The Life
Jerome was born around 347 in Stridon on the Dalmatian frontier. His parents sent him to Rome at twelve to be educated; he studied Latin literature, rhetoric, and philosophy there, and was baptized at about twenty. After traveling through Gaul, he returned home to find his parents had died, raised his younger siblings, then went east to live as a hermit in the Syrian desert of Chalcis for five years. There he learned Hebrew. He was ordained presbyter at Antioch, visited Constantinople (where he heard Saint Gregory the Theologian), and was called to Rome in 382 by Pope Damasus, who made him his secretary and commissioned a Latin translation of the Bible. After Damasus died in 384, Jerome was forced to leave Rome by his enemies. He settled in a cave at Bethlehem in 386 and spent the next thirty-four years there, supported by his disciples Saint Paula and Saint Eustochium, producing the Vulgate, his commentaries on most of the Bible, and his vast correspondence. He reposed in 420.
After Jerome had made arrangements for his siblings in Stridon, he traveled east in 374 with several friends. He settled in the desert of Chalcis, southeast of Antioch in Syria, and lived there as a hermit for some five years. He combined the austerities of desert asceticism with biblical study. He fasted strictly. He stood for long hours in prayer. He copied manuscripts. He read the Greek fathers. He acquired Hebrew — a difficult language for a Latin speaker — from a converted Jewish monk in the desert. He was tempted often by his memory of the Latin classical literature he had loved in Rome; once in a fever he dreamed that he stood before the judgment seat of Christ and was condemned as a Ciceronian rather than a Christian, and from that day he turned his deep love of literature toward the Holy Scriptures alone.
After Jerome’s years in the desert and his ordination at Antioch, he visited Constantinople where he heard Saint Gregory the Theologian preach. In 382 Pope Damasus I, who had heard of Jerome’s combined Latin, Greek, and Hebrew learning, summoned him to Rome and made him his secretary. Pope Damasus was himself interested in biblical scholarship. He commissioned Jerome to undertake a careful revision of the Latin Bible, which existed in many varying versions of poor quality. Jerome began with the Gospels, comparing all the Latin versions against the best Greek manuscripts. He worked on the Psalms. He laid the foundation for the great translation that would consume the rest of his life. He served as Damasus’s secretary for three years, until the pope’s death in December 384.
During his three years at Rome, Jerome became the spiritual director of a circle of aristocratic Roman Christian women who had embraced the ascetic ideal. The most important were the widow Saint Paula and her daughter Saint Eustochium. After Jerome was driven from Rome in 385, Paula and Eustochium followed him east. They abandoned their immense Roman wealth, made a long pilgrimage with him through the Holy Land and Egypt, and finally settled with him at Bethlehem in 386. Paula founded a women’s monastery there with her remaining wealth, where she and Eustochium lived as nuns. They funded the entire Bethlehem project. They learned Hebrew themselves to assist Jerome in the translation work. They lived alongside him as collaborators and friends for the rest of their lives. Paula reposed in 404; Eustochium in 419 or 420. Jerome reposed shortly after.
Jerome’s great work was the Latin Vulgate Bible. He had begun it in Rome with the Gospels in 383. He continued it throughout his thirty-four years at Bethlehem. The most important innovation was that he translated the Old Testament directly from the original Hebrew rather than from the Greek Septuagint, as previous Latin translators had done. He believed that the Hebrew text was closer to the original Word of God than any translation. He was supported in the work by Saint Paula and Saint Eustochium, who learned Hebrew themselves to help him. He completed the Old Testament translation around 405. The Vulgate became the standard Bible of the Western Christian Church and remained so for over a thousand years. Every great medieval theologian read it. Every great medieval mystic prayed the Psalms in it. Every great medieval liturgy sang the Word of God in it. The Council of Trent declared it the official Latin Bible of the Roman Church in 1546.
On August 24, 410, the Visigothic king Alaric and his army entered the city of Rome. They sacked the eternal city for three days. The psychological shock to the Christian world was enormous — Rome had not fallen to a foreign army in eight hundred years. When news reached Bethlehem, Jerome wept bitterly. He had known Rome as a boy. He had been baptized there. He had served Pope Damasus there. He had taught his Roman friends there. The fall of Rome shook him to the core. He wrote letters of theological reflection on the catastrophe. He continued his translation work. He kept faith with the eternal kingdom even as the eternal city fell. His friend Saint Augustine, far away in Africa, would soon begin writing the City of God in response to the same event.
For some twenty-five years Jerome at Bethlehem and Augustine at Hippo Regius in North Africa exchanged letters across the Mediterranean. They debated theological questions: the proper translation of certain biblical passages, the meaning of Saint Paul’s confrontation with Saint Peter at Antioch, the theology of grace, the question of the canon of Scripture. They were both strong-minded men. Their letters sometimes carried a sharp edge. They occasionally misunderstood each other. They never met in person. But across the long years they maintained a mutual respect and a friendship in Christ. Their correspondence is preserved in both their collected letters and is one of the great early monuments of Christian theological friendship.
The psalmist’s words are the summary of Saint Jerome’s entire life. He had given his life to the Word of God. He had translated it from Hebrew and Greek into Latin. He had commented on it across decades. He had taught it to Saint Paula and Saint Eustochium. He had defended it against heretics. He had prayed it in the cave at Bethlehem morning and evening for thirty-four years. The Scriptures had been, for him, a lamp to his feet and a light to his path through every season of his life — the years in Rome, the desert at Chalcis, the office of Pope Damasus, the long Bethlehem decades, the fall of Rome, the Bedouin invasion, the deaths of his beloved Paula and Eustochium, his own final repose. The Word of God carried him. He carried it to the Western Christian world.
Saint Jerome reposed in peace in his cave at Bethlehem on September 30, 420, at about the age of seventy-three. Saint Paula had reposed sixteen years earlier, in 404; Saint Eustochium had reposed only a year before him, in 419. He had outlived almost all of his closest friends. He had completed the great work of his life. He had seen the Vulgate established in the Western Church. He had wept for the fall of Rome and survived the Bedouin invasion of Bethlehem. He died near the cave of the Lord’s birth, surrounded by his books and the small remnant of his monastic community. He was buried at the Cave of the Nativity, near the graves of Saint Paula and Saint Eustochium and his brother Paulinian. His relics were translated to Rome in the seventh century and rest, according to tradition, in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.
Jerome shows us, in extreme form, what a single life of patient labor in service of the Word of God can accomplish. He spent thirty-four years in a cave at Bethlehem. He never held high ecclesiastical office. He never founded a monastic order. He never preached to vast crowds. He simply translated the Bible into Latin, wrote commentaries on it, and corresponded with friends about it. The Christian Church has been reading his Bible, his commentaries, and his letters for sixteen centuries. The lesson is that the Lord uses patient hidden labor for purposes far greater than the laborer can imagine. We may not be biblical translators. But we can give ourselves, with the same patient love, to whatever particular work the Lord has called us to. The Lord will use it in his own way and his own time, perhaps long after we are gone.