Jerome

Stefan Rebenich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134638437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

As a scholar, writer and ascetic, Jerome was a major intellectual force in the early Church and influenced the ideals of Christian chastity and poverty for many generations after his death. This book assembles a representative selection of his voluminous output. It will help readers to a balanced portrait of a complex and brilliant, but not always likeable man.

Part I

INTRODUCTION

1

FROM STRIDON TO AQUILEIA

Between Career and Conversion

Men of letters often make their way into the civil service.

Symmachus

At the end of the fourth century AD, Jerome contemplated writing a history in which he would show how the church during this period ‘increased in influence and in wealth but decreased in virtue’.¹ In the course of his lifetime, Jerome experienced the rapid transformation of the Christian church in Roman society and the Christianization of the imperial government. After the end of the Great Persecution (311) and especially from the moment of Constantine’s promotion of the new religion (312—13), the Christian communities acquired legal privileges and financial benefits from the emperor. The bishops, who received rights of civil jurisdiction, gained much power and influence in the cities. More and more members of the urban and provincial elites were attracted by the prospect of an ecclesiastical career, and many of the ordinary people in the cities were Christianized by the second half of the fourth century. Christian communities flourished, new churches were erected, institutions of charity were founded. Christian culture, based upon the Bible and traditional learning, became more elaborate, better-off Christians travelled to the holy places in Palestine, and the ascetic movement fascinated many true believers.

At the same time, Christian congregations all over the Roman Empire were fragmented through religious divisions. Violence and intimidation were frequent, and many cities saw riots over the election of a bishop.² In Africa, where Christianity was strong, the dispute between Catholic and Donatist parties forced Constantine to intervene soon after he became senior ruler (312). The conflict started when the latter group refused to accept the bishop of Carthage in about 311 on the grounds that his consecrator had surrendered the Scriptures in the Diocletianic persecution. In spite of several interventions of the state, the schism persisted during the fourth century. During his reign, Constantine was also confronted with the teaching of Arius, a priest of Alexandria, who distinguished the divine status of God the Father from that of the Son. His doctrine was strongly opposed and condemned by other theologians. The contending parties, however, appealed to Constantine who summoned, in 325, the Council of Nicaea (now Iznik) to settle the dispute. There, the opponents of Arianism defined the Catholic faith in the consubstantiality of Father and Son, using the famous term homoousios. The emperor took an active part in the discussion since his policy was to unite the Christian church to the secular state in order to stabilize the newly unified Empire. Thus, he enforced the homoousios formula, condemned Arius, and deposed two insubordinate bishops. But, soon, Constantine began to waver and banished some prominent advocates of the Nicene Creed. Therefore, the Arian question was not solved and remained open until Theodosius implemented a strictly Nicene definition of orthodoxy at the beginning of the 380s.

When Jerome was born in 347,³ Athanasius, the ferocious chief opponent of Arianism, had just returned from exile to his see in Alexandria. The influence of Constantine’s son, Constans, who ruled the western part of the Empire, helped to restore him against the will of his brother Constantius, emperor in the east, who openly embraced Arianism.⁴ Jerome grew up in an obscure town called Stridon, which was located somewhere on the border between the Roman provinces of Dalmatia and Pannonia and within easy reach of Aquileia and Emona (Ljubljana/Laibach).⁵ Later, when he ardently campaigned for asceticism, he complained about the rusticity and religious indifference that were to be found in his own country: ‘Men’s only God is their belly. People live only for the day, and the richer you are the more saintly you are held to be.’⁶ Although Jerome’s parents were Christians, who took care that he had been, as a baby, ‘nourished on Catholic milk’,⁷ he was not baptized as a child in Stridon, but as a young man in Rome. In those days, baptism was postponed until maturity, or even until one’s deathbed, for fear of the responsibilities incurred by it. Augustine and Jerome’s friends, Rufinus and Heliodorus, are parallel cases.⁸

