Jerome

• 1. Introduction

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  Jerome, the early Christian priest and scholar also known as Saint Jerome, once described crawling through the catacombs beneath Rome. He wrote of crypts dug deep in the earth, their walls lined on either side with the bodies of the dead, where the darkness was so total that a line of Virgil came to his mind: "Horror ubique animos, simul ipsa silentia terrent." Translated, it reads, "On all sides round, horror spread wide; the very silence breathed a terror on my soul." This was the man who gave Latin Christianity its Bible. Born somewhere between 342 and 347 and dead by the 30th of September 420, he produced the translation that became known as the Vulgate, along with commentaries on the whole Bible. How did a guilt-ridden student in Rome become one of the four Great Latin Church Fathers? Why did a scholar surrounded by aristocratic women end up driven out of Rome under a cloud of suspicion? And why is he still painted with a lion, a skull, and a cardinal's hat? The answers run through deserts, scandals, and a quarrel over which language held the true word of God.

• 2. The Hebrew Gambit

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  Before Jerome, every Latin translation of the Old Testament rested on the Septuagint, the Greek version that came from Alexandria. Jerome made a different choice. He set out to translate the Old Testament from the original Hebrew, a decision that went against the advice of most other Christians of his day. Among those who disagreed was Augustine, who thought the Septuagint itself was divinely inspired.

  Jerome believed mainstream Rabbinical Judaism had rejected the Septuagint as invalid, citing mistranslations and what he saw as Hellenistic heretical elements. To strengthen his grasp of Jewish scripture commentary, he moved to Jerusalem. A wealthy Roman aristocrat named Paula funded his stay in a monastery in nearby Bethlehem, where he settled beside the Church of the Nativity. That church had been built half a century earlier on the orders of Emperor Constantine, over the site reputed to be where Jesus was born.

  The work spanned years. He began in 382 by correcting the existing Latin New Testament, the Vetus Latina. By 390 he had turned to the Hebrew Bible, and he completed the project by 405. Some modern scholars argue the Greek Hexapla was the main source for his translation he called "iuxta Hebraeos," meaning "close to the Hebrews." His Hebrew has been questioned, yet detailed studies conclude that to a considerable degree he was a competent Hebraist. The fruit of that labor would one day be declared authoritative by the Council of Trent in 1546.

• 3. A Circle Of Women

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  Roughly 40 percent of Jerome's epistles were addressed to a woman, and at the time he was criticized for it. He noted that even the philosopher Porphyry had accused Christian communities of being run by women, claiming the favor of the ladies decided who could rise to the priesthood. Jerome lived in the middle of that accusation rather than apart from it.

  In Rome he gathered a circle of well-born, well-educated women, some from the noblest patrician families. Among them were the widows Lea, Marcella, and Paula, along with Paula's daughters Blaesilla and Eustochium. He focused his teaching on how a woman devoted to Jesus should live, drawing these women toward the monastic life and away from the indulgent lasciviousness of the city. His unsparing criticism of the secular Roman clergy turned that same clergy against him.

  The death of Blaesilla sharpened the hostility. Jerome had condemned her hedonistic lifestyle, and she adopted ascetic practices that worsened her physical weakness. She died just four months after beginning to follow his instructions. Much of the Roman populace was outraged, believing Jerome had caused the premature death of a lively young woman. His insistence to Paula that Blaesilla should not be mourned, and his complaints that her grief was excessive, struck many as heartless. The damage to his standing would prove decisive.

• 4. Exile From Rome

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  Pope Damasus I had been Jerome's patron, the man who gave him duties in Rome and set him to revising the Vetus Latina Gospels from Greek manuscripts. Jerome also updated the Psalter then in use in the city, working from the Septuagint. That protection ended on the 10th of December 384, when Damasus died.

  Soon after, the Roman clergy opened an inquiry into allegations that Jerome had an improper relationship with the widow Paula. He was forced to leave his position in Rome. Yet his reputation among women pursuing consecrated virginity held firm. His letters were copied and distributed widely across the Christian empire, and his own writing shows he knew these virgin women were not his only readers.

  Jerome's correspondence became a body of work in its own right. Because no clear line separated private letters from those meant for publication, a single epistle could carry both a confidential message and a treatise intended for a wider audience. Women who had taken vows of virginity commissioned him to write guidance on abstentions and lifestyle, and he spent much of his life answering them.

• 5. The Canon And The Apocrypha

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  For fifteen years, until his death, Jerome produced commentaries on Scripture, often explaining why he chose the original Hebrew over translations he distrusted. His patristic commentaries align closely with Jewish tradition, yet he also indulged in allegorical and mystical subtleties after the manner of Philo and the Alexandrian school.

