WHAT'S IN A NAMESAKE?

Jerry Harkins

Lego de spinas rosas, de terra aurum, de concha margaritum.
—St. Jerome, Letter to Eustochium, 384



SAINT JEROME was born Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus in Dalmatia, then a Greek colony in what is now Croatia, in about 340 and died in Bethlehem in 420. He is one of the early Doctors of the Church — indeed he was Maximus Doctor, the greatest teacher, and Gloriosus Doctor, the glorious teacher — a scholar and prolific writer best know for translating the Bible into Latin and recording a great deal of what we know about the sack of Rome in 410. Much of his work is brilliant. When St. Aidan and his Irish monks set out to teach the English to read and write [1], their McGuffey’s were Jerome’s Psalms and Gospels and, most especially, his commentaries on the latter. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, he was widely admired and often cited by the best and brightest thinkers. The phrase sicut beatus Hieronymus dicit [2] appears almost as an imprimatur in the works of Thomas Aquinas and others. Even Martin Luther (“I know no writer whom I hate as much as I do Jerome.”) relied heavily on the Vulgate for his own German Bible. [3] Still, Jerome was not immune to superficiality and even plagiarism [4] and he sometimes crossed the fine line between orthodoxy and heresy as, for example, in his attraction to certain of the more Stoic ideas of Pelagius. [5]

Jerome’s most important cultural contributions concern the art of translation. He codified and promoted the Roman rhetorical tradition that it is more important to convey the sense of the original than its literal meaning. This is all the more remarkable in that he was dealing primarily with what he believed to be the inspired word of God. He learned Hebrew as an adult and he mocked the pretense of the Septuagint that there had been 72 translators working separately to translate the Old Testament from Hebrew into Greek, and that, in the end, all their versions were identical. For his trouble, he was denounced by the fundamentalists of his day including his fellow Doctor — Doctor Doctoris — St. Augustine. [6]

Sad to say, Jerome was not an altogether appealing personality, making enemies with his sharp tongue wherever he went. Denouncing the gentle Pelagian theologian Jovinian, he wrote: "Whenever I see a dandy, or a man who is no stranger to a hairdresser, with his hair nicely done and his cheeks all aglow, he belongs to your herd, or rather, grunts in concert with your swine."

In spite of all this, Jerome, was a favorite subject of Renaissance painters, possibly because he had vivid erotic dreams that gave them an excuse to paint naked ladies. For example, while fasting and praying for four years in the Syrian desert, he was haunted by visions of Roman dancing girls. The young ladies are featured prominently in several otherwise pious portraits of him. In another dream he was accused by Christ of being a pagan at heart and was flogged senseless by angels. When he awoke, there were (of course) welts on his back and shoulders, a scene that today graces the walls of the Louvre in the form of a fifteenth century painting by Sano di Pietro. Another tradition has him as quite mad. Jusepe Ribera’s 1626 portrait is typical in depicting him as an ascetic with wild eyes. The best known portrait of him, St. Jerome by El Greco (c. 1590), is relatively straightforward. He appears anachronistically in the robes of a Cardinal, imagined as a Spanish don in deep and melancholy thought. [7]

He was very big on virginity. He preached on it so often that one must wonder if he was protesting too much. There were those who thought so. The Pope appointed a special prosecutor to look into the matter and, although Jerome was eventually exonerated, the wonder persists. He was surely an extremist on the subject. The wonderful line quoted at the outset (I gather roses from the thorns, gold from the earth, the pearl from the oyster) was written in the context of saying that he approved of marriage only because, without it, there would be no virgins. The recipient of this famous letter, De Custodia Virginitate, was a 16-year old girl, Eustochium Julia [8] who, with her mother, the widow Paula Julia, followed Jerome to Bethlehem. There Paula established four convents for the good doctor to supervise. Eustochium died on September 28, 420. Jerome passed to his own eternal reward two days later. At the hour of his death, his soul appeared in the company of Christ and the heavenly chorus to Augustine and a number of others who had been critical of his theology.

