ART. VII.-St. Jerome.*

ST. JEROME was the greatest scholar-though by no means the greatest divine-and at the same time the most zealous monk among the church fathers of the fourth and fifth century, and the connecting link between Eastern and Western learning and religion. His life belongs almost with equal right to the history of theology and the history of monasticism. Hence the Catholic artists generally represent him as a penitent in a reading or writing posture, with a lion and a skull, to denote the union of the literary and anchoretic modes of life. He was the first learned divine who not only recommended, but actually embraced the monastic mode of life, and his example exerted a great influence in making monasticism available for the promotion of learning. To rare talents and attainments,t indefatigable activity of mind, ardent faith, immortal merit in the translation and interpretation of the Bible, and earnest

*I. S. EUS. HIERONYMUS: Opera omnia ed. Erasmus (assisted by Ecolampadius), Bas. 1516-20. 9 vols. fol. (first edition, often reprinted, but now antiquated); ed. (Bened.) Martianay, Par. 1693, 5 vols. fol. (incomplete); ed. Vallarsi & Maffei, Veron. 1734-42. 11 vols. fol., Venet. 1766 (best edition). Comp. especially the one hundred and fifty Epistles (the chronological order of which Vallarsi, in tom. I. of his edition, has finally established.) The Epistles have often been separately edited, both in the original Latin and in modern translations. The order differs considerably in different editions. Hence the confusion in quotations from Jerome.

II. For extended works on the life of Jerome see Du PIN (Nouvelle Biblioth. des auteurs eccles. tom. iii. p. 100-140); TILLEMONT (tom. xii. 1—356); MARTIANAY (La vie de St. Jerome, Par. 1706); JOH. STILTING (in the Acta Sanctorum, Sept. tom. viii., p. 418-688, Antw. 1762); Butler (sub Sept. 30); VALLARSI (in Op. Hieron., tom. xi., p. 1-240); SCHRÖCKH (viii. 359 sqq., and especially xi., 3—254); ENGELSTOFT (Hieron. Stridonensis, interpres, criticus, exegeta, apologeta, historicus, doctor, monachus. Havn. 1798); D. V. CÖLLN (in Ersch and Gruber's Encycl., sect. ii., vol. 8); COLLOMBET (Histoire de S. Jérôme. Lyons, 1844); and MILMAN (Hist. of Lat. Christianity, Bk. iii., c. xi: Jerom and the Monastic System.)

† As he himself boasts in his second apology to Rufinus: "Ego philosophus (?), rhetor, grammaticus, dialecticus, hebræus, græcus, latinus, trilinguis." Erasmus had an enthusiastic veneration for Jerome, and placed bim even far above Augustine, partly no doubt from theological sympathy with Jerome's semi-pelagianism.

zeal for ascetic piety, he united so great vanity and ambition, such irritability and bitterness of temper, such vehemence of uncontrolled passion, such an intolerant and persecuting spirit, and such inconstancy of conduct, that we find ourselves alternately attracted and repelled by his character, and now filled with admiration for his greatness, now with contempt or pity for his weakness.

Sophronius Eusebius Hieronymus was born at Stridon,* on the borders of Dalmatia, not far from Aquileia, between the years 331 and 342.† He was the son of wealthy Christian parents, and was educated in Rome, under the direction of the celebrated heathen grammarian, Donatus, and the rhetorician Victorinus. He read with great diligence and profit the classic poets, orators, and philosophers, and collected a considerable library. On Sundays he visited, with Bonosus and other young friends, the subterranean graves of the martyrs, which made an indelible impression upon him. Yet he was not exempt from the temptations of a great and corrupt city, and he lost his chastity, as he himself afterwards repeatedly acknowledged, with pain.

About the year 870, whether before or after his literary tour to Treves and Aquileia is uncertain, but at all events, in his later youth, he received baptism at Rome, and resolved thenceforth to devote himself wholly, in rigid abstinence, to the service of the Lord. In the first zeal of his conversion he renounced his love for the classics, and applied himself to the study of the hitherto distasteful Bible. In a morbid ascetic frame he had, a few years later, that celebrated dream, in which he was summoned before the judgment-seat of Christ, and, as a heathen Ciceronian, so severely reprimanded and scourged, that even

* Hence called Stridonensis; also in distinction from the contemporary but little known Greek Jerome, who was probably a presbyter in Jerusalem.

Martianay, Stilting, Cave, Schröckh, Hagenbach, and others, place his birth, according to Prosper, Chron. ad ann. 331, in the year 331; Baronius, Du Pin, and Tillemont, with greater probability, in the year 842. The last infers, from various circumstances, that Jerome lived not ninety-one years, as Prosper states, but only seventy-eight. His death is placed in the year 419 or

420.

"Mentiris," said the Lord to him, when Jerome called himself a Christian, "Ciceronianus es, non Christianus, ubi enim thesaurus tuus, ibi et cor

the angels interceded for him from sympathy with his youth, and he himself solemnly vowed never again to take worldly books into his hands. When he woke, he still felt the stripes, which, as he thought, not his heated fancy, but the Lord himself had inflicted upon him. Hence he warns his female friend, Eustochium, to whom several years afterwards he recounted this experience, to avoid all profane reading: "What have Christ and Belial, the Psalms and Horace, the Gospels and Virgil, the Apostles and Cicero, to do with one another? We cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of the devil at the same time." But proper as this warning may be against overrating classical scholarship, Jerome himself, in his version of the Bible and his commentaries, affords the best evidence of the inestimable value of linguistic and antiquarian knowledge when devoted to the service of religion. That oath, also, at least in later life, he did not strictly keep. On the contrary, he made the monks copy the dialogues of Cicero, and explained Virgil at Bethlehem, and his writings abound in recollections. and quotations of the classic authors. When Rufinus of Aquileia, at first his warm friend, but afterwards a bitter enemy, cast up to him this inconsistency and breach of a solemn vow, he resorted to the evasion, that he could not obliterate from his memory what he had formerly read;-as if it were not so sinful to cite a heathen author as to read him. With more reason he asserted that all was a mere dream, and a dream-vow was not binding. He referred him to the prophets, "who teach that dreams are vain, and not worthy of faith." Yet was this dream afterwards made frequent use of, as Erasmus laments, to cover monastic obscurantism.

