I no longer where I am, or rather you
are there with me." 3 The man who sent such a
message, a message perhaps more touching than
well expressed, to those from whom he was separ-
ated, the man who appreciated so keenly the bonds
of friendship, was certainly not insensible to those
1 Epist. x. ad Paulum Senem Concordiae.
a Memoirs, etc. , St Jerome. Article iv.
8 Epist. vii. ad Chromatum Jovinum et Eusebium.
B*
18 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
of blood. " Full well do I know," he wrote to
Heliodorus, " what fetters hold thee back. My heart
is not of stone nor my bowels of iron, I was not
begotten by rocks nor suckled by the tigresses of
Hyrcania; I also have gone through the anguish
which thou dreadest." 1 Jerome probably had as
travelling companions this same Heliodorus, and also
Innocentius and Hylas, whom we again meet at his
side in the East when, as Tillemont, who translated
the works of the Saints, tells us : "He set out
carrying with him the library he had collected in
Rome, travelled over many provinces, passed through
Thrace, Pontus and Bithynia, crossed the whole of
Galatia and Cappadocia, suffered the intolerable heat
of Cilicia . . . and finally in Syria found the peace
which he sought as a safe harbour after shipwreck."
Before retiring into the desert, however, he spent a
few days at Antioch with Evagrius, a priest of that city,
whom Jerome had known in Italy, whither he had gone
to lay the discords in his Church before the Western
bishops, and who on his return became the guide and
sponsor of Jerome and his companions in Antioch.
Jerome, inflamed with an ardour for study which
never cooled, wished to hear the men most learned
in the Scriptures, and especially Apollinaris, Bishop
of Laodicea, who at that period had not yet fallen
into his later notorious heresy. It was probably
about this time that Jerome knew the hermit
Malchus, but it was not until long after that he
related his wonderful history, which Lafontaine has
translated into graceful verse.
1 Epist. xiv. ad Heliodorum, 3.
CHAPTER II
THE DESERT OF CHALCIS
JEROME, however, had left Aquileia, not for
J Antioch, but bound for the wilderness. He
plunged into the heart of the desert of Chalcis,
where, under burning skies and amid vast tracts
of sand out of which sprang here and there a few
scattered convents, he had gone to seek repentance,
and where he found fresh sorrows awaiting him.
Heliodorus returned to the West, and Jerome's
friendship for Innocent and Hylas was ruthlessly
severed by their death. But the memories of his
libertine youth, which troubled the peace of his
soul and threatened to sully a chastity so dearly
bought, caused him a still keener grief than the
loss of his friends, and he has left us a description
of his anguish, of his almost desperate but finally
victorious struggles, in pages of striking eloquence
and immortal beauty. " How often," he wrote,
" buried in this vast wilderness, scorched by the
rays of the sun, have I imagined myself in the
midst of the pleasures of Rome. I sat alone be-
cause my heart was filled with exceeding bitter-
ness. My limbs were covered with unsightly sack-
cloth, and my blackened skin gave me the appear-
ance of an Ethiopian. I wept and groaned daily,
20 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
and if in spite of my struggles sleep overcame me,
the bones in my emaciated body, which sank to
the naked earth, barely clave together. I do not
mention my nourishment or drink, for in this desert
even the sick monks scarcely dare touch fresh water,
and to eat cooked food would be considered an
excess. And I, who, through the fear of hell,
had condemned myself to this prison inhabited by
scorpions and serpents, imagined myself trans-
ported into the midst of the dances of the young
Roman maidens. My face was pallid with fasting,
my body cold as ice, yet my soul burned with
sensual emotion and in flesh already dead, only
the fire of the passions was still capable of kindling.
Debarred from all help I threw myself at the feet
of Jesus, watered them with my tears, wiped them
with my hair, and strove to subdue my rebellious
flesh by weeks of abstinence. I do not blush to
own to my misery, rather do I weep that I am
no longer as I once was. I remember having
often spent the entire day and night in crying
aloud and in beating my breast, until, at the com-
mand of God, who rules the tempest, peace crept
back into my soul. I even dreaded my cell as if
it had been an accomplice to my thoughts. Angry
with myself I penetrated alone further into the
desert, and if I discovered any dark valley, any
rugged mountain, any rock of difficult access, it
was the spot I fixed upon to pray in, and to make
into a prison for my wretched body. God is witness
that sometimes, after having long fixed my eyes
upon heaven, and after copious weeping. I believed
THE DESERT OF CHALCIS 21
myself transported among the choir of angels. Then
in a trusting and joyful ecstasy I sang unto the
Lord : ' We pursue Thee by the scent of Thy
perfumes.' " l
In order to subdue his flesh and curb his imagina-
tion, Jerome had recourse to other means besides
corporal punishment. " When I was young," he
wrote, " although buried in the desert, I could not
conquer my burning passions and ardent nature,
and in spite of my body being exhausted by per-
petual fasts my brain was on fire with evil thoughts.
Finally, as a last resource, I put myself under the
tutelage of a certain monk, a Jew who had become
a Christian, and, forsaking the ingenious precepts
of Quintilian, the floods of eloquence poured forth
by Cicero, the grave utterances of Pronto, and the
tender words of Pliny, I began to learn the Hebrew
alphabet, and to study this language of hissing and
harsh-sounding words. I who have suffered so
much, and with me those who at that time shared
my life, can alone testify to the efforts I wasted,
the difficulties I went through, and how often I
despairingly interrupted my studies, which a dogged
determination to learn made me afterwards resume ;
and I give thanks unto God that from such a bitter
sowing I am now able to gather such sweet fruit." 2
It was probably at this period, that is in 374,
that the mysterious dream of which Jerome has left
us a dramatic account came to him. Imbued with
the works of classic antiquity, he cherished a love
Epist. xxii. ad Eustochium, 7.
Epist. cxxv. ad Rusticum monachum, 12,
22 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
for them. " Miserable wretch," he wrote, " I fasted
before reading Cicero, after nights spent in vigil,
after tears wrung from me by the memory of my
sins, I would take up Plautus, and when, on coming
to my senses, I read the Prophets, their speech
seemed to me uncouth and unfinished. Blind, I
blamed the light instead of condemning my own
eyes." A vision cured him, for a while at least, of
this passion. "Towards the middle of Lent (pro-
bably the Lent of 375), while Satan was thus
mocking me, I was seized with a fever which, finding
my body exhausted by want of rest, consumed it to
such an extent that my bones barely clave together.
My body was becoming cold, a faint remnant of
warmth however still enabled my heart to beat. They
were preparing my funeral obsequies, when suddenly
my soul was caught up from me and carried before
the Tribunal of the Supreme Judge. The light was
so dazzling, those who surrounded Him shed such
a blaze of splendour, that, falling back upon the
ground, I dared not gaze aloft. They asked me who
I was and I answered a Christian. ' Thou liest,' said
the Judge, 'thou art a Ciceronian and not a Christian,
for where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also.' I
was silent ; and whilst the blows rained down upon
me, for the Judge had commanded that I should be
scourged, suffering even more from the torment of
my bitter remorse, I repeated to myself this verse
of the Psalms : ' Who will render thee glory in hell?'
Then I cried out weeping : ' Have pity on me, Lord,
have pity.' This cry rang out in the midst of the
blows, and at last those who were present, throwing
THE DESERT OF CHALCIS 23
themselves at the feet of the Judge, entreated Him
to have mercy upon my youth, to grant me time to
work out my repentance, and to punish me severely
if I should again peruse a pagan book. I, who, to
escape from the terrible straits in which I found
myself would have promised far more, swore to Him
and said, calling His name to witness: ' Lord, if
hereafter I harbour or read any secular books, may
I be treated as if I had renounced Thee.' After this
oath I was released and I returned to earth. Those
present were astonished to see me reopen my eyes,
which were bathed in such a flood of tears that my
grief convinced the most sceptical. That it was not
one of those vain dreams by which we are deceived,
I attest the Tribunal before which I lay prostrate
and the sentence which so appalled me. Please God
that I may never again be submitted to such an
ordeal. When I awoke my shoulders were bruised
and I could still feel the blows. From that moment
I studied religious books with far more ardour than
I had ever read profane ones." l
Did Jerome abide by this oath throughout his
life? Although making allowances for the Saint's
vigorous memory, to which reminiscences of Terence,
Lucretius, Cicero, Virgil and Seneca were continu-
ally recurring (Augustine, at Hippo, preserved the
memory of his classical education in the same tenaci-
ous manner), we have reason to believe that Jerome
more than once opened the works of these pagan
authors whom he had renounced. To Rufinus,
whose insidious hatred accused him of the crime of
1 Epist. xxii. ad Eustochium, 30.
24 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
perjury, he replied that the keeping of a promise
made in a dream could not be exacted of him.
However, even if Jerome did not deem himself
irrevocably bound by his pledge, he applied himself
more and more to the study of the Bible, and his
classical reading and recollections were exclusively
devoted to defending and embellishing the truth.
This is what he pointed out in a celebrated letter to
Magnus, the orator, in which, with skilful and
weighty arguments he cited the example of all his
predecessors, reminding him that according to
Deuteronomy the Israelite must needs cut the nails
and hair of his slave before marrying her. "Is it
astonishing that profane literature should have
seduced me by the grace of its language and by the
beauty of its form, or that I should wish to convert
a slave and a captive into a daughter of Israel ? If
I come across anything dead, any passage breathing
idolatry, sensuality, error, or evil passions, I suppress
it, and from my alliance with a stainless spouse are
born servants of the true God ; thus do I increase
the family of Christ." 1
The questions of discipline and dogma which were
agitating the Church of Antioch, disturbed Jerome
afresh in his retreat. Four bishops were contending
for the Patriarchal See of the East. In 361, after
the death of Eustathius, the intrepid champion of
the Nicean faith, the Arians and many Catholics
had agreed to elect Meletius of Sebaste, whose
orthodoxy, already attested at the time of Con-
stantine's persecution, asserted itself at Antioch
1 Epist. Ixx. ad Magnum, oratorem urbis Romse, 2.
THE DESERT OP CHALCIS 25
from the very first, with the result of alienating the
Arians, who chose Euzoius as their leader. Those
Catholics, however, who were most devoted to
Eustathius' glorious memory, refused to give their
support to a bishop who had counted Arians
among his electors. Towards the end of 379 Lucifer
of Cagliari, on his return from the exile to which he
had been banished by the son of Constantine, ap-
pointed the priest Paulinus, who was recognised by
Alexandria and the West, as Bishop to the Eustathians.
At the beginning of 376, to support his heresy in
introducing the Bishop of Laodicea into Antioch,
Apollinaris had the audacity to assign the govern-
ment of this great Church to his disciple Vitalis, whom
he had consecrated. Quite outside of all this, the
inhabitants of Antioch and of the monasteries at
Chalcis were discussing whether they should recog-
nise in God three hypostases or three persons. In
the theological language of to-day the two terms
are synonymous, but in the fourth century they were
not considered so by all. At Antioch the Meletians
used the word hypostasis in preference to the word
person, a form which Sabellius had not refuted ; the
partisans of Paulinus, on the other hand, conforming
themselves to the Latin custom which understood
hypostasis and substance to be synonymous, con-
sidered it an Arian impiety to say that in God there
were three hypostases. Urged by the monks
amongst whom he lived to pronounce upon the
legitimate vicar and the orthodox expression, Jerome
addressed himself in two famous letters to the Pope
Damasus. Certainly these letters are sufficient
26 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
proof that he disliked the word hypostasis, which
seemed to him equivocal or erroneous. Meletius
too, the champion of this word, was especially dis-
pleasing to him, and his sympathies were entirely
drawn towards Paulinus, the patriarch favoured by
Latin Christianity. Upon these points he asked the
judgment of the Roman Pontiff, which he valued
above everything, and to which he was willing to
submit. " I thought," he wrote Damasus, that I
ought to consult the Apostolic See and the Roman
Faith which St Paul the Apostle extolled. I crave
spiritual nourishment from the Church where I
received the baptismal robe. . . . You are the light
of the world, the salt of the earth, in your possession
are the vessels of silver and gold, elsewhere are the
vessels of clay and of wood destined for the iron rod
which shall shatter them, and for the eternal fires
which shall consume them."
In terms which succeeding centuries have freely
quoted, Jerome proclaimed the Roman pre-eminence
and the obligation imposed upon all to conform to it.
" I know that on that stone the Church was built ;
he who eats of the Paschal Lamb outside of its walls
is an impious man. He who has not sought refuge
in the Ark of Noah will be overtaken by the deluge."
He then asked Damasus to inform him which vicar
he was to follow and which term he was to employ.
" I do not know Vitalis, I repudiate Meletius, I
ignore Paulinus. Whoever reaps not with thee>
scatters; whoever belongs not to Christ belongs to
Antichrist." It is evident that Jerome could not
accept the term hypostasis with enthusiasm ; he
THE DESERT OF CHALCIS 27
declares as much in bitter, almost haughty tones;
nevertheless he was willing to accept it should
Damasus pronounce its usage to be legitimate.
" I pray you decide this matter for me, and I will
not shrink from saying that there are three
hypostases in God. ... I implore your Holiness by
the crucified Lord, by the consubstantial Trinity, to
write and authorise me either to suppress or use this
word." l
Jerome left Chalcis, probably driven from the desert
by some foolish persecution, and joined Evagrius in
Antioch, where Paulinus compelled him to enter the
priesthood ; but so strong was his love of solitude,
so jealous was he of his liberty, that he stipulated
that his ordination should not bind him to any one
particular church. By a peculiarity which the Jan-
senists willingly proposed as a model, Jerome never
ascended to the altar. In virtue of this liberty which
was justly dear to him, he contended, in a dialogue
written at Antioch, against the heterodox rigorism
of Lucifer of Cagliari, the bishop who had con-
secrated his friend Paulinus.
Towards 380 we meet the indefatigable traveller
at Constantinople, where St Gregory of Nazianzus,
placed against his will upon the episcopal throne of
that town, was re-establishing the true faith in the
hearts of a people who for forty years had been given
over to Arianism, and with poetic and touching
eloquence was distributing the treasures of his irre-
proachable doctrine among them. It was to the
tuition of such a master that Jerome submitted him-
1 Epist. xv. ad Damasum papam.
28 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
self, and in after years he took pleasure in evoking
his reminiscences of him, and in repeating his lessons.
He also knew at that time another Doctor of the
Church, St Gregory of Nyssa, St Basil's brother,
who read him his refutation of Eunomius and of
Anomoeanism, that audacious and radical form of
the Arian error. Eunomius and his adherents re-
presented in fact the left wing of Arianism, and as
has already been said they extricated the latent
rationalism from this heresy. The name of Anomoean
(avopoiog) which they had adopted, was a protest not
only against the O/AOOIKT/OJ of the Catholics, who pro-
claim the Son to be of the same substance as the
Father, but also against the oftoiovffiog of the semi-
Arians, who declared the substance of the Son to be
like that of the Father. This name signified that,
according to their idea, the Son was neither equal
to nor like the Father. Thus was God leading the
future interpreter of the Scriptures to the purest and
most abundant fountain heads of Catholic teaching
and placing him amongst men to whom heresy was
familiar and who excelled in confuting it. He was
about to bring him into the very heart of truth, for
Gregory of Nazianzus, disheartened by the weakness
and ingratitude of man, and anxious to return to his
solitude of Arianze, had, at the Council of 381, ab-
dicated his Episcopacy; there being now nothing
further to detain Jerome at Constantinople he started
for Rome, where the Council which Pope Damasus
had convoked seemed to call back into the Church
of his baptism this Dalmatian, ripened by age, pen-
ance and study, and especially fitted to give to the
THE DESERT OF CHALCIS 29
supreme authority information regarding the dis-
ciplinarian and dogmatic controversies then agitating
the patriarchate of Antioch. On his way, Jerome,
according to Baronius, must have passed through
Greece, and it is to this period, that is towards the
year 382, that we must ascribe a journey of which we
have but few details. " It is strange," it has been
said, " that our Saint should not have told us more
of a country in which it is impossible to walk a step
without awakening a host of memories. Did he fear
that his journey was in some way an occult sacrifice
to his admiration for the antique, a secret homage
to the pagan spirit whose influence he seemed so
much to dread, or did he recall the words of his
revered master ? " l This master, Gregory Nazi-
anzen, so Greek in his genius and in his language,
certainly seems to have harboured against Athens,
where he had feasted upon the masterpieces of
antiquity, the same feelings of anxious distrust which
many centuries later Manning experienced about the
Oxford of his youth. Let us say, in short, without
more circumlocutions, that Jerome, wedded though
he was to Greek literature, was not in his turn of
mind one of those baptized sons of Hellas who, under
the neophite's robe or even under that of the priest
or pontiff, remain ever faithful to this revealer of so
much beauty, and are always ready to turn towards
it gratefully and almost tenderly. Jerome would
never have exclaimed, as did Fenelon at the beginning
of his career in a letter to Bossuet, full of lively and
charming spontaneity interspersed with reminiscences
1 "Journeys of St Jerome," by Eugene Bernard. Chap. IT. 3.
30 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
and aspirations of the most varied description : " I am
about to start, I very nearly fly. . . . The whole of
Greece lies open before me, the Sultan draws back
in alarm, already the Peloponnesus breathes in liberty
and the Corinthian Church bursts into new life ; the
voice of the Apostle shall once more be heard within
it. I feel myself transported into those lovely spots,
those precious ruins, and collecting there, not only the
most curious monuments but the very spirit of anti-
quity itself. I seek the Areopagus where Paul pro-
claimed the unknown God to the wise men of the
world, but after the sacred comes the profane and I
do not disdain to pause at Piraeus, where Socrates
planned his republic. I ascend the double summit
of Parnassus, I pluck the laurels of Delphi and I
taste the delights of Tempe."
It is not in this manner that Jerome speaks of
Corinth, although he praises its literary taste, culti-
vated by its proximity to Attica, or even of Athens.
If he mentions this town which, according to a
famous saying, is the very Greece of Greece, it was
merely to say that he had seen, near the statue of
Minerva, a brazen sphere so heavy that he could
scarcely move it. "I asked," he adds, "what was
the use of this sphere, and they answered that it
served to test the strength of the athletes, and that
no one could enter the arena without having lifted
this weight, thereby showing which antagonist he
was fitted to encounter." l In another commentary
he alludes to the Athenian altar whose mysterious
superscription suggested such a persuasive exordium
1 Commeutar. in Zachariam. Lib. iii., cap. xii. v. n.
THE DESERT OF CHALCIS 31
to St Paul. "The inscription," said Jerome, "did
not run 'To the unknown God,' but 'To the Gods
of Asia and Africa, to the unknown and foreign
Gods ! ' As Paul only needed to mention one
unknown God he employed the singular when he
informed the Athenians that this God designated
in the inscription on their altar, was his own; and
when he enabled them henceforward to know and
worthily honour the God whom they could not ignore
and whom they unconsciously worshipped." l This
statement, if correct (for Pausanius the geographer
quotes a similar inscription to that mentioned by
St Paul), is an example of how ingeniously, if some-
what unscrupulously, this Apostle, who excited such
a keen interest in Jerome, as indeed he still does in
us, profited by every opportunity that lay within his
reach.
1 Commentar. in Epist. ad Titum. I. v. 10, n.
CHAPTER III
ROME
JEROME arrived in Rome accompanied by two
J Eastern bishops, Paulinus to whom he adhered,
and Epiphanius of Salamis. Important work,
illustrious friendships, struggles, and also bitter
trials, awaited him in the capital of the Christian
world. At the council which Damasus convoked
Jerome gave evidence of his erudition and of the
soundness of his doctrine in defending, with the
authority of St Athanasius, a name ascribed to Christ
(homo dominicus), the orthodoxy of which was con-
tested by the Apollinarists. The Pope, impressed
by the talent he was well fitted to appreciate, made
Jerome his Secretary, empowered him to reply in
his name to the inquiries of the Synods, and often
referred to the wisdom of the learned exegete on his
own account. Further, Damasus forcibly influenced
the whole life of his collaborator. He had seen his
tendency to omnivorous reading, an occupation in-
sufficiently stimulating to the mind, which suggested
to Father Gratry this pithy sally: "Oh! reading!
idleness in disguise!"; and he roused him from this
beguiling torpor by urging him to useful work. At
his request Jerome translated two of Origen's
Homilies on the Song of Solomon, and began to
32
ROME 33
translate the treatise upon the Holy Ghost, by
Didymus, the blind sage of Alexandria. Was it
St Ambrose's work on the same subject which
Jerome criticised in such severe terms in his
Preface ? (" Nihil ibi dialecticum nihil virile atque
districtum . . . sed totum flaccidum, molle. . .").
Rufinus in his Invectives pretended that it was, but
the Benedictines who edited the Bishop of Milan's
work disputed this assertion, which Tillemont, how-
ever, seems inclined to believe. l From the pen of
such a censor as Jerome the harshest criticisms are
by no means surprising, and this was especially a
criticism of a literary order.
Damasus exacted a task of still greater importance
from Jerome. The Gospel had at an early date been
translated into Latin for the benefit of Western
Christianity, but the primitive version, the ancient
Itala, had suffered in the manuscripts in circulation
corrections, and also innumerable alterations and
additions. Moreover, through the need of a con-
cordance, in order to make the copy already owned
as complete as possible, the various narratives of
the Evangelists were frequently united in a single
text. Alarmed at the danger introduced by these
divergencies, Damasus entreated Jerome to revise
the New Testament according to the original Greek.
Jerome, who was by nature intolerant of contradic-
tion, had no illusions as to the criticism to which
this task would expose him. He was about to dis-
turb old ways of thought, and possibly startle timid
consciences ; nevertheless, strong in the support
1 Memoirs, etc., St Ambrose. Note xi,
C9
34 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
afforded him by the Pope, he began and successfully
terminated the work demanded of him, suppressed the
interpolations, re-established the inverted sequence
of the sacred text, and presented this meritorious
achievement to Damasus, having added to it the ten
canons or tables of concordance translated from
Greek into Latin, in which Eusebius of Cassarea, and
later Ammonius of Alexandria, had shown what was
special to each Evangelist and what was common to
all four.
Jerome undertook another revision, that of the
Psalter. The translation current in the Latin
Church had been made from the Greek text of the
Septuagint, but owing to the numerous alterations
which had crept into the manuscript copies, it was
incorrect in many places. From the Hieronymian
revision sprang the Psalterium Romanum, which
was in use in Rome up to the reign of St Pius V.,
and to which the Venite Exultemus in the Invitatory
and the passages of the Psalms cited in the missal
still belong. " This first work was in its turn soon
altered by the copyists, and at the urgent desire of
St Paula, Jerome decided to make a second revision,
which this time he based upon Origen's Hexapla.
This was the Psalterium Gallicanum (anno 389),
so called because it was first adopted in Gaul. . . .
The Gallican Psalter is the one inserted in our
Vulgate and used in our Breviary." l Somewhat
later, about 392, he translated the Psalms from the
Hebrew.
These works, and the austerity of Jerome's life
1 Abb Lesetre. Introduction to the Book of Psalms.
ROME 35
while accomplishing them, drew much attention
upon the secretary of Pope Damasus, and won him
many illustrious and priceless friendships.
In a palace on the Aventine, one of the Seven Hills
of Rome, some noble-hearted women of earnest faith,
striving to attain the evangelical ideal, gathered
together and confronted the paganism which was
still general, and the immorality of an all too large
number of Christians, with the humble and courage-
ous exhibition of their virtue. The mistress of this
noble dwelling was Marcella, who had consecrated
her premature and irrevocable widowhood to God,
to the poor, and to the study of holy w r orks. With
her were also her mother, Albina, Asella, whose
meekness was extolled by Palladius the historian
of St John Chrysostom ; Furia, the heiress of the
Camilli, Fabiola, who, although less strong in
righteousness than her pious comrades, eventually
atoned for the sins of her youth by penance and
charity, Lea, the widow, and Principia.
We must especially mention three women who
were more cherished by Jerome than all the others,
and whose names are closely linked with his in
history, namely Paula and two of her daughters,
Blesilla and Eustochium.
It is unnecessary here to give an account of
Paula's early history. By her mother she was
authentically connected with the Scipios and the
Gracchi, and her father, Rogatus, a wealthy pro-
prietor of Nicopolis, claimed descent from Aga-
memnon, the king of kings. At the age of thirty-
five, after the death of her husband, Julius Toxotius
36 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
a reputed descendant of ^Eneas, for in the genealogy
of patrician Rome legend blends easily with history,
Paula was inspired by Marcella's example to adopt
the ascetic life, in which she soon equalled her
heroic friend. Her eldest daughter, Blesilla, left
a widow after seven months of marriage, re-entered
the narrow path from which the world had momen-
tarily tempted her, and died in the flower of her
youth, lamented in pathetic accents by Jerome.
" Who," he exclaimed, " will bestow upon mine eyes
a spring of tears that I may weep, not like Jeremiah
for the wounded of my people, nor even like Jesus
over the sorrows of Jerusalem, but over saintliness
and mercy, innocence and chastity, all the virtues
laid low in the death of one being. Not that we
need weep for her who is departed, but rather for
ourselves who have ceased to see her. Who could
recall with dry eyes this youthful woman of twenty,
whose ardent faith raised aloft the standard of the
Crucified ? . . . Who could remember unmoved her
persistency in prayer, the beauty of her language,
the accuracy of her memory and the acuteness of
her mind ? Had you heard her speak Greek you
would have supposed that she knew no Latin ; when
she conversed in Latin, no unfamiliarity with that
tongue could be detected in her speech. And,
marvellous gift which the whole of Greece admired
in Origen, in a few days she had overcome the
difficulties of the Hebrew tongue to such an extent
that she vied with her mother in the study and in
the singing of the Psalms. The poverty of her
raiment was not a cloak to pride, as in the case of
ROME 37
so many; genuinely humble, she made no effort
to distinguish herself from among the women who
surrounded her, except by a greater forgetfulness
of self. Weakened by suffering, Blesilla dragged
herself about, pale and trembling, barely able to
raise her head, yet always holding in her hand
either the Prophets or the Gospel. . . . Consumed
by fever and at her last gasp, she addressed her
supreme request to those nearest to her : " Ask the
Lord Jesus to forgive me for not having fulfilled
my intention " (Blesilla had contemplated entering
the monastic life). Rest in peace, oh Blesilla ! thy
garments are white and will always remain so ; their
spotless purity is the splendour of eternal virginity."
"We may be assured," pursues St Jerome, "that
Blesilla was converted " ; (in Christian parlance, in
that of a St Philip Neri, who was continually having
masses celebrated for his conversion, ' Conversion '
does not necessarily signify the transition from sin
to grace ; ) " for as long as this life lasts no conversion
ever comes too late. It was to the crucified thief
that these words were originally said, ' To-day shalt
thou be with me in Paradise.' When Blesilla had
laid down the burden of her perishable flesh, when
her soul, returning from a long exile, had soared
to its Creator and had entered upon the eternal
inheritance, magnificent obsequies were celebrated
in her honour and a long procession of patricians
followed her coffin, over which was spread a golden
veil, to the sepulchre. But I thought that I heard
from the height of heaven Blesilla crying to me:
' I do not recognise such raiment ; these funeral
38 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
trappings are not for me ; this pomp does not con-
cern me.' "
" But what am I doing ? " continued Jerome, " I
forbid a mother to weep yet I weep myself; I
acknowledge my sorrow, the page upon which I
write is wet with my tears. But did not Jesus
weep for Lazarus because he loved him ? . . . I
call to witness, Oh Paula, the Jesus whom Blesilla
followed, the angels whose companion she has now
become, that I suffer the same grief which is rending
you. She was my child of the spirit; I nourished
her with the milk of my chanty; and there were
moments when I cried, ' Perish the day when I was
born.' " l Then the Saint soars to lofty meditations
upon the unfathomable mysteries of the divine
government.
Eustochium, another of Paula's daughters, was
reserved for a longer career than Blesilla, the
tenderly-mourned. She followed her mother to the
East, where she succeeded her in the direction of the
convents in Palestine, and, always calm, always
invincible to temptation, she retained Jerome as
consoler and guide until the end.
The love of the Scriptures glowed in the hearts
of these Christian women who, in order to acquire
a deeper knowledge of the holy books, resolutely
began the study of Greek and Hebrew. In these
researches, where the knowledge of truth and not
the elusive joys of vainglory were sought, they were
directed by Jerome ; and Marcella, whose guest he
had become, outstripped all her companions in
1 Epist. xxxix. ad Paulam, i, 2.
ROME 39
this arduous pursuit. Later on, the recluse of
Bethlehem, in his " Commentary on the Epistle to
the Ephesians," wrote of her : " Whenever I picture
to myself her ardour for study, her vivacity of mind
and her application, I blame my idleness, I who,
retreated in this wilderness, with the manger whither
the shepherds came in haste to adore the wailing
Christ-child constantly before mine eyes, am unable
to accomplish what a noble woman accomplishes in
the hour she snatches from the cares of a large
circle and the government of her household."
Jerome was reproached for teaching only women.
He answered what too often, alas, the priest of the
present day would have the right to reply : " If men
questioned me more about the Scriptures I would
speak less to women." He added : " I rejoice, I am
filled with enthusiasm, when in Babylon I meet
Daniel, Ananias, Azarias, and Misae'l." l He found
Daniel, Ananias, Azarias, and Misae'l in a few chosen
friends who frequented the Aventine and attended
the religious school. They were Pammachius,
Marcella's cousin, who was to marry Paulina,
Paula's second daughter; Oceanus, a learned man
who later visited Jerome at Bethlehem ; Marcellintts,
who in Africa, in the time of Augustine, was the
most conscientious of magistrates ; and Domnion, a
priest advanced in years, the praises of whose
charity were sung by all.
