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Veronese, Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, c.1580, Samel H. Kress Collection Jerome’s Search for Self-Identity Philip Rousseau Crucial to the construction of biographies is a sympathetic understanding of when subjects’ lives made sense to the subjects themselves. That compliment has not been paid sufficiently to Jerome. Nerves fail; writers will not grasp the nettle of his oddity, ‘la complexité de cette personalité si originale’. Such reluctance can be dangerous. Jerome’s ascetic teaching—his ‘spirituality’—appears to be laid out clearly on the surface of his writings. What if the underlying experience was flawed, if his life was a disaster? Could we admire a philosophy designed to disguise, explain, justify, or compensate for a personal sense of inadequacy?
Biographers have to identify problems before they can explain them. To take two obvious examples, J.N.D. Kelly appealed to failures in friendship and repressed sensuality, Stefan Rebenich to Jerome’s struggle in maintaining a wide circle of friends and supporters. The question is whether the explanations have been matched to real difficulties. Kelly referred to ‘a rancour and spitefulness which still dismay’. Is it rancour, then, in the face of a friend’s loss or betrayal, that brings us to heart of the man? Calling Jerome ‘vain and petty, jealous of rivals, morbidly sensitive and irascible, hag-ridden by imaginary fears’, do we sum him up? Kelly thought that ‘ill-health’ or ‘his troubled awareness of his sensual nature’ might explain matters. Otherwise, he fell back on ‘fundamental flaws of character which we can only surmise’. ‘The deeper springs of his psychology’, he concluded, ‘elude us¼ there is an unsolved enigma about the real Jerome’.
Stefan Rebenich seeks another pathway into Jerome’s personality: Hieronymus und sein Kreis is his title; and the Kreis, the circle, becomes the explanation. Perhaps as a result, his Jerome seems more of a success: a man who developed for himself, with persistent calculation, a role as the most orthodox and learned exegete of his day. The persuasiveness of that approach depends on asserting a particular kind of continuity in Jerome’s life: on seeing his Italian connections and his few years in Rome as the basis for a consistently maintained and acknowledged reputation among Latin churchmen; on seeing his removal to Bethlehem not as a serious break in his career but as an opportunity to take further advantage of friendships and associations gained during his preceding years in the West. Jerome becomes in the process a hologram formed at the point where other people’s lives converged: beautifully defined, but lacking in presence. Reading Rebenich is like attending a party where the guest of honour fails to appear.
A readiness like that of Kelly to depend on repressed sensuality and ‘deeper springs’ seems based in part on a preoccupation with Jerome’s female friends. The topic lends itself to our current interest in gender, to an impish desire to speculate about the man’s hypocrisy, to the understandable outrage provoked by his attitudes to the body, sex, and marriage. He ‘craved for female society’, we are told by Kelly, ‘and found deep satisfaction in it when it could be had without doing violence to his principles’. That carries us somewhat beyond making sex a ‘deeper spring’, and the craving was, in any case, distinguished from other, presumably more important principles. What else might lie behind Jerome’s nevertheless persistent sexual unease? (He even learned Hebrew as an antidote to fantasised arousal.) Kelly noted, in Jerome’s early letters back to Italy, ‘the warmth of his affections, his passionate desire to be loved’, but also that he was ‘disgusted with himself because, in spite of all his fastings and mortifications, he could not rid himself of the sensual longing which had plagued him since early manhood’. Who has not been plagued by sensual longing? What leaps to the eye in Kelly’s account is the conjunction of affection and disgust.
The women Jerome knew and counselled continued to live in the world of men. His first surviving literary essay, a letter to Innocentius, betrays collusive admiration for a heroic female: highly stylised and far-fetched, it invites us into the shared culture of male correspondents. On behalf of his own sister, he hoped that male friends in Aquileia would send her encouraging letters: ‘You know how a girl’s mind is more fully formed in such matters, when she knows that her elders care for her’. We hear how Serenilla embraced a life of virtue in the company of Desiderius her brother. Pammachius was linked with Paulina, Oceanus with Fabiola, Lucinus with Theodora. A letter to Pammachius concerning Jovinian makes it clear that this was an argument among men, where men made the decisions binding upon women—even though it might have been the women who shamed them into doing so. Later in life, a letter ostensibly advising women could depend for its effect on the support of a man, while a letter ostensibly advising a man could be prompted by the appeal of a woman.
