Sophronius Eusebius Hieronymus, patron of the learned and of translators, author of the great Latin translation of the Bible known as the Vulgate, was was born in Strido in Dalmatia. He studied grammar, rhetoric and philosophy in Rome and was baptized there. Ηe was attracted by the ascetic life and travelled to the East where he was (unwillingly) ordained a priest. He was recalled to Rome to act as secretary to Pope Damascus, but on the Pope’s death he returned to the East to Bethlehem, where (with the aid of Saint Paula and others) he founded a monastery, a hospice and a school. There he settled down to the most important work of his life, the translation of the Bible into Latin, a translation which, with some revisions, is still in use today.
He wrote many works of his own including letters and commentaries on Holy Scripture. When a time of travels came upon the world, through Barbarian invasions, and to the Church through internal dissension, he helped the refugees and those in need. He died at Bethlehem
He strove to live a life based on the Bible, despite his difficult, hot-tempered character. As a student in Rome he engaged in sexual experimentation. He indulged himself quite casually, but he suffered terrible bouts of guilt afterwards. To appease his conscience, on Sundays he visited the sepulchers of the martyrs and the Apostles in the catacombs. This experience reminded him of the terrors of Hell:
Often I would find myself entering those crypts, deep dug in the earth, with their walls on either side lined with the bodies of the dead, where everything was so dark that almost it seemed as though the Psalmist’s words were fulfilled, Let them go down quick into Hell. Here and there the light, not entering in through windows, but filtering down from above through shafts, relieved the horror of the darkness. But again, as soon as you found yourself cautiously moving forward, the black night closed around and there came to my mind the line of Virgil, “Horror strikes hearts everywhere, and at the same time the very silences terrify them”.
A journey to Trier, where an important colony of monks had settled, had confirmed him in his vocation as an ascetic.
He received Baptism in about 366. He went to Aquileia and joined a group of fervent Christians that had formed around Bishop Valerian and which he described as almost “a choir of blesseds”. He then left for the East and lived as a hermit in the Desert of Chalcis, south of Aleppo, devoting himself assiduously to study. He perfected his knowledge of Greek, began learning Hebrew.
Meditation, solitude, and contact with the Word of God helped his Christian sensibility to mature. He bitterly regretted the indiscretions of his youth and was keenly aware of the contrast between the pagan mentality and the Christian life: a contrast made famous by the dramatic and lively “vision”—of which he has left us an account—in which it seemed to him that he was being scourged before God because he was “Ciceronian rather than Christian”
In 373 he felt the irresistible call of the Bible lands, which gave birth to his other vocation, the service of God’s Word. At Antioch he mastered Greek. In the Aleppo desert where he lived as a hermit for three years he learned Hebrew. From then on he was ‘a man of three languages’. At Constantinople before, during and after the Second Ecumenical Council, he struck up a friendship with the great Cappadocians Gregory of Nazianzen and Gregory of Nyssa and became a fervent follower of Origenist exegesis.
On his return to Rome in 382, he became the secretary and confidant of the aged Pope Damasus. He revised the Latin text of the New Testament, and that of the Psalms in the Septuagint version.
At the same time Jerome was directing a spiritual circle of highly born and beautiful ladies, whom he dissuaded from marriage and encouraged to lead ascetic lives. They included Paula, Marcella, Asella and Lea, who chose him as their spiritual guide and teacher in the methodical approach to the sacred texts. These noblewomen also learned Greek and Hebrew.
After the death of Damasus in 385 not only was Jerome not elected bishop as he was hoping, the people accused him of having caused the death, on account of her austerities, of a girl of whom everyone thought highly for her goodness and charm. Thereupon he took himself to Palestine, where he was joined by the wealthy Paula and other devout ladies. These noblewomen also learned Greek and Hebrew.
When he came back from Egypt where he had gone to visit the monks, Paula settled him in Bethlehem at the head of a monastery of men, while she herself not far from there was in charge of several communities of women. It was she who provided for the building of these houses, as well as a hospice for pilgrims bound for the Holy Land, “remembering Mary and Joseph who had found no room there”. He also founded a monastic school, where he was to write his commentaries on Scripture.
But from 391 to 400, because the Jewish scholars with whom he was working did not accept the authority of the Septuagint, he translated directly from the Hebrew original, thus producing the great Latin Bible which in the Middle Ages came to be called the Vulgate, which was recognized as official by the Council of Trent
He later also referred to The Masoretic text (from masorah, transmission), which is the text of the Hebrew Bible as fixed by the Pharisee rabbis at the Synod of Jamnia in 90 – 95 A.D.
Simultaneously with this work Jerome took part in the Origenist controversy, becoming as relentless an adversary of Origen as he had been a partisan of his. He quarrelled with Rufinus. He also plunged into the Pelagian controversy with such effect that a group of Pelagius’ followers burned his monastery and he himself had a narrow escape from death. He conducted a polemic, vigorous and at times cruel, against those who called in question the superiority of monasticism and virginity.
He also demonstrated the importance and validity of Christian literature, which had by then become a real culture that deserved to be compared with classical literature: he did so by composing his De Viris Illustribus (Of Famous Men), the biographies of more than a hundred Christian authors. Further, he wrote biographies of monks, illustrating, alongside other spiritual paths, the monastic ideal.
The Huns and the Bedouins came and went and from time to time and he had to flee.
In 410 the barbarians sacked Rome. But Jerome was well aware of the relativity of history. He continued to give his attention to the writing of polished Letters, and countless generations were to pray the Psalms and nourish themselves on the Word of God thanks to him.
Letters: some of the best are found in the Loeb Classical Library, edited by F.A. Wright 1954. Note on Septuagint: The Septuagint version is the Greek translation of the Bible made at Alexandria in the third century B.C. According to legend the seventy translators working separately arrived at the same text. During the patristic age this version, the only one known to the authors of the New Testament, was considered as the true Bible of the Church, on certain points marking a progressive revelation or testifying to an older state of the text than the Masoretic version.
Jerome emphasized the joy and importance of being familiar with biblical texts: “Does one not seem to dwell, already here on earth, in the Kingdom of Heaven when one lives with these texts, when one meditates on them, when one does not know or seek anything else?” (Ep. 53, 10). “ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.” This is his famous phrase, cited also by the Second Vatican Council in the Constitution Dei Verbum (no. 25).
A passionate love for Scripture therefore pervaded Jerome’s whole life, a love that he always sought to deepen in the faithful, too. He recommends to one of his spiritual daughters: “Love Sacred Scripture, and wisdom will love you; love it tenderly, and it will protect you; honour it, and you will receive its caresses. May it be for you as your necklaces and your earrings” (Ep. 130, 20). And again: “Love the science of Scripture, and you will not love the vices of the flesh”
Jerome counsels: “The true temple of Christ is the soul of the faithful: adorn it and beautify this shrine, place your offerings in it and receive Christ. What is the use of decorating the walls with precious stones if Christ dies of hunger in the person of the poor?” (Ep. 58, 7). Jerome concretizes the need “to clothe Christ in the poor, to visit him in the suffering, to nourish him in the hungry, to house him in the homeless”
He stayed in Bethlehem until he died, continuing to do a prodigious amount of work: he commented on the Word of God; he defended the faith, vigorously opposing various heresies; he urged the monks on to perfection; he taught classical and Christian culture to young students; he welcomed with a pastor’s heart pilgrims, who were visiting the Holy Land. He died in his cell close to the Grotto of the Nativity on 30 September 419.
