Jerome of Stridon

Stridon, Rome, and the vow in a fever

Jerome — Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus — was born about 347 at Stridon, a town on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia which he himself says was later destroyed by the Goths and whose site is still disputed. His family were Christians of some property, and they sent him, with his lifelong friend Bonosus, to Rome to be educated. There he studied grammar under the great Donatus and rhetoric in the schools, acquired the Latin prose style that never afterwards deserted him, and, by his own confession, acquired also the habits of a young man free in a great city: in the Confessions of his own letters he speaks of sins that he wept for long afterwards, and of Sunday visits to the tombs of the martyrs in the catacombs as the counterweight to a week's dissipation. He was baptised at Rome about his twentieth year, by his own account under Pope Liberius.

From Rome he went with Bonosus to Trier in Gaul, where — in the imperial city, in the neighbourhood of the court — he seems first to have conceived the monastic vocation; then to Aquileia, where he formed part of a circle of ascetically minded clergy that included Rufinus, afterwards his translator-rival, and Chromatius. Some quarrel, of which he says only that it was bitter, broke the group up. About 372 he returned to Stridon to find his parents dead and the care of his younger sister and his brother Paulinian on his hands; having settled their affairs he took ship with friends for the East.

At Antioch in 374 he fell dangerously ill, and in the fever had the dream that he never forgot and never quite obeyed: dragged before the judgement seat and asked what he was, he answered Christianus sum — I am a Christian — and was told, Thou liest; thou art a Ciceronian, not a Christian, for where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also. He swore never again to read the pagan classics. His own later pages, thick with Virgil and Cicero, are the measure of how the promise held; but the dream marks the turn of his life.

The desert of Chalcis and the learning of Hebrew

He went out into the desert of Chalcis, southeast of Antioch — "the Syrian Thebaid" — and lived there for some four or five years among the scattered anchorites. His letters from that period are the most famous he wrote: the account of the scorpions and wild beasts, of his body wasted with fasting while his imagination filled with the dancing-girls of Rome, of the grinding boredom and the still worse quarrels of the Syrian solitaries over the Trinitarian formulae then dividing Antioch into three rival obediences. Two things came out of the desert with him. The first was a permanent, if idiosyncratic, monastic conviction. The second was Hebrew: he engaged a converted Jew to teach him the alphabet and the grammar, complaining of the "hissing and panting" sounds, and stuck at it. No other Latin churchman of the age possessed the language, and everything he afterwards did that mattered rests on it.

The Antiochene schism drove him out of the desert. Refusing to subscribe any of the parties' demands, he came into the city and was ordained presbyter by Paulinus — on condition, he insisted, that he should not be attached to any church or obliged to exercise the priestly office, since he meant to remain a monk. He never celebrated the Liturgy as a matter of course. About 380 he was at Constantinople, where he heard the lectures of Gregory the Theologian — whom he always afterwards called his teacher in Scripture — and met Gregory of Nyssa; there he translated the Chronicle of Eusebius into Latin, continuing it to his own day, and turned the homilies of Origen on Jeremiah and Ezekiel into Latin, work he would later have cause to regret.

Damasus, the Roman ladies, and expulsion

In 382 the Antiochene dispute brought him to Rome, where Pope Damasus — himself a student of Scripture — made him his secretary and commissioned from him a revision of the Latin Gospels against the Greek. He produced it within two years, along with a first revision of the Psalter, and it was the beginning of the greatest work of his life.

At Rome he also became the spiritual director of a remarkable group of aristocratic Christian women on the Aventine: the widow Paula and her daughters Blaesilla and Eustochium, Marcella in her palace, Asella, Lea. He taught them Hebrew and the Psalms, wrote for them the treatises on virginity and widowhood that shaped Latin ascetic literature, and directed them toward a severity that Roman society found scandalous. When Blaesilla died after a few months of extreme fasting, the crowd at her funeral muttered that the monks should be driven out of the city or thrown into the Tiber. Jerome, meanwhile, had turned his satire on the Roman clergy — the fortune-hunting priests with curled hair and scented clothes who dined out among rich widows — and on rival ascetics, in a style that made enemies faster than he could count them. When Damasus died in 384 his protection went with him. An ecclesiastical enquiry was opened into Jerome's relations with Paula; nothing was found, but he left Rome in 385 with a farewell letter of undisguised bitterness, and never returned.