That should be enough to make us look carefully at Jerome’s relations with men, even if only to make more sense of his attitudes to women. Close male friendship, a natural feature of early manhood, was intensified by the privilege and ambition of the late Roman elite, the high-mindedness and segregation of classical paideia, and the formal intensities of the literary genre. Perhaps Jerome’s most significant friend in early years was Bonosus. Together with Rufinus, he and Jerome had shared upbringing, education, and early political ambition. Jerome could hardly have disapproved of Bonosus’ eventual choice of an ascetic life, but he may have regretted its conclusion on a barren island in the Adriatic. Bonosus seemed to have scored a later but more brilliant success, an uncomplicated self-sacrifice; and Jerome’s affectionate jealousy of his dear and now lost companion may signal the seeding of the self-deprecation destined to mark his later life.
What about the Origenist controversy, which encourages concentration on Rufinus and on Pammachius and his associates (an essential feature of Rebenich’s study)? Jerome exaggerated the intertwining of Pammachius’ life with his own. Youthful acquaintance is beyond doubt, but the surviving correspondence betrays a fresh start. He had awaited Pammachius’ initiative, Jerome declared, ‘in case I seemed to want less a friend than someone more influential’. He referred to Pammachius as one ‘whom I had possessed as patron in my cause, even before I asked’, and expressed again the fear that, ‘if I had written to one who had yet to speak, you would have thought me more troublesome than conscientious’. Pammachius belonged to a higher social class than the provincial Jerome, and his vigorous and independent pursuit of Christian causes in Italy counted for more than his contact with the distant exile in Bethlehem. Jerome displayed an ill-judged self-satisfaction in regarding Pammachius and others in his circle merely as channels through which to reach his western enemies. ‘I have sent you this letter’, he wrote, ‘to make the matter clear to you and through you to those others who have felt me worthy of their affection’. Nevertheless, he thought consistently of Pammachius as a patron.
Rufinus was a different case. Their relationship, whether burgeoning or blighted, is crucial to our understanding of Jerome’s psychology. The notorious passion of Letter III betrays feelings that extended well beyond the boundaries of formal correspondence. ‘If the Lord Jesus Christ were now suddenly to grant me a transference like that of Philip to the eunuch or of Habbakuk to Daniel,... how I would press with my lips on that mouth, which has so often either strayed with me in error or savoured the truth’. The letter ends with an equally heartfelt and cruelly ironic declaration: ‘Do not, I implore you, let me... lose that friend so long sought for, so luckily found, so arduously preserved... nothing can be compared to charity; affection is beyond price; a friendship that can end was never true’. Nor need we doubt Jerome’s wish to avoid, years later, a final breakdown. ‘When we are reconciled once more in friendship, I shall maintain no bitterness likely to give others pain... on the contrary, I have decided that I shall not, as if in flight, deny what may seem to others a genuine offence and, as far as I can, I shall not hurt a friend, though hurt myself.’
Yet Rufinus had fallen victim to Jerome’s sense of loss, which reached beyond their own relationship: his frustrated longing for the inescapably absent, which developed many years before the final exile. Separation from Bonosus had been the accidental result of praiseworthy dedication. What Jerome would not so easily forget was a separation like that from Rufinus, stemming, it appeared, from deliberate and intermittent indifference. He had wished Rufinus to join him in Syria, sending him letters ‘that they may lead you back to me, enmeshed in the bonds of love’. Only illness prevented him from dashing off to Egypt to meet his friend. Rufinus, however, did not respond; indeed, it was only from Heliodorus that Jerome first heard of Rufinus’ arrival in the East.
We may allow ourselves to detect here a morbid sense of isolation—more than a mere ‘folie de la persecution.’ Heliodorus himself had gone back to the West, driven away, Jerome felt, by his sinfulness. It was Heliodorus who told the Aquileian monk Chrysocomas how much Jerome loved him; but Chrysocomas did not write. The virgins of Haemona maintained a judgmental silence, prompting abject self-diminution—‘there can be no relations between sinners and the handmaids of God’. To Antony, a monk of Haemona, Jerome complained that he had written ten times and received no reply. ‘You say I was "too argumentative"’, he wrote, and even that he would justify: ‘Believe me, were it not for the modesty demanded by my sense of style, I would hurl so much at you, wounded as I am, that you would write back at once out of sheer fury’.