In spite of the austere sweetness of these friend-
ships, in spite of the substantial support which the
protection of Damasus secured for him, Jerome did
1 Epist. Ixv. ad Principiam virginem, 2.
40 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
not taste peace in Rome. Was peace, however,
what he sought ? Jerome surely did not shrink
from contention. He had defended the incomparable
benefits of perfect chastity against Helvidius, a
contemner of the dogma of the perpetual virginity
of Mary, and, without denying the legitimacy of
marriage, he pointed out its drawbacks, I was about
to say its evils. He encouraged young girls, for
whom honourable or brilliant marriages were in
contemplation, in their desire to lead a monastic
life, and at the sight of the Roman virgins who,
through his advice, thus renounced their families,
there were many who would readily have accused
him of murder, more especially after the death of
Blesilla, whom he was reported to have killed by
dint of the fasts he imposed upon her. That was
not the only grudge harboured against him. He
denounced with eloquent indignation and inexhaust-
ible fervour the licentiousness, avarice, intemper-
ance and hypocrisy which had crept in among the
priests and the monks at Rome, and it may easily
be imagined that those stung by his powerful satire,
and those who recognised themselves or were recog-
nised by others in his portraits, became incensed,
and that anger and resentment broke out against
him on every side. Calumny soon came to the
aid of spite, and at the expense of all justice as
well as truth, the relations between Paula and
her spiritual director were incriminated. The death
of Damasus, which took place on the llth of
December 384, deprived Jerome of his protector,
excluded him from the Apostolic Chancery, and
ROME 41
completed his severance from Rome. His thoughts
turned once more to the desert, but this time it
was the biblical desert in which he wished per-
manently to establish himself, and he left Rome
for ever, taking with him his brother Paulinian,
the priest Vincent, and a few monks. From Ostia,
on the point of embarking, he wrote a letter to
Asella, in which his affectionate and saddened soul
reveals itself. "If I believed myself capable of
thanking thee worthily," he wrote, " I should be
incensed. But God can reward thy saintly soul
for me for the good thou hast done me. As to
me, I am unworthy of it, and I never had any
right to hope or even to wish that thou wouldest
grant me in Jesus Christ so great an affection.
And even if certain persons believe me to be a
vile wretch overwhelmed by the weight of my sins
in comparison to my sins that is but little yet
thou art right in letting thy heart distinguish for thee
between the righteous and the unrighteous. . . ."
Jerome then proceeded to exonerate himself from
the calumnies which had assailed him and invoked
the memory and testimony of Asella and of all
those who lived on the Aventine. " Many a time
have I been surrounded by a flock of virgins, and
to the best of my ability expounded the divine
books to several of them. Study creates assiduity,
assiduity familiarity, and familiarity a mutual under-
standing. Call upon those virgins to answer if they
have ever had any thought from me other than those
one should receive from a Christian. Have I ever
taken money from any of them ? Have I not always
42 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
repulsed every gift large or small ? Has my neigh-
bour's lucre ever soiled my hand? Have I ever
uttered a dubious word or cast too bold a glance ? "
In conclusion Jerome sends a supreme farewell to
the women he was leaving in Rome. " Greet Paula
and Eustochium, who are my sisters in Christ whether
the world so wills it or not, greet Albina my mother,
Marcella my sister, and also Marcellina and Felicitas,
and say to them that we shall all appear together
at the judgment seat of Christ. Then shall be
revealed the inner conscience and the life of each.
Keep me in thy thoughts, oh model of virginal purity,
and may thy prayers subdue the angry waves upon
my way ! " l
Even before the severe trials which had come to
her, Paula had contemplated leaving Rome. She had
been inspired by the descriptions of Paulinus of
Antioch, and of Epiphanius of Salamis, whom she
had received into her home at the time of the
Roman Council of 382, to visit the cradle of religion
in the East, where she yearned to behold the places
consecrated by the mortal life of our Lord. From
early days, but especially after the reign of Con-
stantine, many Christians had visited Palestine.
Helena's pilgrimage lives in every memory. Paula
also wished to make hers, but in her heart she
intended it to be a pilgrimage from which she
should never return. Jerome led the way. " He
journeyed to Rhegium," says Tillemont, " and after
crossing the famous straits of Messina between
Scylla and Charybdis he encircled the Cape of
1 Epist. xlv. ad Asellam.
ROME 43
Malea, crossed the sea of Cyclades and landed at
Cyprus, where he was received by St Epiphanius,
the Bishop of Salamis. From thence he proceeded
to Antioch, where he remained with Paulinus until
the middle of the winter." 1
Accompanied by Eustochium and a band of
Roman maidens who had also dedicated their
lives to virginity, Paula tore herself from the
endearments and tears of her other children
Toxotius and Rufina, who from the shore strove
in vain to detain her, and after a brief sojourn
in the island of Pontus, whither Flavia Domitilla,
a relation of the Emperor Domitian, had been exiled
on account of her faith, and a rest of ten days in
Cyprus, where St Epiphanius returned to his guest
the hospitality he had received from her in Rome,
the noble woman reached Antioch. Here Paulinus
would fain have persuaded her to stop a while, but
she was impatient to start for Jerusalem, and, in
spite of the winter, she set forth across rough
country travelling upon an ass, she who, as Jerome
said, had formerly never walked except supported
upon the arms of her servants. " It is probable,"
says Tillemont, " that Jerome made this journey
in the company of St Paula, with whom he certainly
was when she arrived in Bethlehem." 2
We will not go into their itinerary, nor describe
Paula's raptures when she found herself standing
upon Calvary or at the tomb of our Lord. After
Jerusalem the pilgrims visited Bethlehem. " Miser-
able sinner," cried Paula, " I have been deemed
1 Memoirs, etc., St Jerome. Chap. xlii. 2 Ibid. Art. xiii.
44 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
worthy of kissing the manger wherein my infant
Saviour lay, and of praying in the cave where the
Virgin Mother gave birth to our Lord. This is my
resting-place, for this is the country of my God. I
shall inhabit the dwelling which my Lord selected
for Himself." 1 As a matter of fact it was in
Bethlehem that Paula was to live and die ; it was
there also that Jerome was about to settle.
Our travellers however, before permanently
establishing themselves in the cave of the Nativity
proceeded to Egypt, and the land of the Pharaohs,
where the Holy family had found shelter, and where
so many ascetics seemed by the heroic excesses of
their penances to defy nature and place themselves
on the level of angels, was to Paula and her guide a
second Holy Land. Jerome had still another reason
\/ \
for visiting Egypt ; he was anxious to consult the
blind Didymus, at that time the most illustrious
representative of the school of Alexandria. " My
head," he wrote, " was beginning to be covered
with gray hairs, which better become a master than
a pupil, yet I became a disciple of Didymus, and I
have every cause to be thankful to him. . . ." 2
Jerome's intense love of travel, or rather Providence
which directs secondary causes without forcing them,
led him to Alexandria, after having taken him to
Antioch, Constantinople and Rome, so that no cradle
of tradition or of Catholic science should be unknown
to him.
1 Epist. cviii. ad Eustochium, IO.
2 Epist. Ixxxiv. Pammacliio et Oceano.
CHAPTER IV
BETHLEHEM YEARS OF PEACE
'"PHE traveller returned to Palestine and estab-
lished himself at Bethlehem, where, out of the
wreck of his inheritance, consisting of farms partially
destroyed by the barbarians, which Paulinian was
commissioned to sell, and with the aid of Paula's
bounty. , he erected a monastery which he fortified
with a tower of refuge. He selected for his cell a
cave close to the one where our Lord was born.
Paula, meanwhile, after having built some temporary
cells, was engaged in constructing convents, and
her indefatigable charity endowed as a hospice for
pilgrims the hamlet where, as Jerome observed,
Mary and Joseph had been without shelter.
In Palestine Jerome was once more thrown with
Rufinus, a friend of his youth, who had left Rome in
371 and after six years spent in Egypt had settled
at Jerusalem not far from the widow Melania, cele-
brated for her austere sacrifices and her continual
journeys. The intimacy which absence had inter-
rupted without destroying, was renewed between
the two friends. Jerome used even to have the
manuscripts of secular literature needed for his
disciples copied by the monks belonging to the
convent of the Olive Trees, which Rufinus directed.
46 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
The early days of Jerome's sojourn in Bethlehem
were most serene ; everything charmed and satisfied
him, and a tremour of joyous admiration, a breath of
spring, one might almost say, seems to vibrate
through the pages which he wrote or inspired during
that period. " The most illustrious Gauls con-
gregate here, and no sooner has the Briton, so
remote from our world, made any progress in piety,
than he abandons his early setting sun to seek a
land which he knows only by reputation, and through
the Scriptures. And what of the Armenians, the
Persians, the nations of India and Ethiopia; of
Egypt herself, so rich in monks, of Pontus, Cappa-
docia, Coelesyria and Mesopotamia? All these
Eastern countries send us hordes of monks . . .
they throng here and set us the example of every
virtue. The languages differ but the religion is the
same, and one can count as many different choirs
singing the psalms as there are nations. Yet in
all this and this is the triumph of Christianity
there is no vainglory, none prides himself upon his
chastity ; if they quarrel it is as to who shall be the
humblest, for the last is here counted first. . . .
They do not judge one another, for fear of being
judged by the Saviour, and slander, so prevalent in
many districts where they malign each other out-
rageously, is here completely unknown. Here is
no luxury, no sensuality. . . ." Either Jerome or
Paula closes this description with a few lines of
idyllic grace. "In this land of Christ's all is sim-
plicity, and except when the Psalms are being sung
all is silence. Wherever you may go you hear the
BETHLEHEM YEARS OP PEACE 47
labourer, with his hand upon the plough, murmuring
Alleluia. The reaper, with the sweat pouring from
his brow, finds relaxation in singing the Psalms, and
the vintager recites some passage from David while
pruning his vines. They are, so to speak, the love
songs of the country; the shepherds' lilt, the
labourers' accompaniment." l
These peaceful years were also years of toil for
Jerome. The direction of the convents which had
sprung up about the cave of Bethlehem, the active
correspondence he maintained with his friends in
the outer world, even the grammatical instruction
he gave to the young men, which brought back to
him those secular works of antiquity he had vainly
striven to hate or to forget, would have been suf-
ficient in themselves to fill his life. They were,
however, but a minor portion of his work. He had
undertaken the study of the Scriptures at the advice
of Damasus, but the providential attraction which also
drew him to them, was continually growing stronger
and surer. Everything seemed to lead him to the
Bible. The Abbe Eugene Bernard, in the eighth
chapter of his "Journeys of St Jerome," says that
" his letters were commentaries on the Bible. . . .
If he interested himself in history or geography, it was
in order to gain a more exact knowledge of the land
where the events of the Old and the New Testament
had taken place." To better understand the sacred
books he resumed his study of Hebrew, and added
to it the study of Chaldaic, and this language, in
which are written the book of Tobias and part of the
1 Epist. xlvi. Pauke et Eustochii ad Marcellam, 9, 10, n.
48 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
book of Daniel, cost him infinite pains. " I lately,"
he wrote, " came to a standstill in the book of
Daniel, and I experienced such a feeling of vexation
that, suddenly seized with despair, I was tempted
to look upon everything I had hitherto done as
useless. A Jew, however, encouraged me. He
repeated so often in his own tongue the " Labor
omnia vincit improbus " that I, who was considered
a master in Hebrew, became a scholar in order to
learn Chaldaic. It is true that I read and under-
stand this language better than I speak it." 1
Paula and Eustochium, who were already initiated
into the intricacies of the Hebrew tongue, assisted
Jerome in his work. They read the Bible with him,
and their pious and insatiable thirst for knowledge
provoked explanations which the Saint, by his own
confession, took from the Masters of the Faith, with
whom no one was more familiar than he. At their
desire he commentated the Epistles to Philemon,
to the Galatians, to the Epheeians, and to Titus,
and he completed for these two survivors of Blesilla
the explanation of Ecclesiasticus for which she had
formerly (386-387) asked him. " He translated the
text from the Hebrew, keeping as much as possible
to the Septuagint. Sixtus of Sienna considered it
an admirable work, owing to the brevity and lucidity
with which he expounded the spiritual and literal
meaning." 2
Jerome was also engaged in many other literary
labours, such as the translation of thirty-nine of
1 Prsefatio Hieronymi in Danielem prophetam.
* Tillemont. Memoirs, etc., St Jerome. Art. xlviii.
BETHLEHEM YEARS OF PEACE 49
Origen's Homilies upon St Luke, and the long
interrupted translation of the treatise of Didymus
upon the Holy Ghost, a treatise on Hebrew names
and places, another on Hebraical questions, an
essay on etymology and biblical geography, a
biography of the illustrious men in the Church, and
finally protests against the monk Jovinianus, who
contested the excellence of virginity and added other
errors to this profoundly unchristian one, notably
that of the parity of sins and the equality of merits.
In the midst of these many works the study and
the interpretation of the Bible continued to be the
constant and paramount, I might almost say the
sole object of his thoughts and love. " Before
translating the Scriptures from the Hebrew," says
Tillemont, " he had produced an edition in Latin
very carefully corrected from the Septuagint, not
from the general edition into which a quantity of
faults had crept, but from that in Origen's Hexapla,
which was far more correct and which was sung in
the Palestine Churches." a Unfortunately the greater
part of this translation disappeared during the life-
time of the author. " Pleraque prioris laboris fraude
cujusdam amisimus," he wrote to St Augustine. 2
The Psalter, translated as we remember at the
instance of Pope Damasus, the book of Job dedicated
to Paula and Eustochium, and the prologues to the
books of Solomon and of Chronicles, are all that
remain of the Hieronymian version of the Septuagint.
Another more important and lasting work, however,
has consoled the Christian world for this loss, and
1 Memoirs, etc., St Jerome. Art. liii. 2 Epist. cxxxiv.
D 9
50 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
cast an almost unequalled glory upon Jerome's name.
To put a stop to the divergencies of the Scriptural
versions used in the different Churches and to arrest
the mocking criticism of the Jews, who sometimes
accused the Christians of quoting the Bible without
understanding it, Jerome resolved to translate the
Holy Writ from the original. He did not bind
himself in this to follow the order of the Canon,
and began by the books of Kings, to which he wrote
a famous preface which has been the cause of
lengthy controversies.
Doubting the deuterocanonical writings of the Old
Testament to have been inspired upon this point
the Church has not ratified the learned exegete's
uncertainty Jerome only enumerated the twenty-
two canonical books of the Hebrews in his Preface,
which he intended to act as a sort of shield and
defence to his whole translation of the Bible. " Quasi
Galeatum principium," he said; from thence the
name of Prologus Galeatus which it has preserved.
Jerome wrote this preface about the year 391, and
later in 393, sending the first fruits of his labour
to Pammachius, he apprised him that he had trans-
lated the Sixteen Prophets from Hebrew into Latin.
" Borrow," he wrote, " this work from thy cousin
Marcella, read the same book in Greek and in Latin,
compare with my new version the one I made from
the Septuagint, and thou wilt clearly see what
difference there is between falsehood and the truth." 1
We know that Jerome translated the book of Job,
and especially Daniel, at the cost of infinite labour.
1 Epist. xlix. ad Pammachium, 14.
BETHLEHEM YEARS OF PEACE 51
In 394 he translated Esdras and Nehemiah, which he
dedicated to Domnion and Rogatus, and the follow-
ing year he presented his translation of the Chronicles
to Chromatius. Shall we enumerate all the other
Scriptural works which emanated from the fruitful
solitude of Bethlehem ? At the request of the monk
Sophronius, Jerome translated the Psalms from the
Hebrew and, while recovering from a long illness,
the Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon.
He also commentated the Prophets.
We have selected for quotation a page from the
Commentary upon Sophonias, the prophet in whom
we seem to hear already a sort of prelude of the
Dies Irce. 1 In the downfall of Jerusalem and in the
dispersion of the Jews, Jerome shows us the fulfil-
ment of the divine warning. "The day that Jeru-
salem was taken and destroyed by the Romans, we
see a mourning people, decrepit women crowding to-
gether, ragged old men bent under the burden of
their years and bearing upon their persons and their
raiment the impress of the divine wrath. This
wretched flock herds together at the spot where rose
the cross of our Lord, at the very scene of His
glorious resurrection. The standard of the Cross
glitters upon the Mount of Olives, while this un-
happy race weeps over the ruins of its Temple, with-
out, however, exciting pity. The tears continue to
stream down their cheeks, their arms are livid, their
locks in wild disorder, and the Roman soldier tries to
exact money from them so that they may weep the
more. What witness of this scene could say that
1 Commentar. in Sophoniam (Zephaniah). Lib. i.,cap. v. 15, 16.
52 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
this was not truly the day of tribulation and anguish,
the day of calamity and darkness, the day of clouds
and storms, the day of the last trump and of terror ?
In the midst of their mourning they hear the music
of the clarions, and according to the prophecy the
sound of feasting has been turned into lamentation.
Shrieking with grief they pass over the ashes of the
sanctuary, of the overthrown altar, through towns
but lately fortified, under the towers of the Temple
from which they precipitated James the brother of
our Lord." As Villemain says, "Jerome interpreted
the ancient curses pronounced upon the Jewish race
by the distant glow of the conflagrations which were
devastating the East."
After enumerating the translations made by the
indefatigable ascetic, Tillemont adds, that in spite of
the veneration felt for the Septuagint which the
Church had always used since the days of the
Apostles, the Hieronymian version ended by super-
seding it. " It is this which forms the basis of our
Vulgate, with the exception of the Psalms, which have
remained according to the version of the Septuagint,
the books which do not exist in Hebrew, such as the
book of Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, Maccabees,
and some parts of Daniel and Esther. Even in the
others there are a few traces of the ancient version
unlike St Jerome's." l
Jerome did not escape criticism. What genius
indeed, especially when success has crowned him
with her laurels, will ever be spared it. Jealousy
pursued him with iniquitous and offensive accusa-
1 Memoirs, St Jerome. Art. Ivi.
BETHLEHEM YEARS OF PEACE 53
tions. We read that " Greeks came to accuse him
of plundering the Greek authors. Latins reproached
him for only caring for works done in the East, as if
his acknowledged purpose had not been to throw
light upon the Gospel and the Bible by observations
made in the very spots where the events had taken
place, and to bring his native West into the scientific
movement of Eastern Christianity " ; l and a suspicious
orthodoxy took exception to the works which seemed
to introduce dangerous innovations into liturgical
usages. Yet Jerome was happy and as peaceful as
his restless nature ever allowed him to be. His
letters testify to this peace and happiness which he
would fain have shared with all his friends in Rome.
" We who have already floated so far upon the tide
of life," he wrote to Marcella, " we whose bark has
been alternately battered by the storm and pierced
by hidden reefs, let us hasten to enter port ; a port
of solitude and wide fields, where we eat black bread,
herbs watered by our own hands, and milk, rustic
delicacy, for such is our mean but harmless food.
Leading such a life, sleep shall not beguile us from
prayer nor an overburdened stomach interrupt our
studies. In summer the shade of a tree will provide
us with shelter, and in winter a bed of leaves under
a clement sky afford us a resting-place. In the
spring the land is carpeted with flowers, and the
chanting of the Psalms makes even sweeter melody
than the warbling of the birds. When winter comes
with its cold and snow I have no need to buy fuel ;
thanks to the neighbouring forest, I shall sleep or
1 Amede Thierry. St Jerome, i. 7.
54 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
wake in warmth and comfort, and how economically,
for although I spend nothing I cannot freeze. Let
Rome keep her uproar, let her arenas run with blood,
her circus resound with senseless cries, her theatres
overflow with lust, and finally, to speak of our friends,
may the senate of matrons be daily visited there.
Here we think that it is good to devote ourselves to
God and put our trust in him, so that when the day
comes for us to exchange our poverty for the kingdom
of heaven, we shall be able to say, 'What have I
desired in Heaven, what have I yearned for on earth,
save only Thee, Oh my God.' " l
Among the travellers who visited Jerome there is
one whom we cannot pass over in silence, for his
name evokes the greatest memories of that age.
Towards 393 Alypius, whom the Confessions of St
Augustine have taught us to know and love, arrived
in Palestine, and according to Tillemont, " saw Jerome
and spoke to him of St Augustine. . . . St Augustine
already knew something of Jerome through the fame
of his works . . . but this journey of St Alypius
drew them much closer, for Jerome began to love
St Augustine from what he heard of him from Alypius,
and St Augustine, who was extremely desirous of
seeing Jerome, found his wish gratified to a certain
extent through his complete sympathy of heart
and soul with Alypius, which enabled him to see
Jerome through the eyes of the former. . . . " 2
Fabiola and Oceantts also came to Palestine and
settled, she in Paula's convent and he in Jerome's
monastery.
1 Epist. xliii., ad Marcellam. 2 Memoirs, etc. Art. Ixi.
BETHLEHEM YEARS OP PEACE 55
It was about the time of the visit of Alypius that
Jerome wrote his celebrated letter to Furia, a Roman
widow, and a descendant of the Camilli, in which he
commended her widowhood entirely consecrated to
God and the poor, and laid down certain austere
rules of conduct for her.
CHAPTER V
CONTENTIONS RUFINUS AND ORIGENISM
A LONG and painful ordeal was about to disturb
** what St Augustine called "the peaceful joy"
which Jerome tasted in his work. It arose from the
most unexpected quarter, his adversary being no
other than Rufinus, with whom he engaged in a
fratricidal conflict over the writings of Origen.
Jerome had first met Rufinus at Aquileia, and they
had contracted one of those friendships which seem
eternal. It was to this friend of his youth, who had
left him to visit the Egyptian Thebaides, that Jerome,
isolated in the desert of Chalcis, wrote from a bed
of sickness: "Oh! if the Lord Jesus Christ would
grant that I might suddenly be transported to thy
side as was Philip to the minister of Candacia, and
Habakkuk to Daniel, how tenderly would I clasp
thee in my arms ! " He closed this letter with the
following words, which subsequent events so cruelly
belied: " I beseech thee, let not thy heart lose sight, as
have thine eyes, of a friend so long sought, with such
difficulty found, and so hard to retain ! Let others
gloat over their gold! Friendship is an incompar-
able possession, a priceless treasure, but the friend-
ship which can perish has never been a true one." 1
1 Epist. iii. ad Rufinum monachum,
56
CONTENTIONS 57
This last is a somewhat bold assertion, and one
which fails to take into account the inconstancy of
the human heart, which is liable to take back what
it once gave in all sincerity. St Augustine, who was
the most devoted and faithful of friends, the mere
mention of whose name recalls those of so many
beings dear to him whose lives were inseparably
interwoven with his own, in speaking of this rupture
between Rufinus and Jerome has deplored in touch-
ing accents the frailty which undermines or menaces
our affections. "What hearts will hereafter dare
open themselves to one another; is there any friend
to whom one may freely unbosom oneself ; where is
the friend one does not fear some day to count an
enemy, if this rupture which we deplore could have
taken place between Jerome and Rufinus ? Oh !
wretched plight of mankind, and worthy of pity !
How can we put faith in what we see in our friend's
souls when we cannot foresee what may change
them? Yet why lament thus over others when we
do not know what we may be ourselves ? Man
barely and imperfectly knows what he is to-day, he
has no conception of what he may be to-morrow." 1
A friendship worthy of the name and capable of
lasting undoubtedly has taxes which levity or selfish-
ness frequently shun. Certain circumstances are
favourable to it, create and foster it, and it has often
been noticed how great a bond it is for two men to
have been born at the same point of time and space,
if I may so express it. In the course of years con-
temporaries, even those who differ most in thought,
1 Epist. ex. inter Epist. Hieronymi, 6.
58 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
are drawn together and sometimes end in agreeing,
seeming to feel nearer one another than they do to
the newer generation, who, making no distinctions,
are equally contemptuous or disdainful of them.
How much easier then is a friendship like that of
Rufinus and Jerome, built not only upon a common
origin and memories but upon mutual tastes, studies
and beliefs. As Augustine reminded the latter, they
had both grown to manhood unfettered by the world,
nourished upon the precious words of the Scriptures,
and dwelling in Palestine, where an echo of the
Lord's words proclaiming peace linger in the traces
of his footsteps. It was not at this age when usually
sentiments as well as thoughts take firmer root in
the soul, and life shapes its future course, that the
friendship between Rufinus and Jerome should have
been severed had it not always contained the seeds
of death. But from the very first it had been
founded upon a mistake ; for Rufinus and Jerome,
who had thought that they thoroughly understood
each other, were in reality separated by profound
and irreducible differences. Studious and learned
but narrow-minded and contemptuous of anything of
which he was ignorant, ever ready to introduce a
sophistical skill and a cutting irony into polemical
discussions, Rufinus was totally unlike Jerome, whose
ardent soul sought the truth under every form, and
who seemed more capable of violence than of bitter-
ness. We must acknowledge that at times Jerome,
yielding to this spirit of violence, gave vent to strangely
intemperate language, of which vivid examples may
be found in many of his letters, in his apology against
CONTENTIONS 59
Rufinus, and even in his Scriptural works, where
one would expect to find only the serene inspira-
tion which emanates from God. A famous writing
of Origen's gave rise to a stormy quarrel and an
irrevocable rupture between the two friends. It
was curious that the timid writer, who took excep-
tion to the most legitimate of Jerome's innovations
and behind whose watchful orthodoxy lurked a con-
servative and moody spirit of distrust, should have
been the champion of the brilliant and audacious
Alexandrian, who seems to us one of the most
dazzling and in certain respects one of the most
sympathetic personalities of the Christian school of
Alexandria. When a child he had wished to be re-
united to his father, Leonidas, through martyrdom ;
when a man he continued in the Didascalia the teach-
ing introduced by Pantenus and Clement ; and in his
old age he was privileged to suffer for the truth. He
patiently and unshrinkingly examined every branch
of sacred lore. As a critic he undertook prodigious
works upon the Greek versions of the Bible ; as an
apologist he responded with a vigour and point which
have not suffered by age to the mocking strictures
of Celsus, and as a thinker he broached the most
abstruse points of Christian dogmatism ; but un-
fortunately the soundness of Origen's views as a
theologian fell short of those he held as a critic and
apologist, which was the cause of the wide-spread
controversies he occasioned. Even during his life-
time the audacity of his views attracted attention,
and we are told by a writer, always seeking to gather
any proof in ecclesiastical history of the vigilance and
60 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
far-reaching intervention of the Roman Pontiffs, that
" towards the end of his life he found himself obliged
to justify himself to Pope Fabian and to retract
certain propositions." 1 Origen was especially cen-
sured after his death ; he was blamed for his views
upon the pre-existence of souls and upon the suc-
cessive ordeals which in his mind replaced the dogma
of the irrevocable and final sanction of the human
life, and upon the future resurrection which he seems
to have spiritualised to the point of robbing this
dogma of its obvious and traditional meaning. He
was considered by some a precursor of Arius. He
was opposed by Saints such as Methodius, Bishop
of Olympia in Lycia, Peter, Bishop of Alexandria,
and Eustathius, Bishop of Antioch ; but on the other
hand illustrious disciples and intrepid champions of
his cause rose from the ranks of orthodoxy. St
Gregory Thaumaturgus, whom he had baptized,
glorified him in touching terms, Pamphilus the holy
martyr wrote his apology, while St Gregory of Nyssa
and Didymus of Alexandria considered him their
master.
We do not assert, as did Rufinus to justify the
veneration which clung so long to Origen's memory,
that he was never guilty of the errors attributed to
him and that the heretics inserted them into the
" Periarchon " (the Book on the Fundamental
Doctrines) ; neither do we try to put a favourable
interpretation upon its most unorthodox tenets.
It is enough to repeat the judicious words of Mgr.
1 Duchesne," Ecclesiastical autonomies," ehap. iv. The Roman
Church before Constantine,
CONTENTIONS 61
Freppel : " The author of the ' Periarchon ' did not
at any period of his life put himself in opposition
to the Church's teachings, which always represented
to him the infallible rule of Faith. Firm in his
principles he could only have erred in the applica-
tion by mistaking for liberal opinions what really
was contrary to the Catholic dogma. Origen be-
lieved it possible safely to construct a philosophical
system founded upon the Revelation, the principal
idea of which was taken from Plato. However, he
only formulated this system with many reserva-
tions, as a sort of hypothesis and as a mere mental
exercise." l
But to return to Rufinus and Jerome, can one
wonder that two youths, enthusiastically interested
as they were in learning, should have plunged with
ecstasy into the spring of knowledge which Origen
made accessible to them ; can one wonder that
Jerome should have proclaimed him " the Master
of the Churches after the Apostles ? " 2 Yet much
as he admired Origen's learning and genius, Jerome
was careful to refrain from "Origenism." In his
commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians he
confuted the error of the pre-existence of souls.
He was able to write : " I have praised Origen as
an interpreter, not as a dogmatising theologian." 3
During the years of whose history we are about
to give an outline, he was becoming disillusioned
of the master whom he had so admired, and when
1 Origen, 37th Lesson.
* Lib. de nominibus hebraicis. Praefat.
1 Epist. Ixxxiv. ad Pammachium, 2.
62 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
in 394 a monk called Aterbius came to Jerusalem
and denounced the Origenists in his diocese, Rufinus
especially, to the Bishop John, Jerome had no
hesitation in publicly denying the errors which were
also imputed to him. This, however, was only a
preliminary campaign against Origenism and those
suspected of it, the real war was opened by St
Epiphanius of Salamis, whom our readers already
know, having seen him as Paula's guest in Rome,
and at Cyprus where he returned her hospitality.
The virtues and works of Epiphanius were the
object of a legitimate and well-merited admiration.