Custodia was by no means Jerome’s only venture in defense of virginity. Adversus Helvidium argues that Mary remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus and that, as a calling, virginity is inherently superior to the married state. In fairness, he was merely echoing here the views of St. Paul, and there are those kind souls who think both were trying to protect young women against premature marriages forced upon them by parents who thought that the single state was scandalous. The Bible is, after all, ambiguous on the question of marriage. Paul says it is better to marry than to burn which, in one sense, is obvious. Few things, after all, are worse than burning. And, in Judges 11, Jephthah delays the sacrifice of his daughter for two months so that she can bemoan the fact that she will die a virgin. “Go tell it on the mountain,” he instructs her, clearly signaling that he agrees that virginity is something to be greatly regretted.

But we can only envy anyone who has reached the age of reason believing that the Bible has a subtle feminist agenda. Bear in mind, we are not even told the name of Jephthah’s daughter. The Holy Bible is a book that names three female prophets: Miriam, the sister of Moses, Deborah, the wife of Lappidoth, and Huldah, the wife of Shallum. In each case, that’s pretty much all we know about them — the names of their closest male relatives. At least they have names. And at least two of them were not virgins.

Jerome himself was not a virgin. “I praise virginity to the skies,” he wrote to his friend Pammachius, “not because I myself possess it, but because, not possessing it, I admire it all the more.” It is not credible that anyone could conjure up such erotica as he did out of whole cloth, uninformed by experience and unfettered by embarrassment.

Jerome. The rose and the thorn. Red rose, proud rose, sad Rose of all my days! And God would bid His warfare cease,/ Saying all things were well; / And softly make a rosy peace, / A Peace of Heaven with Hell. [9]

Notes

1. Well, how did you think the English became literate? We’re not talking about the Britons who, as Celts, had been reading and writing for millennia and who are known today as the Welsh. We’re talking about the Anglo-Saxon pagans that invaded the island after the Romans left. One of these was Aethelfrith who established the Kingdom of Northumbria (North of the Humber River) in the early part of the Seventh Century. Upon his assassination, his sons, Oswald and Oswy were given sanctuary by the Irish monks of Iona. When Oswald regained the throne, he invited the monks to establish a colony on the holy island of Lindisfarne from which they sallied forth teaching and sanctifying the barbarians. Oswy who succeeded his brother, eventually betrayed the Irish in favor of the more rigid Roman version of the faith but that is a different story. It is told in a marvelous mystery novel by Peter Tremayne, Absolution by Murder, (St. Martin’s Press, 1994).

For a variety of reasons, a great deal of Jerome’s work has survived and a fair amount of it is still in print. More than a hundred of his letters, dozens of his commentaries on the major and minor prophets and his Latin translation of the Bible can all be found on the Web. My favorite compilation is that of the Loeb Classical Library, Volume 262 which includes superb translations by F.A. Wright (Harvard University Press, 1933). The first collection of the Letters appeared in Rome in 1470, a thousand and fifty years after his death and just 20 years after the Gutenberg Bible. Major editions have followed roughly once a century since. The second edition (Basle, 1520) was edited by Jerome’s great admirer, Desiderius Erasmus. There is also a very large body of literature devoted to St. Jerome but much of it is controversial. A notable exception is Saint Jerome In The Renaissance by Eugene F. Rice, Jr. of Columbia University (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). This is the sort of book every scholar wants to write, a labor of love based on long years of delightful research. I have leaned heavily on Rice whose work has given me great pleasure. Finally, Elaine Pagels treats Jerome extensively in her remarkable book, Adam, Eve and the Serpent (Random House, 1988). If you’re ever curious as to why the church turned sour on sex, this is the book to read.

2. Literally, “As Blessed Jerome says.” A modern version, preferred by the present writer would have it, “Right again, J.P.”

3. It is often said that Luther’s Bible shaped the modern German language in much the same way that the King James Version shaped English. Technically, like all other modern versions, it is a rendition of the Septuagint although Luther’s Greek was sketchy at best. You will also find claims that it “follows” the original Hebrew, but Luther’s Hebrew was worse than his Greek. In fact, the New Testament follows the second edition of Erasmus’ Latin translation of 1519 which, in turn, is more faithful to the Vulgate than contemporary critics realized. The Old Testament appears to have been based on the Brescia Hebrew Bible of 1494. Luther and his collaborators took pains to render the scriptures into ordinary language, in a sense following the practice of Jerome. Perhaps they went too far. Their work, at least to someone who struggled with German locution, seems full of awkward rhetoric and inexplicable logic. Worse, it reflects a narrow, parochial mind. For example, Luther uses Ostern, Easter, for Passover. So on the first Palm Sunday, he has Jesus saying, “In two days time, it will be Easter…” which is, of course, absurd. Luther was an anti-Semite but his avoidance of the perfectly good German word Passah is extreme by any standard. Both Jerome and Erasmus had it right as, “…post biduum pascha fiet.”

