Today is the feast day of St Jerome, patron saint of translators, librarians, interpreters, scripture scholars, and students.
Jerome was born of Christian parents in the year A.D. 347 at Strido, near Aquileia, the capital of Venetia in central Italy. He was educated in the city of Rome, and was baptized there. Before he was twenty years of age, Jerome went to Gaul to carry on research, and returned to live in Aquileia from 370 to 373. In 374 he made an extensive trip through the Near East, including a visit to Jerusalem, and then spent five years in the desert of Chalcis, where he practiced the most intense asceticism, though, says a recent writer, “perpetually haunted by reminiscences of the world and the flesh. He took, however, his classical library with him and comforted himself with Greek and Latin; till one night he dreamed that a judge before whom he was brought punished him for being a Ciceronian and not a Christian; whereupon [in his dream apparently] he vowed to devote his intellect entirely to the Scriptures, and on waking proceeded to learn Hebrew” (Ernest Leigh-Bennett: Handbook of the Early Church Fathers, London, 1920, p. 273).Jerome’s health declined seriously, and in 379 we find him in the great Christian city of Antioch where, much against his will, he was ordained a priest by Paulinus. The following year he visited Constantinople, desiring to hear Gregory of Nazianzus. From 382 to 385 he resided in Rome, and became a close friend of Pope Damasus. Having aroused the bitter opposition of many Roman citizens because of his insistence upon ascetic practices, winning to these a number of noble Roman ladies, in 386 he left for the East and took up residence in Bethlehem, where he continued to live until his death in 420. It was here that most of his writing was done.
Jerome is famous in the history of the Christian Church for four things: He made monastic life popular in the Latin Church, though he by no means originated monasticism, of course, and he did not found an order, such as the Benedictine or Franciscan. His letters are certainly the finest gems of autobiography produced by any Christian, at least in the first millennium of the Church. It is to Jerome that we owe the great Vulgate, completed in 404, which became the standard Bible for the Western Church, and remains such. “In that work he produced what must be numbered among the supreme achievements of the Christian mind in any age” (G. Grutzmacher, art., “Jerome,” ERE, Vol. VII, p. 500). “Here he created an object lesson on monasticism at the most sacred spot in the world, and he invited the world to come and learn. And the world came, for his hostelry was continually filled with travellers from the West. In consequence there now appear a reverence for the monastic life, a reverence for sacred places, and sacred things, and a habit of pilgrimages” (Leigh-Bennett, p. 279).
The following statement on the Septuagint by a recognized contemporary authority is worth quoting: “St. Jerome was more than a channel for Greek learning. As a Hebrew scholar and humanist he brought the Bible closer to the Latin-speaking world. The Old Latin was an unliterary translation from the Septuagint; the Vulgate was based on the ‘Hebrew Truth’ as St. Jerome lovingly calls it. The language, ‘where the rustic Latin of the first Christian centuries mingles with the Hebraising Latinity of St. Jerome,’ was the beginning of a new era, when eastern poetry penetrated into the speech of the western peoples” (Beryl Smalley: The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, Oxford, 1941, p. 9).
Well deserved was Jerome’s title of Doctor Maximus sacris Scripturis explanandis. Even during Jerome’s lifetime, Sulpicius Severus allowed one of the disputants in his Dialogus, written about 405, to say, “I would be surprised if he (Jerome) were not already known to you through his writings, since he is read throughout the whole world.” Although they differed on many matters, Augustine confessed to Jerome, “I have not as great a knowledge of the divine Scriptures as you have, nor could I have such knowledge as I see in you.” (These two quotations are from the excellent chapter, “St. Jerome as an Exegete,” by Louis N. Hartmann, in A Monument to St. Jerome, edited by Francis X. Murphy, New York, 1952, p. 67.)
