In medio Ecclesiæ aperuit os eius: et implevit eum Dominus spiritu sapientiæ et intellectus: stolam gloriæ induit eum. “In the midst of the Church the Lord opened his mouth: and filled him with the spirit of wisdom and understanding: He clothed him with a robe of glory.” — Introit of the Mass, Ecclus. 15:5
I. Identitas et Origines
His name was Eusebius Hieronymus, and he tells us himself where he came from. In the last chapter of his catalogue of Christian writers, De viris illustribus, having written up one hundred and thirty-four others, he adds a brief entry on himself: born the son of Eusebius, in the town of Stridon, on the border between Dalmatia and Pannonia, a town since overthrown by the Goths (De vir. ill. 135). The Goths did their work thoroughly. No one now knows where Stridon stood, and the towns of three modern nations contend for the honour.
The year of his birth is uncertain. The chronicle of Prosper of Aquitaine, reckoning back from his death, implies a date near 331; most modern historians, weighing what Jerome says of his own youth and studies, place it about 347. The family was Christian, provincial, and possessed of enough means to send a clever son to the capital. There was a younger brother, Paulinian, who would follow him into the monastic life, and a sister whose waywardness and later conversion caused him anxiety for years.
At Rome he studied grammar under Aelius Donatus, the most celebrated grammarian of the age, whom he afterwards names simply as “my teacher,” and rhetoric in the schools that were still the finishing of every ambitious young Roman. He learned to love Cicero and Virgil with a passion that would cost him a great deal of trouble later, and he lived, by his own repeated admission, as young men in Rome commonly lived. He was baptized at Rome, most probably while Liberius was still Pope, and thus before 366; he would later recall to Pope Damasus that it was from the Roman Church that he had received the garment of Christ (Ep. 15). As a student he spent his Sundays with his companions going down into the catacombs, walking the dark galleries among the tombs of the martyrs — an experience he describes, forty years afterwards, with the vividness of a man who had never forgotten it (Comm. in Ezech., on ch. 40).
II. Vitae Ratio et Virtutes
The conversion that made him a monk came not at Rome but at Trier, where he had gone, perhaps in pursuit of an imperial career, about the year 367. There, in the city where St. Athanasius had spent his exile, he encountered the monastic ideal of the East and resolved to give his life to God. He copied out, in his own hand, the treatises of St. Hilary of Poitiers for a friend (Ep. 5). He returned to Aquileia and joined a circle of young ascetics — Chromatius, afterwards bishop there, Bonosus, and his dearest friend Rufinus — and when that circle broke apart about 373, he set out for the East.
At Antioch he fell gravely ill, and in the fever came the dream that he himself made famous. He saw himself dragged before the judgment seat; asked what he was, he answered that he was a Christian; and the Judge replied that he lied — he was a Ciceronian, not a Christian, for where his treasure was, there was his heart also. He was scourged, and he woke, he tells Eustochium, with his shoulders bruised, swearing never again to possess or read the books of the pagans (Ep. 22.30). Years later, when Rufinus accused him of breaking the oath, Jerome answered with some tartness that no man is bound by what he promises in a dream (Apologia adv. Rufinum 1.30–31). Both things are true of him: the terror was real, and he never ceased to write like the best-read man of his generation. What changed was the order of his loves.
He went out into the desert of Chalcis, east of Antioch, and lived for two or three years among the hermits. His own account of that time, written to Eustochium, is one of the most unsparing pages in the literature of the spiritual life. Burned black by the sun, clothed in sackcloth, his companions scorpions and wild beasts, he found that his imagination still carried him to the dancing girls of Rome; and he describes how he would throw himself at the feet of Jesus, water them with his tears, and beat his breast day and night until calm returned (Ep. 22.7). To master his thoughts he set himself to the hardest labour he could find: he took lessons in Hebrew from a converted Jew, and after the polish of Quintilian and the richness of Cicero, he says, he gave himself to learning an alphabet of hissing and breathing sounds, with much toil, much despair, and many new beginnings (Ep. 125.12). He did not know that he was preparing the work for which the Church would remember him.
It must be said plainly, because the Church does not canonize temperaments but holiness, that Jerome was a difficult man. His tongue was sharp to the point of cruelty. He quarrelled with bishops, with fellow monks, with old friends. His polemics against Rufinus, once the companion of his youth, are painful to read, and he did not soften them when Rufinus died. He was quick to suspect, slow to forgive a slight, and capable of mockery that was witty and unjust at once. There is a story, told of more than one Pope and attached most often to Sixtus V, that on seeing a painting of Jerome beating his breast with a stone, the Pontiff remarked that he did well to hold that stone, for without it the Church would never have raised him to the altars. The story is almost certainly apocryphal; but it is apocryphal in the way that illuminates. The stone is the truth of him. He never ceased to be a man of violent temper, and he never ceased to repent of it.
