The Irascible Hermit

The Western world, in its scholarly moments, remembers St. Jerome as the learned ascetic who translated the Old Testament into serviceable 4th century Latin--his Vulgate remains the official Latin Bible of the Roman Catholic Church. Medieval and Renaissance artists (including Raphael, El Greco, Duerer and Van Dyck) have handed down a stock portrait of a calm and cadaverous holy man who has generally--following a popular legend--just removed a thorn from a grateful lion's paw. Scholars have long known better. In A Monument to St Jerome (Sheed & Ward; $4.50) nine Roman Catholic authorities have 'written a combined character sketch of one of the livehest, most learned and most cantankerous saints ever to be canonized a pummeling controversialist who could sniff out obscure heresies as a veteran fire-buff smells smoke.

Jerome, according to the best conjectures, was born in 347 A.D. at Stridon near he present border of Italy and Yugoslavia. He was a Roman citizen At Rome he studied the Latin classics with a thoroughness few Christians of his day could match. His Scholarship later got him a job as a secretary to Pope Damasus, who encouraged him to begin his translation of the Bible. At the same time his just but tactless condemnations of Roman social life as a "sinful Babylon" almost got him run out of town. After Damasus died, he prudently went off to Palestine to be near the site of his story. He spent the next 35 years in Bethlehem at a monastery he founded himself.

When he began his translations, Jerome was already a master of Latin, Greek and Hebrew. To understand the Hebrew Scripture more thoroughly, he hired local rabbis (as he complained, "for no small sum of money") to explain difficult passages--especially the Book of Job. With a good feeling both for Latin and Hebrew, his translation steered the difficult middle course between a literal and a figurative interpretation.

Heresy Before Ezekiel. Jerome had other interests which took him away from his translations. He was a self-appointed guardian of the church's orthodoxy. From Bethlehem he thundered against the hairsplitting heresies of the time with the mordancy of a theological Leo Durocher. When Jerome's onetime friend Rufinus died, after a long theological quarrel with him, the saint wrote: "Now that the scorpion lies buried . . . and the hydra with its numerous heads has ceased its hissing against us, and time is given for other things than answering the iniquities of heretics . . . I will tackle the Prophet Ezekiel."

Jerome was no philosopher. As Jesuit Father Ferdinand Cavallera writes, "There is no great mind less speculative than his." Unlike his contemporary, St. Augustine, he did not help produce the theology he defended. He was, however, a literary man of great learning, as particular about his Ciceronian clauses as he was about the doctrine of the Trinity. It was significant that the humanists of the Italian Renaissance, similar in their tastes, admired Jerome, while looking down on other church fathers as uncultured and dull.

Roman Among Peasants. Aside from his controversial letter-writing, Jerome kept his learning inside his monastery. In his 20s he had spent five solitary years as a hermit in the Syrian desert. After leaving Rome, he re-entered the monastic life for good. Inside the monastery, the razor-witted controversialist could be kind and inspiring to his spiritual charges. But he was uncompromising about the monastic rules, and had little patience with those who found them too severe. Writes Paulist Father Eugene Burke: "He never lost sight of the fact that the vocation of a Christian is to be a saint."

In his monastery in the East, the Doctor of the Western Church felt the reverberations of the barbarian attacks on the crumbling Roman empire in Italy. This hurt him deeply. As a Roman citizen, he looked on Rome as his home and the Eastern peoples as unsatisfactory foreigners. During a theological controversy, he once wrote with indignation: "A new expression . . . is demanded ... by these peasants of me, a man of Rome!" In 396, with the barbarians pressing in on all sides, Jerome sadly wrote: "Romanus orbis ruit [the world of Rome is destroyed]." In 416 the troubles of the times were brought to his doorstep. A band of Pelagian heretics, whom he had recently attacked in his writings, assaulted and wrecked his monastery. Jerome spent three or four years in refuge nearby. Then, weary with age and controversy, the holy but irascible hermit died.

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