by Will Durant
Jerome adds to the moralist’s bias the exaggerations of the literary artist molding a period, and of a lawyer inflating a brief. His satires recall those of Juvenal, or of our own time; it is pleasant to know that women have always been as charming as they are today. Like Juvenal, Jerome denounces impartially, fearlessly, and ecumenically. He is shocked to find concubinage even among Christians, and more shocked to find it covered by the pretense of practicing chastity the hard way. “From what source has this plague of ‘dearly beloved sisters’ found its way into the church? Whence come these unwedded wives? These novel concubines, these one-man harlots? They live in the same house with their male friends; they occupy the same room, often the same bed; yet they call us suspicious if we think that anything is wrong.”14 He attacks the Roman clergy whose support might have raised him to the papacy. He ridicules the curled and scented ecclesiastics who frequent fashionable society, and the legacy-hunting priest who rises before dawn to visit women before they have gotten out of bed.15 He condemns the marriage of priests and their sexual digressions, and argues powerfully for clerical celibacy; only monks, he thinks, are true Christians, free from property, lust, and pride. With an eloquence that would have enlisted Casanova, Jerome calls upon men to give up all and follow Christ, asks the Christian matrons to dedicate their first-born to the Lord as offerings due under the Law,16 and advises his lady friends, if they cannot enter a convent, at least to live as virgins in their homes. He comes close to rating marriage as sin. “I praise marriage, but because it produces me virgins”;17 he proposes to “cut down by the ax of virginity the wood of marriage,”18 and exalts John the celibate apostle over Peter, who had a wife.19 His most interesting letter (384) is to a girl, Eustochium, on the pleasures of virginity. He is not against marriage, but those who avoid it escape from Sodom, and painful pregnancies, and bawling infants, and household cares, and the tortures of jealousy. He admits that the path of purity is also hard, and that eternal vigilance is the price of virginity.
Virginity can be lost even by a thought.… Let your companions be those who are pale of face and thin with fasting.… Let your fasts be of daily occurrence. Wash your bed and water your couch nightly with tears. … Let the seclusion of your own chamber ever guard you; ever let the Bridegroom sport with you within.… When sleep falls upon you He will come behind the wall, and will put His hand through the door and will touch your belly (ventrem). And you will awake and rise up and cry, “I am sick with love.” And you will hear Him answer: “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.”20
The publication of this letter, Jerome tells us, “was greeted with showers of stones”; perhaps some readers sensed a morbid prurience in these strange counsels in a man apparently not yet free from the heat of desire. When, a few months later (384), the young ascetic Blesilla died, many blamed the austerities that had been taught her by Jerome; some pagans proposed to throw him into the Tiber with all the monks of Rome. Unrepentant, he addressed to the hysterically mournful mother a letter of consolation and reproof. In the same year Pope Damasus passed away, and his successor did not renew Jerome’s appointment as papal secretary. In 385 he left Rome forever, taking with him Blesilla’s mother Paula, and Eustochium her sister. At Bethlehem he built a monastery of which he became head, a convent over which first Paula and then Eustochium presided, a church for the common worship of the monks and nuns, and a hospice for pilgrims to the Holy Land.
He made his own cell in a cave, gathered his books and papers there, gave himself up to study, composition, and administration, and lived there the remaining thirty-four years of his life. He quarreled at pen’s point with Chrysostom, Ambrose, Pelagius, and Augustine. He wrote with dogmatic force half a hundred works on questions of casuistry and Biblical interpretation, and his writings were eagerly read even by his enemies. He opened a school in Bethlehem, where he humbly and freely taught children a variety of subjects, including Latin and Greek; now a confirmed saint, he felt that he could read again the classic authors whom he had forsworn in his youth. He resumed the study of Hebrew, which he had begun in his first sojourn in the East; and in eighteen years of patient scholarship he achieved that magnificent and sonorous translation of the Bible into Latin which is known to us as the Vulgate, and remains as the greatest and most influential literary accomplishment of the fourth century. There were errors in the translation as in any work so vast, and some “barbarisms” of common speech which offended the purists; but its Latin formed the language of theology and letters throughout the Middle Ages, poured Hebraic emotion and imagery into Latin molds, and gave to literature a thousand noble phrases of compact eloquence and force.* The Latin world became acquainted with the Bible as never before.
