Saint Jerome

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Jerome, Saint (c.347–420), Eusebius Hieronymus (his name in English being a version of the latter), Latin father of the Church. Born at Strido near Aquileia (near the Adriatic coast in north Italy) of a well-to-do Christian family, he was educated at Rome (as a pupil of Donatus) where he was baptized but continued to enjoy a life of dissipation, and then travelled in Gaul before returning to Aquileia and devoting himself to an ascetic life. In about 374 he went to Antioch, where he started upon theological studies and learned Greek, but remained devoted to classical Latin literature. It was here that he had a nightmare in which he found himself facing the Judgement Seat and, upon being asked his condition and answering that he was a Christian, heard the reply, ‘mentiris; Ciceronianus es, non Christianus’ (‘You lie; you are a Ciceronian, not a Christian’). From 375 to 378 he lived in the desert of Chalcis on the frontier of Syria, where he learned Hebrew with much difficulty. But interference by the other hermits made life there intolerable for him. He returned to Antioch (c.377), where he was ordained priest, but theological disputes there made him decide to go back to Rome. Making his way westwards he stayed at Constantinople (c.379), where he attended the lectures of the great Greek theologian Gregory of Nazianzus. From 382 to 385 he stayed at Rome, acting as secretary to Pope Damasus and preaching asceticism. The Christian women who enthusiastically embraced his teaching included Marcella, Paula, and her daughter Eustochium. His advocacy of asceticism and his suspected aspiration to become Pope aroused hostility, and, accompanied by Paula and Eustochium, he left Rome. He travelled first by way of Antioch to Jerusalem, then to Egypt, and subsequently to Palestine; he settled finally at Bethlehem, where Paula founded a monastery over which he presided, and three convents for women which she herself directed. He spent the rest of his life there in intense scholarly activity and vigorous, often virulent, controversy, and died in 420.

Jerome's scholarship was unsurpassed in the early Church. His Latin is classical in its purity; he had absorbed the works of Cicero (as his nightmare suggested), Virgil, Horace, and others to such an extent that constant echoes of them are to be found in his writings. His most important work was his translation of most of the Bible from the original languages into Latin, the so-called Vulgate (i.e. the ‘common text’). This work had originally been suggested to him by Damasus when he stayed at Rome in the 380s. The purpose of the work was to construct an authoritative text to supersede the Old Latin manuscripts with their serious textual variants which were circulating at the end of the fourth century (Latin texts of the Bible earlier than Jerome's Vulgate are known as the ‘Old Latin’ versions). He published a revision of the Gospels in 383, using a Greek manuscript as well as Old Latin texts. It is a matter of dispute whether or to what extent he revised the remaining books of the New Testament. Soon after, he produced a revision of the Psalter. After he had settled in Bethlehem he worked on another text of the Psalter, using as a basis Origen's Hexapla. After this he turned to Job and other books of the Old Testament, but he soon became convinced that he needed to work directly from the Hebrew original and to ignore the unsatisfactory Greek translation (the Septuagint). His Latin translation from the Hebrew occupied him for about fifteen years. There was at first considerable opposition to Jerome's translations from those who remained faithful to old and familiar versions, but the excellence of his work was gradually realized, and his were the translations chosen when (probably in the sixth century) the various books came to be collected into a single Bible.

His other principal works were the Chronicle, a Latin translation from the Greek of Eusebius, with a supplement covering the period 324–78, one of the most important documents for dating events in the ancient world; De viris illustribus (‘concerning famous men’), a series of notices of 135 Christian writers, modelled on the work of Suetonius which has the same title, and closely following Eusebius where the latter had dealt with the same authors; and at least 63 biblical commentaries. There is also a collection of 150 letters (including a number of forgeries), some of which are letters to Jerome and include ten from St Augustine. These are of great interest and historical importance. Jerome had a passionate nature, and his letters reflect his tender affection for his friends, his hatreds and combative nature in controversy, his attacks on hypocrites and heretics, and his condemnation of himself. In his twenty-second letter he recounts how, when he separated himself from his home and family, he could not separate himself from his library; he would fast, but then afterwards commit the sin of reading the pagan Cicero.