"This aged man," says Amedee Thierry, who can-
not be accused of being over-indulgent in his judg-
ments of the saints, "gave proof of his heroism
when, consuming his life in the search of heresies,
braving hunger and thirst and the ill-treatment of
man, even penetrating into the heart of the Arabian
deserts to study the deviations of the Christian
Faith, he firmly upheld the chain of Apostolic
tradition which in the East is so easily weakened
by imagination and fancy." l It is not, however,
disrespectful to the holy Pontiff to acknowledge
that he was at times carried away by excess of
zeal. The line of conduct which, without any
regard to the rights of John Chrysostom, Epi-
phanius pursued at Constantinople towards the close
of a life which covered nearly a hundred years,
can only be explained by the blind confidence he
put in the perverted guidance of Theophilus of
Alexandria, and can only be justified by the un-
1 St John Chrysostom and the Empress Eudoxia. Book III., iii.
CONTENTIONS 63
deniable good faith of a soul which everywhere
waged a truceless war against heresy. Upon the
Episcopal throne of Jerusalem Epiphanius found
less exalted virtues and doctrines less sound than
those he later so unfortunately misjudged at Con-
stantinople. We fear that in junctures like these
he did not display all the prudence and tact desir-
able. Respectfully welcomed by the clergy and
inhabitants of the Holy City, he denounced Origen
in a speech in which the Bishop John thought he
detected allusions personal to himself. The Bishop
of Jerusalem, stung by this attack, created a diver-
sion by scoffing at the coarse anthropomorphism in
which certain adversaries of Origen, fearing his
refined spiritualism, sought an illusory refuge.
Epiphanius retorted : " All that John, through the
union of priesthood my brother, and by reason of
his youth my son, has just said against the heresy
of the Anthropomorphites I consider well spoken
and much to the purpose, but as we both con-
demn the Anthropomorphites, it is but just that
we should also both condemn the impious dogmas
of Origen." l John, however, refused to make the
complete and sudden disavowal for which he was
asked. On another occasion when John had re-
sumed his catechetical teaching in the presence of
Epiphanius, the latter, according to St Jerome,
abruptly left Jerusalem, and as if alarmed at the
discourses he had heard there fled to the monastery
at Bethlehem, where he evinced his grief at having
communicated with a heretical bishop. Jerome and
1 Tillemont. Memoirs, etc., St Jerome. Art. Ixvi.
64 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
his monks, foreseeing the results of such an out-
burst, entreated Epiphanius to return to John and
if possible to effect a reconciliation ; and the Bishop
of Salamis, apparently yielding to their prayers,
returned to Jerusalem. However, he only passed
through the town, arriving in the evening and leav-
ing during the night for the convent of Vieil-Ad,
which he had founded and formerly governed, and
which was in the diocese of Eleutheropolis. From
thence he wrote to John urging him to condemn
Origen, and to all the monasteries in Palestine
exhorting them to cease all relations with the
Bishop of Jerusalem should he not give satisfac-
tion on the subject of his faith.
Hostilities now broke out between John and
Epiphanius, and between those who, like Rufinus
and Melania, remained faithful to the Bishop of
Jerusalem, and the monks at Bethlehem who con-
sidered him an abettor of heresy. Jerome deemed
it sufficient to keep upon terms with Gelasius of
Caesarea, the Metropolitan of Palestine. Would it be
casting a slur on the memory of the illustrious hermit
to repeat Tillemont's severe words ? " He had cut
himself off from communion with his bishop, against
whom nothing had been proved but a mere sus-
picion founded on the accusation of St Epiphanius,
who, saint though he was, was not always judicious
in his words and acts. He afterwards behaved
towards St John Chrysostom in much the same
manner as he had to John of Jerusalem." 1 The
animosity of a bishop who was quick to take offence
1 Memoirs, etc., St Jerome. Art. Ixxv.
CONTENTIONS 65
and who had been deeply wounded, soon made itself
felt.
To procure for the monks of Bethlehem the re-
ligious ministrations which had been denied them by
John's priests, while a pious terror kept Jerome and
his friend Vincent from the altar, Epiphanius almost
forced Jerome's brother Paulinian, whose youth
was to the Bishop of Jerusalem an additional though
not the most important grievance, to be ordained.
Although the ordination had taken place at Vieil-
Ad, over which place John could not claim any
authority, he regarded it as an outrage, and re-
sorted to anathema as a means of revenge. Jerome,
in his eloquent and indignant defence, which is not
conspicuous for its respect, gives an account of the
harshness with which his friends were treated.
" Do we rend the Church," he asks the Bishop
of Jerusalem in defiant tones, " we whose convent
of Bethlehem is in communion with the Church ?
Is it not rather thou, whose faith may be sound but
is disguised through pride ? Or perhaps thy faith is
perverted ; then art thou the real disturber of the
peace. What 1 we rend the Church, we who, a few
month's ago on Whitsunday, when the sun was
obscured and the trembling world thought that the
Supreme Judge was about to appear amongst us
(an allusion to the strange phenomena which terri-
fied the East in 396), presented forty persons of all
ages and both sexes to your priest for baptism, in
spite of there being five priests in our monastery
who had the right to baptise, but who were un-
willing to do ought which might offend thee, for
E 9
66 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
fear of furnishing thee with an excuse for persisting
in a silence which is injurious to the true faith. Is
it not rather thou who rendest the Church ? Thou
who at Easter forbade the priest to baptise our
catechumens? We were obliged to send them to
Diospolis (Lydda), where Dionysius, bishop and
confessor, initiated them into Christianity. We
rend the Church, we who outside of our cells do
not claim in it the least place! Is it not rather
thou who agitatest her, thou who refusest admission
into her fold to anyone recognising as a priest
Paulinian, whom Epiphanius ordained ? Since that
moment we gaze from afar upon the Sepulchre of
our Lord, groaning at being banished from the holy
spot to which even heretics have access." " So it
is we," pursues Jerome, giving way to indignation,
" who rend the Church, and not thou who didst refuse
a shelter to the living and a sepulchre to the dead,
and who didst scheme for the exile of thy brethren.
Who excited against us, thereby endangering our
lives, the awful monster who threatened the entire
world ? Who has left until this very day the bones
and innocent ashes of the Saints to the mercy of
wind and rain ? It is by these gentle means that the
good shepherd bids us make peace, and reproaches us
for wishing to construct an independent government,
we who are united in communion and charity with
every bishop professing the true faith 1 ..." l
This long extract shows us the motives which
inspired Jerome's actions, the manner in which he
justified them in his own eyes, and the passionate
1 Contrajoannem HierosolomytanumadPammachium. Lib 42,43.
CONTENTIONS 67
turmoil of his soul. It also discloses the means to
which the Bishop of Jerusalem resorted to rid him-
self of his fiery opponent : he had procured an order
of banishment from Rufinus, the sinister Prasfect of
the Praetorium, and its execution was only arrested
by the tragic death of this powerful favourite. Jerome
continued to dwell in Bethlehem.
Attempts were made to bring about a reconcilia-
tion between the bishop and the hermit, but the
intervention of Archelaus, the governor of Palestine,
a man, according to Jerome, of great eloquence, and
eminently a Christian, proved fruitless. John seems
to have taken pains to discourage him by making
interminable delays out of the most trivial causes.
In point of fact he wished to refer to another judg-
ment, to that of the governor of the province, and
claimed that which was his due, the intervention of
a bishop. But he sought, not in Palestine nor in
the patriarchate of the East, but in Egypt, this
ecclesiastical arbitration which he claimed as his
right. " You who seek to follow the rules of the
Church," said Jerome, " and invoke the canons of
the Nicean Council, pray tell me what has the
Bishop of Alexandria to do with Palestine? If I
mistake not, the decree of Nicea was to the effect
that Caesarea should be the metropolis of Palestine,
and Antioch that of the entire East. Therefore it
was to the Bishop of Csesarea that you should have
taken this matter, or if you wished to seek further
a-field for a judge, you should have written to the
Bishop of Antioch." l
1 Contra Joanem Hierosolomytanum. Lib. 37.
68 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
The Bishop of Jerusalem had had his own reasons
for addressing himself to the Patriarch of Alexandria.
Theophilus, who was the head of that branch of the
Church which still gloried in Origen, in spite of the
dissension he had certainly created in it, had long
been an admirer of the great Alexandrian, and as
there was nothing at that time to predict that he
was soon to become the ardent promoter of a reac-
tionary movement, and that his enmity, inspired by
hatred, would persecute, and accuse of Origenism,
the venerable monks known as Long Brothers, and
their protector, St John Chrysostom, the Bishop of
Jerusalem counted upon finding in him a favourable
judge; and, in fact, his representative in Palestine,
the priest Isidorus, was won over to his cause
beforehand. All attempt at a reconciliation com-
pletely failed, and the two adversaries continued to
plead their respective causes before the Church.
While this internecine war was dragging its weary
course another had broken out, for Theodosius on
his death had left the Empire, which he had known
how to govern and defend, in weak hands ; Alaric
and his Goths devastated Thrace and Greece, and
an incursion of Huns invaded the East. Jerome
has described in many passages the anguish and
sorrow of those terrible days. " Last year " (that
is in 398), he wrote to Heliodorus, " the wolves, not
of Arabia (which are mentioned in Scripture), but
the wolves of the north which have overrun so many
provinces in so short a time, came forth from the
confines of the Caucasus and precipitated themselves
upon us. How many monasteries they sacked ! how
CONTENTIONS 69
many rivers ran with blood I Antioch and all the
towns situated on the Cydnus, Orontes,and Euphrates
were besieged, and captives driven forth like herds
of cattle. In their terror Arabia, Phoenicia, Palestine,
and Egypt imagined themselves already captive." l
In another letter he writes : " May the Lord Jesus
remove from the Roman Empire these devouring
beasts, which arrive unexpectedly, more swift than
rumour. Neither religion, nor dignity, nor age find
mercy at the hands of the barbarians ; they have no
pity upon the babe in its cradle." 2 Upon a report
which was spread abroad that the Huns would
march straight upon Jerusalem, attracted by the
treasures which the devotion of the Christian world
had amassed there, Jerome hastily procured some
vessels to transport his monks, and the nuns of
Paula's convents, to a place of safety. Encamped
upon the shores of the Mediterranean the fugitives
only awaited the first tidings of the invader's arrival
to embark. The sea was stormy, the winds tempestu-
ous, but as Jerome said, giving expression to the
mortal anguish which chastity or pity inspired in so
many souls, " I feared shipwreck less than I did the
barbarians, and had less horror of our loss at sea
than of the dishonour of our virgins." 8 The enemy,
however, never came, and Jerome and Paula returned
to Bethlehem, whither their former pious duties re-
called them. But the widow Fabiola, who had joined
them in Palestine and who had followed them to
the coast, refused to return to such an unprotected
1 Epist. lx. ad Hcliodorum. Epitaphium Nepotiani, 16.
8 Epist. Ixxvii. ad Oceauuiu, 8. 3 Epist. Ixxvii. 8.
70 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
wilderness, and returned in voluntary poverty to
Italy, where she had once lived in opulence.
In the funeral oration of the priest Nepotian, from
which we extract this tragic account, Jerome wrote:
" At that time there were dissensions in our midst,
and before the scandal of our domestic quarrels the
invasions of the barbarians sank into insignificance."
How often in the most troublous times, men under
the menace or the blow of calamity, have persisted
in private contentions or in scientific controversies,
which distract their attention from the sight of the
universal misery. Can one wonder at this? Is not
man generally most struck by what he hears or sees
in his immediate surroundings, and are not the inter-
ests and ideas to which he has devoted his life the
object of his principal and most constant preoccupa-
tion ? Does it seem strange or wrong that Jerome
should have continued to wage his ceaseless war
against Origenism and other errors, in the midst of
all the sorrow and horror of those disastrous days.
No doubt unworthy sentiments may sometimes have
mingled with the lofty motives which actuated him ;
he may have been mistaken in his judgments and
given vent to undue violence in his language ; but
what, however, remains an undeniable fact is, that
the Hermit of Bethlehem desired before everything
the triumph of Truth, which at all times deserves to
triumph, and should ever be defended. It was this
which occasioned the struggles which Jerome, and
later Augustine, Leo the Great, Gregory the Great,
and so many illustrious doctors of the Church main-
tained against heresy, amid evils so desperate that
CONTENTIONS 71
they seemed to herald the approaching end of the
world. These great men excelled in the saving and
the encouragement of stricken but shrinking souls,
but they did not forget that Eternal Truth is the
primary blessing and the supreme refuge of every
soul, and without allowing themselves to be dis-
couraged or turned from their purpose they con-
tinued to proclaim its imprescriptible rights.
Isidorus the priest, after a repulse which was but
too clearly foreseen, returned to Alexandria in 396.
Theophilus came himself to Jerusalem, but his
sympathies were entirely with John and his censure
for Jerome. " You advise me to observe the canons
of the Church," wrote Jerome ; " I thank you for this
warning, for 'Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth,
and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.' 1
Know this, however, nothing is nearer to my heart
than to keep the law of Christ, not to exceed the
limits imposed by the Fathers, and never to forget
the Roman Faith, which is eulogised by the Apostle,
and which it is the glory of the Alexandrian Church
to share." 2
The reconciliation, however, took place. The
Patriarch of Alexandria, who had hitherto defended
Origen, changed his opinions. " Did he realise in a
sudden illumination of the conscience," asks Thierry,
" that Origen, who was very excellent and useful in
the hands of the learned, presented a real danger to
the ignorant ? Did he see that the needs of the soul
are not the same for everyone, and that a far-seeing
priest should remove from the pathway of the simple
1 Hebrews xii. 6. 2 Epist. Ixiii. ad Theophilum, 2.
72 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
the stumbling block which the philosopher or the
theologian would avoid?" 1 It is possible that he
did, for Theophilus united a thorough knowledge of
men to his theological science, yet there are other
and less praiseworthy motives which account for
this change in his conduct. It was entirely to the
interest of the persecutor of the monks known as
Long Brothers, to the jealous and passionate adver-
sary of St John Chrysostom, henceforth to regard
the Origenism imputed to his enemies as a most per-
nicious heresy. From that moment Epiphanius and
Jerome, who were antagonistic to Origen's doctrines,
became dear to the patriarch and were treated by
him as partisans. John of Jerusalem, who was an
indifferent theologian and who, moreover, preferred
the authority of the Patriarch of Alexandria to the
nearer and more inconvenient supervision of the
Metropolitan of Caesarea, followed, or at least did
not thwart the former in his evolution, and removed
all the interdictions which had been laid upon the
monks at Bethlehem. Rufinus, fired by the example
of his bishop, made some advances towards Jerome,
and they were both reconciled in the Church of the
Resurrection at Jerusalem, where together they par-
took of the Holy Sacrament. This was in 397.
Jerome's reconciliation with John was sincere.
"I think," said Tillemont, "that Jerome will not be
found to have said anything, after this animated
quarrel was over, that could have injured the
bishop's reputation." 2 John, however, at the time
1 St Jerome. Book viii.
3 Memoirs, etc., St Jerome. Art. Ixxxi.
CONTENTIONS 73
of the Pelagian controversy, displayed the same faults
of character which he had shown in the Origenist
controversies, and through a culpable inaction which
strangely resembled complicity, identified himself
with the persecutors of the hermit. A fierce and
inexorable war broke out afresh between Jerome
and Rufinus, but before retailing its painful incidents
let us draw attention to the aggression to which
Jerome was subjected by Vigilantius (a Spaniard in
whom Paulinian had been deceived when he com-
mended him to Jerome), and also of Jerome's answer
to it. Vigilantius accused Jerome of Origenism, alleg-
ing the extracts which the hermit had taken from
the works of the great Alexandrian. Further, and
it is for this that this forerunner of the heretical
leaders of the sixteenth century is best known and
that he most deserved Jerome's condemnations,
Vigilantius rejected the invocation of the Saints,
the cult of relics, the prayers for the dead, the
practice of fasting, and the celibacy of priests and
monks. Jerome had no difficulty in refuting the
accusation of Origenism, but he was better employed
than in his own defence. With a logical eloquence
and force which did not shrink from personalities,
he also refuted the objections of Vigilantius, and
put in their proper light the sacred and historical
character of the dogmas and usages, against which
the audacious innovator was rebelling.
Heliodorus, a friend of Jerome's and for some
time a companion in his travels, had an unusually
gifted nephew called Nepotianus. At the beginning
of his career he had been engaged in the Emperor's
74 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
service, and, having set the same example to the
court of Theodosius which in after years Francis
Borgia and Louis of Gonzaga were to give to the
courts of Charles V. and Philip II., he renounced a
world which had never given him any cause for dis-
illusionment and consecrated himself to the ministry
of the altar. Jerome on this occasion wrote him a
famous letter in which he enumerated the austere
duties of the sacerdotal life. Amongst many other
lessons to be found in it is the following, which
applies to all preachers, and which Fenelon has in-
serted in his third " Dialogue upon Eloquence " :
"When teaching in the church do not excite the
applause but rather the lamentations of the people ;
let the tears of your auditors be your commendation.
The sermons of a priest should overflow with Holy
Scripture. Be not an orator, but a sincere expounder
of the mysteries of your God." l This letter was
written in 394 ; a few years later, in 396, this young
man, whom Heliodorus had vainly counted on as a
successor to his Episcopal See of Attino, was smitten
by death ; and Jerome in an eloquent letter, while
lamenting the friend he was losing, strove to console
the friend who still remained. In it he depicted the
serene death of the youthful priest, and in a delicate
and touching passage reminded him that the last
thoughts of the dying man had been turned towards
him. " His face wore a look of joy; amid the tearful
onlookers he alone smiled . . . you would have
thought, not that he was dying, but that he was
about to start for a long journey ; not that he was
1 Epist. lii. ad Nepotianum, 8.
CONTENTIONS 75
leaving his friends, but that he was going to find
others. . . . Who would believe that at this supreme
moment he should have remembered our friendship,
and that his soul should have been sensible to the
sweetness of our mutual affection, even in the throes
of death ? Having taken his uncle's hand, he said :
Send this vestment which I wore in Christ's service
to my beloved father in years, my brother by the
union of priesthood, and all the affection due to your
nephew expend on him whom, with me, you already
love." l This funeral oration, for such it really is,
which is a precursor of many later masterpieces of
Christian eloquence, contains, as we have already
said, a vivid picture of the evils which were then
devastating the world, and closes with a reference
to the vanity and frailty of things human. " Let us
rouse ourselves. Do you know the instant in which
you passed from childhood to youth, from youth to
man's estate, and finally to old age? Each day
brings death and change to us, and yet we believe
ourselves to be immortal. Even what I am dictating,
what is being written, and what I shall re-read, is so
much cut off from my life. We write and write
again ; our letters cross the seas, the vessels plough
through the waves, and each wave carries with it an
instant of our life. . . ." The Christian, the priest,
however, does not dwell long upon these melancholy
thoughts, but turns his gaze to higher things. " Our
only blessing," Jerome continues, "is our union with
Christ and our union with one another in the charity
of Christ. . . . Charity is undying; it lives eternally in
1 Epist. Ix. ad Heliodorum. Epitaphium Nepotiani, 13.
76 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
the hearts of men ; through it Nepotianus, although
departed, is still with us, and, across the space which
divides us, still clasps our hands in his." l
We cannot linger over these touching pages for
we must return to the Origenist quarrel, which again
sprang into life and distracted Jerome from his
work, I might almost say from his sorrow. Ruflnus
started for Rome, and on arriving in the Eternal
City he met a man called Macarus, a man of the
world "distinguished," he says, "by his faith, his
nobility, and his life," 2 who was occupied at the
time in defending in a special treatise, the dogma of
the divine providence against the fatalistic error and
misleading fancies of astrology. The difficulties of
such an abstruse subject frequently brought him to
a standstill, but firmly believing in a dream, he
expected someone who would soon give him its
solution. He believed Rufinus to be the man his
dream predicted, for could not Rufinus, who had
just returned from Palestine, who was familiar with
Christian literature in the East, and who knew
Origen, whose fame had penetrated into the Latin
world so thoroughly, could not he initiate Macarus,
probably an ignorant, or at least indifferent scholar
of Greek, into the works of the celebrated Alex-
andrian, and thus allow him to draw from his vast
wells of thought. Rufinus also believed that he
was the man, and translated for his friend first the
Apology of Origen by the holy martyr Pamphilus,
and afterwards the Periarchon (the book of Funda-
mental Doctrines).
1 EpisL Ix. 19. 2 Rufini Apologia. Lib. i. u.
CONTENTIONS 77
This last undertaking entailed considerable risk,
for of all Origen's work none had awakened so much
distrust or called forth the censure of orthodoxy
more than the Periarchon. Ruflnus was fully aware
of this, and he owns that he only presented an
expurgated copy to the Latins, in which extracts
from other works of Origen explained and completed
the obscure passages. " One cannot deny," says
Mgr. Freppel, " that Rufinus exceeded his privileges
of translator. He remodelled the original text from
an entirely personal point of view, and even were it
admitted, as in fact we do admit, that he has rightly
grasped Origen's thoughts upon the question of the
Trinity, he should not have presumed to recast any
part whatsoever of the work." 1 In the preface to
his translation Rufinus, to justify his temerity, cited
the example given by St Jerome, for although he
does not actually name him, his manner of praising
him, and the mention of the works which the Hermit
of Bethlehem had already translated, sufficiently
indicate whom he meant. Rufinus declared that he
was following in the footsteps of one greater than
himself. If Jerome sometimes corrected the Book
of Fundamental Doctrines, was he not the first to
suppress or modify anything in his version of the
Homilies of Origen at which the austere orthodoxy
of the Latins might take exception ? Through a
bold stroke Rufinus gained two points, for on one
hand he reinstated Origen, and the Alexandrian,
who until then had been under suspicion, returned
to Rome, if not victorious at least acquitted; and
1 Origen. I4th lesson.
78
on the other, he associated with his cause and with
the cause of Origen the man who formerly in Pales-
tine had, with Epiphanius and Theophilus, been his
most bitter adversary. In Jerome's eyes, Origen-
ism was at that time the Church's greatest peril.
He therefore rejected these compromising eulogies
and this detrimental solidarity. Besides, he also
thought that it was better to resolutely broach the
most unorthodox of the great Alexandrian's works
and expose its audacities and errors, than to give
the misled Romans a modified and therefore a de-
ceptive version of the Periarchon. He accordingly
undertook a complete translation of this work, which,
however, is no longer extant. In his correspondence
Jerome gives an explanation of his past conduct, of the
w r orks in which he had exalted Origen, and the admira-
tion he had evinced for him. The following passage
is extracted from a letter written to Oceanus, and to
Paula's son-in-law Pammachius. It atones for the
injury which Jerome's translation of the malicious
pamphlet of Theophilus did to the great man's
memory, and it will please those of our own time
who, without disputing the errors by which the bold
and subtle Alexandrian was led astray, still honour
him for his virtues and labours. " If you wish to
praise Origen," says Jerome, " praise him as I do.
He was great even from childhood, and the true son
of a martyr ; he governed the Christian school in
Alexandria, where he had succeeded the learned priest
Clement; he abhorred licence and trampled upon
avarice; he knew the Scriptures by heart, and his
days and nights were spent in the study of Holy
CONTENTIONS 79
Writ. . . . What one of us could read all that he
has written ? Who could fail to admire his intense
love for the Scriptures ? And if some Judas, in bitter
zeal, should allege his errors, we will reply boldly :
' Homer becomes at times lethargic. Is it not ex-
cusable in a long poem ? Let us not copy the errors
of one whose virtues we are unable to imitate.' " l
In Rome, the translation of Rufinus had greatly
excited all who had Jerome's reputation and the
cause of orthodoxy at heart. Marcella, the ascetic's
learned friend, was among the first to perceive the
danger; at first she kept silence through modesty,
but as she saw it growing she warned him of it.
Rufinus, afraid of the storm which seemed to be
gathering, left Rome, and provided by Pope Siricius
with credentials, returned to Aquileia. It was under
Anastasius, the successor of Siricius, that Origenism
received its death blows in the East and in the West.
Theophilus prosecuted it in his patriarchate of
Alexandria with a zeal tinged with a fierce love of
power and an intolerance of all contradiction. He
even pretended to discover it among the monks of
Nitria, guilty of having defended the good cause, and
in John Chrysostom their protector. Jerome joined
in this campaign by translating the synodical letters
of Theophilus, and possibly even an odious pamphlet
whose authorship Facundus of Hermione, an author
of the sixth century, attributes to the Patriarch.
" It is more," wrote Tillemont, " than for his honour
we could wish to believe." 2 Jerome, however, joined
1 Epist. Ixxxiv., Pammachio et Oceano, 8.
2 Memoirs, etc., St Jerome. Art. xcviii.
80 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
in this contention with unquestionable sincerity, for
Theophilus, whom he only saw from afar, seemed to
him an intrepid champion of the faith. In 400, a
Roman Council, the Acts of which have been lost,
condemned the Errors of Origen.
The Confession of Faith which Rufinus sent to
Pope Anastasius was completely orthodox, and there
is nothing to prove that the censure of Anastasius
was directed against him any more than against all
those who had propagated erroneous or dangerous
books. The friendship of venerable personages like
St Paulinus of Nola, St Chromatius of Aquileia, and
St Gaudentius of Brescia, which Rufinus always
retained, testify to the purity of his faith. Rufinus
was over bold, he let loose a whirlwind in which
his reputation nearly perished, but he was never
heretical.
Did his charity, as well as his faith, emerge intact
from these painful conflicts ? Anyone who has read
his Apology, his " Invectives against Jerome," for such
is the name which has clung to this work, can only
answer in the negative. "He devoted three years
to this work," says Amde Thierry, "which ap-
peared fragment by fragment ; he divided it into two
books to which he later added a supplement. He
had a double aim, first to exonerate himself from
the crime of heresy by casting upon Jerome the
accusation directed towards himself, and then to
dishonour Jerome and to throw odium on his name
by personal imputations, lamenting the while being
forced to such measures." 1 Indeed no pamphlet
1 St Jerome. Lib. iv.
CONTENTIONS 81
has ever been composed with more cunning hatred,
nor has ever struck the adversary more surely. It
was the man whom Rufinus aimed at in the writer.
We will not linger over the Origenism of which
Jerome was accused, greatly on the strength of
extracts from his own writings. Why should not
Jerome have shared the privilege common to all
authors of explaining, and if necessary of retracting,
his former writings ? He certainly cannot be accused
of having been actuated by personal interest; the
mistake which he made, if indeed it was a mistake,
was in contradicting himself. The venom of Rufinus
sought other outlets. According to him, Jerome was
the enemy of mankind ; a traducer of the faithful,
whose customs he had calumniated in his book upon
Virginity, at the risk of justifying and even magnify-
ing the calumnies of the pagans ; a traducer of the
works of Ambrose, the great bishop ; a traducer of
Rome, the capital of the Christian world ; and a
traducer of all authors, either Greek or Latin, who
had preceded him. One grievance which Rufinus
put forward with malignant insistence, was the
important part the pagan authors played in Jerome's
works and in his thoughts. In vain had Jerome
after a famous vision sworn never to reopen any
secular book. " Peruse his writings and see if there
is a single page which does not point to his having
again become a Ciceronian, and in which he does
not speak of ' Our Cicero,' ' Our Homer,' ' Our
Virgil ' ; he even boasts of having read the works
of Pythagoras, which according to the erudite are
no longer in existence. In almost all his works
F9
82 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
quotations from secular authors are far more
numerous and lengthy than those from the Prophets
and Apostles. Even when writing to women or
maidens, who in our holy books seek only subjects
for edification, he intersperses his letters with
quotations from Horace, Cicero or Virgil." 1
He was guilty of a still graver offence. " In the
monastery at Bethlehem Jerome performed the
office of grammarian, and he expounded Virgil, the
humourists, cynics, and historians, to children who
had been confided to him to be inspired with the
fear of God." 2 The hermit, enamoured as he was
of pagan law, had recourse to the erudition of the
Hebrew doctors to assist him in his biblical works ;
he preferred these masters to any others because
" they alone preserved the truth of the Scriptures."
Ruflnus was certainly not wanting in learning, yet
partly through his violent antipathy to Jerome, partly
through mental cowardice, this strange champion of
Origen took the side of routine and ignorance against
the ascetic. The smallest change introduced by
Jerome into the accepted translations of the sacred
works, for example the substitution of one word for
another, roused the indignation of Rufinus. " Now
that the world is waxing old and all things are draw-
ing near their end," he exclaimed, " let us write upon
the tombs of the Ancients " (the touchingly symbolic
picture of Jonas asleep was frequently reproduced
upon these tombs), "let us write so as to inform
those who have not read it in their Bibles that Jonas
reposed in the shade of an ivy, and not in the shade
1 Apol. Lib. sec. 7. 2 Ibid., 8.
CONTENTIONS 83
of a gourd." l He was sometimes very crafty in his
criticisms, for example, when he reproached Jerome
with the doubts which it was well known that he
entertained of the canonicity of several portions of
the Book of Daniel. In the next breath, however,
placing the legends which vainly aspire to be called
traditions upon the same footing as the dogmatic
traditions of the Church, Rufinus condemned as a
crime Jerome's rejection of the fable of the seventy-
two old men who, detained by order of Ptolemy
Philadelphus, King of Egypt, each in a separate cell,
came forth with an identical version of the Bible. 2
On more than one occasion and under various forms
he put this question, with which men have often
tried to discourage the apostles of the most
legitimate movements: "who of all the great men,
your predecessors, dare embark upon the work which
you have undertaken ? " 8
The pamphlet of Rufinus which was brought to
Jerome by his brother Paulinian, demanded an
answer. It was surely the hermit's right, his duty
even, to refute accusations which defamed both his
character and his works. He accordingly answered
his adversary's " Invectives " by an " Apology," and
Thierry tells us that Jerome was never more inspired
than in these pages, which contain theological dis-
cussions, self-justification, denouncement of the
enemy, lamentations, and finally, anger, when his
indignation overcame him. The trenchancy of his
style, the flow of language, the force of argument,
all were indeed marvellous. The " Apology "
1 Apol. Lib. sec. 35. 2 Ibid., 33. 8 Apol. Lib. ii. 32.
84 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
of Rufinus doubtless bears the stamp of great talent,
but Jerome's that of genius. We must acknow-
ledge that Jerome's wrath, which was justifiable
when restrained within due limits, vented itself in
regrettable personalities.