Jerome’s father Eusebius, like so many other parents, both Christian and pagan, invested in the tuition of his son to prepare the ground for a future career. The family owned property around Stridon and was well off; slaves belonged to the household and nurses took care of the children. We hear of a younger brother named Paulinianus and a sister. Later, Jerome recalled to memory how he romped about the young servants’ cells, how he spent his holidays in play, and how he had to be dragged like a captive from his grandmother’s lap to the lessons of his enraged teacher.⁹ Jerome may have attended the elementary school in his hometown. The syllabus was rather modest and consisted of reading and writing and some arithmetic. We know from Augustine’s Confessions that late antique teaching was not very sophisticated. Pupils were forced to chant ‘One and one are two, two and two are four’; the main stimulus was the ferula (the cane), and educational theory focused on coercion and punishment.¹⁰ ‘Who is there who would not recoil in horror and choose death, if he was asked to choose between dying and going back to his childhood!’¹¹ Jerome would certainly have joined in the lamentation of the aged bishop of Hippo.

Still, the detestable experience of primary school was the first step towards the advanced education that was the privilege of the elites of the Roman Empire, and a classical training was of vital importance for recruitment into the imperial bureaucracy. Ambitious and affluent parents were prepared to send their children first to the school of the grammaticus, who advanced the study of language and literature, and then, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, to the rhetor, who introduced the students into the theory and practice of declamation. There were, of course, remarkable regional and social differences in these schools. Whereas Augustine’s father, a member of the municipal council of Thagaste in Numidia, was hardly able to pay for his son’s education in North Africa, Jerome was allowed to go to Rome to attend the classes of the best teachers the Latin speaking world could provide. Many years later, Jerome mentioned in a letter to a young monk from Toulouse that the latter’s mother, when sending her son to Rome, spared no expense and consoled herself for her son’s absence by the thought of the future that lay before him.¹² Jerome’s father was also prepared to make the economic sacrifice, since he was convinced that exclusive tuition would be the key to his son’s success. Three other young provincial careerists joined Jerome in Rome: his friend Bonosus, who came from Stridon or a neighbouring village, Rufinus of Concordia (close to Aquileia), and Heliodorus of Altinum. All of them were Christians, enjoyed their student life, but also visited the shrines of the martyrs and the Apostles on Sundays.¹³ After they had finished their studies, the fellow-pupils remained in close contact.

In ‘the renowned city, the capital of the Roman Empire’,¹⁴ Jerome was taught by the famous grammarian Aelius Donatus,¹⁵ and then went to a Roman school of rhetoric. His student years in Rome were essential to his intellectual formation. All his later work reveals the brilliant pupil who is proud of his language, style, and dialectic. He closely studied the classics and may have picked up some Greek.¹⁶ Whether he had already followed lectures on philosophy in Rome is difficult to say. But when he left the Urbs, he was undoubtedly well acquainted with the traditional canon of Latin authors who are ubiquitous throughout his oeuvre. Jerome also started to build up with immense zeal and labour his own library, which, though initially restricted to classical authors, soon also housed Christian texts.¹⁷

The provincial parvenu shared his bibliophily with Christian senators, who stored in their libraries copies of classical texts and magnificent manuscripts of the Bible.¹⁸ Rome, the centre of the old senatorial aristocracy, also offered Jerome the possibility of getting in touch with influential friends, amici maiores , who were always important for social promotion. He and his friends from northern Italy met the young aristocrat Pammachius, who belonged to the illustrious gens Furia, and perhaps Melania the Elder, whose husband was prefect of Rome from 361 to 363. Both Jerome and Rufinus profited through all their life from the contacts with the Christian nobility of Rome that they had established during their years of study at the end of the 350s and the beginning of the 360s.