Alongside the faults stand the virtues, and they are of heroic size: a penance lifelong and unrelenting; a poverty real enough that he lived in old age on what his friends could send; an industry that has no parallel in the Latin Church; and a love of the Word of God that consumed him. Above all, there was his fidelity to the Chair of Peter. Writing from the desert to Pope Damasus about 376, while the Church of Antioch was torn among three rival bishops and each faction pressed him to declare himself, he answered that he followed no leader but Christ, and was therefore joined in communion with the Pope’s Beatitude, that is, with the Chair of Peter, upon which rock he knew the Church was built; and that whoever eats the Lamb outside that house is profane (Ep. 15.2). Whatever else he was, he was never a partisan against Rome.
III. Apostolatus et Munus Ecclesiasticum
At Antioch, about 378 or 379, he was ordained priest by Paulinus, the bishop of the faction in communion with Rome and Alexandria. He accepted the priesthood reluctantly and, by his own account, on condition that he remain a monk and not be bound to the service of any particular church. He went on to Constantinople, where he sat at the feet of St. Gregory Nazianzen, whom he calls his teacher, and was in the city during the Council of 381. There he translated the Chronicle of Eusebius and a number of Origen’s homilies into Latin, and discovered his gift.
In 382 he came to Rome with Paulinus and St. Epiphanius of Salamis for a synod, and Pope Damasus kept him. For three years he served the aged Pope as a kind of secretary, assisting with the synodal correspondence of the Roman Church and answering the Pope’s questions on Scripture. Out of that service came the first great commission of his life. The Latin Gospels then in use circulated in so many divergent versions that, as Jerome remarked, there were almost as many texts as manuscripts. Damasus charged him to revise them against the Greek, and in 384 Jerome presented the revised Gospels to the Pope with a dedicatory preface. He knew exactly what he was doing and what it would cost: he wrote to Damasus that he expected to be called a forger and a sacrilege by those who preferred the errors they had grown up with.
At Rome, too, he became the director of a remarkable company of noble women who had gathered on the Aventine to live a life of prayer, study and renunciation in their own houses: Marcella, the widow Paula and her daughters Blesilla and Eustochium, Asella, and others. He taught them the Psalms and the Scriptures, including Hebrew, and they became the most faithful friends of his life. It was to Eustochium that he wrote his great letter on virginity (Ep. 22), and to these women, over the next thirty years, that a large part of his correspondence was addressed.
This influence made him enemies. When Blesilla died in 384, not long after her conversion to a life of severe penance, the crowd at her funeral blamed the monks, and Jerome in particular. In December of the same year Damasus died, and with him Jerome’s protection. There were whispers about his familiarity with Paula; there were resentments among the Roman clergy whom he had satirized without mercy. In August of 385 he took ship for the East, writing from the harbour a bitter farewell to Asella (Ep. 45). He would not see Rome again.
Paula and Eustochium followed him. Together they made the pilgrimage of the holy places of Palestine — Jerome’s letter on Paula’s death preserves its itinerary — and went down into Egypt, where Jerome heard the blind scholar Didymus at Alexandria and visited the monks of Nitria. In 386 they settled at Bethlehem. Paula built, with her fortune, a monastery for men which Jerome governed, three communities of women which she governed herself, and a hostel for pilgrims — built, Jerome wrote, so that if Mary and Joseph should come again to Bethlehem, they would find somewhere to lodge (Ep. 66.14). There, beside the cave of the Nativity, Jerome lived for the remaining thirty-four years of his life.
These were the years of the great labour. He first revised the Latin Psalter against the Greek of Origen’s Hexapla; this version, which came to be called the Gallican Psalter, passed into the Vulgate and, spreading through the Frankish churches and at last through the Breviary of St. Pius V, became the Psalter of the Roman Office until the twentieth century. Then, from about 390 to 405, he did what no Latin Christian before him had attempted: he translated the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew, going behind the Greek Septuagint to what he called the Hebraica veritas, the Hebrew truth. Alongside the translation poured out commentaries on the Prophets, on St. Matthew, on the Epistles of St. Paul; the lives of the hermits Paul, Malchus and Hilarion; the catalogue of Christian writers; works on the Hebrew names and places of Scripture; and more than a hundred letters that were copied and circulated throughout the Latin world, so that questions on Scripture were sent to Bethlehem as to an oracle.
The new translation was not welcomed everywhere. St. Augustine, who admired Jerome’s learning, feared that a version departing from the Septuagint would divide the Latin churches from the Greek, and he reported to Jerome that at Oea in Africa, when the bishop read the new rendering of the plant that shaded Jonah — an ivy where the congregation had always heard a gourd — the people nearly rioted (Augustine, Ep. 71). The correspondence between the two greatest Latin Fathers began badly, with misdelivered letters and wounded pride on Jerome’s side, but it ended in mutual reverence. In his old age Jerome wrote to Augustine that he was renowned throughout the world, that Catholics honoured him as the restorer of the ancient faith, and — the surest sign of his glory — that all the heretics hated him (Ep. 141).