Those early attempts at self-definition and the attendant disappointments at the hands of friends invite us to look beyond his vivid correspondence with women and his estrangement from Rufinus. To explain change in Jerome’s life and the shifts in his own understanding of life’s progress, we need to mount a broader inquiry. I wish to examine three sets of experiences: Jerome’s conviction that the ‘desert’ was the natural locus of asceticism; his sense of distance from the centre of affairs; and the way he presented the familiar distinction between private and public life. The conjunction of those experiences will help us, I believe, to identify more accurately ‘the deeper springs of his psychology’.
Jerome asserted consistently the importance of a ‘desert’ life. His early recommendations—that Rufinus remove himself from Egypt and Heliodorus once again from Italy, to join him in Syria—were already marked by a psychological complexity. One’s homeland sapped the inner life: ‘the danger is within, the enemy is within’. An absence of ‘esteem’ there prompted ‘disdain’ in oneself and ‘constant harassment’ by others. The resulting ‘discontent’ caused a loss of ‘restfulness’, a mind ‘distracted from its resolve’. All those consequences were interior. A move to the ‘desert’ represented a compensating triumph of the imagination—one simply would not notice the isolation: ‘You walk in your mind in Paradise [mente deambula]. Whenever you mount up there in your thoughts, you find yourself no longer in the desert’.
Jerome’s striking invitation did not work: Heliodorus had no intention of following such a path, either in his head or anywhere else. Events in any case caught up with Jerome: he was virtually expelled from his Syrian haven. When he returned to the East, to Bethlehem, he expressed once more his attachment to a place of retreat. Circumstances had changed, however. While he might be warmed by the companionship of Paula and Eustochium and for a while by the proximity of Rufinus in Jerusalem, he experienced new bitterness at the collapse of his influence in Italy. The height from which he had fallen is difficult to exaggerate: he had lost the opportunity, under the patronage of Damasus, to redefine nobilitas in a Christianised empire. That loss now coloured deeply his renewed hope that others would join him. Perfection demanded not only the rejection of secular life but a literal departure to the Holy Land.
A fresh incentive to exile soon presented itself: barbarian violence, the consequence of Gothic migration to the West in ad 401 and the exposure of a weakened Rhine frontier to Vandal incursion in ad 405–406.
Are you held back still by what is left of the world you knew? For have you not witnessed the death of friends and fellow-citizens, the destruction of cities and estates? Amid the disasters of captivity, the fierce faces of the enemy, a province’s shipwreck beyond reversal, grasp at least the plank of repentance and recall to your mind that woman, your fellow-servant, who longs daily for your safety and has not lost hope of its achievement.
The arrival of the barbarians represented as severe a division in Jerome’s life as his ousting from Rome in ad 384 and the readjustments required by the Origenist controversy in the 390s. From a letter to Heliodorus, we can see what the ‘invasion’ of Italy by Alaric in ad 401 had come to mean for him. He attributed current misfortunes to moral failure: ‘The barbarians are made strong by our sinfulness and the Roman army is overcome by our own immorality; and as if these were not disasters enough, civil conflict destroys more than the swords of the enemy’. Jerome the exegete now placed the interpretative template of his textual analysis over the miserable events surrounding him and his correspondents. ‘I believe in God’s mercy’, he wrote, and he needed that assurance to carry him through a reading of Ezekiel, ‘in which the wars of Gog and Magog are recounted’. Only thus could he reach the final sections of the book, ‘which describe the building, the variety, the sheer size of that most holy temple, beyond our understanding’. He traced, against a similar background, the path that Augustine would follow later in his City of God.
Two things appear to have happened to the emphasis on the ‘desert’. One sprang from Jerome’s continuing sense of distance, the other from a readiness to make the ‘desert’ (more honestly, the Holy Land itself) a focus for a specific, Jesus-centred piety; a piety marked, nevertheless, by transcendence and interiorisation.
