About St. Jerome

Stained glass window picture of Saints Jerome & Gregory from
St. Augustine Parish, Montpelier, Vermont
  
 The windows, a defining feature of the church, were made by the Wilbur Burnham Company of Boston and were installed over a year-long period that began in the fall of 1937 and continued almost until the end of 1938.

From September 29, 2005:

The feast day of St. Jerome is September 30.

Jerome was born to a wealthy Christian family in 331 in a town called Stridon, in Dalmatia. When he was 11 or 12 years old, his father sent him to Rome for his secondary education.  He had the most celebrated teacher of the day and learned Latin grammar and classics such as Vergil.  From the age of 14, he studied rhetoric, the expertise in speech and writing which was the path to wealth.  Those practical skills were highly valued in Rome in that day, while the study of philosophy was no longer highly prized.  The young Jerome was highly educated, but he was proud, moody, and vulnerable to lust.  He fell into the pleasures of decadent Rome.   

Years later, Jerome resurfaced.  He was baptized around the age of 35.  The following year, he moved to Trier, a city with career opportunities in a region where monasticism had found a place, and then moved home to Stridon.  Yet, when he returned home, he quarreled bitterly with his family,perhaps because he had decided to become a monk despite his costly education.  Ugly rumors circulated, and in 372 Jerome left his hometown forever.  He set out for Jerusalem together with an ever-expanding library that he had begun while he was a student in Rome.

Jerome proved too weak for the journey.  Stranded in Antioch by illness for a year, he became fluent in Greek.  By spring of 374, he abandoned his planned destination and decided to join the monks of the Syrian desert. 

Christian monasticism had existed for at least 100 years, going back to St. Anthony, who had settled in the Egyptian desert around 271.  By 374, there were several centers of monasticism in the Syrian desert, more extreme in their asceticism than those in Egypt.  However, the Syrians were less solitary than Egyptian monks.  They came together daily for common prayers.  Jerome moved into one of the monastic cells built into caves, library in tow.  He disciplined himself by forcing himself to learn Hebrew.  However, the urban man, with his entourage of copyists making books, did not fit in with the desert monks.  He was disillusioned when he returned to Antioch around 377, but never lost his love for the ascetic ideal. 

For the next few years, Jerome lived as a successful author and translator.  He studied the Bible and the African theologians Tertullian and Cyprian.  He was over fifty when he returned to Rome in 382.  He worked there for three years with Pope Damasus, and he became Bible teacher and spiritual advisor to a group of highly educated Roman women who had chosen an ascetic lifestyle, Marcella among them.  Upper class Christian girls in Rome then received the same education as boys in literature, especially studying the classic poets.  As soon as Christian girls were able to learn, they began to learn the Bible and to memorize the entire book of Psalms.  Another of the women, Paula, was a fine Greek scholar, who with her daughters learned Hebrew so that they could sing the Psalms in the original language.  Pope Damasus had Jerome prepare an improved Latin translation of the Gospels, but there were many people who disliked the changes he made to the well known Old Latin text.

After the death of Pope Damasus, more opponents forced Jerome to move again.  In 385, he, his brother, Paula, and one of her daughters, left Rome for good. They settled in Bethlehem for the rest of their lives.  Jerome established a monastery that quickly attracted many monks.  Paula established a convent that grew to 50 nuns.  Jerome undertook more study of Hebrew, devoted himself to his writing and translating, and sometimes preached.

Spurred on by Marcella and Paula, he undertook writing Bible commentaries, borrowing from the earlier work of Origen and others, and dictating as much as 1,000 lines a day.  From 391 to 405, he translated the entire Old Testament from the Hebrew.  Jerome raised Christian Latin to the high standards of literature in which he had been educated.  However, his translation drew strong criticism from people who did not want change.

Jerome encountered more controversy in the 390’s, when Origen’s opinions came into condemnation as a source of the Arian heresy.  Jerome promptly complied with requests to abjure Origenism, having followed only Origen’s orthodox opinions, but he still encountered accusations.  At one point, while he was accepted by an anti-Origenist bishop, he was excommunicated by another bishop, until the Origenist bishop was finally brought into agreement with orthodoxy.  Jerome continued to support the orthodox part of Origen’s thinking.

Temperamental and easily wounded, Jerome grew to hate Ambrose, and he vilified John Chrysostom. However, the African Bishop Augustine, always the social man, loved Jerome.  Augustine exercised great caution to avoid offending the sensitive writer he admired, and the two developed a warm, if sometimes conflicted, relationship through letters.   They were allies together in the fight against Pelagianism late in Jerome’s life.

The siege of Rome in 410 left Jerome in deep grief for two years.  Months after the siege, tortured and then released, Marcella died quietly, numbered among many of Jerome’s remaining Roman supporters who died.  Not until 413 did he write his dignified epitaph in her memory.  Jerome wrote his last letters around 419 or 420, and he is believed to have died soon afterward.

Jerome’s Latin Gospels and Old Testament, with someone else’s translation of the rest of the Bible, gained acceptance as the standard (“Vulgate”) Latin translation. He was declared a doctor of the Catholic Church in the eighth century.