Saint Jerome

Saint Jerome is one of the four Great Latin Fathers and Doctors of the Catholic Church, alongside Saint Ambrose of Milan, Saint Augustine of Hippo, and Saint Gregory the Great. He is best known for translating the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament into Latin, producing the Vulgate, which would serve as the Catholic Church's authoritative biblical text for over a thousand years.

Early life and education

Jerome was born Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus around 342 in Stridon, a town in Dalmatia (the borderland of modern Slovenia and Croatia). He came from a comfortable Christian family but was not baptized in infancy, in keeping with the late fourth-century custom of postponing baptism. He went to Rome at about age twelve for advanced studies in grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy under Aelius Donatus, the leading Latin grammarian of the age.

In Rome, around age twenty, Jerome was baptized. He continued his studies in Trier and Aquileia, where he gathered around himself a circle of like-minded Catholic scholars. In approximately 374, he set out for the Holy Land. Falling ill at Antioch, he experienced a dream in which he was hauled before the judgment seat of Christ and accused: "You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian, for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Jerome interpreted the dream as a call to subordinate his classical learning to the service of Catholic scripture.¹

Years as a desert hermit

Jerome spent approximately three years (375-378) as a hermit in the desert of Chalcis, in Syria. There he undertook the rigorous study of Hebrew, learning the language from a Jewish convert. The decision was unusual for a Latin Christian scholar of the era and would prove decisive for his later translation work. Hebrew remained extremely rare in the Latin Catholic Church until well into the early modern period; Jerome's command of it was almost unique among his contemporaries.

Secretary to Pope Damasus and the Vulgate project

In 382, Jerome returned to Rome and became secretary to Pope Damasus I. The pope, recognizing the chaotic state of the Latin biblical translations then in use (collectively called the "Old Latin" or Vetus Latina), commissioned Jerome to produce a standardized Latin text. Jerome began with a careful revision of the four Gospels.

After Pope Damasus's death in 384, Jerome was driven out of Rome by enemies hostile to his ascetic teaching and his sharp polemical tone. He returned to the Holy Land, settling in Bethlehem in 386. There, with a small community of monks (and a parallel community of consecrated women under his spiritual direction, including Saint Paula and Saint Eustochium), he undertook the full project of translating the Hebrew Old Testament directly from the Hebrew into Latin.

Jerome's translation, completed around 405, came to be called the Versio Vulgata (the "common version," from vulgatus, common). The Council of Trent (Session IV, April 8, 1546) declared the Vulgate the authentic Latin text of the Catholic Bible. The Sixto-Clementine revision of 1592 and the Nova Vulgata of Pope Saint John Paul II (1979) are the principal subsequent editions; the Nova Vulgata remains the official Latin text of the Catholic Church today.²

Theological writings and controversies

Beyond the Vulgate, Jerome wrote extensive biblical commentaries (on most of the Old Testament books and on the Gospel of Matthew and the Pauline epistles), historical works (notably De Viris Illustribus, a catalog of early Christian writers), and polemical treatises against the heresies of his day (Helvidius, Jovinianus, Vigilantius, Pelagius). His correspondence, preserved in approximately 154 letters, is one of the principal historical sources for the late patristic period.

Jerome's temperament was famously sharp. He quarreled vigorously with Saint Rufinus of Aquileia (his former friend) over Origen's theology, with Saint John Chrysostom indirectly over disciplinary matters, and even briefly with Saint Augustine of Hippo over the interpretation of Galatians 2:11-14. The correspondence between Augustine and Jerome on this point is one of the great patristic exchanges, with both saints eventually finding common ground.

Death and patronage

Jerome died on September 30, 420, in Bethlehem, in the cell where he had labored on the Vulgate for over thirty years. His relics are believed to have been translated to the Basilica of Saint Mary Major in Rome.

Saint Jerome is patron of translators, biblical scholars, librarians, and archaeologists. His feast on September 30 is celebrated as a Memorial in the universal Catholic Church.

The iconographic attribute of the lion comes from a medieval legend (not historical) that Jerome befriended a lion by removing a thorn from its paw at his Bethlehem monastery. The skull in many portraits is the standard memento mori of the desert hermit tradition. The cardinal's hat is an anachronistic medieval attribution; the College of Cardinals as a corporate body did not exist in Jerome's time, though he served Pope Damasus in a role functionally equivalent to that of a cardinal-secretary.

For the broader Catholic understanding of doctoral status, see What is a Doctor of the Church?. For the foundational Catholic prayers grounded in Jerome's biblical translation, see the Pater Noster and the Angelic Salutation.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Jerome's own account of his Ciceronian dream is in Letter 22, to Eustochium, paragraph 30 (c. 384), one of the most-quoted passages in patristic literature. ↩

2. Council of Trent, Session IV (April 8, 1546), Decree concerning the Edition and the Use of the Sacred Books. See also Pope Pius XII, encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943), which clarified the relationship between the Vulgate and the original-language texts for modern Catholic biblical scholarship. ↩