For Jerome was, all his life, a controversialist in the service of the faith, and some of the Church’s clearest defences of her doctrine come from his pen. Against Helvidius, while still at Rome, he defended the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, showing from the usage of Scripture that the “brethren of the Lord” are His kinsmen and not children of Mary. Against Jovinian, who taught that virginity was no higher than marriage and that the baptized cannot fall, he defended the counsels of perfection with such vehemence that his own friends at Rome tried to withdraw copies of the book from circulation. Against Vigilantius he defended the veneration of the relics of the martyrs, the vigils kept at their tombs, and the intercession of the saints. In the Origenist controversy he broke with Rufinus and with John, Bishop of Jerusalem, having come to see in certain of Origen’s speculations — on the pre-existence of souls, the restoration of all things, the resurrection body — errors against the faith, even while he never ceased to make use of Origen’s exegetical learning. And in his last years he wrote against Pelagius, who had settled in Palestine, defending the necessity of grace.
That last controversy came to his door. In 416 a band of Pelagian partisans attacked the monasteries at Bethlehem, set fire to the buildings, beat the monks and nuns, and killed a deacon; Jerome escaped by taking refuge in a fortified tower. Pope Innocent I wrote to Jerome in consolation, and wrote severely to the Bishop of Jerusalem for having allowed it.
He had already lived through the fall of the world he was born into. When Alaric’s Goths sacked Rome in 410, Jerome at Bethlehem, receiving the refugees, wrote that the brightest light of the whole earth had been extinguished and that in one city the whole world had perished (Comm. in Ezech., prologue to Book I). Marcella died of the treatment she received in the sack. Paula had died in 404; Jerome wrote her epitaph in a letter that is at once a biography, a travelogue and a lament (Ep. 108). Eustochium died about 419. He was left, an old man nearly blind, surrounded by the second generation, still dictating.
IV. Mors et Cultus
He died at Bethlehem on the thirtieth of September, 420, according to the chronicle of Prosper; some accounts place it a year earlier. He was buried near Paula and Eustochium in the grottoes beside the cave of the Nativity, where a chapel bearing his name is still shown. A later tradition, recorded in the lessons of the Roman Breviary, holds that his body was afterwards brought to Rome and laid in the Basilica of St. Mary Major, beside the relics of the Crib; the tradition is venerable, though the manner and date of the translation cannot be established from early documents.
His cult in the Latin West was universal from the early Middle Ages, and his feast on the day of his death stands in the Roman calendar of the Tridentine Missal and of the Missal of 1962. In 1298 Boniface VIII, in the decretal Gloriosus Deus, ordered that the feasts of the four great Doctors of the Latin Church — Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Gregory — be kept with solemn rank throughout the Church; in the painted ceilings and carved pulpits of Christendom thereafter the four appear together, Jerome most often with his book open to the Scriptures.
The Church’s highest tribute to his work came at the Council of Trent. In its fourth session, on the eighth of April 1546, the Council declared that the old Latin Vulgate edition, approved by long use in the Church over so many centuries, was to be held as authentic in public readings, disputations, preaching and exposition, and that no one should dare to reject it on any pretext. The revised Sixto-Clementine edition of 1592 became the Bible of the Latin Church for the next four centuries. For the fifteenth centenary of his death, Benedict XV issued the encyclical Spiritus Paraclitus (1920), holding up Jerome as the model of the Catholic exegete and drawing from his writings the Church’s doctrine on the inerrancy of Holy Scripture.
The iconography of St. Jerome gathered legends as it went. The lion who keeps him company was borrowed, in the course of the Middle Ages, from the story of the Palestinian abbot Gerasimus, whose name was easily confused with his; it is a legend and nothing more, though a charming one. The red hat and robes of a cardinal, with which painters commonly clothe him, are an anachronism — there were no cardinals in the later sense in the fourth century — arising from his service to Pope Damasus. The skull on his desk and the stone in his hand are truer to him than either: the one for the study that never ceased, the other for the penance that never ceased.
In the Byzantine Churches he is commemorated as “our holy father Jerome” on the fifteenth of June, a reminder that he belongs to the undivided Church, and that he spent the greater part of his life in the East.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
That to be ignorant of the Scriptures is to be ignorant of Christ. This is the sentence of his that the Church has most often repeated, from the prologue to his commentary on Isaiah, and it is the summary of his life. He did not study Scripture as a philologist studies a text, though he was the greatest philologist of his age. He studied it because it was the voice of Christ, and because he held that a Christian who does not know the Word does not know the One who speaks it. But he read it in the Church, under the Chair of Peter, with the Fathers who had gone before him; the Scripture he gave to the West was the Church’s book, and he made it for her use.