By the time he faced, in his second exile, renewed opposition in Italy, the remoteness of his circumstance had become sharply apparent: ‘Across so many intervening lands and seas and peoples, let him [Jovinian, in this case] catch at least the echo of my cry’. There was nothing surprising in that: what strikes one more is how Jerome put distance to use in constructing his own place in other people’s worlds. He thought of himself as a devotee of the infant Jesus (encouraged by Bethlehem’s status as a centre of pilgrimage). He considered it ‘an act proper to the faith to worship where the Lord has stood’. He described for Fabiola how ‘we hear the infant wailing in the cradle’, and he called himself, writing to Oceanus, ‘a lover of the Lord’s cradle’. When Paula first saw the grotto at Bethlehem, she affirmed ‘that she had seen with the eyes of faith the infant wrapped in bands and wailing in the cradle’. When she was buried in that same spot, inscriptions continued to voice her faith: ‘Here, Christ, was your cradle; here the kings bore mystic gifts for both their fellow-human and their God’.
While he enclosed and defined himself within the Holy Places, Jerome thought also in transcendent terms: ‘Christ is not held captive by place’, he wrote; ‘what monk, exiled from his fatherland, is not an exile from the world itself?’. His language took easily that symbolic form: ‘That is the city to be sought for—not the city that killed the prophets and spilled Christ’s blood, but the city made joyful at the swirling of the waters, the city that cannot be hidden, set upon a mountain-top’. Again we see the anticipation of Augustine: ‘Oh that it were possible to climb to a lookout high enough for us to see the whole world at our feet; ... let us return to ourselves and, as if coming down from heaven, gradually see again familiar things’; and ‘Scripture teaches us with authority that the holy ones on this earth ... are not really dwelling here but lodging, constantly on the move’. Thanks to such an emphasis, people could now float free from the accustomed social nexus within which more limiting or harmful formalities might otherwise have developed.
Jerome did not wish, on the other hand, that elevated symbolism should divorce a believer from social circumstance, especially from the church spread throughout the world. His exile encouraged him to acquire and defend a universal view in literal as well as in transcendent terms. ‘I have taken care always’, he wrote, ‘to say to those listening to me what I have learned publicly in the church’. Bonosus had presented Jerome with an early image of what he wished himself to be: ‘There he is, safe on his island, all the threats and changes of the world surging around him, the island that is the bosom of the church’. ‘More is revealed’, he wrote on another occasion, ‘in the desert wellspring of the church than in the gilded temple of the Synagogue’. He had, for a long time, saved harsh words for ‘men of the church [viri ecclesiastici]’, as he called them with some irony, who did a little gilding of their own, among their ‘walls and towers’. Yet he was always able to combine that censure with a belief that sin meant most of all leaving the church, while the turning back inherent in the notion of ‘repentance’ meant turning back to the church.
The distinction between the public and the private spheres adds an important gloss to that understanding, because it helped Jerome to identify more precisely his own ‘place’ in that system of ideas and relationships. His first criticisms of Pelagius displayed his concern:
He circulates freely among virgins and widows and haughtily philosophizes in their company about the sacred writings. Who, in this secret way, in the very boudoir [quid in secreto, quid in cubiculo], would teach a woman? ... Let him proclaim, therefore, publicly what he teaches in the home [fateatur ergo publice, quod domi loquitur].
Thus Jerome lured his opponent into the open.
Seated among the ladies, he no doubt thinks himself quite learned and eloquent ... Let him deign, therefore, to send us his work ... then he will find out the difference between public argument and dinner-party conversation [aliam vim fori esse, aliam triclinii] ... You do not discuss the teachings of the divine law with learned men the way you might during drinks and nibbles with the girls.
