The Letters of Saint Jerome by Saint Jerome

First transcribed:Sancti Eusebii Hieronymi Epistulae, 370-419 c.e. (English translation, 1933)

Edition(s) used:Select Letters of St. Jerome, translated by F. A. Wright. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Letters

Core issue(s): The Bible; monasticism; virginity

Overview

Among Saint Jerome’s letters, those of enduring interest are of a formal nature, written with the expectation that they would be copied and passed from hand to hand. Jerome often refers readers to other letters just as he refers them to his books. Many of the letters deal with monastic life, a subject of increasing interest and in which guidance was needed. However, monasticism was only one aspect of Jerome’s message for his generation, which was simply a serious call to a devout and holy life.

The Roman world, less than a century after the conversion of Constantine the Great, was nominally Christian but still largely pagan. Hitherto, persecution had kept the Church fairly honest. Now not to be a Christian was considered bad form. Never had the Roman world been so corrupted—and confused. Jerome was a picturesque individual in whom learning was combined with experience of the desert. People wrote to him from every quarter seeking his counsel. What they got was strong medicine: Repent and be converted; separate yourselves from corrupt society; discipline your bodies; renounce wealth and social position; read the Bible and the writings of the saints; minister to the sick and the poor; and pray constantly.

The times were turbulent. Between the death of Constantius in 361 c.e. and the accession of Theodosius the Great in 379, five emperors and three usurpers had met their deaths. With the Goths ravaging Europe and Huns at large in Asia Minor, no one felt safe. In a letter to a young man from Marseilles, Jerome writes, “May our renunciation of the world be a matter of free will and not of necessity! However, in our present miseries, with swords raging fiercely all around us, he is rich enough who is not in actual want of bread, he is more powerful than he needs be who is not reduced to slavery.”

Jerome distinguished between being a Christian in the world and turning one’s back on the world to pursue perfection. In his own case, renouncing the world meant not merely leaving family and friends to go and live in the desert; it also meant disposing of his library of Greek and Latin authors, which he could not make up his mind to do even though he knew that clinging to pagan authors was like drinking the cup of Christ and the cup of the devil at the same time. While he was in Antioch, ready to depart for the Syrian desert, the matter resolved itself. Jerome fell seriously ill and in a delirium, he believed he stood before the judgment seat. When he represented himself as a Christian, the judge said, “Thou liest; thou are a Ciceronian, not a Christian. ’For where thy treasure is there will thy heart be also.’” When he cried for mercy, the sound of his voice was drowned out by the noise of the lash; and he was pardoned only when he swore never again to read the works of pagan authors.

Jerome stayed in the desert for five years, slowly inuring himself to its torments. “I remember that often I joined night to day with my wailings and ceased not from beating my breast till tranquility returned to me at the Lord’s behest.” He was not a member of a community, but there were other monks in the vicinity, and when he could not by fasting overcome “the promptings of sin and the ardent heat of my nature,” he put himself in the hands of a converted Jew and learned Hebrew. “How often I despaired, how often I gave up and then in my eagerness to learn began again . . . those can testify who were then living with me. I thank the Lord that from a bitter seed of learning I am now plucking sweet fruits.” He also wrote letters, including one to his close friend, Heliodorus, who had accompanied him to the desert but after a while had returned to civilization. “Why are you such a timid Christian?” Jerome writes. “Are you looking for an inheritance in this world, you who are a joint-heir with Christ? Consider the meaning of the word monk [monachos, solitary], your proper designation. What are you, a solitary, doing in a crowd?” Heliodorus was ordained a presbyter and later was made a bishop, and his friendship with Jerome continued. Jerome was himself ordained when he left the desert, and he came to look on organized monastic life as a kind of seminary for the secular clergy.

Reconciled, it seems, to the fact that he was temperamentally unsuited to the solitary life, Jerome, as a counselor, concerned himself largely with the question of how one can be in the world and not of the world, how, in Paul’s words, he can “use the world as not abusing it” (1 Cor. 7:31). Writing in the satiric vein common in the classical world, he often approaches this question by portraying false Christians. There are priests, he says, who at home never had anything to eat but millet and coarse bread but who now dine so well that they know the names of every kind of fish, can tell on what coast an oyster was gathered, and have learned to prize a dish solely on its rarity and cost. Other priests he portrays as paying court to old men and women without heirs, sitting by their bedsides, and fetching the basin, impatient of the doctor’s calls and hardly able to conceal their chagrin when the patient shows signs of getting well. “With what labor they seek an empty inheritance! At less trouble they could have bought for themselves the pearl of Christ.”

Jerome is just as hard on Christian women, “putting on a fresh frock every day, and even so unable to get the better of the moth.” Some, in pursuit of piety, wear one dress until it falls to pieces even though their trunks bulge with clothes. They spend their money on costly scrolls, lettered in gold and ornamented with jewels, while Christ lies naked at their doorsteps in the persons of the poor. When they give alms they “sound a trumpet” like the woman lately observed with her band of eunuchs handing out coins at the door of Saint Peter’s. When a ragged woman ran in front to get a second coin, the grand lady clenched her fist and bloodied her nose.