Jerome was a saint only in the sense that he lived an ascetic life devoted to the Church; he was hardly a saint in character or speech. It is sad to find in so great a man so many violent outbursts of hatred, misrepresentation, and controversial ferocity. He calls John, Patriarch of Jerusalem, a Judas, a Satan, for whom hell can never provide adequate punishment;21 he describes the majestic Ambrose as “a deformed crow”;22 and to make trouble for his old friend Rufinus he pursues the dead Origen with such heresy-hunting fury as to force the condemnation of Origen by Pope Anastasius (400). We might rather have pardoned some sins of the flesh than these acerbities of the soul.
His critics punished him without delay. When he taught the Greek and Latin classics they denounced him as a pagan; when he studied Hebrew with a Jew they accused him of being a convert to Judaism; when he dedicated his works to women they described his motives as financial or worse.23 His old age was not happy. Barbarians came down into the Near East and overran Syria and Palestine (395); “how many monasteries they captured, how many rivers were reddened with blood!” “The Roman world,” he concluded sadly, “is falling.”24 While he lived, his beloved Paula, Marcella, and Eustochium died. Almost voiceless and fleshless with austerities, and bent with age, he toiled day after day on work after work; he was writing a commentary on Jeremiah when death came. He was a great, rather than a good, man; a satirist as piercing as Juvenal, a letter writer as eloquent as Seneca, an heroic laborer in scholarship and theology.
3. Christian Soldiers
Jerome and Augustine were only the greatest pair in a remarkable age. Among her “Fathers” the early medieval Church distinguished eight as “Doctors of the Church”: in the East Athanasius, Basil, Gregory Nazianzen, John Chrysostom, and John of Damascus; in the West Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great.
The career of Ambrose (340?–398) illustrates the power of Christianity to draw into its service first-rate men who, a generation earlier, would have served the state. Born at Trier, son of the prefect of Gaul, he was by every precedent destined to a political career, and we are not surprised to hear of him next as provincial governor of northern Italy. Residing at Milan, he was in close touch with the emperor of the West, who found in him the old Roman qualities of solid judgment, executive ability, and quiet courage. Learning that rival factions were gathering at the cathedral to choose a bishop, he hurried to the scene, and by his presence and his words quelled an incipient disturbance. When the factions could not agree on a candidate, someone suggested Ambrose; his name brought the people to an enthusiastic unanimity; and the governor, protesting and still unbaptized, was hurriedly christened, ordained to the diaconate, then to the priesthood, then to the episcopacy, all in one week (374).25
He filled his new office with the dignity and mastery of a statesman. He abandoned the trappings of political position, and lived in exemplary simplicity. He gave his money and property to the poor, and sold the consecrated plate of his church to ransom captives of war.26 He was a theologian who powerfully defended the Nicene Creed, an orator whose sermons helped to convert Augustine, a poet who composed some of the Church’s earliest and noblest hymns, a judge whose learning and integrity shamed the corruption of secular courts, a diplomat entrusted with difficul
t missions by both Church and state, a good disciplinarian who upheld but overshadowed the pope, an ecclesiastic who brought the great Theodosius to penance, and dominated the policies of Valentinian III. The young Emperor had an Arian mother, Justina, who tried to secure a church in Milan for an Arian priest. The congregation of Ambrose remained night and day in the beleaguered church in a holy “sit-down strike” against the Empress’ orders to surrender the building. “Then it was,” says Augustine, “that the custom arose of singing hymns and songs, after the use of the Eastern provinces, to save the people from being utterly worn out by their long and sorrowful vigils.”27 Ambrose fought a famous battle against the Empress, and won a signal victory for intolerance.