Such strictures betray the extent to which a distinction between public and private had begun to affect Jerome’s understanding of how one should teach others and proclaim informed opinions. The first rumblings of the Origenist controversy brought to the surface a further anxiety: for the problem there was that a private document (a gift to Eusebius of Cremona—Jerome’s translation of a letter from Epiphanius) had entered the public domain. ‘What safety is there for any of us, if, behind walls and at our desks, we cannot keep matters to ourselves?’ And he knew whose privacy he wished to protect: ‘Such matters are safe enough among us, the monks and Christ’s priests’. His own immunity rested on the plea, ‘as long as I do not bandy my thoughts about [quamdiu non profero cogitata], as long as ... what I think escapes the public ear [quae aures publicae nesciunt]’. The implied criticism was soon focused on Rufinus. ‘What notion drove him, as he writes himself, to discuss these things among the people [inde in populis disputare], when no one had asked him about them? ... What call is there for appealing to public authority [auctoritate publica], threatening imperial decrees and sending them all over the world?’.
As the controversy gathered pace, Jerome defined his position with increasing force. He laid down the principles behind his public status as an exegete: ‘In these difficult matters, I place before you a variety of opinions, so that I might seem not so much to write to you as to talk to you face to face’. He was working out, in other words, how to make public what might normally have remained a private discussion. A certain exposed intimacy was his chief safeguard: ‘You have asked with love, and all that I teach you is imparted to a believing ear’. There was also a moral dimension: discussing Ps. 89:10, and shamelessly using the Septuagint when the Hebrew was less helpful, he told a correspondent that the passage was rendered in the ancient text: ‘For his gentle hand is laid upon us, and we shall be corrected’. The crucial word was paideuthesometha. The context demanded that it mean more than education (since it came after reference to ‘three score years and ten’): yet education came into it, ‘for we shall be judged not by our merits but by the standard of mercy; and what might have seemed to be correction will be recognized as learning and instruction [quae putatur correptio esse, eruditio est atque doctrina]’.
By his later years the church had become, in Jerome’s eyes, the arena within which potentially disruptive distinctions were at once identified and held in balance. Ecclesiastica interpretatio, as Jerome called it, was not concerned with ‘eloquent polish’ but with the search for its natural audience: ‘It is not to a handful of pupils in the leisured schoolrooms of the philosophers but to the whole human race that we must speak’. That placed at stake, however, the appropriate education of the church’s leaders. ‘Even if you are tickled at the thought of becoming a cleric’, he warned Rusticus, ‘learn first what it is you might teach, and offer yourself as a "reasonable sacrifice" to Christ: you should not play the soldier before your training as a recruit, and you should not be a teacher before you have been a pupil’. He urged Rusticus that, ‘instead of teaching yourself, and setting out without a teacher on a path that is new to you’, he should join an ascetic community. Again, we see the connection between erudition and morality.
Jerome placed himself within the same framework. His scholarship, his controversial engagements, and his relations with other Christians could be interpreted as those of a churchman, an ordained priest, a potential bishop: in those senses, a public person. He distinguished between himself, however, and his particular audience by appealing to authentic learning and authority rather than merely to status. By personal inclination, he might have preferred to conduct his arguments within a narrow group of peers. He could be indignant when he found himself facing open opposition from the ostensibly erudite. Now, to define more effectively his own position, he separated argument from education as features of church life: ‘Writing for the sake of competition (gymnastikos) is one thing, writing as a teacher (dogmatikos) is quite another’. The discourse between Christian masters and disciples was to be marked by ‘straightforward words, as of someone innocent and unpolished, incapable of either setting or avoiding snares’. The scholarly implications were clear: ‘It is the task of the commentator to lay bare not his own wishes but the opinions of the person he interprets’. And one should avoid covert groups cut off from the public domain: ‘Do we not speak with the Saviour? Are we to say one thing in public, another in the home? [aliter foris, aliter domi loquimur]’. He had begun to see in the church the common social ground calculated to bridge the potential gaps between formality and intimacy.