Satire, however, is not of much help to a person seeking spiritual direction, and because of this, Jerome frequently uses the form of a funeral panegyric. One such is his portrait of the ideal theological candidate, Nepotion, a nephew of Heliodorus. He had been a soldier, and when he laid aside his military belt, “he gave all his army savings to the poor. For he had read the words: ’If thou wilt be perfect, sell that thou hast, and give to the poor and follow me.’ He kept nothing for himself except a coarse tunic and cloak to protect him from the cold.” Although he burned with a desire to enter a monastery, he saw that his duty was to stay with his uncle, “in whom he saw a pattern of every virtue and from whose lessons he could profit at home.” Passing through the usual stages, he was at last ordained a presbyter. “Good Jesus! how he sobbed and groaned! how he forbade himself food and fled from the eyes of all!” For he looked on the priesthood not as a glory but as a burden. So, he busied himself with acts of charity and mercy and encouraged others to do the same. First in industry among his fellow priests, he was last in honor. Widows and virgins he honored as mothers and sisters. In private he forgot the clergyman and submitted to the severities of the monk, only tasting his uncle’s dishes, “thus both avoiding superstition and yet keeping to his rule of self-restraint.” When he conversed it was to bring forward some biblical text and to listen modestly to what others had to say, offering no opinion of his own but modestly citing what Cyprian, Tertullian, and Hilary had written. “Let others add shilling to shilling, fastening their claws on married ladies’ purses and hunting wealth by flattering attention; . . . let them possess wealth in the service of a poor Christ such as they never had in the service of a rich devil. . . . Our dear Nepotion tramples gold underfoot, books are the only thing he desires. But while he despises himself in the flesh and walks abroad in splendid poverty, he yet seeks out everything that may adorn his church.”

Had Jerome lived a hundred years earlier, he would no doubt have left us a book of martyrs. As it is, The Letters of Saint Jerome take the place of a lives of the saints. One such life, in the form of a funeral panegyric, is that of Fabiola, whom Jerome with typical exaggeration speaks of as another Magdalene, her fault being that, contrary to the rules of the Church, she had divorced a worthless husband and married a second time. After the death of her second husband, she did public penance—unusual for a woman of wealth—and devoted the rest of her life to works of charity. “When she was restored to communion, what did she do? Did she forget her sorrows in the midst of happiness? Nay, she preferred to break up and sell all that she could lay hands on of her property and when she had turned it into money she disposed of everything for the benefit of the poor.” She founded an infirmary and personally gathered up the sick and helped care for them. Many people, says Jerome, show mercy with the purse, overlooking the fact that the sufferer is made of the same clay as the self. Not so Fabiola. “She was, indeed, such a comforter that many poor people who were well fell to envying the sick.” This is not to say that her concerns were limited to the sick: she also supplied clothes and food to the poor, aided monasteries, and traveled the seas to disperse her bounty. When she visited Jerome in Bethlehem, she especially endeared herself by asking endless questions about biblical passages. Her desires to put her charities in other hands and flee from Rome were only partly realized. The last that we hear, she was at Ostia—Rome’s port city—where she established and helped maintain a hospice for travelers in distress.

In Jerome’s eyes the most formidable obstacles in the way of Christian perfection are marriage and the family. Under the Old Covenant, where the rule was “be fruitful and multiply,” marriage was praised and obedience to parents was second only to obedience to God. Not so under the New Covenant, which sets sons against fathers and daughters against mothers, and which commands virginity to all who can receive it. Jerome has the usual things to say against sexual indulgence, and he regards marriage as no more than a concession to fleshly weakness. However, with other fathers of the Church, Jerome also perceived in virginity a mystical dimension. In a set piece, “The Virgin’s Profession,” addressed to Eustochium, he argues that the virgin Christ is a jealous Bridegroom and demands virginity in the soul that wants to receive his favors. In Jerome’s view, marriage belongs to the order brought on by the Fall. “Death came through Eve: life has come through Mary. . . . As soon as the Son of God set foot on earth, He formed for himself a new household, that as He was adored by Angels in heaven He might have angels also on earth.” Everyone worships the thing he loves, says Jerome. “Wherefore we must take all care that abstinence may bring back to Paradise those whom repletion once drove out.”

Jerome’s letters are not all concerned with personal piety and with clerical ideals. An important group has to do with doctrinal disputes, in which Jerome appears as a formidable and not always kindly defender of Catholic tradition. However, everywhere he reveals himself as a deeply spiritual man waging a war against the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Christian Themes

One of the themes of Saint Jerome’s letters was that the Christian life is a battle, whether one chooses to fight it in the wilderness or in the city. He may have been temperamentally unsuited for the life of an ascetic in the wilderness, and he reported being tormented by his unquiet mind. He noted the struggle necessary in being in the world but not of it, and he wrote of priests and Christian women who had trouble living a true Christian life.

His answer to this problem was the monastic life, which he believed led to receipt of the highest heavenly prize, and this theme informs much of his writing. He urged men who wished to become priests to submit to monastic discipline before receiving ordination. In keeping with the value he placed on turning away from the world, he felt that marriage makes it difficult for a person to renounce the world and attain to perfect love of God. His chief objection to marriage was that it puts a husband or a wife, together with a mountain of worldly cares, between the soul and God. Virginity is nonattachment: As such it is essential for those who are determined in their desire to achieve perfection in the present life. Hence, he advised the young to remain virgins, and widows and widowers not to remarry.

Sources for Further Study

Adkins, Neal. Jerome on Virginity: A Commentary on the “Libellus de virginitate servanda” Letter 22. Cambridge, England: Francis Cairns, 2003. Adkins examines Jerome’s letter dealing with virginity, which touches on the topic as covered in some of his letters.

Kelly, J. N. D. Jerome: His Life, Writings, and Controversies. London: Duckworth, 1975. A biography that looks at the writings of Jerome, including his letters.

Rebenich, Stefan. Jerome. New York: Routledge, 2002. Biography of Jerome that examines the saint as a major intellectual force as a scholar and biblical commentator.

Williams, Megan Hale. The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Examines Saint Jerome’s scholarship and how he made scholarship an acceptable part of the monastic life.