4. Jerome was a quick study and the fastest pen in the East. He is, therefore, occasionally wordy and the reader may be excused for sometimes feeling that he is being deliberately obscure or imprecise. And several of his ideas were clearly borrowed from earlier writers without attribution. Plagiarism, of course, is not nearly so serious an offense in a society that must transmit its culture through the hand copying of manuscripts. It is hardly culpable at all when translation is involved. Indeed, by creating work for subsequent generations of scholars, it may even be said to be beneficial.

5. Pelagius was a contemporary heretic of Irish origin who taught, among other things, the doctrine that we are justified or saved by faith alone (sola fides). He seems to have been congenial, brilliant and persuasive, several times charming hostile synods to his views. Both Jerome and the redoubtable Augustine weighed in with lengthy polemics against him but Jerome could not resist the closely related notion that, since God created man, man merits grace. This, of course, limits God’s power in the sense that it renders God incapable of withholding grace. The present writer has offered a different, almost opposite path to a similar conclusion: man cannot merit justification under any circumstances because man is, by nature, a poor dumb sinner. Sin, however, is defined as anything that detracts from the harmony or wholeness of God. Therefore, while man cannot merit forgiveness, God cannot withhold it. God must forgive us whether or not we ask for it. Thus, Pelagius, Jerome and I agree that God is not really omnipotent which is logical but heretical. Einstein said, “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the universe” [Emphasis added]. He believed but could not prove that God had no choices, that physical laws are universal and that there can not be a differently ordered universe.

David Douglas quotes an unnamed Anglican priest as saying that Pelagianism is the national heresy of England (see “Amazing Grace: A Journey in Time and Faith,” The Hymn, 49:3, July 1998, pp. 9-12). Hogwash! Pelagianism is too Irish to be English anything. The traditional argument is not between faith and grace but faith and works. Luther had rendered Romans 3:28 as, “So halten wir nun dafür, daß der Mensch gerecht wird ohne des Gesetzes Werke, allein durch den Glauben.
"We maintain that man …is justified by faith alone. The Vulgate reads, “…arbitramur enim justificari hominem per fidem sine operibus legis” which is to say man is justified by faith without respect to the law. There is no solam, no allein, no only. Indeed in 23-24, Paul says, “…for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace.” In Paul’s mind, justification seems to be merely one link in a chain that includes grace and even good works which he thinks of as the “fruits of faith.”

6. Jerome was not as steadfast in this as my encomium might imply. In the Letter to Pammachius defending his translation of a letter of Epiphanius to Bishop John of Jerusalem, he says, “For I myself not only admit but freely proclaim that in translating from the Greek (except in the case of holy scriptures where even the order of the words is a mystery) I render sense for sense and not word for word.” This is simply not true; he makes no exception for scripture. However, he seems to have concluded that discretion was the better part of valor and the scriptural fight is one he chooses not to fight here.

7. This portrait proved to be a best seller for El Greco who made at least four versions of it. What is probably the first enjoys a place of honor in the Frick Museum in New York. A smaller version hangs in the Met. In both, the Saint’s hands rest on an open copy of the Bible and he appears to be contemplating a passage he has just read. The book is open near its mid-point, somewhere around the beginning of Ecclesiastes where King Solomon laments (2:15), “I too shall suffer the fate of the fool. To what purpose have I been wise?”

8. Jerome had also been spiritual advisor to Eustochium’s sister, Blaesilla, a young widow who could not overcome the grief she felt for her husband. Jerome prescribed a month of fasting and penitential prayer even though she had a high fever. She died of it.

9. William Butler Years (of course). The Rose, 1893. The first line quoted here is from “To the Rose upon the Rood of Time.” The quatrain is from “The Rose of Peace.”