The distinctions between ‘colleague’ and ‘teacher’ and between ‘master’ and ‘pupil’ were not matched exactly by that between ‘public’ and ‘private’. Pelagius had thought of himself, ‘even without a teacher’, as ‘perfect, "spirit-filled", "taught by God" ’. What he should have done was exchange letters with Jerome: such correspondence was the hallmark of a Christian who had begun to acquire authority but continued to display a genuine spirit of inquiry. The exchange was not entirely private. Its safeguard was its publicity: ‘Let us speak to one another in writing, so that the silent reader may judge us’. Such exchanges, on the other hand, were likely to take place only between a limited number in the church: so who rightly belonged to that privileged band? Jerome recognised in Augustine the bishop’s need to proclaim with authority a sententia in the company of his colleagues. His own task, that of the commentator, was ‘to put forward a number of interpretations, from which each may choose as they will’. Thus he could make more widely known ‘the contrasting opinions of the elders’, while taking care not to venture possibly dangerous opinions of his own. That placed important restrictions on the bishop’s more public stance: ‘You are a young man [he told Augustine] and established in the high position of bishop: teach the people ... It is enough for me to mutter away in the corner of the monastery for the benefit of the humble reader or disciple’. The mutterer had in the end, however, the greater status.
All the ancient writers who have gone before us in the Lord will have been, when interpreting holy scripture, either obscure or plain. If obscure, how can you dare to expound what they could not explain? If plain, is there any point in volunteering an opinion that they have arrived at already?
He affected to wish for equality— ‘either to teach or to learn in conversation with each other’—but soon lapsed into tetchiness: ‘For the rest, love the one who loves you and, young as you are in the field of the scriptures, do not provoke an old man’. As he shamelessly admitted to a less prominent figure, ‘If I want to learn what scripture teaches, I should not dream of asking the simple men of the church [simplices ecclesiae viros], whose talent is different ... but rather those who have learned their skill from a master and who meditate night and day on the law of the Lord’.
So ‘the corner of the monastery’ represented a corner of the church, a disciplined school of humility that would embrace those naturally endowed with a sense of cultural superiority and make them fit instruments for the instruction of others in the Christian faith. The chief requirements of one who wished to be a teacher in the church were an openness to the promptings of the Spirit and a recognition that one needed a master. Such was Jerome’s advice even to one as distinguished and erudite as Paulinus of Nola. It was upon distinguished erudition that one needed most to build. Pammachius, another obvious exemplar, was allowed a natural conceit and would remain justifiably disdainful of ill-instructed opinion: ‘You won’t be much affected in your self-assurance by the petty back-biting of the ignorant’. Ability to recognise ignorance when one saw it was an accomplishment taken for granted: yet it remained compatible with a willingness to learn before one taught. The combination depended, in Jerome’s eyes, on moral or ascetic training—the disciplined school of humility. To Rusticus of Narbonne, Jerome referred constantly to the need for instruction and pointed to the monastery as the best place to acquire it. It was there that Rusticus could prepare himself for the more public task that faced the Christian leader: that of imparting what Jerome would later call ‘the church’s eloquent truth’ in ‘simple speech [oratione simplici]’.
By the end of his life, Jerome understood how those different planes of action and experience might be fitted together. In his letter to Ctesiphon, he wrote that ‘men of the church [ecclesiastici viri]’ would be marked by fidelity to tradition and by a refusal to dazzle or deceive. They would also be public men: not content to whisper one thing to disciples and preach another more broadly among the supposedly ignorant. The two audiences might be distinguishable; but the essence of what they heard had to be the same. That consistency depended on a pact between magistri and those who disseminated their teaching; a pact that Jerome safeguarded by insisting that the master–disciple relationship should be fostered within the church. We have noted already his boast that he had ‘taken care always to say to those listening to me what I have learned publicly in the church’.
A previous step towards that integrated view is displayed by the famous repudiation of Letter XIV in Letter LII (apparently a repudiation of monasticism in the cause of clerisy). Heliodorus, the addressee of the second letter, although now a pontifex Christi, would teach his nephew Nepotianus how to be a monk: it was the ascetic Jerome who would teach him how to be a cleric. His advice, nevertheless, was overwhelmingly ascetic in character. Jerome was not passing here from one pattern of formation to another, but allowing the principles of the ascetic and the clerical life to flow together. Consoling Heliodorus later on Nepotianus’ death, Jerome commented again on the uncle’s formative influence over his nephew: ‘Publicly he knew you as a bishop, but at home as a father’; and it was in that household setting that he moderated his clerical ambition with ascetic discipline. Again, two emphases converge: Heliodorus, the bishop observed by all, was accepted as an authority in public because people could see how he behaved in the privacy of his household.