Several years later, in a letter to Rusticus de-
scribing the happiness of a monastic life, and full
of the most affectingly tender passages, Jerome
sketched a picture worthy of the humourist and the
satirist, Plautus and Juvenal, whose works he was
reproached for reading, but which he probably knew
by heart. He dubbed this picture " Grunnius," and
it has never been denied that it was Rufinus he
strove to portray. At the time of this letter, which
dates from 408, the aged athlete was not yet dis-
abled, and a passage of his commentary upon
Ezekiel, written after the death of Rufinus, seems
to prove that he never became so. It is true that
other saints have left a reputation of greater gentle-
ness and clemency than did the Hermit of Bethlehem.
Let us recall the words of Pope Sixtus V. who, pass-
ing one day before a picture representing Jerome in
the act of striking his breast with a stone, cried :
" You do well to hold that pebble in your hand, for
without it the Church would never have canonised
you."
Rufinus, driven from Aquileia by the invasion of
the Goths, retired to Sicily, where he pursued his
labours of history and translation until his death
there in 410.
CHAPTER VI
JOYS AND SORROWS JEROME AS MENTOR
\ A 7E have at last come to the end of the quarrel
which, after agitating the life of the hermit,
has left a painful impression even upon posterity.
St Jerome's controversy with St Augustine, which
will shortly be mentioned, was never as impassioned
as his dispute with Rufinus, and ended in the inter-
change of mutual proofs of esteem, sympathy and
respect between the theologian of Hippo and the
aged writer.
The close of the fourth century was a period of
mourning for Jerome. Paula's second daughter,
Paulina, died in 397, but it was not until two years
later that Jerome wrote to Pammachius, her be-
reaved husband, a letter which was both a letter of
condolence and a funeral oration. He called himself
a tardy consoler (serus consolator), without, however,
giving any explanation for his delay. In this letter,
which ends with the touching passage quoted below,
he paid tribute not only to the departed Christian,
but also to Paula, Eustochium and Pammachius.
..." In concluding," he said, " I perceive that
Blesilla is missing from your group and from my
portrayal of it. 1 have almost forgotten to mention
her who has gone before you to her God. From
85
86 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
five you are reduced to three, for two have been
ravished by death. Blesilla and her sister Paulina
sleep the sleep of peace, and you who survive them,
standing between their graves, will soar to Christ on
a lighter wing." l
The date of a letter which Jerome wrote to
Leta, the wife of Paula's son, Toxotius, may be
placed somewhere between 398 and 400. Leta,
who had more than once been disappointed in
her hopes of maternity, at last gave birth to a
daughter, whose existence she believed due to the
intercession of a martyr, and whom even before her
birth she had dedicated to a religious life. The
child was called Paula, after its grandmother. In
one respect the family into which Paula was born
strongly resembled many of the present day. Leta
had sprung, as Jerome reminded her when he wrote
"tu es nata de impari tnatrimonio," from a mixed
union, for although the daughter of a Christian, the
daughter-in-law of a saint, and the wife of Toxotius,
whom she had converted to Christianity, her father,
Albinus, was a pagan pontiff. To-day, with very
rare exceptions, pagans and Christians do not inter-
marry, but in many families does not the more or
less conscious rationalism, the theoretical or merely
practical unbelief of the husband, or of the master
spirit, remind us of the paganism of Albinus? Jerome
describes in touching terms how the polytheist was
influenced by the faith of those who surrounded
him. " It seems incredible that a grandchild of the
pontiff Albinus should have owed its existence to a
1 Epist. Ixvi. ad Pammachium, 15.
JOYS AND SORROWS 87
vow of its mother's, that it should lisp the Alleluia
of the Christ in the presence of its delighted grand-
father, and that the aged man should clasp one of
God's virgins in his arms. Let us take courage ; a
pious and faithful household has converted its only
infidel member, and Albinus, surrounded by a flock
of Christian children and grandchildren, has already
become a candidate for baptism." l
The child was still in its cradle when Leta and
her friend Marcella wrote to Jerome asking him for
some suggestions for its education. In certain ways
the letter which Jerome sent in answer may be con-
sidered a treatise upon the " education of girls,"
always taking into consideration that it was origin-
ally written for a Roman patrician maiden of the
fifth century, a child who was dedicated to a religi-
ous life by the most earnest vows. Jerome did not
wish to deprive Paula of the affection of her family.
" May her grandfather," he said, " hold her in his
arms, may she know her father by his smile, may
she be gentle to all so that her relations may
rejoice at having been the stem of such a rose." 2
Yet at the same time he early subjected her to
a training, and sketched for her a plan of study,
without, however, causing her to neglect the more
modest tasks inherent upon her sex, which many
women of the present day, even those to whom Mgr.
Dupanloup dedicated his famous pamphlet, " Studi-
ous and learned women," would consider most severe.
In this letter the austere tutor did not even mention
the pagan authors which Rufinus accused him of
1 Epist. cvii, ad Laetam, I. a Ibid., 4.
88 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
continually quoting in his letters to women and
young girls ; but as Father Charles Daniel observed,
" it was no longer a question of classical studies." l
The only works which the child was to be
allowed to study when she should be of an age to
understand them, were sacred ones and the books of
the authorised expounders of tradition. " Let her first
study the Psalms and then model her life from the
proverbs of Solomon. Let the books of Ecclesiastes
teach her to despise the world, and let her seek
lessons of patience and fortitude in Job. She
should then pass on to the gospel which she should
ever keep open before her, and her heart should be
impregnated with the words of the Acts of the
Apostles and the Epistles." Jerome then indicated
the order in which Paula was to read the other por-
tions of the scripture, as a prudent censor omitting
the Apocrypha with its false titles and unorthodox
doctrine, and as a careful theologian showing the
young Christian maiden from which ecclesiastical
authors she could draw the most irreproachable
doctrine. The authors whom he mentioned were
those whom unconsciously he emulated or rivalled.
" She should always keep the treatises of Cyprian near
at hand. She may safely peruse the letters of Athan-
asius and the books of Hilary. Give her full access
to the works of these great geniuses, for her faith and
her piety cannot be injured by such reading." 2
The recluse was troubled by one misgiving : was
it possible for Leta, who no doubt led a pious life,
1 Classical Studies in Christian Circles, Chapter III.
Epist. cvii. ad Laetam, 12.
JOYS AND SORROWS 89
yet lived in Rome amid worldly surroundings, to
bring up her daughter according to such a system of
education ? The child should be removed from the
perils of Rome. " Send her," he wrote, " to her grand-
mother and her aunt, place this rare pearl in Mary's
cave in the manger where the infant Jesus lay. Nur-
ture her in the convent amid choirs of virgins . . .
that she may be ignorant of the world and live the
life of an angel. . . . Confide this child, whose very
wails are prayers for thee, to Eustochium ; confide
Paula to her so that she may imitate and inherit her
saintliness. Let her see, and love, and admire from
her earliest childhood the woman whose speech, de-
portment and bearing are lessons in virtue. Let
her be rocked in the arms of her grandmother, who
will do for her all that she did for her own child, and
who, through long experience, has learnt the art of
bringing up, instructing and guarding virgins." The
instincts of paternal love and solicitude latent in the
soul of the aged saint seemed to have been awakened ;
he asked to be allowed some share, no matter how
humble, in the child's education. " If you send me
Paula," he said, " I promise to become her tutor and
her nurse. I will carry her upon my shoulders, and,
old man that I am, hold lisping intercourse with her,
prouder of my occupation than ever Aristotle was ol
his. For I shall be forming the character, not of a
King of Macedonia destined to perish by poison at
Babylon, but of a handmaid and a bride of Christ,
an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven." a
Jerome's wish was not immediately granted. There
1 Epist. cvii. 13.
90 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
came a day, however, when the youthful Paula joined
her aunt, whom she survived, at the Convent of
Bethlehem, where she too was submitted to the
abominable persecutions of the Pelagians. After
the death of Eustochium, Jerome commended Paula
to Alypius and to Augustine in a letter written in
419, possibly the last he ever wrote. 1
Long before this, in 404, the elder Paula, of
glorious memory, had entered upon her heavenly
reward. The end, however, for which she yearned,
had only been reached after terrible sorrows. She
had been deeply afflicted by the death of her daughter
Rufina, who from the Ostian shores had tearfully en-
treated her to defer her departure at least until after
her marriage. 2 Although the intrepid Christian had
had the courage to place seas and deserts between
herself and those she loved, yet she never knew
either indifference or forget. Towards the end of
403 a fever forced Paula to take to her bed. Eus-
tochium watched at her side an indefatigable nurse,
who only left her mother while she slept, to visit
our Saviour's manger. Jerome also stayed by the
dying woman, experiencing a bitter joy at contem-
plating such a peaceful end, and in receiving her
last utterances, which were still praises of her God.
John, the Bishop of Jerusalem, the bishops of the
neighbouring towns, and countless priests and
deacons also assisted at Paula's death-bed, and
celebrated magnificent obsequies for her in the
cave of the Nativity.
1 Epist. cxliii. ad Alypium et Augustinum.
2 Ep. cviii. Epitaphium Paulae, 6.
JOYS AND SORROWS 91
Paula died upon the 26th of January 404, at the
age of fifty-seven, having spent eighteen years of
her life at Bethlehem. Jerome tells us that no
sound of weeping was heard at her funeral, but
that he, who began by restraining his grief, was
overcome by it. " The death of the saintly and
venerable Paula," he wrote Theophilus a few
months later, " has so completely prostrated me
that until to-day I have translated nothing from
the holy books. Thou knowest how at one blow
I lost my only comfort. . . ." l In the preface
to his translation of the monastic rules of St
Pachomius he makes a similar confession : The
prostration of grief had long kept him silent, and
if he had finally broken through this torpor and
returned to his customary tasks, beginning with
the translation of some works of the Abbots of
Tabenne, it was in the hope that it would meet
with the approval of the saintly soul who had always
taken such a lively interest in monasteries. 2
Eustochium begged Jerome to write her mother's
funeral oration, and Jerome, who had already eulo-
gised Blesilla, Paulina and Leah, and celebrated the
priestly virtues of Nepotian, could hardly refuse her
request. The more so that he had glorified Fabiola,
the Christian descendant of the Fabii and formerly
his guest in Palestine, in the most stirring accents.
Fabiola, who had been one of the members of the
pious gatherings on the Aventine, had died in 401,
after expiating the weakness and ignorance which
1 Epist. xcix. ad Theophilum, 2.
9 Tillemont Memoires, etc. St Jerome, Art. cvi.
92 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
had permitted her to contract a second marriage
during the lifetime of her unworthy husband, by
the most heroic penances and by lavish charity.
It was therefore incumbent upon the sincere and
eloquent panegyrist of these saintly souls, to over-
come his grief and extol the benefactress and
peerless friend whose death seemed to have almost
crushed him.
Even when he had overcome his hesitation, his
first effort was fruitless. Who, indeed, when trying
to narrate the life of one dear and departed, has not
experienced the same anguish, has not felt conscious
of his own impotence ? The soul oppressed by grief
is no longer master of itself; it has no command over
its thoughts and memories ; words fail it, or are at
best but weak and halting. " Whenever I took up my
stylus," wrote Jerome, "it slipped upon the wax of my
tablets, my fingers became rigid, and the stylus fell
from my hand; my brain seemed powerless." 1 Jerome
finally decided to dictate, and in two vigils he com-
posed the desired eulogy, which is a letter and a
narrative but not a homily. We must not expect to
find it a funeral oration such as Bossuet conceived,
and of which he realised the sublime ideal, an
oration centring all the events of a lifetime around
one or two principal ideas, valuable examples of
which have in modern times been given us by the
Cardinal Pius. " Jerome," says Thierry, " followed
Paula through all the phases of her life, her
marriage, widowhood, consecration to the religious
life, her domestic sorrows, and the persecution of
1 Epist. cviii., 32.
JOYS AND SORROWS 93
those dear to her. He gives an account of her
departure from Rome, their journey together in the
Holy Land, their visit to the wilderness of Nitria,
and their life at Bethlehem. It was the story of
the twenty years they had passed in close proximity
that he delighted to set before his absent friend.
He omitted nothing, and in his narrative Paula
seems alive once more ; she speaks and walks,
we hear the austere lessons which she addressed
to her nuns, her controversies with heretical monks,
even the gentle sallies of a mind incapable of bitter-
ness. Her grief at the loss of her children, her
wasting illness, and her last struggles with death,
are all recorded and described with tearful emotion.
Sacred memories of a friend, destined to awaken
and to mingle with those of a daughter!" 1 If we
do not make any extracts from the pathetic passages
in which this funeral oration abounds, we must at
least quote its peroration. ' I call the Lord to
witness," said Jerome, " that Paula has not only
left her daughter completely destitute, but she has
left her many debts, and what is even worse, a
multitude of brothers and sisters, whom it is next
to impossible to feed, and whom it would be wicked
to turn away. Was there ever such an example of
virtue ? A woman of the highest breeding, and
formerly extremely wealthy, so impoverished by her
own faith and charity that she almost reduced her-
self to starvation. . . . Fear not, Eustochium, for
the Lord is thine inheritance, and in this greatest
inheritance of all, thy share is large. Now that thy
1 St Jerome, Book x.
94 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
mother has been crowned by a long martyrdom thy
cup of joy is full. It is not the shedding of blood
which alone constitutes martyrdom; the faithful
bondage of a soul wholly consecrated to God is a
daily martyrdom, the crown for which is woven of
lilies, while the crown of the bleeding martyr is
woven of roses and violets. ... To those who have
conquered, be it in peace, be it in war, the same
reward is given."
" Like Abraham of old, thy mother heard a voice,
saying, ' Get thee out of thy country and from thy
kindred and from thy father's house unto a land
that I will show thee.' She heard the command
which Jeremiah gave in the name of God, ' Flee
out of the midst of Babylon and deliver every man
his soul,' and faithful until the end, she never
returned to Chaldea, never yearned for the tainted
pleasures of Egypt, but accompanied by a choir
of virgins, she went to inhabit the birthplace of
her Lord, and from her lowly home in Bethlehem,
raising her voice to heaven, she cried to God as
did Ruth to Naomi, 'Thy people are my people,
and thy God shall be my God.' . . . Farewell,
oh Paula, may thy prayers support the declining
years of him who reveres you. Thy faith and thy
good works have gained thee access to Christ,
once admitted to His presence thy prayers will
be more surely heard." 1
In the passage we have just quoted, Jerome made
a slight allusion to the monks and the nuns which
Paula's death had left so destitute. Providence,
1 Epist. cviii. Epitaphium Paulae, 30, 31, 32.
JOYS AND SORROWS 95
however, continued to watch over the convents at
Bethlehem. We already know how Jerome sold
the last remnants of his patrimony in order to
support his monks. And Eustochium, brave and
generous as her mother had been, was soon joined
by Paula, who, obedient to Jerome's bidding and
to the supreme wish of her grandmother, brought
ample funds to the nuns whose life she had come
to share.
CHAPTER VII
CONTROVERSY WITH ST AUGUSTINE
"~pHE controversy which a passage of St Paul's
Epistle to the Galatians, differently interpreted
by Jerome and Augustine, excited between the aged
expounder of the Scriptures, who compared himself
to Entellus in the Aineid, and the priest who had
already become famous, and who later shed such
unparalleled glory upon the hitherto obscure see of
Hippo, took place between the years 395 and 405.
A few historical details may help to explain the
object of the controversy.
The Gospel had first been proclaimed to the Jews,
just as the Messiah had first been promised to them.
Their severe monotheism, the traditions and hopes
which they held in trust, everything in the designs of
God had prepared them to receive the new revela-
tion, for, according to St Paul, the law of Moses was
to be their guide to the Gospel. We know what re-
sistance the unintelligent and intractable pride of
many of the Jews opposed to the divine gift, and
even among those who accepted Christianity there
were many who, failing to understand its supremely
new and liberating character, imposed the observance
of the Mosaic rites upon the Gentiles as a necessary
condition of their salvation. The question had been
decided at the Council of Jerusalem, where, under
96
CONTROVERSY WITH AUGUSTINE 97
the divine guidance, Peter the leader of the Twelve,
and James the bishop of what were termed the
Christians of the Circumcision, had agreed to eman-
cipate the converted Pagans from the prescriptions
of the law. All the Jewish Christians, however, did
not allow themselves to be convinced. In the eyes
of these staunch upholders of rites henceforward
rendered useless, the only true Christians were
those who conformed themselves to all the Mosaic
observances, and who became in the Church what
the " proselytes of the Temple " had been in the
Synagogue ; the others were the " proselytes of the
Gate," with whom all the relations of life, all familiar
intercourse were forbidden. At one moment, Peter
had seemed to favour these unjustifiable claims. In
the following fluent and dramatic language St Paul
has given us an account of what has been called the
" Conflict of Antioch." " But when Peter was come
to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because
he was to be blamed. For before certain came
from James, he did eat with the Gentiles: but when
they were come, he withdrew and separated himself,
fearing them which were of the circumcision. And
the other Jews dissembled likewise with him ; inso-
much that Barnabas also was carried away with
their dissimulation. But when I saw that they
walked not uprightly according to the truth of the
gospel, I said unto Peter before them all, If thou,
being a Jew, livest after the manner of the Gentiles,
and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the
Gentiles to live as do the Jews ? " 1
1 Galatians ii., 11-14.
Q9
98 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
Let it first be clearly understood, that in whatever
manner the passage which so agitated St Jerome
and St Augustine may be interpreted, the doctrine
of the infallibility of St Peter and the apostles,
infallibility which, personal to these, has been per-
petuated in the successors of St Peter was not
in question. The apostles' contention touched only
upon a question of conduct.
Was this contention, however, real, or was it not
rather a preconcerted scene between Paul and Peter
who were both anxious to repress, by some startling
example, the intolerable pretensions of the Judaisers ?
This was Jerome's opinion. " Paul," he wrote, " see-
ing the grace of the Gospel thus imperilled, as an ex-
perienced warrior had recourse to a new manoeuvre ;
he wished to oppose another line of action to that
by which Peter hoped to save the Jews, and to with-
stand the apostle of circumcision to his face. He
did not really blame Peter's intention, and if he
reproved him and publicly resisted him, it was in
the interest of the Christians of Gentile extraction.
Should it be maintained that Paul really resisted
Peter, and that to uphold the truth of the Gospel
he made his senior the object of a bold and public
affront, it should no longer be said that Paul became
a Jew in order to convert the Jews, and one would
have to believe him guilty of deception when he
shaved his hair at Cenchrea and made his offering
at Jerusalem with a shorn head, 1 when he circum-
cised Timothy, 2 and when he walked barefooted, all
of which were clearly a part of the Jewish cere-
1 Acts xviii, 2 Acts xvj.
CONTROVERSY WITH AUGUSTINE 99
monies. If Paul who had been sent to the Gentiles
believed he had a right to say, ' Give no offence
either to the Jews or to the church of God. . . .' ;
if, fearing to scandalise the Jews, he did certain
things which were contrary to the liberty of the
Gospel, by what right, or on what ground, dared he
reprove Peter, the apostle of the Gentiles, for what
he himself might be accused of having done ? But
as we have already said, Paul publicly opposed
Peter and the others, that is, the Judaising party,
so that the stratagem which, to the disadvantage
of the Christians of Gentile extraction, imposed
legal observances, might be corrected by a feigned
rebuke. . . ." 2 In support of this theory Jerome
alleged the authority of Origen, Didymus, Appol-
linaris, who was still a Catholic, Eusebius of Emesa,
Theodorus of Heraclea, 3 and later that of John
Chrysostom, whom the plots and violent measures
of his friend Theophilus had lately caused to be
deposed and banished. 4
Augustine took exception to an interpretation
which seemed to him to weaken the testimony of
St Paul and the veracity of the Scriptures, and in
a letter which the African priest Profuturus was
intrusted to deliver to Jerome, he expressed himself
upon the subject with half sorrowful severity (" dedit
. . . litteras . . . familiares illas quidem, salibus
tamen acrioris correctionis aspersas," said Baronius).
1 1 Cor. x. 32.
* Comment, in Epistolam ad Galatas. Lib. i, cap. n.
* Comment, in Epistolam ad Galatas. Prologue.
* Epist. cxii. Hieronymi ad Augustinum, 6.
100 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
" I have read," Augustine wrote Jerome, " a com-
mentary upon the Epistles of St Paul which is
ascribed to you, and I came across the passage in
the Epistle to the Galatians, where the Apostle
Peter is reproved for the deception into which he
had been drawn. I confess with no small sorrow
that in it you, even you, or the author of this writing
whosoever he may be, have defended the cause of
untruth. I consider it a fatal error to believe it
possible to find anything in the Scriptures which is
untrue, in other words, to believe that the men to
whom we are indebted for the sacred works could
have inserted therein any falsehood. Once admit
any officious untruth in the Holy books, then, in
accordance to this pernicious principle, in order to
escape from a moral which imposes too much re-
straint upon us, or from dogmas which are beyond
our comprehension, we may attribute any part of
these works to the artifice of an author who has not
told the truth." Having pursued his urgent argu-
ment pointed by illustrations from the Bible, Augus-
tine, scarcely hoping that his request would be
acceded to, demanded an explanation which would
dispel his doubts. In conclusion he claimed a
fraternally severe criticism of which he had just
given an example, for those of his works which
Profuturus was to offer to Jerome.
Meanwhile Profuturus, who had been made Bishop
of Cirta in Numidia, instead of starting for Palestine
took possession of his see, where he very shortly
died. The letter, therefore, which had been given
to him never reached its destination, but unfortun-
CONTROVERSY WITH AUGUSTINE 101
ately fell into indiscreet hands, and the copies of
it which were circulated in Dalmatia and Italy,
encouraged Jerome's enemies in their criticisms.
Augustine had also been raised to the Episcopacy
in 395, and amid new cares and duties had no doubt
forgotten not only his letter, but the commentary
which had provoked it, when a note which the deacon
Presidius brought him from Jerome, recalled them
to his mind. As Jerome's missive did not in any
way answer the questions Augustine had put to him,
the latter thinking that his letter had gone astray
wrote another, which was longer but not less
peremptory and no less aggressive. After having
again tried to demonstrate the dangers of the
hieronymian explanation, Augustine exhorted the
aged historian to a courageous retraction of it, re-
minding him of the fable of Stesichorus who, struck
with blindness by the demi-gods Castor and Pollux
for having decried the chastity and beauty of Helen
in a satire, did not recover his sight until he had
sung the praises of the grace and virtue he had out-
raged, upon his lyre.
" I implore you," he wrote Jerome, " gird yourself
with a sincere and Christian severity, correct and
amend your work, and so to speak sing its recanta-
tion. The truth of Christians is incomparably more
beautiful than the Helen of the Greeks, for it indeed,
have our martyrs fought more bravely against the
Sodoma of their century, than did the Greek heroes
against Troy. I do not urge you to this disavowal,
so that you may recover your mental sight, for God
forbid that I should think that you had lost it, yet
102 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
suffer me to tell you that through I know not what
inadvertency you have turned aside your eyes, sound
and far-sighted though they may be, and have failed
to see the disastrous consequences of a system which
would admit that one of the authors of our sacred
books, could once, in some part of his work, have
conscientiously and piously lied." l
The man, by name Paul, to whom this letter had
been cpnfided, overcome by his terror of the sea, did
not embark for Palestine, and another messenger
chosen by Augustine also failed to deliver the
missive to Jerome. The letter, however, spread
abroad, and with it a report that Augustine had
composed and sent to Rome a book against Jerome.
The deacon Sisinius, a friend of the hermit, found
Augustine's letter, together with some other writ-
ings by the same doctor, on an island in the Adriatic,
and lost no time in sending it to its destination.
This certainly was enough to rouse a soul less
ardent, and a writer less harassed by envy, or less
surrounded by admirers, quick to take alarm and
even to be angered at all criticisms directed against
their master ; yet Jerome controlled himself and re-
frained from answering. He explained his silence in
the letters which later he wrote to the Bishop of
Hippo. It seems that, although he unmistakably
recognised Augustine's familiar style and manner of
argument, the material evidences of authenticity
were wanting. Besides which, the veteran soldier
of Orthodoxy shrank from opening hostilities with
1 Epist. Ixvii. Augustini ad Hieronymum, inter Epistolas
Ilieronymi, 7.
CONTROVERSY WITH AUGUSTINE 103
a bishop of his own communion whom he had loved
before even knowing him, and who had sought him
in friendship ; one, who already illustrious, was to
continue his scriptural works, and one in whom he
gladly welcomed a legitimate heir.
When at last Augustine heard of the pain his
letters, divulged in such an unaccountable manner,
had caused in the solitude of Bethlehem, he wrote
to Jerome : " A rumour has reached me which I
have difficulty in believing, yet why should I not
mention it to you ? It has been reported to me
that some brothers, I know not which, have given
you to understand that I have written a book
against you, and that I have sent it to Rome.
Rest assured that this is false ; God is witness
that I have written no book against you " (the
book in question was the letter, or letters, of
which Jerome's enemies had taken a perfidious
advantage). " If there be anything in my works
contrary to your views, know or believe that it
was written not to antagonise you, but to explain
what seemed to me the truth. Point out to me
anything in my writings which could offend you ;
I will receive your counsels as from one brother
to another, glad to make any corrections, glad also
of such a token of your affection. I ask and entreat
this of you." Then followed one of those effusions
in which Augustine's soul so often found its outlet.
" Oh, why, if I may not live with you, may I not at
least live in your vicinity, and hold sweet and fre-
quent intercourse with you. But since that has not
been granted me, consent at least to uphold and
104 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
draw closer the ties which render us present to one
another in the Lord : disdain not the letters which
I will sometimes write you." 1
Sincere and touching as were the tones of this
letter, it failed to disarm Jerome, who did not
think it sufficiently explicit. Moreover the advice,
and even the appeals, which it contained offended
the somewhat proud susceptibility of the aged
biblical student. After evincing his doubts, which
we have already mentioned, upon the authenticity
of Augustine's letter, he proceeded to add these
words : " God forbid that I should dare to censure
the works of your Beatitude ; let it suffice me to
defend my own, without criticising those of others.
Your wisdom knows full well that every man is
wedded to his own opinion, and that it were childish
boasting to imitate the youths of old who, by slander-
ing famous men, sought to become famous them-
selves. Neither am I foolish enough to be offended
by the divergences which exist between your ex-
planation and mine. You yourself are not hurt
at my holding different opinions. But where our
friends have really the right to reprove us is when
not perceiving our own wallet, as Persius says, we
look at that of another."
" I have still one thing to ask of you, which is that
you should love one who loves you, and that being
young, you challenge not an aged man upon the
battlefield of the Scriptures. We too have had our
day, and we have run our race to the best of our
abilities, and now that it has come to be your turn
1 Ep. ci. Augustini ad Hieronymum, 2, 3.
CONTROVERSY WITH AUGUSTINE 105
to do likewise, and that you are making great
strides, we have a right to rest. To follow your
example in quoting the poets, remember Dares and
Entellus, think also of the proverb which says, ' As
the ox grows weary he plants his foot more firmly.'
I dictate these lines with sadness; would to God I
might embrace you, and that in brotherly intercourse
we might have instructed one another. . . . Think
of me, saintly and venerable pontiff ! See how much
I love you, I who, although challenged, have been
unwilling to reply, and who do not yet resign myself
to ascribe to you what in another I should blame."
To this letter, which was brought him by the sub-
deacon Asterius, Augustine made a modest and
touching answer. He vindicated himself of having,
so to speak, defied the aged athlete upon the field of
the Scriptures, and merely asked to be enlightened.
" Far be it from me that I should take offence, if by
sound reasons you will and can prove to me that
you understand the Epistle to the Galatians or any
other like part of the Scriptures better than I. Far
from resenting it, I should deem it a privilege to be
instructed or corrected by you. But, beloved brother,
you would not think that your answer could have
hurt me, had you not thought that I had been the
first to wound you. My best course is to acknow-
ledge my fault, and to confess that I offended you
in writing that letter which I cannot disown. If I
offended you, I conjure you by the meekness of Jesus
Christ do not render me evil for evil by offending
me in your turn. Now, to dissimulate what you find
to alter or correct in my writings or my discourses
106 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
would be to offend me. . . . Reprove me with charity
if you deem me in the wrong, innocent though I may
be, or treat me with the tenderness of a father if
you think me worthy of your affection. . . . Inno-
cent, I will receive your reproaches in a spirit of
gratitude ; guilty, I will acknowledge both your
benevolence and my own error."
Jerome's allusion to the hardy Entellus furnished
Augustine with the opportunity for the following
humble confession: " What! shall I fear your letters,
which are severe perhaps, but salutary like the
gauntlets of Entellus ? The aged athlete dealt
Dares formidable blows, and felled him to the
ground without curing him. But I shall receive
your corrections with a quiet heart, for I shall not
suffer through them, but be healed. . . . You wish
me to compare you to an ox; I consent, but to an
ox who under the weight of years retains all his
vigour, and in the divine acre pursues his fruitful
toils. I prostrate myself before you. If I have
done any wrong, trample upon me. The weight
which has accrued to you with age is not too heavy,
so long as my sin be crushed under your foot like a
rush of straw."
Augustine then complained of the great distance
which separated Hippo from Bethlehem, and of the
endless delays to which their correspondence was
subjected. How he would have liked to see and
listen to the aged master ! " I discover so much in
those of your letters which have reached me, that
my most earnest wish is to live at your side. I am
thinking of sending one of my sons to your school
CONTROVERSY WITH AUGUSTINE 107
should you deign to answer me, for I have not, and
never shall have, your scriptural knowledge. What
little I have I distribute among God's people, and
my episcopal duties make it impossible for me to
devote more time to such a study than is strictly
necessary for the instruction of my people." l
Won by the humble and persuasive tones of this
letter, Jerome answered it, and at last began the
purely amicable controversy for which Augustine had
asked. It has been said, however, that " before
entering the lists he wished once for all to unburden
his heart, so that the leaven of the past should in
the future, no longer embitter their friendship or his
own judgment. He gratified this desire in a letter
of an entirely personal character, which acts as a
sort of prologue to the second one which he wrote." 2
Jerome's explanations were at times frank to the
point of harshness. An undercurrent of resentment
runs through them, yet his anger was not unmixed
with love.