After his baptism Jerome divided his life between the east and the west, between ascetic discipline and literary labour. He removed from Rome to Antioch with a few friends, and his library, visited the most celebrated anchorets, attended the exegetical lectures of the younger Apollinaris in Antioch, and then (374) spent some time as an ascetic in the dreary Syrian desert of Chalcis. Here, like so many other hermits, he underwent a tuum." Ep. xxii. ad Eustochium (ed. Vallars.) C. A. Heumann has written a special treatise, De ecstasi Hieronymi anti-Ciceroniana. Comp: also Schröckh, vol. vii. p. 35 sqq., and Ozanam: "Civilisation au 5e siècle," i. 801.

grievous struggle with sensuality, which he described ten years after with indelicate minuteness in a long letter to his virgin friend Eustochium.* In spite of his starved and emaciated body his fancy tormented him with wild images of Roman banquets and dances of women; showing that the monastic seclusion from the world was by no means proof against the temptations of the flesh and the devil. Helpless he cast himself at the feet of Jesus, wet them with tears of repentance, and subdued the resisting flesh by a week of fasting, and by the dry study of Hebrew grammar, (which, according to a letter to Rusticus,† he was at that time learning from a converted Jew,) until he found peace and thought himself transported to the choirs of the angels in heaven. In this period probably fall the dream mentioned above, and the composition of his few ascetic writings full of heated eulogy of the monastic life.‡ His biographies of distinguished anchorets, however, are very pleasantly and temperately written.§ He commends monastic seclusion even against the will of parents; interpreting the word of the Lord about forsaking father and mother, as if monasticism and Christianity were the same. "Though thy mother"-he writes to his friend Heliodorus, who had left him. in the midst of his journey to the Syrian desert-"with flowing hair and rent garments should show thee the breasts which have nourished thee; though thy father should lie upon the threshold; yet depart thou, treading over thy father, and fly with dry eyes to the standard of the cross. This is the only religion of its kind, in this matter to be cruel. . . . The love of God and the fear of hell easily rend the bonds of household asunder. The holy Scripture indeed enjoins obedience to parents; but he, who loves them more than Christ, loses his soul. . . . O desert, where the flowers of Christ are blooming! O solitude, where the stones for the new Jerusalem are pre

* Ep. xxii., tom. i. p. 91, ed. Vallars.

Ep. cxxv., ed. Vallars.

De laude vitæ solitarie, Ep. ad Heliodorum. The Roman lady Fabiola learned this letter by heart, and Du Pin calls it a masterpiece of eloquence. (Nouv. Bibl. des auteurs eccl. iii. 102,) but it is almost too declamatory and turgid. He himself afterwards acknowledged it overdrawn.

Gibbon says of them: "The stories of Paul, Hilarion, and Malchus, are admirably told; and the only defect of these pleasing compositions is the want of truth and common sense."

pared! O retreat, which rejoices in the friendship of God! What doest thou in the world, my brother, with thy soul greater than the world? How long wilt thou remain in the shadow of roofs, and in the smoky dungeon of cities? Believe me, I see here more of the light." Similar descriptions of the attractions of monastic life we meet with in the ascetic writings of Gregory, Basil, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Cassian, Nilus, and in the beginning of the fifth century, Isidor. "So great grace, says the venerable monk Nilus of Mount Sinai (Ep. lib. i. ep. 1, as quoted by Neander, Am. ed. ii. 250,) "so great grace has God bestowed on the monks, even in anticipation of the future world, that they wish for no honours from men, and feel no longing after the greatness of this world; but, on the contrary, often seek rather to remain concealed from men: while, on the other hand, many of the great who possess all the glory of the world, either of their own accord, or compelled by misfortune, take refuge with the lowly monks, and, delivered from fatal dangers, obtain at once a temporal and an eternal salvation." Jerome's eloquent appeal to his friend failed of the desired effect; Heliodorus entered the teaching order and became bishop.

The active and restless spirit of Jerome soon brought him again upon the public stage, and involved him in all the doctrinal and ecclesiastical controversies of those controversial times. He received the ordination of presbyter from the bishop Paulinus in Antioch, without taking charge of a congregation. He preferred the itinerant life of a monk and a student to a fixed office, and about 380 journeyed to Constantinople, where he heard the anti-Arian sermons of the celebrated Gregory Nazianzen, and translated the Chronicle of Eusebius and the homilies of Origen on Jeremiah and Ezekiel. In 382, on account of the Meletian schism, he returned to Rome with Paulinus and Epiphanius. Here he came into close connection with the bishop Damasus, as his theological adviser and ecclesiastical secretary,* and was led by him into new exegetical

As we infer from an occasional remark of Jerome in a letter written A. D. 409, Ep. cxxiii. c. 10, ed. Vall., "Quum in chartis ecclesiasticis (i. e., probably in ecclesiastical documents; though Schröckh, viii. p. 122, refers it to the Holy Scriptures, appealing to a work of Bonamici unknown to me,) “juvarem