The question that faces us now is whether there was a ‘spirituality’ behind Jerome’s accumulated understanding of the ‘desert’, of the ‘ecclesial space’ he laid claim to, of the ‘publicity’ demanded by dedication to virtue and learning. How relevant, in addition, are his experience and self-image to Christian spirituality more generally? After all, he has been considered by the church an exemplary figure and has exerted great influence through the temper of his biblical translations. It seems to matter that his attitudes on sexuality, his conduct as a polemicist, and his interpretation of the ascetic life were developed against a background of personal change—the experience of isolation in particular; the isolation of both exile and exceptional talent.
Note first Jerome’s sense of failure, the disappointment that persisted throughout his life. Here was a strong and negative streak in his personality, which he had, somehow, to turn to his spiritual advantage. Self-deprecation set in early: Jerome in Syria saw himself as a weakened sheep wandering from the flock. He lay like Lazarus in the tomb, waiting to be called forth. He contrasted himself with others, Bonosus in particular—indeed, he may have come to depend on their jealously observed success in order to colour his own dissatisfaction with the cloak of enforced humility. Above all, he doubted his ability to be positive in his endeavours: ‘It is easier to correct omissions than to generate love’.
Self-justification, however, was never far behind: he elevated his pessimism to the level of spiritual theory. Intention, he felt, should count for more than achievement; a conviction expressed at several stages of his life, especially during his later involvement with Pelagius. To Innocentius he wrote, ‘In God’s affairs, it is not capacity we look to but cast of mind’; to Paulinus, ‘I am thinking more of what you should seek than of what you may find’. Even Eustochium was expected to accept a similar excuse, taking votum and voluntas in place of fragilitas and vires. He may have wished, in other words, to seem spiritually more ambitious than his actual virtue or talent allowed; or perhaps he justified lowly achievement by the scale of his ambition. He was not merely explaining or defending his own ineptitude; but he did come to depend on a pessimistic anthropology. He combined Matthew’s dictum about the two masters (Mt. 6:24) with Paul’s reflections on ‘this body of death’ (Rom. 7:14ff.), giving marginally greater prominence thereby to the regrettable effects of free choice. The conflict between flesh and spirit meant inevitably that one did not do what one wished. Indeed, the very ardour of one’s desire for self-improvement might so disturb the memory as to make further sin difficult to avoid. By the time we reach the letter to Ctesiphon, Jerome was fully armed with all the principles he needed against Pelagius. His key text was still Pauline: ‘God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy on all’. Typically, he welcomed the pity of those more powerful than himself.
Such a view of self and of humanity was not unconnected with Jerome’s sense of ‘distance’. He overcame it; but again it was a matter of finding positive advantage in a negative situation. His solution was twofold. First, he made himself a scholar dependent on the authority of the past more than on a stimulating, creative, argumentative community in his own time. That was no more than to make the best of a bad job: for others, then as now, better placed to share their views, were happy to take their cue from the insights of contemporaries. So a theology of the church took shape in Jerome’s mind, and a theology of the authority properly deployed within the church. Differing opinions were, for Jerome, always dead opinions, safely pinned down in the library, where good could be sorted from bad and more attention paid to logic than to personality: ‘My purpose is to read the ancient authors, put each to the test, hold fast to those that are good, and avoid withdrawing from the faith of the universal church’. Second, Jerome established himself as above all a correspondent, whether by letter or by commentary, marrying distance with instruction. He transformed a culture of understated politesse into a community of shared reflection, driven to that strategy by the combined imperatives of exegesis, authority, and isolation.
Jerome was forced to decide in the process how to distinguish between intimate enthusiasm and public responsibility within a new, Christian society, and how to position masters and disciples within that transformed situation. He was led to do so in order to solve the difficulties of his own temperament and circumstance. He identified the appropriate social envelope within which to develop a spirituality, and in particular the setting that would best accommodate and redeem inevitable human weakness. Even though he was a priest, with much to say about priesthood and about the respect due to bishops, his civitas had little to do with sacraments or even with prayer. His inner balance was safeguarded, his debt to others acknowledged, more by the commitment of a scholar and the sympathetic clarity of a teacher. They provided a blueprint for personal growth and a shared faith no less striking, and ultimately no less influential, than Augustine’s pilgrim city.
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