He wrote, " Several of our brothers, pure vessels
of Christ, such as may be found in great numbers in
Jerusalem and the holy places, have suggested to me
the thought that you did not act uprightly, but that
enamoured of the vain clamour and glories of this
world you sought to increase your reputation at the
expense of ours, persuading the majority that when
you challenge I tremble, and that you write as a
scholar, but that I keep silence like an ignorant
man, and that I have at last met someone who has
1 Epist. ex. Augustini ad Hieronymum, I, 2, 4, 5.
2 Thierry, St Jerome, book xi.
known how to silence my loquacity. I frankly con-
fess to your Beatitude that it was primarily for this
reason I would not answer you. Besides which, I
could not bring myself to believe that the letter was
really from you, not deeming you capable of attack-
ing me with as in the proverb, a sword immersed in
honey. Moreover, I feared that I should be accused
of arrogance towards a bishop, should I censure my
censor, especially had I drawn attention to the pas-
sages in his letter which breathed of heresy. Finally,
I should have given you good cause to complain of
an inconsiderate answer, and to say to me, ' Did you
verify my letter and recognise my signature before
permitting yourself to thus outrage a friend and to
brand him with the shame of the malice of others ? '
Also, as I have already written you, either send me
the same writing signed by your hand, or else cease
from challenging an aged man who is hidden in the
depths of his cell. If you wish to display and show
your learning, then seek out some of the noble and
eloquent youths who I am told abound in Rome, who
are able to combat you, and who would dare cross
swords with a bishop. I, who was once a soldier, and
am to-day a veteran, will sing your victories and the
victories of others, but I cannot face a battle with a
body which is exhausted by age. Still, should you
persist in asking me for an answer, remember that
the masterly inactivity of the aged Fabius Maximus
defeated the youthful ouslaughts of Hannibal. . . ."
Jerome continued his recriminations and com-
plaints, and concluded his letter with a paragraph in
which are summed up the various sentiments which
CONTROVERSY WITH AUGUSTINE 109
had inspired it. " Farewell, beloved, my son by
reason of your age, my father by reason of your
rank. I ask one thing of you: when you wish to
write to me, pray do in such sort that I may be the
first to receive your letters." l
In another letter 2 Jerome, drawing upon his re-
sources of vehement powers of argument and vast
erudition, defended the thesis which, following the
example of illustrious predecessors, he had adopted.
In certain parts of this letter, making an undue use
of the ex absurdis argument, and imputing con-
clusions to his opponent which the latter would have
had the right to disown, he reproached Augustine
with resuscitating or abetting ancient errors. The
Bishop of Hippo maintained that if Paul had some-
times practised the law, it was not that after the
coming of the Messiah he thought it necessary to
salvation, but to show that he did not disapprove of
it, and that if he blamed the prince of the apostles,
it was because his conduct exposed the Christians of
Gentile extraction to the danger of considering legal
ceremonies as obligatory. " Should this be true,"
exclaimed Jerome, "we fall into the heresy of Cerin-
thus and Ebion, who believed in Christ, and who have
only been anathematised by the Fathers for having
added legal ceremonies to his Gospel, who although
professing the new doctrine, insisted upon retaining
the ancient rites. And what of the Ebionites who call
themselves Christians ? To this very day they are per-
petuated in all the synagogues in the East, a sect of
1 Ep. cv. ad Augustinum, 2, 3, 5.
2 Ep. cxii. ad Augustinum.
110 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
Mineans, known as Nazarenes, whom even the Phari-
sees condemn. They believe in the same Christ as
we, the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered
under Pontius Pilate, who rose again from the dead;
but wishing to be both Christians and Jews they suc-
ceed in being neither Jews nor Christians. If you
thought it your duty to try to heal my slight wound
which in reality is but the prick of a needle, I beg of
you think of your own, which has every appearance
of a lance thrust. Indeed the wrong of having given
in the explanation of the Scriptures, various opinions
of the ancients, is not so great as that of reintroduc-
ing a perverse heresy into the Church. If we are
compelled to receive the Jews with their ceremonies,
if we allow them to bring the rites of the synagogue
into the Church, I say most sincerely that it will not
be the Jews who will become Christians, but the
Christians who will become Jews." With the same
eloquence and spirit Jerome summed up the reasons
which Augustine had alleged in support of his opinions,
and he endeavoured to show that he and his adver-
sary were more agreed than they believed. " Be-
tween your opinion and mine the difference is small.
I maintain that Peter and Paul observed, or rather
pretended to observe, the ceremonies of the law for
fear of vexing the Jews who had become Christians.
You say that their observance of them was no arti-
ficial dissimulation, but a charitable condescension;
hat it was not a vain fear, but mercy, which drove
them to pretend to be what they were not." l The
lengthy answer of Jerome's adversary proves, how-
1 Epist. cxii., 13, 17.
CONTROVERSY WITH AUGUSTINE 111
ever, that he and Augustine were less united upon
this point than he would have us think. " Who is
there," asked the bishop of Hippo, " in whose dis-
courses and writings I can believe if it be true that
Paul deceived his sons ? . . . The apostle said in the
beginning, ' I call upon God to witness that I am
not lying in what I write you,' and yet, through I
know not what administrative dissimulation (nescio
qua dispensatoria simulatione), he would have as-
serted that Peter and Barnabas were not acting
uprightly according to the Gospel, and that he had
resisted Peter to his face because he compelled the
Gentiles to conform to Judaism." : Augustine passed
over as completely unfounded, the resemblance sig-
nalised by Jerome between Peter's conduct at Antioch,
when he drew aside from the Christians of Gentile
extraction, and that of Paul, when by prudent econ-
omy, he practised himself certain Jewish rites.
Paul's whole life and teaching attest that he did not
wish the Christian salvation to be thought dependent
upon these practices, but neither did he wish to
be suspected of holding ceremonies which had been
instituted by God, and which, in the divine scheme
of things, prefigured the glorious realities of the
future, profane or idolatrous.
Of the two theories St Augustine's was the one
which prevailed, and even Jerome seems to have
ended by yielding to it. At the time of his conten-
tion with the Pelagians, Jerome wrote the following
decisive phrase : " Who can complain that he is
denied what the Prince of the Apostles himself did
1 Epist., cxvi. Augustini ad Hieronymum.
IMMACULATE HEART
NOVITIATE
112 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
not have?" 1 Indeed, in the face of St Paul's
distinct affirmation, no orthodox exegete of the
present day would dare to represent the controversy
of Antioch as the result of a preconcerted scheme
between the two apostles, and as a sort of symboli-
cal drama in which they were actors. Its true
explanation is more simple. " Peter thought that
he should spare the prejudices of the Jews amongst
whom he was to exercise a great part of his ad-
ministration, knowing that a command issued from
Jerusalem was capable of raising impediments to
his apostleship in the Jewish quarters of the
whole world. Paul looked at things from a dif-
ferent standpoint. More especially the apostle of
the Gentiles, he held that the Gentile Christians
should be treated with the same consideration as
others. He considered that the right, which after
the Council of Jerusalem, the Gentiles had obtained
to abstain from the circumcision and from the law
of Moses, should certainly be as much respected as
the right of the Jews to retain these practices. His
love for the Church's liberty received a shock when
he saw that Peter now seemed to disapprove of
what he used formerly to practise in person. There
were thus two different forms of apostolic zeal in
opposition. 2 Peter had exceeded in his condescen-
sion to the Jewish Christians, but, although the
leader of the apostles, he bravely and with meek
humility received the warning which Paul gave him
before the Church of Antioch.
1 Dialog. I contra Pelagianos, 22.
8 Lesetre. Holy Church at the time of the Apostles.
CONTROVERSY WITH AUGUSTINE 113
The controversy between Jerome and Augustine
ended with assurances of cordial and respectful
admiration, on the part of the young bishop. " I
pray you," he wrote to his former antagonist, " spare
me not your strictures when you think them salu-
tary. No doubt according to ecclesiastical rank,
priesthood stands subordinate to the Episcopate,
but in many other things Augustine is subordinate
to Jerome. Moreover, one should neither fear nor
disdain to be corrected by an inferior in rank." 1
The difference between Augustine and Jerome
had also touched upon another point, which we will
merely indicate. Augustine, fearing that Jerome's
translations from the Hebrew might bewilder the
Churches which knew only the Septuagint, had
urged him rather to translate with the utmost care
the Greek version, which was consecrated by long
usage and unanimous respect, into Latin. Jerome,
however, answered Augustine's somewhat tentative
objections in the most decided manner. " Since I
have corrected and translated the old version from
Greek into Latin for the benefit of those who only
understand our own language (Augustine does not
seem to have known this), I do not pretend to abolish
them. In my translation I merely wished to re-estab-
lish the passages suppressed or altered by the Jews,
and elucidate the meaning of the original Hebrew, to
the Latins. No one is forced to read it should they
not wish to. Let them drink the old wine with con-
tentment and, if they like, disdain our new." 2
1 Epist. cxvi. Augustini ad Hieronymum, 33.
2 Epist. cxii. 20.
H9
114 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
In spite of these dissensions, Augustine carefully
and sympathetically followed the scriptural work
of the aged master until his death. In "The City
of God" he praised Jerome's commentary upon
David, he more than once consulted the learned
exegete, and finally applauded the supreme battle
which the indomitable old man waged against the
growing heresy of Pelagius.
The commentary upon the Epistle to the Gala-
tians belongs to the scriptural studies which filled
Jerome's life. In 406, he finished the explanation
of the twelve minor prophets with a commentary
upon the prophecy of Amos, and in a preface to the
second book of this commentary he weighed the
advantages and disadvantages attendant upon old
age.
CHAPTER VIII
THE LAST YEARS OF ST JEROME'S LIFE HIS LAST
ORDEALS
I N their declining years, men look back sorrowfully
upon their past and wonder what the brief and
uncertain future, which is all they dare look forward
to, has in store for them. Most of those who begin
to feel oppressed by the burden of their years are
incapable of restraining a sigh, which is sometimes
bitter, sometimes manly or resigned, but which
always attests to the hopeless impotence with
which old age threatens or strikes the majority.
Even Christians are not exempt from this feeling
of regret. It was not a worldling, disillusioned
without being weaned from mundane interests,
not a slave of ambition whom the approach of
old age filled with despair, but Joseph de Maistre,
the most steadfast of believers, who, when over
sixty, wrote these words, in which he somewhat
exaggerated his weakness : " I am now but an
aged prisoner, whose greatest privilege is to gaze
out of the window." The saints, who set no
value upon the things of this world, and in their
isolation aspire only to the longed for end, gladly
welcome the grim visitor who leads them towards
it, and by lightening their burden, shortens their
116 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
journey. " Old age," wrote Jerome, " is accom-
panied by many blessings and many evils. It
frees us from the overbearing mastery of the
senses, curbs our appetites, crushes our carnal
impulses, increases wisdom, and whispers riper
counsels. The evils imputed to it are the infirmi-
ties by which it is frequently attended. The eyes
become dim, food loses its savour, the hand
trembles, the teeth decay, the feet begin to totter,
and are scarcely able to walk, the body seems fast
losing its hold upon life, and many of its members
are already a prey to death. And yet all things
well considered, weighing evil against evil, it is
worth suffering the infirmities of old age to be
delivered from the aggression of sensuality, a
mistress in herself more grievous and importunate
than any other. Even old age, indeed, is not secure
from her attacks ; but it is one thing to be brought
into contact with temptation, and another to
succumb to it. Buried beneath dead ashes, the
spark still seeks at times to rekindle, but it has
no longer the power to cause a conflagration." l
Jerome's letters to Hedibia and Algasia, in
which he solved the difficulties in certain pas-
sages of the New Testament, which these studious
Christian women had propounded to him, were
written almost at the same time as his com-
mentary upon Amos, and are a continuation of
his scriptural works.
The commentary upon David, written towards
407, drew upon its author censure of a different
1 Comment, in Amos. Lib. ii.
HIS LAST ORDEALS 117
order from that which had hitherto assailed him.
In the explanation of a famous dream of Nebu-
chadnezzar, Jerome, turning his attention from the
distant ages whose memories he was evoking to
the calamitous time in which he was forced to live,
recognised in the iron and the clay of the statue
shown to the King of Babylon, a symbol and a
prophecy of the various stages through which the
Roman Empire was to pass. The iron, typified the
ancient glory and the ancient power of the Romans ;
the clay, the humiliation of the times in which he
wrote : " There was nothing more mighty or in-
vincible than Rome at her outset ; to-day there is
nothing weaker : in our civil wars and in our wars
with foreign nations, we are reduced to craving
the aid of the barbarians." l A defiant spirit of
patriotism was aroused by these confessions, and
Jerome was obliged to justify himself. " If I have
applied to the Roman Empire the words of Daniel
upon the statue, which is shown to us in the Scrip-
tures as at first powerful and now weak, lay not the
blame upon me, but rather upon the prophet, for
one should not flatter princes to the extent of
undervaluing the truths of the Scriptures. Gene-
ralisation does no individual injury." 2
Jerome dedicated the commentary upon Isaiah,
from which this short defence has been extracted,
and which had formerly been promised to St Paula,
to Eustochium and Pammachius. While engaged
upon this work he was taken ill, and upon his
1 Comment, in Danielem. Lib i., chap. ii.
2 Comment, in Isaiam. Lib. xi.
118 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
recovery he wrote to Eustochium these strong and
serene words which Tillemont has so well rendered :
" Knowing to whom I am indebted for every instant
of my life, and knowing that my death was perhaps
only deferred so that I might be able to accomplish
the work upon the Prophets which I had begun, I
devote myself exclusively to this task ; and as from
some lofty elevation I contemplate the storms and
the shipwrecks of this world, which, however, I be-
moan, and which cause me infinite distress. Com-
pletely detached from the things of the present, I
think only of the future, and, paying no heed to the
clamour and the judgments of men, my thoughts
dwell exclusively upon the awful Judgment Day of
God. And you, Eustochium, virgin of Christ, whose
prayers guarded me during my illness, now that I
am recovered, again implore for me the grace of
Jesus Christ, so that, under the guidance of the
same spirit which through the mouths of the pro-
phets predicted the things to come, I may penetrate
the clouds, pierce their obscurity, and hear the Word
of God." i
It is possible that the tempests and storms men-
tioned by Jerome were the opposition by which he
was incessantly harassed, but it is incontestable
that they also were allusions to the evils to which
the East was at that time a prey. At the end of
the year 408 Alaric laid siege to Rome, which, in
order to regain its liberty, expended immense sums ;
in 409 the King of the Goths again appeared before
the walls of the Eternal City. During these years
1 Comment, in Isaiam. Lib. xi.
HIS LAST ORDEALS 119
of calamity Jerome kept reminding his correspon-
dents of the duties of the Christian life, and recalling
to them evangelical counsels, the practice of which
seemed to be facilitated by so many disasters. In
the midst of his exhortations to the widowed Agerucia
to keep an inviolable continence from that time for-
ward, and to pour abundant alms into the hands of
the poor, he suddenly, at the thought of the uni-
versal ruin and the universal distress, exclaimed :
"What! the vessel has foundered, yet I think of the
cargo ! ... If we, pitiable survivors, have hitherto
been spared, it is due not to our own merits, but to
the mercy of God. Innumerable and cruel nations
have inundated Gaul. All which lies between the
Ocean and the Rhine, and between the Alps and the
Pyrenees, has been devastated by the Quadi, the
Vandals, the Sarmatians, the Ulans, the Herulians,
the Burgundians, and oh ! unhappy republic I even
by the Pannonians. Mainz, which was formerly an
important town, has been taken and sacked, and
thousands have been slaughtered in its church,
After a long siege Worms has been destroyed, and
Reims, a town of old so strong ; Amiens, Arras, the
Morinians who dwell at the extremities of the earth ;
Tournai, Spires, Strasburg, have passed under the
rule of the Germans. With the exception of a few
towns, Aquitania, Novempopulania, Lyonnais, and
Narbonensis have been completely ravaged. Beyond
the walls it is the sword which slays ; inside them,
hunger. I am unable to recall without tears the
fate of Toulouse, which, until now, had owed its
preservation to the merits of Exuperus, its saintly
120 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
bishop. Even Spain trembles daily at the memory
of the Cimbrian invasion, and her terror causes her
to suffer continually, what others have suffered but
once. Answer me, my daughter: Is this a proper
moment for thee to think of remarrying ? Who,
I ask thee, wilt thou espouse ? One who flies before
the enemy, or one who resists him ? Whatever thy
choice, thou knowest what awaits thee ! " l
Jerome also strove to inspire Julian, the Dalma-
tian, with the same feeling of scorn for a world
which on every side was passing from its wretched
people. He urged him, appealing to the man of
wealth smitten through the loss of a great part
of his fortune, and to the father and husband,
smitten through the loss of his wife and daughters,
whose death seemed to his faithful soul merely a
temporary separation, to devote himself more than
ever to the service of God and the poor, and to
follow Pammachius and the saintly priest Paulinus
in their path of complete renunciation. The date
of a letter which Jerome wrote to the deacon Sabini-
anus may possibly be fixed at the same period.
Sabinianus, after certain episodes in his dissolute
career which had caused the death of several of his
accomplices, and after a notorious scandal which
exposed him to a formidable revenge, fled from
Rome and concealed himself among the ranks of
some Samnite brigands. He then succeeded in
reaching Palestine, where he presented favourable
letters from the deluded bishop who had ordained
him, to Jerome, who intrusted him with the office
1 Epist. cxxiii. ad Ageruchiam. De Monogamia, 16, 18.
HIS LAST ORDEALS 121
of reader in one of the convents directed by Bus-
tochium. The incorrigible seducer, however, pur-
sued his evil ways even in the very cave of the
Nativity. He persuaded a young girl, who had
received the virgin's veil in Rome and who had
renewed her vow in Jerusalem, to follow him, but
at the very moment fixed upon for their flight all
was discovered. The heads of religious communities
were empowered to inflict severe punishment upon
rebellious persons and fugitives. Sabinianus threw
himself at Jerome's feet in mortal terror, and, weep-
ing bitterly, promised to henceforward lead a life of
repentance under the monastic rule. He obtained
mercy, but his tears do not seem to have been very
sincere, for once reassured as to the danger of severe
chastisement, he fled from the convent where he
was confined and resumed a vagabond and profligate
life throughout the Syrian towns, hurling the vilest
calumnies against Jerome and Eustochium. More
affected by the well-nigh desperate peril of Sabini-
anus' soul than by his own injuries, the anchorite
wrote him an eloquent letter, saying : " Have pity
on thyself. Remember that God will some day
judge thee. Remember the bishop from whom thou
didst receive thy deaconship. . . . Wonder not that
the holy man should have been deceived when he
ordained thee. God sorely repented of having
anointed Saul, and among the twelve apostles even,
there proved to be one traitor. Unhappy wretch,
turn toward thy Saviour so that He may turn
towards thee. Repent, so that God may repent of
the awful judgment He has pronounced against thee.
122 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
Why, forgetful of thy own misdeeds, dost thou
strive to traduce others ? Why traduce a man who
gives thee salutary advice ? I assent to being a
malefactor, which is the report of me which thou
hast spread abroad. Then let us mingle our repent-
ance. I assent to being a sinner, then let us to-
gether expiate our sins with our tears. Thinkest
thou that my crimes may become virtues for thee ?
Thinkest thou that it will mitigate the evils of thy
plight to have many companions in thy profligacy ?
At least shed a few tears upon the costly raiments
which adorn thee in thine eyes, and know that thou
art but a ragged and filthy mendicant. It is never
too late to repent. Hadst thou lain wounded upon
the road which leads from Jerusalem to Jericho, the
good Samaritan would have put thee on thy horse
again, and guided thee to the hostelry to be cared
for. Wert thou lying in the tomb and already
exhaling the odour of death, the Saviour would
bring thee back to life. . . ." l
While Jerome was writing these lofty and inspired
letters to Sabinianus, Rome, which had stood so
many sieges and which had long been in imminent
peril, fell into the hands of the barbarians. Upon
the 24th of August 410, Alaric entered by the Porta
Salaria and delivered the Eternal City to pillage,
fire, and the sword. Marcella, the illustrious and
pious widow who had founded the first monastery
in Rome, and who had encouraged Jerome in his
biblical labours, was one of the victims of the catas-
trophe. Her abode upon the Aventine was in-
1 Epist. cxlvii., ad Sabinianum lapsum, 4, 9.
HIS LAST ORDEALS 123
vaded, but the intrepid Christian woman resolutely
faced the Goths who resorted to torture in order to
force her to surrender them treasures which she no
longer possessed, having distributed them among
the poor. " Marcella," wrote St Jerome, " seemed
insensible to the torment of scourge and lash. She
threw herself weeping at the feet of the barbarians,
but her one prayer was that they would not separate
Principia from her, and that the youthful virgin
might be spared that, which because of her great
age, she herself had no cause to fear. Jesus Christ
softened the hardness of their hearts, and pity crept
in among their blood-stained swords. After the
barbarians had conducted Marcella and her com-
panion to the basilica of St Paul the Apostle, there
to find either a place of refuge or a sepulchre, Mar-
cella burst into transports of praise. She gave
thanks unto God for having preserved Principia's
chastity, for having permitted that captivity should
be powerless to impoverish her, for she had no need
of daily bread being so filled with the spirit of God
that she felt no hunger, and for being able to say in
all sincerity, " naked came I out of my mother's
womb and naked shall I return thither. The Lord
gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the
name of the Lord." *
A few days after these events Marcella expired.
All these tragic tidings were brought to Palestine
by some fugitives, and Jerome was simultaneously
informed of the death of Marcella, of that of Pam-
1 Epist. cxxvii. ad Principiam virginem, sive Marcellae vidux
Epitaphium, 13.
124 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
machius for which no one seemed able to account,
and of the fall of Rome. A few of the lamenta-
tions which the triumph of the Goths wrung from
Jerome's patriotic soul, have already been quoted in
the introductory chapter. The commentary upon
Ezekiel was interrupted, and it was not until two
years after the catastrophe that the hermit was at
last able to write Marcella's funeral oration and
" Epitaphium " for Principia. A letter intended to
direct the education of the youthful Pacatula,
written by Jerome to Gaudentius gives us some idea
of the universal desolation and also of the inconceiv-
able obstinacy of a world which defied every divine
threat and punishment. " Oh, shame," he cried,
" all is crumbling to dust and ashes, except our sins,
which still flourish. Rome, the famous, the head of
the universe has perished in the flames of a single con-
flagration, and there is no region whither exile has not
driven its citizens. The churches, formerly so holy,
have been reduced to ashes, but we are still given over
to avarice. We live as if we had but one day to live,
we build as if we were always to dwell here below." l
Fugitives from Rome had landed upon every shore
and had, figuratively speaking, inundated Palestine.
" Who would have believed," asked Jerome in one of
his prefaces to Ezekiel, " that Rome, whose victories
had raised her above the universe, could have fallen
and become for her people both a mother and a
tomb ? Who would have believed that the daughters
of the mighty city would one day be wandering upon
1 Ep. cxxxviii. ad Gaudentium de Pacatulae infantuJae educa-
tione, 4.
HIS LAST ORDEALS 125
the shores of the East, of Egypt, and of Africa, ser-
vants and slaves. Who would have believed that
Bethlehem would daily receive noble Romans,
illustrious matrons reared in opulence, but now
reduced to beggary! Powerless to succour them
all, I grieve and weep with them, and, completely
given up to the duties which charity imposes upon
me, I have put aside my commentary upon Ezekiel
and almost all study, for to-day one must translate
the words of the scriptures into deeds, and instead
of speaking saintly words one must act them." l
Jerome's refuge did not escape from the incur-
sion of the barbarians. Towards the year 411 the
Saracens invaded and ravaged the frontiers of Egypt,
Palestine, Phoenicia, and Syria. Fresh exiles, not-
ably Pinianus, his mother Albina, and his wife
Melania, fleeing from the cruelties and extortions
of the prefect Heraclius, who had revolted against
the Emperor, came to the Holy Land from Africa.
In the midst of endless trials, beset by duties and
visits which scarcely left him any leisure, Jerome
became more and more oppressed by the burden of
his years. " In the hours of the night," wrote the
indefatigable veteran, " hours which I earn or rather
snatch, and which towards winter begin to be some-
what longer, by the light of a small lamp, I en-
deavour to dictate these lucubrations, such as they
are, and absorbed in my exegetical labours gain
some respite from the cares of a tormented soul.
Besides the effort of dictating I find another diffi-
culty, for my eyes, like those of the saintly patri-
1 Comment, in Ezechielem. Lib. iii. prrefat.
126 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
arch Isaac, have grown dim with age, and I cannot
read by lamplight the Hebrew works which, on
account of the exiguity of the characters, are
almost unintelligible to me even in the daytime.
As to the Greek commentaries, I can only read
them through the eyes of my brothers." l
In spite of this, Jerome persisted in his work, and
was about to enter upon a supreme struggle. In a
famous letter to Demetrias, which was a sort of
treatise upon virginity, he warned this young patri-
cian maiden, who had sought refuge in Africa,
against some errors, in which Tillemont professes
to detect traces of Origenism. As of old, when with
a resolute heart and a firm voice he had adhered to
the teachings of the Pope Damasus, Jerome exhorted
Demetrias to remain faithfully united to the Holy
See. Having reminded the youthful virgin of the
blows which Pope Damasus dealt to heresy, he
wrote : " It is my religious affection which prompts
me to warn thee ; keep the faith of Innocent, the
son and successor of Anastasius upon the Apostolic
throne, and however wise and well informed thou
mayest think thyself, never embrace a strange
doctrine." 2
In 415 the Spaniard, Paulus Orosius, a disciple
of Augustine, arrived in Bethlehem bearing letters
in which the bishop of Hippo propounded two ques-
tions to the aged doctor. He consulted him upon
the meaning of St James' text, " For whosoever
shall keep the whole law and yet offend in one point
1 Comment, in Ezechielem. Lib. xii., cap. xxi.
2 Epist. cxxx. ad Demetriadem. De servanda virginitate.
HIS LAST ORDEALS 127
he is guilty of all," l and closed his letter with the
following humble words : " Should thy erudition find
anything to censure, I implore thee to write and tell
me of it, and do not fear to correct me. One would
indeed be unfortunate could one not listen respect-
fully to a man who has worked so much and with so
much edification, and could one not give thanks to
the Lord our God, who made thee what thou art,
for the success of thy work. If it is my duty to be
more disposed to learn from whomsoever it may be,
that which it is well for me to know, than to impart
my knowledge to others, how much more natural it
is, that I should be ready to accept this service of
charity from one whose erudition has, in the name
and with the help of the Lord, advanced the study
of the Scriptures to an extent hitherto unheard
of." 2
In another letter the bishop questioned Jerome
upon the origin of the soul. This was not the first
time that this question had been submitted to
Jerome, for as early as 411 the Governor of Africa
and his wife Anapsychia had laid it before him. The
problem was, whether the human soul was immedi-
ately created by God at the very instant when nature
ordains it to be united to the body, or whether the
theory of a spiritual generation, causing one soul to
proceed from another, were admissible. Upon this
point Augustine had hesitated, and, as Cardinal
Norris says, the audacity of the Pelagian party in
1 James ii. 10.
2 Epist. cxxxii. Augustini ad Ilieronymum seu liber desententia
Jacobi, 21.
128 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
declaring original sin to be irreconcilable with the
"creationist" doctrine, inclined the bishop of Hippo
towards the contrary opinion. 1 St Augustine tells
us, that in his answer, Jerome pleaded his ab-
sence of leisure to solve the problem ; and as a
matter of fact he did not solve it in any subse-
quent letter. 2 Although vehemently disclaiming the
Origenist error of the pre-existence of souls, he does
not seem to have adopted any solution of the diffi-
culty, either in his books against Ruflnus, or in his
letters to Marcellinus. Jerome was not the only
learned doctor with whom the question has remained
undecided. In the twelfth century St Anselm prayed
upon his death-bed that God might grant him a few
days more of life in which to elucidate it, not that he
was, as Charles de Remusat tells us, one of those
"great restless souls . . . who prefer love to pos-
session, and upon the threshold of heaven sigh for
the labour and the hope of their earthly existences,"
but because as a religious thinker he would have
wished to bequeath to his brethren one truth the
more. The slow and sure workings of Catholic
theology, under the direction and with the authority
of the priesthood, have definitely solved the problem
which tormented Augustine and Anselm, and raised
the primarily contested theory of the immediate
creation of souls, to the rank of other positive
doctrines.
" Orosius," wrote Tillemont, " left St Augustine
occupied in combating the Pelagians ; he found St
1 Vindicke Augustinianse, cap. iv. 3.
' 2 Retractat, lib. xii., cap. xlv.
HIS LAST ORDEALS 129
Jerome engaged in the same war." l It was in
this war that Jerome expended all his remaining
strength.
The great Eastern heresies had touched upon the
mysteries of the divine life, and had ended in offer-
ing their supporters a false explanation of them.
Pelagius, an Irishman and a shrewd and daring
spirit, fixed the general attention upon human
nature, and professed to elucidate the mystery of
the relations existing between created liberty and
the concurrence and grace of God. There were two
terms, one of which Pelagius suppressed, only ac-
knowledging that of free will. According to him, a
man possessing the divine gift of liberty could per-
form every duty, even the most difficult, avoid all sin,
and become invulnerable to the impulses of passion.