That the mind given to God is the flesh’s best enemy. Jerome knew the violence of temptation as few saints have confessed it. His counsel, learned in the desert, was not only fasting and tears but labour: to fill the mind so fully with holy things that it has no room for others. He told the young monk Rusticus to love the knowledge of the Scriptures, and he would not love the vices of the flesh (Ep. 125.11), and to keep a book always in his hand. His study of Hebrew began as a penance before it became a vocation. There is here a lesson for any soul troubled by distraction or temptation: idleness is the devil’s workshop, and holy work is a discipline.
That the saint is made by repentance, not by temperament. The Epistle of his Mass has St. Paul charge Timothy to “reprove, entreat, rebuke in all patience and doctrine” (2 Tim. 4:2). Jerome was superb at the reproving and rebuking; he was not always patient. He is a saint not because he conquered his temper, which he never fully did, but because he never ceased to fight it and to weep over it, and because he placed every gift he had, including his sharpness, at the service of the truth. A late medieval tradition tells that Christ appeared to him in the cave at Bethlehem and asked what gift he would bring to the Child. Jerome offered his labours, his fasts, his translations; and each time the Lord asked for something more, until at last Jerome asked in bewilderment what remained, and the Lord answered: Give me your sins, that I may forgive them. The story is a legend; but no one who has read Jerome doubts that it tells the truth about him.
That the teacher must first be the doer. The Gospel of the Mass ends with the Lord’s sentence: “he that shall do and teach, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:19). The Collect takes this up precisely: it asks not that we may teach as Jerome taught, but that we may practise what he taught ore simul et opere — by word and by work together. The Church does not ask us to imitate his tongue. She asks us to imitate his obedience to the Word he translated.
VI. Oratio
Deus, qui Ecclesiæ tuæ, in exponendis sacris Scripturis, beatum Hieronymum Confessorem tuum, Doctorem maximum providere dignatus es: præsta, quæsumus; ut, eius suffragantibus meritis, quod ore simul et opere docuit, te adiuvante, exercere valeamus. Per Dominum.
“O God, who didst vouchsafe to provide for Thy Church, in the expounding of the Sacred Scriptures, blessed Jerome Thy Confessor as her greatest Doctor: grant, we beseech Thee, that through the help of his merits we may be able, by Thy assistance, to practise what he taught by word and work alike. Through our Lord.”
VII. Aspiratio
Sancte Hieronyme, qui Verbum Dei in Scripturis dilexisti, fac ut Christum in eis cognoscamus. “Saint Jerome, who didst love the Word of God in the Scriptures, obtain that we may know Christ in them.”
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the questions Jerome’s life raises most directly: the inspiration and inerrancy of Holy Scripture, the formation of the canon, and the meaning of the Tridentine decree on the Vulgate — what “authentic” signifies, and what it does not. The same path treats the perpetual virginity of Our Lady, which Jerome defended against Helvidius.
The Church History path treats the Origenist controversy and the rupture between Jerome and Rufinus, the Pelagian crisis in which Jerome and Augustine stood together, and the sack of Rome in 410 as the Fathers experienced it.
The Lives of the Saints path continues with those whose lives were woven into his: Pope St. Damasus (11 December), St. Paula (26 January), and St. Augustine, whose correspondence with Jerome is one of the great dialogues of the patristic age.
The Sacred Liturgy path treats the Gallican Psalter, Jerome’s revision of the Psalms, how it displaced the older Roman Psalter in the Divine Office, and how it was set aside as an option by the Pian Psalter of 1945.
Practice
Examine. Where does my tongue run ahead of my charity? Jerome’s example is not that sharpness is a virtue, but that every gift, even a dangerous one, can be placed under discipline and put to the service of truth — and that the discipline is lifelong.
Do. Read one chapter of Scripture today, slowly, as the voice of Christ — preferably one of the Gospels. If you can, make it a daily habit, beginning with the Gospel of St. Matthew, on which Jerome wrote his commentary at Bethlehem.
Pray. The Collect of the day, or the aspiration above.
Devote. The Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary, attending particularly to the Nativity, beside whose cave Jerome lived and labored for thirty-four years; or, for those who struggle with anger, the Sorrowful Mysteries, with attention to the silence of Our Lord before His accusers.
Sancte Hieronyme, Doctor maxime in exponendis sacris Scripturis, ora pro nobis.
Sources consulted: the letters and treatises of St. Jerome (loci as given); St. Augustine, Ep. 71; the Chronicle of Prosper of Aquitaine; the Council of Trent, Session IV; Benedict XV, Spiritus Paraclitus; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), s.v. “St. Jerome”; Butler’s Lives of the Saints; the lessons of the Roman Breviary for 30 September.