Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/658

 630 J E R J E R the place. The modem village is but a group of squalid huts, and the ancient groves are represented by a thicket of the Spina Christi and other trees between the village and the Sultan s Spring. JEROME, ST (HIEBONYMUS, in full EUSEBIUS SOPH- RONIUS HIERONYMTJS), was born at Strido (modern Strigau 1 ?), a town on the border of Dalmatia fronting Pannonia, destroyed by the Goths in 377 A.D. Some authorities, following Prosper s chronicle, give 330 or 331 as the date of his birth, but from certain passages in his writings it is more probable that he was not born till 340. or 342. He says, for example, that he was a boy learning grammar when Julian died ; but Julian died in 363, and Jerome would scarcely call himself a boy if he had been thirty- three years old. What is known of Jerome has mostly been recovered from his own writings, for he was a gossiping sort of man, and biographers have only to string together extracts from his epistles and prologues to get a very good account of his life. His parents were Christians, orthodox though living among people mostly Arians, and wealthy. He was at first educated at home, Bonosus, a life-long friend, sharing his boyish studies, and was after wards sent to Rome to perfect his education. Donatus, whose Latin grammar was to be the plague of generations of mediaeval school-boys from St Andrews to Prague till Corderius and the Reformation drove it out, taught him grammar and explained the Latin poets. Victorinus taught him rhetoric. He attended the law-courts, and listened to the Roman advocates pleading in the Forum. He went to the schools of philosophy, and heard lectures on Plato, Diogenes, Clitomachus, and Carneades ; the conjunction of names shows how philosophy had become a dead tradition. His Sundays were spent in the catacombs in discovering graves of the martyrs and deciphering inscriptions. Pope Liberius baptized him in 360 ; three years later the news of the death of the emperor Julian the Apostate came to Rome, and Christians felt relieved from a great dread. When his student days were over Jerome returned to Strido, but did not stay there long. His character was formed. He was a scholar, with a scholar s tastes and crav ings for knowledge, easily excited, bent on scholarly dis coveries. From Strido he went to Aquileia, where he formed some friendships among the monks of the large monastery there, the most notable being his acquaintance with Rufinus, with whom he was destined to quarrel bitterly over the question of Origen s orthodoxy and worth as a commentator; for Jerome was a man who always sacrificed a friend to an opinion, and when he changed sides in a controversy expected his acquaintances to follow him. From Aquileia he went to Gaul, visiting in turn the principal places in that country, from Narbonne and Toulouse in the south to Treves on the north-east frontier. He stayed some time at Treves studying and observing, and it was there that he first began to think seriously upon divine things. From Treves he returned to Strido, and from Strido to Aquileia. He settled down to literary work in Aquileia, and com posed there his first original tract, De Midiere septies percussa, in the form of a letter to his friend Innocentius. Some quarrel, no one knows what, caused him to leave Aquileia suddenly; and with some companions, Innocentius, Evagrius, and Heliodorus being among them, he started for a long tour in the East. The epistle to Rufinus (3d in Vallarsi s enumeration) tells us the route. They went through Thrace, visiting Athens, Bithynia, Galatia, Pontus, Cappadocia, and Cilicia, to Antioch, Jerome observing and making notes as they went. He was interested in the theological disputes and schisms in Galatia, in the two languages spoken in Cilicia, &c. At Antioch the party remained some time. Innocentius died of a fever, and Jerome was dangerously ill. This illness brought him face to face with death; he experienced conversion, and resolved to renounce whatever kept him back from God. His greatest temptation was the study of the literature of pagan Rome. In his dreams God reproached him with caring more to be a Ciceronian than a Christian. He disliked the uncouth style of the Scriptures. &quot; O Lord,&quot; he prayed, &quot; Thou knowest that whenever I have and study secular. MSS. I deny Thee,&quot; and he made a resolve henceforth to devote his scholarship to the Holy Scripture. &quot;David was to be henceforth his Simonides, Pindar, and Alcseus, his Flaccus, Catullus, and Severus.&quot; Fortified by these resolves he betook himself to a hermit life in the wastes of Chalcis. Chalcis was the Thebaid or the Marseilles of Syria. Great numbers of monks, each in solitary cell, spent lonely lives, scorched by the sun, ill-clad and scantily fed, pondering on portions of Scripture or copying MSS. to serve as objects of meditation. Jerome at once set himself to such scholarly work as the place afforded. He discovered and copied MSS., and began to study Hebrew. There also he wrote the life of St Paul of Thebes, probably an imaginary tale embodying the facts of the monkish life around him. Just then the Meletian schism, which had to do with the relation of the orthodox to Arian bishops and to those baptized by Arians, distressed the church at Antioch, and Jerome as usual eagerly joined the fray. Here as elsewhere he had but one rule to guide him in matters of doctrine and discipline, the practice of Rome and the West ; for it is singular to see how Jerome, who is daringly original in points of scholarly criticism, was simply a ruthless partisan in all other matters ; and, having discovered what was the Western practice, he set tongue and pen to work with his usual bitterness (Altercatia Luciferiani et Orfhodoxi). From Antiooh he went to Con stantinople, where he met with the great eastern scholar and theologian Gregory of Nazianzus, and with his aid tried to perfect himself in Greek. The result of his studies there was the translation of the Chronicon of Eusebius, with a continuation, 1 of twenty-eight homilies of Origen on Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and of nine homilies of Origen on the Visions of Isaiah. In 381 Meletius died, and Pope Damasus interfered in the dispute at Antioch, hoping to end it. Jerome was called to Rome in 382 to give help in the matter, and was made secretary during the investigation. His work brought him into intercourse with this great pontiff, who soon saw what he could best do, and how his vast scholarship might be made of use to the church. Damasus suggested to him to revise the existing Latin translation of the Bible ; and to this task he henceforth devoted his great abilities (see BIBLE). At Rome were published the Gospels (with a dedication to Pope Damasus, an explanatory introduction, and the canons of Eusebius), the rest of the New Testa ment, and the version of the Psalms from the LXX. text, known as the Psalterium Romanum, which was followed in 385 by the Psalt. Gallicanum, based on the Hexaplar Greek text. These scholarly labours, however, did not take up his whole time, and it was almost impossible for Jerome to be long anywhere without getting into a dis pute. He was a zealous defender of that monastic life which was beginning to take such a large place in the church of the 4th century, and he found enthusiastic dis ciples among the Roman ladies. A number of widows and maidens met together in the house of Marcella to study the Scriptures with him ; he taught them Hebrew, and preached the virtues of the celibate life. His argu ments and exhortations may be gathered from many of his epistles and from his tract Adversus Helvidium, in which he defends the perpetual virginity of the Virgin Mary 1 Comp. Schoene s critical edition (Berlin, 1866, 1875).