The innovator also rejected the dogma of original
sin. Nature was good and sufficient unto itself;
it needed no healing remedy, nor any assistance
which would raise it to higher spheres. The idea
of the Redemption, " that great remedy granted to a
great distress," 2 was dying out, and even prayer was
arrested as if stifled upon human lips, from whence it
nevertheless springs spontaneously. " If the grace
of God consist in that He has given us the use of
our own will," wrote Jerome, drawing legitimate
conclusions from the theories advanced by Pelagius,
"if satisfied with our liberty we consider that we
had no longer need of His help, fearing that this
very dependence might destroy our freedom of will,
we should no longer pray nor try, in order daily to
1 Memoirs, etc., St Jerome. Art. cxxxv. 2 Gerbet.
19
130 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
obtain a gift which once received remains for ever
in our power, to move the divine mercy by our sup-
plications. . . . Let us also abolish fasting and con-
tinence; why should I exert myself to obtain through
labour that which already belongs to me ? " l All
the rationalism of future ages was anticipated in this
haughty system which undervalued human weakness
and rejected all divine assistance. One can already
hear the arrogant sophism of Rousseau : " I converse
with God ; I bless him for his gifts, but I do not pray
to Him. What should I ask of Him ? "
Pelagius had in turn taken his false doctrine to
Italy, Africa and Palestine. In Rome he had won
the protection of Melania, the illustrious widow.
During a brief space of time the bishop of Hippo
had also yielded to his charm, and Jerome had
sympathetically received the innovator who knew
how to regulate his speech and his silences ac-
cording to circumstances. There were two disciples
who propagated the doctrines of Pelagius with inde-
fatigable zeal, one Celestius, who was less prudent or
more daring than his master, and Julianus of Eclana,
a former pupil of St Augustine and a friend of St
Paulinus of Nola, who sang his Epithalamium in the
most poetic language. Jerome soon discovered the
true sense and import of the assertions of Pelagius,
and urged thereto by the faithful who referred to the
defender and tried interpreter of the true doctrine,
he finally determined to write to Ctesiphon his
letter against the new heresy.
" Perhaps none of his books," said Amedee Thierry,
1 Epist. cxxxiii. ad Ctesiphontem, 5.
HIS LAST ORDEALS 131
"better reveals the marvellous acuteness of St
Jerome's mind. To pass judgment upon such a
man as Pelagius, he had but the vague data which
he had been able to collect from public rumour, from
the reports of a few friends, or from the adroitly
calculated conversation of the monk himself; of
the audacious preachings of Celestius, or of the
Pelagian writings which were beginning to spread
over the East, Jerome knew practically nothing.
... A few of the Pelagian propositions, shrouded
in circumlocution and mystery, were sufficient to
enable him to reconstruct the whole of Pelagianism,
to point out its dangers to the Faith, and to furnish
weapons against its leader." l The letter to Ctesi-
phon, from which we have lately made quotations,
contains a testimony which, without pride, but in
tones of legitimate assurance, Jerome the septua-
genarian rendered to the immaculate orthodoxy of
his long life exclusively spent in the quest of truth.
" From my youth . . . since when, many years have
elapsed . . ." he said, " until my present age, I have
written many works. I have ever been solicitous
to set nought before my readers but that which
I had learnt from the public teachings of the Church,
and to follow, not the arguments of the philosophers,
but the simplicity of the apostles ; for I remembered
this verse, ' For it is written, I will destroy the
wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the
understanding of the prudent,' and again, ' Because
the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the
weakness of God is stronger than men.' 2 I defy
1 St Jerome, Book xii. 2 I Cor. i. 19, 25.
132 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
my adversaries ; let them examine every book which
I have written up till this moment, and if they find
that I have made any mistake from lack of compe-
tence let them publicly denounce it, or else let
them correct those things which are right and I
will refute their calumnies ; or should there be any
foundation for their criticism, I will acknowledge my
error, for I would rather correct myself than perse-
vere in erroneous ideas."
Beside this letter to Ctesiphon, famous in the
history of the Pelagian controversy, Jerome wrote
his three " Dialogues," in which he quoted the
Pharisaical prayer of the heresiarch, " Lord, Thou
knowest that my hands are clean of plunder and my
lips pure of lies ; it is with these lips that I implore
Thy mercy." l Words which may or may not be
Pelagius' own, but in which breathe the whole
Pelagian spirit of pride. In opposition to this vain-
glorious formula Jerome cited the humble petitions
contained in the Lord's prayer. " Forgive us our
trespasses. . . . lead us not into temptation but
deliver us from evil." He invoked the testimony
of the liturgy which Bossuet surnamed the "chief
instrument of tradition." 2 "... If you acknow-
ledge but one baptism, the same for infants and
adults, it is clear that infants receive it for the sins
they have contracted in Adam." 8 Jerome did not
omit the testimony of the divines ; after alleging that
of St Cyprian, he confronted his contradictor with
1 Dial, ad versus Pelagianos. Lib. iii. 14.
2 Instruction sur les etats d'oraison. Traite i., livre vi. n. i.
8 Dial., Lib. iii. 19.
HIS LAST ORDEALS 133
the authority, at that time so weighty, of the bishop
of Hippo. " Since long ago the pontiff Augustine
wrote against thy false doctrine concerning the
baptism of infants, two books which he dedicated
to the tribune Marcellinus, the innocent victim of
the tyrant Heraclius and of the heretics ... he
wrote a third denouncing those who say as thou
dost, that if man be willing, he may preserve him-
self from sin without the help of grace, and has
lately written a fourth for Hilarion refuting thy
false system. It is said that he is writing other
books especially directed against thee, but they
have not reached me. Not wishing to be reminded
of Horace's lines, ' Do not carry timber to the
forest,' I am inclined to cease this work. I should
but uselessly reiterate the same things, or if I
wished to say new ones, that brilliant genius has
already said them better than I."
Jerome did not desert the battlefield. To escape
from it he would have been obliged to leave Pales-
tine, which was then ringing with the Pelagian
controversy. The general disquiet which was thus
agitating the Church no doubt decided bishop John
to open, in July 415, the Conference of Jerusalem,
which was entirely composed of priests, from among
whom a few Europeans Avitus, Vitalis and Pas-
serius equally versed in Latin and in Greek, were
to serve as interpreters. Domninus, an orthodox
and wealthy layman, formerly the controller of the
imperial largess and invested by the Emperor
Arcadius with the title of vicar of the prefects, sat
also in the assembly.
134 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
In the absence of Jerome, who perhaps had not
been bidden to the conference, Orosius attended in
all the ardour of his youth and intrepid faith. He
reported the condemnation passed upon Celestius
by the Council of Carthage, and was loud in his
praise of Augustine's and Jerome's refutations of
the new dogmas. Pelagius when called upon to
explain himself, did so in an ambiguous manner ; the
only daring which he evinced was in the contempt
which, to the indignant stupefaction of the assem-
blage, he showed for the bishop of Hippo. The
arch heretic knew himself to be protected by the
benevolent attitude of John, whose misadventures
in the Origenist matter had failed either to warn or
make him amend his ways.
The conference dispersed after having decided
that letters and deputies should be sent to Pope
Innocent, and after having enjoined silence upon
all. This silence, however, was broken by the
bishop of Jerusalem, who accused Orosius of having
advanced a heresy diametrically opposed to that of
Pelagius. Orosius wrote his Apology and the
controversy was reopened. Moreover, two Gallic
bishops, Heros of Aries and Lazarus of Aix, driven
from their province by political difficulties and
drawn to Palestine by their desire to make a pilgrim-
age, denounced at that very moment the heresies of
Celestius and Pelagius to Eulogius, the metropolitan
of Caesarea. A council was convened at Diospolis,
the Greek name of the ancient city of Lydda, at
which Heros and Lazarus, one of whom was ill,
did not appear. Orosius, possibly prevented by
HIS LAST ORDEALS 135
secret intrigues from attending, was also absent.
However, the memorandum upon which Heros and
Lazarus had recorded a certain number of erroneous
propositions was read at the Council, and Pelagius
was called upon either to justify himself or to retract.
With the aid of evasions, sophistical distinctions,
or audacious denials, Pelagius succeeded in convinc-
ing of his innocence the fourteen bishops presided
over by Eulogius and assembled at Diospolis. He
was absolved, but Pelagianism was condemned ; from
whence the diverse opinions of a conference whose
verdict " Pope Innocent would neither censure nor
approve," have arisen. The bishop of Hippo has
laid the responsibility of this verdict upon Julianus
of Eclana. St Jerome, on the contrary, has found
no better epithet to describe the Council of Dios-
polis than that of " contemptible." l Pelagius had
disavowed his errors merely with his lips, in his
heart neither he nor any of his party had the
slightest intention of laying down their arms. His
heresy was gaining ground in Europe and even in
the East ; in Asia, which until then had only been
engrossed in metaphysical questions, Pelagianism
excited considerable sympathy. Theodorus, the
bishop of Mopsuestia, in Cilicia, and the apostle of
the heresy which, disowning Christ's one and divine
personality, attributed a separate personality to our
Lord's humanity, favoured the false doctrines of
Pelagius, and even wrote a book against Jerome
which he later had the courage to destroy. Can
one wonder at the secret affinity which drew to-
1 Tillemont, St Augustine. Art. cclx.
136 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
gether the adversaries of grace and the future
apostles of a heresy which was to debase Jesus
Christ to the rank of a human being ? As I have
already said elsewhere, " if Christ be not God, grace,
which is the fruit of his blood and sufferings, must
lose its inestimable dignity and its priceless worth.
If that were the case, why consider grace to be the
succour without which the human will, although
capable through its own strength of acts morally
good, can never accomplish deeds worthy of heaven ?
The practical naturalism of the Western heretics
and the speculative rationalism of those of the East
sought one another across the distance which
divided them, that they might embrace." l
The discussion of ideas and text did not satisfy
the bellicose ardour of the Pelagians. Even the
calumnies directed against Jerome did not satiate
their relentless animosity. The coarse and ignorant
rabble which too often forms the rearguard of fac-
tions, soon added material violence to these less
tangible offences. One night in the year 416 the
convent at Bethlehem was broken into, and St
Augustine tells us that " a band of lost souls who,
it is said, serve the perverse designs of Pelagius,
gave themselves up to the most incredible outrages.
The servitors of God, both male and female, who
dwelt in this refuge under the guardianship of
Jerome were cruelly beaten. A deacon was killed.
The buildings of the monastery were set on fire,
and Jerome only escaped from this furious assault
1 History of ecclesiastical history. St Cyril of Alexandria and
the Council of Ephesus.
HIS LAST ORDEALS 137
by taking refuge in a tower" 1 the same tower
which later afforded refuge to the monks against
the Arab invasions, and wherein Eustochium and
her niece, Paula, fugitive and half-naked but always
intrepid, also succeeded in concealing themselves.
The bishop of Jerusalem had foreseen nothing and
had arrested nothing; he took no steps toward
restoring the ruins or towards consoling the victims.
Vanity and obstinacy had rendered this venerable
person, who at that time was completing his
thirtieth year of episcopacy, a more or less con-
scious accomplice of revolting deeds of violence.
It was of course possible to ask the governor of
Caesarea for material protection, but Jerome,
Eustochium, and Paula, feeling the necessity of
seeking a higher authority as well, addressed them-
selves to the Pope, St Innocent. Aurelius, the
metropolitan of Carthage, transmitted their griev-
ances to the Pontiff, but the merciful discretion of
the supplicants omitted the names of the guilty,
and the Pope in his answer to Jerome was able
to say, " Moved by the spectacle of such great
misfortune we are prepared to exert the authority
of the Apostolic See to punish the crime, but thy
letter does not designate to us the criminal upon
whom we are to visit our displeasure, and does not
formulate any precise accusation." 2
The Pope severely reprimanded the bishop of
Jerusalem. "What preventive measures didst thou
take ? And when the calamity took place what con-
solation, what assistance didst thou proffer the
1 De gestis Pelagii, 66. 2 Epist. cxxxvi.
138 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
victims, who say that they fear still worse evils
than those which they have already suffered ? " l
John had died by the time Innocent's letter
reached Jerusalem in 417, and under his successor
Jerome was able to breathe more freely, for although
some of the Pelagians continued to live in Pales-
tine, at least their leader had been banished from it.
" Know," Jerome wrote to the Aquilanian priest
Riparius, in language which continually reminds
us of Sallust " that Catiline has been driven from
Jerusalem and from the whole province, not by any
human power, but by the command of Jesus Christ
himself. But I grieve to say that many of his con-
spirators still remain with Lentulus at Joppa.' 2 In
apprising another friend, Apronius, of the distress to
which he had been reduced, and of the peace which
he at last enjoyed, Jerome wrote : " Your best course
would be to leave all and come to the East, especially
the Holy Land, for here all is tranquil. Doubtless
the hearts of the heretics are still filled with venom,
but they dare not open their impious mouths, and
are like asps who stop their ears so as to hear
nothing. . . . Our house, as far as temporal goods
are concerned, has been shaken to its very founda-
tion by the violence of the heretics, but thanks to
Christ it abounds in spiritual blessings, and it is
better to have nought but bread to eat than to lose
one's Faith.' " 3
No mention has yet been made of Jerome's last
scriptural work, his commentary upon Jeremiah,
1 Epist. cxxxvii. 2 Epist. cxxxvii. ad Riparium.
8 Epist. cxxxix. ad Apronium.
HIS LAST ORDEALS 139
which was frequently interrupted by the Pelagian
persecution, and of which he only finished thirty-
three chapters. He was growing weak and fast
losing his hold upon life. He could scarcely speak,
and was obliged to lift himself upon his wretched
pallet by the aid of a rope when he wished to give
instructions to his monks.
A supreme trial was reserved for the evening of
Jerome's life. In the course of the year 418, Eusto-
chium, at the age of fifty, thirty-four years of which
had been spent in the convent of Bethlehem, fell
asleep in the Lord. As Jerome wrote to his friends
in Africa, Alypius and Augustine, such a sorrow
caused him to disdain the outrageous writings of
Anianus, the Pelagian. Providence, however, had
not left him alone in his affliction, for the youth-
ful Paula, whom he loved as if she had been his
grandchild, was by his side. " This," said Thierry,
"was the third generation of women which the
most illustrious of the great Roman houses had
sent to the Dalmatian priest to be to him a
guardian angel in the desert ; this last was the
angel who ministered to him upon his death-
bed." 1 A handful of people which the course of
events had led from Rome to Hippo and from
Hippo into Palestine, namely, Pinianus, his mother
Albina, and his wife Melania, the heiress of a
famous name, also surrounded the aged Saint with
pious cares. Jerome passed away, close to the
cave of the Nativity, on the 30th of September
420, leaving, we are told, the direction of his
1 St Jerome, Book xii.
140 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
monastery to Eusebius of Cremona, and bequeath-
ing to the entire Church immortal examples and
immortal works.
There is no saint who lends himself less easily
to legend than does Jerome, for his whole life is
known to us ; his works and his letters enable us
to follow him through most of it; yet legend has
fastened upon him. Should this cause astonish-
ment or dissatisfaction ? Legend was an homage
which memory and popular imagination rendered
to a man whose moral stature surpassed all
ordinary proportions. Of the facts which legend
has embroidered upon the austere woof of a simple
and laborious existence I will mention but one the
incident of the wounded lion whom Jerome healed,
and who became the guardian of the monks of
Bethlehem and assisted them in their rustic labours.
This lion, who must be closely related to the wolf
tamed by St Francis of Assisi, has escorted, if I
may so express it, the hermit throughout many
centuries, has served him as a symbol, and appears
stretched at the feet of the dying Saint in Domeni-
chino's picture.
But, after all, like many other symbols, it has a
foundation of truth ; the generations of artists whc
have depicted the bishop of Hippo clasping in his
hand the heart which, when finally weaned from
unworthy affections, steadfastly adored the truth,
were as justified in so doing as in giving Jerome
the lion as symbol. None of the Fathers of the
Church has better exemplified the characteristics
of this noble animal such as they are described to
HIS LAST ORDEALS 141
us in natural history, in fables or in poetry. Jerome
was intrepid and generous ; he faced his adversaries
without pausing to count their number or to measure
their strength ; and if at times a mighty roaring
escaped him, it was the cry of a soul devoted to
and desirous of truth alone ; and if he were subject
to violent outbreaks of wrath, his anger was often
the anger of love.
THE WORKS AND THE
TEACHINGS OF ST JEROME
CHAPTER I
THE WORKS OF ST JEROME
R readers are by this time familiar with the
works and the teachings of St Jerome, for it
would be well-nigh impossible to write the life of
this great man without making frequent quotations
from the pages in which he has given us a most
life-like and sincere portrait of himself, and the
narrative of his life would indeed be incomplete
were the doctrines and doctrinal controversies which
so largely filled it, passed over in silence.
Jerome was before all, and therein lies his prin-
cipal claim to fame, the commentator and translator
of religious literature. It has already been men-
tioned, and it will be sufficient to recall the fact,
that the whole of the New Testament and all the
protocanonical books of the Old Testament, that is
to say those which belonged to the Jewish Canon,
and of which the sacred character had never been
questioned, underwent revision or translation at his
learned hands. Of the deuterocanonical portions of
the Old Testament, the portions which were the
MS
144 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
object of suspicions shared by Jerome but definitely
removed at the Council of Trent, he only translated
the books of Tobias and Judith, and the disputed
passages of Daniel and Esther.
Jerome's reverend love for Holy Writ did not
recognise individual fancy or private judgment as
having any right to interpret it : he considered that
the authority which guarded it should also expound
it. " When Philip asked the man of Ethiopia, the
Eunuch of great authority under Queen Candace
who was reading the works of the prophet Isaiah:
Understandest thou what thou readest ? he an-
swered, how can I except some man should guide
me? As for me, if I may be allowed to speak of
myself, I say that I am no more of a saint or no
more zealous than this stranger who, leaving his
Sovereign's court, had journeyed to the Temple
from the remotest part of Ethiopia ; who loved the
divine laws and teachings to the point of reading
the Scriptures in his chariot; but who, although
absorbed in meditating and repeating the oracles
of the Lord, still ignored Him whom, without
recognising, he worshipped in the Holy Bible.
Philip came and revealed to him Jesus concealed
in the Scriptures as if under the rind of a tree.
The Ethiopian was instantly convinced, he was
baptised, became a believer and a saint, and from
having been a disciple became a doctor. He learned
more from the solitary spring into which the Church
immersed him, than he had learned under the gilded
canopies of the synagogue." l
1 Epist. liii. ad Paulinum, 5.
THE WORKS OF SAINT JEROME 145
In a letter to Pammachius, Jerome, the translator
of the Holy Scriptures, expressed his ideas upon the
proper manner of translating. He frankly confessed,
justifying himself by the example of Cicero and
Terence and by Horace's precepts, that when
translating Greek works into Latin, he did not
bind himself to be scrupulously literal ; his desire
was faithfully to render the authors' thoughts, and,
when he considered it necessary, adapt the forms
and figures of speech which they employed to the
character of his own language. From this rule, how-
ever, which Jerome had established for his own use, he
excepted the translation of the Scriptures in which he
said " there is some mystery even in the very order ol
the words " (Ubi et verborum ordo mysterium est) 1 .
Of the language and the style employed in the
hieronymian version of the Bible, Villemain said
and we cannot do better than to repeat his able and
just words upon the subject, that "human language
has never received a more violent shock than in this
sudden outbreak of the thoughts of the prophets
and biblical hyperbole into the idiom of Cicero.
The result is indeed unique, partly owing to the
literal translation which introduces such strange
forms into the Roman tongue, and partly because
of the coined words with which the learned hermit
of Bethlehem was inspired by his zeal and by his
efforts to emulate the text."
In the course of this biographical sketch, mention
has been made of Jerome's biblical commentaries
which, with the exception of the later ones, he has
1 Epist. Ivii. ad Pammachium.
K9
146 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
himself enumerated in the last chapter of his " De
Viris Illustribus."
" It may truly be said," wrote Richard Simon, a
critic against whose true worth we must not allow
ourselves to be prejudiced by his irreverence, and
his, at times, excessive audacity, " that in his know-
ledge of Hebrew, Chaldean, Greek and Latin, Jerome
possessed the necessary qualities for properly inter-
preting the Scriptures in a greater degree than all
the other Fathers. Not only had he read and
examined the Greek versions in Origen's Hexapla,'
but he had also frequently conferred with the most
erudite Jews of his day, and he rarely took any steps in
his scriptural work without first consulting them. In
addition to this he had read every author, both Greek
and Latin, who had written upon the Bible before him,
and finally, he was well versed in profane literature. .
" Jerome's best method was the one which he
employed in compiling his Commentaries upon the
books of the Prophets, in which he first gave the
ancient Latin version then in usage, adding to it
a new one which he had made from the Hebrew text ;
he then compared the ancient Greek versions in his
Commentaries so as to better understand the value
of the Hebrew words. . . . Indeed we have no author
from whom we may better gather the literal meaning
than from Jerome. . . . No author who can instruct
us more thoroughly in the criticism of the holy books
than do the works of this Father. . . ." l
Jerome did not only expound the Bible in the
biblical commentaries which he has left us, but
1 Critical History of the Old Testament, Book iii. chap. 9.
THE WORKS OF SAINT JEROME 147
many of his letters are of an exegetical character.
In letters written to the Pope Damasus, to Evan-
gelus and Dardanus, and to many monks and women
who without personally knowing him turned towards
him from the different standpoints of Christianity,
craving his instructions, Jerome strove to solve the
difficulties submitted to him, and to conciliate the
diversities and the apparent contradictions in the
sacred story.
Jerome was skilled in polemic as well as in exegesis
and criticism. His treatises against Helvidius,
Jovinianus and Vigilantius, his dialogue against the
disciples of Lucifer of Cagliari, his answers to John
of Jerusalem, and his dialogue against the Pelagians,
are all examples of his polemical writings.
In these hostile works, which contain passages of
great eloquence, but which are by no means free
from faults, Jerome's fiery spirit had full play.
Jerome's great strength lay in the fact that he
maintained against his adversaries the position of a
steadfast champion of tradition, a field which he
knew well, and upon which, like Bossuet in later
years, he was thoroughly in his element.
With what precision and with what a masterly
touch did the bishop of Meaux quote, summarise,
and judge his illustrious predecessors, the Fathers
whose imposing tradition he has continued. Jerome
also, had studied his predecessors, and knew how to
characterise them. He enumerated them in a letter
to Magnus, the orator, beginning with the Greeks.
Quadratus, a disciple of the Apostles, and bishop of
Athens, who had offered an apology of the Christian
148 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
religion to the Emperor Hadrian, and whose alert and
inquisitive mind had led him to Eleusis ; the eloquent
Aristides, another who had defended Christianity be-
fore the same prince of justice; Meliton of Sardis ;
Apollinaris of Hierapolis ; Denis of Corinth, and
Irenasus of Lyons, the historian of the early
heresies. Jerome also mentioned Origen ; the
Roman senator Apollonius, whose eloquent apology
has been found in the present century; Julius
Africanus ; Gregory Thaumaturgus ; Denis of Alex-
andria ; Anatole of Laodicea ; the priest Pamphilus,
Pierus, Lucian, Malchion, Eusebius of Emesa;
Triphilus of Cyprus; Asterius of Scythopolis; the
venerable confessor Serapion and the illustrious
Cappadocians, Gregory, Basil and Amphilochus. 1
. . . Then follow the Latins : " Tertullian, whose
Apologetica and whose works against the nations
are a reservoir of secular knowledge ; Minucius
Felix, a Roman lawyer, who in his ' Octavius ' and
in his book against the astrologers (providing the
title of this last work is correct) has touched
upon all the works of pagan literature, ' either to
make use of or to refute.'" . . . "The blessed
Cyprian resembles a pure spring from which
well sweet and tranquil waters." . . . The language
of Victorinus, who received the martyr's crown,
did not do justice to his thoughts. Lactantius
recalls to me the flood of Ciceronian eloquence.
Would to God he had established our beliefs as effec-
tually as he destroyed the adverse heresies. Arnobus
is unequal and exaggerated ; a faulty arrangement
1 Epist. Ixx. ad Magnum Oratorem Urbis Romae, 4.
THE WORKS OF SAINT JEROME 149
renders his work confused. St Hilarion speaks in
obsolete heroics ; the flowers of Greek rhetoric with
which he adorns his style, the long periods in which
he envelopes it, renders it almost unintelligible to the
unlearned reader. . . . J
In the reign of the Emperor Constans the priest
Juvencus wrote the history of our Lord in verse, and
did not shrink from subjecting the majesty of the
Gospel to the laws of metre. 2
Jerome waged his war against the innovators,
attended by all these witnesses, and armed with
the resources they afforded him. He confronted
their audacious denials not only with positive texts,
but with the constant usage of the Church. Thus,
to Vigilantius, a scoffer at the cult of relics, he
showed the Roman Pontiff and all the bishops of
the world, offering the eucharistic sacrament upon
the tomb of the martyrs. He had, ere this, pleaded
the teachings and the traditional uses of the Church
to the partisans of Lucifer of Cagliari who, in their
fierce zeal, declared the bishops who had signed the
inadequate formula of Rimini to have irrevocably
forfeited the right to discharge their duties, and
reiterated the baptism conferred by the heretics.
Wiser and more merciful than the sectarians, who
under various titles Novatians, Montanists,
Donatists, Luciferans strove to enclose within
narrow limits a society intended to embrace the
whole of humanity and the entire world, the Church
by her councils and her numerous acts has con-
stantly offered pardon to repentant heretics, and has
1 Epist. Iviii. ad Paulinum, 10. 8 Epist. ad Magnum, 5.
150 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
frequently restored to their hierarchial rank, bishops
who had been momentarily led into heresy or con-
strained by violence. To the sophism of the deacon
Hilarion, who had pertinaciously defended re-baptism,
Jerome opposed from preference the custom of the
Roman Church, as being more decisive than the
contrary attempts of distinguished and saintly
adversaries. "Cyprian sought to avoid polluted
springs and untried waters; so as further to
separate himself from them he condemned the
baptism of heretics, and sent to Stephen the Pope,
and the twenty-second successor of St Peter, the
decree passed upon the subject by the Council of
Africa. Cyprian's effort was fruitless. Later, the
same bishops who, with the bishops of Carthage,
unanimously had decreed the re-baptism of heretics,
having reverted to the ancient custom, passed a
fresh decree." 1 Other Popes, Julius, Mark and
Sylvester upheld in their turn this baptismal discip-
line, and the Council of Nicea solemnly proclaimed it.
Does not Jerome at times exceed in his polemical
writings, does one not find in them cutting person-
alities, cunning arguments and pleasantries, which
the austere good taste of a Bossuet or a Fenelon
would have shrunk from ? Did he not wish some-
times to prove too much, and for this very reason
did he not succeed in provoking doubt and
opposition ?
The treatise written against Jovinianus, a traducer
of Christian virginity, aroused much criticism even
during the lifetime of its author, Jerome was accused
1 Dial, adversus Luciferianos,
THE WORKS OF SAINT JEROME 151
of having been too vehement in his depreciation of
matrimony. Perhaps the picture which he drew of
women towards the end of the first book, may remind
the pertinacious student of the seventeenth century,
too much of Boileau's famous satire, in which are
mingled both the enfeebled inspiration of Juvenal
and the accents of a sorrowful old age, and which
Bossuet, although a friend of the poet's, censured
so severely. . . . This man has taken upon himselt
to blame women ; he seems regardless as to whether
he condemn marriage and estrange from it those to
whom it was given as a remedy. . . . x But there
certainly is a wide gulf between the selfish, and after
all, fallacious and morose celibacy, which the satiric
poets lauded, and the devoted celibacy extolled by
Jerome. If Jerome, however, was at times unduly
influenced by his humour or disposition, if he painted
his picture of feminine faults and vices in too sombre
colours, the friend of Paula, Eustochium, Marcella,
and many other noble virgins and matrons personally
corrected the exaggerated character of his descrip-
tion in the enthusiastic eulogies he had shortly before
bestowed upon various historic or fabulous heroines.
As to the contempt for the marriage tie with which
Jerome was accredited, he exonerated himself upon
this point in an apologetic letter to Pammachius, in
which he recalled that in the incriminated treatise
he had proclaimed the legitimacy of marriage, and
that he had steered an even course between the
Jews and the Gentiles, who did not understand the
virtue of perfect continence, and the Oriential sects,
1 Treatise upon Concupiscence, chap. viii.
152 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
whose false spiritualism condemned all union between
the sexes.
" As, cautious traveller, I warned my reader
at almost every step that I regarded matrimony
as lawful, although preferring the continence of
widows and virgins to the married state, a wise
and kindly reader would have interpreted those
of my assertions which seemed to him unduly
severe, by the context, and would not have accused
me of having advanced contrary opinions in the
same work. Does any writer exist, so stupid or
so ignorant of his art, as to praise and censure
the same thing, as to destroy that which he had
built so as to rebuild that which he had destroyed,
and after having triumphed over his enemy to
pierce himself with his own sword ? " l Jerome, more-
over, as he frequently asserted, merely repeated the
teachings of his predecessors. And the polemical
writer, confident in a doctrine which he had not
originated, but which he had received, turned upon
his adversaries in tones of vengeful irony. " Execrable
crime," he cried, " the churches are ruined, the
entire world has stopped its ears, so as not to hear
me, because I have declared virginity to be more
holy than matrimony." Jerome terminated his
defence with an humble allusion to his past.
" Finally, I protest that I have never condemned
marriage that I do not condemn it. I answered
my adversary (Jovinianus), I have not feared the
pitfalls which my own people might lay for me. I
extol virginity to the skies, not that I possess it, but
1 Epist. xlviii. ad Pammachium, 12.
THE WORKS OF SAINT JEROME 153
because I admire above all a blessing which is no
longer mine. To praise in others that wherein one is
oneself deficient is a sincere and discreet avowal. The
weight of my body holds me down upon the earth ; is
that a reason to admire the flight of the birds any the
less ? Should I not praise the dove which swiftly
traverses space without even stirring its wings ? "
The controversialist whom we have been studying
frequently executed the work of an historian, for
which he was fitted, to a certain extent at least, by
his vast and accurate memory, and by his taste for
erudite researches, and for which the eloquence
with which he was naturally gifted did not disqualify
him ; who could complain of Sallust and Tacitus
having been eloquent ? Many pages from history are
to be found in Jerome's polemical treatises ; take,
for instance, the description of the Council of Rimini
and the narrative of the events which followed.