Bethlehem: the cave, the monasteries, and the Vulgate

With his brother Paulinian and a few companions he travelled through Antioch, Palestine and Egypt — where he sat at the feet of the blind Didymus at Alexandria and visited the monks of Nitria — and in 386 settled at Bethlehem. Paula followed with Eustochium and founded there, out of her fortune, a monastery for men under Jerome, three houses for women under herself, and a hospice for pilgrims on the road; Jerome took a cave near the cave of the Nativity for his cell and his library, and taught the boys of the village their grammar. He lived there for thirty-four years.

The work of those years is enormous. He revised, and then abandoned revising, the Old Latin Old Testament from the Greek, and undertook instead the thing no Latin had attempted: a fresh translation from the Hebrew original, book by book, with rabbis of Palestine consulted at his own expense and often by night. The principle he defended under the slogan Hebraica veritas — the Hebrew truth — was fiercely contested; Augustine of Hippo wrote to him warning that to abandon the Septuagint, which the Apostles used and the churches read, was to unsettle the faithful and to break communion with the Greeks. Jerome answered, at length and with some asperity, that a translator's business is the original. The version he made, combined later with his revised Gospels and Psalter and with Old Latin renderings of the books he did not touch, became the Vulgate, the Bible of the Latin West for eleven centuries and the vehicle in which nearly all of Western Christendom heard the Scriptures until the Reformation. He also produced the Prologues that go with it, the Book of Hebrew Names, the Book of Hebrew Places after Eusebius, commentaries on almost all the prophets and on Matthew, Galatians, Ephesians, Titus and Philemon, the Lives of the hermits Paul, Hilarion and Malchus, the biographical catalogue De viris illustribus, and some hundred and twenty surviving letters, which are among the finest in Latin.

His enemies got the same energy. He wrote against Helvidius on the perpetual virginity of the Theotokos, against Jovinian on virginity and fasting, against Vigilantius on the veneration of relics and the martyrs' shrines, and against the Pelagians in the last years of his life — a work which cost him his monastery, for in 416 a mob, which he blamed on the Pelagians, burned the buildings and killed a deacon; and in 411 or thereabouts the community had already been half-ruined by an incursion of desert raiders. He lived to see Rome sacked by Alaric in 410, and the letter in which he lays down his pen because "the city which took the whole world captive is itself taken" is one of the great pieces of late Latin prose. Refugees from the sack came to Bethlehem and were fed at the hospice.

The Origenist controversy

The hardest chapter, and the one that most affects his standing in the East, is the first Origenist controversy. Jerome had begun as an admirer and translator of Origen, whose exegesis he plundered all his life. When Epiphanius of Salamis opened a campaign against Origen's memory in Palestine about 393, Jerome went over to the attack — against John, Bishop of Jerusalem, against his own oldest friend Rufinus of Aquileia, who was translating Origen's On First Principles at the monastery on the Mount of Olives, and against Rufinus's patroness Melania the Elder, the Roman noblewoman whose reading of Origen on a scale that astonished Palladius made her a natural target. Jerome had earlier written of Melania with warm praise in his Chronicle; when the quarrel came he erased the notice and turned on her, and on Rufinus, with a violence that even his admirers have found hard to defend. The polemic was mutual, prolonged, and squalid; Epiphanius ordained Jerome's brother Paulinian irregularly to spite John of Jerusalem, and Bethlehem was for a time cut off from the sacraments. A reconciliation of sorts was patched up in 397 and broke down again.

The Orthodox Church, which keeps the memory of the saints on both sides of that dispute — Epiphanius, John of Jerusalem, Melania, and Jerome himself — has never treated Jerome's polemic as a verdict. Melania's entry in this collection records the erased notice and Palladius's own judgement in her favour; the same restraint governs the reading here. What the controversy shows is a man of immense learning and small charity, whose zeal for orthodoxy was real and whose incapacity for peace was equally real, and whom the Church canonised for the first without pretending the second away.

Repose and relics

Jerome died at Bethlehem, worn out and nearly blind, on 30 September, in the year 419 or 420; Paula and Eustochium had gone before him, and he was buried near them under the church of the Nativity. His relics are said to have been carried to Rome in the seventh century — the OCA notice gives 642 — and to have been laid in Santa Maria Maggiore; the Roman tradition points to a tomb there and to a relic of his hand kept near the Piazza Farnese, but the transfer is poorly documented and the present whereabouts of the body are not securely known. The empty tomb at Bethlehem is still shown to pilgrims.