  Unlike his contemporaries, Jerome insisted on a hard distinction between the Hebrew Bible and the Hebraica veritas of the protocanonical books. In his Vulgate prologues he labeled portions found in the Septuagint but absent from the Hebrew as non-canonical, calling them apocrypha. His Preface to the Books of Samuel and Kings, known as the Helmeted Preface, declared that whatever is not found in his list must be placed among the Apocryphal writings. He named Wisdom, the book of Jesus the Son of Sirach, Judith, Tobias, and the Shepherd as not in the canon. He observed that the first book of Maccabees he found to be Hebrew, while the second was Greek, as could be proved from its very style.

  Jerome also produced reference tools that outlived him. Two onomastica appeared commonly in later Bibles until the Reformation. One was the Liber de Nominibus Hebraicis, a list of biblical names and etymologies based on a work attributed to Philo and expanded by Origen. The other was a translation and expansion of the Onomasticon of Eusebius, cataloguing places mentioned in the Bible.

• 6. Historian And Cataloguer

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  Between 392 and 393 Jerome wrote a biobibliography covering four centuries of mostly Christian writers, reaching from the apostolic age up to himself. Titled De Viris Illustribus, or On Illustrious Men, it was modeled after earlier Greek and Latin authors. It circulated widely soon after completion and defined a canon of knowledge, written in part to show that Christian authors had real accomplishments at a time when Christian writing was seen as inferior.

  His most famous historical work was the Chronicon, a translation, reworking, and continuation of the Chronicon of Eusebius. Composed in Constantinople around 380, it became influential across Latin Christendom despite its errors. Jerome did not consider himself bound by the rules of historians, and his work in this field has to be judged with that in mind.

  One passage from his hagiography holds an unexpected place in medical history. It appears to be the earliest account of the cause, symptoms, and cure of severe vitamin A deficiency. The subject ate six ounces of barley bread and lightly cooked vegetables without oil from his thirty-first to his thirty-fifth year. When his eyes grew dim and his body was shriveled with an eruption and a stony roughness, he added oil to his food and continued that temperate course until his sixty-third year.

• 7. The Last Things

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  Jerome warned a noblewoman of Gaul that the Antichrist was near. He described savage tribes overrunning the country between the Alps and the Pyrenees, between the Rhine and the Ocean, laid waste by hordes of Quadi, Vandals, Sarmatians, Alans, Gepids, Herules, Saxons, Burgundians, Allemanni, and even Pannonians. To Jerome, the Roman Empire was the force restraining the "mystery of iniquity" that Paul wrote of in 2 Thessalonians, and as Rome fell, that restraint was removed.

  His Commentary on Daniel was written to answer Porphyry, who taught that the Book of Daniel referred entirely to the time of Antiochus IV Epiphanes and was composed by an unknown author in the second century BC. Jerome identified Rome as the fourth kingdom of Daniel's visions, and he read the "little horn" as the Antichrist. He expected ten kings to partition the Roman world, after which an insignificant eleventh king would arise and overcome three of them. He warned against treating the Antichrist as the Devil or a demon, calling him instead one of the human race in whom Satan would take up residence in bodily form.

  On salvation, Jerome opposed the doctrine of Pelagianism, writing against it three years before his death. Though he rejected Origen, his soteriology absorbed Origenism. He taught that the Devil and the unbelieving would be eternally punished, yet held that punishment for Christians who once believed but fell away would be temporal. Augustine, without naming Jerome, criticized the view that all Christians would eventually be reunited to God.

• 8. Saint With A Lion

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  Jerome is the second-most voluminous writer in ancient Latin Christianity, behind only Augustine of Hippo. The Catholic Church names him the patron saint of translators, librarians, and encyclopedists. He is honored as a saint not only by Catholics but also in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Lutheran Church, and the Anglican Communion, with the Church of England keeping a commemoration on the 30th of September.

  Artists rarely show him without a lion. The image comes from a hagiographical belief that Jerome once tamed a lion in the wilderness by healing its paw. The source may actually be the second century Roman tale of Androcles, or a confusion with the exploits of Gerasimus, since Jerome in later Latin is "Geronimus." Scholars have called the lion story a figment, found in the thirteenth-century Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine.

  From the late Middle Ages painters set him in a study filled with books or in a rocky desert, sometimes both at once. He often appears clean-shaven, well-dressed, and crowned with a cardinal's hat. The subject of "Jerome Penitent" emerged in the later 15th century in Italy, showing him in ragged clothes, often naked above the waist, gazing at a crucifix and beating himself with a fist or a rock. He is tied to the vanitas motif as well, paired with a skull and the admonition Cogita Mori, "Think upon death." His name endures beyond paint. There are cathedrals dedicated to him in Ica and Quebec, a university in Ontario, a college in Tamil Nadu, and an airport at Split that carries his name.