At Nola in southern Italy Paulinus (353–431) exemplified a gentler type of Christian saint. Born in an old rich family of Bordeaux, and married to a lady of like high lineage, he studied under the poet Ausonius, entered politics, and rapidly advanced. Suddenly “conversion” came to him in the full sense of a turning away from the world: he sold his property, and gave all to the poor except enough to keep himself in the barest necessities; and his wife Therasia agreed to live with him as his chaste “sister in Christ.” The monastic life not yet having established itself in the West, they made their modest home at Nola a private monastery and lived there for thirty-five years, abstaining from meat and wine, fasting many days in every month, and happy to be released from the complexities of wealth. The pagan friends of his youth, above all his old teacher Ausonius, protested against what seemed to them a withdrawal from the obligations of civic life; he answered by inviting them to come and share his bliss. In a century of hatred and violence he kept to the end a spirit of toleration. Pagans and Jews joined Christians at his funeral.
Paulinus wrote charming verse, but only incidentally. The poet who best expressed the Christian view in this age was the Spaniard Aurelius Prudentius Clemens (c. 348–410). While Claudian and Ausonius cluttered their compositions with dead gods, Prudentius sang in the ancient meters the new and living themes: stories of the martyrs (Peri stephanon, or Book of Crowns), hymns for every hour of the day, and an answer in verse to Symmachus’ plea for the statue of Victory. It was in this last poem that he made a memorable appeal to Honorius to suppress gladiatorial combats. He did not hate the pagans; he had kind words for Symmachus, and even for Julian; and he begged his fellow Christians not to destroy pagan works of art. He shared Claudian’s admiration for Rome, and rejoiced that one might pass through most of the white man’s world and be under the same laws, everywhere secure; “wherever we are we live as fellow citizens.”28 In this Christian poet we catch a last echo of the achievement and mastery of Rome.
It was not Rome’s least glory that Gaul had now so high a civilization. Corresponding to Ausonius and Sidonius in literature were the great bishops of fourth-century Gaul: Hilary of Poitiers, Remi of Reims, Euphronius of Autun, Martin of Tours. Hilary (d. c. 367) was one of the most active defenders of the Nicene Creed, and wrote a treatise in twelve “books” struggling to explain the Trinity. Yet in his modest see at Poitiers we see him living the good life of a devoted churchman—rising early, receiving all callers, hearing complaints, adjusting disputes, saying Mass, preaching, teaching, dictating books and letters, listening to pious readings at his meals, and every day performing some manual labor like cultivating the fields, or weaving garments for the poor.29 This was the ecclesiastic at his best.
St. Martin left more of a name; 3675 churches and 425 villages in France bear it today. He was born in Pannonia about 316; at twelve he wished to become a monk, but at fifteen his father compelled him to join the army. He was an unusual soldier—giving his pay to the poor, helping the distressed, practicing humility and patience as if he would make a monastery out of the army camp. After five years in military service Martin realized his ambition, and went to live as a monk in a cell, first in Italy, then at Poitiers near the Hilary he loved. In 371 the people of Tours clamored to have him as their bishop, despite his shabby garments and rough hair. He agreed, but insisted on still living like a monk. Two miles from the city, at Marmoutier, he built a monastery, gathered together eighty monks, and lived with them a life of unpretentious austerity. His idea of a bishop was of a man who not only celebrated Mass, preached, administered the sacraments, and raised funds, but also fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick, and helped the unfortunate. Gaul loved him so that all its parts told stories of his miracles, even of his having raised three men from the dead.30 France made him one of her patron saints.
The monastery that Martin had founded at Poitiers (362) was the first of many that now sprang up in Gaul. Because the monastic idea had come to Rome through Athanasius’ Life of Anthony, and Jerome’s powerful call to the anchoritic life, the West first took up the most arduous and lonely forms of monasticism, and tried to practice in less genial climates the rigors of monks living under the Egyptian sun. The monk Wulfilaich lived for years, with bare legs and feet, on a column at Trier; in winter the nails fell from his toes, and icicles hung from his beard. St. Senoch, near Tours, enclosed himself so narrowly within four walls that the lower half of his body could not move; in this situation he lived many years, an object of veneration to the populace.31 St. John Cassian brought the ideas of Pachomius to balance the ecstasy of Anthony; inspired by some sermons of Chrysostom, he established a monastery and convent at Marseille (415), and wrote for it the first Western regimen for the monastic life; before he died (435) some 5000 monks in Provence were living by his rule. Soon after 400 St. Honoratus and St. Caprasius built a monastery on the island of Lérins, facing Cannes. These institutions trained men to co-operative labor, study, and scholarship rather than to solitary devotion; they became schools of theology, and vitally influenced the thought of the West. When the rule of St. Benedict came to Gaul in the next century, it built upon the tradition of Cassian one of the most beneficent religious orders in history.