It was now up to Jerome, bene uti litteris, as Augustine once said,¹⁹ to make the best out of his education. Hence, Jerome, after his graduation, moved, together with his friend Bonosus, to Augusta Trever-orum (Trier). Although Jerome does not tell us the motives for this journey to Gaul in his later writings, there cannot be any doubt that the two young men intended to make careers in Trier, which was at that time both an imperial residence and an administrative centre. In Ausonius’ The Order of Famous Cities , written c.388—9, Trier comes sixth, after Rome, Constantinople, Carthage, Antioch, Alexandria, and just ahead ofMilan.²⁰ The tetrarchs had based the Gallic prefecture there, and, throughout the fourth century, it accommodated various emperors and their entourages. Valentinian I, who was elected emperor in Nicaea in February 364, reached Trier in October 367, where he concentrated on frontier defence, fought against the Alamanni, and rebuilt the fortifications on the Rhine. Soon after his arrival, Ausonius, who had been teaching grammar and rhetoric in Burdigala (Bordeaux) for 30 years, was summoned to Trier and appointed tutor of the emperor’s son and heir, Gratian. Valentinian was known for promoting professors and bureaucrats, and, after his death in 375, Ausonius went on to enjoy a remarkable career, securing family and friends positions of influence at the imperial court. He himself gained a praetorian prefecture and the consulship of 379.²¹

The ambitious and talented son of a rich landowner in Stridon must have hoped that the liberal arts he had studied in Rome would help him to get a post in the imperial bureaucracy. Such an appointment was the passport to success and ascent into the governing classes. It seems that Jerome decided to go to the right place at the right time. Valentinian’s court was an important cultural and political centre in the west and a catalyst of social mobility, where an exclusive group of new functionaries was formed. Service at court promised economic success and social prestige, offered relative security, and could even promote the ‘courtier’ to the highest ranks of the Empire.

As we know, Jerome did not end as a bureaucrat at the imperial court. The intended career was abruptly stopped through a religious awakening. What happened? Once again, we have no testimony from Jerome himself, who only mentions some years later that he purchased Christian texts and theological treatises for his ever-growing library.²² A revealing account of a conversion at Trier is also to be found in Augustine’s Confessions: that of two court officials, agentes in rebus , who, while walking through the gardens on the fringe of Trier, happened to meet two hermits who possessed a copy of the Life of Antony by Athanasius.²³ The two friends were captivated by the inspirational biography and spontaneously decided to embrace an ascetic life, giving up their worldly employment (militia saecularis~) to serve God. ‘What is our motive in doing service? Can our hopes in court rise higher than to be friends of the emperor (amiciprincipis)?’ they asked, and came to the conclusion that they should ‘become a friend of God (amicus dei).’²⁴ It has been suggested that the officeholders mentioned in Augustine were Jerome and Bonosus.²⁵ This ingenious hypothesis cannot be confirmed, especially since Augustine’s stylized story describes an exemplary conversion. But Jerome’s withdrawal from the imperial service may be imagined in a similar way. In Trier, he could have come across the popular Latin version of the Life of Antony, which spread through the west, and may have experienced new forms of Christian living in an area where, in those days, the first monasteries were founded.

His dedication to the ascetic life was a major event, powerful and overwhelming. But, in his later work, Jerome did not reflect upon his conversion. Instead, he describes another episode that has always fascinated later generations: his famous dream. We find an impressive account of this event in letter 22, which encouraged the young Roman lady Eustochium to devote herself to virginity and warned her against overestimating the relevance of classical education:

Many years ago when, for the kingdom of heaven’s sake, I had cut myself off from home, parents, sister, relations, and, what was harder, from the dainty food to which I had been accustomed, and when I was on my way to Jerusalem to wage my warfare, I still could not bring myself to forego the library which I had formed for myself at Rome with great care and labour. And so, miserable man that I was, I would fast only that I might afterwards read Cicero. After many nights spent in vigil, after floods of tears called from my inmost heart in recollection of my past sins, I would once more take up Plautus. And when at times I returned to my right mind and began to read the prophets, their style seemed rude and repellent. With my blinded eyes I could not see the light; but I attributed the fault not to them, but to the sun. While the old serpent was thus making me his plaything, about the middle of Lent a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Translations
• Part III Bibliography
• Notes
• Index