That he might be as accurate an interpreter of the Old Testament Scriptures as possible, Jerome mastered the Hebrew language, and the claim cannot be denied that “he surpassed all the Fathers in the mastery of Hebrew.” He loved the Word of God and counted the hours and days, and years spent in its study the happiest and most profitable of his life. In the Preface to his lost revision of the Old Latin Paralipomenon, written about 389, he says, “For I must admit to you, my dearest Domnion and Rogatian, that, in regard to the divine volumes, I have never trusted in my own ability, nor have I let my opinion be my teacher. Even in those things which I thought I already knew, my custom has been to make inquiries, and I have done so all the more in those matters about which I was uncertain. Hence, when you recently wrote to me and begged me to translate the Book of Paralipomenon into Latin, I procured a former teacher of the Law from Tiberias, who was held in high esteem among the Hebrews, and I conferred with him ‘from top to toe,’ as they say. Only thus fortified, have I been bold enough to do what you asked of me.”
In one of his famous letters to Paula (Ep. 30) Jerome expresses his profound admiration for the Holy Scriptures: “What, pray, can be more sacred than this sacred mystery (of the Scriptures)? What can be more delightful than the pleasure found therein? What food, what honey can be sweeter than to learn of God’s wise plan, to enter into His sanctuary and gaze on the mind of the Creator, and to rehearse the words of your Lord, which, though derided by the wise of this world, are really full of spiritual wisdom! Let the others, if they will, have their wealth, and drink from jewelled cups, be clad in silk, and bask in popular applause, as if they could not exhaust their riches in all kinds of pleasures. Our delight shall be to meditate on the Law of the Lord day and night, to knock at His door when it is not open, to receive the bread of the Trinity, and, with our Lord going before us, to walk on the billows of the world.” [http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/jerome_daniel_01_intro.htm]
Nice post. But did people wear glasses in St Jerome’s day ?
I procured a former teacher of the Law from Tiberias, who was held in high esteem among the Hebrews, and I conferred with him ‘from top to toe,’ as they say.
I think that consulting Jewish scholars remains an excellent approach to understanding the Jewish scriptures.
It is to Jerome that we owe the great Vulgate, completed in 404, which became the standard Bible for the Western Church, and remains such.
Not quite. JPII, recognising the limitations of St Jerome’s Vulgate, authorized the re-translation of the Vulgate giving us the New Vulgate, now the standard for the Latin Church.
God Bless
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The saint looks oddly like a young version of Toad.
St Jerome was cosmopolitan in his interests, and in many ways a more appealing figure than Augustine. As we know Augustine in his De Civitate Dei contra Paganos took a philosophical view of the collapse of the Roman west. But Jerome, writing after the sack of the city of Rome in 410 registers much more human feeling:
I cannot speak without tears of Toulouse, which the merits of the holy Bishop Exuperius have prevailed so far to save from destruction. Spain, even, is in daily terror lest it perish, remembering the invasion of the Cimbri; and whatsoever the other provinces have suffered once, they continue to suffer in their fear.
I will keep silence concerning the rest, lest I seem to despair of the mercy of God. For a long time, from the Black Sea to the Julian Alps, those things which are ours have not been ours; and for thirty years, since the Danube boundary was broken, war has been waged in the very midst of the Roman Empire. Our tears are dried by old age. Except a few old men, all were born in captivity and siege, and do not desire the liberty they never knew.
Who could believe this? How could the whole tale be worthily told? How Rome has fought within her own bosom not for glory, but for preservation – nay, how she has not even fought, but with gold and all her precious things has ransomed her life…
Who could believe that Rome, built upon the conquest of the whole world, would fall to the ground? That the mother herself would become the tomb of her peoples? That all the regions of the East, of Africa and Egypt, once ruled by the queenly city, would be filled with troops of slaves and handmaidens? That to-day holy Bethlehem should shelter men and women of noble birth, who once abounded in wealth and are now beggars?”
And unlike Augustine, you’d never accuse him of being a man “deformed by steeping himself too deeply in too few books”