IV. THE CHRISTIAN EAST
1. The Monks of the East
As the Church ceased to be a set of devotees and became an institution governing millions of men, she tended to adopt a more lenient view of human frailty, and to tolerate, sometimes to share, the pleasures of this world. A minority of Christians held such condescension to be treason to Christ; they resolved to gain heaven by poverty, chastity, and prayer, and retired completely from the world. Possibly Ashoka’s missionaries (c. 250 B.C.) had brought to the Near East the monastic forms as well as the theory and ethics of Buddhism; and pre-Christian anchorites like those of Serapis in Egypt, or the Essene communities in Judea, may have transmitted to Anthony and Pachomius the ideals and methods of the strictly religious life. Monasticism was for many souls a refuge from the chaos and war of the barbarian invasions; there were no taxes in the monastery or the desert cell, no military service, no marital strife, no weary toil; ordination to the priesthood was not required of a monk; and after a few years of peace would come eternal bliss.
Egypt, whose climate almost invited monasticism, teemed with anchoritic and cenobitic monks, following the solitary habits of Anthony, or the community life that Pachomius had established at Tabenne. The Nile was banked with monasteries and convents, some containing as many as 3000 monks and nuns. Of the anchorites Anthony (c. 251–356) was by far the most renowned. After wandering from solitude to solitude he fixed his cell on Mount Kolzim, near the Red Sea. Admirers found him out, imitated his devotion, and built their cells as near to his as he would permit; before he died the desert was peopled with his spiritual progeny. He seldom washed, and lived to the age of 105. He declined an invitation from Constantine, but at the age of ninety he journeyed to Alexandria to support Athanasius against the Arians. Only less famous was Pachomius, who (325) founded nine monasteries and one nunnery; sometimes 7000 monks who followed his rule gathered to celebrate some holy day. These cenobites worked as well as prayed; periodically they sailed down the Nile to Alexandria to sell their products, buy their necessities, and join in the eccl
esiastical-political fray.
Among the anchorites a keen rivalry arose for the austerity championship. Macarius of Alexandria, says the Abbé Duchesne, “could never hear of any feat of asceticism without at once trying to surpass it.” If other monks ate no cooked food in Lent, Macarius ate none for seven years; if some punished themselves with sleeplessness, Macarius could be seen “frantically endeavoring for twenty consecutive nights to keep himself awake.” Throughout one Lent he stood upright night and day, and ate nothing except, once a week, a few cabbage leaves; and during this time he continued to work at his basket-weaving trade.32 For six months he slept in a marsh, and exposed his naked body to poisonous flies.33 Some monks excelled in feats of solitude; so Serapion inhabited a cave at the bottom of an abyss into which few pilgrims had the hardihood to descend; when Jerome and Paula reached his lair they found a man almost composed of bones, dressed only in a loincloth, face and shoulders covered by uncut hair; his cell was barely large enough for a bed of leaves and a plank; yet this man had lived among the aristocracy of Rome.34 Some, like Bessarion for forty, Pachomius for fifty, years, never lay down while they slept;35 some specialized in silence, and went many years without uttering a word; others carried heavy weights wherever they went, or bound their limbs with iron bracelets, greaves, or chains. Many proudly recorded the number of years since they had looked upon a woman’s face.36 Nearly all anchorites lived—some to a great age—on a narrow range of food. Jerome tells of monks who subsisted exclusively on figs or on barley bread. When Macarius was ill someone brought him grapes; unwilling so to indulge himself, he sent them to another hermit, who sent them to another; and so they made the rounds of the desert (Rufinus assures us) until they came back intact to Macarius.37 The pilgrims who flocked from all quarters of the Christian world to see the monks of the East credited them with miracles as remarkable as those of Christ. They could cure diseases or repel demons by a touch or a word, tame serpents or lions with a look or a prayer, and cross the Nile on the back of a crocodile. The relics of the anchorites became the most precious possession of Christian churches, and are treasured in them to this day.