" The ship of the apostles was in jeopardy, the
tempest raged, the waves beat incessantly upon
the sides of the boat. The Lord awoke and rebuked
the wind and the raging of the waters ; the monster
(Constans) dies, and calm is restored. Through
the indulgence of the new prince (Julian) all the
bishops who had been banished from their sees are
restored to their churches. Then did Egypt re-
ceive Athanasius as a conqueror, then did the
church of Gaul greet Hilarion returning from the
battle-field, with loud acclamations. At the return of
Eusebius, bishop of Vercelli, Italy cast aside her
mourning garments." l Jerome, the painter of this
Dialog, adversus Luciferianos, 19.
154 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
vivid picture, had planned a task of the same nature
as that of Eusebius of Caesarea. " I purpose," he
says in the beginning of his " Life of St Malchus,"
" provided that God grant me the necessary time,
and that my censors cease from persecuting a fugi-
tive and a recluse, I purpose to relate how, and with
the help of what men, from our Lord's advent up to
the present day, the Church of Christ was born and
developed. How it waxed mighty under persecu-
tion, and how it was crowned by martyrdom ; how
also when the emperors became Christian it lost in
virtue what it had gained in wealth and in power." l
Stern words to which many other ecclesiastical
writers to whom the evils of their day were forcibly
brought home have given utterance. After all, per-
secution, creating as it does formidable perils for the
weak, who form the majority, is not the Church's
normal condition. Surely the society instituted and
governed by Jesus Christ is sufficiently strong
history has proved it to face and to pass through,
producing saints the while, the test of prosperity.
Jerome did not carry out his scheme, neither did
he translate the Ecclesiastical History by Eusebius,
which in handing down the story of the glorious
sources of its origin has preserved for Christianity
its titles of nobility. We owe to Jerome, however,
the version of another of the Bishop of Csesarea's
works, namely the " Chronicle," the original of which
has perished. Besides completing the somewhat
meagre portions concerning Roman history, the
translator continued this work from the twentieth
1 Vita Malchi monachi captivi.
THE WORKS OF SAINT JEROME 155
year of the reign of (kmstantine until the death of
the Emperor Valens in 378.
This work, which in spite of its breaks and inaccu-
racies rendered great service during many years,
dates from 388. A few years later, in 392, Jerome
wrote his " De Viris Illustribus," which is the title
he himself gave it, 1 although he has acknowledged
that he should rather have entitled it " De Scrip-
toribus Ecclesiasticis." 2 This latter would perhaps
have been a more appropriate title to a work in
whose 135 chapters, according to the request of
Dexter, the prefect of the Praetorium, are drawn up a
catalogue of authors, all of whom, with the exception of
Philo and Seneca, were Christians. Jerome even pro-
fessed to discover disciples of Christianity in the Jew
Alexandrinus and in the Spanish philosopher. A few
heretics were also mentioned. Jerome began his list
with the name of St Peter the Apostle, he closed it with
his own. " I placed myself at the end of the volume,"
he wrote, " even I, a wretched abortion and the very
last among Christians, and I deemed it necessary
briefly to indicate all the works written by me up till
the fourteenth year of the reign of Theodosius." 3
One may criticise this book in which Athenagoras,
the apologist, receives no mention, and where con-
ciseness too frequently degenerates into dryness,
yet in it some of Jerome's most eminent qualities
are displayed. Evidences of his critical talent are
discernible in his refusal to recognise the style of
1 Epist. xlvii. ad Desiderium, 3.
a Epist. cxii. ad Augustinum, 3.
8 Epist. xlvii. ad Desiderium, 3.
156 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
Minucius Felix in the treatise " De Fato," which was
ascribed to the polished author of the Octavius.
This work of Jerome's obtained a lasting success.
Ebert says that " It serves as a foundation to later
writers, and however imperfect it may be, it has
none the less remained to us as an evidence of its
author's immense erudition, and in many respects
as a unique source of history and literature." l
Jerome has left us the biography of three hermits ;
we will first mention that of St Paul, the institutor
of the eremitical life, described to us by Monta-
lembert, who took this passage in his eloquent
summary from Jerome : " Discovered by Anthony
in his cave, overshadowed by the palm-tree which
afforded him food and raiment, he offered him the
hospitality which has been so often recorded in
history and sung in verse, and died, bequeathing
him the tunic of palm-leaves in which Anthony
arrayed himself upon Easter Day and at Whitsun-
tide as with the armour of a hero who had passed
away at the very moment of victory." 2
It may be remembered that Jerome met, in the
vicinity of Antioch, the monk Malchus, and it was
from the mouth of this aged man who had at last
entered upon the peace of the desert, that he heard
the narrative of the strange adventures of which his
biography is composed. The life of St Hilarion,
which was also drawn from an oral source as well
as from written documents a letter from St
1 6bert. General history of the literature of the Middle Ages
in Europe. Book ii., St Jerome.
a The Monks of the West. Book i. to vi.
THE WORKS OF SAINT JEROME 157
Epiphanius is mentioned in the first chapter
covers more ground than the two other biographies.
The ascetic of Bethlehem seems to have delighted
in glorifying his daring contemporary who introduced
monasticism into Palestine ; he relates his penances
and miracles; he follows him in his journeys to
Egypt and Sicily, to the Island of Cyprus, where
Hilarion expired at the age of eighty, addressing the
following joyful exhortation to his soul : " Speed
forth, oh my soul, what fearest thou ? After serving
Christ for nigh upon seventy years wouldst thou
shrink affrighted from death ? " l
In this cursory review of the works of St Jerome,
his letters, which have however been freely and
frequently quoted, and whose ample and attractive
matter would well repay study, have not yet been
mentioned. M. Ebert has divided these letters into
six categories. First, those in which Jerome relates
incidents of his own life and of the life of others,
then what the Saint termed consolatory letters,
" Scripsi consolatoriam (epistolam) de morte filiae
ad Paulam"; funeral orations (Epitaphia) ; letters
of exhortation (the title is Jerome's) ; polemical
apologetic letters in which the author both defends
and attacks ; and finally the didactic letters, such as
the fifty-seventh letter to Pammachius, in which
last class M. Ebert includes the exegetical letters.
" St Jerome," says this author, " first gave the
true model of the modern epistolary style; his
individuality never revealed itself under more
remarkable and varied aspects than in his corres-
1 Vita Sancti Hilarionis Eremitae, 45.
158 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
pondence. The collection of his letters was the
delight of the Middle Ages, the world at the time
of the Reformation still revelled in them." l
Erasmus, an ardent admirer of St Jerome, whose
command of language he had the temerity to compare
with that of Cicero, was one of the most enthusiastic
panegyrists of this correspondence, which he would
willingly have commentated. " Flagrat jam olim
mihi incredibili ardore animus Hieronymianas
Epistolas Commentario illustrandi," he wrote.
The eminent humanist exceeded all limits when
in his reaction against the scholastic he com-
plained of the sensation which Albert the Great
and Duns Scotus, for whom we are more just
than he, were creating in the schools. (Scotus,
Albertus et his impolitiores auctores omnibus in
scholis perstrepent.") But he was fully justified
when he pleaded that the hermit of Bethlehem
should also be listened to, and when he demanded
that the eloquent defender of the teachings of
Christianity should be accorded a prominent place.
Jerome's letters afford us pleasure for the same
reason that they delighted our forbears. We see
the scenes which they put before us, for example
the description of the invasion of the Huns, in a
letter to Oceanus, Fabiola's funeral oration ; in
another letter, the picture of the desert island
whither Bonosus, the friend of his younger days,
had retired. " Bonosus," he wrote to Rufinus,
with whom he was then still on affectionate terms,
1 History of the literature of the Middle Ages in Europe
Book ii., St Jerome.
THE WORKS OF SAINT JEROME 159
"thy friend and mine is ascending the prophetic
ladder of Jacob's dream, he bears his cross, gives
no thought to the morrow, and looks not backward.
He sows in tears so that he may reap in joy. . . .
The truth of such a miracle surpasses all the
wonders invented by the poets of Greece and
Rome. A youth of honourable family, who re-
ceived the same literary education as you and I,
distinguished among his contemporaries by reason
of his rank and wealth, abandons his mother, his
sisters, and a tenderly cherished brother, to land upon
an island, upon whose shores, fertile in shipwreck,
the sounding waves expend their fury, and which
presents nought to the eye but jagged rocks and
barren deserts. He at once establishes himself as
though in a Paradise. No labourer, no monk, not
even the young Onesimus, whom thou knowest,
and whom he loved like a brother, shares his
solitude in this vast wilderness. He is alone, or
rather he is not alone, for Christ is with him,
and he contemplates the glory of God which the
apostles saw only in the desert. He discovers no
tower-strengthened towns, but he has caused his
name to be inscribed upon the roll of the new and
eternal city. His limbs shiver under a wretched
hair shirt, but thus arrayed he will the sooner
penetrate the clouds and meet his Christ. He
cannot hearken to the flow of pleasant fountains,
but he drinks the waters which gush from the
Saviour's side. ... An angry sea moans about
the island, and the waves break with a crash upon
its treacherous reefs. On land there is no verdure,
160 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
no luxuriant foliage casting shade upon the fields.
Rocks stand sentinel upon every side, and the island
is as if imprisoned. But Bonosus, calm, intrepid,
guided with the arms of which the apostle has spoken,
in his constant perusal of the Holy Scriptures, dis-
cerns the voice of God, and communes with Him
in his prayers ; perhaps some vision may appear to
him upon his rock-bound island, as it did to John,
when relegated to Patmos." l
Like our predecessors we read in these letters,
which date from 370 to 419, the annals of half a
century, and as M. Ebert observes, "we find in
them a most interesting portrait-gallery, and a
picture, which from the point of view of the
civilisation of that epoch is invaluable." In these
letters a procession of personages, some famous,
others obscure, continually pass before us ; an allu-
sion to a few of them would not be amiss. With-
out mentioning those women, Paula, Eustochium,
Marcella, and many others who were valiant even
unto heroism, and who form such an incomparable
escort to Jerome's name in history, notable among
his correspondents were Pope Damasus, Augustine
of Hippo, Chromatius of Aquilea, Heliodorus, and
Paulinus of Nola, whom Jerome, in an eloquent
letter, exhorted to the study of the holy works,
saying : " I ask you, beloved brother, to live in
the midst of all these things" (revealed to us by
the Scriptures) "to meditate upon them, to know
and to seek nought else ; does it not seem as if this
were beginning here below the life of heaven ? Do
1 Epist. iii. ad Rufinum Monachum.
THE WORKS OF SAINT JEROME 161
not take exception to the simplicity of the Scriptures
and to the unpolished language, which betokens either
a mistake of the translator or the intention of the
pious author, who wished to make himself understood
by the vulgar, and in the same discourse instruct
both the learned and the ignorant. I do not flatter
myself that I understand everything in the Scriptures,
and that I am able to gather upon this terrestrial plane
the fruits of a tree whose roots are in heaven ; still
1 confess it is this for which I yearn. To one who has
not yet begun to walk I offer myself, not as a master
but as a companion ; to him who asks is given, to him
who knocks is opened, he who seeks finds. Let us
acquire upon earth, knowledge which will stand us
in good stead in heaven." l
In another letter Jerome, after having praised the
learning and the talent of Paulinus, again said to
him: "To this learning, to this eloquence, add the
study and understanding of the Scriptures and thou
wilt soon surpass us all. Gird, then, I beg of thee,
thy loins for toil, for life gives nothing to mortals
except at the cost of arduous labour. Be illustrious
in the Church as thou wert in the Senate. Amass
spiritual treasures which thou canst daily pour forth.
May these spiritual riches never fail thee now that
thou art in the prime of life, and may thy hair not
yet grow white. ... In thee nothing mediocre will
content me : to see thee in the foremost rank ; to
see thee perfect, is my ambition." 2
These letters, in which fifty years of political and
religious history are vividly revived, and which evoke
1 Epist. liii. 9. 2 Epist. Iviii. ad Paulinum ji.
162 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
so many and such varied characters, are interesting
in still another respect, namely, in the fact that they
reveal Jerome to us, better than any of his other
works. A correspondence is generally the true
portrait and history of a soul, and when this soul
has been a noble one, when to express noble senti-
ments it has found eloquence, we can but delight in
reading the history and in contemplating the por-
trait which it has left us of itself in the pages of a
correspondence frequently written from day to day.
That is why we revert with pleasure to Jerome's
letters, at least to certain of Jerome's letters. That
also is the secret of the fascination which St Augus-
tine's correspondence exercises over those who have
once tasted of its living fountains, which give forth
both tenderness and doctrine. We experience a
similar and even more penetrating charm, for we
are on more familiar ground, when we reopen the
correspondence of Father Lacordaire, especially the
letters to Madame Swetchine, from those written in
anxious and troublous times to the letter dated the
30th of September 1856, in which we see the re-
storer of the Dominican Order in France in the
serene glory of twilight, " like an aged lion who has
journeyed in the deserts, and who, in majestic
repose, contemplates with a somewhat melancholy
air the sea and its waves."
The lion recalls us to St Jerome, whose doctrine
we have still to briefly expound, although it is always
a matter of some doubt whether in the proper ac-
ceptation of the word St Jerome may be said to
have had a doctrine,
CHAPTER II
THE DOCTRINE OF ST JEROME
A S the word is applied to the teachings of St
** Anselm and St Thomas, or to those of St
Augustine, Jerome had no doctrine. The bishop
of Hippo, his contemporary, broached, either to ex-
pose or to defend them, almost every point of revealed
doctrine, several of which he presented synthetically ;
he essayed explanations and opened points of view
of every description, leaving them as an inheritance
to his successors, and thus justifying the remark
of Charles de Remusat, an able historian who
wrote : " One can scarcely realise to what an ex-
tent this great mind, so cultivated and so polished,
has furnished ideas and studies to the scholars of
our own times " (the eleventh and twelfth centuries).
" Before ascribing the invention of a system or the
understanding of an ancient thought to any of them,
one should first ascertain that St Augustine has
said nothing upon the subject." 1
All these masters, St Bonaventura, St Thomas, St
Anselm, and St Augustine before them, were the
mighty architects of the doctrinal development and
dogmatic progress of which I have said elsewhere
my readers must pardon me if I quote my own words :
1 St Anselm, p. 476.
163
164 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
" Not only did theological language gain greater pre-
cision and acquire a delicacy, firmness, and vigour
which satisfy the subtlest requirements of the
Christian soul and disconcert and refute all the
presumptions of heresy ; not only are the data of the
Revelation successively divulged, thanks especially
to the infallible authority which, to quote the words
of St Vincent of Lerins, completes the unfinished
passages, consolidates and confirms what is already
expressed, and retains with loving care what is already
confirmed and defined. But the catholic intellect
penetrates still further into the essence of revealed
dogma, gains greater insight into its beauties, and
the better grasps its harmonious proportions and its
relations to the doctrinal whole, as well as to the
aspirations of human nature; finally, following the
example of doctors too great to be accused of
temerity, it strives to discover and if possible to make
manifest its most hidden meaning. As St Anselm said :
' It is faith seeking, and frequently meeting, intellect.' " l
It is true that one must not expect from Jerome
either a synthetic exposition of doctrine, or views
which treat of profound dogmatical subjects. It
would be a more difficult task to write a theology of
St Jerome than a theology of St Anselm, St Thomas
or St Bonaventura.
It is possible, however, to gather and to recapitu-
late the doctrine scattered among the works of the
great anchorite. This has been done by Dom Remy
Ceillier, the author of the " General History of
Ecclesiastical and Sacred Writers," who, step by step,
1 Conferences upon the faith, p. 316, 317.
THE DOCTRINE OF SAINT JEROME 165
follows Jerome upon every point of Catholic teach-
ing, first setting forth his views upon the inspiration
and the canon of the Scriptures. He acknowledges
that the learned exegete did not consider those
books of the ancient Testament which do not figure
in the Jewish canon, as inspired. It has already
been said that the Church pronounced to the con-
trary, and the decree of Trent not to mention the
decrees of the council of Hippo and Carthage,
and the letter of the pope, St Innocent I., to St
Exuperus of Toulouse fixed in its catalogue the
position of the books which Jerome had doubted.
The hesitations and even the denials of a doctor, no
matter how famous he may have been, will never
shake the faith of a Catholic. Doubtless should the
faithful wish to assure themselves of the truth of
our beliefs, more especially should they wish to
defend it, they will search the monuments of the
past and discover in the works of the fathers, even
the most ancient, not only the dogma of an infallible
Church which embraces all other tenets, but a
startling manifestation of many other dogmas, such
as, for example, that of the Eucharist. They will
convince themselves that whatever may have been
the divergences of certain churches upon certain
questions, moral universality was never the character
of the sentiments opposed to those which were later
to be defined. And as the authority of an ever-
living Church is the guiding rule of their faith, they
will not be astonished, still less scandalised, by the
divergences which their studies will have disclosed
to them ; they will believe in the validity of baptism
166 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
conferred by heretics, in spite of the protests of St
Cyprian ; and in spite of St Jerome's doubts, they
will believe in the inspiration of the deuterocanoni-
cal books of the Old Testament. It is curious tc
notice how often the traditional and Catholic mean-
ing has triumphed in Jerome's mind and in his
speech over the objections of the critic. " He
frequently employed the deuterocanonical books,"
wrote the Abbe Tronchon, "he called the book of
Ecclesiasticus a Divine writing. . . . He quotes the
book of Wisdom as scripture, and uses it with other
texts of the protocanonical works as having an equal
value. In his commentaries upon the Epistle to the
Galatians, he quotes in succession a verse from the
book of Wisdom, one from the Epistle to the Romans,
one from the first Epistle to the Corinthians, and
a deuterocanonical verse from Daniel. . . . He
employs the testimony of the deuterocanonical parts
of Daniel, which he cites as belonging to this
prophet's book, in his refutation of the Pelagians,
and explains the meaning of the passages which the
latter were doing their best to render obscure. In
his commentary upon the prophet Nahum he proved
by another deuterocanonical verse from Daniel, and
upon the authority of Ezekiel, that Israel was called
the race of Canaan, because of her crimes." l
As to the books of the New Testament, Jerome
held as inspired those, which in spite of partial and
temporary doubts, tradition has declared to be such,
and which the Church has inscribed upon its canon.
Interested in all the works which, apart from cur-
1 The Holy Bible. General Introduction, 3rd part, p. 149.
THE DOCTRINE OF SAINT JEROME 167
rent tradition, were the growth of popular memory
and imagination, always so easily imposed upon,
Jerome made a translation, no longer extant, of the
Aramean Gospel according to the Jews which Remy
Ceillier believed to be an alteration of the first
gospel, although Mr Harnack declares that its
author had never heard of St Matthew or of St
Luke. Jerome was careful not to compare this
gospel, of which his writings have preserved us a few
extracts, with our canonical gospel.
He countenanced the Epistle which bears the name
of St Barnabas, and the " Shepherd " of Hermas, but
sternly condemned apocryphal works such as the
Acts, the Gospel and the Apocalypse of Saint Peter,
one book of Ecclesiastes, and another of Judgment,
and also the journeys of St Paul and St Thecla.
As to the veracity of the Holy Books the
denial of which would also demolish the dogma
of Scriptural inspiration without entering upon a
delicate hermeneutical question, we will merely
repeat an opinion more than once expressed
by Jerome. Speaking of a text in Jeremiah,
he finds fault with the Septuagint for not having
given, as in the original, the title of prophet to
Hananiah, who was no prophet, " as if," he
argued, "there were not many things in the
Scriptures which were recorded according to the
opinion of the times, and not according to the
true state of things (quasi non multa in Scripturis
sanctis dicantur juxta opinionem illius temporis
quo gesta referuntur et non juxta quod rei veritas
continebat)." Jerome put the same construction
168 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
upon the 15th verse, of which the sacred text
ran thus : " The prophet Jeremiah said unto the
prophet Hananiah : Hear now, Hananiah : The
Lord hath not sent thee. . . . And the prophet
died (Et dixit Jeremias ad Hananiam prophetam :
Audi, Hanania: non misit te Dominus. . . . Et
Mortuus est propheta)." 1 Jerome observed that
the original Hebrew version persisted in calling
Hananiah prophet, and asked how the sacred
writer could have applied the name of prophet to
a man whom he denies having been sent by God
(" Quomodo enim prophetam poterat appellare quern
missum a Domino denegabat ? "). This is the context
of his answer : " As we have already said, the truth
and order of history was in this case preserved by
the transcription, not of the reality, but of the general
opinion of the times (. . . Historiae veritas et ordo
servatur, sicut praediximus, non juxta id quod erat,
sed juxta quod illo tempore putabatur)."
In another instance, speaking of the verse in St
Matthew, " and the King was sorry " (at the petition
of the daughter of Herodias, who asked for the head
of John the Baptist), Jerome, who did not believe
that Herod's grief was sincere, made this observa-
tion : " It was customary in the Scriptures, for the
historian to record the opinion of the majority, such
as it was then generally admitted (Consuetudinis
Scripturarum est opinionem multorum sic narret
historicus, quomodo eo tempore ab omnibus crede-
batur"). Exegetes and apologists of the present
day profess to have discovered in this opinion of a
1 xxviii. 10.
Father, considered by the Encyclical Providentissimus
Dens to be unequalled as an expounder of the Bible
(Hieronymus ... a singulari Bibliorum scientia
magnisque ad eorum usum laboribus nomine Doc-
toris maximi praeconio Ecclesiae est honestatus), a
principle of solution to the obstacles which, in the
name of history, are raised against certain Bibli-
cal facts. In the assertion of facts of a physical
order, the sacred writer frequently adjusted his
language to obvious appearances; a method taught
by St Augustine and St Thomas, and with supreme
authority by Pope Leo XIII.; why, therefore, should
we not believe that in the statement of facts con-
cerning history, the sacred writer occasionally spoke
from certain appearances which were equivalent to
obvious appearances ? Historical facts, when, as
is sometimes the case, handed down by an errone-
ous tradition founded upon deceptive appearances,
assume an aspect which does not correspond with
the reality ; but the populace, who have neither
the leisure nor the intellect necessary to reach the
bottom of things, holds by what strikes it, judging
from the outside, and forming its opinion and lan-
guage upon exterior evidences and appearances.
The exegetes and apologists who refer to St Jerome,
assert that it is quite permissible to record history
according to popular opinion, in a work intended not
for the historical but for the religious and moral in-
struction of the people, to record it, either indicating
the reference in the Scriptures to popular opinion as
in the verse from Jeremiah which has been lately
quoted (Et dixit Jeremias ad Hananiam. . . . Non
170 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
misit te Dominus), or even without any such indica-
tion, at least of an explicit character, as in the text
from St Matthew. It is no deception to oneself
or to others, in writing the current opinion, to give
only what one wishes of it, and in this manner of
writing there is nothing contrary to the infallibility
and plenary inspiration proclaimed in the Encyclical
of the 18th of November 1893.
We have dwelt at length upon St Jerome's
scriptural opinions, and must now proceed to the
examination of other doctrines professed by the illus-
trious recluse. It is scarcely necessary to prove that
upon all dogmas of which the Church preserves the
inalienable heritage natural dogmas which she has
restored, and supernatural dogmas which her apostles
revealed to the world Jerome professed an irre-
proachable doctrine. He believed in Providence, and
the apparent confusion of human affairs was power-
less to shake his soul's faith in a Paternity supremely
wise and supremely loving.
"A host of burning questions cause a tumult in
my soul," he cried, as he stood before the grave into
which Blesilla's corpse had just been lowered. " I
wonder why godless old age is permitted to enjoy
the advantages of the century; why innocent youth,
why sinless childhood are cut down in their budding
springtime; why children of two and three, new-born
babes still at the breast, are possessed by devils,
struck with leprosy or epilepsy, whilst the godless,
the adulterers, the homicides and the sacrilegious,
resplendent with health, blaspheme against God ?
Yet the iniquity of the father does not descend upon
THE DOCTRINE OP SAINT JEROME 171
the son ; only he who has sinned shall die. And
even if the ancient decree were still in existence,
does it not seem unjust that the son should expiate
the sins of the father? Does it not seem unjust that
the debts accumulated during a long life by a sinful
parent should be paid by a sinless child ? And I
said, ' It is then in vain that I have kept my heart
pure, and cleansed my hands amongst the innocent,
that I have been daily sore tormented, and that
every morning has brought me fresh trials and
afflictions ! ' ' Jerome, however, did not dwell long
upon these painful questions, to which so many weak
and troubled souls have found no answer but in re-
bellion; he hastened to add: "As these thoughts were
passing through my mind, I received this lesson from
the Prophet : l I had undertaken to penetrate these
mysteries, and until I had entered into God's sanctu-
ary and had seen what shall be the end of the wicked,
the burden of my task weighed heavily upon me. The
divine judgments are impenetrable. Oh, fathomless
treasure of the wisdom and knowledge of God. In-
scrutable are the decrees of the Lord, impenetrable
are His ways. God is good, therefore all His de-
crees must be good also. Should I suffer bereave-
ment through the death of a spouse, I would weep ;
but since God has so willed it, I would suffer with a
resigned heart. An only son is ravished from me :
the blow is a terrible one but I shall bear it bravely
for the God who took my son from me is the same
God who gave him to me. Should I become blind,
the reading of a friend shall be a consolation unto
1 Exod. xxxiv.
me. Should my ears, succumbing to deafness, fail
me, I shall the more easily abstain from sin, and
think but of God. Should dire poverty, cold, sick-
ness, nakedness, be my lot, I will await death as the
supreme end to my sufferings which, since they will
be replaced by ultimate bliss, I shall not consider
long. Let us not forget the lesson in this verse of
the Psalms 'Thou art just, O Lord, and thy judg-
ments are equitable.'
" Words like these can only be spoken by one who,
in the midst of tribulation, glorifies the Lord, and,
believing himself alone responsible for his adversities,
finds in them cause to glorify the Divine clemency.
. . . When in good health I devoutly thank the
Lord. In sickness I bless the divine will which has
subjected me to probation. ... In my weakness
I am strong, saith the apostle. The soul's vitality
is strengthened by the anguish of the flesh. Paul
in his sufferings cried upon God to succour him, but
God answered him : My grace is sufficient to thee,
for weakness fosters strength. To restrain the temp-
tation to pride which might have sprung from these
very revelations, a monitor was given to Paul to
remind him of human frailties, like the slave who
stood behind the victorious general upon his triumphal
chariot, and, in the midst of the acclamations of the
people, kept repeating to him, ' Remember that thou
art but human. . . . ' " 1
Jerome did not only testify to the truths and
mysteries of purely rational theodicy, upon which
revealed doctrine has thrown so much light, but he
1 Epist. xxxix., ad Paulam.
THE DOCTRINE OP SAINT JEROME 173
A r as also a staunch champion of dogmas of the super-
natural order. It is true that we should not expect
from him a treatise upon that most sublime mystery
of Christianity, the Trinity, like the masterly work
in which Augustine, in the prime of life and at the
height of his genius, united a doctrinal exposition,
which subsequent scholastic works have further speci-
fied, with ingenious explanatory essays founded upon
psychological observations. Still, is it necessary to
be a metaphysician or a psychologist to uphold the
Trinitarian dogma? "Who would be sacrilegious
enough," queried Jerome, "to maintain that there
are three substances in God ? There is in God one
unique nature which subsists veritably. For what
subsists veritably does not derive its being from else-
where, but possesses it in itself. All that is created
seems to be, but, in the full sense of the word, is not ;
for there was a time when things created were non-
existent, and that which has had a beginning may
also have an end. To God alone, who is eternal,
that is, who has had no beginning, may properly be
applied the name of essence. . . . Thus there is in
God one substance and three consubstantial persons,
perfect, equal and co-eternal. . . ." l
All things are one to the Father and to the Son.
A disciple of Gregory Nazianzen, Jerome professed
upon the third person of the Trinity the same doc-
trines as did his master. " All that appertains to the
Father and to the Son appertains also to the Holy
Ghost. When the Holy Ghost is sent, he is sent by
the Father and by the Son. In various parts of the
1 Epist. xv. ad Damasum Papam 4.
174 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
Scriptures he is called the Spirit of God the Father,
and the Spirit of Jesus Christ. This is why it is
written in the Acts of the Apostles, that those who
had only been baptised by John, and who believed
in God the Father and in Jesus Christ, but who
ignored the very existence of the Holy Ghost, were
baptised anew; and this second baptism was the
true one, for without the Holy Ghost there is no
Trinity." x
The texts in which Jerome asserted the Incarna-
tion of the Word, and in which he combated the
heresies which strove to divide the one and divine
person of Jesus Christ, were plentiful and decisive.
" Jesus Christ was crucified as man, He is glorified
as God. . . . We do not express ourselves thus,
being convinced that in Jesus Christ, other would be
the God, other would be the man. We do not intro-
duce two persons in the only Son of God as we are
accused of doing. In our Saviour's words there
are certain things which relate to the glory of His
divinity, and others which concern our salvation.
It was for us that He took upon Himself the form
and the nature of a slave, and forced Himself to
be obedient until death the death of the cross.
