The transformation of wealthy, wild Roman party boy Jerome (Eusebius Hieronymus Sophronius, to give him his full name) into the ascetic scholar St Jerome who worked for his last 34 years out of a cave in Bethlehem (the stable where Jesus had been born), is one of the more significant miracles in world history.
But the fact is, Jerome’s whole adult life was a stripping away of the luxurious and ephemeral in search of the essential and enduring.
In his youth, Jerome travelled from Dalmatia to Rome to study the literature of the pre-Christian Mediterranean world, but, in a dream, he felt God accusing him of being a ‘Ciceronian’ rather than a Christian. His youthful escapades behind him, Jerome spent a life devoted to researching and promulgating truth – in his case, the truth found in the sacred scriptures of faith.
His move to asceticism signalled, too, a repugnance for the changing role of the Church in the fourth century, a change which did not reflect Jerome’s ideal Christian approach: ‘Our walls glitter with gold, and gold gleams on our ceilings and the capitals of our pillars; yet Christ is dying at our doors in the person of his poor, the naked and hungry.’
Before Jerome was born, the Emperor Constantine had begun the wholescale transformation of the Church from a sort of nation-within-the-nation into the visible, hierarchical mirror of the imperial government, with a social role as the near-official religion of the empire.
As part of this transformation, Pope Damasus I asked Jerome to create an authoritative Latin text of the Gospels out of the varied Latin texts that were in circulation. Jerome, in his quest for the best literary form of God’s revelation to humanity, went further: he translated the Old Testament from its original Hebrew as well.
Jerome’s creation of what became known as the Vulgate Bible, the authoritative Catholic Bible for more than a millennium, was a response not only to a Pope’s request, but also to his own deep desire to keep the Church connected to the authentic, the genuine, the true. If any man’s life reflected a deep belief in Jesus’ claim ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life’ (John 14:6), it was St Jerome’s.
Jerome’s ability to merge his stated beliefs with deeds stirred his followers, many of whom were women. One in particular, Paula (St Paula of Rome), stands out as someone who managed to ‘out-Jerome’ Jerome. Born into the highest echelon of Roman society, Paula followed Jerome to Bethlehem, where she surrendered all of her worldly wealth to the service of others (‘Dead to the world before your death, you have spent all your mere worldly substance upon the poor...’).
Jerome’s relationship to Paula was deep, but consistent with his beliefs. What he wrote to her when one of her daughters died is both tender (‘I … weep … for holiness, mercy, innocence, chastity, and all the virtues, for all are gone now that Blæsilla is dead’) and remonstrative: ‘Why do we grieve for the dead?... I pardon you the tears of a mother, but I ask you to restrain your grief’.
What was both admirable and severe about Jerome grew from his sincere consistency. His and Paula’s renunciation of the world was neither affectation nor ‘virtue signalling’; his asceticism and his all-pervasive Biblical scholarship came from a singularity of purpose: to bring the whole world, phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, to the blazing truth of Jesus. For a man of so many words, only one satisfied: Christ.
St Jerome
Circa 347 – 420 CE
Translator of the Bible
Feast day: 30 September
Patron saint of: Archaeologists, archivists, Bible scholars, librarians, libraries, school children, students and translators.
Image: St Jerome, wiki images.