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among
us." 2
None have more vigorously supported the dogmas
of the divine maternity, and the perpetual virginity
of Mary, than Jerome, whose struggles against Helvi-
dius and Jovinianus are already known to us. Jerome
supported and defended the doctrines of free-will,
1 Epist. cxx. ad Hedibiam, cap. ix. 2 Ibid,
THE DOCTRINE OF SAINT JEROME 175
original sin, and divine mercy, and waged war
against all those who contested their veracity. His
last battle was fought against the Pelagians. Jerome
would not have permitted Ba'ius and Jansenius to
claim him as an ancestor any more than would have
his friend St Augustine. " God," he said, " has
ordained possible things, but it is not men who
render them possible. We are all dependent upon
God, and have need of His mercy." l
The relentless dogma of reprobation prior to the
prevision of sin, was odious to Jerome. " Do I
desire the death of a sinner," asked our Lord, " do
I not rather wish him to turn from his wickedness
and live ? For such is the will of God that all shall be
saved and come to the knowledge of the truth." 2
The number is too great of those who have perished
" because they have refused to believe and have
offended against the Holy Ghost. . . . God wished
to save all those who desired salvation, and has led
them to salvation so that they might by their own
will deserve the reward. ... It is not His fault if
some have been unwilling to believe. In coming into
the world His will was that all should believe and
save themselves." 3
Upon the sacraments which are the means of
grace, Jerome professed the same doctrine which
is taught in the Church. It is unnecessary to
repeat all that he has said in praise of the divine
institution of baptism, but we have quoted one of
1 Dialog, adversus Pelagianos. Lib. iii. 3.
2 Commentar in Ezechielem. Lib. v., cap. xviii., v. 23.
8 Commentar in Isaiam. Lib. xvii.
176 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
the many passages in his commentaries and in his
letters, in which he upholds the dogma of the actual
presence. In an epistle to Hedibia, who, from the
extremities of Gaul, had appealed to him for instruc-
tion, he wrote : " You ask how these words of our
Lord should be interpreted : Verily, I say unto you,
I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine until that
day that I drink it new with you in my Father's
kingdom. Upon this passage some people have
founded the fable of the millennium, during which
they pretend that Jesus Christ will reign in the flesh
upon the earth, and that He will drink of the wine
of which He had not drunk until then. . . . But let
us understand that the bread which the Lord broke
and gave to His disciples was the body of our
Lord and Saviour, as He assured His disciples when
He said to them, 'Take, eat, this is my body;
likewise the cup; Drink ye all of this, for this is
my blood of the New Testament, which is shed
for many. ..." If, therefore, the bread which de-
scended from heaven is the body of our Lord, and if
the wine which He gave to His disciples is the blood
of the New Testament which was shed for many, for
the remission of their sins, let us reject the Jewish
fables, and go up with the Lord into the guest
chamber ; let us there receive the cup of the New
Testament from His hands, make our Easter cele-
bration, and draw from the divine beverage a holy
rapture. ... It was not Moses who gave us the
Bread of Life, but Jesus Christ, who was both
the guest and the feast, who partook Himself,
and was partaken of. It is His blood which we
THE DOCTRINE OF SAINT JEROME 177
drink. . . ." l We should also read this passage from
a commentary upon St Paul, in which Jerome speaks
of the incomprehensible and bountiful mystery which
ever sustains the fruitful vitality of the Church.
" Between the show-bread (of the ancient law) and
the body of Christ, there is as great a difference as
between the shadow and the body, the image and
the reality, the symbols of future things and the
things themselves which the symbols represented.
And just as gentleness, temperance and disinter-
estedness should be the most prominent virtues of
a bishop, raising him above the laity, so also should
he possess chastity and, so to speak, sacerdotal
modesty, in order that the soul who administers
the body of Christ should not only abstain from
any act of impurity, but should also keep strict
guard over his thoughts and glance." 2
Jerome believed in sacrifice, as he did in the
Eucharistic sacrament. " It is the fruit of the true
vine which we daily press in our sacrifices," he wrote
to Hedibia. " Our mystery," he said again, " is typi-
fied in these words Thou art a priest for ever after
the order of Melchisedec ; we no longer immolate
victims who have lost their reason as did Aaron, but
we offer the bread and the wine, that is the body and
the blood of Christ." 3 It was at Jerome's sugges-
tion that Paula and Eustochium wrote to Marcella
from Bethlehem: "Turn back as far as Genesis
and you will see that the King of Salem ... in the
1 Epist. xx. ad Hedibiam.
2 Commentar. in Ep. ad Titum.
1 Commentar. in Ep. ad Titum.
M9
178 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
image of Christ, offered the bread and the wine,
and inaugurated the Christian sacrament of the
body and blood of the Lord." 1
Jerome also upheld the existence of a sacramental
rite which gives remission to sins committed after
baptism, and considered bishops and priests to be
the ministers of forgiveness. " God forbid," he
wrote to Heliodorus, " that I should speak ill of
priests. . . . They hold the keys to the kingdom
of heaven, and possess the power of judging to a
certain extent, before the day of Judgment. . . ." '
He has made another allusion elsewhere to the
power which the divine mercy confers upon bishops
and priests, whom he warns in the stern tones
which were customary to him, against pride and
despotism. 3
It is doubtful, however, whether Jerome, in spite
of his frequent allusions to the prerogatives of
priesthood, ever consented to realise the great
difference between the priest and the bishop, which
the Catholic teachings proclaim, and whether,
instead of regarding the episcopacy as a divine
institution, he did not consider it a purely
ecclesiastical institution. Does he not seem thus
to have paved the way to the Protestants and
the Rationalists, who in the second century rejected
in certain churches, whose example other churches
followed, the establishment of monarchical, or what
is termed uninominal Episcopacy? Indeed, he said
1 Epist. xlvi. Paula; et Eustochii ad Marcellam 7.
2 Epist. xiv. ad Heliodorus 8.
* Commentar. in Matt. Lib. iii., cap. xvi., v. 19.
THE DOCTRINE OP SAINT JEROME 179
in his commentary upon the Epistle to Titus that
originally the churches were governed in common by
a college of priests, but that in order to put a check
upon rivalry and to avoid schism, it was decreed that
the supremacy over all the churches should be con-
fided to one. l He expressed the same opinions in a
letter to Evangel us. 2
It should be noticed that in this letter, after
rebuking the arrogance of the Roman deacons
who, proud of the riches of the Supreme Church
of which they were the dispensers, held themselves
above the priests, Jerome, in order effectually to
suppress this arrogant spirit, adopted a polemical
method too frequently resorted to, rushed to the
opposite extreme and very nearly declared the
ordinary priests to be equal to bishops. I say
nearly, because I have found in the same letter
a direct confession of this opinion. "Always
excepting ordination, does a bishop do anything
which a priest does not do also?" But it is this
right to ordain, to transmit to others the divine
power of priesthood or even of Episcopacy which
constitutes the peerless dignity of a bishop ; for
from whom can such a right directly emanate
except from Him who instituted the sacraments
and endowed them with a sanctifying power.
The Reverend Father De Smedt, whose words
upon the subject we would do well to read, has
observed that " in the Dialogus Contra Luciferianos,
c. 9, St Jerome seems to trace the pre-eminence of
1 Commentar. in Epist. ad Titum. Cap. I., v. 5.
2 Epist. cxlvi. ad Evangelum i.
180 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
bishops over ordinary priests, to a divine or at least
to an apostolic institution. . . . He seems to repre-
sent the prerogatives of the Episcopal rank as an
essential principle of the order and the unity of the
Church. He attributes one of these privileges, the
power of confirmation, to the descent of the Holy
Ghost upon the Apostles at Pentecost, which certainly
seems to prove that they must have been recognised
from the very beginning. It seems to me that from
this we can pretty much conclude that Jerome had
no very definite idea upon the subject." l
This conclusion, expressed by a master, is sufficient,
and we must acknowledge that upon the point in
question Jerome hesitated. It is the special right
of the Church canonically to explain all controversies.
Should we wish to find the clue to the objections
which Jerome raised to the origin of Episcopacy, we
might read these words of that eminent Bollandist
writer. " Catholic theologians, although maintain-
ing as is their usual custom that the Episcopacy is
an order distinct from that of the ordinary priests
and was divinely ordained, need, however, have no
scruple in admitting that this institution did not
reach its complete development and take its definite
shape until after the time of the Apostles. So long
as the Apostles were alive, the Church possessed
in them a visible and a living authority. There
is nothing to prevent thinking it possible that
the Apostles always kept the government of the
Churches in their own hands, being substituted by
1 Review of historical subjects, 1st Oct. 1888. The organisation
of the Christian Churches until the middle of the Third Century.
THE DOCTRINE OP SAINT JEROME 181
what we term ordinary priests for the usual prac-
tices and for certain particular functions of the ad-
ministration. ..." In point of fact, however, the
most ancient Churches, dating back as far as the
lifetime of the Apostles, were governed by the
Episcopacy, and what has been called the Unitarian
Episcopacy. James was bishop of Jerusalem. In
the pastoral epistles we read of Timothy and Titus
being charged through their Episcopal rights with
the government of the Churches. And finally, as the
Rev. Father De Smedt has observed, "the warnings
which (in the Apocalypse) were successively given
to the Angel of each of the Seven Churches evidently
referred to one individual person bearing the weight
and the responsibility of the supreme administration."
It was a vital question with Jerome, as it is with
us all, to know which was the Church founded by
Christ, and to know also what were the distinguish-
ing characteristics enabling us to recognise it. The
true and only Church was founded upon St Peter.
The testimony which Jerome, in a letter to Damasus,
rendered to the Roman supremacy has already been
quoted ; here, however, is another testimony of the
same nature. The following words were attributed
by Jerome to Jovinianus, who, anxious to depreciate
the virtues of virginity, recalled the fact that the
supremacy was conferred upon a married man, and
not upon John the virgin apostle ; the truth of which
Jerome did not contest but rather admitted, since
he explained that by reason of his youth John was
less fitted to receive the signal favour than Peter,
who had reached a mature age.
182 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
" The Church is founded upon Peter," said Jerome,
" although it has been said that it is also founded
upon the apostles, all of whom received the keys of
the heavenly kingdom, and that the solidarity of the
Church is equally established upon them all, never-
theless one is chosen from amongst them in order
that the unity of one leader might prevent any
occasion for schism." l This Church which is one,
is Apostolic. " I will speak my thoughts openly :
we must abide in this Church which, having been
founded on the apostles, endures until now." -
This Church is catholic, it enfolds or calls all
nations into its mighty unity, and we should not
try as did Lucifer of Cagliari to restrict it to
Sardinia. It is holy, but its holiness does not
exclude sinners ; all who have been baptised and
have not left it through heresy, or who have not
been excommunicated, belong to it. " As St Peter
has said, the ark of Noah is the symbol of the
Church. ... As there were in the ark every
variety of animal, so there are in the Church
men of all nations and customs. As there were
in the ark leopards, goats, wolves, and lambs, so
there are in the Church the just and the unjust,
the vessels of gold and of silver mingled with the
vessels of wood and of clay." 8 How merciful is
this doctrine which the Church has persistently
defended against a powerful spirit of pharisaism,
and which Father Lacordaire so delighted in :
1 Adversus Jovinianum. Lib. i. 26.
8 Dialog. Adversus Luciferianos 28.
8 Dialog. Adversus Luciferianos 22.
THE DOCTRINE OF SAINT JEROME 183
" How I have always loved," wrote the distin-
guished Dominican in his third letter upon the
Christian life, " the admirable economy which has
made the portals through which one enters into the
city of God, so lofty and so wide, and the doors
through which one departs from it, so low and
so narrow. Wretched sectarians have repeatedly
attempted to condemn sinners, and to discard them
from the bosom of the Church ; but the Church,
faithful to her master's teachings and example, has
ever retained them in her inmost recesses. . . ."
To pursue our investigation upon the rest of
Jerome's doctrines. His letters and his contro-
versial treatises have justified and precognised the
invocation of Saints, the worship of the Cross and
the worship of relics. " The day will come," he
once wrote to Heliodorus in a transport of pious
enthusiasm, " when triumphant thou shalt enter the
New Jerusalem and share thy citizenship with Paul.
Then also wilt thou beseech the same rights for
those dear to thee, and pray for me who helped thee
to conquer." l " If the apostles and martyrs, while
still in the flesh and while occupied with their own
salvation, can nevertheless pray for others," wrote
Jerome to Vigilantius, " how much more will they
be able to do so after they have won their crowns,
their triumphs, and their victories." 2
Man instinctively clings to every object which
reminds him of the dear ones whom he has lost.
Every trace of their earthly life, especially any
writings, should they have left any, has the power to
1 Epist. xiv. ad Heliodorum. 2 Lib. contra Vigilantium 6.
184 THE LIFE OP SAINT JEROME
prolong their presence, even to the very faintest
tones of their voices, upon this earth. Respect and
admiration sometimes produce the same effect as
affection. " I have found," wrote Jerome, " Origen's
twenty-five commentaries upon the twelve (minor)
prophets, transcribed by the hand of the martyr
Pamphilius, and in my joy at possessing them, in
the care with which I preserved them, I seemed to
myself master of the riches of Croesus. If there
is so much joy in the possession of a solitary letter
written by a martyr, how much more is there in the
possession of numerable pages in which one can
almost see traces of his blood." l
Some secret instinct seemed to move Jerome un-
hesitatingly to accept the doctrine of the worship of
relics, to which these words of J. de Maistre so par-
ticularly apply. " There is no dogma in the Catholic
Church, no general usage belonging to exalted dis-
cipline even, which has not its roots in the inmost
depths of human nature." 2 Enlightened by the
Catholic teachings, Jerome was able to affirm and
explain his adhesion to the cult of relics, in a letter
to the Spanish priest Riparius, an adversary of
Vigilantius. " We do not adore the relics of the
martyrs, neither do we adore the sun, the moon, the
archangels, the cherubim, or seraphim . . . for fear
of rendering supreme worship to the creation instead
of to the Creator, who is blessed throughout all
centuries. We honour the relics of martyrs only to
adore Him to whom they rendered the testimony of
1 De Viris Illustribus, Ixxv.
a Of the Pope. Book 3, chap. Hi.
THE DOCTRINE OF SAINT JEROME 185
blood. We honour the servants so that the homage
which we tender them may ascend to the Lord who
said : Whoso receiveth you receiveth me. Whenever
we enter the basilica of the apostles, of the prophets,
and of the martyrs, are we bringing our homage to
idolatrous temples ? Are then the tapers which
we light before the tombs of the Saints, signs of
idolatry ? " l
Jerome was no less explicit in his views upon the
worship of the cross. It is he who has told us how
fervently Paula venerated the instrument of salva-
tion and how her dying lips formed its saving sign.
It was he who commended Eustochium and Deme-
triade to fortify themselves with the sign of the
cross, and he who has given us an account of how,
with its help, the hermit Hilarion overcame the devil.
The problem of the final state of things, what is
technically termed eschatology, rose before Jerome
as it had before Origen, and as it does before every
soul who has grasped the awful grandeur of human
destiny. Knowing the answer which the Catholic
faith has made to this question, it is natural to
wonder whether Jerome's doctrine upon this point
was always irreproachable. For a long time he had
been so impregnated with the works of Origen,
that even after he had vehemently shaken off the
doctrinal authority of the distinguished Alexandrian,
traces of Origenism may possibly have lingered in
his mind. Have not many of our own contem-
poraries retained the impression of ideas which,
with the best possible faith, they have amended
1 Epist. cix. ad Riparium.
186 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
and have abjured, and does not their language
sometimes betray a revival of the traditionalism
of Lamenais, or of the fideism of the Abb
Bautain ? Certain passages in Jerome's writings
have given the impression that he doubted that, if
the torments of the next world were not eternal, at
least they must be so for all baptised sinners who
have not died in incredulity, apostasy, or blasphemy.
This, at all events, is the sense which a few portions
of the commentary upon the sixty-third chapter of
Isaiah, and the first book of the Dialogue against the
Pelagians, seem to express. Vallarsi, the Italian
editor of Jerome's works, tried to interpret these
passages in an orthodox manner, but Ceillier, bishop
of Avranches, Daniel Huet and Petau, refused to
accept this favourable exegesis. If, however, Jerome
betrays the influence of Origen in certain passages,
there are many others in which, with his inflexible
sternness, he maintained the Catholic doctrine. In
commentating the third verse of the eleventh chapter
of Ecclesiastes " If the tree fall toward the south
or toward the north, in the place where the tree
falleth there it shall be " (Si ceciderit lignum ad
austrum aut ad aquilonem, in quocumque loco ceci-
derit, ibi erit) Jerome wrote " You are like unto this
tree : no matter how long a life you may have, you
cannot live for ever. Death like a mighty wind will
uproot you, and in whatever direction you may fall,
you will remain such as the last day of your life has
found you, either hard and pitiless, or rich in mercy."
In his commentary upon the Epistle to the Galatians,
Jerome enumerated the various sins by which, accord-
THE DOCTRINE OF SAINT JEROME 187
ing to St Paul, man is excluded from the kingdom
of God; the commentary upon the prophecy of Jonas
also contains testimonies to the exegete's faith in
the irrevocability of the sanction beyond the grave.
He realised that the pity which would assure an un-
conditional pardon to all sins, except avowed infidelity,
would be but a cruel kindness. The world, in its
indulgence born of self-interest, readily absolves what
it calls, and what we also, for want of a better word,
will call sins of weakness; but it does not follow, how-
ever, that these sins are so trifling that they should
be granted, so to speak, an unfailing pardon ; for who
can say how they sear the soul or souls, who can
count the ruins which they have accumulated ? All
those who have not already done so, should read
those bold and chaste pages in the " Knowledge
of the Soul," in which Father Gratry describes the
immense mischief caused by " playing with fire," or
else those in which Charles Perraud, a disciple of
Father Gratry, points out and denounces the excesses
which have so frequently turned " the valley of tears
into a sea of mire and blood." Unquestionably God
pardons " sins of weakness," as He pardons sins of
a graver nature resulting from rebellious pride, or
from conscious malice, but He only pardons them
in those who repent them with their tears. The
pardon which the followers of Origen promise to
souls which have been sinful until the end is offered
by the divine clemency as long as the earthly struggle
lasts, even at the very last hour, and is, let us hope,
frequently accepted. So different from Father Ravig-
nan in many respects, Jerome would certainly not
188 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
have rejected this consoling thought of the pious
monk, " At the last stage of the journey, upon the
threshold of eternity, the mysteries of justice which
take place within the soul are no doubt great, but
the mysteries of mercy and of love are even greater." l
The hermit of Bethlehem was a champion of
Catholic discipline, just as he was a champion of
dogma. The Catholic discipline which was instituted
for men of all races and all times has altered, as it
was necessary that it should, and has been obliged
to adapt itself to the varying needs of nations and
of ages.
" Thou askest me," wrote Jerome to Lucinius
the Spaniard, " whether thou shouldest fast upon
Saturdays, and daily receive the Sacrament as is
the custom in Rome or in Spain. ... I will answer
thee briefly: when ecclesiastical traditions do not in
any way run counter to the rules of faith, we should
observe them in the same manner as we have re-
ceived them from our predecessors, the practices of
one particular Church not being prejudicial to those
observed in another. . . . Each province should hold
its own opinions, and consider that the precepts of
its forbears are laws descended from the apostles." -
This discipline which, during eighteen centuries,
has adjusted itself to so many different exigencies,
was no longer quite the same under Innocent III. as
it had been under St Gregory the Great, and even at
the present day is changing upon many points; but
it has, however, remained intact in its outlines and in
1 36th Conference of Notre Dame.
1 Epist. Ixxi. ad Lucinium 7.
THE DOCTRINE OP SAINT JEROME 189
its early inspiration. It has maintained in the world,
through its established institutions, the conception
and the respect of the Christian ideal, the pursuit
of which it has facilitated, and has raised barriers to
arrest the waves of human covetousness.
It has established the great law of public prayer.
Jerome tells us how this law was observed in his
day, and the hours which he mentions as having
been devoted to liturgical prayer seem to have been
the same as those which, under the names of tierce,
sexte, and none, we consecrate to this great duty.
" There are," wrote the Saint, " three moments
during the day when one should fall upon one's
knees before God, namely, the third, the sixth, and
the ninth hour, in accordance with the tradition of
the Church. At the third hour the Holy Ghost de-
scended upon the aposties at the sixth, Peter being
hungry went up into the upper room to pray; and at
the ninth, Peter and John went up together into the
Temple." l While Jerome was writing these very
lines, the office of Prime was being established in
Palestine. 2 The Saint also tells us that the last
hours of the day were sanctified by the singing of
psalms, and that when the lamps were lit, they
offered to God what the hermit termed the " Even-
ing Sacrifice." 3
Jerome has also given us information upon many
other points, such as, for instance, upon the probable
origin of Easter Eve : although our Lord did not
1 Comment, in Daniel. Cap. vi., v. 10.
2 Abbe Batifol. History of the Roman Breviary.
3 Ep. cvii. ad Lsetam g.
indicate either the hour, the day, the season, or the
period of his coming again (But pray that your flight
be not in winter, neither on the Sabbath day 1 );
although the apostles specified nothing upon the
subject either, and although in his second epistle
St Peter warned Christians against measuring the
day of the Lord by the brief duration of their own,
the faithful of the first generation expected that
Jesus Christ would shortly reappear among them,
and it was said that they awaited His advent upon
the night before Easter. " The Jewish tradition,"
wrote Jerome, " is that Christ will come in the
middle of the night, and that it will be as upon
that first Easter in Egypt when the avenging angel
appeared, and when the Lord passed over the
dwellings of Israel and their doors were consecrated
by the blood of the lamb." I believe he added,
no doubt drawing his impression from Lactantius,
" that the Apostolic custom which upon Easter Eve
forbids the dismissal of the people before midnight,
because until that hour they await the coming of
Christ, owes its derivation to this. . . ." '
Jerome has told us that in the Eastern Churches
it was habitual, before reading the Gospel, to light the
lamps even in broad daylight (jam sole rutilante) as
a sign of joy. 3 He has also frequently described the
modest pomp of the Christian funerals.
Ecclesiastical discipline maintains the idea, and
upon certain days and under certain forms imposes
1 Matthew xxiv. 20.
2 Commentator in Matt. Lib. iv., cap. xxv.
8 Contra Vigilantium. Lib. 7.
the practice not only of prayer, but also penance.
Jerome, affirming the traditional usage of the
Church and at the same time rejecting the exag-
gerated severity of the Montanists, wrote : " We,
according to the traditions of the apostles, have
but one Lent, a Lent which is observed by the
whole world ; but they, (meaning the Montanists)
observe three every year, as if three Saviours had
suffered for us. Not that it is not permissible to
fast the whole year through, except during the
fifty days after Easter, but it is one thing to
make one's offering because of a compelling law,
and quite another to be actuated thereto by a
voluntary impulse." l Although Jerome enjoined
fasting upon others, and practised it himself with
an austerity which would seem to us extreme, he
discarded from it all subtleties and eccentricities. 2
He reminds us that fasting and prayer, in short
the most holy deeds, are fruitless when they are
not accompanied by or are not a preparation to
conversion ; to presume to move God by our vows
and sacrifices whilst persevering in sin is a form of
mental blindness. 3 None have valued the practice
of evangelical councils more highly than did Jerome,
and none have more forcibly reminded those who
freely bound themselves to the observance of them,
of the duty of steadfast faithfulness. He attests the
great law of clerical continence which was so early
imposed by the Church upon her ministers, and
1 Ep. xli. ad Marcellum 3.
' J Ep. lii. ad Nepotianum Presbyterum 12.
* Commentar. in Jeremiah, prophetam. Lib. iii., cap. xiv.
192 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
which, through the invincible constancy of the
Popes, has prevailed for the greater glory of
God, as well as for the greater good of souls.
" What," asked Jerome of Vigilantius, who wished
to do away with this holy law, " what will become
of the Eastern Churches, of the Churches of
Egypt, and of the Apostolic See, none of which
raise to holy orders any but those who have never
lost their chastity, those who abide in continence,
or those husbands who consent to abandon their
marital rights ? " l
The practice of evangelical counsels took root,
so to speak, in monasticism, in which it found a
firm and lasting organisation. We already know
how the historian of St Paul the hermit, of St
Malchus, and of St Hilarion, recorded the early
history of this life in the East. In the West, in
Rome, he was the spiritual director of the noble
souls who aspired to the life of the desert, and
who even in the midst of the world were able to
create for themselves a solitude. Through him we
know every detail of those stern existences in which
ceaseless sacrifice reigned supreme. Chastity, poverty
and obedience, have ever found in Jerome the most
sincere and eloquent of panegyrists, but he never
thought that these exalted virtues replaced all
others ; he believed and taught that they should
be quickened by a virtue still more excellent in
which they culminate, namely charity.
The recluse whose lips gave utterance to so many
harsh sayings was moved to gentleness when he
1 Contra Vigilantium. Lib. 2.
THE DOCTRINE OF SAINT JEROME 193
glorified this supreme virtue which seeks and loves
God before all else, and which in God seeks and
loves its neighbour, who was created and redeemed
by the eternal love. In his efforts to win the souls
of men to the exercise of charity, he extolled, one
might almost say that he exaggerated, the facility of
practising it. " Pasting exhausts the body," he said,
"vigils mortify the flesh, and alms are costly. . . .
No matter how ardent the faith, blood is not shed in
martyrdom without anguish and horror, and yet
many have done these things ; charity alone is easy
to practise. . . . But the possession of this virtue is,
however, rare. Who, following Paul's example, is
willing to be accursed for his fellow-men ? Who
weeps with those who weep and rejoices with
those who rejoice, who suffers through another's
sorrow ? " l
And again we find this passage: "To give one's
life for one's fellow-men, to fight against sin even to
the shedding of blood, is to walk in charity and to
imitate Jesus Christ who loved us enough to suffer
the anguish of the cross for our salvation." 2
These were the sentiments expressed by Jerome
upon the subject of tasks which are ordained by
God and imposed upon us by the Church, but which
receive from charity alone the supreme and finishing
touch. Is it astonishing that he should have spoken
in the same way of a task of which the Church, no
doubt, approves, but which it has never generally
prescribed ? Jerome was a born explorer, and both
1 Commentar. in Epist. ad Galatas. Lib. iii. , cap. v. 14.
8 Commentar. in Epist. ad Ephesios. Lib. iii.
194 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
his nature and his devout spirit predisposed him to
the pilgrimages of which he has left us an undying
example, and of which he has shown the way to so
many. He lived in the times when pilgrims were
drawn to Palestine by a pious longing to find again
the traces of our Lord's footsteps when Silvia of
Aquitaine made a journey to the Holy Land, and
left us in the Peregrinatio a programme of liturgical
festival which the Abbe Duchesne has aptly named
"The Religious Week in Jerusalem in the fourth
century." l Jerome, however, did not consider these
pious journeys to be essential or imperative ; he
even deterred his friend Paulinus from making a
pilgrimage to Palestine. " It is not the mere fact of
having seen Jerusalem," he wrote him, " but the fact
of having long dwelt there, which is laudable. The
city worthy of our longings and of our praise is not
that which slew the prophets and shed the blood of
Christ, it is the city situated upon a mountain, ex-
posed to the gaze of all, at whose base flow the
waters of a river, the city which the apostle declares
to be the mother of the saints, and in which he
rejoices at possessing rights of citizenship with the
just.
In speaking thus, I do not convince myself of
inconstancy, I do not condemn my conduct. Like
Abraham, I have abandoned my kindred and my
fatherland, and I do not pretend that I acted in vain ;
but I dare not restrict God's omnipotence within
narrow limits, I dare not imprison in a corner of
this earth, Him whom the heavens cannot contain.
1 Abbe Duchesne.
THE DOCTRINE OF SAINT JEROME 195
Believers are judged not according to the various
places which they inhabit, but according to the
merit of their faith. True worshippers do not wor-
ship the Father either at Jerusalem or upon Mt.
Garizim ; for God is spirit, and it is in spirit and in
truth that He should be adored. . . . The spot where
stood the cross, the spot where our Lord rose again,
benefit those only who carry their cross, who daily
rise again with Jesus Christ, and who show them-
selves worthy of dwelling amid these sacred places.
. . . The kingdom of heaven is free to those who
come from Jerusalem or to those who come from
Britain ; the kingdom of God is indeed within us.
Anthony and all those hosts of hermits who lived
in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Pontus, Cappadocia, and
Armenia, never saw Jerusalem, and yet though they
never set eyes upon the holy city, the gates of
Paradise were opened to them. The blessed Hilarion,
who was born and had lived in Palestine, went but
once to Jerusalem and stayed there but one day,
thus showing that he revered the sacred places
which were so near to him, but that at the same
time he feared to seem to restrict the Lord to one
place." 1
Seven centuries later Bernard, the ardent pro-
moter of the second crusade, the man who almost
depopulated Europe in order to send innumerable
pilgrims to Asia to conquer the Holy Sepulchre,
spoke in much the same words as Jerome : " A
monk should strive to reach not the terrestrial but
the Celestial Jerusalem." And in a charming letter
1 Epist. Iviii. ad Paulinum, 2, 3.
196 THE LIFE OF SAINT JEROME
to the bishop of Lincoln he depicts to us an English
pilgrim who had started for the holy land, but had
stopped at Clairvaux and had found there the peace
and the joy which he expected to taste only in
Jerusalem. The whole Catholic tradition teaches
us the same thing ; it glorifies the good works
accomplished for God and with the help of God,
but it maintains a hierarchy amongst them by sub-
jecting them all to the quickening and vivifying
spirit of charity.
Such is the doctrine set forth by Jerome's works,
in which we find the dogmas which a tradition of
nineteen centuries has taught us to venerate and to
profess. Upon several points, in accordance with the
law of progress which was foreseen by Petau in the
seventeenth century, and which in our own times
Newman has so brilliantly illustrated, the Catholic
teachings have become more definite, they have
developed like the germ which grows into a tree, but
they have not countenanced and will never counten-
ance any variation which would alter and pervert a
doctrine. In St Jerome the Church has recognised
one of the most dependable and steadfast champions
of the truth, and it has acknowledged his services
and awarded him a glorious tribute, by crowning him
with the aureole of a Doctor.
TURNBUI.L AND Sl'KARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH
^^^^^^^BPn^UJt.
UCSB LIBRARY
yl
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